Bleach 551 - The Burnt Offerings

The newest chapter of Bleach is out.  So let's talk about it!

Spoilers after the cut.

Haschwald makes a return to actually being shown, though he's not doing anything.  This should not come as a surprise.

I'm not sure what the point of his appearance in this chapter is.  He's being held back from Kyouraku and VC Ise Nanao by an invisible barrier that Ise put up.  Why?  Who knows?

Apparently, Soi Fong and Hitsugaya are being "massacred".  Okay, sure.

Kurotsuchi doesn't look like he's doing much of anything, and then what little he is doing is interrupted by Urahara (Kubo's head troll avatar) spouting some nonsense about restoring lost bankai to the captains who are missing them currently.

So as you can see, this chapter is a bit of a clusterfuck.  What might be interesting is seeing what becomes of this new Quincy/Stern Ritter, the one who insists on delivering the final blow to those who had their bankai stolen. He has three claws on his right hand, much like Wolverine (or Vega from SFII). Let it never be said that Kubo was unwilling to "borrow" an idea from somewhere else (especially if that other thing was more successful).

The varying viewpoints device is nothing new, but I can't say that it's done all that well in this chapter.  For one, none of the viewpoints actually matter, since nothing interesting happens.  So this chapter is, once again, merely a bridge to bigger and better things, postponing the promise that the final arc should be delivering on every single week.  I don't know if this angers anyone else, but you can be damn sure that it angers me.  There's no point to stretching out the final arc until the manga becomes self-parody, yet that is exactly what Kubo is doing with inane and uneventful chapters like this one. We are now five chapters into the final arc and still nothing interesting has happened.  We're all waiting for an Ichigo sighting and failing that, some kind of resolution to these two battles that very few are likely to care about.

I would hope that next week provides something a bit more substantial, but I think I'd just be pissing in the wind.