This week’s episode of BLEACH was relatively slow-paced compared to recent ones. Of course, this means the people craving an action and sakuga high were quite frustrated with it while many manga readers were frustrated for…other reasons that I’ll get into. That being said, this week was a strong transition between the fight(s) we’ve seen since the beginning of BLEACH 2022. Action has pretty much been nonstop and even busted, OP characters need to heal sometimes. Personally, I found this episode to be incredibly worthwhile for two reasons.
One, this was an interesting microcosm into some of the specific dynamics behind the leadership of the Soul Society. Captains don’t gather too often in one room for long and when they do there usually aren’t so many of them speaking. Seeing them and the new characters from this week interact was quite nice. Two, there were some key changes from the manga that I think are worth mentioning, especially since they affect the flow of the story. The rest of the article will contain spoilers for BLEACH episode 8. Read on with that in mind.
We don’t usually get to see BLEACH captains fight amongst themselves and the last few times it happened were around internal struggles rather than frustration with an enemy from the outside. The different emotional reactions each of the captains had, both in this episode and the last one, created interested layers to the many generations of Soul Society represented in the episode. The Visored captains, who were exiled from Soul Society for a century but were relatively respected prior to that, arguably have a stronger, if mixed, connection to Soul Society and Yamamoto. Younger captains like Soi Fon came in specifically as a result of Visored captains departing, so it isn’t a massive surprise that there’s some tension there.
Combining this with members of the zero division recognizing and speaking to their captain proteges, we got some interesting lines drawn between recurring characters and some of the new ones. This, alongside the verbal and visual depiction of the zero captains’ strengths (stopping Soi Fon like that was amazing), made for a nice presentation of characters that acted silly but clearly have a penchant for being serious and showing their power and authority when necessary. As far as adapting this portion of the episode, I felt like the introduction of the zero division was a faithful adaptation and didn’t add much. This isn’t a bad thing, but it seems other adapted scenes tended to add extra layers from the strength of their voice acting. The only scene in this episode that did this was Rukia’s speaking to Shinji. Her concern and unique understanding of how Ichigo hides his pain came through much more clearly in the BLEACH anime relative to the manga.
There were a bunch of small changes in adapting the BLEACH manga for this episode. Many of these changes were trivial ones such as removing a line of dialogue here and there or compressing conversations into their most crucial elements. As has been the pattern in BLEACH 2022, the writers and directors of the anime are selectively removing some humorous scenes and, in this week’s episode, potentially making changes for censorship purposes. During the episode’s final bath scene, the manga has what is known as the “peach scene,” where an unconscious Rukia’s butt floats above the water and Tenjiro Kirinji, the zero captain known as the “Hot Spring Demon,” compares it to a peach. Personally I think this scene being removed is a positive thing; it doesn’t add anything to the episode and I appreciate the general winnowing down of the some of the humor to make BLEACH 2022 seem a bit more serious overall. Plus watching Rukia fanboys cry over it is always great. This scene being removed makes me think of a few others that will be adjusted down the line, but those are similarly trivial.
There are three changes that I think are actually rather important. One is in the image above: the sun sitting behind the central shrine of the soul king palace. There have been debates about the distance these floating castles are from the Sereitei for countless years. Placing a sun in this scene and showing its size relative to the rest of the land is a nice artistic touch and lends some context toward distance. The second two have to do with showing characters. During Urahara’s surprise announcement, the BLEACH anime made it quite clear that Grimmjow was present. In the manga there obviously is no voice, but the anime went a step farther and made his hollow hole and part of his outfit clearly visible to the viewers. Additionally, and much more importantly, Kukaku, when musing about her uncle, has a flashback showing that uncle. I won’t reveal much beyond that because it’s not immediately obvious who that scene is hinting toward without some decent memory of prior arcs.
The fact that BLEACH 2022 is adapting certain scenes to more explicitly hint toward the re-involvement of characters like Grimmjow is interesting. On the one hand it makes sense — given that each episode of the BLEACH anime adapts four or so chapters of the manga, the gap between a tease and a reveal can potentially shrink from months to just a single week. With that little time it might not be worth hiding some things and then using screen time to dramatically reveal them immediately after. Even more, given that the anime is adding scenes not present in the manga, like those involving Uryu and his family’s journals, this might be a move to make room for additional new content. There were also reveals like those of a few of the Xcution members from the Fullbringer arc that were relatively explicit in both the anime and manga, so perhaps this was a shift for parity.
In any case, episodes like this week’s are pretty important. They give the audience time to digest the multiple revelations that have just come up and give the staff bandwidth to keep animating fantastic fights. This episode may not be as appealing as the eye-catching fight episodes, but it was excellent in terms of both thematic quality and role fulfillment.
Featured image and screenshots via Hulu.
© TITE KUBO / SHUEISHA, TV TOKYO, dentsu, Pierrot