Yay? Bleach Returning Next Year to Animate the Manga Ending.

Back in 2016, the hit manga series Bleach, by Tite Kubo, finally came to an end, but because the original anime decided to hit the brakes in 2012, fans never got to see the final arc animated. Well, “good” news: The Bleach anime will return to finish up the “Thousand-Year Blood Arc.”

In case you haven’t heard, the Bleach anime is coming back! Read the “Thousand-Year Blood Arc” before it’s animated! It starts from Chapter 480! Members can read all of Bleach and much more in the Shonen Jump Digital Vault! https://t.co/OxnZRF0yYv pic.twitter.com/KHjhOWUWE2

— Shonen Jump (@shonenjump) March 21, 2020

I was a huge fan of Bleach growing up. The anime had some of the best openings and endings out there, and I was hooked all the way until the end of the “Soul Society Arc.” Everything that came with it—the battle between Byakuya and Ichigo, the Renji battles, and of course, Ichigo dramatically saving Rukia from death—was all excellently done. Plus, the Aizen twist was something that shook the table when it first happened. Yet, despite dozens of excellent chapters, worldbuilding, and a villain that people considered one of the best, the Bleach series just … fizzled out.

Whenever I did end up checking in, the results were almost always disappointing. Arcs that started off with promise, like the Arrancar story, just dragged on for ages and lost a lot of the momentum the series built up to that point. The last storyline I truly enjoyed from Bleach was the flashback storyline, which showed us a lot of the history of the Soul Society and laid the foundation for what would have been an epic battle—if it had been epic once it started.

Nothing like panels of reaction shots.

I read the last chapter of Bleach, and I disliked it for personal shipping reasons (IchiRuki for life), but even beyond that, it just felt like it had taken so long to get there and most of it wasn’t necessary. I may not have been a huge Naruto fan, but at least it took its long runtime to really develop a bunch of characters and have fun. Bleach stopped being fun.

So, for those Bleach fans who enjoyed the ending and stuck through the series all the way through, I hope this will be fun for you. I may pop in to listen to the music, but I’m more interested in the OVA from a Kubo one-shot called Burn the Witch, which seems some fun. I’ll keep my love of Bleach in the past, with the storylines and characters I enjoyed—and man did I used to enjoy it—but who knows, maybe with so many years of separation, the final storyline will go down a bit smoother for those who had expectations built in after fifteen years of chapters.

Just no spinoff with their children, please.

(via Kotaku, image: TV Tokyo/VIZ))

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