User blog comment:Xilinoc/Ch. 686 - Death & Strawberry (End of Bleach reMIX)/@comment-1489595-20160819152958/@comment-29190231-20160820053235

Not to mention it's anime...

Relationships that form between characters of vast age differences happen quite frequently in the anime/manga world. Even the West isn't new to such things. Read any bit of vampire literature (and I'm talking about the good kind, not the abomination that is Twilight) and you'll find out that the concept of falling in love with someone centuries older than yourself is very much a human topic when it comes to literature and is in no way a valid argument for why a particular relationship did or didn't take place.

In my personal opinion, Bleach shouldn't have had any parings to begin with (so relax: I'm not a shipper of any sort). As several have noted, there was scare romance hinted at in this series, and even the ones where it was implied (even strongly so) were very one-sided or two-dimensional. I lament the fact that so many fictional series now have to end with the main characters grown up and with children. It simply isn't necessary, nor was it in the case with Bleach. The story could have closed up nicely without us knowing who ended up with who, because it wasn't important to the story to know that.