Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-10838999-20130614081922/@comment-5398287-20130614150011

I'm fairly certain people can relate to Ichigo for different reasons than they do to Naruto.

1. Ichigo lost his mother. While Naruto lost his mother and father, he wasn't aware of them until much later. Ichigo knew and loved his mother, and he was THERE when she died. People can relate to how it feels to lose a loved one like that, and how it might affect someone's personality.

2. Ichigo has dealt with some more serious issues. Now, before you ask, yes, I read Naruto as well, so I know what Naruto's gone through, and I'm not saying losing your mentor and watching some asshat blow up most of your village isn't tough. But Ichigo deals with a lot of gray areas. For example, the Quincy. When he learned about their extinction, he couldn't fathom why, yet he knew it had to have been done because otherwise the world would be in peril. Currently, that's even more important because the Quincy are back and have destroyed Soul Society, and Ichigo's one of them. Naruto may have learned about the Sage of Six Paths and his sons ans whatnot, but he's never really had a deep moral conflict.

3. Ichigo is less Goku-like than Naruto. He doesn't grow stronger when he gets mad, he doesn't constantly have a demon side within him (hell, it only lasted from the SS arc to the end of the FKT arc), and he does have a limit to his power, in stark contrast to Naruto, who, currently, is producing so much chakra it's beyond belief. While still powerful in his own right, sometimes annoyingly so, Ichigo is reined in compared to other main characters.

And as for if I still think Bleach has direction, well, yeah. If it didn't, Kubo would've just had Yamamoto kill Yhwach and that'd be that. But he didn't because he's still got a story to tell. There are many unresolved plot points in this story, and he intends to wrap them all up in one go and finish this story proper. Additionally, it's always seemed to me that out of the Big 3, Bleach has always been the most subtle, with metaphors, imagery, and things tying back to each other across whole arcs.

Anyhow, that's just my two cents.