Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-26830922-20180315020522/@comment-27565137-20180424021224

SunXia wrote: Sigh. TITE Kubo never stated that anyone in the series were "the good guys". In fact, this site and users don not take that view and when I say users I mean people who contribute consistently to the site and its upkeep, not fluff forum theorists. We have and the series has always been clear that Shinigami are not "the good guys" but their purpose is to preserve the balance of souls in the realms to ensure their stability. It doesn't matter what the Soul King was, he is and was stated as the literal linchpin that held the realms together. When he was killed, those realms started falling apart and everyone would have died had Ukitake not sacrificed himself in that moment and forced Yhwach to do something else.

You really are looking at the series through Rose Tinted Glasses if you ever thought it was done in a "good guys versus bad guys" way. Otherwise Ichigo would never have had to fight against the forces of the Gotei 13 initially at all. They were always imperfect and portrayed as such but what they need to do has been about keeping the realms together. The only "good guys" were Ichigo and his friends wanting to protect their loved ones.

But denying that the novel basically says that everything we thought we knew was actually wrong. Ichibei initial plan was to have Ichigo be the Soul King. Trap him in that same prison, and cut away his limbs so as for Ichigo to not get free.

This is definitely not the working of good guys. Or even reasonable neutral guys. Honestly I gained much more respect for the Hollows. They at least are what they are. They aren't going around pretending to be what they are not.

The Quincy although obvious chess pieces of Yuha, they too thought they were simply protecting humanity.

And seeing the Soul King doesn't really rules over nothing but is instead just the tool that keeps things working as Soul Society wants them to work. For all we know that so called balance of souls serves only to keep appearances.

The novel really didn't paint a good imagine of the Shinigamis. We all knew they were very strict with their laws, but apparently those laws didn't even applied to everyone in Soul Society. When I discovered why Tōsen rebel against Soul Society, if I had known that before the Hueco Mundo arc, then I would say that Aizen was the real hero of this whole story. SS laws didn't applied at all to the royal families. And the Central 46 were nothing but tools of the Royal families.

If this novel had came out way sooner then I could see a lot of Bleach fans ditching the Anime and Manga altogether.