User blog comment:Udarsha45/Bleach to end in another 5 chapters.../@comment-24769684-20160704124858

If this is true, I smell editor interference all over this. Bleach has pretty much been failing in Japan for years, propped up only by its tenure and volume sales. I guess those aren't enough anymore.

That leaves us 4-5 chapters for Jugram to turn and Ichigo to defeat Yhwach, which obviously cannot happen in that short a timespan without some kind of deus ex machina or whatnot. Or we get some kind of Lost-type twist where the Quincy Blood War wasn't real after all. Or this was all a dream. Either way, it's extremely shitty, and I struggle to hold onto any inklings of faith. If Yhwach is defeated, we'll likely end with some sort of epilogue, as Kubo will most likely be forced to ignore characters and their setups that never got completed (Hisagi! The Visored! Kenpachi! Rangiku! Aizen! and so on!).

It's a shame that Bleach faltered so much in this arc. If done right, it could have reached the level of the Arrancar arc, and erase any bad memories of the Fullbring arc. But no, characters were handled shittily, with many of them only being there to display their powers and then leave. The Quincy lore we've gotten so far has barely made any sense, and most of the Sternritter members were grossly underdeveloped, as though Kubo lost steam with them halfway through and decided to just use Auswahlen and get to the top villains without bothering to give many of the weaker Shinigami moments to shine. And of course the top Sternritter were all ridiculously overpowered, with the exception of Askin, one of the lone bright spots in this arc. Lille's and Gerard's fights were both trainwrecks, and in Gerard's fight Kubo only returned big characters without giving any underdeveloped ones a chance to shine. And Yhwach's power is so bad, it has no logical weakness in sight. And then of course the Royal Guard...don't get me started on them.

If Kubo had managed to handle those things well, then five chapters would still be incredibly disappointing, but perhaps manage to be a bit more realistic. But since this arc hasn't been much more than a trainwreck, I can only bet that the ending is going to be just as bad.