Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-39522398-20190519202509/@comment-31222592-20190929190342

For one, mocking other sites, instead of demonstrating them to be wrong, doesn't make you look any better. It shows others disliked it and proves my point. Next, this site itself acknowledges them as one and the same, so you mean to oppose this very wikia article. Finally, what bastion of intellectualism behaves like you're doing? It's at best an ad hominem, at worst just meaningless. Get some counter-evidence or make a decent argument. I've seen those sites give far better ones. Especially not other nonsense above like how people didn't believe the hollow, when the hollow explicitly clarified what he meant and later fused with Tensa Zangetsu with both of them repeating the same words about being one and the same. It was never ambiguous, both are parts of the same thing. This was an established fact that nobody, not even Ichigo upon being told so, denied.

Ichigo's personal acceptance doesn't matter here. To him, both are Zangetsu, which is just a personal reflection or notice that has no baring outside. The problem is that this personal acceptance is nothing more than what was previously established. It's like being told Bruce Wayne isn't Batman, only for someone to personally accept Bruce Wayne as Batman.

And by "almost always", we tend to forget cases like against Kenpachi where the old man saves him. Cases afterwards had the Hollow be the dominant one like he said. With the two being one and the same, it's functionally the same person saving him anyway. Tensa Zangetsu saying he wished to protect Ichigo even at the cost of letting Aizen go, all sides wanted to protect him.

It also doesn't fit because the old man was the one always teaching him. He could have steered Ichigo in any other direction, including teaching him Quincy powers at any moment. Yet he never brought it up or tried convincing Ichigo to go a different direction.