Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-27392440-20160214172258/@comment-27392440-20160221183156

Are you sure it's necessary to train once the mask is broken? I remember that grand fisher changed into an arrancar after it was broken for him in the manga and it's heavily implied Ulquiorra permanently and for the first time changed into an arrancar when his mask got broken by that tree he let himself fall into.

Also, I may just be over thinking it but didn't the incident with Sora imply there was another inner spirit trying to take over? This would suggest that hollows are a lot like zanpakuto in that they have an inner spirit that is the base of their power. The big difference in why shinigami see it and hollows don't I think is similar to how most quincy don't know they have an inner Yhwach spirit like Ichigo revealed they do, because shinigami are trained in methods to communicate with their spirit and as a result know they have one. Unless the vizard inner hollows aren't typical and only shinigami develop actual hollow spirits when they hollowfy, the vizard seem to be proof that all hollows have inner spirits and aren't just one ravenous soul, vizard just are aware of that fact because they have training in entering their own soul and confronting their inner selves. My personal theory about Starrk and Lilinette actually is that they were a hollow that in their loneliness may have learned of their inner hollow and externalized it like a shinigami would for their bankai, also suggesting that they were so much stronger than they're comrades because they learned to draw power from their bond similar to a shinigami, of course that's only what I think on that topic and could be totally off base.

I think the answer for why Nel's fraccion had such a bad reaction to having their masks torn off is the reason hollows need more than just broken masks to become arrancar, I think that having a hollow hole represents that they still need a mask or fragment of it to live with the pain, sorrow and incompleteness the hole represents and you can only become an arrancar if you can handle most of the trauma without the whole mask protecting you from it. This would suggest that having their mask fragments ripped off meant they had to face the trauma that made them hollows in the first place before they were ready and as a result they regressed to a fully masked state to handle the stress. I'm curious if they regressed if they count enough like hollows now that they could complete their evolution one day into vasto lorde or if they're more in a worst of both worlds state forever