User blog comment:Xilinoc/Ch. 686 - Death & Strawberry (End of Bleach reMIX)/@comment-24769684-20160818150944

Song of the chapter, and of pretty much the arc as a whole

Oh boy. I suppose I had better get my complaints out of the way first. There are two abandoned plotlines which tick me off to no end.
 * The Soul King - Last I checked the guy was dead and without Yhwach to keep his power stable all the worlds will crumble and collapse. Yet we get no explanation as to what happened to the Soul King and why the worlds are still intact. Ukitake could have risen up and inhabited the Soul King's form, but nah, he just died. Aizen could have risen up in glorious success, but nah, he just got imprisoned again. How'd that work exactly? I mean, the guy had access to Kyoka Suigetsu again, his power level was near omnipotent, and he could have very easily made a getaway.
 * Urahara and co.: Oh man, this one just boils my blood because this was the one decent fight in the entire Wahrwelt portion of the arc. Not to mention that Urahara is one of the most important characters in the series!!! And Kubo is just going to leave them inside the Gift Ball???????

The whole ending with the original cast would have been kind of sweet were it not for the other great gaping plot holes. Honestly, I'd have been fine if the Urahara Shop only appeared for a single page, if still a little miffed. I'm honestly apathetic to the pairings, while extremely gratuitous they weren't exactly a surprise. Chad not even being seen and just being mentioned was hilarious and pretty indicative of his role in pretty much the entire series. At least it's better than Ganju, though, last we saw him he was getting ready to fight some statues.

Then there's the Yhwach subplot, which goes absolutely nowhere as expected. And that brings me to the kids. I can't believe I'm saying this, but Naruto did a better kid subplot at the end. All Kazui and Ichika do are extremely random stuff that never gets explained, and oh look they're both Shinigami.

Honestly, this manga had a worse ending than Naruto, which I never thought or hoped I would hear myself say. True, Kubo wasn't entirely at fault for this, but it is his fault for not making Bleach into something people wanted to see. I would have remembered Bleach much more fondly if it had ended after the Fake Karakura battle. Why did this arc fail? Well, that may be something to tackle in a blog of its own.

So that concludes my one year and one month journey of reading Bleach weekly; now I'll have to find another weekly manga to accompany One Piece. My experience with the series and this wiki has had its ups and downs, but overall I had fun despite some of the worse parts. I don't really know if I'll care enough to see the live action movie two years from now (will anyone?)

So, if this is it for my time of major contributing on this sight, I'll just say So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, good night...