User blog comment:Xilinoc/Ch. 631 - friend/@comment-28861328-20150618230619/@comment-28861328-20150621172355

The backstories. It is rare we get to see the Human world's history. Yhwach as a conquering Human king is more what I expected from the Quincies than what Kubo made them out to be.

Furthermore, one of my major problems with the new Quincy is that they could even stand up to the Gotei 13 when Uryu was fodder compared to them for most of the time. In fact, most of the humans were. That a human could do so much to the superior-in-every-way Shinigami angered me greatly, especially with the bullsh*t way Kubo killed Yama-jii.

But this chapter revealed that Yhwach was an exception. Bazz-B mentions in the flashback that all Quincy use bows and arrows, yet Yhwach ruled with some weird supernatural powers. So rather than Kubo just retconing everything we knew about Quincy, it turns out that Yhwach and his Quincy are just exceptions to the rules, which made the new Quincy seem less absolutely terrible to me.

Furthermore, I finally feel some sort of connection to Bazz-B and Haschwalth. One of my major gripes with this arc is that the Sternritter and Quincy in general are very two dimensional. They appear, they have some annoying characteristic, go through the motions of a typical Bleach fight and then die. This upset me because when the Arrancar were the villains, we got attached to them. Ulquiorra, Grimmjow, Harribel, Starrk; we got to know them as characters, which made their deaths (in the case of Ulquiorra) almost as bad as losing one of the heroes. I haven't felt that with any of these Quincy. In fact, at times, it seemed like Kubo rushed to get them out of the way (Colonel Sanders) and we didn't get to know them at all.

I simply can't get behind a story where I feel no attachment to the characters. That's why I am one of the few people who actually really enjoyed the Fullbring arc. I felt like Ichigo, as a character, was exposed and, for the first time, I was rooting for him rather than a captain of the Gotei 13 that I really liked.

Hopefully Kubo keeps up the momentum with this flashback arc. There is some real potential here for some good stuff.