Quote Originally Posted by Rynjin View Post
The issue with pointing to "foreshadowing" in Bleach is that it's reeeeally hard to tell when something has actually been foreshadowed or not. Kubo's greatest narrative strength is taking small, insignificant details and making future plot points around them, when he had no intention of doing that before.

The single best example of this is Aizen. Remember that Aizen was supposed to ACTUALLY be dead when he is "killed" in the Soul Society arc. He was written and killed with the intention that everything about him could be taken at face value. He actually was a kindhearted man who wanted to solve a mystery and right an injustice, and he was killed for it.

Except at the last minute Kubo looked at what he had written down and decided that revealing Aizen was still alive, and was the main villain, not only MADE SENSE but was a superior twist to his original intention (having Kisuke Urahara be the primary overarching villain of the series). The only thing he needed to do was whip the right overpowered effect for Aizen's Shikai out of his ass and any minor inconsistencies like him being dead are smoothed over.

It is a genuine master stroke of narrative and one of the best villain reveals of all time. And was completely done on the fly in a week or two before the end of the arc.
I guess that explains why I've always been so conflicted about that reveal.

On the one hand, everything you said about a great villain reveal. Tousen swapping sides unexpectedly was also great, albeit in retrospect. I hated that bit at the time, but when we finally got the full story I found that it paid off well.

On the other hand, I hate hate hate Whodunnits that don't play fair. Everything leading up to the reveal points towards Aizen being dead, and there aren't really any clues that he isn't. And the only way for him to have pulled it off is to have utterly broken reality-warping illusion powers that also weren't hinted at. As a result, I've always felt pretty cheated that Aizen was the villain.

I'm willing to give it a pass because the result was so good, but there's always that little nagging voice at the back of my head...