@Ramza00: I can appreciate you put way more thought (and certainly more words) into this than Kubo himself did, but I'm with Rynjin on this one.

Quote Originally Posted by Rynjin View Post
No, the selling point was that they were inaccessible without INSIDE help. It was the singular good, thematic thing about making him a Fullbringer in the first place. It was a power he had to ****ing earn instead of being handed to him again and again, like his original Shinigami powers, his Hollow powers, and even his Bankai were.

Having him use Fullbring as a stepping stone to reawaken his true powers? Great! Awesome.

But that's not what happened. He was, again, quite literally gifted his powers back in a (and I cannot stress enough how absurd this is) quite literal giftwrapped box, thus making the entire arc in the end, pointless. The Fullbring Arc is a shaggy dog story. The moral lesson seems to be that hard work is punished; Ichigo wouldn't have had to go through so much **** if he had just laid down and gone back to his normal life until some folks from the Soul Society came and re-powered him.

It also feels like a complete Deus Ex Machina ending to an arc I'd already started to sour on when Ginjo was revealed to totally be the final villain of the arc. I don't really care if it was foreshadowed, it was still people coming out of the woodwork to, again, quite literally hand Ichigo the W at the end. It was not an earned victory, and it was not a satisfying fight.

Not that I ever saw the fight until I rewatched the anime last year, because I again dropped the series like a hot potato the instant he was just given his powers back. And I'll tell you, I was a helluva lot less critically aware of media when I was 19, so it took A LOT to make me drop a series. I watched every season of Heroes, even the ****ty reboot! Bleach was, to me, at the time worse than the later seasons of Heroes. It was very obviously doing something wrong.
Definitely, and we're not the only ones who realized it. Hence its rather precipitous plummet from SJ. But I won't rehash that when folks like Super Eyepatch Wolf, Mother's Basement and Gigguk did a much better job than I would have.