Bleach: The Thousand Year Blood War

[Rynjin]

On Ichigo and power.

I uh... I mean, if Ginjo hadn't been a traitor, if X-Cution had been telling the truth about not wanting their powers, then that training arc would have literally ended with Ichigo being given a whole bunch of power.

Like, that was supposedly what was in it for X-cution, giving their powers away to someone who actually wanted power.

Which is inherently much more interesting. "Gain the trust and respect of these people so you can take away their burdens" is much more heroic than a lot of what happens in the series, and emotional work is still work.

The only time Ichigo was given power was when Rukia transferred her powers to him in the first chapter and those powers were literally destroyed and replaced with his own powers. In a process that required him to effectively die and also almost suffer a fate worse than death while he underwent an internal struggle, followed by an immediate life or death battle to get the hang of using them properly

The end of the Fullbring arc? Nobody's giving him powers, they're pumping him full of energy to brute-force him past a barrier that was keeping the powers he already had from being accessible.

Every other power was likewise either the direct result of a training arc or internal struggle or required him to undergo the same in order to master.

Which, honestly, should have foreshadowed the twist in the Fullbringer arc. The one time Ichigo was just flat out given power he lost it and had to replace it with a power that was legitimately his so of course he's not actually gonna be gifted power that belongs to someone else.

"Training arc" is extremely generous for what Ichigo typically goes through. You could say he earned back his Shinigami powers the first time, sure. But he was given his Fullbring (and Quincy powers) by consequences of his birth out of his control. He was given his Vizard powers by Kisuke. He was, essentially, gifted his bankai by Kisuke as well. Literal centuries of hard training and introspection distilled down to 3 days for no extra effort (and quite a bit less) than doing it manually. He was given his Resureccion by Ulquiorra. And I've already talked about the ending of the Fullbringer arc.

Ichigo earned very little of what he was given over the course of the series, in a way completely unlike the others of the Big Three.

Luffy has earned every single one of his powerups, save maybe the most recent one, through hard work and training; mostly offscreen, but still.

Naruto likewise was gifted a single powerup...but it was, early on, power AT A PRICE which balanced things out. He had to work a lot harder than the average ninja to master even the basics of the basics of Ninjutsu BECAUSE of that "gift" and its effects on his chakra control. Everything else he gets is the result of hard work either physically (almost everything) or emotionally (befriending Kurama).

John Bleach is...just naturally a half-demon, half-angel, robot-vampire-zombie-wizard OC because that's the extent of Kubo's creativity in that regard.