I’ve put my finger on exactly why the “Inoue tries to kiss Ichigo” scene has always bothered me so much. I never liked it, and it was the reason I started to dislike her, because of the obvious consent violation, but I’ve also always half set my feelings on just not liking that ship.
But also: I don’t ship IchiRuki and I’ve never had a problem with most of their interactions beyond a distaste for how she casually hits him.
Comparing Bleach’s kiss scene to the Phoenix Mountain Kiss from Mo Dao Zu Shi throws it into sharp relief.
In Mo Dao Zu Shi, Lan Wangji comes upon Wei WuXian while he is blindfolded and alone, pins him against the tree he’s leaning on and kisses him. This scene is from Wei WuXian’s POV and you see that he’s shocked and upset at the loss of his first kiss (which he’d been saving). Then he relaxes after noticing how the “maiden” his shaking and nervous, his generous and compassionate nature letting him move past the violation to forgiveness for this person he sees as terribly shy.
He had the chance and opportunity to protest and push the person kissing him away. He chose not to. It’s another moment of character development for him, showing how he’s willing to give up something he considers precious if he feels someone else will benefit more.
Wei WuXian is blindfolded, but he isn’t vulnerable - he’d literally just walked through the woods blindfold on purpose and nuked an entire forest of monsters to show how strong he is. The staying blindfolded and lounging is him being a bit of an arrogant ass. Yes, he’s physically weaker than Lan Wangji, but nothing is stopping him biting and shouting and kicking. Only his hands are restrained by Lan Wangji then.
For Lan Wangji, this is immediately a pivotal character moment. He is horrified at himself. He realizes that what he did was wrong, a violation of Wei WuXian’s consent, and starts to change himself. It paves the road for him to become the man he does 13 years after Wei WuXian’s death. Someone who, even drunk, is so adverse to taking advantage that he punches himself in the face to knock himself out.
Both characters are active and reactive to what’s happening.
In Bleach, Inoue sneaks into Ichigo’s room while she’s under a spell to make it so no one is able to notice her presence. She comes upon him while he’s sleeping. Not only is he unconscious and unable to object to this infringement on his person, there isn’t any way he could know it was happening even if he was awake.
This scene is also entirely from her POV.
Ichigo, in contrast to Wei WuXian, is very vulnerable here. Not only is he not awake, he’s injured.
Not only can he not consent, he is unable to object, which takes on a darker tone in the context of how he’s treated by other characters over the course of his life. His conception and birth were literally orchestrated by two mad and half-mad geniuses in their giant game of chess, he’s physically drawn out of his body and battered around many times by many characters, and a lot of important things, many deeply personal to him, things about him, are hidden so he can’t know it unless someone else tells him.
How he would react in this scene is a non-existant argument because he can’t - though past information says he wouldn’t agree to this. He was loudly upset when Kon previously used his body to kiss…Inoue. Not in a *jealous another guy is kissing her* way, he doesn’t want Kon kissing anyone at all. He doesn’t want to kiss anyone.
Ichigo is an empty doll here, narratively. Nothing of him is present.
He has no part here except to be the sexy guy Inoue wants. An object she’s acting on, not a person. There is no characterization happening for him, no internal change or even a reveal of something about his nature. He is unconscious and not really in the scene at all.
Inoue doesn’t go through with it. To her weak credit. People use this to excuse and absolve her, but it really doesn’t. The story treats this backing off instead of kissing Ichigo as a failing, not of her morality for thinking and trying to do it in the first place, but of her determination to be with Ichigo. It’s “she wasn’t strong enough to kiss him when she had the chance”, not “she shouldn’t have done that”. She doesn’t change from this, or have any realization about the way she treats Ichigo or what or how she want’s/takes from him. She walks out of that room the same Inoue she was when she walked in story-wise, except now she’s been shown to the reader to be of the Edward Cullen school of “romancing”. PUtting her as just one more person in the long line of people willing to enforce their own wishes on Ichigo without his permission or knowledge - that she didn’t go through with it doesn’t erase that. Especially since it’s never addressed again.
She could have had a whole arc dealing with consent. This could have been a catalyst for her to have some self realizations of her own and grow and change. It was set up in-fact, beyond just the kiss.
Her brother takes her away from her parents, for her own good, but she had no say in that herself. She has that one (rare) moment of actual conversation with Ichigo just before he goes to Soul Society and points out that he might be saving Rukia against her will and should think about what she wants - but then immediately backtracks even though Ichigo is considering her words and hasn’t even said anything against it (looks like he might,perhaps, agree with her a bit or at least think she has a point). Instead of having any tangilbe effect on Ichigo’s decision to go to Soul Society, she negates the entire conversation and says he’s right and the issue is…never really brought up again. Ichigo never thinks about this “what is the will of the person he wants to save” thing ever again. It could have been addressed, in the arrancar arc, with her deciding she didn’t want to be saved, with her sticking by her decision to go with Ulquiorra. She could have had a substantial effect and change on Ichigo similar to Rukia, but inverted. Instead of opening up his world by introducing something from the outside, she could have helped open up his world internally by provoking growth in his views of the world. But she doesn’t, she just caves to what Ichigo wants to do without any protest, leaving him unchallenged and unchanged by her existence as always.
Instead, we just have this one weird, skeevy scene where she almost kisses Ichigo’s “unattended body” for the second time, and she never faces a consequence for it. Never even has to deal with Ichigo’s reaction as he never finds out this happened.
At the end of their respective stories, Lan Wangji and Inoue both waited for the lead romantically, but in very different ways. Lan Wangji had grown and was waiting only for Wei WuXian to return, and happy with just his presence when he did; romance being a very hard (but very welcome) second to his presence and happiness. Inoue was waiting, as Matsumoto suggested, for Ichigo to stop being stupid and fall in love with her like he “should”, which happened offscreen and…that was that for them.
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