#bad cake

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME! HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR GRAND SKELETON! It’s 12AM where I’m at so I just wanted to make this because it’s party time for me, well once I get off at work and watch the premiere of Deadpool 2 with my brother so I can’t wait for that. So yeah, I’m now 24.

Picture it: Newark, New Jersey. 2017.

Setting: a lovely outdoor restaurant with live music with my neighbor/friend, J, awaiting the arrival of the blind date she has set up for me.

I’ve never been much for blind dates. I find the prospect of someone coming to meet me, sight unseen, absolutely terrifying. What if I don’t fit their ideal of physical beauty?

Somewhat more importantly, what if I think they’re busted?

But, at the behest of J, I agree to give it a shot in order to hone my people skills. After all, I really do need to learn to have a somewhat successful interaction with a man at some point in my life.

J and I eat dinner and listen to the (laughably bad) live singer’s sets. My date is late and this does not bode well for my ability to like him. I’m not the type of woman who waits for anything, let alone a stranger. Sometime after dinner and two post-dinner coffees, the man arrives. 

I immediately register that I’m not attracted to him, but resolve to give things a chance. Again, I’m there to practice my people skills, not find a man to marry and ride off into the sunset with.

The man is somehow more awkward that I am. He doesn’t make any eye contact, he has his arms folded over his chest and is hugging himself. He barely asks me any questions, and when he does they are simply to turn my questions around on me (ex: when I asked what he liked do in his spare time, he answered and asked what I liked to do). My ability to carry the one-sided interaction is fading fast, so I ask the man what he likes to read, assuming that I could at least talk about whatever book it is for another 5 minutes and then gracefully make my exit.

I was wrong.

This is a recurring theme.

He answers that he hadn’t really read since middle school until recently. Now, he was VERY into reading about terrorists.

Da. Fuq? 

My eyebrows shoot into my hairline. I kick J under the table several times, indicating that this is OVER and I want to go home. She suggests that we walk to a nearby diner for dessert. 

I’m non-plussed (and not in the American sense) because everyone knows you don’t go with a weirdo to a second location. 

Still, we walk with the man to the diner and the conversation is just as stilted and awkward as it was at the restaurant. Once there, while waiting for our to-go desserts, I make a last ditch attempt to find some kind of connection with this man, if for no other reason than maybe he’ll be less likely follow me home and kill me. So, I ask him his top 5 favorite movies. 

He tells me that ALL of the Fast and Furious movies are his number one.

At that point, I bid him adieu. He was clearly beyond all hope.

First of all, I need you all to know that I have sixty-one screenshots in my folder for this episode. Tumblr lets you have 10 images per post (somehow I got away with more in this post?? #blessed). Granted, some of them I use to make animated gifs-- wait, no. That doesn’t make it better.

THIS EPISODE. The theme of this episode is: everything is a bother, trying is for losers. We open with the Captain-General ordering Kurotsuchi to go to the World of the Living for some damn reason and also, to simplify the procedures for Gentei Kaijo. Seriously, they spend at least four filler episodes talking about simplifying gentei kaijo (which is when your power limit gets lifted and you yell gentei kaijo!! and they zoom in on the squad flower symbol on your tits, and it’s great, why on earth would anyone want to simplify this??) Anyway, ain’t no one got time for this, so Kurotsuchi delegates to Akon who delegates to...uh, anyone wanna go?

It turns out exactly one person does, Rin (who uses he/him pronouns) wants to go for candy eating purposes. So you get an idea of who we’re dealing with, they send Rin with a protection detail of...Hanatarou.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned this, but remember when Ulquiorra and Yammy showed up in the park and they made that giant crater? Well, it’s still there, and I’m pretty sure it’s featured prominently in every one of these filler eps. In my mind, it’s the same pit from Parks and Rec and that Karakura Town and Pawnee, Indiana are somehow one and the same. Uh, that’s right, Rin is there to investigate the pit. Urahara makes Yumichika go with my two pasty nonbinary children and he is salty about it.

Along the way, Rin stops off to buy cake, and appropos of nothing, has a horrifying monstrosity that allows souls to be seen by humans without a gigai. Why does it have boobs, tho?

Oh no, they’ve stood outside the cake shop too long, because here comes a sad ghost with some unfinished business. Yumichika, a genius, is like, “okay, konsou time,” but Rin and Hanatarou convince him to hear the dude out. (ALWAYS KONSOU RIGHT AWAY. NEVER LISTEN TO A GHOST. NO LISTEN. ONLY KONSOU). Uggggggh the ghost is sad because his mom never ate his cake he was hit by a car she’s moving away whooooooo caaaaaaaares konsoooooouuuu hiiiiiiim.

Reader, they do not, and somehow agree to bake the cake for him. It’s because Rin wants cake, and Hanatarou is soft for Rin, I guess. Yumichika is generally horrified by all this, because he’s lazy and hates doing things, but he goes along with it. So they go back to Urahara’s, and Urahara and Tessai spend twenty minutes talking about their kitchen remodeling job and we find out that Yumichika agreed to this nonsense because he likes how he looks in a chef’s outfit. To be fair: Yumichika looks killer in that chef’s outfit.

So they try to make a cake. Everything seems fine, it… looks like a cake. It’s time to test it aaaaaand none of them know what cake is supposed to taste like. Ururu (WHO HAS SURELY HAD CAKE BEFORE) shows up, and is like, I got this. So she runs the cake down to the Training Buttes and we get a few exciting seconds of Chad vs Renji Round 17.

All of these filler episodes also love to sprinkle in a little Chad - Renji training and reader, I am here for it. It’s always the same. Renji shouts, “Are you ready for me?” while Hihiou Zabimaru does A(lways) B(e) C(oiling) and Chad goes “You bastard!” and then Hihou Zabimaru headbutts Chad into a rock face, and I love it, I could watch this literally forever, I wrote a 30k word fanfic about it. 

Ahem. Enter Ururu, bearing cake.

“I have had cake before,” says Chad. 

“I KNOW EVERYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT THE WORLD OF THE LIVING,” Our Renji intones.

They eat the cake.

Ururu’s face dissolves into horror.

What follows is possibly the most perfect 30 seconds of television ever, heretofore known as the Bad Cake Montage. I love it so much I made a moodboard for it. Hanatarou, Rin, and Yumichika make a series of horrific cakes while the chef ghost harangues them. There’s an animation where Yumichika is supposed to be chopping strawberries, but he’s not, he’s just chopping nothing, threateningly. Renji and Chad become increasingly distressed until they are literally hiding from the cake. Wacky music plays. I assume Chad and Renji actually die in this episode. We do not see them after the montage, and the other three end up tasting the final cake themselves.

Oh, yeah, there’s a part where the chef ghost stands on the corner where he was hit by the car and his mom is moving away tomorrow and it’s real sad and Yumichika resolves to put in 0.001% effort. They make the final cake, and then this happens:

When I was a teen I was really into pre-Food Network Iron Chef, and this was the judging portion of every single episode. It’s perf.

Okay, eyes on the prize, Polynya. The cake is great, they take it to the ghost chef’s mom and this lady is like, “I hate cake now.” OH. MY. GOD. Ghost chef starts flipping his shit, drops the cake and turns into a Hollow. I cannot fault him, I want to turn into a Hollow at this point. Hantarou’s all, “hoo boy, let’s talk this out,” and a MENOS GRANDE STROLLS IN. WUT.

Yumichika is like, “Oh, thank God, it’s stabbing time,” and goes off to fight the Hollow, and gets injured protecting the cake. And THEN, Hanatarou whips out his zanpakutou, and uses it to “heal” ghost chef from turning into a Hollow. For those non-Hanatarou stans in the audience, first of all, get off my blog, and second, Hisagomaru goes to shikai by absorbing people’s wounds and then discharges a massive blast of power once its gauge is full, critically injuring the Menos after which Yumichika finishes it off.

In all the kerfuffle, the nightmarish ghost projection machine has fallen out of Rin’s bag and Ghost Chef’s mom sees him and eats the cake and proclaims it delicious. Everyone cries.

I hope that Ghost Chef gets sent to District 80.