meta q: i don't know if anyone asked this before. apologies if anyone did. but i was wondering what you think about why exactly aizen sort of accepted to be locked away in muken? now mind you, i am not as educated about him as you and might be missing out on details here but it always appeared to me that despite the seals around him on that chair, he very much had the power to free himself on his own had he ever wished to do so?
if not, please educate me senpai ;w;
random asks | always accepting
alright, pain train time it is.
honestly, thereâs numerous reasons as for why aizen is willing to remain in muken but the most pointed reason of all has to do with Deicide. i have talked extensively of how much Deicide has impacted aizen in terms of how he wanted to lose by the time ichigo showed up.
now, if you know me, you know i like to talk about aizen and his power because, unlike many villains, aizen never wanted his power. we get two whole pages alluding to what his motivations could have been in regards to the hogyoku and with himself and i, for one, am pretty sure that ichigo is a shit liar so i take what he said about aizen and his own loneliness as gospel myself. the line ichigo says has always stood out to me, that being: once i had enough power to be able to fight aizen as an equal, i felt nothing in his sword but 'loneliness'. if he had incredible power from the time he was born, then maybe he was searching for someone who could see things the way he did. and when he finally gave upon finding that, maybe he began to wish he could just be a 'normal' shinigami.
now, the reason why i thrive on this line so much is because aizen is not like many villains out there; if he was your stereotypical shonen villain, the man would have a body count in the hundreds, iâm sure. yes, i know what he did to make his hogyoku but that wasnât directly himself doing such things; aizen entrusted underlings to do that. and aizen has only two on-screen deaths attributed directly to him in the entire series; he didnât even strike the final blow on yhwach. his hands are not clean, but neither is he a man to casually dispose of others without thinking it through either. those onscreen deaths? kaname and gin. kaname, as we know from CFYOW, asked aizen to kill him. that is, truthfully, a whole fucking bag of worms i need to unpack at some point because boy. itâs -- itâs a hell of a thing to ask someone you know is capable of killing you. but equally, aizen promised kaname that he would -- and he did. aizen respected kaname enough to fulfill that wish and desire of his. thatâs a hell of a thing to think about.
gin? ... aizen never wanted gin dead. yes, he says he took him along that day, saying he knew that gin would try to kill him, but thereâs nothing in him that says that he wanted gin dead. and two years later, in the blood war, we see that aizen does not want to leave Muken. shunsui had to force him to leave in order to get aizen to help, but there were other factors in play; aizen would have been content to leave seireitei to burn, i feel - but he did have some kind of tie or draw still to the place he once served. that - or yhwach really offended him. i think itâs a combination of all of them.
but Deicide is something that i could probably break down into several interconnected meta; thereâs so much to unpack from it and i take great delight in trying to puzzle things out with it. someone on twitter said once that kubo is a shallow, static writer. he doesnât worldbuild extensively and his lore is slapdash, but by and large things more or less remain constant.
except that he deliberately displayed to us that aizen has become withdrawn. aizen does not exhibit behaviors that he used to in regards to the events prior to the blood war. he shows flashes of them, moments of that old pride and arrogance, but aizen does not behave the way he did prior to Deicide. and part of that is shown in that he exhibits to shunsui that he can undo those seals. he can leave Muken any time he damn well pleases. but he doesnât. in a way, aizen is deliberately going along with the punishment involved with keeping him locked away in Muken because he wants to be there. the biggest factor in why his behavior has changed is gone. gin is no longer there and without gin there to provide his sly comments and more ... well, aizen just chooses to stay. why, though? i mean, even in CFYOW ( as loosely canon as that is; i have taken select things from it and thatâs all ) when theyâre cleaning up from the blood war, aizen doesnât protest in being put back into Muken which is very strange to me.
heâs sullen and withdrawn in the behavior he shows. he doesnât bother trying to interact with others. aizen doesnât even try to keep up that arrogant self he used to be. one of the biggest points of proof is one of my favorite displays:
aizen doesnât even try to refute what yhwach says here about his own anguish. aizen is a practical man; like kisuke, he plans dozens, if not hundreds of steps ahead of what others do and it is very rare for him not to be able to read someone and thusly come up with a dozen ways to counteract them. only one person has been able to successfully lie to aizenâs face and yhwach is not that person. that person was killed by aizen when he never planned on it.
aizen is in Muken because he wants to be in Muken. aizen lost to ichigo because he wanted to lose. he wants to be there in Muken because he killed gin and i feel like thatâs something which didnât hit him until even after his trial. you have to remember, too, that aizen is a man who very much is skilled at concealing himself and his emotions but in the blood war, itâs like he doesnât even try. we see him expressing dissociative behavior. he has little interest in whatâs going on. he doesnât pursue things such as telling shunsui to free him from more of those seals. for that matter, aizen is willingly letting himself remain sealed when we have proof that he can undo them. yes, he has the power to undo those seals. yes, he can get out of that chair and leave whenever he wishes. and for that matter, given the new Hell arc thatâs incoming, it seems aizen has finally decided to leave Muken. aizen could have freed himself from the chair and his bonds before the point here with yhwach. he showed it with shunsui when shunsui came down to try wrangling him into going along with the plan.
thereâs a lot to be said about aizen and Muken and why heâs staying down there and it boils down to, essentially, his being in there because he wants to be. heâs there because he has nothing else to him now. he killed kaname because kaname asked it of him. he ( or rather, the hogyoku wearing his face and his hands ) killed gin. did some part of him want gin dead? maybe in the heat of the moment. maybe in the aching pain of betrayal and perhaps heartbreak. maybe not. i donât think aizen ever planned to kill gin. like i absolutely do not think that was something he had expected or anticipated. like, aizenâs smart enough to know there will be things he doesnât plan for happening. but i donât think he ever anticipated that.
staying in Muken is, in a way, his attempt at penance, perhaps. that -- or he just has lost so much. he wanted to throw his power away and he failed. his time in Muken has not weakened aizen. he is, in fact, stronger than he was on the day of Deicide. we see repeated proof of this, but he doesnât take any joy in it. if anything, aizen seems more frustrated from his inability to help than anything else. and i imagine that if he had truly tried to make a point, he could have overridden whatever mayuri was using on him with ease. but he never did.
itâs a whole complicated mess and this is not anywhere near coherent enough to try conveying it all.
