#rodella

Rodney please talk to a girl normally you are so close to figuring it out

requested on the discord server @/megalopolus started!

They could have a nice “city girl/country guy” dynamic as well, since (according to her audition tape) Ella lives in an apartment in the city and Rodney lives on a farm.

Since Rodney is a farm boy with a ton of little brothers and Ella’s apartment has thin walls, their lower-middle/working-class backgrounds could be a thing they bond on.

I especially envision them both having an interest in poetry and love songs and serenades.

Their one interaction together in the show with Ella offering to help Rodney with his bag is the closest we got to Rodella, but I’ll take it!

Souma: I thought it was chinchilla!

In my view, Orihime’s pathway to villainy would be using her powers to reject all the events that get in the way of her getting what she wants (which is to say, mostly Ichigo). In other words, going Full Spooky Galadriel and deciding, “In place of a Dark Lord, you would have a queen! […] All shall love me and despair!”

Now, she could settle for the present where Ichigo already knows Rukia, and Aizen and Yhwach are off the board, but we already know what that yields because of 686: a universe where Ichigo is at his absolute happiest when he just sees Rukia again and argues with her, rather than when he marries Orihime or she gives birth to their son, or whatever typical things might be cited as the happiest moments of one’s life. And, honestly? From Orihime’s perspective? That must really fucking suck.

So, if Orihime is going Full Spooky Galadriel (Orihime Untethered), why would she settle? Surely she can do better than that. And the simplest way to do better would be deleting Yhwach and Aizen at the right times in history. 

The right time for the former would be during the late 1980s or early 1990s, and would keep Masaki alive and fundamentally alter Ichigo as a character (probably significantly dulling his focus on protection and removing his disaffection), and removes future problems associated with the Quincy coming back.

Doing the latter could only be done in the latter-half of the 1980s, after Ichigo had been conceived, but before Aizen set any of his other plans in motion. So the Visored and Urahara Shop would still be around, and Kaien and Miyako would still be dead. Regardless, doing this would keep him from doing what he did with Rukia.

Trouble is, the Hougyoku is already in Rukia’s soul by that time. And it seems highly likely that Aizen did not “send” Rukia to Ichigo, but rather that the Hougyoku bent Aizen’s machinations so that it happened. (Why would Aizen be immune to the Hougyoku’s effects?) In other words, the Hougyoku being stuffed in Rukia’s soul makes it seem likely that Rukia would still encounter Ichigo eventually, regardless of how normal and happy his life was, because their encounter is essentially fated. (Kaien more than likely reminds Rukia of Ichigo, in a non-linear framework, rather than Ichigo reminded Rukia of Kaien.)

So the trouble for Orihime Untethered is that she has to:

Delete two of the most powerful dudes in the series (admittedly not at their strongest) to get a lock on the guy she wants (i.e., by removing “incentives” for him to not want to be human, and to remove her main competition) when her powers don’t work on any sufficiently powerful reiatsu.

Her main competition still having a reality-altering device shoved into her soul which may or may not be beyond Orihime’s powers to mess with even if she could kill a merely Shinigami Aizen and a comatose Yhwach. (As it was never made clear whether she actually could destroy the incomplete Hougyoku with her powers, and it sure seems like Aizen is impossible to destroy with one in him in the present.)

So the question here is: where does Orihime Untethered get the kind of monstrous power that would be necessary for such feats? And the only place she could reasonably get it from would probably be if Uryuu decided to somehow lend her the power by going beast mode in a reishi rich environment. 

Whether Uryuu is stupid enough to do that for her without knowing what she really intends, for the sake of making her happy even if he’s not in the picture at all, is an open question. (Perhaps yes, because Uryuu can be dumb like that.)

So, Aizen and Yhwach get deleted and the Hougyoku is plucked out of Rukia. (I feel it’d be going a bit far for even Orihime Untethered to delete Rukia, and I really don’t think Uryuu would agree to that.) This of course means it is never around to be in proximity to Orihime herself and Chad, so she is also retroactively keeping herself from getting powers in the first place.

Oh, that’s a problem. It’s a one-way ticket. This isn’t Donnie Darko or The Butterfly Effect: if your powers get deleted from the timestream you can’t get them back and you’re stuck. Ooh. So maybe don’t delete the Hougyoku from Rukia, even if you can. But doesn’t that then mean you’re relying on encountering her…?

Masaki would probably teach Ichigo about Quincy powers once he was of age, so he’d probably have noticed and gravitated toward Uryuu in school?

But the thing is, even if Masaki (and Kanae) didn’t die, Souken still did. So Uryuu would still become bitter toward Shinigami. Maybe he would turn Ichigo onto that way of thinking too? So they probably still become embroiled with Soul Society.

Okay, so Orihime has to have deleted Mayuri too now, to keep Souken alive and keep Uryuu and Ichigo from fighting against Shinigami. Uryuu in the present giving her the power to change shit carte blanche would probably be cool with that.

So, Souken is alive too. His big thing was cooperation with Shinigami. Working with them to eliminate Hollows in a non-destructive way while protecting humans. His proposal seemed to have been working at least a little.

What’s to say that Rukia isn’t sent as Soul Society’s representative as part of that program? Or one of the people sent? Or that she isn’t sent to walk the beat in Karakura anyway, since it seems to be the 13th Division’s responsibility? Especially so if she still has the Hougyoku in her, warping events around to take her to Ichigo?

So, there’s Quincy Uryuu and Quincy Ichigo (with latent Shinigami and Hollow powers…) working with Shinigami, including maybe Rukia. If Rukia didn’t have the Hougyoku, and turned up like this, Orihime would have no ability to get her powers back and keep up. If you can’t get powers then can’t keep up if Ichigo and Uryuu start getting adventurous in this new, happier Bleach with more functional familial and friendly relationships. So she needs the Hougyoku to still be in Rukia no matter what.

She can’t remove the Hougyoku from Rukia, let alone delete her even if she wanted to, and her having the Hougyoku means she is almost assuredly going to show up. (Plus, even if you could delete her, karma is a bitch. Who’s to say she wouldn’t reincarnate even if you did delete her? Especially if you do it too early? She might just Senna her way back. Hell, even if it works, maybe Senna herself shows up to take her place! Especially since a lot of the filler is now being treated as semi-canonical.)

So, we go around in circles with the real problems.

The first real problem for Orihime Untethered is ultimately that Rukia is absolutely necessary to her own ability to have a role in Ichigo’s supernatural nonsense. Meanwhile, she can’t really strip Ichigo of powers because they’re fundamental to who he is. So there is no way to really undo things when it comes to either of them directly, just the things around them. Ichigo and Rukia are effectively “status locked” in a fashion similar to Doctor Who’s “time locked” concept.

The second real problem is that even without Aizen and Mayuri, Soul Society is still its corrupt self and likely to draw the Kurosaki and Ishida into its shenanigans. And even if Yhwach is eliminated, Wandenreich is also still out there. As are all the Espada. So some version of supernatural nonsense is basically guaranteed to happen, no matter how many other pieces you knock down.

At the end of the day, Ichigo and Rukia are going to meet. They are going to have adventures. They are going to develop a rapport. And her only real solution is going to be social engineering, not her powers. And the truth is, Orihime isn’t really that great at the Mean Girls game, and I doubt Orihime Untethered is either.

I see her trying to force, as much as possible, the series into being a slice-of-life school comedy series, and it kind of playing out like Groundhog Day as she selectively undoes things and redoes scenarios, and it just never works out. And that leads back to the fundamental issue she’s encountering: she is trying to fuck with something that is more or less written into the fundamental laws of the universe itself.

Even if she gets Ichigo, it’s always going to be some form of settling for less. She is always going to be the second-place prize. And she is also likely to be only a temporary one, because if souls are kicking around at a rate of aging ~30 years per 2000 years that pass, an awful lot can change. And that’s before taking into account the confirmed mechanic of reincarnation.

(And this is, ultimately, why 686 is stupid in addition to being a non sequitur: okay, IH and RR had kids. So fucking what? Divorces happen. People can change, grow apart, and move on. As I said once before, what is “five lifetimes” in comparison to like, 5000 years? Or an infinite cycle of maximally 5000 year reincarnations? Barring their souls being killed somehow, Ichigo and Rukia are going to be around for longer into the future than we are now from when the Pyramids were built. You think some possibly expedient marriages are going to keep them apart all that time? Or into their next lives? Yeah, no. That’s the thing: their story isn’t over even if Bleach is. That’s yet another reason that ending is so shit beyond its character assassination and ass-pull pairings: literally anything could happen beyond it. It is not definitive because these are not normal-ass normal people.)

So what does she do, trapped in this hell of her own creation? As I see it, she has three options:

She goes completely crazy and decides to delete existence itself or massively restructure it a la Yhwach. I also really don’t think Uryuu would agree to that and I can see it ending rather tragically.

She decides to just accept being second-best with a smile until it eventually burns her out, at which point she probably tries to find someone who actually appreciates her. (One guess as to who that is.)

She skips being miserable and instead grows up and realizes that Ichigo is never going to be as happy with her as he is with Rukia, and that she needs to find that person immediately rather than wasting everyone’s time, including her own.