i was reading through this post here and read your tags for it and wanted to give my two cents on it because you make a super valid point. from my understanding, and vaguely remember, Enrakyōten's wielder has to visibly witness the Zankaputō. it's been a hot minute since i've skimmed through any of the CFYOW books but his whole shtick baffles me because he's apparently seen quite a few Zanpakutōs releases.
however!
i wouldn't entirely be surprised if the Zanpakutōs were all in a network of sorts considering Ōetsu created the asauchi and that he's able to sense where every Zanpakutō is in existence. it reminds me a bit of how the conduit works in xenoblade chronicles 2 where the aegises are capable of using every blade's ability in existence when in their true forms as well as knowing who is and isn't bonded with a driver.
my only questions / concerns to the whole shtick with Ōetsu are:
exactly how old is he? i would assume that he's well over 1000 years old because all Zanpakutōs have an asauchi and he's the one who created them. not only that but we see old man yama using ryujin jaka in the og fight against the quincies.
if all soul reapers have a zanpakutō but require an asauchi to even remotely communicate with them ... does this mean that there was a time that they fought without their zanpakutōs? i ask this because the whole thing with Ōetsu is a big headscratcher to me. and not only that but he wasn't even part of the og gotei 13 so there's that.
i'd love to hear what you have to say about everything because your metas are some of my absolute favorite things to read tbh! and i might be forgetting ( or outright overlooking ) something because it's honestly been a hot minute since i've read anything from the tybw arc!
I know that the Wiki specifies this as a weakness of its abilities, but having skimmed through chapter 21, I didn't see any narration or statements from Tokinada to such effect. He certainly uses Shikai he could've observed via the Visual Department, and maybe I just missed the specific line. So I'm kind of ambivalent on this point until someone points me at an exact quote from the official translation. There were some other interesting things in the chapter I did notice though. So, onto the questions! Amusingly, I was sort of talking about this sort of thing on a server earlier:
How old is Ōetsu?
We have to guess. But we get some interesting quotes. On page 93, CFYOW volume 3:
[Ikomikidomoe] tried to scale the skies in an attempt to consume the Reio, but as a result of the battle with Soul Reapers such as Shigekuni Yamamoto, who was still a youthful hero at the time, he was defeated at the hands of the Manako Osho and Oh-Etsu Nimaiya.
So, Ōetsu was around when Yamamoto was a young man, and Ikomikidomoe beat Yamamoto, although Yamamoto did not yet have a zanpakutō. (It's probably also important to note that the narrative already refers to them as Shinigami here.) We know this because on page 94:
Because of his singularity and his expansive spiritual pressure, he could not be entirely destroyed. After his name and existence had been remade, through Oh-Etsu Nimaiya’s hand, he was kneaded into a zanpaku-to and was simply sealed away. Oh-Etsu had initially planned to hold back the thing by turning him into a full Asauchi, but the Soul Reaper was still in the process of doing that research and was not capable of entirely erasing individuality in those days, so the monstrosity ended up becoming a demonic sword with the ability to devour his own wielder’s konpaku.
Ōetsu had not yet perfected the method of making asauchi, and thus would not yet have dispensed zanpakutō at large. We also know this because, per Tokinada on Kisuke making the Hōgyoku on page 140:
“For what reason would anyone need to do that? In those days, he did not even know about Aizen’s rebellious inclinations, and no being could have defeated Genryusai Shigekuni Yamamoto. What would he accomplish by making anyone more powerful?”
Yamamoto with a zanpakutō simply could not be beaten, thus Aizen needing Wonderweiss and Yhwach needing trickery. Given Kenpachi beats Ikomikidomoe, we can say Yamamoto would have done so as well with a zanpakutō, and therefore he didn't have one. And then on page 94 again:
As a result, they had ended up sealing him away at the bottom of Hoohden’s seafloor until a Soul Reaper with the tenacity and spiritual ability to properly use him appeared. A thousand years had flowed by…
We see here that the English translators cannot reasonably distinguish when they ought to use plural or singular. In other words, they cannot distinguish between millennium and millennia, because Japanese doesn't have plurals. We know this because Yamamoto had his zanpakutō and Bankai and was fighting Yhwach 1000 years ago. These events did not take place literally 1000 years ago, but millennia ago. (Likewise, Yamamoto's statement of there being no Shinigami stronger than him in 1000 years, is a mistranslation; he's saying there has never been a Shinigami stronger than him.)
We know that the Academy was founded 2,066 years before 1956/1957, meaning it was founded in either 110 or 111 BC. (Meaning it is 2111 or 2110 years old when Bleach starts in 2001) We know the Gotei 13 had to exist before then, that Shinigami were called Shinigami and not Balancers by then, that they had zanpakutō and shihakushō, and that Shinuchi had been renamed to Bankai, because we see all those things in Yamamoto's flashback about Sasakibe in chapter 504, where the Academy did not even exist yet:
He was gathering "military fame" for himself and was teaching at the "Genji School" instead. (This seems to be before even the founding of the Gotei 13.)
In other words, if the Academy is founded in 110/111 BC, it seems reasonable to imagine the Gotei 13 is much older, and that the advent of Shinigami in their modern form is older still. It would be pretty reasonable to suspect what we are seeing here is from 1000 BC.
If that's the case, then for Yamamoto to be a young man without a zanpakutō, we would be discussing an even earlier time, say 2000 or 3000 or 4000 BC.
Ōetsu is thus older than that. Mind you, when Ikomikidomoe's back story is given starting on page 92, it begins with, "In the far ancient days…" so this is hardly unreasonable.
Was there a time Shinigami fought without their zanpakutō?
Yes. We can see that through the above quotes. Based on the above, the asauchi, and thus the zanpakutō, are maybe maximally 10,000 years old.
We also know from Klub Outside that the "million-year history of Soul Society" is not coterminal with the history of the Five Great Noble Clans. In other words, the Soul King was only bound and the Five Great Noble Clans only rose to prominence and the Seireitei was only created much less than one million years ago. For academic purposes, let's say 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
That is to say, for most of their history as Shinigami and Balancers, there were no zanpakutō. For that reason, I was previously inclined to believe either all Kidō purify souls, or there is one specifically designed to purify souls, because otherwise the balance of souls ought to have gone out of whack over that interval.
However, there is another possibility. We also get this interesting exchange from Klub Outside:
Q293: When it comes to the role of a Shinigami, they cleanse Hollows of their sins and send them to Soul Society where they can rest in peace via their Zanpakuto. However, was the role of a Shinigami to simply annihilate Hollows before Ouetsu Nimaiya showed up? A293: The role of a Shinigami was in fact stipulated after the creation of Gotei 13.
If this is the case, with the role of Shinigami only becoming finalized after the Gotei 13 was created (that is, within likely the past 3,000 years) then one has to ask what made "Balancers" into "Balancers" before, and why all the accoutrements of the Shinigami (like the zanpakutō) were created if not for that mission.
Perhaps the reason the Original Gotei 13 were all murderous thugs is because the way balance was originally achieved was how Mayuri did it in TYBW, in chapter 489:
Maybe there was no purification before then. Maybe there were only mass cullings of souls. It would explain why there were plenty of mass-murderers around. It would also explain the Balancers being renamed Shinigami: death gods. They killed innumerable people to maintain the balance.
This would suggest the creation of the zanpakutō was to achieve battlefield superiority (they present numerous benefits over standard bladed weapons) and that things like the shihakushō were to create a basic level of standardization, creating a semi-professional "job" of Shinigami, with the Gotei 13 being a further centralization into a pseudo-military "guild" for that job.
Dark stuff, but pretty in keeping with the setting. Anyway, it was good to have a reason to make these thoughts more rigorous. Thanks for asking!
