#squad six

Renji always shows up wearing a shirt, but somehow, the shirt disappears almost immediately. Where does it go? It is a mystery.

He puts a bucket of water on his head and everyone throws rocks at him while he deflects them with a bo staff. He has never been hit, not even once. It’s all fun and games, throwing rocks at your vice-captain, until you’re the one standing there with a bucket wobbling precariously on your head as you’re being pelted with projectiles.

He sings a song about honor while you are shooting tomatoes with a bow-and-arrow despite the fact that shinigami do not fight with bow-and-arrow. You wish someone would dub him over with Donny Osmond.

You go running while carrying sandbags on poles, like a donkey. Rikichi collapses on the side of the road. Renji picks up his sandbags and runs on.

On the rare occasions that Byakuya shows up, Renji’s shirt is immediately back on. Where did it come from? Where was he keeping it? You think, our distinguished, honorable captain is going to save us from this dreadful humiliation of trying to snatch fish out of a river with our bare hands. Byakuya saunters up, mumbles some absolutely incomprehensible bit of “wisdom”, like “The true strength of a man’s soul is what he does with his time before 10am on a weekend” and Renji is like “Of course, sir,” and Byakuya catches, like, 3 fish with his bare hand, and walks off again, what the hell, he didn’t even get wet???

Oh, God, it’s time to climb the pole with the weights tied to your arms. Please, not the pole. And once again, Vice-Captain’s shirt has disappeared.

Sorry, Anon, I am very firmly in the Renji-doesn’t-want-to-be-captain camp (even though he would be great at it and I go hard for Renji-reluctanctly-becomes-a-captain fanfiction). We will have to agree to disagree.

Because I love hijacking my own asks, and also it’s my #brand, here’s some bonus Squad 6 discourse:

So, I have heard that in the TYBW arc, Byakuya was supposed to actually die and theoretically Renji would have taken over for him. I don’t know the origin of this, if it was fan speculation, or Kubo said it in an interview, or what, but I have thought about this, and I think that the Kuchikis would burn Soul Society to the ground if this had happened.

I have theorized that there are no other acceptably high-spiritually-powered Kuchikis, otherwise, they would be Vice Captain at the 6th, and not Renji. I assume that the Clan Head does not have to be the Captain at 6, in fact, does not need to be a shinigami at all, but that is often the case. The obvious choice would actually be Rukia, especially since she gets bankai in the same arc. (I assume she learned it in the Royal Realm, although it’s possible that she already had it).

Now, there are two possibilities why this might not work out, both of which are very believable:

1) She doesn’t want to, either because she loves the 13th too much, hates the rules and regulations of the 6th, or because she wants Renji to have it.

2) The Kuchikis despise her, and made Byakuya explicitly write her out of the line of succession as soon as he adopted her.

In either case, it would make a very good (read: thirsty) story hook where the Kuchikis don’t have anyone to install as Captain of the 6th, so they agree to let Renji do it, but they make him marry Rukia first.

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