Bleach Meta is Cancelled
I'm going to be direct and real with you: Bleach as a whole does not spark much joy for me anymore. I never intended to be and have never particularly enjoyed being known for my meta regarding it, because I have never really viewed that meta as an important or meaningful contribution. Having said that, I feel it's also wrong to diminish the opinions or feelings of people who did find that meta valuable for some reason or another. So, if you liked what I’ve written on the subject, or are from the future and are only just discovering it and think it’s great, then thank you. If you feel it has materially improved your life in some fashion, I’m glad to have done that.
However, I find it not just bothersome and distracting, but an actively bad use of my time.
Let me be clear that I am not going anywhere. I intend to keep writing fiction and developing ideas, both related to my existing and ongoing fics, and other ideas I have in mind. (I think how hard I’ve fallen for YoruIchiRuki should be evident, but I still have some IchiRuki concepts beyond those nominally being worked on.)
What I will not be doing going forward is meta posts, with the sole exception of the Hyperchlorate series, as I feel that that is “summative” and can largely be constructed from what I have already written, and it points exactly toward one of those ideas (my personal vision of what Bleach “could have been” had the focus simply been on telling a good story and respecting the characters.) The reasons for this are simple:
Bleach’s failures have been beaten to death. It’s intellectually and emotionally boring to rehash the same things over and over again. It’s Rage Archaeology. And you know what? I’ve spent more time thinking about it and dissecting it than most people have. I’ve forgotten more about it than most people will ever know, and the conclusion I have come to is essentially that...
Bleach is trash. It’s just... objectively bad. It’s sophomoric. It’s a minimum viable product. Don’t get me wrong: there were good things in it, but if you go to that first Hyperchlorate post up there and you take the five things I said made it notable (1. Deuteragonists. 2. Character Designs, 3. Mystery, 4. Contrast, and 5. Urban Fantasy Setting), you might notice that those five things can be reduced to really just two things: A. Characters and B. Vibe. That’s it. That’s the show. Bleach had some good characters and a neato vibe. And the trouble is...
Bleach squandered that vibe by becoming generic shounen schlock and it constantly abused those characters. As I have said repeatedly and consistently for several years now, the only way that Bleach makes sense as a holistic and cohesive product is that it is designed to make you feel bad. It abandoned its own themes for the sake of promoting a nihilistic and shitty worldview, which it articulated through the flagrant abuse and twisting of its characters (throughout, not merely at the end). It’s misery porn. The thing is, it’s not even cathartic misery porn—it’s misery porn designed to inspire yet more misery in its audience. It is calculated to erase its own purpose and in so doing to waste your time and bring you down. It is not entertainment, it is a psychological weapon. And you know...
There is little point to knowing or memorizing or debating the minutiae of such a piece of work. Canonicity is not correlated with quality whatsoever, and the authorial intent of an author engaging in bad faith is worth less than zero (as people who’ve been following J. K. Rowling could tell you). In other words, not only is it a waste of time and energy, but it is an actively pernicious subject. Bleach is, in a certain very real sense, evil, and its evil is on the one hand made most obvious through analysis but it is also made all the more wearying through analysis. And even if you view uncovering the truth as a valid and worthwhile goal...
What is the point? No one is really much persuaded by analysis in the present age. Argumentation really only serves to sharpen preexisting viewpoints. It might give people already inclined to agree with you the words to express what they already instinctually knew or felt, but at what cost? And even if there could be said to be a good in such a service, how much is there? To talk about it like a capitalist might: the opportunity cost outweighs the thin profit margin. And to consider it from another angle, artistic output is a more effective tool of persuasion anyway. (I could go on, but I am not [and have no interest in being] some sort of leadership figure, so I will stop here.)
What this means going forward is that I’m not interested in receiving asks about meta. If I can’t answer such a thing in a sentence, I will delete it. It’s nothing personal; I have simply made the decision that it’s not worth my time. I’m going to be focusing on my fiction. And a lot of that is going to be focused on AUs, be they IR or YIR focused (the latter of which I know exceedingly few people are willing to take a risk on, let alone interested in).
So, if you’re here because of my work on meta in the past, or that newly specified focus bothers you, this serves as your one and only notice that you’re probably better off blacklisting the tags I do bother to use for my interests, or just unfollowing or blocking me. I make no apologies for and will not reconsider this shift in my priorities.
