Bleach in Suburban Senshi

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Bleach in Suburban Senshi

The universe of Bleach has been mostly absorbed into the greater canon of Suburban Senshi; as such, for those of us who are unfamiliar with the series, a greater explanation is past due. To help smooth things out when the waving of wangs becomes relevant, this article will deal primarily with the integrated notions that will likely arise in the course of play. For more in-depth information, it is advised that other external sources such as the wikipedia page be consulted.

This page contains some spoilers, be on the watch.

Soul Society

After a person dies, their soul becomes detatched from their body. The recently dead are listless, sometimes confused creatures who seek comfort in the trappings of the real world, following after persons or lingering in places that they were attached to in life. Most cling tightly to the memories of who they once were, and are thus generally incapable of moving on without assistance. While the universe is rife with things that assist souls with moving on, one of the most prominent on Earth, and especially in Japan, is the Soul Society. Comprised chiefly of once-living humans, Soul Society is a great accumulated gathering of the dead, organized under a loose approximation of a feudal Japanese society.

Soul Society is a huge, sprawling place, filled with millions upon millions of the dead, and is administrated in large part by the militarily-inclined souls known as the Shinigami.

Shinigami

Shinigami, within the context of Bleach, are spirits of the dead who have learned to awaken their latent spiritual power, termed reiatsu within Soul Society, analogous to ki in humans. While this seems like an unnecessary precaution, developing martial skills is often necessary to fulfill the twin duties of the thirteen shinigami divisions.

The first duty of shinigami is to maintain the balance of souls passing from this world to the next. This is done by a process known as soul burial, and serves to process a recently passed soul and send it to Soul Society. The second duty of shinigami is to do battle with entities that prey upon souls and spiritual power—most often degenerate souls who have become bestial Hollows.

All shinigami possess a weapon known as a zanpakuto, a katana that evolves with the shinigami's personal spiritual growth. It is both servant and peer to the shinigami, fully sentient and is the gateway for both stages of a shinigami's spiritual growth, the uncommon power known as shikai and the extraordinarily rare power known as bankai.

The Ranks

The comparative power of a shinigami is usually judged by their rank within the gotei 13: rank-and-file, seated officer, lieutenant, vice-captain, and captain-class. The rank-and-file are roughly comparable to skilled, but mundane and nameless human soldiers, with captain-class shinigami and their almost-universal bankai capability the fighting peers of the stronger Suburban Senshi.

Hollows

Not all wayward souls are collected and processed by the shinigami. There are times when the connection between a soul and its former life frays, due to neglect or the destruction/death of its former links; when this connection, often known as a chain of fate, frays apart, all too often the soul's preoccupations drive it to madness. When this stress becomes too strong, the soul violently and painfully reconstructs itself into a being known as a hollow. A hollow is easily identified by two universal characteristics: a circular hole in its chest, and a ghastly demonic white mask.

While still essentially human in nature, the vast majority of hollows have degenerated to a semi-sentience—possessing some semblance of a personality and some memory of their former life. Their existence is plagued by a continual sensation of emptiness, a feeling that abates only when they are eating. The preferred food of hollows is other dead souls—the more powerful the better—and a hollow will even devour living humans if they are strong enough to get away with it.

Much like shinigami, hollows are often sorted by their relative power the weakest are simply called hollows and resemble more monsters from nightmare than anything human. Higher ranks are known collectively as the menos and are divided into the gillian adjuchas and vastolorde; while the strongest ranks seldom venture forth from the hollow-infested subdimension known as Hueco Mundo, it has been hypothesized that the four official ranks of hollows roughly parallel the less official four categories of shinigami, with a probable edge to the hollows.

Gigai and Soul Candy

Thankfully, these battles are by and large unnoticed by the vast majority of the human populace, though hollows and vindictive ghosts can have poltergeist-like effects on their environment, and shinigami/hollow battles can thoroughly scar their surroundings. Most of the time, the former goes unnoticed, and the latter is attributed to more conventional supernatural threats. Ghosts, hollows, and shinigami are completely invisible and inaudible to the average human. Those who can see the dead are usually possessed of hidden power or supernatural talents of some sort; as an example, most of the persons in #suburbansenshi2 can observe the dead, with a few exceptions, including such perfectly normal individuals as starcat.

In order to interact with the living world, Soul Society has created artificial soulless bodies known as gigai. Shinigami make use of gigai to perform everyday interactions with the real world, often to take advantage of the luxuries not available in Soul Society. However, because they cannot access their true power while in a gigai, and gigai often take a great deal of effort to get free of, this prompted the creation of modsouls, also known as soul candy. Modsouls are artificial souls in the shape of a small candy-like green pill. All modsouls are crafted to automatically animate any body they are placed in. Shinigami generally use modsouls to quickly and easily separate from their gigai, limiting the need to repair them, and allowing them to act quickly in the face of a threat. While most shinigami keep their modsouls close to them, there are others who allow any modsouls they may own to inhabit dolls or stuffed animals.

The Next Level: Rampant Spoilers!

Spoilers are rampant in this section for the dub, possibly the translated manga, and parts of the fansub. You have been warned!!!



While it is theoretically possible for a shinigami or hollow to be able to advance through the ranks to the highest strengths given enough time and energy, true advancement is a rare and valued thing. Amongst both groups, only a handful of shinigami learn to achieve shikai—the first release of the zanpakuto; furthermore, no more than twenty shinigami in all of soul society can perform the final release, known as bankai. Hollows are similarly limited. Rather than communion and focus with their zanpakuto, hollows achieve growth only by killing and devouring other hollows of comparable power, adding their prey's spiritual strength to their own.

Even still, research undertaken in Soul Society has demonstrated that the shinigami combat arts all possess an inherent ceiling. A shinigami who has come within spitting distance of this ceiling would be capable of acts attributable to gods themselves, but just the same, this upper limit is a hard fact and an utter certainty. However, there is a way (it is not known when nor how it was discovered), but within the same being, the powers of a shinigami and the powers of a hollow augment one another, rather than overlap. Thus, many shinigami who were eager to achieve incredible power underwent what is now a forbidden ritual that awakened what is known as an inner hollow. The process to awaken the inner hollow is inherently and exceedingly dangerous, and there is no guarantee of success. If the soul in question does not manage to dominate this hidden violent terrible strength in an internal battle of wills, they will themselves be destroyed, and the inner hollow will assume command of the spiritual body. The ambitious shinigami that survived this ritual are known as vizard after the masks they manifest when they draw upon their inner hollow, and they are all exiles from Soul Society for dabbling in the powers and strengths of their enemy.

Similarly, a hollow may gain shinigami powers and become what is known as an arrancar. While the details of this process are not quite specified in the canon, the end result is an uncannily human looking entity with the torn remnants of its old hollow mask fused somewhere upon its body, usually the head. Arrancar wield zanpakuto, much like shinigami do, and can even perform a shikai as shinigami do. The result is much different, however. Instead of altering the form of the zanpakuto the arrancar, shikai reveals their true physical form: a more human looking semblance of their former hollow visage.