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I've been poking at the structure of Bleach, now that the second cycle is finished and a new one is starting, because I honestly kind of expected the fall of Aizen to be the end. Looking back on it, that may have been foolish, because the end of the Hollow cycle matches the end of the shinigami cycle very closely: there is a huge confrontation in which martial ability is useful, is necessary to survive, but does not actually accomplish the desired end. In fact, no one gets a perfectly happy ending and things are still a hot mess afterward.
Now we have a new cycle, which looks like it may be focused on human powers, and that brought my thoughts back to my earlier speculation on KT's apparent cosmological model. In the first cycle, we had a trip to Soul Society, home of the shinigami (Asura). In the second cycle, we had a trip to Hueca Mundo, home of the Hollows (hungry ghosts). Perhaps this cycle will represent the human world.
To be sure, the story in general returns to humans as a touchstone, again and again, but that makes a certain amount of sense if the world-structure really is inspired by the six worlds of the realm of desire. The human realm, the human existence, is, after all, the one to which the greatest potential for enlightenment is attributed. This also makes a certain cosmological sense of why it's the humans who progress so astonishingly quickly, in Bleach.
Thinking about all that, though, brought me back to the basic point that KT really seems to love parallelism and symbolism, and that the personal aspects of the Hollow cycle didn't seem nearly as parallel to the shinigami cycle as I was expecting. Maybe they were, though--parallel in light of the worlds in question, anyway.
( Rukia's journey and Orihime's journey )
Now we have a new cycle, which looks like it may be focused on human powers, and that brought my thoughts back to my earlier speculation on KT's apparent cosmological model. In the first cycle, we had a trip to Soul Society, home of the shinigami (Asura). In the second cycle, we had a trip to Hueca Mundo, home of the Hollows (hungry ghosts). Perhaps this cycle will represent the human world.
To be sure, the story in general returns to humans as a touchstone, again and again, but that makes a certain amount of sense if the world-structure really is inspired by the six worlds of the realm of desire. The human realm, the human existence, is, after all, the one to which the greatest potential for enlightenment is attributed. This also makes a certain cosmological sense of why it's the humans who progress so astonishingly quickly, in Bleach.
Thinking about all that, though, brought me back to the basic point that KT really seems to love parallelism and symbolism, and that the personal aspects of the Hollow cycle didn't seem nearly as parallel to the shinigami cycle as I was expecting. Maybe they were, though--parallel in light of the worlds in question, anyway.
( Rukia's journey and Orihime's journey )
