If you read this shit while it was publishing sit the fuck down. I read this shit for the first time in like three months in 2020 after hearing for TEN FUCKING YEARS about how bad this shit is to form my own opinion. Why the fuck would you all lie to me like that?

The cast? Iconic
The art? Iconic
The fights? Iconic
The arcs? Iconic

You all are dumb as a bag of rocks.

Ok to dial it back real quick I could get being annoyed while reading this weekly but tbh that's y'all's fault for reading a battle series weekly instead of just waiting for it to end to read at your own pace. This shit on a binge is legendary.

Bleach is a truly cohesive work that plays to the strengths of the battle series genre with little fluff and fat. The characters are always moving forward, the story is engaging and iterates on itself smartly, it's constantly refining and executing on its themes, it's a near perfect showing of the battle genre. It pays off on investing in side characters, it rewards thinking about the themes and visual/textual metaphor with a deceptive amount of depth. It employs a mature cast and a strong grasp on real, tangibly complex emotion to great effect.

If you like battle series but have been shrugging this one off due to hearsay or the public opinion being SuperEyepatchWolf's, stop. Read it. It's good.