What the… Bleach?

More than a decade… all gone poof in one chapter numbered 686. That is just another way of saying: One of the greatest, long-running manga ‘Bleach’ has ended!

And what an end that was. I can’t say I enjoyed the ‘end’ of Bleach as much as I’d have liked… It’s not that what was covered in this last chapter was underwhelming. It was more about what was not covered and shown that overwhelmed me. It was shown that things have settled down and people have moved on… (I was also disappointed when I couldn’t recognize the main character when he first appeared in this chapter as his ‘moved-on’ self!) But given that a couple of chapters earlier, there were fierce Battles (yes battleS, with a capital B and capital S) raging on, it seemed quite a jump-cut-paste to “everything turned out fine” ending.

Everything turned out fine in ‘InuYasha’; everything turned out fine in ‘FullMetal Alchemist’; things turned out well in ‘Scrapped Princess’ (recently re-watched with my Superpartner); hell, even it turned out well in ‘Naruto’ but that ‘fine’-ness and ‘well’-ness was introduced after the ongoing ‘conflicts’ were dealt with in reasonable detail. Their endings seemed to fit in nicely with the previous build-up and resolution of conflicts. But in Bleach, the build-up was excruciatingly detailed as much as the resolution was swift. And that threw me off my balance. That made me think of open-ended stories. That makes me expect more of Bleach next week.

And most importantly, that makes me no more wiser as to why the hell is this manga titled ‘Bleach’? or…

Is it ‘Breach’?