A few thoughts on the Bounto
As I’ve mentioned before, my first week of classes at Waterloo was spent watching the entireity of Bleach up to 97 after I decided to download the first episode during Frosh Week. Currently, Bleach is going through a filler arc.
Unlike the Naruto fillers, which is a large pile of tripe, the Bleach filler had a lot of potential. I say had, because it had some interesting ideas: another group of humans with special abilities like the Quincy and more mod souls to name a few. The arc started off kind of standard filler stuff, with Urahara’s little game.
Once the Bounto were introduced, it picked up, since it gave some purpose and direction to the fillers. The problem with Naruto’s fillers were that it was just a bunch of random sidestories put together for no reason but to take up a lot of time. Anyway, there was an actual story to this and the interaction between the Bounto and their backstory was quite interesting.
The problem that I have with the Bounto is that they are terribly unbalanced. If this was an MMORPG, forums across the Internet would flare up with cries of “UNBALANCED!!”. This is especially bad in the later episodes when the Bounto make it to Soul Society.
Remember when we first went to Soul Society, or even before that? Ichigo almost died several times. Who was he fighting? Ikkaku, who was an officer; Renji, a vice-captain; Zaraki Kenpachi, a captain; and Kuchiki Byakuya, another captain. We got the message that you do not mess with the captains and vice-captains.
And in come the Bounto. We have one of them destroy two vice-captains at the very start. We have Kariya fight against Kuchiki Byakuya and Ichigo without getting injured terribly. We have Soi Fong getting owned by one of her own ninja-guys that got controlled by a Bounto. We have a Bounto just pwning about twenty Shinigami at once.
The other problem is the characters. I said before that the interactions between the Bounto were kind of interesting. That was in the middle of the arc. Now that all of the conflict is gone and the Bounto are actually working together, it’s become very dull, since all of them are the same: generic evil psychopaths.
As if we did not know they were evil already, Kariya goes to gather a small army to open the gate to Seireitei. This had a lot of potential. Here he was, riling up the crowds in Rukongai about the injustice and oppression of Seireitei. So they go and manage to open the gate. And what does Kariya do? The “oh noes! he’s evil” card: “I used you and now you’re of no use to me, kthxdie.” and kills them all in about three seconds. Yeah, real creative there. I only saw this in Naruto about thirty times in the past year.
Basically, the Bounto filler is mediocre. It’s not crap like Naruto, and it has an interesting plot and concept, but there is too much disparity in power and skill from the previous (canon) arc (Soul Society) and a lot of squandered potential, and that is what is making it very hard to keep watching.