Tuesday, November 19, 2024

Bleach 1.01

The Day I Became a Shinigami

Fifteen-year-old high, school student Ichigo Kurosaki is trying to protect the ghost of a young girl from an evil spirit (Hollow) when he encounters soul reaper Rukia Kuchicki for the first time. Rukia is surprised to discover that he can see and touch her. She tries to protect him and the ghost of the young girl from the Hollow but she is badly injured fighting the evil spirit.

Rukia proposes that she use what spirit energy she has left to transform Ichigo into a shinnigami or soul reaper. He agrees but when she does he becomes considerably more powerful than she imagined he would. 

Thoughts

I first watched this series about 15 years ago. I only made it through the first three seasons (63 episodes). The first anime series ran for 366 episodes. I also read the first 25 volumes of the manga, roughly one-third of the 74 collected editions. 

This episode holds up to my memory of it. The first season sets the scene and populates the world of this series with a number of characters, mostly allies of Ichigo. It is set on Earth. Rukia is captured around the end of the first season. The next two seasons are about the quest that Ichigo and his friends go on to rescue Rukia. It takes them from Earth to the Soul Society where she is imprisoned. That’s about as far as I got in the anime. I didn’t get much further in the manga. 

Notes

The anime includes arcs that were not in the manga. The first three seasons (63 episodes) of the anime, with the exception of two episodes (33, 50) follow the story in the manga. The fourth and fifth seasons of the anime are filler arcs. The first 18 episodes (110-127) of the sixth season follow the manga but the last four episodes are filler. Most of the seventh season (138-146, 150-151) and all of the eighth follow the manga. The ninth season is all filler. This means by my count that roughly sixty percent (110/189) of the first nine seasons comes from the manga and the other forty percent is filler.

There are a few movies that belong somewhere in the first eight or nine seasons

The Sealed Sword Frenzy - after Ep 63
Memories of Nobody - before Ep 110
The Diamond Dust Rebellion - after Ep 153

I found this information on animefillerguide.com. There’s more for the remaining seasons but this seemed like a good place to pause my research. 

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