Realm of Living silliness
One thing that always intrigued me about Bleach was how it's modern world was quite literally just ours. Any history lesson, myth, or religion you can think of is there.
Ichigo lives in a mirror of our Earth in a mirror of Japan.
You even see how this could cause unintentional humor at times. One such example is from one of the novels which depicts Ginjo arriving in the Soul Society not long after Ichigo killed him.
He comes across a religious group losing their shit because it's not heaven. They assume their new reality is the "devil's work".
It just shows how little of their reality the living humans truly understand in Bleach.
There's also these weird time discrepancies between what would be in Earth's archeological record vs what the Soul Society's history is.
Granted, those that run the Soul Society are shady as hell and rewrite history often but that doesn't make everything a lie either. At times they'll reference how something took place thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years prior.
The recent anime shows that in relation to the Reiล (Soul King) and his ambiguous history. If he truly reshaped his primordial world of chaos into the three current worlds that far back then what of the inhabitants?
Were their only spirits in the original world? Were "the people" a mix of spirit and matter? At what point did the reincarnation cycle cause humans to appear or evolve on Earth despite spiritual beings having humanoid forms since before the world was shaped?
Hell, it's also possible that the world as humans know it is a lie just as portions of history as the Soul Society knows it is a lie.
Often the rewrites are done to hide some scandal but at times they're also done to bury something world ending. The nature of the Soul King is one in of itself because he holds reality together just by existing.
Knowing the mechanics can allow you to make a "new soul king" or just outright kill the original depending on your intent. Both things are actually attempted between Yhwach's war on the Shinigami and the events of "Can't Fear Your Own World".
So knowing that leads to wonder just how much of the living world as people know it is even fact. Compared to a spirit a human lives barely a blink of an eye making any alterations easy to pull off.
And no, I have no end point or bigger point to make with all of this. These are just random things I wonder about with Bleach's world. It makes it's setting of modern Japan a bit more unique than most because I want to know how it fits into the grander spiritual setting.
There's also plenty of mysteries about the Soul Society that's too big to ever cover in a tumblr post.
Either way, I hope I piqued your curiosity. And remember, within Bleach's world it's a fact that Hell exists but Heaven does not.
Think about that one, bye~
