Renji shows up in the Fullbringer Arc:

Renji 10 minutes later, getting ready to fight Jackie:

D-did he adjust himself? Were the tits out specifically for Ichigo?

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Rukia is in the WHERE now?

[Bleach 089]

If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that my mental map of the Seireitei is very wrong, and that there is really no helping this at this point. I also realized that when I think about Soul Society, invariably west is always down, east is up, north is left, and south is right--which like, whyyyy would THAT be the way I orient the map?!

Because of Hisagi's dumb bowl drawing in Colorful Bleach, that's why:

[Colorful Bleach]

Naturally, I was curious about the directions Ikkaku offers here! Rukia is where?

"the barracks of the Thirteen Court Guard companies"

My assumption has always been that each division's barracks are separate from one another, and exist within the rest of the division grounds. We all assume this. We know we are correct about this. Though it WOULD be hilarious is this massive tower prison was just like, the barrack penthouse and the entire Gotei lived in one very flammable tenement. Also, the Gotei version of Rear Window would be magnificent. But anyway. I guess I assumed the rest of Rukia's Tower Complex was also prison, or that it was part of some amalgamated center where the Central 46 and stuff was, rather than barrack.

So what is Ikkaku talking about here?

Specifically, he says, 各隊の詰所 (kakutai no tsumesho), which he then abbreviates to 各隊詰所, each division's station/post (same "station" as in Coordinated Relief Station). In the Edo period, a tsumesho was basically a rest stop for visiting government officials, or people who were traveling to shrines and the like--a place to overnight, or nap, or wait. In modern parlance, it's kind of like a hostel. So I don't think he means like, the barracks barracks, the primary sleeping locations barracks.

Gotei WeWork

The Wiki article on tsumesho also notes that tsumesho can refer to like, shared office space for factory guards, or people who are coming and going, which makes the most sense in our application. So rather than 'every barrack for every division' I feel like the intention here is "Rukia is in the tower part of the shared workspace/staging area, Gotei WeWork." It makes sense to have one, particularly if this is where the library and reports archives live!

Also obsessed with the idea that the The Tower is just like, next to some crappy portable with one table, a wastebasket, a copy machine with zero toner, a cabinet with a shitton of paper and brushes and ink so you can handwrite your own copies, and a mysterious stained futon that literally every shinigami in the entire Gotei has napped on at one point or another.

But also, I feel like Ikkaku could have been a little more descriptive. "That can't-miss imperious white tower by the giant butte smack in the middle of town," maybe? But I guess if that's not how they talk about that place in their working day, then it's not how they talk about that place in their working day!

I'll also note that in this view, north is actually at the top of the image, unlike in Hisagi's drawing:

[Bleach e384]

In fairness to Hisagi, his drawing was explaining the POV of Ichigo et al having started in West Rukongai. Because they walked up to the West Gate to try to enter the Seireitei, it makes sense that the vanishing point (that which lies beyond the gate; that is, east) would be at the top of the frame. But I prefer to think of Hisagi as someone who would just draw maps like that, because now he's got me doing it, too.

I really think you're onto something, and I think I found actual footage of the WeWork building.

It's this building that Renji is cutting through after dropping Rukia off at the tower when he runs into Aizen, yes/no??

Like, if you wanted to have a shady meeting with a guy that he would feel really weird and uncomfortable about telling anyone about later, of course you would do it in the hotdesking space.

Those jars are full of toner. How do you get the toner into the printer? Only the Kidou Corps knows.

Why doesn't this supply closet have a real door???? (Because it's the supply closet where people go to make out, so Sasakibe took the door away, but then someone just hung up a curtain. Obviously.)

The bird's eye view of Seireitei is just that, while the map is, well, a map. According to Wikipedia, Japanese maps were for a long time drawn with their use in mind rather than accuracy, which included the orientation (a map made to be placed on the ground and viewed from above may hence not be drawn with a single orientation in mind, for instance).

I started looking into this after reading this post because I thought I remembered reading somewhere that East used to often be at the top, but I was unable to confirm that this time around, so. But yeah, apparently maps in Japan often pointed whichever way the user was expected to be turned towards for the journey or the like. Hence, actually very traditional of him for his map to not be at scale and have East at the top.

Arguably the bird's eye view is as much a representation as Hisagi's map is, given that its view is not, in fact, a bird's, but the narrative's. XDD The usage factor is not a quality unique to Japanese maps, but it is one of my favorite things about maps in general! Though, indeed, there ARE many maps of Japan that set the country on its side (east is 'down' here).

Because the original post is about the tsumesho, and not maps per se (aside from joking about Hisagi my beloved), I didn't include map information, but I am always down to talk about maps. I have a bunch of maps I want to share exactly in regard to the usage factor you mentioned! They're kind of bad photos of in-person maps that were supposed to be uploaded into a super cool, user-friendly digital collection, but it's been like 6 months and that hasn't happened yet, so maybe it's time to go rogue (in a separate post, to make room for 900 bad map photos lol), because the maps are super cool and extremely (imho) Bleach relevant. I cannot imagine what other use these maps would be for besides fodder for people's Bleach headcanons, haha. They're ours now.

But! I will also say that the reason I find Hisagi's map so endearing, and want to specifically headcanon in this way, is explicitly because I like the idea that he is the kind of person who would draw the map with east at the top for NO contextual reason just as much as he would for any contextual reason. Hisagi as 'east is always at the top why wouldn't it be.' Hisagi as 'this is something he and Zaraki actually agree on, though they've never had a conversation about it so they'll never know this about each other.'

I mentioned in the footnote that sure, there's a metacontextual reason for the map to be oriented this way this one time, re: Ichigo's flight through the skies of Junrinan and into the eastward Seireitei, BUT. If you're gonna draw the Seireitei bowl, you're gonna reprint that same image of the Seireitei bowl every time because even the SC interns have too much work to do to be recreating pre-existing assets. And I would imagine Hisagi as a person has no real reason to imagine the map in this way in his daily life, except that he does, perhaps always has, and that is so precious to me. He is precious.

(For my own use case, I've adopted the Seireitei bowl map in my mind because 1) I love the SC, and 2) I consider Junrinan the entrypoint to all things, too. That map was made for ME. And uh, Hinamori and Hitsugaya, I guess. But mostly ME.)

At first, I was not okay with the assertion that Hisagi believes that east should up because Hisagi is from East Rukongai (per B3 headcanon), and that, as problematic as it is, I think that up should always point towards the Seireitei, so to him, *west* should be up.

Now, of course this would be my instinct, because my primary area of academic focus is South Rukongai, where up would be north. I habitually make Rukia and Renji use the phrase "go up to the city", but I think all Rukongonians say "go up to the city", regardless of which quadrant they are in.

I don't like to be a contrarian, though, so I tried to think of other reasons why Hisagi might consider east to be up. My first thought: Hisagi is dyslexic, is probably *true*, but it doesn't really explain why they let him publish an entire map about it.

Another thing that is in East Rukongai (per my own headcanon) is the Kidou Corps Institute for High Energy Thaumaturgy (a joke on Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study). B3 and I were just talking about weather prediction in Soul Society, because this is what happens in the comments section of my fanfic and I didn't mention it at the time, because I couldn't justify it, but I felt like weather prediction should actually fall under the purview of the Kidou Corps rather than the R&D department. Of course, the reason why is obvious now: because Princeton was the cradle of numerical weather prediction, thanks in no small part to John von Neumann (very important figure in applied mathematics). Now, to my mind, if they're going to do weather, they might as well do maps as well, simple as that. If you really think about it, tho, a lot of the maps you see are, in fact, weather maps, so it might make sense that the weather forecasting office sets the standards. Now, would the Kidou Corps Institute for High Energy Thaumaturgy set east as up? a) of all: yes, because to *them*, the Kidou Corps Institute for High Energy Thaumaturgy is the only place anyone would ever want to go, and that's the direction you head to get from the Seireitei (the only other place one might be) to get there. b) of all, at the far edge of East Rukongai (per a lot of people's headcanons, oddly enough) is an ocean. All things flow to the ocean, so might as well make that your up direction. c) of all, if you have ever tried to generate display a map using a programming language, odds are, you had to do it upside-down. This is because in mathematical space, we set the origin pixel, (0,0) at the lower left, but most GUIs like to set an image origin in the upper left, because that's how we think about images.

The other other thing in East Rukongai is, of course, the train, and I imagine the standard, much-simplified route map features District 6 at the bottom and District 24 at the top, again, following the "which way you are interested in going" heuristic, since most passengers will be coming from the Seireitei side.

The upshot of all of this is that people from North Rukongai consider south to be up, people from west Rukongai consider east to be up, people from South Rukongai consider north to be up, and for a mishmash of strange cultural reasons, most of East Rukongai considers east to be up. (There's a stretch in the 40s and 50s that considers west to be up, because they are too far from the Kidou Corps Institute for High Energy Thaumaturgy to get drawn into their bullshit and not yet close enough to the ocean to care about it on a daily basis). Most of the Seireitei considers east to be up, because of the weather map thing, which also explains why they would print an east-up map in the newspaper. For arcane historical reasons, the official position of the Kuchiki is that south is up, which nearly all Kuchiki ignore because it's incredibly inconvenient, but of course, that would never stop Byakuya.

Rukia from bleach

summer🏖🏖🏖

renruki in the first arc

Every piece of dogshit art makes the world a better place to live. Better to create poorly than not at all.