not only has my local video game store been selling comics and strategy guides in the back of their store the whlle time but they also recently got in 4 English volumes of Bleach for $3 each???? had to nab
I had what I guess was a nightmare and walked into a murder scene. But it made me uncomfortable so I decided it was a birthday and the dead bodies posed with me and my cake bled strawberry sauce when I cut into it and it was great. 7/10. I want that cake in real life.
I watched the first eight episodes of the BLEACH anime!!! Originally I wanted to do some sort of thing where I do a post per each episode and highlight my favorite screengrab from it, but then I realized I'd rather watch the episodes relaxed without stressing over rewinding to specific frames and all that...so you'll just get some scattered images instead!
Its a really interesting adaptation if only because it adds so many small little things seemingly for no reason - and now that I've already read the manga those little creative liberties just stick out as fascinating more than they do annoying. Like, they technically let us see inside Hueco Mundo several times by following the perspective of Hollows, and that'll make the eventual trip there a lot more satisfying!
But then there's some dumb stuff like how they add a complete no-name Soul Reaper to hunt down Rukia before even Renji and Byakuya are sent out. Like on the one hand - it helps solve a weird logic issue as to why a CAPTAIN would leave their post to do this pretty basic basic by implying that they tried someone lesser before and it didnt work....buuuuut at the same time there's something undeniably powerful about Ichigo realizing just how far above him the rest of Soul Society is when he encounters Renji and Byakuya for the first time
I was initially kind of put off by how brightly colored the anime is, as I often am with anime adaptations - I feel like there's an understated beauty in black-and-white Manga like One Piece that its own anime adaptation kind of ruins. But I'm surprised by how quickly I warmed up to it here, they play with color in a lot of really interesting ways given the weekly-anime-in-the-2000s context of ir all, be it clouding the world around the characters in darkness to convey they're in spirit form or by making backgrounds super abstract and bubbly like in the Orihime Leek Spin scene to convey when its sillytime
Last thing - I REALLY like the dub acting. Yeah it sometimes has that stilted delivery from trying to cram everything into a small timeframe, but it makes a lot of really natural flowing changes to dialogue (That guy vouldn't tell a stethoscope from a telephone!) althewhile being...actually funny??? This is the only clip I have on hand because it genuinely made me laugh so hard I had to save it for later
Overall - SUPER excited to see what'll happen when fights start ramping up once the Soul Society arc starts. The first eight episodes have been surprisingly breezily paced (possibly thanks to the new content they added helping it from feeling arbitrarily stretched out?) and I'm lookin forward to hearing my favs' voices for the first time heheheee