#this is a vague about my graduate cohort lol don’t mind me

[communistkenobi]

there are valid reasons to have an antagonistic relationship to academic scholarship, but those reasons are overwhelmingly not raised in graduate classrooms, where students instead bitch about theory in general, jargon in general, making them sound ultimately like conservatives, who view any attempt to systematically account for social phenomena as a form of useless intellectual degeneracy

#you’re in a PhD program and you’re bitching about reading theory? Aren’t you just a little bit embarrassed? #this is a vague about my graduate cohort lol don’t mind me #I have increasingly little patience for grad students who refuse to engage with anything even slightly abstract or dense #you are literally in a social science graduate program. That is like one of the primary tasks you need to do in grad school #If you want to engage with it for the purposes of critique that is completely acceptable #but seeing a word you don’t know and immediately quitting and dismissing it as useless nonsense is not going to get you very far #we have to read Capital for our comps lol. what are you gonna do then

[bleachbleachbleach]

BLEACH 007

My gosh, I’m never gonna get anywhere in this re-read if I keep going backwards, but I’ll latch onto anything about the Academy for headcanons!!! This is sorta continuing from my earlier post about Rukia’s chance to narrate her story/relationship to Soul Society, but I think it’s so charming that in explaining her use of healing kidou she immediately reverts to talking about her "top class" kidou grades. School on the brain after having attended Karakura High for a while? Because it’s not as though Rukia is fresh out of school—and we know she only attended the academy proper for a year, so it’s not even a place she spent a lot of time. (I’m assuming you don’t get "grades" when being privately tutored within the Kuchiki family, but who knows—maybe they run a homeschool co-op or something lol.)

Distant and fleeting memory or not, that year of Academy seems like something she’s been thinking about—something truncated/not quite grasped, and then returned to her in some way now. But even though she’s the one who introduces that framework she doesn’t actually want to talk about it, and just kind of vaguely affirms its existence. In the Viz translation she says responds with, "Something like that," which I’m interested in because it makes me think about what differences Rukia would have had in mind. The obvious difference is in its curriculum, but given that Rukia led with kidou it’s not like Ichigo would think shinigami school taught Contemporary Japanese Literature. And given that SOUL SOCIETY DOES NOT HAVE CAKE (I am never going to let this go) the way the Academy is set up really is astonishingly similar to a (Japanese) human school—the classes are separated the same way, there are gendered uniforms, the students get ranked… (God do they have clubs? I HOPE THEY HAVE CLUBS. I mean, if Seireitei proper has all these clubs and hobby societies, surely the Academy does too!) 

Sure, the Academy has the occasional fatal field trip, but what human school doesn’t have a few of those, too?

(OH NO NOW I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT THE NERD SQUAD’S CLASS TRIP. Do they go on a cultural excursion to a Rukongai district? To Seireitei?)

But then, Rukia’s reticence probably isn’t about the Academy itself, and whether or not it exactly fits Ichigo’s conception of “school.” Rukia just wants to change the topic, because she never actually had the full Academy experience, which makes her a lonely weirdo--but she doesn’t have to be here. Especially given the change in topic feels fairly emphatic to me--それより implies that whatever she’s about to say is more important than the topic being left behind. (She then goes on to ask about juice boxes.)

It’s worth noting that a few pages later, when she’s chasing after a Hollow (in her gigai, essentially powerless) the kidou she tries is Sokatsui, which basically only she and Byakuya ever use. If that’s her comfort kidou, then it’s also a reminder that she was trained fundamentally differently than the rest of her cohort. (And it foreshadows the coming flashback we get with Renji and Rukia entering the Academy, and then her adoption by Byakuya.) Rukiaaa ToT

NB: I am 10000% convinced that anyone else would have gone for a Shakkahou. I am at least 70% convinced that the only thing you really need to demonstrate in order to graduate from the Academy is Shakkahou, because it is the only offensive kidou anyone ever seems to use. Like, "Look, you don’t need shunpo, you don’t need to know how to heal, you only need to be a passable swordsman and you don’t need to be anywhere near shikai. If you can muster even the slightest hint of this single kidou we will just pass you gdi." Shakkahou is the algebra 1 of Shinigami Academy!!

#kuchiki rukia #shinigami academy #shinoureijutsuin #bleach headcanons #bleach reread 2021 #bleach manga #SOKATSUI KUCHIKI SPECIAL #please send me all your academy hcs pls i love