Top Gun

I knew him best as Chief Ken Hotate. One of the funniest side characters in a series full of great ones. Blew my mind to learn that he was on KOTH too.

How's the finding-out part working for him?

Wow, only took three episodes to hit peak Bleach. Characters getting arms lopped off left and right. (If you were playing the drinking game you'd already be dead.) Characters getting dumb-looking power-ups that somehow immediately get more dumb-looking. A bunch of new characters who only exist to get offed soon after (in record time no less!) The side we're ostensibly supposed to be cheering for acting like irredeemable fascist assholes--which is really saying something when this time the other side are literal Nazis. Unpronounceable attack names. It's all here. What's cracking me up the most is how this conflict is predicated on the whole "balance of souls" thing. You said it yourself Ben, none of that background world-building shit made any sense from day one, but it was never brought up much after that so whatever, I can deal with that. But now the story's going to act like it's a major issue again? Sure. I mean no one seemed to have any issue with Ishida doing his thing all this time. Man, it's the year 2025 and I'm ripping on new Bleach episodes on the block. It's all I ever wanted. What a time to be alive.

I just want to know what the hell language ghostrek speaks.

She looks exactly like that crazy mushroom lady from Common Side Effects.

"Occasional spurts of decent animation?" Uh-huh. Try semi-weekly examples of cinematic-quality fight scenes, the type that make you sit there and think "how the hell is this possible 1100 episodes into this juggernaut of a franchise?" What the anime team has done with the source material over the past few years is nothing short of extraordinary. And it goes beyond the raw animation, the show feels so much snappier and more ambitious now than it has since maybe its very earliest days. There's nothing legitimate about any of this CR nonsense, but if there was, there's no universe in which OP doesn't deserve a spot in the best ongoing series conversation.

Tell me you know nothing about the last two or three years of the series without telling me that.

Oh no! ...anyway.

I mean someone's gotta be a guinea pig, so long as it's not me. I want those GITS cyberbrains already.

I've written many, many words in the past about how Bleach's narrative fell off a cliff, and I'm well aware of the total clusterfuck that awaits, but despite all that I still couldn't help but have a big dumb grin on my face as soon as I heard IF YOU WANNA SEE SOME ACTION. Of course that gets immediately followed up by the death of a character so irrelevant that literally no one ever bothered to learn his name.

Not only that, but pretty much everyone has someone in their life who's received an advanced cancer diagnosis with little to no warning. That's what makes cancer so fucking horrible. It sounds like they just found a nodule on Biden's prostate a couple of months ago, so in a different timeline he wouldn't have had any idea what was up until after he was already president.

I've always used electric razors because I'm a pussy.

Happy Milf Day!

Please do take a bullet for Trump.

Big "Deez nuts!" energy at the end.

There's a stock car driver called Casey Mears and I did a serious double-take for a moment.

Liking Naruto feels like it should be a red flag.

Who and what?

Ah, right. John Paul II apparently authorized use of the pre-Vatican II Tridentine Mass, which was said in Latin and had some other liturgical differences, in very limited circumstances. Benedict was something of a traditionalist, and he eased some of those restrictions a bit more. Francis tightened them up again, noting (correctly) that some traditionalist Catholic groups have used it as something of a wedge political issue.

Nope, it was before his papacy. My parents remember the Latin Mass from when they were very young, but it had been gone for two decades by the time I was born.

Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council that modernized the Mass and allowed it to be said in local languages back in the 1960s. Yes, they would at least roughly understand what they're saying, because Latin is part of their seminary studies, and that would certainly be an expectation once you're at that level. And they only had cameras present for the introductory ceremony. At some point the president literally calls "Everyone else out" in Latin, and the doors are locked.

Well as they say there's no accounting for taste.

Nah, it's more like the vast majority of Bleach's cast isn't interesting enough to justify remembering their existence. Meanwhile I can instantly tell you that the mayor of Luffy's hometown is named Woop Slap...to be fair that's mostly because Woop Slap is an awesome name.

I could not tell you that 90% of those characters existed in the first place. Such is Bleach.

Yeah this is like, easily in the top 5 original shows [as] has ever made. Just incredible.