Kuchiki Manor

Kuchiki Manor

It's a silly thought because Kubo clearly didn't specifically account for it but I do sort of want to just take stock, i guess, of all the little wuxing oriented details that just kinda line up in Bleach.

The wuxing to be clear, is a bit of daoist mysticism generally translated as "the 5 phases" and outlines the relationship between 5 core elements. But this structure is actually applied to a bunch of different sets of 5, and across those sets certain essential qualities are linked or shared.

So for example Wood is associated with East, with Green/Blue, and Spring and there are kind of some shared themes there around growth and plants and such. Fire and South and Red and Summer. Water, North, Black, and Winter. Etc.... They are also where the very popular 4 Auspicious Beasts motif comes from, something utilized pretty heavily in anime and manga and videogames: White tiger, Blue Dragon, Vermillion Bird, and Black Tortoise/Snake. There is also a 5th "direction" considered Center, and a 5th season considered the transition between seasons; it's associated with, variably, either a golden qilin or golden dragon, and sometimes the dragon is also just the chinese god emperor and thus interchangeably a dragon or a just a dude.

There are a lot of odd little idiosyncrasies, I won't get into all of them here...

Starting with the obvious, though... The 4 gates around the seireitei are directional, and each have a name evoking the corresponding and color, and even mythic beast. Honestly the gate guardians themselves don't appear to be super cohesively themed after the beasts, although the Dragon guy verymuch has an asian dragon beard thing going on, and the black tortoise guy is black.

There is no central guard but conspicuously Kirinji's name comes from Qilin, but apparently according to official height he's actually not nearly as tall as Kubo's drawings always made him seem. Not that he was on the same scale as the gate guardians...

Hacchi's big 4 Beast Gate kidou array he uses fighting Baraggan evokes this same motif with the correct color, and animals. He is also conspicuously large, but not to the degree of the gate guardians...

In regard to directions and associated colors, the Central 46 has a series of banners with made up hybrid kanji combining the 4 cardinal directions and the correct colors. And then the Royal Guard are introduced with according positions as General of the North, South, East and West, implicitly leaving Ichibee as General of the Center direction, which makes sense since he's the defacto leader.

I complained of it at some point when the anime was airing but it annoyed me that when they added the big tsuba crest thing when the royal guard killed themselves that they were not correctly oriented in any kind of cardinal formation.

In a small post I made forever ago, I lightly proposed that the Sword Five actually fit the elemental associations of the wu-xing in accordance with their names and roles as tools of smithing:

Tokie and Mera being Water and Fire are obvious,

but Hasuka being tongs is reflected in the "chopsticks" in her name which I associated with wood(plus flowers in her name),

Nomino being a chisel and having it in her name pegs her as the metal one,

and Tsuchimiya as hammer has a pun on Earth:"tsuchi" in her name.

Oddly the anime chose to give them each a unique color outfit, although they are the 5 colors in the wuxing they do not match the elements

But then there's the incomplete set of season that I actually think are being evoked in the 4/5 Noble Houses.

The Shihouin name and family crest reference the Japanese maple, and Autumn is traditionally the season for moon viewing, which feels like it pegs them as an Autumn themed family.

The Kuchiki name refers to dying trees, and the family crest features what appear to be cranes, and the Japanese red crowned crane is an icon deeply associated with winter and the snow.

Finally, my only very loose guess on the Shiba is that they're Summer themed mostly on the back of Kukaku's fireworks gimmick and summer fireworks in Japan, but also because the other evocations we get of the family's spiral crest are Kaien's whirlpools and Ganju's cliff and sand spell, which all seems to evoke the beach or waterfront bluffs, which again sort of point toward summer. No idea what theoretical spring or transitional season families would be like.

The LN's Tsunayashiro family does not fit this in any way I can recognize.

A weird little piece of early Bleach ephemera that I am obsessed with is the phrasing around Rukia's favorite foods on her character profile sketch:

"But the list could get longer."

I feel like this implies that at some point, Kubo envisioned that shinigami didn't eat or that there was no food in Soul Society. Which...makes sense? They're ghosts after all. And even in the way it turned out, non-powerful souls still have no need to eat.

It's just hard to picture Soul Society without food--all I can think of is the version of Soul Society from the Bleach live action movie, which was all shadowy rooms and purple glowing orbs.

The thing I really want to know about the idea of a food-less Soul Society, though is-- do souls who died have any kind of memory of what food tastes like? Like, would Renji's favorite food still by taiyaki, but only because he has ghost-memories of it from when he was alive? In that regard, is it perhaps a mark of class to not know what food tastes like? Someone like Byakuya, born and raised in Soul Society would have never eaten. That would put Rukia in a funny position, in the sense that she doesn't know what anything tastes like, not because she's noble, but simply because she was too young when she died to remember what anything tasted like.

Anyway, I think it's for the best that Kubo changed it, but I also enjoy thinking about Rukia eating whole cucumbers in Ichigo's closet in the middle of the night and exclaiming over their exquisite crunch and flavor while he smashes his pillow over his ears and wishes that someone would come and get her already.

happy menos monday

Ms Chappy.

a sunny day