yhunata said:
Every single thing done in the last chapter, undone. Nice job, Kubo. And yet another villain is gonna get the spotlight only to get one-shot for a couple of weeks, which he will somehow survive for some reason.
My thoughts exactly, I couldn't agree with you more. I'm not a huge fan of Rukia but Kubo essentially took all of the progress she had made in increasing her abilities and threw it all to the wayside in the span of a chapter. It was just a major cop out for her new ability to just become useless to this guy's "fear". Just reading this chapter felt like the past two chapters before were essentially write offs. Kubo is far too good at making little sense.
While I do enjoy Byakuya entering, as I said above it seems to just belittle Rukia's powers and cast her aside as just another shinigami. I would have much rather seen one of the espada come down with Urahara or something but I'm sure that will happen eventually.
All that said, I just really find this whole arc to be very dry and predictable. I'm not a fan of any of the sternritter and I do not like Juha Bach as the big baddie right now, perhaps that changes but right now he's boring to me. Again though, these chapters will probably all progress similarly to this one, very slowly, due to Kubo's uncanny ability to prolong things with needless panels stretching everything out.