dibattito Topic 10: In Bleach, when Ichigo fights Ulquiorra, he dies, but then randomly comes back to life, in an even più powerful form. What is your opinion on this transformation?

Well, to some extent, I'm torn. On the one hand, I loved the look and the fighting capabilities of this form. It was the first time we really got to see Ichigo unload on anyone without holding back. On the other hand, it was complete bullshit on so many levels.

Yeah, it's difficult to believe. I generally think that a giant hole in your chest isn't the best way to go about living your life, and yet suddenly, that somehow granted him incredible power... o maybe the thought of his Friends dead did... o the Hougyoku... seriously, anyone want to explain it to me? I'm pretty sure it's one o all three of those, but I don't understand how any of them work. Hell, the Hougyoku is used as a blanket explanation for how he did practically everything over the course of the series and yet we never find out how it functions over such a large space... o at all.

But getting off of that brief tangent, I can't say I understand it. In the past, we had a couple of Hollow takeovers for Ichigo, but this was demonstrably different. His inner Hollow (who, for some reason, is also Zangetsu... fml, seriously) did tell him that the moment that Ichigo waned he would take over, but this doesn't in any way resemble past takeovers, nor does it make sense that he could take over a corpse. I'm pretty sure that having a beating cuore is a prerequisite to being a Hollow in all cases, and that high speed regeneration doesn't restore major organs (didn't Ulquiorra actually say that himself?), so it flies in the face of the series' own logic.

Didn't help that this form annihilated one of my preferito characters just after he revealed that he is far più badass than I had supposed beforehand. The actual jump in strength here is monstrous. He couldn't even touch Ulquiorra after his first release, and suddenly he was destroying him in his strongest form? Yay for power boosts... never seen that one before...

In the end, my assessment is this: it wasn't the first thing to ruin Bleach, but it went a long way into it. It's a form that ended up being entirely unnecessary, being used in this fight, da his inner Hollow and as a plot device in a random movie. It hasn't shown up again, and likely won't, but the damage is done.

Well the build up to it with Orihime screaming "Kurosaki-kun" over and over and over again pissed me right off and my thoughts were pretty much like the picture below...

But in all seriousness the first time I watched it I was too enthralled da the form of the Hollow transformation to even care about things making sense. I mean that form looks epic !

It was only after watching the scene multiple times that my brain really noticed how messy it all was. So, as I like to do, I tried to make sense of it all.

And how I tried to make sense of it was like this:
Hollows don't have a cuore (their cuore becomes their Hollow mask and their Hollow hole is representative of their lack of a heart) and Ichigo's cuore got blown out, funnily enough in the same place where the transformation has its Hollow hole. So, due to Orihime's annoying mantra, Ichigo's 'heart' became Hollow Ichigo's mask and poof we have an awesome Hollow transformation. I mean Hollow Ichigo did warn him that he should always be on the alert because if he ever came close to death, he would turn into a Hollow (which he did with aplomb).

As for the unrealistically incredible power up, well I thought back to the time when Ulquiorra first encountered Ichigo and remember him saying something along the lines of, "At his lowest level of power he is trash, but at its highest it's above me". So then I thought, maybe that could explain and justify the curb-stomp power boost.

But eventually I stopped caring altogether and reverted back into the 'holy-fuck-that-transformation-was-awesome' mentality.
Unfortunately, one of the greatest Bleach villains was gone forever and the most awesome Hollow transformation would never get proper screen time again...

Well, let's look at it this way. It was a pretty novel moment when Ichigo was killed. The moment I saw the gaping hole in his chest, I immediately thought 'Someone's going to come, revive him, and give him another level up in power'. I wasn't completely wrong; there was third party interference from his hallow within.

No explanation, no logic, and no surprise. Frankly, it was a major plot device that we could see coming, like the autore of the manga wanted to mostra us Ichigo completely hollified at some point during the Arrancar Arc, pushing aside proper execution o even tying it properly into the story.

Frankly, I'm più pissed off da Segunda Etapa, which came out of no where and existed for the sole purpose of pushing Ichigo into a fully hollified form and nothing more. But I digress; hollified Ichigo was just a plot device to satiate the curiosity of the fans. Frankly, I don't like it.