#if you're reblogging this please be normal and do NOT start ship disk horse in the tags...b..lease...i beg

[zabiume]

ichihime is my otp but i wish kubo did more to show ichigo developing feelings as the manga progressed

that's reasonable, but i can't necessarily claim to understand it, mainly because of how i perceive romance IRL and in fiction as an aroace person.

i'm not even going to pretend to understand romantic love in real life, but in fiction at least, romance has a purpose because everything in fiction is purposeful, no choice is accidental etc etc. mainstream media, in that regard, has usually pushed the idea that romance is the pinnacle of all human relationships, and i guess the reason i liked bleach or found it particularly subversive for the year it was written in was because it notably...didn't do that.

there is romance in bleach, but it is not the highlight or focus, and is only supplementary. adding that to the fact that this is a typically romance-averse genre, i doubt kubo ever intended to display romance in a way we're conventionally used to seeing it—confessions, kisses, hugs, proposals, dates, etc. even with married couples like isshin and masaki/kaien and miyako/byakuya and hisana, we don't really see the actual marriages—just the important "milestones" of the relationship (how they met, the sacrifices they might have made for each other, and even then, these relationships are used to drive the plot forward). i've been reading kubo's answers on klub outside lately, and they're very illuminating in terms of how he approaches romance and/or writing in general. see: the answer where he talks about how he considered including a scene where isshin and masaki (mainly masaki) name ichigo together, but eventually decided against writing it because it would be "too lovey dovey and that's gross" (lol).

the bizarre thing about kubo, though, is that this should technically make him extremely bad at romance in general. and i know people who would and do argue that he is, but i personally enjoyed all the canon romances over the course of the story, and i could feel the passion/tenderness/affection that the couples in the story have for each other, simply because kubo is good at body language and portraying relationships of ALL kinds between the characters. whether it's the love between nakama and nakama, parent and child, student and mentor, you do feel that these characters really feel for each other, so the romances aren't any different (to me).

and this is a pattern with kubo's writing in general! he constantly see-saws between extremely bizarre and bad takes on writing (AKA his boob fixation that shows up repeatedly both in the series and in his answers on klub when asked about female characters) and surprisingly good ones (like him saying writers often complain that female characters are hard to draw/write because they can't understand women's feelings, but women's feelings, like men's feelings, are difficult because feelings are difficult in general. very apt for a series that's all about people dealing with their own complicated feelings and relationships! i know it isn't radical or revolutionary to say women and men both have the same feelings and that writing a Female Character isn't any different from writing a male character, but considering his contemporaries (shonen male mangakas aged 40+), he is practically Enlightened in his response here lmao.

my point is that, reluctant as he is, he doesn't do a bad job with romance as a whole. compared to many ships and marriages in the same genre bracket, i would say ichihime is doing far better. even though it's the notorious girl-has-a-crush-on-the-boy trope, you don't ever feel like orihime gets too punished for it the way a lot of girls do in this genre, just giving and giving and giving but receiving very little in turn. ichigo is generally very attentive to her, they're friends who only get closer over the course of the series, they're...friends (which is funnily a lot more than a lot of other couples get sadly), they have a variety of fluffy/angsty/silly/hurt-comfort-y scenes spread out pretty evenly across all arcs, and ichigo does often return orihime's care for him in his own, magnanimous way.

if we're looking for explicit signs, then i guess we don't really get ichigo spelling out that he has a crush on her. and if that makes ichihime less plausible or likeable to people, that's fine. but to me, ichihime has always been about subtlety, about this tentative, nervous way two people might reach out to each other, hoping the other understands them. ichigo softens up around orihime, and i joke that he's always got one ear on her because of the way he pays attention to even the slightest changes in her mood. i don't want to spend too much time "proving" what ichigo feels or doesn't feel because that's a journey we get to take and interpret as individual readers, but we can't deny that their relationship is very tender because of...ichigo and not orihime. orihime is soft with everyone. ichigo is, usually, 90% of the time, prickly with everyone. so him softening up around her, to me, was one of the many things about their dynamic that "proved" to me they'd be a good romance. just. the way ichigo was around her. also, between plot-important developments (like ichigo and orihime going from struggling to stand on the battlefield together, to fighting, however briefly, as partners; or ichigo learning to lean on the people in his life), and feelings stuff (maybe ichigo reflecting on his romantic feelings for orihime), i would definitely prefer to get the former and interpret the latter. it was important to me to know how exactly ichigo and orihime were going to navigate the fact that ichigo was too overprotective and orihime was too weak, but it wasn't important to me to see them dating or proposing or whatever. it would have clashed rather horribly with the narrative/thematic/genre concerns of the series as a whole, cute as it might have been to see, and i might not have ever been as hard of an ichihime shipper as i am now if the series ended after lust, and not after horn of salvation. the development of their dynamic (and orihime getting the recognition she deserves from him as an equal) was more important to me personally. most of the times, when i'm writing fic, i draw from the actual manga panels of them before they were dating anyway, so i don't think they'd be too different AFTER.

LASTLY, i do want to point out that ichigo catching feelings for orihime later does not at all diminish the weight of those feelings. maybe he had a mild crush in the soul society arc (if that's how you want to interpret it), or maybe he developed one later on during the HM arc/FB arc, but maybe he didn't realize he could have crushes at all until after yhwach was gone and he got to have more than a few weeks of peace at a stretch. this is the same boy who, at 15, thought kissing a classmate was a "big deal" and none of his friends were ever dating either, so it completely makes sense to me that these things weren't on his mind. it doesn't diminish orihime's importance to him, or his feelings for her, it just makes him a typical teenager who is going through...a lot in the already-turbulent stages of growing up. his feelings could just be a thing in the background, simmering, unconscious, not really evident until he grows up and starts thinking about things like who he likes spending time with, who he might want to spend his life with. the important thing is that we get all the build-up laid down (which we did get, considering how long the ichihime subplot is). the resolution is up to us!

that's not to say i'm diminishing your feelings or whatever, but this is just how i see it! i never understand when people say something is romantic "enough" because i think romance is an elusive concept that is defined based on extremely personal criteria for proof. is ichigo's love for orihime "enough"? i don't know! for me, the various moments between ichigo and orihime were enough to solidify their potential romantic relationship in my head. someone else might need to see it to believe it. we're both valid, as long as we're just enjoying ourselves and not being mean to someone else who perceives things differently! :D

#me: *types all this up* #also me: ichihime is the greatest thing ever #all ships are great ships if i ship them etc etc #ichihime #asks #if you're reblogging this please be normal and do NOT start ship disk horse in the tags...b..lease...i beg #i am an adult with a job i don't do that shit