Watching "Bleach" on Netflix...

Up to epsidode 26 so far.

Is Ichigo’s father a child molester or am I misinterpreting his actions towards his daughters? Those bits are really off-putting.

Does the pace for actually developing the plot ever pick up? How can something involving this much combat somehow be so slow?

Does the level of fanservice improve (I could be watching High School of the Dead, you know)?

Am I the only one who finds the Hollows to be disturbingly clown-like?

I haven’t watched too much of it (though I have followed the manga series), and it’s really just comic relief. The family doesn’t play such a big role later in the series.

Ever watch Dragon Ball? It’s the same kind of thing. There’s only so much of the manga (which is still being written), so things are stretched out as much as possible.

But this only gets you so far. There’s a fair amount of filler material inserted so the show doesn’t catch up to the manga.

Nope. The show/manga is targeted at the 8-15 year old demographic in Japan. You don’t give them too much fanservice. It’s supposed to be mostly family friendly.

That’s opposed to Highschool of the Dead, which aired in Japan past midnight, targeted somewhat older males, and had lots of censoring.

Isshin is just…overzealous in his single parenting? Yeah, I dunno.

Pace never picks up, I’m sorry to say. And half the series is filler anyway. Bleach isn’t the kind of series you want for a good, nice paced, well plotted experience.

There’s a couple of fanservice-y characters coming up, but the cast is just so damn big they don’t get enough screen time anyway.

Apparently episode 26 is just around the intro of Soul Society…you’re gonna need a notebook to keep track of people soon!

Uggh. That’s the reason I eventually stopped watching Bleach. There were just too many new characters being brought in and so little screen time for the established characters I actually cared about seeing and following.

“How many Dragon Ball Z characters does it take to change a light bulb?”
“Well, I don’t know, but it’ll take 'em about eight episodes to do it.”

It’s not the only anime I’ve seen where this sort of behaviour is intended as comic relief. Maybe it works better for a Japanese audience, I don’t know.

Unfortunately, Bleach is a slow series. The manga is slow, and the anime has to be even slower so it doesn’t overtake its source material.

As others have said, there are some fanservice-y characters,* but there are also a lot of un-fanservice-y characters who will take up screen time.

*like an assassin whose idea of fun is to get Ichigo flustered.

You’re just getting up to the best part of the series (the Soul Society arc), so if it was me, I’d try to keep watching until that arc is over.

And it introduces my personal favourite character: Kenpachi :D.

I actually held off on watching for years because from the start it looks like another high school shounen series. That’s a shame, because I love the Gotei 13 and would have jumped in immediately had I known they were coming.

I, personally, share the same appreciation of Byakuya that the Shinigami Women’s Association does.

True but if you want to stop after that arc it’d be fine with me. It kind of goes down hill after that and there’s not much of a pay off.

Eleven seconds is the new five minutes.