Bleach/Headscratchers/Uryu and Quincies


 * Sooo. Ishida looses his powers to Quincy Final Form. Now, what should the poor lad do in a situation like this? Perhaps he should mope around, luck into his father being a power Quincy and rescuing him. Then perhaps he should agree to a promise he knows he can't really keep so that he can get his powers restored by an extremely dangerous method. Ooooor, maybe he should ask this girl, who just happens to be his friend, who also just happens to have miraculous healing powers to restore his own powers? Tough choice, really. I know that the extent of her phenomenon rejection powers was only revealed later but he didn't even try asking her for help.
 * Her power can only heal physical damage, it can't put someone's abilities right back into their body. Plus, all they knew at the time was that Orihime could heal physical injuries, as the readers thought before Aizen told the Espada.
 * That's never once stated or suggested, in fact the opposite is far more likely given what we've seen since her power is to "repel all negative events". Losing your powers is a negative event. In addition the final form is described as sealing the user off from spiritual energies when used, which could very well be physical damage due to the tremendous amount of power being more than can be handled. We don't know if this (final form spam) is possible, but dismissing it out of hand would be incorrect. However her ability to reject bad things wasn't known at the time, so that part stands.
 * However, I already adressed this by saying that the main problem was that he didn't even try doing that. Ishida is a very intelligent guy(as proved by his school results) so he should've figured out that it was at least worth a shot. It certainly couldn't have been emotional reasons - asking Orihime for help would've been way less humilating than asking his father for help.
 * He's also been hiding even the fact that he lost his powers from his friends; Ichigo notices after Orihime mentions that Uryu's been acting strange and he tries and fails to sense his spiritual pressure, but doesn't tell anyone that he knows about it. It's possibly because he didn't want the others to feel responsible for what happened as a result of going on the mission to save Rukia.
 * Uryuu's behavior could be a case of wounded pride combined with Remember That You Trust Me, except that no one ever bothers to remind Uryuu that he trusts them. He's both too used to having to do things for himself and too proud to ask Orihime for help. It's only when he's attacked and Ryuuken shows up that he realizes that this can't go on and he's going to have to get his powers back in order to survive. Also, as cited below the belief that Orihime is thought to only be able to heal wounds at this point in the game comes into play--Uryuu probably thought she couldn't do anything for him.
 * We only learned that Orihime could reject events after he got his powers back. Presumably, his thoughts were "Orihime heals wounds, this isn't a wound, she can't help me."
 * Is it possible for Quincies to become Soul Reapers after they die (SR/Quincy opinions of each other notwithstanding)?
 * There's no reason it shouldn't be possible. In fact, given their superior spiritual power to the run-of-the-mill soul, Quincies would seem like they'd be excellent candidates.
 * If the reason Quncies are bad is that they destroy Hollows rather than purifying them, and souls are perpetually cycling between Soul Society and Earth, does this mean that every time the Quincies fight a Hollow the number of available souls goes down permanently? How does this work with human population increases, anyway?
 * Animal souls being reborn as humans?
 * As mentioned elsewhere, new souls pop up all the time. Destroying souls is not really a problem except that it denies them the option of reincarnation.
 * Since it seems that people can be born in Soul Society (characters such as Yoruichi and Byakuya were, for example), obviously new souls can be created in both worlds. But when there were large numbers of Quincies eradicating Hollows, they were destroying souls faster than new ones could form to replace them. Thus, they ran the risk of permanently unbalancing the reincarnation cycle.
 * What the hell are Jinta and Ururu? They're not soul reapers, they're not quincies, and they have no hollow-like characteristics. We know they're not enhanced mod souls, as Urahara seemed to be in line with Soul Society about enhanced mod souls, and their skills are too far ahead of Kon's "strong legs" thing to be from an earlier project. They're sure as hell not human, so what the smeg does that leave?
 * Well, they could still be modsouls (the author has remarked that the Bount Arc modsouls might become canon characters at some point, so Urahara's opinion on modsouls is presumably malleable enough), or they could be whatever the heck Chad and Orihime are.
 * Also, because of how militeristically Urahara went after Kon could be taken as proof that Jinta and Ururu are mod souls. Soul Society was leaving him alone. Exiled, not causing much trouble, they were ignoring his smuggling of stuff back and forth to the Soul Society. A mod soul appearing on Earth, from his shop, and he didn't do anything? Soul Society might have a reason to take a closer look.
 * Also, Urahara didn't know Kon's personality yet, nor that he could be trusted. Kon could have become the Jack of Mod Souls.
 * Ururu may not even be a Mod Soul, but something similar. A mod soul is a replacement soul for a dead body. Ururu could be a, for lack of better term, Mod Soul 2.0. Same concept, but designed to work in/with a gigai, not a corpse.
 * In fact, in the battle with Arrancars Ururu enters a "Berserk Mode" acting in such a way that it seems she's a robot.
 * So, Ururu is almost like Nemu, but in a gigai? Awesome.
 * Who says they're not something similar to Shinigami? Ururu in particular is probably a result of Urahara's version of the same process Mayuri used to create Nemu.


 * What happened to all the dead Quincies? I mean, the dead go to Soul Society and bird-boy proves that the whole 'no memory of life' thing is pretty much bunk, so theorectically Soul Society should've been swamped with justifiably pissed off Quincies, but there's no mention of anything like that.
 * The Science Division Captain happened.
 * To all of them? (I kind of got the impression that prior to their being offed there was at least a few hundred of them).
 * And Mayuri went into some detail about how in the hundreds of Quincy he had tested, not one had Ishida's abilities.
 * Gah. Didn't see that episode. Although now I'm wondering how he managed to catch them all. After all, if Soul Society is so disorganised that family members can't find each other, I'd have thought that it would be pretty easy to give the shinigamis the slip (hmm, I wonder if they've missed any). Then again, it has been a couple of hundred years.
 * Knowing Mayuri he would wait for a Quincy to get gang raped by a hollow, take them back half died, then go to work on them. And to make sure that none would escape he would put explosives in their bodies, like he did to his own subordinates.
 * Ishida basically watched his grandfather pass on, but Mayuri still got his hands on him. It was probably easier to know where a person will pop-up if you watch them pass on.
 * If I remember correctly, he bribed the shinigami who were sent to keep an eye on the surviving Quincies so that, when they were attacked by Hollows, they would wait until after the Quincy was dead to show up... and once the Hollow was defeated, they'd deliver the dearly departed right to Mayuri's front door.
 * And, of course, Kurotsuchi doesn't stop prodding and poking until his subject's died AGAIN. Presumably after which Quincy souls are recycled into the real world again without knowing of their former life.
 * This Troper wonders if Quincies keep their abilities after they die. I thought that they did not, but how Mayuri said that none of the Quincies he experimented on had the ability Uryuu had leads me to believe that they might retain their Quincy powers even after they die.
 * Well, we know that souls that die in the real world go to Soul Society and souls that die in Soul Society go back to the real world minus their memories. My guess is that Quincies keep their powers when going from the real world to Soul Society, but lose the abilities along with their memories when they die in Soul Society and go back to the real world.
 * Where is it stated that souls that die in Soul Society are revived without their memories? Kaien said that souls turn into dust and become spirit particles in Soul Society.
 * That's what happens to their bodies, not their souls. The fact that souls reincarnate back into the world of the living after they die in Soul Society was shown back when the Shinigami/Quincy war was explained. The fact that this happens, and has to happen, is why the Quicnies' Hollow exterminations were not just bad for the human souls they destroyed, but for the entire universe.
 * The Senrei glove. Basically, what it seems to do is act as a 'weight', making it more difficult for a Quincy to gather spirit particles. If they can manage to actively draw in particles with the limiter, it improves their abilities to the point that they reach the 'pinnacle' of Quincy powers. Now, two things bug me. First is the idea that it makes them so much more powerful, because in the Arrancar arc Ishida got his powers back using an ordinary Quincy cross, and was much more powerful than he ever was with the senrei gloves. Secondly, what Ishida's father said about never taking them off. Seriously? Does that mean that if Ishida hadn't broken them then he would be forced to wear them for the rest of his life?
 * If the glove makes it more difficult for a Quincy to gather spirit particles, then it only stands to reason that without the glove inhibiting Ishida's abilities, he'll be able to use the skills he learned with the glove in a much more efficient manner. Presumably the repelling effect of the glove also helps to pack some extra power behind the launch of an arrow. Ishida's attacks in Hueco Mundo may also be attributed to his new weapon (pentacle thingy) as opposed to his original cross, and his tendency toward a Flechette Storm of weaker arrows than a single powerful shot. As for the latter... well. Probably. Makes you wonder why they can't just... you know, stop collecting spirit particles. It's not as if they have their bows out at all times.
 * When we first see the gloves, they're noticeably lacking the barbs Ishida breaks to activate his super mode. Perhaps he can remove them without breaking them?
 * Relates to the top JBM, why didn't Ishida's grandfather mention that the power loss from Final Form was reversible? If Ryuuken knew about it then Souken definitely knew about it, so he could have left a note or something.
 * Maybe he didn't want Uryu using it carelessly, or he himself wasn't skilled enough to pull off the restoration, and he didn't factor in Ryuuken caring.
 * Apparently answered in the Thousand Year Blood War arc:.
 * When Ishida was fighting Szayel, and Szayel was destroying his organs, why didn't he use Ransoutengai to move, therefore temporarily negating the effects of the attack. Sure, it would have hurt, but that's not a problem when you have Heroic Willpower, amirite?
 * My guess is that technique requires a good amount of concentration in order to work. Against Mayuri, Uryuu wasn't all that injured, just paralyzed by a neurological agent, and rage is a pretty good focusing tool. Against Szayel, there wasn't quite so personal a level of hatred, plus Uryuu had had his stomach blown out. Kind of hard to concentrate when you're dealing with that.

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