#governthestars

[zabiume]

i would love to hear more about your orihime thoughts! particularly on her characterization in fanfiction. what to do and what not to do. i love my girl, and i feel ya-- when an ichihime fic does her dirty, sometimes i'll try to slug it through to see if it gets better, but that's not really a guarantee. i love how you treat all the characters with such care, especially the karakura six. so please indulge us with more of your wonderful thoughts and brainworms!

Ahh, I love the main six so much, they’re such great characters and they all have really lovely interpersonal relationships with each other, so I’ll never get sick of talking about them lmao, but Orihime and Ichigo especially are two of my favorite characters and I think they’re just neat! I don’t want to be like,,,an authoritative voice on what people should or shouldn’t do because everyone has a different interpretation and the fun in fanfiction is having that creative freedom to do what you want, so do keep in mind these are my opinions and observations and in no way reflect any sort of scale on what is Objectively good.

TLDR: Me and my trashbag opinions under the cut ✨

I think one thing Kubo really excels at is writing Orihime with nuance, and some of the things he did with her really elevated my own view of what good characters can do in a story. He made so many mistakes with her, but reducing her to “Nice Girl, Big Boobs” was not one of them. The Hueco Mundo arc is really as much her arc as it is Ichigo’s, because it’s where she’s confronted with her own flaws and Kubo uses them as a baseline to develop her further in the next two arcs. Jealousy, weakness, dependence, stumbling over herself to stop Ichigo from getting hurt -- these were the four hoursemen of Orihime’s flaws early on and Kubo tackled every single one of them over the course of FB and TYBW arcs. Could he have done more for her? Sure. Am I happy with the screentime/focus we already got? Hell yes.

Now, I’ve read a lot of Orihime fics, from IchiOri, to TatsuHime to Ichi/Ruki, to RenHime, and even the less popular ones like ByaHime, Shuuhei x Hime, Shinji x Hime and RiruHime, and each ship tends to put different spotlight on her various canon traits, but for the sake of analysis, it’s generally agreed that she is 1) quirky/weird, 2) gentle/kind, 3) emotional and 4) a pacifist

The extent to which these traits are exaggerated usually depends on the ship. IchiOri writers like to work with her gentleness/quirkiness a lot as a complement to Ichigo’s own hardheadedness/rationality. In small doses, this works really well. Good IchiOri writers play on the goofy back-and-forth, light teasing dynamic that they have in canon where Ichigo plays the straight man to Orihime’s quirkiness, like the infamous Bread Scene, or Drainpipe scene, or the Post-battle Piggyback scene. In excess, you have the dreaded Little Blue Men. I don’t know who started this trend, but it’s seeped into the mainstream IH consciousness and there’s nothing we can do about it. The best kind of Orihime writing is when the writer embraces her weirdness in tandem with her intelligence. Orihime’s weird food, or her weird imagination or her weird jokes aren’t ironic because she’s a dumbass, they’re ironic because she’s generally very smart. She’s a Smart Dumbass. She scores cent per cent on her math exams but can’t think to use the stairs instead of flying down a drain pipe. She’s the kind of girl who would pour salt in her coffee on accident and then try to convince her friends she did it on purpose to gain extreme and hilarious reactions from them. I bring up IchiOri fics because they’re usually the ones who write this element of her character more, but it really applies to her in all pairings because she’s Like This with everyone. In canon, the other characters are exasperated by her but they don’t actually believe she’s stupid, just silly. In fanfic, characters think she’s serious, which has a way of painting her as very disconnected from reality/dumber than everyone else. A good rule of thumb to write her humorous elements would be to just emulate the atmosphere of a room when a friend makes a bad joke and you’re just Done With Their Audacity.

Orihime’s gentleness/kindness has its place and purpose in canon, too. Orihime isn’t forgiving to just about everyone. Think about how she treats Ulquiorra when he talks shit about Chad, vs how she treats Loly/Menoly when they talk about her. Think about her reaction when Ginjo was going to attack Ichigo vs when Grimmjow was choking her. Orihime isn’t forgiving to a fault, she just had really low self esteem in Hueco Mundo and had resigned herself to the possibility she might die. She only forgives enemies when they’re no longer a threat or when they’re on the literal verge of death and in need of closure. Orihime excels at reading between the lines for ‘what characters say‘ vs ‘what they actually mean’. This is why she’s good at reading closed-off characters like Ichigo, Uryu, and Riruka. The one time she fails to read someone is Urahara, but that was when she’d convinced herself she was useless, and no one really understands him, anyway, so who can blame her? TLDR: Orihime is tough and gentle and the nuance of writing her involves understanding what situations evoke her anger and what situations evoke her sympathy.

Ichi/Ruki fans & Non IchiOri fans like to play up her emotional aspect a lot, especially with how they deal with doing the legwork in making her move on from Ichigo and fall for the intended pairing instead. TatsuHime fics do this well-- very true to her character--where Orihime gravitates slowly from Ichigo to Tatsuki and no losses are borne to anyone, just as she would want. One thing I’m deadset on as an Orihime fan (and obviously, you’re free to disagree) is that she would never, ever consciously confess to Ichigo, regardless of whether her feelings are requited or not. I think this is why I have a hard time reading fics where she asks him out and he pity-dates her because a) she would never ask him out and b) she would know if he’s not into it because, like I said, she can read him really well. This is up to interpretation, but the reason I think so is because of how Kubo wrote her feelings for him in the manga.  If Orihime’s Five Lifetimes speech was supposed to be indicative of his feelings--requited or not-- for her, he would have been awake. Ichigo’s feelings for her have never been a factor in whether or not she loves him, because he’s just a good guy and she will always love his shonen protagonist ass. People tend to write her feelings for Ichigo as source of suffering, but the reality is that she likes being friends with him, and being by his side makes her happy. She doesn’t see her relationship with Ichigo as “just friends” because their friendship is so wholesome and complete in and of itself that there’s nothing “just” about it. Orihime would totally love reading fics where she’s evil, though, because she’s just Like That. Imagine if Kubo had done a breaking-the-fourth-wall omake with her, like they did in Deadpool. Peak meta comedy.

(Part 2)

Bonus:

I will forgive any IchiOri fic if they make Ichigo blush AT LEAST 2-3 times during,,,,you-know,,,,because that dude does not know what a cl*t is and you cannot convince me otherwise

[zabiume]

Orihime as a pacifist + TYBW reflections

So, yesterday, we were talking about Orihime’s core traits in @governthestars ask about writing Orihime + her general characterization and I didn’t expand much about her pacifism because I wanted to make a separate post about it.

On my first read of TYBW, the thing that struck me the most is that both Yhwach and Orihime were probably the most proclaimed “peace-loving” characters in that they both called for a unity of all three worlds.

But the way both characters aim for this “peace” is rather distinct. Yhwach advocates for total anarchy, and his definition of anarchy is the total breakdown of social systems and orders that currently uphold society as we know it, rendering everyone into one clustered group through destruction. Orihime, on the other hand, advocates for anarchy in that she trusts social groups to be capable of taking care of each other and living in harmony through interdependence, without the help of higher institutions like Soul Society. Yhwach focuses on destroying the status quo; Orihime focuses on unionizing the 90%. The fun thing for me is that both definitions have been used to describe anarchism/anarcho-pacifism before and I’m sure this wasn’t meant to be that deep, but it could be, and I’m sad it never went anywhere.

The most frustrating thing about Orihime’s “cool-ness” as a character is that she’s a pacifist in a series where literally everyone is a fighter. Bleach is a shonen, so power-ups (shikai/bankai) and final forms take center stage in what makes a character “cool” to an audience. Kubo set up bankai to be a technique that is incredibly rare to achieve + a physical manifestation of a character’s self-actualization, and that’s pretty deep, but the thing about writing a shonen is that you’re inevitably going to have a shonen audience. AKA, no one cares about what you can do if you can’t do bankai. This is why Chad and Orihime are usually ranked low in popularity polls, despite having solid character arcs and motivations that are apt for them, while characters like Byakuya and Hitsugaya (who have had little to no relevant character arcs post-HM) are very popular. You’d be surprised at how many people on forums think Chad is irrelevant to Ichigo’s main circle, simply because he’s a non-shinigami character. You’d be surprised at how many people think Ichigo is closer to Byakuya than he is to Orihime. But when you see both these ideologies floating around, it isn’t really surprising that most fans thought Ichigo would end up in Soul Society.

I think the point Kubo was trying to make with Ichigo and his identity struggles as a Visored in HM arc, Fullbring in the FB arc, Quincy in the Quincy arc and shinigami throughout is that he can co-opt the identities of all these factions without actually committing an undying loyalty to any single one of them. This is why Ichigo has allies in every faction, just as he has enemies. The entire point of Ichigio’s moral code is that he discards the official manifestos of whatever groups he’s in and creates his own. He’s no one’s man, so to speak, abiding by what he thinks is right as opposed to what each society claims is right. This is a recurring theme seeded in as early as the Lost Agent arc and people still think he’d throw in with the shinigami folk after all the awful shit they’ve done and would have done to him & his friends. If we were to draw a scale of anarchy →  status quo, you’d have it be something like: Yhwach → Orihime (& Ichigo & co) → Urahara(& co) → Gotei 13 with all other characters falling somewhere within that spectrum.

What does this have to do with Orihime as a pacifist? Well, this is what peace and harmony means to her on a grander scale. On a smaller scale, Orihime doesn’t want to hurt a character unless she absolutely has no choice. And even then, her heart isn’t in it unless she’s protecting someone other than herself. This is why she had troubles with Tsubaki before Fullbring Arc, but I don’t think she does now, even if Kubo didn’t really have the time to expand on her powers and origins. I think this quote by Wonder Woman does a good job at summarizing Orihime’s take on violence:

“Don't kill if you can wound, don't wound if you can subdue, don't subdue if you can pacify, and don't raise your hand at all until you've first extended it.”

Orihime would much rather avoid violence and she hates when there’s avoidable loss of life, as we see in Ichigo’s introspection of her re: Yammy. She values life, much like other popular characters in media who don’t kill--like Batman, or Aang. Given her history with family violence and abuse in general, it is pretty much central to her character to be non-violent. Plenty of good characters in media are non-violent as I said, but I think fans like to jest and mock her a lot in fics, especially in I/R fics where her pacifism is written as passive-ism;  where she doesn’t appreciate her powers as much as Ichigo does, where she doesn’t care about whether she has powers or not, unlike Ichigo, who would die without Rukia his powers. This is such a fundamental and hateful misunderstanding of what her powers mean to her and why they were born in the first place-- i.e to protect. Her powers were born because of Ichigo and in the epilogue, we saw her powers protecting Kazui, their son. One of the main reasons why I think a Bleach next gen series would never work--or at least why I don’t want Kubo to cave and make one-- is because it dismantles Orihime and Ichigo’s core of wanting to protect their loved ones. As long as Ichigo and Orihime are alive and functional, I don’t think they’d delegate any wars or greater responsibilities to their son, beyond the occasional Hollow. Orihime sees her powers as an avenue to protect her loved ones, to keep them safe from their enemies -- which, ahem, you might be surprised, is how Ichigo sees his powers, too! It’s almost like she has a fully developed moral code, just like Ichigo does, who knew?

Look, we all read Bleach for different characters and I think it’s amazing that it’s  a versatile enough series that you could read the entirety of it for a character who’s not the protagonist and still walk away with a satisfying story. I mean, I literally could not care less about Nnoitra, while there are fans who run entire meta Tumblr accounts for him. My point isn’t that you shouldn’t do that, it’s that if you read Bleach entirely for characters that are not Orihime and willfully ignored every single panel she was in, you’re not going to have a well-rounded or accurate opinion of her. You’re only going to see her as Ichigo’s bland and convenient love interest or wet blanket wife (yuck) or even a nuisance and hence you’re going to write her as such. If Kubo wrote her that way, I would understand that reflection in fics as well, but he didn’t. We see her as one of Ichigo’s closest companions and motivators for 685 chapters. We see her as his wife in one of them. You don’t need a degree in the School of Orihime Arts & Sciences to be a good Orihime writer-- you just have to understand that she had more of a purpose in Bleach than to be Ichigo’s wife, or Ichi/Ruki’s red herring, or Uryu’s trophy wife or XYZ gay ship’s laughing stock. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.

(Part 1)