I view bleach as my first love of anime. When we first met it was love at first site. We were inseperable for the good 200 chapters, but then Bleach started to change. It began with the little things, main characters being ignored, more and more characters being added, cheap plot twists. They soon began to add up and I was fed up. We eventually grew apart, but bleach always had a special place in my heart. For a while I thought bleach had moved on without me, and was struggling with an addiction to it's cheap plot twists. Recently though things have started to change. It seems bleach has started returning my metaphorical phone calls. First with Don Kanonji, tatsuki and Keigo making an appearance, and Ichigo returning to his inner world to deal with his fears once more. Just when I thought Bleach was falling back on old habits with the Gin twist, it went out there and surprised me. Ichigo showed up, and achieved the same level of awesomeness as the introduction to the Byakuya fight (AKA my favorite part of the manga). The key to this was returning Ichigo to former badassery, thus putting him on the same level on aizen. It's one thing to see him continually struggle against the arrancar and their releases. This being shounen though we must eventually reach a point where the main character is capable of matching and defeating the big bad, because he has gone through these trials. He drags Aizen out of town by the face for Shigeru's sake. No kidding.

[IMG]http://i247.photobucket.com/albums/gg150/linkzeldi/16_17.png[/IMG]

I believe the bleach manga is the same way. Sure it has made mistakes, but Bleach has learned from them and become better because of it. Plus ichigo looks hot with long hair. Just sayin'