In my defense, I never said I WOULDN’T review doujinshi.
Many doujinshi are technically manga, even if they’re fan-produced. I feel like a case can be made that they’re a little different than their Western fan fic/fan art counterparts, in that their history stretches back to that late Meiji Period and they hold a strange position in Japanese copyright law as shinkokuzai–a kind of extra legal state that, so long as the holder does not submit a formal complaint, their violation of copyright law is not prosecutable.
Secondly, I feel like I have a bit of an excuse thanks to all of Bleach‘s twenty-year anniversary hoopla, this ridiculous manga/anime has been on my mind again A LOT again.
So of course I went looking for smut!
As a caution, however, I will say that this particular review may not make much sense to any reader unfamiliar with the source material. Because I am a mega-fan of this manga, I may not even always be aware of what needs explaining and so some of this may read entirely like gobbledygook. Normally, I’d suggest you check out the original (which I do link to it in a paragraph above,) no amount of smutty one-shots is likely worth the time and effort it would take anyone new to the series to read all 365 chapters. I will, however, in my comments on each of these try to give those readers a sense of whether or not it might be possible to enjoy these stories without any prior knowledge of Bleach.
Psst, for those of you who are fans of the original, it’s out. Bleach‘s Thousand Year Bloodwar Arc hit Hulu on Monday of this week. If you want to watch the trailer for the new anime series, you can catch it here: https://www.comingsoon.net/anime/news/1229239-bleach-thousand-year-blood-war-sequel-anime-trailer-previews-return. Not going to lie, it’s got me pretty pumped. And, yes, before any one feels the urge to jump into the comments to tell me I have a pig face and no taste being a Bleach fan, I am aware, my friend. Very aware.
SPOILERS
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Despite all of my complaining, I am, as I have noted, still a sucker for this manga.
My current character obsession is our previous Big Bad, the suave and sophisticated manipulator: Aizen Sousuke. Last night I stumbled across a number of doujinshi featuring Aizen Sousuke/Ichimaru Gin. Including this one…
Qualirengue by Kitamura Koume. Actually, I read Kitamura’s entire Bleach doujinshi oeuvre, which included Roulinsou, Suifuyu, Yukichidori, Koisenshou, and Koishoushou. Of these six, my personal favorite was the last one, Koishoushou. That story details a story from the time that Ichimaru served as a fairly young child in the Third Division when Aizen was the lieutenant there. In this version of their relationship, Ichimaru offers his love confession to Aizen as a “kishoumon,” which is, historically, a written vow to a god.
Which, I mean, that’s got to appeal to Azien’s ego…
This story is told from Aizen’s point of view and the moment that really works for me is when after receiving Gin’s written confession, Aizen has this moment of truth that feels very real to his character in canon.
And then Aizen basically says, “Listen, thanks, but I’m dead inside.”
His actual words more convoluted than that in the doujinshi, but it basically boils down the idea that Aizen is incapable of loving anyone other than himself. I think we are supposed to come to the rather romantic conclusion that Aizen holds on to this love confession for the next several hundred years because Ichimaru does come to fill that hole, changes him, etc., etc., but… I dunno, man, this is Aizen. My money says: once sociopathically dead inside, always sociopathically dead inside.
Interestingly, this is the most romantic of all of Kitamura’s stories. Generally, she seems to be enamored of an abused and manipulated Ichimaru, who can’t help but love his abuser anyway.
I mean, canon did give off those vibes, but I can’t help but wonder what people who love this pairing for that particular dynamic do with the fact that Ichimaru later turns coat and successfully steals the hogyoku from Aizen’s heart and is the one person (besides Urahara) who comes closest to killing him. This does not seem like a shrinking violet afraid of his abusive lover to me. I tend to be a bigger fan of these two strong men coming together and doing the frienemies dance, but that is difficult when you want to write about a guy whose spiritual pressure is literally off the charts. Aizen is the definition of peerless.
But, I mean, believing Aizen is a villain even in bed: easy. So, it’s not like I don’t buy the basic premise.
Generally, though I would not say that the average, non-Bleach obsessed yaoi reader would get much out of this set of doujinshi. A few sexy times are there, but, if you’re in it to see the abuse, it’s mostly implied by bruises and scratches that apparently were procured off-stage, like the image above. Which, I mean, if I’m gonna sign on that particular vision of Aizen, I want the art and the story to really go there (See Tentacles x Uryuu later in this review for what I mean.)
I will say in the positive column that I really liked Kitamura’s Aizen. She draws him particularly well–in all his guises: lieutenant, captain, and the Aizen-sama of Hueco Mundo. Meanwhile, she tends to soften Ichimaru in temperament as well as artistically, so hers is not the nearly skeletal, foxy, creepy version that canon usually shows us.
For Bleach fans, I will say that at least one of these doujinshi, Roulinsou, attempts to explain why Ichimaru was nearly entirely absent in most of the Hueco Mundo arc (Kitamura’s answer: doing the sex slave thing, like a princess in a tower!) so that’s at least somewhat fun to imagine sliding into the background of canon.
Generally, though your tolerance for these will depend on your ability to believe in a soft!Ichimaru.
The next doujinshi that I want to review is the ‘not even trying to hide it’ named, Tentacles x Uryuu by Oda Kazui. Given the simplicity of the concept, almost any yaoi or tentacle porn fan could enjoy this one-shot. The only part of this premise that at all relates to Bleach is that the tentacles are being controlled by Aizen. The titular victim, Ishida Uryuu, is a member of the imaginary race of Quincy, which are considered somewhat rare in Bleach (despite an army of them showing up in the final chapters which we are now seeing animated.) However, this means that Ishida is often threatened, even in canon, with various vivisections and torturous experiments because he is One of a Kind and In Need of Study. The tentacles, therefore, are simply an extension of this lascivious and gratuitous ‘scientific’ research into his race.
I can show you no pictures because Tentacles x Uryuu one-shot is smut from start to finish.
I will admit that despite the incredibly sketchy art that barely seemed finished enough to go to whatever passes for press in the doujinshi world, I still enjoyed this one. I suspect that part of my enjoyment has entirely to do with my own kinks around how I imagine Aizen enjoying sex. So, mileage may vary.
Oda’s three other doujinshi are really only for the Bleach fan, alas. The sex, if there is any, is really secondary to the characters studies of a very tsundere Ishida Uryuu. There is Baby I Love You in which, in an alternate universe, Ishida is the owner of two cats, one orange (Kurosaki Ichigo) and one white (Shiro / Hollow Ichigo.) There is cat sex. With tails.
Oda also wrote Beni Hitoiro featuring Ishida and Ichigo that explores the dynamic of two heroes, both stupidly and stubbornly self-sacrificing. No sex, only a bit of kissing, and angsty thoughts about why Ishida secretly only ever hated Ichigo for being so damn hot and noble.
Another Oda, Subete no Owari no Hajimari, is a strange little story about… well, I guess the dangers of unrequited love in a world where there are a WHOLE lot of other versions of the main character, including the existence of the Grand Fisher Hollow that can make you think you’re with someone you love. It’s still Ishida x Ichigo, but Ichigo prime doesn’t figure out what’s going on with his dear friend who seems to be physically wasting away, until he discovers a Hollow sexing up Ishida in the guise of… himself.
That’s, perhaps, the perfect segue to the surprising number of doujinshi that feature Bleach‘s main character, Ichigo having sex with various versions of himself.
For the uninitiated, options include, but are definitely not limited to: the mod Soul possessed ‘gigai’ (a kind of a body-double) known as Kon and, most popularly, Ichigo’s sword spirit, previously most commonly referred to in Bleach fandom as Shiro. “Shiro” is a play on words since Zangetsu, Ichigo’s sword spirit, looks like a color-flipped version of Ichigo, whose last name KUROsaki has the word for black in it, Shiro is the word for white, and you will sometimes, though rarely see this Hollow version referred to as SHIROsaki.
At any rate, in the category of “Ichigo Does Himself,” we have Hot Summer by Gyohkoh and Masaki Rioka, which can be summed up as Ichigo comes home and discovers his body-double is feeling horny and gets caught up in it.
To be fair, this storyline could easily have been inspired by canon. There is a scene in the JUMP version of Bleach (that gets censored in the English-language tankoban) where we see Kon, in Ichigo’s body, the night of Ichigo’s return from his first big adventure in the Soul Society. Kon inside the gigai body-double is asleep on Ichigo’s bed, and very clearly has his hands in his pants.
The translators went with “scritch, scritch” like he’s just itching down there, but the flushed cheeks and the ‘uk, uk” face tell another story.
However, the far more popular pairing in the “self love” category is Ichigo and his Hollow sword spirit, Shiro. Hollows are kind of monster in the Bleachverse, so Shiro is, even in canon, portrayed as Ichigo’s id, if you will, his more animalistic inner self. Given this antagonistic, yet literally soul-bonded dynamic, you can probably begin to imagine the emotional appeal of this couple.
Sono Toki Sekai ga bibi Wareru Oto wo Kikita also by Gyohkoh and Masaki Rioka opens with a compelling splash page that goes a long way to making the case of the aesthetic appeal of this pairing, as well:
They are pretty together? It’s very much not my thing, but I kind of get it.
Rioka-sensei on her own wrote a whole bunch of other Ichigo x Shiro doujinshi: Rosemoon, which is just a smut piece poetically framed around, of all things, the Lord’s Prayer. Play of the Twin Dragons is a Edo Period alternatte universe with Shiro and Ichigo in some kind of slave/master relationship only this time with inexplicable tattoos. Rioka also plays with another fan favorite “what if….?” concept, which revolves around the fact that it becomes very clear in canon that Ichigo is one step away from being the very monsters he fights. This becomes particularly clear when Kubo-sensei introduces a new kind of evolved monster called the Espada. They look much like shinigami/humans, except they have a broken Hollow mask and a hole somewhere on their bodies. The “what if…?” is that given that Espada are an option for Hollow-types, what if Ichigo got somehow taken in by Aizen and made into an Espada himself.
Rioka has two of these, Espada-version Ichigo stories. In the first, Wilder Than Heaven, we have Espada-Ichigo, Grimmjow, and our universe Ichigo getting it on (mostly just because, see: id aspect of Hollow versions of Ichigo). Playback (which has two chapters scanlated) is another one of Rioka’s where the dominant Ichigo in this story is Espada Ichigo and the Ichigo we know is locked up in Hueco Mundo (literally translates as Hollow World) as a sex slave (apparently a theme for Bleach doujinshi writers given that we saw Ichimaru in this position as well!)
Rioka’s co-author Gyohkoh has a insanely smutty and deeply convoluted one-shot called Lollipop Carnival, which involves so many alternate versions of Ichigo, I’m not sure I could begin to explain who they are all are, even to the most well-versed Bleach fan!
Moving on to another mangaka, but with the same basic pairings Imaginary Play by M2 where a brooding Ichigo accidentally falls into his Internal World (where his sword spirit lives) and is basically raped by Shiro in a show of dominance. Reincarnation Flow, also by M2, just seems like a few extra pages they forgot to add to Imaginary Play. Twilight is another of theirs that goes a little deeper into setting-up some reasonable reason for Shiro and Ichigo to bang, with some added bonus humor with the inclusion of Kon in his stuffed lion form (non-Bleach fans, don’t even ask. We have a sentient stuffy as canon. Just… roll with it. We also have a furry Shinigami captain in canon, so, you know, broad appeal!)
Though I suspect there are many more Ichigo x Ichigo doujinshi out there that I just didn’t even find during this pass through, this is a decent enough survey, I feel, of the types of stories you’re likely to find. I will say that a lot of the art of these doujinshi are as crude as the storylines. If you are an average yaoi fan that would enjoy the deeply confusing visual of two people who look nearly identical banging for reasons that will make very little sense to you, then sure, any of these Ichigo x Ichigo tiles will be fine for you to try out and enjoy responsibly. Plot not required.
Bleach fans should also feel free to take or leave these. There were no special insights into Ichigo’s relationship to himself or to Zangetsu to be gleaned, in my opinion, but there also isn’t anything wrong with enjoying these for what they are. No kink shaming here! If that blue tongue of Shiro’s does it for you, hey, power to ya.
There is so much of this stuff out there (Bleach has a rather shockingly large array of side-characters, several of whom are popular enough in the fandom to rate dozens of doujinshi) that I think I will leave this here for now and schedule a part II for later.
Who knows, maybe I can do several parts as a continued celebration of the return of the anime.
Don’t say I never done nothin’ for ya.
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