It didn't take long for the official ratings for Bleach: The Arrancar Arc to go live.
9.7.
The number hit the screens like a shot fired in the dead of night. Producers, industry insiders, professional critics - everyone who made a living pretending to be unfazed by new releases - held their breath when they saw it. Some let out a short, wary laugh. Others wore that look that said, Alright… where's the catch?
The suspicion came instantly: had Alex bought the score?
It was the most common script in the world. When a series premieres, ratings tend to be a little inflated for the first few days. Not because of magic, but because of strategy. Platforms want buzz, producers want clicks, and nobody lets the scoreboard look ugly at kickoff. But the doubt didn't last long, because reality had an inconvenient answer.
Season one - The Soul Society Arc - was still holding a 9.8 on review sites.
If you were going to "inflate" something, you'd inflate it above that, not below it. Minimum effort, at the very least.
That's when curiosity beat cynicism. A lot of people in the business dove into the comments - not to hunt for praise, but to sniff out flaws. And above all, to read what the four-star reviewers had written. Because one detail made it even weirder: there were barely any one- to three-star ratings. And when one did show up, it was the usual pattern… someone who clearly hated Alex for reasons that had nothing to do with the series, or just a troll looking for attention.
Anyone with eyes - and without bad faith - could see the obvious: the first two episodes of Arrancars were ridiculously well made.
And then they read the "issues" that justified those four stars.
"It's an amazing show. But I'm a Mark fan… and Alex, that bastard, made him suffer way too much. So I can only give four."
"I'm not even a Mark fan. I'm an Ichigo fan. Two episodes and they've already brutalized the protagonist twice. I'm pissed. Take one star off."
"Alex, give Sasha back to me! Four stars as a warning!"
"Season two keeps the quality sky-high, but I'm a Sosuke Aizen fan and in the first two episodes he barely got any screen time. So I can only give four."
"Please give Aizen more scenes. Then I'll change it to five."
And on and on.
By the time they stopped scrolling, a bunch of industry people and review creators - people who lived off dissecting shows - were frozen in place, like they'd been tricked by an inside joke no one bothered to explain.
What kind of reasons were those?
And yet, at the same time, one thing was loud - and strangely unsettling precisely because it was so rare: nobody was questioning the quality of The Arrancar Arc. Nobody.
And the topic Bleach - Season 2 shot to the top of the trends without the slightest surprise.
Thirty million plays on day one. Forty million worldwide.
In the middle of the storm, one hashtag shone like it had a light of its own - stubborn, relentless, hammered into existence through sheer repetition:
"Fans worldwide complain that Sosuke Aizen barely appeared."
It wasn't just local forums or niche bubbles. Even on global platforms, it became a mass debate - those endless threads packed with screenshots, clips, theories, and people treating "screen time" like a constitutional right.
And it was almost eerie how fans from completely different places arrived at the exact same point with the exact same certainty. Fans of Bleach… or rather: fans of Aizen. That was the more honest way to put it.
The comment sections on the production company's official account and Alex's personal socials turned into a wall of demands. "More Aizen." "More Aizen." "More Aizen." There were even foreigners showing up just to type broken, desperate English, like crossing the digital border was an act of faith.
It was almost funny.
As if Jasper Quin and Kenpachi Zaraki didn't exist. As if other insanely popular characters hadn't even returned to the screen yet. And still, nobody seemed to care. Aizen had appeared - briefly, but he had - and they still wanted more, like two episodes without him were a personal insult.
And it escalated in an even more surreal way when a few celebrities jumped in, tagging Alex publicly with posts that ranged from adorable to shameless.
A famous actress begged, "Please, I'm begging you - more Aizen." A young actor complained, "The best character is missing." A TV star said the episodes were incredible… and that because Aizen barely showed up, she'd gone back and rewatched all of season one again.
When Alex saw those tags, he pulled a face that looked stolen from an exhausted old man on the subway, staring into the void like the universe had just told a terrible joke.
He couldn't even tell if those people were real fans or if they'd simply smelled the scent of a trending topic. Worse - he didn't even recognize many of them. Just famous faces with reach, smiling through text.
Sure, it proved - indirectly - how successful his portrayal of Aizen had been. An antagonist - or something beyond that - who slipped through the screen and lodged himself in people's minds like an addiction. And yet, for some reason, it didn't make Alex happy.
Because Bleach wasn't - and had never been - a one-man stage.
It was an ensemble story. A series where every character had their moment, their flash of steel, their scar. Even the villains. Even the ones the audience claimed to hate but couldn't forget. From the outside, it always looked like Ichigo defeating the "final boss." But underneath, the beating heart of the story was collective. A world turning on many gears - not a single star swallowing all the light.
"Alex… the noise online is getting really loud. You… you don't think you should - " The voice was timid, uncertain. The girl still had that air of someone who hadn't fully adjusted to the size of the waves a production like this could generate. Her fear wasn't the audience - it was what the audience could become when they organized.
Alex didn't even blink. "No. Let them talk. If they've got the guts, they can stop watching."
He said it with a calm that was almost infuriating - the calm of someone who'd already decided and wasn't moving an inch. And the irony was exactly that: Alex himself was an Aizen fan. He understood the obsession better than anyone. Still, he wasn't about to betray the story just to please extremists.
Yes, there were adjustments that would be necessary later - certain choices in the final battle demanded adaptation. But up until Aizen's exit, the original plot worked. It was solid. It was alive.
And above all, it didn't deserve to be contaminated by the internet's "brilliant ideas."
At least he wasn't going to commit the insanity of inventing some "miracle fruit" out of nowhere and calling it a twist. If he listened to radical fans and started patching the script based on who screamed the loudest, that would be how you destroyed a classic.
Two days later, when other platforms that had purchased streaming rights added Arrancars to their catalogs, the total views smashed past a hundred million like it had been inevitable.
Sure, a portion of the loudest Aizen extremists were still yelling for "more Aizen." Of course they were. They always would. But Alex simply… unplugged. He did the thing everyone claimed was impossible: he ignored them.
The line was simple, repeated like a mantra: if you don't like it, don't watch.
He wasn't about to turn Bleach into that decaying kind of series - infamous for becoming fan service for organized stan culture - where the script was held hostage by noise and characters existed only to satisfy one specific faction. He'd seen that kind of disaster happen to other franchises. He knew how it ended: a soulless Frankenstein, applauded for a month and forgotten the next.
An entire week went by and Alex gave no response at all about "increasing Aizen's screen time."
When the second week's update time arrived, his assistant brought the numbers. Alex took the report and, reading the audience curve, let out a low sound that was almost a scoff.
Viewership hadn't dropped. It had risen.
"Hah. So you don't have that much backbone after all."
Plenty of people had sworn in the comments they'd quit if Aizen didn't get more screen time. But in reality… there they were. Watching. Commenting. Rewatching. The classic "I'm leaving," followed by the even more classic, "Okay - just one more episode."
Alex caught himself remembering an old line from another world, something gamers used to say about certain companies: "Go ahead, complain all you want. Just don't forget to buy it."
And like lightning cutting through an idle afternoon, an idea prodded at his mind: what if he brought Pokémon into this market?
The biggest IP on the planet. A monster.
But reality came right behind it, cold and heavy. It would be far too hard. The effects budget alone would be obscene. And what would he even play? There was no universe where he'd agree to be Ash. You couldn't even joke about that without becoming a meme. Maybe… twist the concept, create an original, invent a character and make him "Cynthia's husband" as the lead?
He cleared his throat, as if to scare off his own embarrassment.
No. Later.
For now, focus on Arrancars. And besides, soon he'd have to fly to the United States to begin filming Death Note.
In week three, the new episode arrived like a blade.
And finally, Aizen made his move: he sent the Arrancar army to attack the human world.
But something about the offensive felt… off. It looked big at first glance - masks, pressure, chaos - but when you actually paid attention, it wasn't an all-out assault. Aside from a swarm of obvious fodder Arrancars, the "front line" had… almost no one.
The main force boiled down to Yammy - who had already lost an arm to a rampaging Ichigo - and Grimmjow, who, even after having his left arm cut off and being demoted, still carried the same intact violence in his eyes.
It didn't feel like a decisive invasion.
It felt like a test. A provocation. A hand pushing the door just to hear the hinge scream.
Either way, Grimmjow came for Ichigo again.
And to the absolute despair of the protagonist's fans, the absurd happened again: even with one arm gone, Grimmjow could still overpower Ichigo with humiliating certainty, like he was proving with his own body that the gap between them was bigger than pain and blood.
The internet detonated.
"Alex, you bastard! Are you ever going to buff the protagonist?!"
And it wasn't only Ichigo fans complaining. Jasper Quin fans, Kenpachi fans - even Aizen fans were saying, "Okay, that's enough." Because three episodes, three times crushing the protagonist… it was starting to feel like calculated sadism.
And then - right at the exact point where frustration threatened to snap into rupture - a man appeared, smiling like someone stepping into frame already knowing he was about to wreck everything.
He introduced himself with the calm of someone who didn't need to prove a thing:
"Shinji Hirako."
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