”peace” we’ve enjoyed

it's almost like real life haha

That was somewhat answered on CFYOW where it was stated that people lose hope when they discover how SS really is. They just have a wrong idea of what afterlife is, but in reality things are not different between the worlds.

talk about this, so what happened if westerner die?
do they come to they respected SS?

Well it's better than hell right?

The Soul Society in bleach is Soul Society East.

So some of the dead Espada might've ended up in the Western branch?

>So some of the dead Espada might've ended up in the Western branch?
No? Espada members were already dead spiritual beings. They do not reborn if killed, they just turn into reishi.

WE DON'T KNOW HAHA

Why don't the poor people in SS team up and build a rich community? What's stopping them (other than Hollows)?

I've been wondering that too. The Shinigami don't seem to be actively oppressing the populace, they're just indifferent, and hollow attacks seem rare. What's stopping people who died recently and don't buy the feudal Japanese lifestyle from building factories and creating a functioning economy of their own? Surely the free market would notice the demand for shoes and thus a shoe factory would spring up to meet that demand?

To me, the absolute worst thing about Soul Society is that there is no system in place to allow people to reunite with their loved ones, it would make things so much less painful for everyone. You'd think that there would be some kind of registry where you could give your name and find out where your dead wife is. But nope, Parakeet Kid will live out the rest of his days in a shitty village, never knowing where his Mom is. Orihime will probably never be reunited with her brother.
There is literally no reason for this to not be a thing other than Kubo being a hack.

Nobles? The guy who killed Tousen's waifu wasn't a Shinigami, but just a noble, right?

Hell actually did look better than SS in the movie.

Why would Nobles care about what the peasants do? In fact, wouldn't it be in their best interest for peasants to make more money so that they can then tax them?

>you get repeatedly assfucked by giants but you cant die
not really my idea of a good time but okay

Maybe if they worried about long-term gain, but you just know they are a bunch of hedonists who would rather mess with the poor here and now.

I don't think there's any real way to fix that. There's a fundamental issue with how the reincarnation cycle in Bleach works, and that is: the dead will always outnumber the living. The dead can continue on "existing", I suppose, for an extraordinarily long time. There are ghosts in Bleach who have been around for thousands of years. The average human lifespan is less than 100 years, and accidents, murders, wars, diseases, etc., etc., and people are dying literally every day. The dead, from what I can tell, have a bit less to worry about. At the very least, those without any power don't get hungry, and that means that an extraordinarily small number will ever die from starvation, so that's one thing off the list already.

Now, while it's true that there does seem to be a sort of balance in regards to living and dead souls, it's still a fact that there are probably at LEAST several billion souls in Soul Society, but there is only one central governing body. In our world, even with the colossal number of people living on this planet, we're all segmented off into different nations, so it's not as if one governing body has to worry about all seven billion people. And even then, our governments are imperfect for governing the relatively small number of people they're in charge of. If you have only a single governing body taking charge of literally billions of individuals, well, it's really pretty much impossible. There is no way.

Now, I suppose what one could do is segment that central governing body and assign a group of people to each of the hundred named areas in Soul Society, but that's not gonna work either. There aren't anywhere near enough executive-level individuals in Seireitei to allow that. You'd be stretching them insanely thin. Even if you could, the furthest major area is so far, far away from the central Seireitei that it would take forever to get anything really done anyway. It's a fundamental issue in how Soul Society works geographically.

There are literally billions of souls. How would they even begin to do that, especially with the relatively small number of Shinigami? I mean, fuck, WE can't even competently manage to do that, and we have way, WAY less people to deal with in such matters. Soul Society is just inherently fucked due to how the reincarnation cycle works.

There also seems to be a number of issues in terms of Soul Society's technological level. There's strangely insanely advanced in some ways, yet absolutely archaic in others. They have functioning computers and cell phones, but don't even know what straws are. Mass production in particular doesn't appear to exist in Soul Society at all, so distributing ANYTHING over a large populace seems to be all but impossible. Seireitei is entirely ill-fit for taking care of such a large populace.

>There are literally billions of souls. How would they even begin to do that, especially with the relatively small number of Shinigami?
Computers are a thing. When you die, set up an account with your name, birthday, birthplace, parents' names, and other information that would differenciate you from all the other John Smiths of the world, and state what loved ones you want to be reunited with, the computer system then tries to find your loved ones if they show up.
Sure, it would probably take a long time, but it's not like the inhabitants of Rukongai have anything better to do than wait around.
In fact, Kubo could use this as a plot device to show how SS is still pretty unfair. Parakeet Kid would be more tragic. Parakeet Kid is stuck in a shitty town for months waiting for the overloaded bureaucratic mess that is SS to tell him where his mother is. To make matters worse, he's been taken in by a woman who has been waiting to be told where her daughter is for over 10 years.
A shitty system is better than no system at all.

>Mass production in particular doesn't appear to exist in Soul Society at all, so distributing ANYTHING over a large populace seems to be all but impossible
Only because nobody has bothered doing anything about it even though dead people who should know better have been coming to SS for decades.

Sasdly, it seems that everyone in a position of power in SS is over 100 years old and are very conservative, so a Rukongai peasant who was a city planner in his past life will be ignored no matter how much sense he makes.

>The Quincy did nothing wrong.
What exactly was Yhwach going to do again?

There's nothing even for distributing things between just the Shinigami. Ikkaku was fucking shocked when he saw convenience store onigiri, as if the idea of daily restocked mass-produced food is foreign to him. I doubt they even know what factories are. Computers are fucking huge and bolted down, and even things that seem advanced have some archaic aspect to them that would make them less than ideal in our modern world. Even the shit created by Urahara and Kurotsuchi, the two resident super-geniuses, are strangely lopsided in terms of technological advancement. It's like a strange mix of cyberpunk, steampunk and a shitton of wood.

Blur the lines between the spirit and the living world or some shit like that. Was there an explanation as to why? I can't remember anymore.

Even more strange thing is people die all the time so they have a steady influx of people from """CURRENT YEAR"""", who all have an idea of iphones and shit like that.
you died? Have fun spending eternity in FEUDAL JAPAN.

>Massive poverty
But it's peaceful poverty

Well a lot of shit wouldn't really work on that side, would it? They use fundamentally different physical laws. One major concern is the comparative lack of metal or glass, which are necessary to most of our current technology. In fact, if you actually look at Soul Society, or at least what we've seen of it, natural resources seem almost non-existent. We've never even seen so much as a single body of water in all of Soul Society, and the bulk of the land seems to be composed of flatland. Even someone technologically savvy from our world wouldn't know where to begin.

Most of the technology in Soul Society is based around spirit particles, so you'd need to learn everything about that before you can begin to use it for anything.

I know, but they have computers so they must be able to produce some shit. But even basic understanding of how factories work, mining and excavation etc. is doable in SS. Especially with the addition of spirit particles.

Probably because The same people have been running SS for centuries, old people who know nothing about the modern world and since they have a life of luxury they see no reason to change anything. Rukia and Hitsugaya are the youngest people we know who are in positions of power in SS, and they're still super old. Everyone born in the 20th or 21st century is stuck in Rukongai and has no way of doing anything, unless they have strong spiritual power in which case they might be allowed into the Shinigami academy, where it will be decades before they will be made seated officers.
This is a world where if you're not super old with super-powers, you don't matter and you can't do shit.

Like I said, there's a lot that strange about those computers. Even if Bill Gates look at the internals of one of those, he'd probably be lost.

Even if Seireitei didn't care about the bulk of Soul Society, it's strange how even Seireitei itself is so off-kilter in terms of technological advancement. Everything seems to be handmade and there seems to be little in the way of modern convenience. Everything seems to be made from either stone or wood. You'd think they'd at least have advanced far enough to make things better for their own sakes, but even Kurotsuchi's division seems pretty inconvenient in a lot of ways.

>There are ghosts in Bleach who have been around for thousands of years
Those are high powered shinigami. Regular humans in SS die just as easily as they do in earth

Since Burn the Witch introduced the idea of a soul society spanning multiple nations with vastly different methods of exterminating hollows, I wonder how they are connected in the spirit world. Are they closed off from each other? Or can you actually travel between them?

Just thinking about this makes it all even more strange. For example dying is quite trivial, considering you will live a "normal" life with a mostly immortal body afterwards.

But they at least don't die from starvation. If they don't eat, they don't have to worry about parasites. Disease transmitted by food is also a non-issue. Malnutrition also isn't a factor. Just by taking food out of the equation, their survival rate is probably higher than of those who live in our own modern third world countries.

Create a unified realm where nobody has to die. Because apparently that's better than a bunch of realms and reincarnating between them. Dumb writer came up with a dumb motive for a dumb character in a dumb story.

Make everyone immortal. He feared dying and though he was doing everyone a favor

I wonder if the afterlife in other branches of SS sucks less. At least they probably don't live like Feudal Japanese peasants.

I imagine SS:EB and SS:WB would be in the same plane of existence, but a huge distance apart. So far apart, the makeup and functioning of their societies are incredibly different.

Weren't there supposed to be multiple districts, with the outer ones being 'kill or be killed' wastelands? Isn't Kenpachi from the outermost one?

Yeah. Zaraki's the furthermost. Kusajishi is second.

If what you're saying is true, though, it raises some questions about Soul Society's geology.

We all know Kubo never thought this through anyway.

Not to mention, most of the Powers that Be in SS are "pure souls" i.e. they were born as spirits in SS, they're not humans that died and became spirits.

Explain why that's dumb

West Branch was mentioned in character 50 or bleach

No wait, WB wasn't mentioned. It was said that Rukia is from the east branch. My bad

Because a) it's completely unnecessary since death is nothing to be scared of and b) Yhwach dooms an untold number of souls to permanent death with no chance of reincarnation on his way to his goal of saving everyone from death.

>it's completely unnecessary since death is nothing to be scared of
t. shillnigami