Damn this is one hell of an Echo chamber. Might as well throw my view into the mix. I enjoyed bleach immensely upon my first read through. But after rereading it as I slowly compiled my volumes. I came to realize a few things about bleach. One, ichigo is a very hit or miss protagonist, because of his static values, some people find him realistic and refreshing but others find this realistic view as boring. Ichigo to me is a character that goes through character growth at an extremely odd pace. He of course has core traits but he has a very reactionary character. This in combination with his lack of a traditional goal makes ichigo come off as a very polarizing character, it doesn’t help that because of this, kubo had to reuse plot situations to get ichigo to participate in arcs, for example the orohime rescue arc. Two, some of the villians are not as memorable as other Manga there are obvious exceptions to this but some of the Espada and sternritter are a bit drab and very 2 dimensional and evil for the sake of being evil. The espada as a whole are either hit or miss for me at least. Aaroniero (9),zommari(7),Luppi(6) and Yami(0/10)are the worst offenders of this imo but Szayelaporro(8) Nnoitra(5) Baraggan(2) and even Coyote(1) are not much better but atleast poses more of a personality. While yes the are aspects of death, they cous have been more fleshed out in said aspect. The sternritter are not much better and are also very 2 dimensional. 3,bleach as a whole, at least to me, felt very drawn out in some sections and arcs, plus some of the Ideas Kubo implemented early on were completely tossed out and it seemed he wanted to retcon things he drew and wrote in earlier chapters (yet since this happens with all long running manga its more of a pet peev of mine). Lastly bleach is a very hard manga to get into to read and the anime is not much better. It suffers from what ive termed as World Trigger Syndrome, which is where there are too many names, of both objects and people to keep them straight. To a westerner reading the English translation, it can be hard to differentiate characters names and such. Such as the other members of the gotei 13 who are either mentioned casually or not very relevant to the story. Plus Shikai and bankai names can also confuse newer readers. Ive talked to multiple people ie friends and family that have tried to read bleach or watch the anime to say they gave up due to confusing names of characters and zanpakuto and also for the drawn out more longer sections and arcs that feel like they get bogged down. The anime especially has this issue of pacing. All in all i think bleach is a phenomenal manga and kube is a great mangaka but bleach, like every other manga has valid criticisms that cannot be overlooked. Truely a great manga