notquiteaphoenix

Probably one of the most fun parts of writing fic is deciding which parts of the canon you are going to keep, which parts you are going to twist or put through a different genre lens, which ones you are going to dismiss completely, and which ones you aren’t really going to address but leave the readers to consider. 

And with a long anime like Bleach, oh boy is there a lot of things like this to decide. You have a very long canon with convoluted and mildly fleshed out worldbuilding, anime filler arcs, connected novels (that I have not read), video games, that anniversary chapter recently released, and probably a number of things I don’t recall or don’t even know about. 

I’m choosing to look at Bleach with  “oooh, what a big sandbox to work with!” which is funny to me since I also dropped SPN early on for a similar exponentially expanding worldbuilding and never ending The Next Big Bad and similarly decide when I am still in a KHR fic writing mood to dismiss A LOT  more of the later stage lore. 

For my Alternative Phenotypes series, I’m currently considering keeping much of the concepts/storyline of 

• Most of the canon arc up through the Fullbringer arc
• The Zanpakutō Unknown Tales anime filler arc
• Some stand alone anime filler episodes
• Heavily borrowing backstory/information/maybe some plot from the Thousand Year Blood War
• A tiny smidge from my limited knowledge of the video games Hello Segundas Etapas
• The extra feeling of Soul Society being quite disturbing reinforced from the anniversary chapter but probably without the particular specifics from that