At first, it looks like Yhwach’s Auswählen ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. Squad Zero takes the upper hand in every fight, while Ichibei unleashes his zanpakuto, Ichimonji, which he uses to paint things black. Anything painted, like Yhwach’s sword, loses its name, thus rendering it useless. Another point to Squad Zero.
But, as has been so often the case in these high-level battles, the Quincy manage to turn the tables and take down the Squad Zero members, one by one. As for Yhwach, he simply steals Black from Ichibei and envelops him in blue flame. Another point to Team Quincy.
Finally, Squad Zero stops playing around. They reveal that they’d only been using a small fraction of their power, the rest being bound by one anothers’ lives. But when Kirinji, Hikifune, and Nimaiya all kill themselves, the blood oath seal on the surviving Shutara is broken, and she’s able to wield her full power, causing earthquakes on all three worlds.
She summons her Bankai, which has a very long name and takes the form of a colossal loom. The Royal Guard members plus Haschwalth and Uryuu are all surrounded by various patterns of cloth, chosen by Shutara to eliminate them in unique, trippy ways, all while uttering highfalutin poetry describing their demises.
Finally, the blue flames around Ichibei dissipate. Turns out Black wasn’t Yhwach’s to steal. The moment Ichibei released Ichimonji, anything and everything in the three worlds is fair game to be painted black. Ichibei then releases his “Bankai”, which I put in quotes because it technically far predates that concept.
The ink on his brush turns from black to white, enabling him to write a new name for Yhwach on his black ink-covered body. Ichibei chooses “black ant”, and Yhwach becomes so. Ichibei first stomps on him with a gigantic foot, then as he’s falling through the sky he smashes him between two giant palms.
We cut to credits from this apparent but almost certainly premature victory, and afterwards we get a very tonally dissident omake sequence featuring Kon, whom we haven’t seen in quite some time, and whom I wasn’t that interested in seeing anyway.
The weird, out-of-place omake aside, this finale, while featuring plenty of bombastic battles and table-turning, didn’t have quite the luster it could have had for the simple reason that of the eleven combatants, only one was a character I actually cared about: Ishida Uryuu. There’s no freakin’ way he’s dead, either, so we’ll have to wait till next year for his showdown with Ichigo & Co.
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