Bleach 169

[Yukimura]

This sort of thing gets into who 'owns' the Bleach universe, the manga or the anime, or are there two separate universes, the manga universe and the anime universe? Since the anime universe seems to just trail the manga universe and doesn't ever allow itself to (permanently) advance anything or anyone beyond whatever state they are supposed to be in in the manga universe it's hard to make the argument that the anime universe is truly independent.

In the LotR movies, and many other true adaptations, events are changed or removed in the adaptation such that elements of the later parts of the original story couldn't reasonably take place in the later parts of the adaptation and still make sense. In these situations the adaptations just rework things so that they have a coherent story. This gives an adaptation a measure of independence from the original source work because it is free to just ignore events from the original story and provide alternative causes for events that did happen in the original story.

If a manga-adaptation anime did something like that (Full Metal Alchemist) then I could see it as an independent adapted story as well and adding a flashbacks to something not in the original story in a part directly copied from the original story wouldn't bother me so much. However as it stands, the Bleach anime has set itself up as a direct copy of the manga story with no meaningful plot impact given to the fillers.

Since nothing unique to the anime is allowed to be anything but a zero-sum time filler it's hardly right to consider such fillers as part of the 'story'. References back to zero-sum events seem pointless as well, because those events don't exist to support any actual story, they simply exist because one chapter of manga doesn't equal one episode of anime.