Yes! Soul Society is a pretty sick society, and that fact is at the heart of the story. It doesn't help that the rulers are kept intensely secret and have too much power, or that the governing body is militaristic, or that they seem to have more types of secret police than Soviet Russia, or that the government actually feels no responsibility to govern outside of Seireitai, or to provide anything to the ordinary citizens, even threats. But most of all, the problem at the heart of their existence is that it is their job to maintain the status quo. Souls coming in, souls going out. Homeostasis. They said back during Ishida's debut that that was why they existed. And they eliminate threats to that balance.
That means that they are devoted to everything staying the same, forever. That is Seireitai. People age, very slowly, but everything else, ideally, goes on as it has ever been, and if it threatens to change unacceptably, you dispose of it. Urahara, Ichigo, and Aizen are all 'agents of change' in this static world. Urahara, in the name of knowledge or truth, keeps stepping over lines (this would have gotten him into trouble sooner or later even if Aizen hadn't framed him), and is the most suited to bring about benign paradigm shifts, if Soul Society would let him. (Not that he always makes good choices.) Ichigo just changes things by accident, by being a powerful irregularity. And Aizen represents the most vast and brutal change of all, because he wants to remake the entire world.
Superheroes normally fight to maintain the status quo, aka save the world; villains want to change it to their own benefit or occasionally just its detriment; Urahara doesn't belong as a major player in a superhero comic. Hah. Which I guess means Bleach pwns Spider-man, who didn't doubt it?
So...if the world changes at the end, that'll be good. If most of the Soul Society old guard get killed off and the remainder are brought to a point of decreased closemindedness, that would be good. But how far can they go, and still hold together? I mean, they still have to make sure the world doesn't explode from homeostatic imbalance, and kill hollows, and they still need an organized way to run this outfit, and a war-gutted elite isn't exactly in the best position to try to start beneficially administrating the biggest slum in the universe. |