AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I think the "punishment" thing is inherited, something their clan did a long time ago, possibly before the foundation of the modern Soul Society. The elder may have had quite a long time to find out how to reverse the curse.

If a story stops interesting me, I stop reading/watching it. Get off the train before it wrecks. Don't punish yourself.

Where are you in the Manga Kamak? I'm pretty into it now that the fourth great ninja war started.
And it's obviously about to wrap every thing up.

I'm just reading the most current stuff, mainly because I know a few friends that freak out each week over it and now I can be like "but nothing fucking happened this week. Or for the last month. Jesus."

I can't wait for the KLK ost to be released

I'm enjoying the building up, seeing as how the, and spoiler alert if you're no fully caught up, blew up the village AGAIN and killed everybody in it, AGAIN.

New episode of Kill La Kill was SO FUCKING COOL THAT I LOST MY SHIT

IT WAS REALLY NEAT

And then H-Neun was in hiding after killing most of the magius council and getting away alive? Maybe? Please? ; _ ;

I'm following along with the official US Shonen Jump, which comes out once a week now. Yeah, I'm buying manga; horrifying isn't it? Right now in Naruto it's the actual main character talking to (hopefully) the final antagonist, Obito. It's in what's hopefully it's actual super final chapters. In Bleach, it's still the generic captain vs. main bad guy's underlings schlock, almost the same as Fake Karakura Town. That means we've got what, two more years to go? Also, the beginning of Bleach Chapter 555 is a straight rip of Goku coming back and rushing over to where Piccolo and the gang are fighting Vegeta and Nappa. "Oh the fight started a while ago? I better get there fast! Even with my powers it'll take me a while! Food? Thanks guys!" That's pretty fucking pathetic, even for Kubo.

Pay attention to what Ichigo is wearing in that scene. That was intentional. When Kubo couldn't get his stuff published it was Toriyama who looked at his stuff and told him to keep trying.

I love callbacks and shoutouts like that.

Even if it is a shout-out, it's still a cop-out to pad the story out for longer while all the captains face off against the Quincies revealing more super-secret captain powers/abilities.

Well yeah, his writing is kinda mediocre, what with him basically being the sole creator with no one telling him "yo, it might be cooler if you didn't do that, and did this instead". Yes, it could definitely be better, but at the same time, it's not bad, and I understand why it's at the level that it is. When you have a one-person team working on a pretty large production (I don't know if he has page cleaning assistants, but whatever), you're going to run into some good ideas, and some bad ones that went unchecked. Because he's including all of the ideas without anyone weeding them out and saying "we could condense this to cut some of the DEM and drama".
But honestly, we all kind of knew that we were going to get into a story like that. See previous comments: "You just went full shonen" and all.

Manga authors usually have editors to keep them in check and give them advice on their stuff, but Kubo's editor(s) is (are) probably on board with his stuff since it's popular and sells

Kubo has said that he isn't much of a fan of his editors.

They're part of the reason Hueco Mundo got dragged out to hell and back, because they wanted him to dig in and expand on what he already came up with. It's probably the reason that Szayel Aporro was around for fucking ever, and why Nel didn't take down Nnoitora.

I know he said at one point he wasn't enjoying the arc anymore because of how dragged out it became and he apologized to the fans. It's probably why all of the fights and arcs since then have wrapped up a lot faster.