Intro

Bleach is often criticized for its overabundance of characters, and I think nowhere is this criticism more evident than with The Visored. They aren’t treated as individuals (except Shinji and Hiyori) but rather as a group, which is what results in the feeling of there being “too many of them”. So far, I’ve done my best to individualize each one of them, give them a role to play in the story, but even I have trouble doing so for one particular character.

Aikawa Love

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Love is such a fascinating phenomenon. When his fellow Visored Captains returned to their old positions after Aizen’s defeat, Love was left behind, and once his old position of the 7th Division Captain became vacant, he was yet again left behind. Despite his impressive performance against Primera Espada, it is Iba, a character we barely saw in action that gets to fill in the vacant Captain position. It also doesn’t help that Love’s whole “deal” was co-opted by Kubo for another character in the story. You might have noticed this but both Love and Zaraki’s abilities are both based on an Oni.
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Oni (Ogre/Demon) are kind of a Yōkai from Japanese folklore who wield massive weapons (iron Kanabō clubs) which both Love and Zaraki can be seen wielding in their respective Shikai (giant mace for Love, giant axe for Zaraki). Oni also have short horns on their foreheads, like the ones Zaraki can be seen having in his Bankai and the one Love has on his Hollow Mask. Even Love’s “base design” is quite uninspired: he wears sunglasses like Iba, wears a tracksuit like Hiyori, and he even shares his love of Manga with Rose and Lisa.
So, if Kubo has already cannibalized Love so much, why not go all the way? Why not just merge his character into another lackluster character as if they were one; a character like Rose.
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I’m sure there is a fan of Love out there, but he honestly brings nothing to the story. And it’s not that removing him is what necessarily makes the story better, but relocating his actions to Rose would make for a more complete one (their actions are already incredibly similar anyway). Instead of having two lackluster characters, have just one that is great.

Rōjūrō “Rose” Ōtoribashi

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Rose gets very little play in the story. I once described him as the “background Captain” because whenever he appears in the panel he is the one character always seen in the background; the fight against the Primera Espada is framed as a fight between Love and Starrk with Rose playing the supporting role. So, let Rose shine more against Starrk. Why prioritize Rose over Love, who gets a bigger focus and more impressive portrayal; because Rose eventually returns as a Gotei Captain (while Love doesn’t).
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Make this fight something akin to a showcase of abilities for Rose; a little preview of Rose’s capability as a fighter that would make us go “Yeah, I get why this guy is a Captain”. It’s far more impressive to Solo fight the Primera Espada, even if you don’t end up winning, than it is to do so in a Duet. The fight still goes down the same with Shunsui finishing off Starrk, but Rose looks more impressive now since there is no Love to split the achievement with.
The major focus of this fight would obviously be Rose’s Hollow Mask, and his Shikai, Kinshara. Kinshara is a golden whip that is meant to represent a giant piano wire, and with it Rose uses an attack called “Golden Sal Tree Sonata Number Eleven - Sixteen Day-Old Moon Rose”, which implies the existence of at least 10 other attacks (Sonatas). Instead of seeing multiple Shikai using just one ability, we will now see just one Shikai using multiple abilities. I think 3 is a nice number that also parallels Rose using 3 Dances in his Bankai.
I would love if one of the attacks used by Rose is \"Golden Sal Tree Sonata Number 14 - Moonlight Rose\", named after the Moonlight Sonata.
There is no need for a story to be told in a fight between Rose and Starrk because a story is being told between Starrk and Shunsui. Rose is the supporting act and will get his due later…

The Musician

For the real world occupation, I figured Rose would obviously be a Musician; a mix of a Composer , Conductor, and Pianist, to be more specific. Rose’s entire character heavily revolves around music, not just in his appearance, but also in the appearance and abilities of his Zanpakuto. One of the abilities of Rose’s Bankai, Kinshara Butōdan, is called „Ein Heldenleben“ („A Hero’s Life“), named after a real life tone poem composed by Richard Strauss. „Prometheus“ and „Sea Drift“ are also based on real life poems, „Prometheus: The Poem of Fire“ (1910) and „Sea Drift“) (1903-04), each composed by a different musician, but in the world of Bleach, they will both be composed by Rose after his banishment from the Soul Society.
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During one of Ichigo’s classes (Chapter 51), his teacher will hold a lecture about a bunch of different poems commonly believed to have originated from the same artist, under different names, who used the call-sign of „Rose“. However, this theory would be dismissed because there is no realistic way for the same person to compose all the poems as their timeframe ranges from the 17th (the period Rose lived in) all the way up to the 20th century.
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The Baseball Player

I know I said Love gets cut out of the roster, but I decided to give him an occupation as well, for the sake of your entertainment. Due to the nature of his Shikai being a giant club, I think Love being a baseball player is the most fitting occupation for him. He even dresses “sporty”. Love is also going to be the inspiration behind Jinta’s weapon of choice; Jinta is going to mention him by name as he fools around in front of the store.
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Other than this, the only other suggestion I have is, if we were to keep Love as a character, to make him take up his old position of Captain of the 7th Division, after it becomes vacant. Love would go to the Royal Palace alongside the rest of the Visored, reveal his Bankai in the fight with Gerard, and later on become a Captain again. Iba really doesn’t do anything in the story to make it a satisfying conclusion for him to become the new Captain (this might change in the future). He can stay as a Lieutenant; he even makes for a nice duo with Love.
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The issue with Love is that he gets almost no characterization, so if anything were to change it would be giving him more character moments while keeping his portrayal against Starrk.

End of Part 3

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Viggo Mortensen was always drawn to the old piano in his grandparents’ house in Watertown, N.Y., 30 miles south of the Canadian border, the community where he lived after his parents divorced. Whenever he went over, he would sit down and play. He improvised melodies, usually imagining a scene or something visual.
“It was a comfortable place to be, and you could sort of travel with your imagination as you were playing,” the actor, 65, says via Zoom from his part-time home in Spain, the afternoon light spilling from the window behind him as he lights up a smoke. “Even as a kid, I liked doing that. I always related music to images. I would imagine being somewhere.”
It’s only too clear in hindsight that Mortensen was, essentially, scoring a movie in his mind.
Now he’s doing it for real. Mortensen has written and directed “The Dead Don’t Hurt,” a new western out Friday in which he also stars as a Danish immigrant handyman who leaves his bold new bride (Vicky Krieps) to serve in the Civil War. As if that weren’t enough hats to wear, Mortensen composed the music, performing several instruments on the score.
Mortensen, who also scored his 2020 directorial debut, “Falling,” joins a very exclusive club of directors who’ve created the music for their own films — from Charlie Chaplin and Clint Eastwood to Jeymes Samuel. But one doesn’t get the sense that this is some auteurist flex, or even simply a means to save on the music budget (as was the case for fellow club member John Carpenter). For Mortensen, who also does painting and photography and runs a micro publishing company, making music has always been a vital part of telling the story of his life.
“He really is a total, complete artist,” says Elijah Wood, Mortensen’s “Lord of the Rings” co-star, on a Zoom call from his home in Highland Park. “Certainly, there are people who express themselves in different disciplines and have other interests, but he’s so accomplished in everything he does. And he’s very humble and quiet about it. He just does.”
As his acting career began to take off in the 1980s — his first big screen role was as an Amish man in Peter Weir’s “Witness” — Mortensen married punk singer Exene Cervenka of the Los Angeles band X after they played husband and wife in the 1987 televangelism satire “Salvation!” He wrote some lyrics with her, although his role in her career was mainly limited to taking the cover photos for her solo albums. Their union ended in 1992, but it produced a son, Henry, who became a skilled musician and “knows a lot more about punk rock music than I do,” Mortensen says, “even though I like it.”
Still, there was always something punk, or bohemian, about Mortensen onscreen — even though he was often cast as working-class, macho types: a drug dealer, a hitman. He played tough parts sensitively, and straight parts sideways.
A fateful moment came in the mid-’90s, when the producers of a spoken word album about Greek and Roman myths approached Mortensen to contribute a piece about Poseidon. He wrote and performed a water-themed poem and “crudely, with a little tape recorder, recorded some water sounds to go with it,” he says. “I mixed it in a half-assed way and sent it to the company.”
They sent it back, fully mixed, with some interesting guitar parts by an enigmatic musician whose stage name was Buckethead. Brian Patrick Carroll is an Anaheim native who wears an upside-down KFC bucket for a hat over his long curly locks and a white “Halloween” mask. Mortensen asked Buckethead if he wanted to collaborate and they met in the Chatsworth studio of Travis Dickerson.
Something sparked between Mortensen, with his improvisational and decidedly non-pop inclinations and poetic musings, and Buckethead, with his virtuosic shredding and duffel bag full of Japanese toys. Their first indie album was “One Less Thing to Worry About” in 1997 (long out of print), which featured a black-and-white photo of Mortensen eating a shoe on its cover.
“We’ve made several records since then,” says Mortensen, “all with Travis recording and laughing and just enjoying us clowning around. Some things are really odd to listen to, I guess. But every once in a while, we’d come up with a melody that was really beautiful.”
The whirlwind, impromptu sessions involved Mortensen’s son from the beginning. Afterward, “I would feel just very calm, almost like a really benevolent kind of drug or something I’d taken,” Mortensen says, laughing at himself. “I would drive home feeling really good, and then when we had the record finished, I would just listen to it over and over again — especially driving.”
Even when Mortensen found blockbuster fame as Aragorn in the “Rings” films, he kept making these weirdo soundscape albums. At the height of “Rings” fever, he roped his new co-stars — Wood, Dominic Monaghan and Billy Boyd — into contributing on a bizarre record called “pandemoniumfromamerica.”
Mortensen “invited us hobbits to laser tag,” Wood recalls, and then they all went over to Dickerson’s studio, where Buckethead and a bunch of instruments were scattered around the room. “It was just a couple of friends hanging out and messing around in the studio, and suddenly these things started to take shape out of the ether.”
On one track, “Half Fling,” Wood and Monaghan made “high-pitched, Muppet call-and-response voices,” says Wood. “I became aware instantly that the musical expression is not dissimilar from painting or photography for him. I don’t know that it even has an identifiable genre. I wouldn’t know how to classify it. It’s sort of beautifully undisciplined.”
“We did it for ourselves, really,” Mortensen says. “That’s how I see making art, generally — making it as a way of remembering what I’m experiencing at that time.”
That was the same impulse for Mortensen’s turn as a writer-director. “Falling” was inspired by memories of his mother and father, who divorced when he was young, and the dementia they both developed in older age.
Based on his own original script, “The Dead Don’t Hurt” is a classic western in many respects. Mortensen plays the Danish-born Holger Olsen — his own father, Viggo Sr., was Danish and the actor still has family in Denmark — and Krieps plays Vivienne Le Coudy, a French Canadian woman with clear echoes of Mortensen’s mother, Grace Gamble, of Canadian descent. The story was born from his image of her running around in the maple forests near the Canadian border as a little girl.
Mortensen says he wrote the score as he was writing the screenplay, pegging where he thought music should go. He knew he wanted music of the period and reached out to violinist Scarlet Rivera — who famously played with Bob Dylan in the ’70s — and cellist Cameron Stone to perform his folky Americana ideas. They convened in the Chatsworth studio and Mortensen joined in on piano and also played bass, guitar and percussion.
When it came to shooting the movie, the score was as much of a guide as the script.
“I played the music for the cinematographer and for my first [assistant director] and some of the actors,” he says, “just to explain: This is the tone I’m going for and this will affect the duration of the scene, the rhythm of the scene and even shot selection. And because it’s a nonlinear story I knew there were going to be transitions from one time period to another, or ellipses. I knew the music would help.”
The sharp sound of clacking claves accompanies Mortensen’s character in the present day, hunting down the man who preyed on his wife during his military absence. Warm fiddle tunes and sweet harmonies underscore happier times in their marriage. Mortensen’s melodic score has a tactile, earthy feel that perfectly suits the steep trails, canyons and rustic production design. (Stunning locations in Durango, Mexico, stood in for Nevada.)
“I don’t like it when the music in a movie is telling you, ‘Now you must be afraid. Now you must be sad. Now you must be happy,’” the actor-director-composer says, “any more than I like it when the dialogue does that or the acting or the cinematography. So the idea was to have all the music before, and know what we were aiming to get across — but that it would accompany, and sometimes be in contrast, in the right moment, to what was happening.”
Mortensen says he might hire a different composer for the next movie he directs. He’s aware of his own limitations. Regardless, he’ll involve them early.
But whenever he comes across a piano — in a hotel, a restaurant or in a holding area on the set of “Eastern Promises” — he’s going to sit down and play it.
“Even if you just play for two minutes,” he says, “it brings you back down, puts your feet on the ground” — and it lets Mortensen’s imagination wander off into some new world.