TYBW EPISODE 20: I Am the Edge

[Frosty]

The Stern Ritters certainly are massive threats. Just looking at the massive damage, deaths and suffering they caused shows this. At the same time, at least so far, Stern Ritters are presented as a threat first and as people second. It is obvious that we are supposed to dislike them and root for the Shinigami - no matter that we are also encouraged to respect at least some of them for their fighting abilities.

I understand it but at the same time, I think dehumanizing the enemy and just turn them into bad guys is very one dimensional. This is one reason why I regret it so much that the appearance of the Quincy Lady has been cut completely, it seems. Sometimes we are also meant to feel somewhat sorry for a bad guy because of the sad background information but there is no feeling of loss after the battle in question is over.

I think this arc would be more interesting if we had more character variety also among the Stern Ritters.

I wish there was more cameraderie among the Sternritters which would, perhaps, make them more likeable. From what was shown, Bambietta kills an average Quincy in a chamber, Gigi then goes ahead and treats Bambietta rather poorly, Hashwalth executes BG9 and Cang Du. Quincy were a race that were apparently deemed to be problematic and were apparently killed for it. One would expect them to be less hostile to their own people.

However, what we saw was that Quincy were brutal to their own kin [except for the case where Liltotto visits Gremmy in his prison being friendly (AFAIK and I could be wrong about her being friendly to Gremmy) and even that hasn't been mentioned in the manga and seems to be an afterthought] and in contrast, we saw Shinigami showing more camaraderie among themselves. With some examples being Rose being saddened by Kira's apparent death, Isane being saddened by Unohana's impending demise (and Unohana happened to leave a letter for her to read before she left to train Zaraki IIRC), Yamamoto turning out to be very caring towards his subordinate, Byakuya expressing his sorrow over not being able to protect his fellow Shinigami and perhaps more examples which I don't really remember right now. Moreover, Yhwach goes onto say that Yamamoto has grown soft or something along those lines IIRC. No matter how brutal he and his fellow Shinigami were in the past, things are much different now.

I definitely dislike how the Quincy were written. I wish they weren't written as rabid pawns (for the most part) for Yhwach's plan for "greater good" or whatever that was which he talks about at the end of the manga. I was very excited in the earlier stages of this arc but my excitement dwindled as we progressed through the arc and saw that Quincy were brutal to their own kin and it seemed to be too easy to dislike them. The invasion certainly did not help. It also did not help that we did not learn much about the Quincy (atleast most of what was potentially shown in the past was forgettable and I don't remember much).