Warning: Contains spoilers for Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War.Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War’s opening has finally been released, and it manages to hide the identity of one of the major villains of the arc. Episode 2 featured the first official showing of Thousand-Year Blood War’s opening, and it contains an incredible amount of spoilers for the arc. Some spoilers include the connection between Zangetsu and Yhwach, Ishida joining the Wandenreich, and the true form of Ichigo’s zanpakuto. Granted, it’s very common for anime openings to spoil future plot points, and it has been over six years since Bleach ended, but it’s still surprising that the opening would spoil key plot points such as those.
2022’s Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War‘s opening has a lot of spoilers in it, but even with that, it managed to hide the identity of one of its biggest villains, Askin Nakk Le Vaar. Despite being one of the Schutzstaffel, Yhwach’s royal guard and the most powerful of his Quincy soldiers, Askin is removed from the other three Schutzstaffel and is instead grouped with the regular Sternritter, with the opening doing nothing to make him stand out from the others. It’s a very clever way of hiding his importance in the arc, especially with how many other things the opening spoiled.
Bleach’s Askin Nakk Le Vaar Explained
As previously stated, Askin Nakk Le Vaar is one of the Schutzstaffel, the four strongest members of Bleach‘s Quincy Sternritters who make up Yhwach’s royal guard. Askin’s Schrift is D, “The Deathdealing”, and it allows him to control the lethal dosage of anything he ingests; for example, by ingesting someone’s blood, he can decrease its lethal dosage so that someone’s blood is always toxic to them, and by absorbing someone’s spiritual power, he can increase its lethal dosage to become immune to their attacks. The Deathdealing can also be used to attack people with weapons made of poison, and Askin’s Vollständig, Hasshein, augments its power even further.
Why Did Bleach’s Opening Hide Askin Nakk Le Vaar’s True Status?
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War’s opening did a good job of hiding Askin Nakk Le Vaar’s true importance, but it begs the question of why it went out of its way to do so, especially when several other plot points were spoiled. One possible reason could be that Askin wasn’t made a Schutzstaffel until late into Bleach‘s Thousand-Year Blood War arc, so Studio Pierrot might not have seen the need to group him with the other Schutzstaffel right off the bat. Another possibility is that it was kept hidden because the reveal doesn’t play a big part in the overall story, as opposed to the reveals about Ichigo, Zangetsu, and Ishida, which are all very crucial to the arc. There’s no real way of knowing why the opening was structured that way, but at the very least, there are reasonable explanations for it.
Askin Nakk Le Vaar was one of the key players in Bleach’s final arc, but the opening to Studio Pierrot’s Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War managed to do a good job of keeping that fact a secret. For whatever reason, the opening doesn’t make him look any more important than the other Sternritters, so someone would only know that he’s supposed to be important if they had already read the manga. A lot of major plot points were spoiled by Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War’s opening, but it’s good that it was able to keep at least one plot point secret for those unfamiliar with the story.
Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War releases new episodes Mondays on Hulu.
