Bleach: Sennen Kessen-hen – Ketsubetsu-tan – 10

「Marching Out the Zombies 2」

Bleach: Sennen Kessen-hen – Ketsubetsu-tan continues off from the last episode as Mayuri and Giselle continue their zombie fight. But elsewhere, there’s another kind of zombie fight going on as a disheveled Sternritter named PePe uses the power of love to charm Soul Reapers into joining his cause.

HITSUGAYA, I’VE COME TO BARGAIN

If I’m going to be honest, this episode was pretty underwhelming. The honeymoon period of a zombie fight ends quickly as soon as Mayuri’s fight with Hitsugaya is fought with words. As Mayuri’s injection works to put Hitsugaya and Giselle’s other zombies under his control instead, he spends most of the episode giving parlor speeches about how his opponents are ignorant to exactly how much he’s won already.

Giselle also doesn’t do much this time around. With the zombie horde being reverse-engineered towards Mayuri’s side or her blood spill not working on most of her opponents, she’s left to be a sitting duck until Mayuri throws a sword at her. It’s all comically rushed, but with how she’s taken sword wounds in the past, she’ll likely jump in at some time before the season ends.

There isn’t much payoff to the character returns at the moment since Charlotte is mortally (Immortally?) wounded, completely writing them off from the fight. It doesn’t help that Luppi, Dordoni, and Cirucci are left with nothing to do aside from warding off the zombie Vizards and Rangiku. Circucci gets a funny quip in when she attempts to put zombie blood on Mayuri. But in this episode, they aren’t given as much to work with.

CORRUPTION HYPNO QUINCY

Things don’t fare any better for PePe either, who is a major downgrade from Giselle and her friends. His powers wind up being a variation of Giselle’s abilities but for the living. The duality is neat, but he shares the same problem with Mask where a silly character is made for the sake of comedy, but is ultimately a major pushover. A chubby old man who flies around in a diaper and shoots love beams at people had no chance of being taken seriously.

They also don’t really play into the “love” aspects of his abilities either. You’ve got Hisagi being brainwashed by PePe’s love, but nothing’s different about him aside from acting as PePe’s bodyguard. This point is more of a nitpick, but it doesn’t make sense for him to represent “love” if his love spell is merely creating bodyguards to the same song from the Shinji fight.

To its credit, it looks like the PePe fight will segue towards a prospective Liltotto fight. Now her abilities are pretty gnarly since she can stretch her mouth open and devour anything and anyone within her reach. she feels like like a colder, wiser fighter who deals more with results than showmanship.