Renji Abarai Quotes

Everything about the sentence is set up to be reversed, and the reversal takes nineteen chapters. When he says it, Renji is a lieutenant with tattoos, a released zanpakuto and an audience of one captain, and Ichigo cannot see the sword he is being cut with. The word overnight is precise: Rukia gave the boy her powers a few weeks earlier and he has never met another Soul Reaper. What the story then does is send that overnight Shinigami to Soul Society, where he beats Renji in a hallway and, later, gets Renji to say the words he could not say to Byakuya. The insult is the measuring stick the series hands the reader so it can show the distance travelled. Renji is not wrong here. He is just stating the score before the game has started.

He and Rukia came out of the same slum, and he watched a noble house adopt her and take her past a gate he could not follow through. Forty years in the Sixth Division under that house's head is the story he is telling here, and the confession is not that he was loyal. It is that the loyalty was a way of standing near her without having to be measured against him. What makes the speech land is the geography of the moment: he has just achieved bankai, the thing captains have, used it on his captain, and lost, and only in the losing does he say the true reason he stayed. The shadow he was afraid to tread on is Byakuya's rank, and the sword he could not raise was the one he has just raised. The series lets him be beaten and honest in the same breath, which is the only way that man could have managed either.