Old news but its not bad considering its in 5th place, now Bleach, look how far that dropped. Attack on Titan is popular cause well, it exploded in popularity once the western world caught wind of it.
One Piece is still around the same position because Oda just drags on events as long as he feels like. People kinda just suck up One piece at this point.
But for Naruto, its not bad as long as the story is actuall progessing. I mean want to know why bleach fell behind? Because everything was jumbled up after the Aizen incident was solved. Really Once that occured we got the fullbringer and thousand year blood war arc which is curently the final arc of the series. In all honesty, I consider the anime with its fillers included on Bleach to be better than the manga itself because we at least get more of a sense of adventure in the anime, even characters from the fillers like the mod souls from the bount arc, they had a lasting prescene in the anime entirely. Its sad the anime ended in the fullbringer arc though. As far as Tite Kubo's writing is, he just rewrote the rules too many times when it came to who ichigo really was and what his powers were dervied from.
It went from:
ichigo as a human with special perception of spirits gains a lot of powers from rukia to,
ichigo "dies" shortly and generates his own inner hollow but overcomes it to become a stronger soul reaper to
he awakens his inner zanpakto spirit and gains the use of more power to
he trains with said spirit to aquire bankai to rescue rukia while supressing his inner hallow to
he encounters other soul reapers with hallowfication abilties like him to
he trains to put the inner hallow under his submission to become a vizard
(at this point he is considered a special human, with soul reaper powers, and vizard abilties due to what kiskae did back in the short time he first nearly went hallow early in the series when his inner hallow was "awakened" from training before he entered the soul society)
Ichigo goes through at lot of fights only to attain the highest power to take down aizen and lose his powers
after the timeskip, Ichigo is a normal human who can hardly sense spritual energy
he eventually becomes a fullbringer due to "residual energy" in his subsitute soul reaper badage, he manifests that energy into a new power so now he is a fullbringer
as a fullbringer he doesn't fight much but becomes rather part of a plot to energize the real antagonist of the arc, ichigo loses his fullbringer powers
At the right moment, Rukia reappears, stabs him with a sword to bring back his soul reaper powers, now he is back as a reborn soul reaper.
Eventually the junk with the vandenriech on the soul soecity happens, ichigo loses sword and needs to rebuild it
Then comes the most recent, apparently Ichigo isnt a human with powers of a Soul reaper at all, he is a human with powers dervied from a qunicy, inferfused with a hallow, manifested as those of a soul reaper. The spirit Zangetsu all this time "hasn't been the real guide when in fact the hallow side itself was the real one but this zangestsu tried to protect and guide ichigo and since zangetsu is both the sword spirit and hallow spirit, ichigo overcomes this and unleashes his swords real form, that of twin blades we have yet to see in battle.
See how many times Kubo changed the rules?
Edited by Inferno180, 05 March 2014 - 12:47 PM.