excuse me, but i saw your posts on the bbs specials and their translations, if it's not to much trouble, could you help explain the meaning of 6th anni aizen renewed's special 夢幻落華 (Mugen Rakka) and how it differs in meaning from 夢幻崩華 (Mugen Hōka)?
Oh, neat. I didn't notice they'd changed his special attack when they recycled that character model. Yeah so, as a refesher or anyone else reading this, The Mugen Houka[夢幻崩華] bit read as "Dream/Fantasy+Crumble+Flower/Beauty" describing something like "The Falling Apart of a Splendid Dream" or "A Vision of Crumbling Brilliance."
But this new one seems to substitute in just the one kanji [落] meaning "to fall/to drop/to leave behind." So, "Dream/Fantasy+Fall(ing)+Flower/Beauty"
With the -ka[華] meaning flower right there it would most readily read like flowers falling from their stems, implicitly as their blossoming season ends, and in that sense the Houka and Rakka read pretty much as synonyms.
Although given how little a difference it seems to make, I wonder if this was even intentional or if it was maybe a typo...
The only other meaning I might be tempted to tweeze out of it is that houkyo[崩御] refers to the death of an emperor, and subsequently a transfer of power, and rakujo[落城] is literally "Fall+Castle" and can be both literal or a figurative way to refer to a total surrender of a kingdom.
So if I were to really go out on a limb, working off Aizen and Kyouka Suigetsu's existing themes of illusions and godhood and deicide, it could be kind of an escalation from just killing god himself, to demolishing the kingdom of god in its entirety. In both cases they could be characterized as the "collapsing of a beautiful dream" where the "dream" in question is the world order under the soul king that Aizen was tying to rewrite in his own image; in the first version he takes the crown for himself, in the second he topples the kingdom itself.
But again that's a pretty big stretch even at the most gracious interpretation
Incidentally the Hou-[崩]: "collapse" in direct reference to themes of the downfall of god shows up in actual canon. First as part of the epithet of the Shiba family crest, and Kaien's weirdly unresolved thing about fighting the law by association and upturning the order of the world, and then wa~ay later when Uryuu tries to blow up Yhwach's castle after it's replaced the Soul King's palace.
ah shit ya know it didn't even occur to me but this is all also a reference to Mugen Kuuka[夢幻空華]: "Dream Heaven/Sky Flower" which has its roots in some specific niches of buddhist philosophies, but I'm absolutely not qualified to get into the specifics of that.
thanks, on the bleach wiki, they have not added his renewed's special to the zanpakuto page so i had no idea how the name was meant to be translated. but from the animation of the renewed version, he can pull you into the illusion! which made me think, if he can pull you into it, could he pull stuff out?
