User blog comment:Njalm2/Nanja's Point of View: Shinigami Edition/@comment-1493741-20150503073419/@comment-3403804-20150503162908

I'd say it's pretty much a fact that Shinigami are Shinigami, and that they're not humans from a strictly racial perspective, I will however not state that you can't assign them human qualities, because they obviously have them. But the ways in which those human qualities show is where the real difference lie - sure, you might say that they're human, but they're not human in the same way that we're human. As humans we're limited by our age, Shinigami have much less of a restriction in that regard, consequently their worldview would be very different from ours. If you want to study the life of a Shinigami, you'd probably have to divide their life into generations as opposed to decades. With each generation being a full century.

The First Generation of a Shinigami's life is how they became a Shinigami and the early years of that occupation. Further Generations add to this, with the second generation being their first century as a Shinigami and the experiences they got therein. The reason that Shinigami are so different from humans is because even someone like Rukia, who's fairly young for a Shinigami, has experienced what amounts to the full lives of two humans, with all personal choices and developments that entails. At this point she's probably started on what essentially amounts to her "third generation". Consider Rukia to be a collection of people, rather than a single one, characters like Shunsui, who've lived for more than a millennia probably don't even remember their first few generations, which would, if you compared them to their current selves seem like entirely different persons. I get the feeling you underestimate just how much time a century truly is, even to Shinigami. Because time is the primary difference between humans and Shinigami, and why even young Shinigami are vastly different from humans, even if it might seem otherwise.