User blog comment:Njalm2/Nanja's Point of View: Shinigami Edition/@comment-1493741-20150503073419/@comment-3403804-20150503231703

Zf6hellion, I'm not going to say much or anything at all in response to your post because at this point it's serves no further purpose, you're uninterested in listening to my viewpoints and I'm likewise uninterested in listening to yours. Both of us are adamant in our views about this, and any further attempt at breaching that wall will only lead to a pointless argument. I will say this, I think there's compelling arguments for both sides of the spectrum, and people should be allowed to draw their own conclusions with neither of us cramming our thoughts down their throat. It's true, much of what I've said is conjecture and opinions, as it always is and I apologize for invoking it as fact, that was quite presumptuous of me.

The true reason I wrote this guide is to have it serve as an expansion of how Shinigami might interact with one another; precisely because I thought it had been very poorly handled within the series itself. So consider this a guide not on canon Shinigami (which is something I'd never have written in the first place), and more of a guide on my perception of how Shinigami might be. That the Shinigami seen in the series are as simple as they are, and as human as they are, is probably because Kubo lacked the will to actually delve into their mindset. As a result you have a group of beings whose age appears to be largely meaningless and contrived, and existing solely as a way to quantify someone's level of power. Assuming you want to roleplay a millennium old human who has nothing to show for their advanced age other than an extra big sword, then yes, this is probably a bad guide.

However, there are quite a lot of people who'd be dissatisfied with that set-up, myself included. This is a guide for them, but not only for them, for anyone who'd like to add some more variance and depth to their Shinigami characters beyond what has been shown in canon. For those who're content with it as it is, go ahead and stick to that. Take whatever you want from this guide and discard the rest, that's something that holds true for all of my guides, including this one. You take what you agree with, and leave it at that.

Although I find it sad that you didn't like the guide, I don't agree with your assessment of what a bad guide is. For a guide to qualify as bad, it'd need to give bad advice, advice that does more damage than good and which is more harmful than beneficial. Within a fanon setting like ours, there's actually very few things that could pass for a bad guide; certainly not an influx of new ideas and alternative interpretations. Examples of guides that I would consider bad in a fanon context would either be completely unintelligible guides written by someone without at least a basic understanding of English, and the following.

Nanja's Guide to Ripoffs, A Lesson in Inoriginality, How to make Transformers In the Bleachverse and How to be a Troll. The first one encourages plagiarism, the second one inspires flat out laziness, the third one disrupts the bleachverse with crossover content and the last one antagonizes the userbase. My guide is about looking out of the canon box, about stepping out of your comfort zone and trying to look at something in a different way, it's not bad, but it is alternative. Creatures of habit as we are, we often tend to look at something new as something inherently bad or scary.

So yeah, sorry this guide didn't appeal to you pal, hopefully the next one I'll make will be more to your taste. For now, feel free to take whatever of worth you can glean from it, I'm certain there's something there at least, we did seem to at the very least see eye to eye on the subject of how Shinigami age.