Thread:Silver-Haired Seireitou/@comment-30807545-20160225022419/@comment-2089817-20160225024121

I abide by two principles.

The first being what Void told me awhile back. A character is only truly overpowered when they no longer have a challenge. So long as they have sufficient challenge, then they are not overpowered. Seireitou, on first glance, seems like he'd be overpowered right off the bat. But he has challenges present throughout the site. Hiroya, Kenshin, Raian, et cetera. In terms of canon, I wouldn't call Aizen overpowered either. As we've seen, on his own merits, Aizen was being bested by Isshin in swordsmanship. And by Aizen's own claim, Urahara far surpasses him in intellect and Kidou. The idea to follow is that there has to be a challenge available. If not in terms of overall power, somebody has to be better than that character in something that would make them capable of defeating them. When comparing Aizen to Urahara, Aizen overall is leagues more powerful, but Urahara's craftiness combined with his spell creation makes it so even he can overcome Aizen.

The second principle I follow is that the power a character possesses has to make inherent sense. For instance, Aizen's power is great and widespread across the four combat fields. But he clearly shows no innovation in any of them, like what we've seen from Yoruichi in Hakuda, Urahara in Kidou, Byakuya in Hohou, and so on. Seireitou is a Hakuda Grandmaster and it took him his entire life to reach that point. We're talking right under 2000 years. In the pursuit of that goal, he abandoned Zanjutsu and Kidou. That has to also be taken into account. It's not a video game where he'd keep the experience points he gained in Kidou or Zanjutsu. Those skills would obviously suffer and become nonexistent after not practicing them for so many centuries. Only such devotion to a single craft would enable anybody to become good enough to be considered a Grandmaster in a field. This is why I abhor the concept of anybody claiming that their character is a Grandmaster in all four fields, like that user Jak does. It's ridiculous and I refuse to even acknowledge the title of Grandmaster in characters like that. Even if the character is 20,000 years old, which is absurd, spending two thousand years to master Hakuda means you spent 2000 years ignoring the other fields. If you plan to spend another 2000 years after that to refine your Kidou, that means 2000 years of ignoring your Hakuda. If you practice them side-by-side for 2000 years, then maybe you'd gain high skill in both, but it would fall short of somebody's skills who devoted themselves entirely to just one of those fields.

So the two principles to follow are "ever-existing challenges" and "inherent sense".