It’s a pretty standard fictional exercise to show the clash between the law and human nature – the character acting out their human impulses alone, going beyond the rules. Are they forgiveable? Would they be less admirable for restraining their emotions? Since we’re a social animal, and societies need laws, how obliged are we to these systems?

Promises get made – thumbs up, big smile. Social contracts are necessary for the functioning of human society, often the “contract” is implicit in the form of acceptable behaviour. If it’s honourable to live by our promises to others, so it is honourable to live by the implicit and explicit promises we make by choosing to live in a given society. The law/impulse divide tends to segregate the personal and impersonal. It reflects the very real gap in our experiences of the promises we make to one another and the fixed ones required in the societies we were born into.

What tends to turn up in fiction is the angle that it’s the personal that’s truly good – not the social contracts. It’s a human virtue to live according to our word – it’s a virtue because we couldn’t exist without it. When a maverick hero breaks the rules the implicit message is that the honour you can rely on is the honour between individuals. Systems of law are impersonal, inhuman even – and so we mistrust them.

We don’t mistrust laws because they’re wrong, because we doubt their rationality, or our need for them, but because we can’t talk to them. In Bleach the shinigami boss Yamamoto embodies this with his stern, implacable attitude. He’ll execute his juniors without hesitation, he’s only one of the good guys when the laws tell him to do the right thing. He’s a total contrast to our impulsive hero. He wouldn’t save the girl.

Bleach even comes with an evil counterpart (Tousen) who joins the bad guys through sticking by his sense of justice (also Yamamoto’s byword). Of course there’s a vital difference between a personal moral absolutism and an absolutist adherence to the law. But the quality of unflinching objectivity unites both stances. They’re inhuman in that they put a fixed system over personal contracts. It is implied that Tousen only acts like this because of a past emotional trauma.
The temporary antagonist Byakuya follows a similar creed. Except he’s a good guy really. A good guy because his attitude to the law is a product of a personal covenant with his dead wife, and because he changes. Beating him is beating his old approach to the law – which is, conveniently, being manipulated by a crazy supervillain.

This is obviously not a proper discourse. Because the law is being run by Aizen it doesn’t have to be challenged. Bleach makes it’s argument for the personal without engaging with the deeper conflict between individual and social rules. This is because, lest I forget, it is a show about dudes (mostly) hitting each other with swords. It presents a theme, an important theme, but it’s task is not to explore it. The approach to human law found in Bleach is actually window dressing. It’s a style. Bleach wears this approach to life on its sleeve because it’s an approach to life which suits the action.

[Criticizing the inhumanity of laws isn't a bad message. Monstrous (choice of adjective relevant), morally indefensible things have been done in the name of laws. It is right to be sceptical. And it's right to remember that laws are only as good as their consequences, the promise is only worth making if it protects people.]

The film Memories of Nobody replicates the conflict from the original story in a ludicrously artificial manner. Ichigo runs after the girl, ol’beardy declares that the fate of the universe is at stake and pulls a transdimensional-super-spear-cannon out of his arse. Result: hero saves the girl, up close and personal, display of bravery; beardy sits back and looks stern with his quasi-nuke looming over the action. It personalises the contrast between personal and systemic. The personal is handsome and potent. The system has a beard.

These narratives cast the people who make and watch them as individualistic, afraid of systems, mistrusting of truths beyond the close at hand. There’s two sides to this: 1) The story tells you to put your personal bonds first, 2) the obeyer/enforcer and dissident are themselves personifications of the conflict. When a character is defined as the one who goes above and beyond the law, then that person will be measured by the viewer against the characters that don’t. In fact it is the destiny of fiction to frame thing this way, to humanise and personalise conflicts for our consumption. In doing so the narrative seems to decide the message, it invites us to personalise.

We even personalise inhumanity in our villains. When ninja Voldem Orochimaru coughs up his snake collection we’re seeing villainy as nightmare, grotesque and inhuman. Sticking to a villainous archetype reinforces this inhumanity – they are plot figures not people. Aizen dons the mantle of villainy, slicks back his hair and declares himself a god – replacing his creepy schoolteacher (gone inexplicably crazy) vibe with good old inhumanity.

A common trope when the villain ascends away from the personal is seeking immortality. We (people) all get to grips with the whole dying thing. The villain refuses, overcomes, ends up inhuman. The odd thing here is the bit where hero wins. The human beats the superhuman. The hero overcomes his limits rightly (by being really really damn human) to beat someone who overcame the limits wrongly (by being more than human).

That seems a fair reflection of that big social question. The construction of laws which hold up the kind of interpersonal contracts for living we’d like to have with everybody in society. Making the superhuman to protect the human. So when Bleach delivers a law-sceptical subtext it’s addressing something we need to remember. It’s personalising the conflict, but that serves to remind us that the law has to be the human (humane) writ large. It’s a crude, emotional way of thinking – but something we have to stay in touch with.