Bleach was brought to the US a little bit too late for me. I was just starting to fall out of interest in anime and start getting into video games when they started publishing Bleach, but I did manage to get the first two volumes of the series. I never managed to watch Bleach when it started airing on Cartoon Network, and by the time I got back into anime, I just wasn’t interested in the shounen action genre anymore. Bleach gradually gained this association with Naruto and the fanboys of both series that made me instinctively avoid it. Mind you I had a lot more experience with Naruto – I read it long enough to see it turn to shit, and I’d seen enough of the anime to hate it. But not Bleach – that dislike was purely fabrication.