Gin Ichimaru

Lean and tall, Gin carries a gaunt, almost skeletal look sharpened by silver hair cropped to ear length. His eyes stay pinched into thin slits nearly all the time, parting only on occasion to reveal their vivid sky-blue color, and a broad taunting grin sits fixed on his face, slipping away only in rare moments of irritation, shock, or sorrow.

After deserting Soul Society, he trades his standard black uniform for a long white robe worn over his hakama, its wide bell sleeves swallowing his hands. Later he adopts the white hakama favored by the Arrancar, the robe parting in a narrow V at the chest before closing over the hips and opening again toward the hem.

Few figures in the Gotei 13 are harder to read. The constant grin, shuttered eyes, and layers of mocking courtesy keep his real intentions almost entirely hidden, and his composure holds even when a fight appears to be slipping away from him. Many find his presence deeply unsettling, and he knows it, delighting in toying with people's emotions and wearing down their nerve; even Rukia Kuchiki and the childlike Wonderweiss Margela shrink from him in fear, and Rukia likens his words to being coiled by snakes. He speaks in a soft, roundabout Kyōto dialect that sounds polite yet never quite direct.

Beneath all that menace lies one seemingly sincere attachment. His bond with Rangiku Matsumoto runs deep, and causing her pain plainly grieves him, so much so that he devotes his life to avenging a wrong done to her. He is also uncommonly perceptive, reading straight through Aizen's calculated masks, and he clings to a lifelong love of dried persimmons, the very food he once offered the starving Rangiku when they were children.

Gin met Rangiku while both were destitute children in Rukongai, sharing his persimmons on the reasoning that anyone who could faint from hunger must hold spiritual energy. Later he stumbled on Aizen draining souls into an unfinished Hōgyoku, among them a fragment torn from Rangiku, and quietly resolved to one day kill the man responsible. To reach him, Gin became a Shinigami, tore through the Academy in a single year, and cut down the 5th Division's third seat, a killing Aizen buried while promoting him.

Across the next hundred-odd years Gin climbed to lead the 3rd Division as its captain while acting as Aizen's seemingly devoted instrument, taking part in the Hollowfication experiments and the betrayal that rocked Soul Society before commanding the Arrancar armies from Las Noches. His weapon looks like a plain short sword even in its true state; sealed as Shinsō, it becomes in Bankai the God-Killing Spear, Kamishini no Yari, whose genuine secret is not its boasted reach or speed but a poison that dissolves flesh at the cellular level. Turning on Aizen at last, Gin buries a fragment of the blade in his heart and speaks the command to kill, tearing a hole through his chest.

The gambit fails. The Hōgyoku revives and evolves Aizen beyond harm, and he rips away Gin's arm and runs him through. Rangiku reaches him as he lies dying, and he takes quiet comfort in seeing that Ichigo Kurosaki now carries the strength to finish what he could not.