Ishida, the Quincy | go back

Despite looking like a normal student, Ishida has also spiritual powers of his own, much like Ichigo, Orihime and Chad. Ishida is, however, a Quincy, someone who uses that power to exterminate hollows, materializing a bow and arrows to distroy them.

He's actually the last of his kind, since most of the quincy were all exterminated 200 years ago. The one that taught him all about the quincy and trained him was his grandfather, Ishida Souken, who was the last quincy survivor at the time, since his own son (Ishida's father) didn't want to follow his steps.

Although they may seem alike at first glance, shinigami and quincy are actually very different at the core. From the way of using spiritual power, to their methods of killing hollows. While shinigami use their inner spiritual energy to fight, quincy gather the energy from the enviroment and combines it with their own in order to materialize weapons.

But probably the most important difference, and the one that ultimately lead to their destruction, is their way to exterminate hollows. When a shinigami "kills" a hollow, he/she's only purifying its soul and sending him to Soul Society, where it recovers its humanity and it's treated as any other soul. Quincy, on the other hand, completely distroy hollows... killing them in all its meaning.

This may seem inhuman, but quincy were normal people who witnessed countless amounts of people being devored by hollows, because shinigami couldn't save every single person. They felt that there was no reason for being compassionate towards beings that were monsters in all senses and totally emotionless.

However, leaving aside ethics, this method of killing hollows posed a real danger to humanity. The world of the living and Soul Society hold a delicate balance of souls which simply cannot be broken, because that would mean the entire world's destruction. Completely destroying hollows, creates a disarray in the soul count and so shinigami told the quincy to stop their doings or else. However, the quincy didn't listen and thus they were completely wiped out by the shinigami.

Despite this totally dismeasured genocide, Ishida concedes that shinigami were right in their way of thinking, so that's not why he holds a grudge against them. His reasons relay in the murder of his grandfather. He was killed when Ishida was only a child, by five huge hollows, while shinigami arrived two hours late, failed to save him and he could only stare horrified. Later on, he would find out the real happenings behind this incident.