[ZGoten]

What you have to realize is that there is a difference between being reactionary to the point of formulating a goal or simply reactionary to the point of prevending harm from being done. What I mean is that, yes, Luke Skywalker's goal essentially was born from reactionary behaviour, but it went further than that and in turn forced the opposing forces to react to his actions. He took the lead and took things into his own hands. After joining the rebels, he set his mind on destroying the death star. The imperial forces were then the ones forced to react to the hero's heroic deed. With Ichigo, we don't have that. We just have a villain threatening peace and Ichigo stepping up and defeating him, because essentially there's no other choice for him. Luke and the rebels had different choices. They could have gone straight for Vader or the emperor, theoretically. They could have tried to intercept them on one of their flights. Instead they formulated a different plan and decided to destroy the death star, which in and of itself is not simply a reactionary measure born from Luke losing his parents. There is a transition from a passive farmer boy to the hero who takes things into his own hands. Even more so with the second movie. And I think it was the makers' intention to clearly have this transformation of a seemingly random guy living up to his true inner potential.

Of course you are correct when you say that there are many good protagonists who probably don't follow this scheme. It more or less is true for Neo, but to be honest, I don't think Neo is a good main character for that matter. I have not watched Terminator or Back to the Future and have no idea who John Maclean even is, but I'm sure it worked for other movies. It's just the vast majoritiy of entertainment products I know, follow this idea of an active hero, with an inherent goal and opposing forces to it, resulting in a conflict. With Bleach, it's the other way around. There's no conflict because antagonistic forces threaten his goal, there's a conflict because he has to stop the antagonists from achieving their goal. And once again, I'm not saiying that something like this can't work out great, but it didn't for Bleach, and if might have it Kubo had structured it differently from the beginning. At least during the soul society arc, there was a bit more going on, because he wanted to rescue Rukia and not necessarily defeat the shinigamis. But we all kind of feel like that the series has gone downhill from then on. And well, one of the reasons for this, I think I formulated sufficiently now.