Furthermore, at one time or another, the Quincy KO’d a significant portion of the main cast: Kira, Byakuya, Renji, Rukia, Kenpachi, Hitsugaya, Matsumoto. You might notice a pattern here, which is that the Quincy suck ass at killing shinigami. (Incidentally, I think Urahara is also very good at this, as evidenced by his bankai).

Mayuri, who is able to think of himself as a big moving glob of reishi, might be nearly impossible to kill without literally, like, doing some sort of Quincy reishi absorption trick. This is sort of a two-edged sword, in the sense that it is this identification with their physical corpus that can cause them to die if it gets hacked up too bad. I mentioned earlier that a shinigami is a set of memories, but another way to think of that is that they are a self-concept. This has happened to Hitsugaya, like 4 times, although I don’t remember which ones turned out to be illusions or in filler, or what, but I am pretty sure that there were at least twice. You can even cut a shinigami, like 65-35, and if the head is on the big half, they can probably survive that. Even when Tousen gets stabbed through the brain, he is still able to chat a little bit before, um, exploding, for some reason, which is definitely not what would happen to a person who got stabbed through the brain. To actually kill a shinigami, it seems like you have to either cut off or destroy their head, or cut them roughly in half.

Xteam minibot