Uryū
Ishida

Uryu Ishida introduces himself by luring a swarm of Hollows into Karakura Town with bait, just to prove a Quincy can out-hunt a Shinigami. It is a petty, dangerous stunt, and it is also grief: his grandfather Soken, the man who taught him the Quincy arts and preached coexistence with the Shinigami, died in front of him waiting for backup that arrived late on purpose. Uryu carries the pride of an exterminated people and the specific loneliness of being its last practicing member.

He becomes Ichigo's rival, then his friend, then the team's precision instrument: the archer with the white cape, the sewing kit, and the plan. He loses his powers destroying a Menos, gets them back from his father Ryuken on the condition he never helps Shinigami again, and breaks that promise almost immediately, because his actual code has always outranked his ancestors' grudge. In Hueco Mundo he fights Mayuri, the man who dissected Quincy corpses, and Szayelaporro, and walks out of both with his dignity attached.

The Thousand-Year Blood War weaponizes his history. Yhwach names him successor, Sternritter A, Antithesis, and Uryu stands on the Quincy side of the war while Ichigo shouts at him across a battlefield. Episode 406 finally opens the box: Soken's journal, which records that Yhwach's Auswahlen in 1994 murdered Uryu's mother Kanae Katagiri and stripped Masaki Kurosaki of her powers, and that Yhwach was never the Quincy's savior. Uryu joined the Wandenreich to destroy it from inside. The aired anime leaves him at the Gate of the Sun, handing Ichigo the key to reach Yhwach and turning to hold off Haschwalth alone, insisting these will not be his last words.