There is a shortage of parents.
Yes, parents. No, not anything else, not donors, not doctors, not surgeons. Parents.
That is the problem with Soul Society.
There are simply not enough parents for the children who stream into Rukongai day after day after day. The numbers just keep going up, but there is a limit to the number of children a pair of people can take in. And there are already very few of these pairs of people, of these kind-hearted married couples who came together to Rukongai, dead. Very few. Most souls never see a familiar face ever again.
And so there are not enough parents.
Supply and demand dictates the severity of the problem. A low supply, in fact, it is a decreasing supply, for wars have not occurred in ages, and couples no longer die together. And insanely high levels of demand. Children just keep dying, and no one knows why, really. They just keep dying. Perhaps it is because the real world is no less brutal or cruel than Soul Society, and that welfare, pfft. Welfare is the dream of governments. Dreams do not transcend to reality.
The decreasing supply, the increasing demand, these lead to a widening gap between those who need parents, and those who have parents.
Simple economics, the laws of supply and demand.
There are simply not enough parents for these children.
And so what do they do? What do they do? Those with nothing, they resort to stealing, bunching together in gangs to live out their lives with others, to survive, to attempt to survive. It does not always work. Most die before they reach the age of twenty, or its equivalent in the real world. Reality is cruel, both in life and in death, there is no respite. Not for the children.
What about those with something more? Those with that spark of brilliance, that power that so many crave and so few have? What do they do? They flee the uncivilized killing zones of the lower districts, they run from the so-viewed lower standards of living in the higher districts. They run to the Academy. And it is their age that weeds out the weak from the strong, that ensures that the young ones, those too small to reach to the waists of their comrades, it ensures that they are strong enough to stand up for themselves. They have the power, but have no idea what they can do with it so they blindly follow their perceived better path.
And it is that simple. The innocent flock to paradise. Seireitei is their pearly-gated Paradise, the tall white tower, the Senzaikyuu, it stands upright, shining in the noon sun, glistening in the moonlight, bathed almost eerily. It is a marker. A mark of Paradise. It is their target, their goal, their aim. They run to it like moths to a flame. They rush blindly into their perceived better environment.
In geography, this is known as the Bright Lights Effect.
Moths to a flame, every last one of them. Moths to a flame.
And there is no one to guide them along. There is no one who can help them, who can give them advice, so they rush headlong into what they think is better for them. But is it, really? Is it? Is paradise really as it claims to be?
A very simple answer. It is not. And really, they should have known. It is not. All those stories of death being a respite, of death being peaceful, of all that, it is not. Death is not peaceful. Death, they should be in heaven, most of these children. They have not done anything worth keeping them in the middle, or sending them to the bottom, simply because they have not lived long enough.
So they have already been lied to once. Yet, they throw themselves headlong into that exact same trap. The exact same thing. Problem was, the first time, they just died. They did not exactly have a choice. And is it not so much more foolish to deliberately tread that exact same path? They walk themselves down the path of violence, down the path that bears the same markers as the one that had deceived them.
History repeats itself, again, and again, and again.
Those who have witnessed generation after generation grow up would know.
These kids need parents, but they don't have them.
The number of adults, the number of adults able to take care of these kids, it is not even close. There are more shinigami than there are reliable adults. There are more seated officers than kind souls. There are more lieutenants than proper orphanages, and there are more Captains than the number of orphans a single orphanage can take care of.
There is just, simply, no one. And this is not a little thing; it is not insignificant to be shelved away in the dark dank shelves somewhere in the depths of the Twelfth Division's database. This concerns the world. This concerns both worlds, the balance between them, and the dynamics. This concerns everyone whether they know it or not. The reason why more children appear in Soul Society than ever has everything to do with shinigami.
Shinigami are more kind-hearted than they like to think. They are more biased than they appear. Shinigami protect the dead and eliminate hollows. The latter being an easier job than the former. Eliminating hollows is easy, a quick strike to the head, and the hollow disappears. It even thanks the shinigami. Protecting the dead, however, is a tad more difficult.
And because it is more difficult, shinigami tend to concentrate more on children. After all, children have not done anything remotely deserving of being so afraid, so scared and so alone. The shinigami flock to the newly dead, the young newly dead, and they send these people on. It is a simple give and take situation.
For every newly dead child the shinigami find, there are five adults they do not.
For every newly dead child they chase down, four adults languish away, lost.
For every newly dead child they comfort, three adults remain, confused, afraid.
For every child they spend time chasing down and sending on, two adults in the vicinity slowly take one more step towards hollow-dom.
The math is simple. Simple, yet devastating.
Children take time to manage, and time is and can be said to be wasted on them. Hollowfication does not differentiate between adults or children; it affects them all the same.
And yet, what can they do? What can anyone do to help them? What can they do to save themselves?
Nothing.
There is nothing that they can do, nothing that they can do to help, and that is what is worst.
Those who see cannot speak.
Those who recognize cannot solve.
Those who acknowledge cannot act.
Those who suffer cannot cry.
Those who experience choose to forget.
Those who can act choose to ignore.
This is life, and life is unfair.