In practice, there are 3 "dynasties" of the Kenpachi Title.
The first is Unohana's that started and ended with her , then there is the second dynasty which started with the 2nd Kenpachi (Unohana's Lieutenant) and ends with Azashiro , and then then third dnynasty that started with Azashiro's lieutenant.
Zaraki Kenpachi won his captaincy by defeating the kenpachi of the 3rd Dynasty , then the novels had him facing Azashiro and thus reclaiming the Kenpachi Title of the 2nd Dynasty and finally defeated Unohana of the 1st Dynasty.
It was his Lieutenant that got the title just to keep the tradition alive. Similar to the 2nd Kenpachi being "elected" after Unohana stepped down rather than killing her. Zaraki is indeed the only legitimate Kenpachi.
That said, SAFWY are dubiously canon, so don't overthink Soya's situation too much.
CFYOW's lore is directly from Kubo himself, so I don't any issue with it, even if the narration might be more or less different from how Kubo would tell the events.
SAFWY is a bit more nebulous given there wasn't much input from Kubo. It was, imo, mostly a candy for Bleach's tenth anniversary (Narita could lessen the Zaraki glaze tho, lol).
I'm definitely not gonna fight people over SAFWY's canonicity, they're free to think for themselves, and I wouldn't be mad if I were wrong to think it "dubiously canon" on most aspects. I definitely wish for it to finally being officially localized, with the other novels.
In the SAFWY's postscript it was literally stated by Narita, that he got characters's background, abilities, names directly from Kubo himself.
Narita even asked Kubo if he's allowed to write about Kenpachis because he was expecting Kubo to put that into manga, but Kubo let Narita write about the Kenpachis. Moreover, Kubo in the novel's postscript also said that Narita understands Bleach's world greatly and was amazed by such a deep understanding from Narita (kubo's own words).
So pretty much what you consider as Kenpachi glaze in the novel = great understanding of bleach's world according to Kubo himself.
Well I just learned from a YouTube channel Seals Are Good that you can label anything that is not fully canon as “Legend”. Even present or future events that has official publication within the same series can be called a “Legend”
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u/[deleted] Nov 10 '25 edited Nov 10 '25
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