People who did not grow up with bleach has no idea how hard this hit all of us 😭😭
Tomohisa Taguchi, Chief Director of 'BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War,' discussed the thought process behind depicting Orihime in the anime in a new interview:
"I think there's going to be a scene later where they stand alongside each other. For people who have been following the original manga for a long time, or those who have been watching the anime since its very early days, I thought they'd probably be able to naturally accept that scene. But for people who started watching with the Thousand-Year Blood War arc, I felt that Orihime had fewer opportunities to play an active role compared with some of the other characters.
So one of the ideas behind it was: Could we depict her in a way where even someone seeing her for the first time would immediately understand, 'Ah, this is a girl who can stand alongside Ichigo, the protagonist'?"