#one of the reasons i enjoy sprawling serial media is the raw edges--for flavor!

[bleachbleachbleach]

Hi! You are a recognised Bleach specialist, so you're my only hope. Am I being crazy, but did Kubo and anime studio changes Inoue eye colour? In the early anime and manga it was for sure gray, but in the 1000 years war arc it is orange/brown? Was it somehow explained? Is it just retcone?

God, I hope we're not a recognized Bleach specialist, because I only chase down details if I think they will be more interesting than simply making it up. XD (Er, in ways that we label as headcanons, not just intentionally spreading misinformation!)

You are correct in that there are several color changes between the manga and the anime (and then again in TYBW, which hews closer to the colors of the source material). I feel like the one people talk the most about is Ukitake's eye color, though Orihime's may also be up there. Oh, and Matsumoto's hair, of course--and Orihime's. And because I am me, Daiguren Hyourinmaru's flowers and associated items.

I don't feel like minor design alterations like this are uncommon in the manga->anime pipeline, and I couldn't say for sure why this is, except that animators can take artistic license, or a studio might decide one color over another scans better on film. Or they simply didn't notice, which you'd think would be hard to do when designing your primary protagonists but hey, someone decided That Shinigami Guy was a worthy addition to the cause, so--!

Manga-wise, I think Orihime's eyes were always brown/chestnut? Unless we're talking early as in earlier than Volume 3:

I'm sure opinions differ on this, but I'm not sure it's anything that really needs to be explained? Aesthetic tastes change, and artists shouldn't be locked into one thing if they wake up one day and decide it's time for something completely different. (And/or it's time for something to be brown and not gray.)

I'm someone who expects variation when something is translated across media, or when a series spans incredible spans of real time, and I don't feel like every creative shift needs to be accounted for, or internally coherent at all times. Really, I'm only interested in making everything match up if I think that will be more interesting than living with paradoxes and incongruities, and I think I'm 50/50 on which of these I find more appealing at any given moment.

Like, in one of my other fandoms, people used to rage at any kind of narrative inconsistency or plothole or dropped thread, and point to this as a reason why their favorite show sucked. And yeah, objectively, it probably was often a narrative shitshow, and I'm not saying that shitshow was always to my taste, either. But I feel like that's one of the charms of week-to-week media, where every so often (or sometimes very obviously) you can see a thing flying by the seat of its pants and improving its way through life. It's like a middle ground between a studiously well-considered, slow-written, rigorously edited novel and live improv show, and I find that delightful. For me, that element is often one of the reasons I am so enamored with a thing, and see that as part of its character rather than a hindrance to whatever true form it "should" be taking.

(Granted, a lot of this kind of thing is also often wrapped up in people being overworked and underpaid due to Capitalism [and unionbusting, where applicable]--that part definitely sucks! Don't get me wrong! But the art that comes out of raw, non-ideal spaces or time crunches re: serial media, and the freeform yes-and [or no-that-never-happened-you-never-saw-that-episode-there-were-no-droids] nature of that type of storytelling is very enjoyable to me.)