Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Episode 45: Ichigo's Chain-Bound Form Wasn't in the Manga

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War's 45th episode gives Ichigo Kurosaki a brand-new form — bound in glowing red chains — that doesn't appear anywhere in Kubo Tite's original manga. Across 1,079 comments on the official Japanese clip, the top comment (1,772 likes) sums up the reaction with a single joke: anime-only fans were thrilled, manga readers were stunned.

From there, the comment section split between decoding what the chains mean narratively and joking about how much anime-original material got added — commenters blamed a specific Bleach villain, Tsukishima, whose power is literally inserting fake pages into people's memories, for how far this episode strayed from the source.

By the end of the thread, the joke eats its own tail — one commenter deadpan-asks whether a character named "Tsuki-something" ever really existed in the story at all.

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War's 45th episode gave Ichigo a new form nobody has seen before — a version of him wrapped in chains, glowing a deep red, that doesn't exist anywhere in Kubo Tite's original manga. The Japanese comment section spent the entire 1,079-comment thread trying to figure out what they'd just watched.

The reaction split almost immediately along a line manga readers know well: is this canon, or is the anime just going off-book?

That gap between excitement and unease ran through the whole thread. A lot of commenters leaned on a specific in-joke to describe the feeling — that the episode simply wasn't in their "data," meaning nothing about it matched what they remembered from the source material.

Theories started forming almost immediately about what the new chained form actually means. One read connects it to Yhwach — the antagonist whose power lets him see every possible future — being caught off guard for what might be the first time.

From there, fans zeroed in on the chains themselves as the actual point of the scene.

• “Too much information, my brain can't keep up... what happened to Orihime... so the chains really are supposed to bind all of his powers together...?”👍519⇄情報ありすぎて頭が追いつかねぇよ… 織姫どうなったんだよ… 一護の鎖ってやっぱり全部の能力を繋ぎ止めるって意味なのかよ…— @kaikai-t2t · 👍519
• “Watching Orihime get tormented, you could really tell the master himself was supervising this one lol”👍186⇄織姫がいたぶられるシーン見てさすが師匠監修やと感じたw— @ルロイ修道士-g1o · 👍186

"The master" is doing a lot of work in that last comment — it's short for Kubo Tite, the original creator, who has been credited as a supervisor on this arc. Several commenters treated that credit as the explanation for why the episode felt like a genuine rewrite rather than filler, and turned it into a running joke about a specific character.

Tsukishima is a Bleach villain whose entire power is inserting fabricated pages into other people's memories — so blaming him for how much new material got "inserted" into a normally manga-faithful arc became the thread's favorite bit.

• “This is already way beyond even Tsukishima's usual job description.”👍36⇄もう月島さんの仕事超えてるだろこれ— @黄金猩々 · 👍36
• “You're inserting so much we're gonna break!”👍51⇄挟む量多すぎて俺ら壊れちゃうだろ！— @黒霧-q5r · 👍51
• “This time you inserted a whole digital dictionary instead of paper pages, Tsukishima.”👍19⇄紙のページじゃない電子辞書を挟みましたね月島さん。— @外山眞人 · 👍19

Underneath the jokes, though, a good chunk of the section was just glad to get more screen time for a fight the manga rushed through.

Others went further, framing the anime-original material as Kubo finally getting to draw the version of this fight he wanted all along.

Not everyone was ready to call it canon, though — a smaller group floated the idea that the whole sequence might be an alternate timeline, or something that gets undone by the end of the arc.

By the end of the thread, the running joke had eaten its own tail — one commenter, completely deadpan, asked whether a character named "Tsuki-something-san" had ever actually existed in the story, or if that was just another memory that isn't in anyone's data.

Whatever this new chained form turns out to mean going into next week, one thing is already unanimous in the replies: nobody in that comment section is trusting their own memory of this show again.