Rangiku
Matsumoto

Rangiku Matsumoto plays the 10th Division's lieutenant as a running joke, allergic to paperwork, first in line for sake, forever teasing her tiny captain. The show lets the act stand for long stretches because the truth underneath is heavy. She was a starving Rukongai child when a silver-haired boy handed her dried persimmons, and everything painful in her life since has been about that boy, Gin Ichimaru.

Gin leaves her three times. Once as children, when he becomes a Shinigami with a purpose he never explains. Once during the betrayal, when he follows Aizen into the sky and she cannot even get an answer out of him at sword-point, only a vague apology. And once in the fake Karakura Town, where she confronts him mid-war demanding to know why he abandoned Izuru and everyone else, and he leaves her unconscious and walks back to Aizen so she will not be near what he is about to attempt. She reaches him as he is dying, and the series gives her the worst version of closure: the knowledge that all of it, the whole century, had been for her.

She fights on anyway. Her Zanpakuto, Haineko, turns to cutting ash, and she stands through the Arrancar war, gets killed and zombified by Giselle Gewelle in the Blood War, and is dragged back to life by Mayuri's chemistry. The aired anime's last image of her is quietly right: on the walls of Wahrwelt beside Hitsugaya, both of them restored, looking over the enemy city.