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Originally Posted by Androzani84

I think I should mention that the actress playing Hiyori got ill for real while filming this movie. So the character will be phased out of the show for the next few episodes, though not without some awkwardness involved.

And history repeated itself next year, when Den-O’s leading lady got ill filming their movie. Though instead of phasing her out until she could return, they just pulled a Doctor Who on the situation.

I was going to wait to talk about this until after it affected the series, since I would consider that to be a spoiler (YMMV). But yeah, Hiyori's actress, Yui Satonaka (Google warning: there is another Japanese actress named Yui Satonaka who... let's just say makes movies for a very different audience), is generally said to have gotten really ill during the filming of Kabuto. She retired from the entertainment industry after the show ended. This is the vague production issue I mentioned in one of my early responses to this thread, as the show had to figure out how to work around the absence of one of its central characters. She doesn't leave entirely, but she makes very few appearances after episode 32.

I stumbled across this video a week or two ago while looking up some Kabuto information and it gives a pretty decently researched rundown of what happened. There's not a lot of public information about it, but what actually may have been more complex then the "she got sick" explanation I'd always heard.