Have Fillers Ruined Anime?

No, no it defiantly wasn't.

Case and point, the moment CN hit filler after Suaske left was the moment ratings for Naruto plummeted to unfathomable levels and trumpeted the end of Toonami.

It was sadly all so predictable. Many of us around here saw it happening while many kept up hope that some how filler would do good.

Most the Naruto filler was just bad.
 
Really? I thought I saw somewhere that some of the filler episodes that aired after toonami got cancelled recieved really high ratings, but again I could be wrong.
 
From what I've read over here, it seems that the episode titled "Death of Naruto" got some high ratings for CN one night. Not sure if it was the title or anything.

Also I do remeraber reading that in Japan that the ratings dipped when Naruto did those fillers that I didn't think would end, so I was kind of expecting America airings to do the same as well.
 
And there's the other side of the argument. Sometimes, only the knowledge that certain crap was filler kept me at least somewhat interested in a show, whereas before I'd simply dump it thinking it was all that bad.
 
"The Death of Naruto" got HUGE ratings. Not sure if it was the highest rated episode but it definitely got higher ratings than most of the canon.

The Naruto filler never got the "abysmal" ratings some people here are claiming. It stayed fine for the most part, with the occasional oddball episodes such as the aforementioned "Death of Naruto". Although I'm sure the title had something to do with it.
 
Uh, no it wasn't. Naruto's rating didn't plummet when it hit filler territory, granted ratings weren't as high when it was following the manga, it still had decent ratings even after Toonami's demise and the series was put on hiatus not because of ratings but due to changes in the network in general, reports show that CN could have gotten Naruto Shippuden quite easily but decided not to.

For the most part they're really not all that terrible, the truly bad ones were the standalone ones (Curry of life, Money-bag jutsu, the fake gai and rock lee) but the arcs themselves were exactly pretty good and gave characters like Hinata some worthwhile development that Kishi didn't. I really have nothing bad to say about the Shippuden fillers since all of them have been good especially by giving Asuma and Jiraiya decent backstories, exploring the character of one of the jinchūriki and more importantly character development that Kishi glossed over. Too bad that everything associated with filler and Naruto are gonna be precieved as bad because of a few REALLY bad apples
 
I didn't say I liked it BETTER than than the rest of the show, just that I didn't think it was nearly as bad as people make it out to be. (-: Also it had Chichi getting high on mist and pimpslapping Gohan, and Popo and Kami running away from evil spirits Mario platformer style. That stuff's hilarious, how can you not like it at least a little?
 
Here's my main beef with filler.

It's the product of a more serious underlying problem in the show, that it doesn't know where it's going. If the manga it's being addapted from knows where it's going, then surely the manga writers should be in consultation with the anime addaptation writers (If they're different) so that they're both on the same page and then at least the filler can be relevant instead of either a pointless comic relief episode (Which don't get me wrong, some of those are brilliant, however pointless they may be to the overall plot.) or just a tedious retreading of some minor character's backstory to make explicit and dull what might otherwise have been mysterious and intresting because it was only implied.

But of course, usually Mangas don't know where they're going either. There is no end goal in mind for the story, it's just a bunch of stuff happening for as long as it can remain profitable and while that might very well be an intresting diversion, it doesn't make for a particularilly compelling read/watch for those of us who like our visual media to have something more to recommend it than simple substanceless entertainment.
 
I never meant to imply you liked it better.


I haven't seen the Garlic Jr. arc for years, but when I get the third DBox, I'll be watching it in Japanese for the first time!!

...at the risk of my health.
 
thats not true, the anime people just never bother asking the mangaka, i mean look at One Piece, nobody in toei even bothered to ask Oda what color Kuma' clothes were originally supposed to be, they just did their own thing.
 
It's not exactly feasible to go to the creators for every little thing, though. They have to churn out a new chapter every single week; they probably just don't have the time to be passing notes back and forth.



The Jouto saga gets a lot of flack for having bad filler, but really, most of it isn't that bad. Some of the filler is really quite good.
 
I honestly don't mind DBZ's filler in the Saiyan, Cell and Boo arcs. Its really only the filler during the late Freeza arc (fighting Freeza himself) where filler got absurd.

People seem to forget that a lot of DBZ's filler is quite enjoyable, and I'd much rather see the characters train than not. Dragonball Kai did not make me feel like Goku trained under 100 times normal gravity, and all the Saiyan saga filler was removed so it felt like they did almost no training.



Johto still has a higher ratio of bad to good filler. I rewatched (or tried to) rewatch most of it back in 2008 since HGSS was coming out, and most of it was exactly as I had remerabered.
 
Knighthammer you need to stop making statements that aren't true =p. The ratings actually were basically the same, heck "The Death of Naruto" got serious ones(granted it was the title that won the audience) but most of the fillers did get pretty good ratings.
 
And I liked seeing that. When Goku landed on Namek to fight the Ginyu Force, you understood why he became so much more powerful. It was like we were there with Goku while he was training, he was suffering and we were right there along with him.

When you cut all of that out, you just don't get the same impact.
 
I'm not entirely sure how the colour of a character's clothing is relevant relative to the main plot of the show unless it turns out to have some kind of deeper significance... But then I'm one of the... what... three people on this forum that finRAB One Piece a complette waste of thier time so if that's an example that I'd have to watch one piece to understand... I appologize...

What I was really getting at though is that I have a very low tollerance for poorly planned pieces of fiction. I dearly wish for some of these things that they'd either consult more closely with the original creators or wait until the manga is done before they start adapting it. The fact that they do it because stuff neeRAB to sell doesn't make it the least bit intresting to me. I've now seen two series with remakes after the manga's got further along, FMA and Guyver and in each case, the remakes have been vastly superior because there was no dicking around by the writers waiting for new material to adapt and they could just get on with it.

If more series did this from the outset, I'd like a lot more anime.
 
It's not 'cut out'. It's specific only to Dragon Ball Z which is still available for purchase.

Heck, the only major thing that Dragon Ball Z added was the episode Gok
 
Well, the reason I dislike One Piece has nothing to do with it's filler or it's planning or implementation so I can't really speak for against the filler in One Piece, I'm only speaking in general terms from things I liked in thier first draft but liked oh so much more with the filler cut out.
 
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