When does filler kill a series?

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loveexdanielaa

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Today, an interesting poll came up on my Facebook feed. It was a poll of what animes you thought were the best.

As I was running down the list, I kept hesitating to click on series like DBZ (not Kai), Sailormoon, Naruto and Bleach because, with all series, I found it very hard to consider those series top notch because how much the filler pulled them down.

So my question to everyone here is this: how do you think we should call these series? Should we evaluate the good only? Should we evaluate the good with the bad? If so, how much of the series has to be good to offset how much of it is bad?

With Naruto for instance, I don't think anyone can refute the non-filler was simply awesome if you gave it a chance. In the anime, generally speaking, we got to episode 88 before we saw much of any filler, but past episode 88, the remainder of the 220 episodes were almost all filler and all the canon that was in it was taken care of inside an episode that was mostly filler.

So 88 episodes of good stuff, 132 episodes of filler. Do those 88 episodes carry the series as a "good series" ?

This is truly a tough question in my book. Naruto is a little easier because all the filler is at the end of the series and I think most fans can write the filler off. But what about a series like Bleach or Sailormoon where there are whole seasons of filler that separate the canon of the filler? What about series like DBZ that stretch out the canon material to the point that we have 20 episodes of power up?

This is something I'm having a hard time deciding on as a whole.
 
I feel you have to judge a series in its entirety in this case. If you're only watching the anime, the anime is all you know. Not to mention the original creator usually does not have much of anything to do with the anime adaptation so, for all intents and purposes, it's a different animal, and is therefore judged as such.
 
Depends on what you mean by filler as in:

A. Stories that were created exclusively for the anime version.
B. Stories that don't expand the background of a character or advance the plot.

But to give examples on both meanings:

1. Dragonball Z- To be honest I think the filler is scapegoated as the reason why the series wasn't so good. But the problem was how the filler was handled.

Now stretching out canon battles was probably the worst way to keep from getting ahead of the manga. But when the show had filler stories such as:
- Goz and Mez
- Princess Snake
- Goku's Ordeal (Maybe it's overrated, but it's still fun and certainly not tedious)
- The Puzzle of Mercenary Tao
- A Girl Named Lime

It wasn't really all that bad.

And what really puzzles me is why they didn't take advantage of the time during the training for the Androids. I mean you had three years unaccounted for and only one story is made.

2. Pokemon- The Johto Season is the big offender in this. Now the show as a whole isn't exactly the pinnacle of originality, but the Johto fillers upped the redundancy. Basically the high majority of fillers consisted of the exact formula:

- Ash and company meet an insecure trainer and helps to boost his/her confidence.
- Team Rocket plans to steal the Pokemon of the day and fail only to blast off.

Now look at a few examples of filler that were more creative:
A. Path to the Pokemon League- No insecure trainer in sight. Infact the trainer of the day gives Ash a run for his money and arguably should have been made several more appearances.

B. Wake Up Snorlax- Team Rocket helps out albeit for their own reasons, thus again diverting from the formula.

C. Malice in Wonderland- No trainer of the day, nor does Team Rocket even pursue Ash and company.

Now if Johto had been more inventive with the fillers, then their presence wouldn't be problematic.


But to give a simple answer to your question, the filler is only problematic when the writers don't put effort into them.
 
Adding to what was already said I noticed you cited Sailor Moon. Problem is, if you want what was covered in the manga you would only have less that 26-52 episodes for the entire series. The Sailor Moon anime was very monster-of-the-day and episodic but it gave some nice fleshed out characterizations for the cast and you got some fun episodes out of it. In the manga while the characterizations are more mature I felt more detached from the cast's manga counterparts because they lacked a lot of the quirks and humanization the anime characters had. I think Sailor Moon stands as a series that shows how to make a show different from the manga, have filler, and just have fun with it. It also helped that the series was helmed by good directors.

O-chan
 
As someone who has actually watched the first two hundred nine episodes of Dragon Ball Z recently I can tell you there are no actual episodes that are only powering up. There's anime-only fighting going on (a lot of it pretty cool), but no episodes that are completely 'powering up'. Very few in-arc episodes were actually complete filler. When filler was included (before the Freeza battle, at least) it was pretty unobtrusive.

Anyhow, Naruto was certainly spared with its first series. The episodes that adapted from the comic are really mostly split from the filler episodes of #135+, so if one is going to refuse to watch those episodes for whatever reason, they're hardly in a pinch. Now, with Naruto Shipp?den, the first year or so really dragged behind the comic out of blantant fear of catching up. They took about sixty-six chapters and adapted them into fifty-three episodes. Most of those early episodes really took a hit because of that.

I'm not very well read up on Bleach's anime, but I do hear the anime-only arcs are pretty well-received. I know the current one has been pretty cool, so take that how you will.
 
Anime fans are so allergic to fillers, they might as well not watch the Simpsons, Family Guy, or heck, any episodic show EVER.

But as someone here said, it's not episodic filler that's bad. Many anime studios have very capable writers able to do many decent one shot episodes. It's when they stretch out a canon battle to taffy-like proportions that really makes a show hard to watch.
 
Always. Context is everything.

Filler is bad if:

  • It bores you (obviously!).
  • It has characters doing things you think are extremely stupid and/or out of character
  • It creates continuity problems or introduces interesting new things or characters that never appear again
  • It keeps interrupting canon material in the middle of the story while very important things are going on (translation: good heavens, the Bleach cartoon's narrative is an unholy mess now, may it be the first and the last series to ever do this)
  • It recycles ideas that were done better before--in the same series!
  • It takes the form of "padding" just to fill time and not really add anything to the show (i.e. excessive powering up, empty dialogue., excuses to have clip shows).
This is important: filler is not bad because it's non-canon/not in the comic. Another way to frame it is that "filler" content is original content, and in theory originality is a fantastic thing to have in the shonen jump action series of the world because the Japanese industry insists on animating comics that are still running, and they end up at the mercy of the comic schedule otherwise. It also helps give the cartoon its own identity. If Yu Yu Hakusho had simply imitated the comic instead of being what it is, for instance, the world would be poorer for it.

Originality is a great thing. It just needs to be done better over there far more often.
 
^^The Yu Yu Hakusho manga had a much better ending than the anime did (IMO), it actually, you know, finished important character arcs (Hiei), i would have preferred that the anime stuck with the manga for that reason. Not that the original stuff the anime put in was bad, it wasn't, but i would've preferred a better ending (like i feel we got in the manga).
 
I personally don't mind filler that much since I don't care if an anime is based off of a manga by the same title or not, so as long as I'm enjoying what I'm watching whether it be "filler" or not then I don't care just so long as it's entertaining me. Take a series like Naruto for instance, I know it has long stretches of filler that annoyed people who followed the manga but since I started watching the show before I started reading the manga, I didn't care whatsoever. Even if I read the manga back when I was watching the show and the animated series changed things from the manga I wouldn't care as long as I'm loving what I'm watching, if I hated it then that would be a different story I suppose.
 
I'd like to add that one thing that's always bugged me personally about anime is that there are so much demand for literal, panel by panel interpretations of manga, and for that I blame fans because they always want it EXACTLY like the manga. But manga and anime are two different mediums, and they SHOULD be different. One is designed to be specifically read, while the other watched. It often seems that people only care about the "original" stories at the expense of everything else that makes a filmic medium filmic and a manga medium manga.

This is how we run into so many cases of anime not finishing, or following the manga stringently and then making something up at the last minute to cap it off. If they had simply reinterpreted the manga from the start and made it their own, they wouldn't run into so many geekish problems that leave fans hanging. If fans want the original story, then let them read the manga. What is the point of reading a manga and then wanting the anime to be the exact same thing as you read? You already know the story, can't you be satisfied that it's the manga's story alone?

An anime should not be a slave to the manga. Unfortunately in most cases, it is.
 
There's far too many series that are ruined because too much filler and I think GWO hits a lot of the points.

Of some of the biggest animes out there, Naruto is the most forgivable because of how many episodes it went without a single scene of anything that looked like / felt like filler. It took them 88 episodes to start relying on filler. I still sit back and wonder to myself, even though I gave up on the series as soon as filler hell started on the dubbed version, should this weight in?

The original run of DBZ I used to hold in very high standings but I have to be honest, watching DBZ Kai is like night and day. DBZ Kai without the filler is just so much better. I can't even pretend it's not I'm that much in awe over.

Naruto Ship was doing pretty good with how they were managing filler for a long time. This is probably actually the first series I had followed the manga from the start before the anime begun. I felt like right up until the point where Guy fought himself, they did a really good job with filler. It was unobtrusive, it added subcontext, it expanded the story so slightly but so noticeably it really was cool. Sometime after the Sakura vs Sasori fight, the filler just deeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerp IMHO. Its been hard to watch any filler since. Once again though, when Naruto Ship is good, its top notch, completely outstanding, mind blowingly good. Does this level of awesomeness wipe out filler? I've long since stopped watching Naruto, so the filler has easily pushed me away and now makes it very hard for me to think positively of filler.

Bleach is another story all together. Its level of filler I think has easily ruined the series for me. It's not just the fact that we have filler in the anime, but we have "filler" in the manga too. The Pendulum arch was really cool (although, IMHO, misplaced). That being said, the very first filler arch (The bount arch), while not super awesome, was pretty good. It had a clean cutting point from the main story, it cleaned itself up nicely and had a coherent ending and closing. Seemingly, most other points of filler since then have been pretty bad.

It's once again, a series that was really good and it seems like the intense creative juices that made the series what it was earlier on have all but evaporated and the remaining filler has largely destroyed the series. Can we continue to count Bleach as a good series or is it going to require a "Bleach Kai" (name used for narrative sattire) to have a Bleach series we can call good or can anyone stand back and really argue the series is something thats worth calling "good" these days?

Sailrmoon, being the only series that doesn't currently have any continuation is maybe one of the most interesting series to draw upon for this debate. I personally found all the filler to really interrupt the story too much and really downplays how good the non-filler parts actually are. Like GWO talked about "expanding" the sotry, a lot of good elements from the Sailormoon anime that introduced or expanded in filler simply evaporated when the series went back to the main story. I think I can firmly say the filler in Sailormoon didn't help to expand the universe. The series probably would have been better as a 32 or 52 episode series.
 
Concerning how stretching out battles supposedly "ruined" DBZ, i have to say i disagree entirely. Until about a year and a half ago, i had never seen an episode of DBZ or had any familiarity with anything other DB-related. A friend of mine however got me to watch the entire Frieza fight with him (we would watch about four episodes of it every time i came over) and i absolutely LOVED it. Not only was the fight executed so well, but i thought the very idea of having a battle go on for so long was very cool due to how epic it felt. At that time, i did not know what "filler" was and had no idea that "stretching out" anime series with reactionary shots and stuff is commonplace (i hadn't watched much anime yet at the time), so i though the slow pacing was simply a stylistic choice. And i thought it worked splendidly, giving the show time to build suspense in a way that you never, ever see in american action cartoons.

So after seeing that fight, i was hooked, and my and my friend immediatly started watching the show from the beginning. And i loved every minute of it. I have watched a couple of episodes of the Kai-version for comparasion and i feel that the original wins due to it's more epic atmosphere.

However, i will admit that i imagine that it must be pretty frustrating to watch the show the way it was originally intended, that is, on TV with only one episode a week. By the time a fight ends then, i guess the viewer might have already forgotten what the combatants are fighting about. :sweat: But when you have the ability to watch as many episodes as you like, it's a fantastic show.
 
Bleach has been filler series, we have been in a filler for a while now. The only fillers of Naruto Shippuden I didn't like was the flashbacks, that almost killed the series for me. I stopped watching that series for a while, till we got back to Naruto being a teen again, I'd enjoy Naruto as a teen fillers better than that stuff :shrug:
 
Naruto Shipp?den will do a canon arc or two, then go into anime-only arcs. The anime-only arcs are now being built into the canon, too. Episodes #54-71 mixed in and expanded on early elements of the Hidan/Kakuzu arc. #72-88 covered the actual Hidan/Kakuzu arc, and #89-112 expanded Tobi and Deidara's capturing of the Three-Tails into an arc, also. #113-143 covers the Team Hebi, Amegakure, and Hunt for Itachi arcs, mixing in a two part adaption of the Kakashi Gaiden, too. #144-151 is an anime-only arc that ties the previous thirty episodes of canon together with the next canon arc, both narratively and thematically. Episode #152-175 (#170-171 being a two part mini-arc to tie into the fourth Shipp?den film), covers the Pain arc. #176-196 is an entire stretch of filler that returns us to Part I material (either Naruto's academy days or random Teams 7-10 missions). #197-215 (the latest episode title we know of) covers canon.

After that first year of Shipp?den Studio Perriot really settled into a nice groove of doing a comic-adapted arc (with really good pacing and animation) and then a stretch of filler that tended to try to tie itself into the canon narrative and themes. It's really a great way to handle it, I think. Toei Animation tended to do similar with the first Dragon Ball series. The Captain Silver chapters of the Red Ribbon Army arc (only two chapters) were turned into a six episode filler arc that introduced the RRA as a really awesome, badass fighting force. The twenty-second Tenka'ichi Bud?kai played up the classic martial arts film aspects too, tossing in an initial meeting between Gok? and Tenshinhan while training for the tournament and then having the Crane Hermit attempt to assassinate Gok? in his sleep. Of course, rarely did this sort of thing really influence how they adapted canon, but it was still neat stuff.
 
This post basically sums up how I feel about this topic, I couldn't have said it any better myself.

Anime and manga are two different things and should be treated as being two different things, if people want an animated series to mirror the manga then I don't see why they would just re-read the manga. Honestly, there would be no point in an animated series if it was just going to be the exact same as it's manga counterpart, that would bore the life out of me and I probably wouldn't even bother if there was going to be no differences

Take something like X-Men for example: The comic, animated series, movies and books all had their share of differences and I don't remember hearing much of an outcry because things were different, but if everything was just going to be the same then why bother making different media based on the same property? There would be no reason.

Throughout the years I've really become used to just shaking my head at these manga/anime fans who have to complain that the show is different from the print and that one doesn't follow the other verbatim, people need to get over it and be thankful that there is anime available to us at all.
 
Then again, filler is easy to make fun of. Remember this line from Naruto Abridged?

"Welcome to the wonderful world of filler."
"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!"
 
These 2 points are pretty much my answer.

However, I won't say they kill the series for me though. For the most part I tend to skip filler. No matter what series I just skip it. The only filler I've actually watched and thought was good was Bleach's Zanpakuto arc (the current arc has me very interested at the moment).
 
I can see how filler can prevent people from enjoying the show, especially if there's too much uninteresting filler episodes that delay the plot from moving along as GWOtaku mentioned earlier, but I'm usually not too bothered by it. Even when I was watching the Johto saga of Pokemon for the first time, I remember enjoying watching the new episodes every Saturday morning more often than wondering when the heck Ash was going to get another badge. There were some fillers that did fall under the typical Ash and his friends help the COTD and their Pokemon with a specific problem that might make it feel more dragged out due to only having one or two episodes a week, but they weren't all exactly the same problem and I think that there were more fun filler episodes during that saga than really dull ones.

I didn't see much of DBZ before I started to watch Kai and I barely remember watching Sailor Moon episodes. I did see some of Bleach. What turned me off from the series wasn't the amount anime-only arcs, but just the pace of the Soul Society arc dragging on and making me lose interest in the point of that arc. I don't know if there were a large amount of filler episodes in that arc, but it didn't seem interesting enough for me to see the whole rescue plan unfold.

As for the issue with the manga adaptations, I usually don't mind the changes they make for the anime, but I think it helps that most of the manga I read are based off anime series after they aired, like with the GX manga, or off video games like Pokemon Adventures/Special. I think keeping the fact that manga and anime are two different mediums is an extremely good point to keep in mind. It's pretty hard to capture the entire manga in animated form due to how it is meant to be read instead of seen like an animated series. Though, considering I haven't read the FMA manga yet, I don't know if they've been able to do that with Brotherhood. Plus, sometimes, an anime adaptation can make improvements to the story with the changes its makes from its original source material. I haven't seen all of the original Fullmetal Alchemist series, but I do recall that the half of the series that didn't follow the manga was well received. I personally think that the Pretear anime is much better than its manga, which I'm pretty sure came first, due to giving more character interactions between the cast, better buildup to the final battle and making the villain more human than this evil force taking over people's bodies. For a minor example, in the manga version of the duel between Yugi and mind-controlled Joey, their other friends didn't show up until the duel was over and Kaiba was the one to save Joey from drowning by tossing down the key. Including their friends near the end of the duel and having Serenity save Joey in the anime added more dramatic tension for me to see how they would be able to get their in time. Besides, by having the anime and manga being so different, it can make me more interested in reading the manga after the series is done and I want to see more of the characters in slightly different situations.
 
Personally I don;t ,omd fillers all that much. I mean, I understand why their made, and I;d rather they be there so the series can continue than have it die out and not cover all of the source material. That being said, there are certain kinds of filler I like and dislike. I love filler arcs that expand on some of the canon material like the filler arcs in Naruto Shippuuden and Reborn. At the same time I;m not a fan of fillers where absolutlely nothing happens, and some characters are well...out of character. I mean sometimes those can show off character development, but it's rare.

As far as the anime being faithful thing, I personally prefer anime that stick to the source material since I like seeing certain events I might have enjoyed in a manga animated. That being said, I;m not a fan of page by page adaptions since those do add a bit too much predictability. I like anime adaptions that EXPAND on the manga material, since let's face it, no manga writer is perfect and there will almost always be elements from the manga that can be expanded upon and improved in the anime without feeling the need to jump off the rails and do something completely different. Fairy Tail's anime adaption is a good example of that to me,. since it expands on a lot of the story arcs, and gives some side characters screen time.

What I don;t like is anime adaptions that do something completely different from the source material. Mostly because the studios that do that most of the time, like DEEN and GONZO usually suck at doing so. There are very few FMA like success with changes from the source material.
 
THANK YOU. I agree with everything you said. It's basically my philosophy. When it comes to anime series based on a long ongoing manga, for example, I'd rather have a solid series with a clear beginning, middle, and end than a show that follows the manga to the point of suffering. There are so many shows that meander around and end up with a non-ending because they spent too much time being a slave to the manga and not going in its own direction.
 
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