Anime is extremely popular all over the world, and most shows have tight 12-24 episode “seasons” with very little meandering in the plot. However, if you’re watching long-running shows likeNarutoorOne Pieceyou might notice something strange with some episodes.
Sometimes the characters seem to go off on these little side adventures that don’t seem to matter to the major events of the plot at all. Congrats—you’ve just encountered anime “filler”.
Most Anime Are Adapted From Other Sources
Most anime is adapted from another medium. Most of the time that’s manga (Japanese graphic novels), but these days so-called “light” novels are another popular source of stories to adapt for television in animated form.
It’s pretty rare for an anime to be a completely original show not based on something else, but it’s one of the main reason anime is so diverse and creative when it comes to the premises and stories that are told. Manga is extremely popular in Japan, much more so than anime itself. Which is why there’s a manga for just about every niche audience, and that’s why you’ll see anime about, for example, tennis players, or people who run a restaurant in a fantasy world. It makes Netflix’s hyper-specific genre categories look mainstream in comparison!
Sometimes the Anime Runs Out of Source Material
Generally, you’d think that animation studios would wait until the source material was finished before committing to making a long-running series, but manga series run for decades, and you have to strike while the iron’s hot. So it could happen that you’ve committed to bringing out an episode of a series like Naruto every week foryearsin advance, and then the creators of the manga can’t keep up withyourproduction schedule.
So now you have a problem. You have to keep making those episodes, but you have no canonical source material to draw from.
So They Just Make Up New Stuff—Filler
The solution, apparently, to this (self-inflicted) problem isn’t to simply put the show on hiatus until you have more material to adapt like a sane person would. No, what actually ends up happening is that the anime creators make up new stories that never feature in the source material.
In order to avoid conflicts with future plot points, these filler episodes (which can span lengthy arcs) are carefully written so that they can’t possibly have any impact on future events in the main plot. Nothing the characters might do or learn (if anything) will ever be referred to again, and none of the characters introduced in the filler content will be seen again, unless there’s another set of filler episodes one day.
The events in filler episodes might as well happen in a parallel universe for all the difference they make, and that’s often why these episodes don’t feel good to watch. It’s not that they are necessarily poorly-written (though they can be); it’s that they just don’t matter.
Not All Filler Is Bad
Just because filler episodes of a show are inconsequential to the main plot does mean the actual episodes aren’t worth watching. Just like any story, these filler plots can be entertaining, have great stories and well-animated sequences. They can sometimes have backstory about characters that you won’t find in the source material, since showing things that happened in the past won’t conflict with future plot points, assuming that those backstories align with the canon. Even if they don’t, they can change how you look at some characters, so in some ways filler can impact how you experience the main plot.
So I’m not going to tell you to avoid filler, as so many anime fans do, but simply that you should be aware that what you’re watching is filler and that it’s not the same as the rest of the show.
But All Filler Can Be Skipped
Even though I’m not here to tell you all filler is bad content and that you should skip it, I think everyone should know that filler episodes are optional. So if you care about moving the plot forward, and would rather use your time doing something else, then skip it!
The good news is that a simple internet search will usually give you access to detailed filler guides, which outline exactly which episodes you can skip. Sometimes individual episodes can be partly canon, and partly filler, but even then you can skip the part that doesn’t matter to the main plot. There are also episodes that are canon to the anime, but don’t appear in the source material. These should not be skipped!
This is especially useful if you’re only now getting around to watching a show that’s amassed hundreds if not thousands of episodes over the decades. With these long-running shows, skipping the filler can save you ahugechunk of time and result in a tighter, more enjoyable story overall.
