Musings of a technophile

Although Filler episodes are something I could definitely do without (although they are a neccessary evil in order to allow the manga to advance farther since the Anime catches up so quickly), I must say that the filler episodes to Bleach are MUCH better than the crap filler from Naruto.

Plot
Basically Naruto just does these one off (or maybe a series of like up to five) episodes that, in the end, have no meaning. MOST of the filler is extremely boring. Who really cares what Hinata thinks about Naruto? (For that matter – why do they even include that crap in the Anime – I mean it’s an Anime about ninja’s…do you honestly think we care about Hinata’s love interest for Naruto?)

Bleach on the other hand decides that an entire season is going to be a filler season. While no one will learn any new powers or anything, but at least they do a decent job with making an interesting plot and developing characters for that season. Additionally, most of the filler episodes center around how the characters would actually act and stuff they would normally do (As opposed to Naruto where the filler episodes contain stupid stuff like catching a bee hive…

Basically for Bleach the story for the filler continues for an entire season, whereas Naruto just does individual filler episodes that

Time line
Bleach will go back during regular episodes and make references to things that happened in the filler, keeping the time line in tact (even though the manga obviously doesn’t have that same time line since the filler didn’t occur). Naruto doesn’t do this – there is never any mention of any filler episode in any Naruto show – although that might be for the best since Naruto fillers are so boring who would want to be reminded of them anyways.

When will it end
At least with Bleach, you get some sort of feeling of “when will the filler end?!?”. You know that it will end whenever the current season gets done – so about half a year. With the way they do the one off episode fillers of Naruto, you always wonder when in the world it will end (if anyone watched the end of Naruto in between the final battle with Sasuke and the beginning of Shippūden – you’ll know what I’m talking about).

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In the end, I’m just using these two popular Anime’s to display a difference in the way the waiting for content from the manga can be addressed. Personally I would choose the Bleach method over the Naruto method any day of the week, and can only hope that future Anime’s decide to go with a story arc season filler instead of the crap “what’s this episode going to be about” like Naruto.