BasharOfTheAges wrote:If the series can support filler there's nothing wrong with it. Now, by "support", I refer to the general pacing and tone of the series. If non-plot intensive, fancy-free (fanservice or otherwise) episodes are already present in the series on a frequent enough basis, and the causal viewer wouldn't know anything is up then there's absolutely no problem with it. If filler detracts from the mood significantly, however, it realy hurts the series.
Now, of course, the example of Naruto shows how little the people in charged followed this little design structure. Naruto has an insanely large audience and a stranglehold on them and can therefore get away with stuff like this. Then there's always the fact that the audience they're marketing to is 10 YEARS OLD!!! I don't care what country you're in, a 10 year old isn't any proper judge of taste in terms of entertainment. Throw popular crap at them and they'll eat it up; especially if it was good at some point.
Just because something isn't in the manga it was based off of, doesn't mean it's crap though. Wasn't most of FMA filler? Last I heard, that was doing rather well for itself. The only thing that Filler automatically tells you is that important charcters are definately not going to die or become diferent in any way, but hell, look at a lot of anime that has the random beach or hotspring adventure episodes in their plot to begin with. Does that fact really make them any better?
I think the big problem with most filler is that the writers the animation teams have can't write (supprise!) and when they don't have the manga to go from, they really can't come up with good plot to save their asses. I imagine it's intentionally like that though. I'd wager the manga production team has their hand in making sure noone on the animation team will upstage them in terms of writing good plot. If they did, who would need the manga team? They'd be out of a job.
Half of it was different from the manga. That's not what I classify "filler" as though. It still moved with its new plot. "Filler" means it has nothing to do with the plot.
