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Answerman - Do Manga Artists Have Any Control Over "Filler" Episodes?


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Gina Szanboti



Joined: 03 Aug 2008
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2017 6:49 pm Reply with quote
residentgrigo wrote:
but that once killed Kenshin´s chance to see the last 3rd adapted.

They had their chance to adapt the Jinchuu arc but inexplicably chose to reboot the Kyoto arc (and made a mess of it). That was probably its last chance, but maybe the success of the live action movies might move someone to give it another go. I doubt it though.

SaitoHajime101 wrote:
Quote:
So when a manga artist is old/successful/powerful enough to throw their weight around a little more,

Is it just me or does it feel like there was suppose to be a bit more to this sentence?

While the clause structure and ending comma would certainly suggest that, Wink
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Redbeard 101
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PostPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:33 pm Reply with quote
xchampion wrote:
In some ways I like the approach of anime like Attack On Titan, Yes, we had to wait 4 years in between seasons, but we didn't have to deal with any damn filler. We only have to worry about canon content. I can see why most would want the show to continue to air even with filler. If a show is off the air too long in between season there might not be enough fans left to care about it.

You already hit the nail on the head as to why there is filler. Keep people talking about that show. Keep it in their minds. Even if the filler episodes are bad it's keeping the show on the minds of people. AOT is the exception to the rule where they waited this long between seasons. I will be very interested to see what the end game numbers are for viewership for season 2 compared to season 1. Even shows that don't use much filler normally don't wait this long between seasons.

As for the broader topic of filler I have never gotten the reasoning for the hate many have. There's good filler, there's bad filler, but unless it actually starts interfering with the core plot from the manga and changing it I take the approach of "I can just ignore it if it's boring". Bothering to get all pissed off and have such "rage" over something as petty as filler just seems like a complete waste of time to me. I have much larger issues to rage over. Like paying my rent or getting my scumlord landlord to finally frakking fix the roof he's been saying he would fix for 2 years now. Now THAT is worth some rage.
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Paiprince



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2017 9:35 pm Reply with quote
Fillers are just too risky nowadays to fall back on seeing as how general viewership style has shifted. In the era of 40+ seasonals, there's so much choice that people are going to gravitate to the other shows once they lose interest in that 100+ anime. World Trigger realized that a little too late. They've caught up to the manga, but the ratings for it aren't doing it any favors for another season.

Having intermittent breaks until more content from the source is made is the best approach in sustaining interest while building up momentum for when it finally continues...if the series itself has lasting popularity of course. Shingeki right now is a testament to this.
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rinkwolf10



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2017 10:10 pm Reply with quote
Magaka meddling is the reason Japanese dub has Goku sounding like a 12 year old girl when he is a full grown man and why any anime fan I've shown the Japanese dub of Dragon Ball Z that speaks english started laughing Laughing , myself included.

I remember the first time I heard the voice and thought it was some sort of prank, I was playing a Dragon Ball Z game on playstation (yes the first one) and then chose Goku as my fighting character, needless to say, I never used Goku again. Laughing
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Kadmos1



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:34 pm Reply with quote
[quote="Rinkwolf"]Magaka meddling is the reason Japanese dub has Goku sounding like a 12 year old girl when he is a full grown man and why any anime fan I've shown the Japanese dub of Dragon Ball Z that speaks english started laughing/quote]
Moments like this are where I stand with my view it's possible for even the creator to make a casting mistake. Goku may be simple-minded thought that doesn't necessarily mean a guy his age should still be voiced by an 80-year-old woman.

If we count filler as including stuff that is not present in a movie form while a manga is still running, Katsuhiro Otomo did that with "Akira". He directed the movie version of a manga he wrote. Speaking of which, he turned 63 on 4/14. A similar instance was when Miyazaki directed the movie version "Nausicaa".
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Mr. Oshawott



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PostPosted: Mon Apr 17, 2017 11:50 pm Reply with quote
While filler episodes can help keep people interested in a long-running anime show through side quests and funny incidents, they can be painfully boring to sit through when they feel as if they're redundant of previous episodes. On top of that, excessive filler can cause one to be deterred from ever finishing a long-running show like Naruto Shippūden.
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leafy sea dragon



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 2:47 am Reply with quote
Heh, Tite Kupo. That amuses me more than it should. He's a Moogle.

maximilianjenus wrote:
but then again, nto all mangaka works for shounen jump, or more broadly, not all of them work in weekly magazines, though, then again anime not based on weekly magazine manga tends not to have fillers.


Is that so? Monthly magazines have a lower page count relative to time the series has been out (with 50 pages per month, as opposed to weekly magazines, which most often have 60 to 80 pages per month), so I figured they'd catch up faster. It happened REAL fast with Blue Exorcist for instance.

Aquamine-Amarine wrote:

If I were a manga artist, I wouldn't tolerate an unfaithful anime adaption. You either guarantee me a faithful anime, or I'm going to tell you to jump off a cliff. I wouldn't let someone destroy my work.


On the other hand, some authors don't care at all.

Filler arcs are really more based around TV schedules than anything else, really. Seasons were only recently a widely accepted practice in anime series. Prior, anime would run all year round with no breaks except holidays, and a few long-runners, mostly from Toei, are still doing that.

MarshalBanana wrote:
I think there was a filler arc in One Piece written by Oda.


There was a movie (Strong World), but not a filler arc.

xchampion wrote:
In some ways I like the approach of anime like Attack On Titan, Yes, we had to wait 4 years in between seasons, but we didn't have to deal with any damn filler. We only have to worry about canon content. I can see why most would want the show to continue to air even with filler. If a show is off the air too long in between season there might not be enough fans left to care about it. It's why shows like Shirobako and Prison School might not get 2nd seasons, not because they weren't popular, but because the demand might not be there anymore. You could say that AoT is the exception to the rule.


I think it comes down to how well you can generate awareness and hype, considering that doing something all year round can cause people to get burned out on a series. Attack on Titan worked, if you ask me, BECAUSE of the long gapbetween seasons. The show created a lot of fans, and the first season ended with people wanting more, and the viewers got hungrier the longer the series went without more anime.

Though the real reason why some shows lose interest while others gain interest is incredibly complicated and way beyond my understanding, but I think I can make a reasonable guess as to Attack on Titan specifically.

Videogamep wrote:
I know the staff for the One Piece anime consults with Oda about any anime original Devil Fruits to make sure they don't accidently use one Oda had plans for later on. Aside from that, I don't think he has much involvement in the anime.


He gave a note early on specifying to the writers not to call Rayleigh a captain (which they followed), but aside from that, I don't think there was much else. He did design some filler characters though, as well as some movies he didn't write (such as Movie 6, whose pre-production happened shortly after the Davy Back Fight arc, and the movie-original character designs really show).

Jonny Mendes wrote:
The time of the never ending shonen titles going non stop for years are ending with, One Piece and Detective Conan as one of the few survivors. Japanese TV stations have less and less time schedules for daytime shonen anime and are not investing in that kind of anime as in the past.
And with that filler episodes will also be a thing of the past. When the get near the manga they will stop until enough manga chapters are out for a new season.


The other factor is that Japanese TV stations are allowing anime series to take breaks and come back for more seasons later. It used to be that if an anime series didn't have another episode coming up at the same time next week, the station would just sell the timeslot to some other show on the waiting list, and the original series's crew would have to fight to get it back. That's a major reason why filler existed in the first place: To keep the timeslot occupied with that show so they didn't have to wrestle with other studios and producers.

Code Geass is an exampleof a show that attempted the seasons system under the old format: When they finished Season 1, another show immediately took its place, and they had to get a different timeslot for Season 2.

Psycho 101 wrote:
As for the broader topic of filler I have never gotten the reasoning for the hate many have. There's good filler, there's bad filler, but unless it actually starts interfering with the core plot from the manga and changing it I take the approach of "I can just ignore it if it's boring". Bothering to get all pissed off and have such "rage" over something as petty as filler just seems like a complete waste of time to me. I have much larger issues to rage over. Like paying my rent or getting my scumlord landlord to finally frakking fix the roof he's been saying he would fix for 2 years now. Now THAT is worth some rage.


The most common one seems to stem from the agony of waiting. Unlike a season break, where fans can just let go of the anime and go watch other things in the meantime and just wait for an official announcement for the next season, it can be difficult to gauge when a filler arc will end, so the fans have to keep paying attention so they can get back in where the canon material continues.

Toei's been particularly underhanded as of late with this, as they're now starting canon material from the middle or even END of filler episodes, forcing their viewers to watch the filler episodes or the next episode, made entirely of canon story, will lose the viewers.

There was a recent filler arc for One Piece where the last few minutes of the episode were of the Straw Hat Pirates reaching their next (canon) island, with important details given about it, then the "TO BE CONTINUED" card. Unsurprisingly, when I was seeing the weekly episode-by-episode graphs on this site, that episode of One Piece ranked at the bottom of that week's anime.
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SWAnimefan



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 4:47 am Reply with quote
After suffering the great Naruto and Bleach fillers, that gave me a good dose of not bothering with fillers anymore. Honestly, it was one of the factors why I stopped watching Shipuuden. Because fillers in these long-term anime really do not add to the content, it's just stupid stories that throws off the momentum of the series. Like said previously, there are fillers that are just for gags and there are some that adds unnecessarily to the drama.

But I'm not saying they all were bad, the good ones were those that actually added to character development and explored their characters that the original couldn't. That's probably why the Soul Eater and FMA animes is so highly regarded, because they went in their own direction and yet stayed true to the series in their own way. And at the same time, didn't turn the original into a mockery. That's why people comment on Rosario+Vampire's Capu2 anime, which completely took the original and throw it upsidedown from turning a serious story into just another fanservice anime.

So it's give and take. But honestly, I think they learned their lessons.
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Sakagami Tomoyo



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 5:22 am Reply with quote
Aquamine-Amarine wrote:
"In fact, some artists have tried to influence anime production over the years, and only succeeded in annoying everyone on staff."

Good. Annoy them some more.

I think filler episodes are an insult to the original creator. It's like a big middle finger to them, as though the anime staff is saying "your stuff isn't good enough on it's own, let me fix it by adding my stuff into it".


Not really - as has been noted already, fillers get made out of necessity, not to stroke anime writer's egos, or attack the mangaka's. And really, most mangaka at least accept the necessity and don't mind that much. Some look forward to seeing what the anime staff come up with. From time to time there will be some who can't stand anything being added, but in short it's too bad for them.

Aquamine-Amarine wrote:
If I were a manga artist, I wouldn't tolerate an unfaithful anime adaption. You either guarantee me a faithful anime, or I'm going to tell you to jump off a cliff. I wouldn't let someone destroy my work.


You know, a lot of the time when they do change things in the adaptation, it's because things weren't quite right in the original, and the adaptation is a chance to fix it. There have been cases where the original had some problems and the author did what you say and said "my way or no way at all". Sometimes it winds up not happening at all and the author and companies involved don't get the money for it and the audience doesn't get the anime/movie/whatever at all, no-one wins.

Other times they do it exactly as per the original, fans who wanted to see a version of it with the issues fixed are disappointed, the rest of the audience think it's not very good, the author and the companies involved don't get as much money as they could have, and everyone has a low opinion of their ability to do a good story. Not as bad a situation, but still not great.
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Naruto Guru



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 5:58 am Reply with quote
I miss when filler wasn't just random garbage to stall the show that's obviously just random garbage to stall the show. Back in the days of Dragon Ball Z, Yu-gi-oh: Waking the Dragons, or the old Hunter X Hunter, the filler episodes were unique and relevant to the anime's own canon and would easily go undetected to anyone who hadn't read the manga. More recently, Naruto's Fire Temple arc (and even Bleach's Bount arc) got it right also; one could skip them in a fit of impatience if need be, but those who watched them were rewarded in some way as they were subtly referenced later on in the shows.

Sadly, the majority of modern shonen filler is just the opposite; obviously recycled content or mindless crap that appears to be written by 10-year-olds who barely even follow the show and instead quickly skimmed the Cliff Notes to pass their tests. Filler may be a necessity, but there is no reason whatsoever for the blatant disparity in quality even without supervision from the original author.
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Jonny Mendes



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 7:09 am Reply with quote
Naruto Guru wrote:

Sadly, the majority of modern shonen filler is just the opposite; obviously recycled content or mindless crap that appears to be written by 10-year-olds who barely even follow the show and instead quickly skimmed the Cliff Notes to pass their tests. Filler may be a necessity, but there is no reason whatsoever for the blatant disparity in quality even without supervision from the original author.


I know what you mean. But if we look at the age of the target audience (children to early teens) of this shows in Japan, this is probably enough to keep them occupied until a new arc begins. But probably the older fans that keep watching the anime since the beginning will be the most disappointed with the fillers.
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leafy sea dragon



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 11:21 am Reply with quote
Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
You know, a lot of the time when they do change things in the adaptation, it's because things weren't quite right in the original, and the adaptation is a chance to fix it. There have been cases where the original had some problems and the author did what you say and said "my way or no way at all". Sometimes it winds up not happening at all and the author and companies involved don't get the money for it and the audience doesn't get the anime/movie/whatever at all, no-one wins.


Sometimes, though, it's pretty clear the author knows full well they won't get more money but considers it worth it. Alan Moore is infamous for that behavior. He hated the V for Vendetta movie and he REALLY hated the Watchmen movie, to where he refused to have his name in the latter. And while he was directly consulted for the Justice League episode "For the Man Who Has Everything" as the writing team wanted to adapt one of Moore's stories in a way he'd approve of, he went dead silent about it after it was over, never speaking a word of it. Roald Dahl disliked the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory so much that he vetoed any further adaptations of his novels for the rest of his life (which is why we never got another one until James and the Giant Peach).

In a sense, the original author might consider it a win. Maybe it's a win out of spite, or they consider it a moral victory. Everyone else still loses though.
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Sakagami Tomoyo



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:26 pm Reply with quote
leafy sea dragon wrote:
Sometimes, though, it's pretty clear the author knows full well they won't get more money but considers it worth it. Alan Moore is infamous for that behavior. He hated the V for Vendetta movie and he REALLY hated the Watchmen movie, to where he refused to have his name in the latter.


True enough, though Alan Moore is an extreme example. And I was under the impression that he preemptively hates any adaptation of his works, and if he's not able to prevent it happening, he'll distance himself as much as possible from it - going so far as to demand he not be credited and refuse any royalties. At least that's what I heard about his approach to the Watchmen movie.

leafy sea dragon wrote:
In a sense, the original author might consider it a win. Maybe it's a win out of spite, or they consider it a moral victory. Everyone else still loses though.


To a certain extent I can respect them sticking to their guns, but I do tend to find myself annoyed that we don't get the adaptation at all when they dig their heels in over something inconsequential or a change that would have been for the better.
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leafy sea dragon



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PostPosted: Tue Apr 18, 2017 9:51 pm Reply with quote
Sakagami Tomoyo wrote:
True enough, though Alan Moore is an extreme example. And I was under the impression that he preemptively hates any adaptation of his works, and if he's not able to prevent it happening, he'll distance himself as much as possible from it - going so far as to demand he not be credited and refuse any royalties. At least that's what I heard about his approach to the Watchmen movie.

To a certain extent I can respect them sticking to their guns, but I do tend to find myself annoyed that we don't get the adaptation at all when they dig their heels in over something inconsequential or a change that would have been for the better.


I've definitely read about that regarding Alan Moore and the Watchmen movie. I'm sure he's not the only author like that either (besides Roald Dahl, who actually had the authority to block adaptations). I am pretty certain he WAS credited for V for Vendetta, but I think that was the very first time something he wrote was adapted into a movie. I suppose Bill Watterson would be an example of someone even more extreme than Alan Moore, who blocks ALL things Calvin and Hobbes except for printings of the comic strips, and at one point, grew so paranoid that he would burn everything he painted because he was afraid someone was going to steal it and sell it.

I would agree with you, by the way, that it's annoying if the author vetoes something simply because it isn't exactly like how they envision it. An adaptation, by its very nature, requires changes to be made because it's on another medium. Each medium has its strengths and weaknesses, and it's best for an adaptation to modify the story to play to those strengths and avoid its weaknesses. Otherwise, you get a story in one medium that plays out like something in another medium.
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BadNewsBlues



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PostPosted: Thu Apr 20, 2017 8:52 am Reply with quote
Rinkwolf wrote:
Magaka meddling is the reason Japanese dub has Goku sounding like a 12 year old girl when he is a full grown man and why any anime fan I've shown the Japanese dub of Dragon Ball Z that speaks english started laughing[


By the same token just because english viewers don't like Nowaza voicing Goku cause many of them can't reconcile an 80 something year old woman voicing him doesn't mean most fans of the japanese version of DragonBall which includes english speaking fans should care what they think. Made all the more hilarious with characters like Fat Buu in the dub whose voice is higher in the english dub than the Japanese dub and sounds legitimately awful but yet no one seems to mind as much....unlike when Linda Young voiced Frieza in the dub, despite Frieza's androgyny kind of being a stable of the character.
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