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Answerman - Why Do American Companies Bother To Release Filler Episodes?

Revolutionary Girl Utena being an extreme example of this, tacking some of its more important developments onto the end of what are otherwise recap episodes.

Considering the amount of indignation and outrage I often see over a bit of editing I am really surprised that so many people are in favor of having the US companies omit entire episodes.

I would like to be the one who decides whether or not I watch each episode.
There have been a lot of filler episodes that I have enjoyed.

I can always choose to skip an episode that is released, but I cannot choose to watch an episode that is not released.

You also have to consider that any ending that is made for the anime would, by the definition being used here, be filler.
Should all anime-original endings be omitted from the releases here?

Then you have Bleach which had to suffer through a lot of filler arcs/episodes from what I've heard, some stuck in at inconvenient spots from what I recall that would otherwise make no sense being there according to the actual plot line. Could filler have been what caused the death of the Bleach anime, or was there just an overall decline in interest in the series as a whole in Japan, and that's what caused the Bleach anime to be cut short, or were they just done at that point because the anime would have gotten caught up with the manga by that point? I know the anime ended after the Fullbringer Arc ended and before the Quincy War arc.

I believe the entirety of Hunter x Hunter (2011) was canon (all 148 eps), unless you want two count the two recap episodes that featured anime-original framing stories.

And I'm gonna be that guy and point out that if we're talking percentages, One Piece, despite it's enormous length, actually has comparatively few filler episodes (~90-ish out of 740) for an SJ long-runner. Instead, it usually opts to drag out canon material, which I suppose might be just as bad or even worse depending on your perspective. This might be one of those rare cases where filler arcs would actually be preferable as a means to avoid catching up to the manga, since many fans find OP's anime-original episodes to be surprisingly decent overall.

As far as play in the West goes, Adult Swim, once upon a time, was doing double premieres of BLEACH, which I thought was a good way to not lose peoples interest by playing one episode a week for 8 years. But then, they would burn through canon material. It kind of doesn't make any sense to me why One Piece, as incredibly long as it is, is not in double premieres.

I might've misunderstood, but I think Kakashi's backstory arc was filler, but it was great.

Gina Szanboti wrote:

I might've misunderstood, but I think Kakashi's backstory arc was filler, but it was great.

I think it might've turned into filler due to where it was placed in the anime.

In the manga it was done immediately after the Sasuke Retrieval Arc. The anime of course didn't follow suit.

(Fist of the North Star suffered from indifferent reception and canceled releases, likely due to the crawling pace, leading many to characterize it as "guy roams wastelands and kills motorcycle gangs" and not see beyond the piles of filler, even in the manga)

DBZ Fillers (and the later episodes of one piece) are the worst kind of fillers.

They're the fillers you can't skip because they are ingrained in the very episode.

Ideally, there would be some way to automatically skip filler. But since that isn't going to happen...

1. I'd like for filler to be marked as filler. You don't have to make it some sort of massive label, but some sort of indicator that "this episode" or "this block of episodes" is filler would be nice, especially when it comes to buying anime.

2. Try, if at all possible, to contain filler in blocks you can buy or not buy at once. The whole deal where there is a package that contains 1 canon episode and 12 filler episodes is pretty horrible: you're paying full price for basically one episode's worth of material (I nearly always skip filler when I recognize it).

Also, for what it's worth, I wish people would agree on terms here so they can just use one word instead of having to describe what they're talking about every time. Can we define filler as non-canon material (see Naruto) and padding as the term for stretching out material, canon or otherwise, to slow down the pace (see most long running Toei series) with recaps, flashbacks to previously aired material, and animation stalling tactics?