Okay this is kind of making me crazy but I'm gonna try my best here.MasenkoHA wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 12:28 pm I understand wanting to see a manga you enjoy brought to life in animation, but if said adaptation is so bad and bogged down with endless filler (that the fandom seems to universally agree is bad and boring?) it's probably not worth watching.
If the FILLER isn't worth watching, then you don't watch the filler. Naruto, Doctor Who and the Simpsons are functionally very similar in this regard. If the episodes suck, you wait until there are better episodes (and no, the opinions of you, me or anyone else about these shows aren't important, "modern Simpsons sucks" is not an argument here).
The fact that you bring up a movie here is really telling. Of course I'd never tell you to watch a bad movie adaptation and just fast-forward through all the parts that suck or look away at a persistent recurring change, because that's a stupid, immersion-breaking chore that would ruin what good parts of the experience were there to begin with. Skipping over episodes of a TV show that don't matter isn't like that! I still haven't watched the episode where Homer frames Marge for a DUI, because that sounds like a bad time, and there are other episodes of the show I wanted to see instead! I didn't swear off watching anything past that point just because.
Naruto actually has it way better in this regard because it's incentivized to not make filler a big deal within the narrative, because it's an adaptation that has to play it close to source material. Someone jumping into Season 35 Simpsons who stopped after Principal and the Pauper may have missed way more continuity and status quo shifts. Ned had two wives die in that period of time! Comic Book Guy got married! I watched the Inception episode when it came out and didn't know that Homer's mom had died! I thought he just never knew she faked her death in that other episode!
I wouldn't know what the hell Neil Patrick Harris is talking about in The Giggle if I didn't watch Chris Chibnall's seasons of Doctor Who, and while that might be worth it because Good God Flux Was Boring, that stuff matters in Season 14 and informs parts of Ncuti Gatwa Doctor's character. Meanwhile, I have no idea what happened between Naruto vs. Sasuke and Naruto leaving with Jiraiya, and the show never punished me for that, because it's based off a manga where nothing happened in that period of time.
Making this about the quantity of content and not the quality relative to your own self-selection is just confusing and arbitrary. If a serialized show is six episodes long, and one of them is dogshit, the fact that it's bad matters more than Praxeus or Web Weirdos or Onion Gang or Water Park Prank or Orphan 55 or Lisa Goes Gaga or Homer vs. Dignity, because it's an entire sixth of the show, and you can't ignore it. You can't just say "there are a lot of filler episodes, therefore the non-filler episodes are also worth tossing in the garbage".
This argument ironically works way better for Dragon Ball and One Piece! These shows don't have a lot of dedicated filler episodes, instead they draaaaaaaaag the moment-to-moment pacing of fights out to such a ludicrous degree that parts of them are utterly unwatchable. You don't have the option to skip any of this though, because it's not technically non-canon! See what the problem is?
I'm not asking for anything in specific, I absolutely believe continuity be damned if something makes for a more interesting narrative, I'm just saying that narrative conflict is not separate from how we view the writing of a character or idea. Should experiencing Jelly Vegeta or Garlic Jr. have taught the characters any lessons or changed them in some ways such that their behavior in the Goku Black or Cell arcs would be different? Maybe, maybe not, but the point is that the effect can matter...in better stories than Dragon Ball, usually.JulieYBM wrote: Tue Dec 17, 2024 1:40 pm While I agree that canon does often contribute to our understanding of a story's themes and the characters' arcs, I don't necessarily think that's a hard and fast rule that needs to be followed. While I think the Sayan arc and Artificial Human arcs would have been improved if they had kept calling back to the anime-original episodes of Gohan growing up in the wilderness, I don't necessarily think that, say, they needed to follow those episodes precisely to fix some of the issues present in later Gohan storylines (although it would certainly be easier and really exciting to see a future story reference those episodes and actually affect how an older Gohan functions as a character instead of whatever shit we get now post-1995).
