Offical Countdown to the end of fillers!

[Dionysos]

yes i think so too, because if the ratings would have plumetted so much they definitely wouldnt do such a long filler period

[EternalDarkness]

um... how can u tell if the show is a filler? is like the ep. were narutos team trys to find out whats under kakashi's face mask?

[EternalDarkness]

nvm didnt see last post but still how can u tell if its a filler

[Narasho]

If the content in the episode was not content taken from the manga, then it is a filler. Huge plot differences is one example, or episodes where nothing plot related occurs.

[Yukimura]

An intressting point about fillers though, is that many of you wouldn't know they were showing fillers if the manga readers hadn't told you. You all would have just been commenting on how bad Naruto had gotten and possibly dropped the series, not having any hope for a good storyline to return.

Somehting i'm curious about is why is telling someone what didn't happen in the manga not considered a spoiler. Not that I want it to be, but to play Devil's Advocate, isn't the point of banning spoilers supposed to be to keep the anime separate from the manga. If that's the case then the term filler is meaningless, as the anime just has episodes the manga does't have. However would you all still care about Naruto after this much crap if you didn't know there was a manga and that the show wasn't following the manga anymore?

[IFHTT]

Well the only thing keeping a lot of people even interested in the show is the aspect that someday it will move back to the storyline and wholesome Naruto goodness can be experienced once again.

But at the same time I think that if there was no knowledge of what is and isn't actually storyline material then we wouldn't have been as disappointed with the filler as we are. We'd have just been like "What the hell happened to this show?".

I can safely say though, that if there was no knowledge of filler and storyline progression, and no manga to compensate for the lack thereof that I'd have dropped this show long ago.

[Vegechan]

I agree with Fing. If I didn't know about the fillers, I would have dropped Naruto a long time ago. I mean, it's been more than a year, and nothing critial has happened, at all. It's just been a ton of short stories. The only person who got a new ability was Hinata, and I don't know if she'll still have it come non-fillers.

What they should have done is introduced a new villan. Actually show progression through a story, rather than a ton of little short ones. I think that wouold have made it a bit more beleivable than what we got instead.