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So all protagonists must be 100% correct and good from the start and know everything and be perfect? No character or narrative growth?
Also why must everything “advance the plot”? Why can’t Aang just do things because their fun? That is a way of telling a story and “advancing the plot” in itself.
Again, if this is how they are dealing with characters, wtf are they going to do with Zuko?
I mean you need some of them, if every episode is made up of full throttle battles and major plot twists, it can get exhausting and actually diminish the value of those plot points/twists and battles. At that point, it might as well be a movie.
Though there is also the problem of too much filler, but filler episodes play a key part in pacing, and providing background information and motivations of characters, fleshing them out.
Yes, I mean it, filler episodes are good
And if they weren’t, One Piece wouldn’t have such a large audience
Counterpoint: Kill la Kill pared everything down as much as possible, eliminating filler and eliminating or truncating redundant animations, and wound up with nearly perfect pacing as a result. Meanwhile something like Hunter x Hunter turned into like 90% filler (or even worse, story progression that was so empty and slow it basically was filler) and became basically unwatchable as a result.
There’s definitely a line where paring things down goes too far, like Cyberpunk Edgerunners was Studio Trigger taking the streamlining a little too far when the story could have had a bit more in places, but in general I can’t help but feel like filler is more a negative to overall pacing and the approach should instead be to control the overall pacing with things that still advance the overall story but are more focused on a narrower tangent, instead of just throwing in completely empty and self-contained filler.
Makes me nostalgic for some series made for TV where you could jump into a random episode and enjoy it even if you weren’t following along the whole plot. Particularly I remember Supernatural having a lot of monster hunting episodes that didn’t really drive the plot but were really fun.
