Mod_Man_Extreme wrote:the7k wrote:I dunno, I've been trying to watch what's on Adult Swim lately - the Hueco Mundo deal. While it certainly isn't filler bad, I still feel like it has lost a lot of its magic.
One of the biggest problems I have with this series is that there are too damn many characters. They should have just kept it Ichigo, Rukia, Orihime, Chad and Uryu, with Urahara and Yoruichi as the mentor/support figures. Once we started getting involved in all those Soul Reapers, it just got confusing. Focus was lost.
This is why I feel Yu Yu Hakusho is clearly superior - regardless of what is going on, the focus was always on Yusuke, Kuwabara, Kurama and Hiei, with Genkai and Junior as the mentor/support figures.
Exactly, Bleach was a series that could have been knocked out of the park in as little as 26-70 eps max. regardless of how long the manga is continuing.
Shonen Jump series' for the most part have always been good properties, but once they've established themselves with the hardcore audience they almost always do a complete 180 and try to get the marketable 10-14 year old money making audience. It's not about being a quality show or manga, it's about being a show or manga that makes money hand over fist with kids that think characters with the ability to infinitely power up are cool.
Like 7k said earlier Yu-Yu-Hakusho was a great and clearly superior show because it always kept the focus on the main characters and refused to introduce needless sidekicks and wasted plot-lines. I watched the first two seasons of Bleach and part of the third but after the second everything just became unbearable so I stopped.
JFrost, you're a Bleach fan, but you've already said that you haven't seen a CANON episode that isn't awful yet. Sadly the canon episodes only account for about 20% of the series entire run and I think that my time is better spent watching a show that is 100% quality than a show which enjoys dangling a good episode in your face every twenty or so bad ones and expects you to stay around for weeks waiting for the next good one.
Well, just to be fair, fillers are about 50% of the show (of 250 episodes, 122 are filler). YuYu Hakusho was an exception in shonen mangas in that it was relatively short and thus fillers were not necessary to keep the TV show going (and they even
cut the awesome ending of the manga in the TV series, never will I forgive the creators).
YuYu Hakusho is fairly unusual. They could even have given the series a filler ending, like those of, say, Rurouni Kenshin and Fullmetal Alchemist. But it went unharmed. You also can notice a rather blunt change of pacing in YYH after the Toguro arc. When they were fighting Toguro, they really took their time with the fights and preparations and evertyhing else. When Sensui became the enemy, and the manga was ended, the anime ran very fast (and, to me, Sensui's arc was the better one).
Also, there are some series that are more receptive to filler than others. Bleach clearly is not receptive at all, because of the very nature of the story. One Piece, on the other hand, can and does have good fillers that do not conflict with the main story and bring some interesting stuff to the table (for instance, the Navarone arc). However, not even One Piece, which is an amazing anime in my opinion, is immune to the poisonous effect of fillers. Sometimes they just extend scenes far too much to fill TV time or even make the characters do stuff that conflict with the canon.
I'm not trying to excuse the fillers' poor writing or anything, but I just want to point out that if you bring them up as an indicator of the quality of a show, you'll miss out on a lot of stuff. Dragon Ball Z didn't have "fillers" in the sense we use the words nowadays (it only had two filler arcs, the Garlic Jr. arc before the Android saga and the Other World Tournament arc before Majin Boo), but characters spent weeks upon weeks looking at each other just to burn running time on TV. Yet most people do see the value of Dragon Ball Z.
About the amount of characters, I see your point and the series could use more focus. If I recall correctly, that stems from the creative process Tite Kubo uses, creating characters first and the setting and story afterwards. Yet, I still think the series is good and a big part of that is due to the fact that the characters are so interesting in their own right. I guess it can be a mixed blessing.
