Why make filler episodes?


The general rule seems to be that filler is made when an anime is being
produced faster than the manga. The thing I just can't seem to figure out is

  1. How an entire freaking episode takes longer to produce than a manga which practically only equals a story board.
  2. Why would they start producing random filler rather than just overtaking the manga with their own story.

I mean, is this some Japanese cultural thing where a lot of credit is given to
the author of the manga and he isn't allowed to collaborate with others to
speed up production or is this a cultural thing where Japanese actually like
those fillers or what? After all, there are a lot of economic incentives not
to produce filler episodes as they tend to irritate fans a lot and still cost
a lot to produce.




**TL;DR** \- It's because financially, it pays off for longer, more popular
anime series. It allows them to retain broadcasting slot, as well as sponsors
and advertisers, by sacrificing a bit of quality.

* * *

First, it needs to be pointed out that many anime don't have filler. Filler
episodes are only common in long-running popular anime such as _One Piece_ ,
_Naruto_ , or _Bleach_. This is because of the particular profit model they
have. These long-running shows make a profit through sponsorships and
advertisements. In contrast, shorter works, especially late night anime, only
make a profit through sales of blu-rays and other merchandise. Hence, for
long-running shows, the quality of individual episodes is somewhat less of a
concern.

Given that the episodes need to be around 20 minutes long (excluding OP and ED
sequences) and air once a week to fit into TV programming schedules, the anime
almost always needs to go faster than the manga. Hence, there are essentially
3 options for what to do. Most commonly, they will just add a few irrelevant
"filler" episodes occasionally. This does tend to make viewers unhappy if
they're too common, but production studios have determined that viewers are
less likely to stop watching if fillers air than if the anime just takes a
break.

Another option is to take a break whenever the anime gets close to the manga.
This is the strategy _Gintama_ takes as well as most late-night anime that are
popular enough to be adapted fully (e.g. _To Love-Ru_ ). It results in higher
quality, but it's harder to keep sponsorships and TV slots when the show airs
infrequently, and viewers may drop it during the break. _One Piece_ has done
this at times and aired fillers at other times. The third option is to abandon
the manga entirely and write an original story. Some works that did this are
_Fullmetal Alchemist_ (the original), _Hayate no Gotoku_ (1st season), _Hunter
x Hunter_ (original) and _Soul Eater_. This used to be much more popular,
especially in the 1990s, but it makes it more difficult to continue the anime
and fans usually aren't happy with the changes, so these days it's become very
uncommon. Notice that 3 of these 4 ended up needing to be rebooted or have
large retcons to have anime continuations, and the fourth hasn't been despite
a large following simply because of the difficulties involved.

So, to put it simply, these long-running shows have filler because that's
their best option to keep their TV slots, sponsors, and viewers. It does cost
a bit of quality, but that's acceptable for highly popular shows like this
where quality is somewhat less of a concern.

* * *

As for why they can't just speed up the manga production to accommodate the
anime, that wouldn't really be feasible. Manga production is mostly done by a
single mangaka with an editor and sometimes one or more assistants, while a
single anime episode may have dozens of animators working on it. In the case
of popular works, essentially everything that can possibly be is left to the
assistants. Apart from splitting up story and artwork, there isn't much that
could be done to speed up the process, and few mangaka want to do that (though
it has been done in some cases). Furthermore, managaka are already
ridiculously overworked; the rate at which manga is produced right now is
basically as fast as it can possibly be produced. To get rid of fillers,
production would need to be sped up significantly (roughly 50-100% faster for
most works), and it's hard to imagine any way to do that.

In addition, it wouldn't really help the manga to be produced faster. Most of
these manga are released in weekly magazines which contain a chapter of
several works. If production was sped up drastically, this would mean fewer
works could be included in a single issue. It's likely that this wouldn't
really increase revenue, since these works typically target younger children
and adolescents without a large amount of disposable income, but it would
drastically increase the production costs per series. Given that the manga and
anime are produced by two completely different companies, that relatively few
manga ever get adapted to anime, and that the manga is often more profitable
than the anime, there's really no reason (and no realistic way) to speed up
the manga just for the sake of eliminating anime fillers.

