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Filler Percentages, Best Wishes Edition!

Rocketshipper

SOOOOONANSU!!
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I'm back! I exist! Dang, its been forever since I posted anything. After the somewhat..."controversial" turn the Isshu league arc took and the IMO rather mediocre Episode N, I was about ready to give up on Pokemon altogether, and stopped watching after the 2nd Da! episode. But seeing as XY has turned out *amazing* so far (on episode 12 and working my way forward) I ended up going back and finishing all the BW episodes too. And I thought I might update my old filler percentages list for the recently finished 5th gen seasons! If everyone might recall, I previously posted a thread (seen here: http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/f228/filler-percentages-saga-saga-71342/) that calculated the filler percentages of the first 4 generations of the Pokemon anime, and I recently did the same for gen 5, Best Wishes. Since the original thread is so old, and has 13 pages of comments, I thought I should just create a new thread. As before, my criteria for considering an episode "plot" was if it contained one or more of the following 6 things.

-Pokemon captures/releases/evolutions/trades
-events relating to gyms and gym leaders
-scenes where a character trains their pokemon to learn a new move or to significantly improve themselves in battle, such that the Pokemon's progress is visible in later episodes.
-events involving significant character development or background information that gets referenced later
-events the develop the rivalries between the main characters and their respective rivals
-episodes involving events, characters, or locations taken out of the games

episodes without these elements would be considered "filler". And again the number of fillers vs plot episodes I came up with is *approximate* because not everyone is going to fully agree on what should or shouldn't be plot and filler, and I could have over-looked something too. BW also ended up with the unique situation of several episodes being written as foreshadowing to the Plasma vs TR special which then ended up being ret-conned out of existence. So are those episodes still plot or should they be considered filler now? discuss, have fun! So here we go.

Best Wishes season 1: Badge Quest: 84 episodes, Approx. 11 filler, Approx. 13% filler
List:
“Scare at the Litwick Mansion!”
“Cottonee in Love!”
“A UFO for Elgyem!”
“Archeops In The Modern World!”
“Beheeyem, Duosion, and the Dream Thief!”
“The Beartic Mountain Feud!”
“The Four Seasons of Sawsbuck!”
“Scraggy and the Demanding Gothita!”
“Baffling the Bouffalant!”
“A Restoration Confrontation! Part 1”
“A Restoration Confrontation! Part 2”

Notes: "Saving Darmanitan From the Bell!" is definitely mostly filler, but it also advances the TR meteor plot, and even though the Plasma vs Rocket special got wiped out, that plot still advances in several other episodes that are definitely NOT filler, so I think it would be a little weird to cut a chunk out of it. Same with the Nacrene museum episode, which also introduced the gym leader. "The Lost World of Gothitelle!" established Satoshi actively switching his party, and had him switch Pidove back into his party, but could be considered filler depending on how important you think that would really be. I struggled with whether or not to include the Archeops and Tirtouga episodes as filler. The Archeops episode set up the later Tirtouga episodes, which were also a more involved two part story, but in the end I thought that those episodes still didn;t really change or advance anything, so I ended up counting them as filler. I originally had the Maractus episode on the filler list, but after thinking about it I decided that it fit with the 6th criteria; its pretty much the only episode in the series that dealt with the game mechanic of Pokemon musicals.

Best Wishes Season 2: Junior Cup and the Isshu League: 24 episodes, Approx. 2 filler, Approx. 8% filler
list:
“The Mystery of the Missing Cubchoo!”
“A Surface to Air Tag Battle Team!”

Episode N: 14 episodes: approx. 2 filler, approx. 14% filler
list:
“The Light of Floccesy Ranch!”
“The Pokémon Harbor Patrol!”

Decolora Adventures: 20 episodes Approx. 8 fillers approx. 40% filler
list:
“Crowning the Scalchop King!”
“The Island of Illusions!”
“The Pirates of Decolore!”
“Butterfree and Me!”
“Searching for a Wish!”
“Capacia Island UFO!”
“Mystery on a Deserted Island!”
“Go, Go Gogoat!”

Notes: "Celebrating the Hero's Comet!" would definitely be filler too, but it is also the episode where Alexa reveals she has a Noivern for the first time. Was kind of unsure whether or not to include "Cilan and the Case of the Purrloin Witness!" as filler or not. Ash and Iris finally heard why Cilan hates Purloin but the audience didn't hear, which kind of makes it pointless, but then the episode got flashed back to in "Survival of the Striaton Gym!" which was plot, so I'm not sure. "Danger, Sweet as Honey!" would also be filler, if not for the fact that it is the episode that establishes there are multiple Porters, just like Joy and Jenny. But that might be such a minor tidbit of info that it could still be considered filler.

So in total...Best Wishes series: 142 episodes, Approx. 23 fillers, approx. 16% filler

Got to admit I was kind of surprised when I went through it all. I thought the series had a lot more filler originally than it actually ended up with. Best Wishes now has the honor of being the gen with the least amount of filler total. And yet...definitely my least favorite ^^.
 
Interesting analysis. I have also tried to determine what is filler and what isn't in previous seasons in an old thread of mine. When it comes to the anime, it can be quite tricky to determine what is filler and what isn't and can cause debate.

I should update it sometime and maybe go through it again. Here is the old thread for reference:

http://bmgf.bulbagarden.net/f228/pokemon-anime-fans-guide-non-fillers-118592/
 
It's still the worst saga to date, thank God it's over.
 
Yeah, it definitely shouldn't be about bashing Best Wishes, though I would think it would be ok to express our opinions about this or any of the other seasons as long as we all do it in a civil manner ^^

My original theory back in the day when I made my first thread, was that the quality of the show improved with less filler, but that didn't seem to hold entirely true for BW.
 
Well, if we're going to be that technical with TR's plan advancement, then shouldn't Archeops In The Modern World! kinda be removed from the list? I'm not sure I recall correctly, but didn't they steal information regarding the resurrection machine that Fennel and Juniper created for Archen, which helped them ''advance'' in their plans similiar to ''Saving Darmanitan From the Bell'' did? Oh, and I personally don't consider Scraggy and the Demanding Gothita! to have been a filler as that episode introduced Katharine, which even though didn't become a recurring character was someone that we various time witnessed during the Unova League.

Also, ''''Beheeyem, Duosion, and the Dream Thief!” and ''Beartic Mountain Feud!” did both have short scenes at the end that featured Ingo and Emmet and TR, providing with an insight to the climax of the whole arc with Meowth joining Ash and Co. etc. The Beheeyem episode did at least serve as the actual introduction episode of Ingo and Emmet regardless.

Personally, and this is just personal, I don't consider episodes where the gang have been accompanied by Dawn, N, and Meowth to be fillers as they all really served some purpose. N seeing Halsey and his Pokémon working together saving both people and Pokémon gave N another perspective and did in my opinion only further contribute into him, by the three-parter endning of Episode N, realize that there are people and Pokémon that actually can live together as equals. As for Meowth, the more adventures he went through together with Ash and Co. the more attached they became to him, making their surprise and disappointment upon realising that Meowth only had been fooling them the whole time even more realistic. Meowth as well did at some moments seem to have somewhat split feelings about betraying them, which was logical due to him having gone through a lot together with them. I also don't think that episodes featuring characters such as Juniper or Fennel should be considered to be filler.

My own definition of fillers differs quite drastically from this list, as there a lot of episodes that I think should've been added while some should be removed. I barely think that minor details such as short scenes featuring TR advancing in their plans for an example saves the episode from being filler. Grasping an exact definition of what a filler is is kinda hard though, and I think you did a good job with creating this as it most likely summarizes the general definition of a filler!

I'm normally not a fan of fillers, but BW and AG are the sagas that featured the best fillers overall imo, but I suppose that whether you like a filler or not has a lot to do with how much you enjoy the interactions amongst the group for that particular saga.
 
Yeah, I was aware of the Archeops connection thing, as I mentioned. The reason I ended up deciding it was filler (along with the Tirtouga episodes) was because the events in the Archeops episode were foreshadowing to what happened in the Tirtouga episode...and the Tirtouga two parter didn't really effect anything at all. It wasn't like the previous Battle Subway two parter (which brought the kids to the next gym town, saw Meowth Departing, and introduced the kids to Emmet and Ingo) or the multi-parter with the elemental legendaries, which featured Clay and also connected into the later Meloetta episodes. The Tirtouga episodes weren't much different from your standard "Team Rocket tries to capture a pokemon" episode, except that they were a two parter. They both felt like filler to me. and since the episodes that the Archeops episode foreshadowed were filler, I'd say that makes the Archeops episode ultimately filler too.

Its true that the Beehyem and Beartic episodes featured some scenes with Team Rocket setting up their plans, and showed us Emmet and Ingo for the first time, but I didn't feel like any of those scenes really added anything to the plot. You can understand everything that is going on with Meowth and with the Subway two parter without having to see those scenes. I felt like they were less about advancing the plot, and more about just giving TR an obligatory scene and reminding the viewers that something is brewing. "The Mystery of the Missing Cubchoo" was sort of like that too, it included a scene of TR in their submarine searching the ocean, but it really just served to show that "TR is still out there seaching" and didn't really have them find or do anything important. It was a bit different than all those little scene tidbits from the meteor plot, where each episode had TR acquiring some new item they would need or advancing a bit farther in their goal, like with stealing an object from the museum.
 
Very small elements of an episode such as the TR plans make an epsiode non-filler. It's like with Hypno's Naptime, which is mostly filler but that very small bit at the end where Misty catches Psyduck makes the entire episode non-filler. It's funny how episodes work but even just the smallest bit of character development can turn an episode into an important one.
 
Maybe I'm missing something, but is there any reason you didn't include "Where Did You Go, Audino?" as a filler? Is it because of the focus on Cilan's detective skills?
 
Yeah, that was about it. Cilan's whole "Detective Connoisseur" thing was introduced in that episode, and it became a running gag of him declaring himself to be an "*insert noun here* connoisseur" in many episodes after that. Also Da! episode 19, Cilan and Iris' departure episode, featured flashbacks to Detective Cilan, so it seems like the writers would consider it a notable aspect of his character. (on the other hand though...Da! 19 also had a flashback to that tag battle episode from BW Season 2, which otherwise was definitely filler-ish)
 
Just something else I thought of when it comes to "fillers". If you go through every episode on Bulbapedia's guide, there is a section called "Major events". If this is left blank, then it is likely a filler. Otherwise it is mostly a non-filler.
 
Please note: The thread is from 10 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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