Canon or Catastrophe? Ranking Anime Filler Arcs From 'Surprisingly Slept On' to 'Legally Questionable'
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Every long-running anime has a dirty secret. Somewhere between the manga catching up and the production schedule refusing to cooperate, someone in a meeting said the words "we'll just do a filler arc" — and a thousand fan arguments were born.
Filler is anime's great equalizer. It doesn't matter how beloved your series is. Doesn't matter how tight your lore is, how iconic your protagonist, or how carefully your author has constructed a multi-decade narrative. Eventually, the filler arc comes for everyone. Sometimes it's a detour. Sometimes it's a vacation. And sometimes it's a full-on fever dream that makes you question whether the production team had access to the same show you've been watching.
We ranked them. You're welcome.
S-Tier: Filler That Became Part of the Culture
Naruto's Land of Tea Escort Mission Arc
Okay, hear us out. This arc is technically filler. It's also the arc that gave us one of the most underrated Naruto-and-Lee moments in the whole pre-Shippuden run. Nobody talks about it, which is exactly why it earns S-tier in the "secretly good filler" category. It doesn't pretend to be important. It knows what it is. It delivers a contained little story with actual emotional stakes and then exits gracefully. This is filler behaving itself.
Dragon Ball Z's Garlic Jr. Saga
Look, Garlic Jr. was in a movie first, came back for a filler arc, and then was never mentioned again in any canonical context. And yet — this arc has a dedicated fanbase that will go to bat for it in 2024. The Garlic Jr. saga features Gohan and Piccolo teaming up while Goku and Vegeta are entirely absent, which means for a brief window, it accidentally told a more interesting story than the main series was doing at the time. It's filler that had the audacity to be compelling. S-tier for sheer nerve.
A-Tier: Filler That Didn't Embarrass Anyone
One Piece's G-8 Arc
If you ask any serious One Piece fan to name the best filler arc in the series, they will say G-8 with zero hesitation. It slots in directly after Skypiea — a canon arc that many fans found overlong — and delivers a tight, funny, character-driven story where the crew has to sneak around a Marine base. It has stakes. It has laughs. It has character moments that feel consistent with who these people are. G-8 is the gold standard of filler done right, and it sets a bar that most other arcs, filler or otherwise, never reach.
Bleach's Bount Arc
The Bount arc is polarizing, which is exactly why it lands in A-tier instead of S. It's long — probably longer than it needed to be — and it introduces a concept (soul-eating vampires powered by dolls) that the show never revisits. But the arc has genuine tension, some solid fight choreography, and a villain in Kariya Jin who is legitimately menacing. It's the kind of filler that a newer fan might watch without realizing it's not canon, which is honestly the highest compliment you can give.
B-Tier: Forgettable But Harmless
Naruto's Curry of Life Arc
The Curry of Life arc exists. It happened. Characters ate curry. Rock Lee's drunken fist made an appearance. There was a dog. No one was harmed. No one was particularly enriched. It is the anime equivalent of a rest stop on a highway — you didn't need it, but it gave you somewhere to be for twenty minutes and the vending machine had decent snacks. B-tier: inoffensive, immediately forgettable, occasionally referenced as a meme.
Dragon Ball Super's Various Slice-of-Life Episodes
These are technically not filler in the traditional sense, but they occupy the same narrative space — episodes where Goku and friends play baseball, go fishing, or attend a school play. They're fine. They're cute. They add nothing to any ongoing story. But they also occasionally remind you that these characters are people who theoretically live lives between universe-threatening crises, which is charming in small doses.
C-Tier: Somebody Made a Decision and It Shows
Naruto's Infinite Tsukuyomi Filler (The Tail End of Shippuden)
This is where filler stops being a detour and starts being a philosophical choice. The final stretch of Naruto Shippuden, during the Infinite Tsukuyomi, used the "everyone is trapped in a dream" premise as a license to produce dozens of episodes of alternate-universe what-if content. Some of it was charming. Most of it was stalling. All of it aired while fans were waiting for the actual ending of a series they'd followed for over a decade. The audacity of making people sit through filler during the finale earns a firm C-tier placement and a raised eyebrow.
One Piece's Foxy Pirate Crew Arc (Return)
The original Foxy arc was divisive. The decision to bring Foxy back for a second filler arc — after the fandom had largely made peace with forgetting the first one — is the kind of creative choice that requires explanation. We don't have one. Nobody does. Foxy came back, did Foxy things, left again, and the show continued as if it hadn't just reopened a wound.
F-Tier: What Were They Thinking, Seriously
Dragon Ball GT (Broadly)
GT is technically not filler in the traditional sense — it was a full sequel series. But it was produced without Akira Toriyama's involvement and aired in a space where canon was ambiguous, which makes it the spiritual ancestor of all modern filler debates. Baby saga aside, GT is a monument to what happens when a franchise loses the thread. Evil Shenron. Kid Goku. Pan being perpetually sidelined. The whole enterprise feels like a very expensive dare. It has been largely retconned into irrelevance by Dragon Ball Super, which is the universe's way of saying "we know."
Naruto's Infinite Filler Stretch (Pre-Shippuden Transition)
Between the end of the original Naruto and the beginning of Shippuden, the show produced nearly eighty consecutive filler episodes. Eighty. The filler included a mission involving a ghost, a mission involving a haunted castle, a mission involving a kid who could talk to animals, and a mission that appears to have been written in an afternoon. Some of these episodes are now beloved ironically. Most of them exist as a cautionary tale about what happens when a production schedule and a manga release date have a falling out.
The Verdict
Filler is never going away. As long as anime adaptations run ahead of their source material, someone is going to write an arc about a beach episode that accidentally becomes a fan-favorite or a ghost arc that becomes a meme for the wrong reasons.
The best filler respects the characters. The worst filler treats them like props in a completely different show. And somewhere in the middle, Naruto is eating curry and Rock Lee is inexplicably drunk, and honestly — for twenty minutes — that's enough.
