As a general statement fillers in anime are very annoying, but the reason I never minded it in Naruto is because there are roughly 858 characters in the series and somehow those feel like the ONLY times we ever allowed to explore anybody not directly connected to Team 7.
Like, to clarify- I do not dislike Team 7. I don’t! Naruto is an idiot, but he’s MY idiot. Watching Sakura take charge of Kankuro’s medical treatment after everybody else said he couldn’t be saved? A religious experience. Sasuke- yes, okay, I admit I bitch about him a lot, but I blame every aspect of how the Leaf Village handles trauma in children for how Sasuke ended up the way he did more than I blame him. He wasn’t a bad kid, he was a kid who got failed by almost everyone around him.
(Seriously every adult in that entire village except for Iruka, Teuchi and Ayame can eat shit.)
No, my feelings on Team 7 are more like… y'know how there’s a certain breed of DC fans who have like, a knee jerk rage reaction to the presence of Batman in stuff because everything DC makes seems to be about Batman, and even when they make something centered around characters that aren’t Batman they have to somehow connect it back to Batman, and then he, or one of his kids, or one of his villains appear, and then what was originally something entirely different then BECOMES about Batman?
With the fillers we get shit centered on worldbuilding, the backstories of various side characters, and explorations of untraditional team ups where we can see the personalities of various members of The Rookie 9, The Sand Siblings, and envoys from different villages bounce off each other and find new dynamics.
And then we go back to canon, and it’s like-
“Can we talk about the fucked up implication about the Hyuuga’s Main vs Branch family thing? No? Okay, what about Hinata and Neji’s relationship towards Hanabi? That’s gotta be weird, for Neji his youngest cousin is being trained to have more say over how his life goes than he is, and he’s barely permitted to interact with her. For Hinata, that’s her little sister who her father has chosen over her as heir, and she hasn’t been allowed to talk to her since the day their father disowned her. They share blood, they live in the same town, but they’re basically strangers. Can we talk about that?
Okay, how about THIS- what if we do some shit with the Jinchuuriki besides Naruto, Gaara, and Killer Bee? Some of them are a lot older than Naruto is- were they all treated the way he was growing up? How did they handle it? How did that affect the kind of person they grew up into? He could learn from them, and they could learn from him! That would be huge, for him to see somebody like himself have lived long enough to reach adulthood, to be able to talk to and get advice from someone who understands- and it would be the perfect chance for him to do a Therapy no Jutsu to restore their faith in people/bonds! We could do the sad flute music and the swing and everything!
…also no. I see. Hm. Well… hm…
why don’t we try some world building? What DID happen to the Hidden Whirlpool? Who attacked them? There had to have been more survivors than just Kushina, Nagato and Karin’s parents. Where did they go? Could any of the one-off characters we met with unexplained strange abilities potentially have Whirlpool blood? And while we’re at it, why don’t we talk about Haku’s kekkei genkai? That seems worth revisiting, good lore.
Who are Konohamaru’s parents? We meet his grandfather and his uncle but no mom and dad? Are we ever going to talk about Anko having been Orochimaru’s original student again?
Sasuke Commits A War Crime While Naruto, Sakura and Kakashi Try To Drag Him Back To The Village #497 it is, then.”
