Posted 2006-12-05, 10:39 AM
in reply to hotdog's post "Filler?"
Filler is material that is not created or endorsed by the original author.
For anime this means that the animation studio hired some random schmuck to write what amounts to fan-fiction and based an episode on it.
This is usually done to distance the anime and manga from each other. For example, an average episode of Naruto is 1.7 manga chapters. Since they are both weekly, you can see that eventually it caught up... and has had filler episodes for over a year now.