I have a theory that none of the episodes are fillers, starting from book one.

Think about it, even though the episode is technically considered "filler," every single one of them is referenced in some form in another episode, or has a tiny bit of new information.

For example (one example from every season):
111- The Great Divide: The first episode ever in the series to mention Ba Sing Se, AND it was referenced in The Ember Island Players.

205- Avatar Day: Told us more about Kyoshi, and over all was referenced the in the finale.

309- Nightmares and Daydreams: This episode actually had a lot of foreshadowing, and it referenced the war meeting, which was over all important in the finale.

I dont understand why people are calling certain episodes fillers.

Avatar is not based on a comic, it was a planned tv show, every episode was planned to have certain dialogue info, action. etc...

Something like naruto, taken from the comic, sometimes catches up to the comic and has no story to tell. And they cant just stop working, so they create bs stories. And because these are bs stories, they spend less money till there is enought story in the manga for them to up the quality again. So the quality of drawings and animation fades, and the characters become different people, doing and saying things the mangaka never intended. Sometimes, the animation studio dont want to catch up to the manga to quickly because they fear enter ing another era of fillers, so they make goku hold his spirit bomb for 10 episodes. And this is in some way filler i guess.

So basically, the animation is juggleing around the manga ka, so if they catch up too quickly, we know were gonna see a lotta fillers and fillers usually suck. Thus a filler is bad, although if they did a good job on the fillers maybe we wouldnt consider it a negitive thing.

Avatar dose not juggle around a manga ka. It is a planned tv show intended to have 3 seasons. And it takes a while to write and animate each episode opposed to anime which is supposed to knock one episode out every week. So how can there be a filler. Its taking anime jargon based on how japanese animation works, and applieing it to avatar which did things differently.

Also, the story dosnt always have to advance forward. I mean your watching this to be entertained. This isnt a job or somthing. Wheather the story is moving forward or some comic releif is provivded, eather way your being entertained. Every epiode of spong bob would be filler then. I personally loved ember island players. And it was kinda sad cuz i expected them to have one final adventure before sozin, but instead you had a play, and i kinda felt like the characters were bowing or saying good bye before the end, instead of your usual, lets save dad and suki or find the guy who killed my mother. Plus i would say ember island players highlighted all the unresovled problems before the problems were confronted in sozin.

Anyway i think there are no fillers in avatar and perhaps its the wrong place to use the word.

sullen's right, every episode was relevant, of course some were more relevant than others, but everything was thought out and planned from the beginning. and character development not being important to the plot...hmm .

filler is more like powering up for five episodes in DBZ.

oh, I read more of his post, he basically already said that, darn.

Well...In my eyes filler episodes are episodes that either

A: Don't advance the plot MUCH

B:Could the season make sense without the episode

The Painted Lady

The Beach

The Avatar and The Firelord (flashback episode mostly)

The Runaway (to some extent)

The Ember Island Players (although it did give us lolz)

And a large chunk of The Phoenix King.

Of course that's just my opinion.

But they were still all excellent episodes, filler or not.

True, thanks for pointing that out.

I'm new here by the way, but I'm a long time member at a Naruto forum, so I'm not a total noob.

(People are much nicer over here btw.)