Bleach Filler List: Every Episode You Can Skip

Summary

• Bleach has 165 filler episodes, which is over half of the original anime’s episode count.
• While most of the filler content in Bleach adds little to the series, there are a few standout episodes and arcs worth watching.
• The Zanpakuto Rebellion arc is a recommended filler arc that enhances the established lore, introduces unique aspects, and features great animation and fight scenes.

Bleach has an excessive amount of filler episodes, making it necessary to have a list of which episodes are essential and which aren’t. As with other long-running anime adapted from manga, Bleach often employed filler to pad the show out. This made Bleach and many other anime like it come off as tiresome and a poor substitute for the manga, which is why one of the biggest draws of Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War has been that it’s adapting the final arc of the manga from start to finish without any filler.

All in all, Bleach is another long-running anime with too much filler, and here’s a list of every episode that can be skipped. While the definition of filler in media has become somewhat nebulous, for anime adaptations, it’s generally accepted that filler is anything that wasn’t in the source material. It should also be stated that none of this is necessarily a criticism of the episodes; there are many times that filler episodes provide great content, but that doesn’t change the fact that they can be skipped, and bleaches are no exception.

Every Filler Episode Of Bleach

When added all together, Bleach has 165 filler episodes, over half of the original anime’s episode account. Calling that egregious would be an understatement, and what made them even worse was that, because of how long Bleach’s canon arcs were, the filler episodes would often cause the main story to abruptly stop for months. For anyone who watched Bleach as it aired, that practice undoubtedly made the experience worse than it needed to be, and with how often the content was tedious stories that detracted from the established canon, it was almost always impossible to justify.

Is Any Of Bleach’s Filler Worth Watching?

While most of Bleach’s filler content adds very little to the series, there are some filler episodes and arcs that stand out. Episode #132, “Hitsugaya, Karin, and Soccer Ball”, for example, is a surprisingly good episode for how well Toshiro and Karin play off each other and for being one of the few times Karin gets any meaningful character work. The Forest of Menos arc is also worth watching for how it expands on the series lore, and that especially makes sense when considering how it was a story Tite Kubo had wanted to write in the manga, but didn’t have the time for.

If any filler should be watched, however, it’s the Zanpakuto Rebellion arc. Unlike the other long filler arcs of the anime, the conflict in the Zanpakuto Rebellion arc doesn’t clash with the established lore, only enhancing it, and having a chance to see everyone’s Zanpakuto spirits and their personalities gave the arc a great hook, especially since those aspects and others would later be incorporated into canon. Add in some great animation and fight scenes, and the arc perfectly shows that while most of Bleach’s filler wasn’t worth watching, there were definitely some gems every so often.

Which Bleach Filler Episodes You Should Skip

As noted above, the Bount arc is considered one of the worst filler arcs in the original Bleach anime because of how awkwardly it disrupts the flow from the Soul Society arc to the Arrancar arc. At 45 episodes long, the arc also painfully drags on, and anyone familiar with the manga will be dying to get to the next canonical episode. The Bount also just don’t make much sense within the lore of Bleach, as their association with immortality goes against the entire premise of Soul Reapers.

Another filler arc commonly derided by fans is the New Captain Shusuke Amagai arc, which deals with a new captain being selected to lead Squad Three after Gin Ichimaru defected to Aizen’s side. Its placement is extremely awkward, as it disrupts the main characters’ struggles in Hueco Mundo for this largely irrelevant introduction of a new Captain who ultimately won’t stick around because he’s not canon. Given the mix of powers seen in the arc, there’s also no way to slot it cleanly into the show’s timeline.

A common refrain from Bleach fans is for new viewers to skip all filler episodes on their first watch through, and only then return and watch filler if they’re dying for more Bleach content. Since the Bleach filler tends to give a lot more time with characters who otherwise don’t get a lot of focus, it can be a great way to spend more time with a favorite character, especially popular ones like Toshiro Hitsugaya. Characterization in the filler can be a bit strange at times, particularly when it comes to characters who were largely unknown in canon, like Yamamoto before Thousand-Year Blood War.

How Bleach’s Filler Compares To Other Shonen Anime

Where Does Bleach Stand In Terms Of Filler?

With 165 filler episodes out of 392, Bleach‘s filler accounts for roughly 42% of its total length; that puts it roughly on par with Naruto, which was about 40% filler, and far above One Piece and Dragon Ball, which are roughly 9% and 13% filler, respectively. Granted, Bleach is a lot shorter than those anime and others, but the fact that Bleach would devote so much of its time to filler episodes still highlights one of the biggest problems with long-running anime, and it’s part of why the original anime was so divisive for so many years.

Another point against Bleach is how it uses filler in canon episodes. It’s common for anime to stretch out what was originally a short chapter with original content to pad the runtime of an episode, but whereas anime like Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, and modern One Piece typically use that as a means of fleshing out the original story, Bleach will typically needlessly drag out its story with flashbacks and unnecessary fighting and slapstick. Naruto and Dragon Ball are also guilty of that, but unfortunately, Bleach has far fewer moments of it resulting in something good.

Another point that works against Bleach is the overall quality of its filler content. While filler, in general, tends to be very tedious, anime like Dragon Ball and One Piece at least occasionally use it for good character moments or to add to the worldbuilding in ways their manga couldn’t. However, between how often the filler arcs awkwardly disrupt the main story and how they typically revolve around irrelevant characters and concepts, Bleach‘s filler episodes tend to be of much lower quality than other anime, even if the difference in quality isn’t that great, at the end of the day.

How Thousand-Year Blood War is Fixing Bleach’s Filler Problem

Fortunately, the revival series Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War hasn’t needed filler, since the series is already complete in manga form. The pacing of the series is much better as a result of this lack of filler, and it feels much more like the story as it was meant to be. With the series complete, it’s much easier to map out how long a particular arc or scene should be, given the total number of episodes being produced. Thousand-Year Blood War is also being produced in a different format, with episodes airing in separate “cours” of 12-13 episodes at a time.

That doesn’t mean that the anime adaptation of Thousand-Year Blood War is a perfect 1:1 with the manga, however. Studio Pierrot, producers of the anime, have been working closely with Tite Kubo, the creator of the manga, to enhance the ending of the series further, incorporating new material that had to be cut from the manga to meet tight deadlines. Thousand-Year Blood War has also been operating at an extremely quick pace, with 4 to 5 chapters adapted per episode, meaning some scenes are being cut for time if they don’t substantially impact the story.

In this way, the anime-original material is working to enhance the surrounding material, explaining things that went unexplained before, or showcasing events that happened offscreen. That’s a far sight better than “filler,” which was often actively detrimental to the canon of the series and rarely took the opportunity to expand on things that deserved more focus.

Where To Stream Bleach

All episodes of the original Bleach anime are currently streaming on Hulu and Disney Plus, and both services have their benefits. Both services offer the original series as well as Thousand-Year Blood War, so it’s really a matter of preference. For the complete Bleach experience, including the newest series, fans may prefer Hulu despite the ad breaks. Unfortunately, neither service has any of the series’ four anime movies, though those are filler, so fans only wanting canon events might not be disappointed to miss them.

Regardless of how fans experience Bleach though, the filler shouldn’t be used to measure the actual canon material. Bleach was one of the biggest Shonen Jump titles of all time for good reason, but the filler doesn’t always do a great job capturing what makes the series so remarkable. Knowing which episodes are filler and which aren’t can be essential for enjoying Bleach.