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No. 112365
>>112364
There's this thing on the internet, where armchair critics have heard the term "filler" and don't really understand what it means, so they apply it willy-nilly even where it doesn't apply, like they do with Mary Sue and Hipster, to the point that it becomes meaningless. Really, outside of an work that's an adaptation from one medium to another, it's "filler" isn't really a thing that can exist.
But even if it were, it's not supposed to refer to episodes that advance a character's emotional arc or provide reduced tension for the sake of pacing and characterization. If it were, you would have to refer to pretty much the entirety of Cowboy Bebop as "filler," since there are only about four "plot" episodes in the entire series. That is not how filler works. Filler is supposed to have no relation to the rest of the work. Even if the only effect that an episode has is that it foreshadows something that happens later, or sets the audience's expectations about how a character behaves so that a later character moment has the appropriate amount of emotional torque, it's not filler.
Sometimes the fact that "nothing happens" (which is impossible, but people who focus on plot over character have a bad habit of not being able to see the forest for the trees) is important to the story that's being told.
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