Thread:Lord Hyōga/@comment-4944362-20200419003501/@comment-4576906-20200425234838

Yes, after a question I got earlier last week, I've been familiarizing myself more with the manga. Amazingly, the Final Act comprises half of the entire manga, even though it's only 26 episodes. I thought this was because they cut out a lot of miscellaneous "side quest" type chapters, but amazingly I think I only found two or three that don't show up in the anime. One involving a mosquito yokai, and another involving a cat-possessed nun. Idk how they trimmed down so much to fit it all in one season, but I think maybe there's just so much action in the latter half of the series that it takes less time to animate it than it does pages to print out in a manga. A lot of the battles are also either truncated or completely altered.

As far as I know though, I don't imagine the manga deviates too much from the anime. I usually go by the anime when writing articles, since usually it adds more stuff than it changes or omits. So the anime kind of acts as a "final draft", if you will. I'll eventually get around to reading the first half of the series, after I finish the second half (to see how the Final Act differs, which is substantial in many areas). For now I think we should just give the anime the benefit of the doubt. There's a lot of filler in the first anime (20%; which is actually low by anime standards--Naruto has a 41% filler content rate), and we're still able to keep the overall arc structure. Even though the arcs are pretty Naraku-centric, I included filler inside that because it's mostly just side-tracks from the main story.

So like, let's say Naraku's Barrier arc is a third tier heading; Panther Devas would be a tier 4 heading, even though it's "unrelated" to the overall arc of that season. So events of side quests/filler/movies can still be put in their own headings, just underneath the overall headings of the 10 arcs I organized. Since InuYasha doesn't follow a clearly-delineated arc formula for organizing the series, we just have to organize it ourselves by the "main themes/plot trajectories", and then anything that doesn't neatly fall into that scheme will just have to be included by dent of proximity. Luckily, some material, like the second movie, fit into the arc structure, since they "find" Naraku during the "Find Naraku arc", but then lose him again at the end of the movie and have to continue looking for him, which leads to the Mt. Hakurei arc. The other movies are more self-contained, so they just need to go into their closest arc for convenience's sake.