NaruTo

Imagine a number of colleges all like HMC. Now imagine they all have lots of clinic projects, and no thesis. Now imagine when you graduate you become a professor.

Now imagine you're all ninjas instead of engineers. And you have internal magical powers.

That would be the setting (pretty silly when you describe it that way, huh?) Good action, reasonable drama and humor. The protagonist has a mythical demon sealed inside him which makes him something of an outcast, so one of the major themes is Friendship.

And now imagine that HMC has 10 years of pointless review classes before they teach you anything. That's what the filler is like :).

• It's true, the manga-generated plot is drastically superior to the filler
• It's actually more like imagine if HMC has 10 years of learning about creative writing, or something else that's generally orthogonal to things learned at Mudd. And it'd be between your sophomore and junior years, not before they teach you anything.
  • And then with sporadic outbreaks of similar required courses during your junior and senior years. Somebody really should compare Naruto filler to the HumRequirements?, although the latter are less painful by far.