Yeah, that reminds me I am trying to convince myself this is not a shitty anime lol.
Haha, tell me about it. I've decided to watch shounen anime sparingly. See, some got into Naruto, some got into Bleach, some One Piece, some all three or combinations of them. The only reason I (or probably 85% of people) are still watching shounen anime like Naruto are because they got into them when they were 12 (as is my case) and have been following them for years now. It's like loyalty and nostalgia. When shounen anime first come out, they are usually pretty awesome. I've watched some of Fairy Tail. It's pretty cool, people love it. Naruto captivated audiences when it first hit the TV/Internet as well. It was truly amazing
to my 12-year-old self. But what inevitably happens, and I'm sure will unfortunately happen to Fairy Tail as well, is they eventually just get terrible, to be honest. Whether it's fillers, flashbacks, continuity errors, over-poweredness, repetition, etc. Shounen anime will have any of the aforementioned problems, and they usually become terrible to anyone who's not a die-hard fan. By the time they get out of the terrible and into the awesome (which Naruto has done in the manga and is on the brink in the anime), nobody else will watch them because 1. You have to have kept up with the series to know anything that's going on, and 2. They've heard so much about it and seen the terrible already that they don't want to have anything to do with it. So this is the issue with the long, tiring Shounen genre. /rant