itsybitsyjoltik:

1. What is Hunter x Hunter? And why should I watch it?

hunter x hunter, or hxh, is a series created by yoshihiro togashi, also known for creating yu yu hakusho. (he’s also married to naoko takeuchi, creator of sailor moon, and the two of them tend to put little cameos of each other’s work in their respective series. it’s really cute.) it is a shounen action series, so if you aren’t into that kind of thing, it’s probably not for you. it’s a lot smarter about how it handles its tropes than a lot of other shounen action series, though!

(mind, it’s not as good as the fullmetal alchemist manga/fma brotherhood, imo, but not a lot is, and i personally prefer hxh on the whole. ymmv though.)

it’s like…hxh is tropey but it knows it, and it doesn’t always take its tropes in quite the places you’d expect them to go. there’s almost no tournament arcs (unlike yyh, which was like 90% tournament arc…probably partly due to editor meddling, really), and just about every arc dabbles in a different genre. there are almost no typical good guys vs. the bad guys end of arc Good Conquers Evil showdowns, and arcs pretty much always naturally flow into the next arc. if you’re looking for a good ol’ shounen beat ’em up, you might find it a little anticlimactic, but i really appreciate its writing, personally.

it also deals a lot with things like dealing with trauma and revenge, but i’ll get to that later.

the obligatory power system is also really well thought out and consistent, and there’s not really any obnoxious instant powerups – any shortcuts taken are really risky and can and do have serious consequences.

2. Which version should I watch/read?

so there’s two separate hunter x hunter anime and one manga. the manga is the orignal version and the version that’s truest to togashi’s original vision. i believe it’s currently 349 chapters/32 volumes and 9 uncompiled chapters long (plus some backstory chapters). the first anime, which began airing in 1999. is i believe ~62 episodes and three OVA series, coming out to a little over 100 episodes total (don’t quote me on this, i’m less familiar with that version). the newer anime began airing in 2011 and ended last september, and it’s 148 episodes and two non-canon movies. (the movies kind of suck. maybe only watch them with alcohol and/or friends. i’ve watched them with a friend while drunk and i definitely recommend that.)

as for which one you should watch/read? the short version is the 2011 version’s a pretty safe choice. the longer version is. really long, so it’s its own post here.

3. You never actually said what it’s about.

shit, that’s right, I didn’t. well, I mean, as mentioned it kind of flits around from genre to genre a lot, so it’s a little hard to describe as a whole. uh, basically, it’s set in a fantasy world sort of like our world but a lot different, too. in this world, there’s these people called hunters, and they’re basically professional badasses. there’s this annual test called the hunter exam which is both dangerous and notoriously hard to pass which you have to take to become a licensed hunter, but a ton of people take it every year anyway because it’s such a prestigious career. our hero, gon freecss, was abandoned by his father ging freecss, a famous hunter, at a young age, and he decides at the age of 12 to become a hunter in his own right to try to find ging and also to try to find out why being a hunter was more important to ging than raising him. along the way, he makes some really important friendships, ends up with a really rad (albeit dysfunctional) found family, and, uh. ultimately ends up going through a lot of traumatic shit a 12 year old really shouldn’t have to deal with. yeah.

i don’t want to make the series sound bleak on the whole because it’s really not, there’s a lot of fun and cute things that happen and even in the darkest moments it’s never at like. oppressively grimdark levels. it’s a fucking shounen series. but there’s definitely things that happen that are likely to give you a case of The Feels so you might want to brace yourself. especially when you get to the chimera ant arc.

4. Okay. If you can’t really describe the plot, tell me about the characters.

this is gon freecss! he is the main protagonist and a literal ball of sunshine. okay, well. gon is definitely a take on the classic energetic shounen protagonist archetype, so if you tend to hate that kind of protagonist, you might have a hard time liking gon. i think togashi has some really interesting things to say about that character type, though! he does a really great job folding in flaws that stem naturally from that type of character into gon’s character, and even if those flaws aren’t apparent right away, they definitely end up having consequences later on. it turns out a stubborn refusal to give up no matter what can backfire, since stubbornness isn’t always enough to make up for a lack of strength. a strong moral compass can be a scary thing when it’s slightly askew from a normal sense of morality. and boundless optimism isn’t always a good thing when it translates into a refusal to accept reality. there’s also arguably a really interesting underlying sense of, like…self-worth issues in gon’s character, due to his abandonment by ging. gon is definitely a deeper character than he appears at first glance, but at first glance he’s pretty adorable, too.

look at this little shit right here. i really wish i had that bob’s burgers “little king trash mouth” or w/e screencap handy bc that’s basically killua. he’s a fucking nerd. he will rip your heart out and hand it to you and you’ll say thank you. hoo boy. so killua is the same age as gon, and they become friends like immediately. but also like killua’s a 12 y.o. ex-assassin. yeah. uhh very abusive backstory so head’s up about that…on the surface it’s kind of handled in the whole ~it’s okay to put little kids in really dangerous situations for the sake of training bc it’s for their own good~ shounen kind of way but. it’s definitely handled as having way more fucked up ramifications than that. the series also kind of touches on how emotional/psychological abuse can be just as damaging as physical abuse, if not moreso, so that’s kind of cool. all that being said, as i mentioned before, he’s a little shit, so it never really goes into overwrought angst territory wrt killua’s family issues. his friendship with gon is…really, a beautiful thing; they’re foils to each other in a lot of ways – where gon’s an optimist, killua tends toward pessimism; where gon will literally never give up regardless of the consequences, killua’s a lot more cautious, etc. – so in general, they balance each other out really well, and they’re both each other’s first friends and just…so important to each other. you’ll cry over their friendship. (there’s also a ton of subtext, at least from killua’s end of things, later on. i am not responsible if you start shipping 12 year olds. well, maybe i am, but i’m not sorry.)

(i have no good screencaps of kurapika on my laptop. i probably do on my netbook, but that doesn’t do any good if i can’t get it to acknowledge it has a hard drive. i’m sorry. he’s the blond one.)

so uh. genocide backstory warning. kurapika’s like a less obnoxious proto-sasuke (since hxh technically started before naruto). his clan had eyes that turn red when angry or otherwise experiencing strong emotions (which he later learns to do on command, thus making him a walking hulk joke), and the whole clan except kurapika was massacred to harvest their eyes and sell them on the black market. kurapika’s understandably kind of pissed about that. his whole arc basically boils down to him trying to track down the stolen eyeballs and get vengeance on the group that killed his clan, and the kind of things that can happen when a good person loses themself to revenge. (he’s not the only character to touch on that, but that’s spoilers.) when he’s not being a tiny ball of 17 year old rage, he does care deeply about his friends, and he’s actually the biggest sassmouth you’ve ever seen. also, a bunch of people have trans/nonbinary headcanons about him, so that’s cool.

at first glance, leorio seems like a money-obsessed jerk, but he’s really, really not. under his loudmouthed exterior, he has one of the biggest hearts in the series. if you’ve seen yyh, he’s basically equivalent to doctor kuwabara. (there’s another character later on in the series who’s basically literal kuwabara, so that’s two kuwabaras for the price of one. really, that should be reason enough to watch hxh.) leorio is 100% dadfriend. look at him there, proud dading it up. leorio’s comparatively the most normal of the four protags – he decided to take the hunter exam to get the money to go to medical school, so he could become a doctor and cure kids who don’t have enough money to go to a regular doctor, since his friend died of a preventable disease when he was younger. as a comparatively normal guy with a relatively normal goal, he kind of tends to get dragged into circumstances that are way over his head a lot, but he takes it like a champ.

there’s a lot of other characters and so many of them are really good, but since i clearly am awful at keeping things concise, i’ll leave it at the main four so this post doesn’t become even more of a behemoth than it already is.

5. Cool. But no series is without flaws, so like…

yeah, i’m definitely not going to pretend that hxh doesn’t have issues. probably the biggest flaw is that it’s not finished. the manga’s still technically running, but it’s frequently on hiatus due to togashi’s health issues (for instance, it was supposed to come off hiatus at around the same time as the 2011 anime ended last september, but then the hiatus got extended and there still haven’t been any new chapters almost a year later). the 2011 anime ends off at a point that wraps up the most glaring loose ends, but there’s still a ton of unanswered questions that are left hanging. the manga’s on a new arc with 10 chapters of setup and exposition, but not a whole lot has actually happened. it’s frustrating, and we might not ever actually get the answers we want.

the other really blatant issue with the series is its lack of female characters, especially in the early arcs. the later arcs do start getting a little better about that, and most of the female characters that do exist are really great. there’s even a canon trans girl, although she only appears in one arc so far. still, the ratio of male to female characters is really high, and i really wish there were more female characters with more screentime.

as far as lgbt representation goes, especially wrt the lgb part, it’s. not great. there’s really not a whole lot beyond just subtext, and the most obviously queercoded character is a whole mess of problematic shit in and of himself.

hisoka is…kind of a fifth main character and a primary antagonist at the same time. the thing about hisoka is he literally gets off on fighting people, and he’s very indiscriminate about who he wants to fight as long as they’re strong enough for it to be interesting. you could argue that he’s technically not a pedophile since he gets off on the fighting itself rather than the person, but it’s…really uncomfortable, and although it’s treated as creepy in the series, it’s never really…quite condemned for what it is. ugh.

so i’m definitely not going to pretend that hxh is for everyone or that it doesn’t have issues, but i love it and think it’s definitely worth checking out if you like shounen action series and it doesn’t contain any aspects that are dealbreakers for you personally.

(i only touched on some triggery aspects within this post, but if you have triggers you’re concerned about and want to know if it’s something you need a warning for, send me an ask and i’ll try to help!)