tsukum:

secretendings:

basically i feel like everyone kind of ignores how gons (canonically stated) history as a young child of being abused for unclear “romantic” and/or sexual purposes by adult women affects his character when it affects A Whole Fucking Heck Of A Lot

upon a reread, the way gon’s reaction to the scary loss of physical control around hisoka from the dart drug when his tag was taken is one of the earliest hints that gon might be carrying some of this baggage, especially with how he talks about it to kurapika on the blimp afterward. a lot of his interactions with hisoka, as well as thought processes and vocabulary wrt getting thrills from physical violence at this stage, are age-inappropriate and other characters who are at least a little older and present for this do express at least some degree of concern or at the very least discomfort. equally telling/worrying is the way that he blames himself for the actions of adults. it explains everything from big things (compounded with his abandonment trauma, it goes further to explain why his self-worth issues are at the level we see them revealed to be in the chimera ant arc) to tiny, tiny things (at one point in yorkshin pakunoda nonchalantly puts her arm around killua and we briefly see gon in the background suddenly become watchful and on the defensive)

togashi writes about characters with all different kinds of trauma and has written about characters with sexual abuse trauma before (severe tw in link), so forgive me if i think that what was alluded to in the weightlifting scene was not the lighthearted-in-bad-taste-joke many read it as, especially coming from a character whose default coping mechanism whenever awful things happen to him is to try and normalize them to himself