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What's Hexbear's take on Hunter X Hunter?
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this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2024
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It's not explicit, but yes the sort-of queer-coded serial killing clown villain who's really obsessed with Gon in a way that vacillates between "frenemy wants the target of his obsession to reach his full power level out of platonic interest in power levels" and "licking his lips while he threatens to murder the child he is obsessed with" really sucks as, like, a narrative decision the author made.
It's not the only problematic thing about the series either, it's just the most egregious and persistent part. It's really not worth looking past either, tbh. The best the series gets is just like generic shonen fight arc slop interspersed with generic shonen training arc slop in a setting with some interesting worldbuilding. I think the series is kind of historically important in the same way DBZ or Sailor Moon is, but tbh the things it does well JoJo does better and in more interesting ways, and for the anime at least the HxH pacing is terrible to the point that it becomes an agonizing slog to get through.
Hunter x Hunter definitely isn't generic. Nen is a really interesting narrative device that Togashi uses to make the fights in HxH have more layers. Also HxH doesn't have to stop every few seconds to remind the audience that the protagonists are Good(TM) and they have to kill the villains and save the world like other Shonen. The worldbuilding of HxH actually is the weakest part for me especially with the chimera ant arc being set in Togashi's liberal imagination of North Korea. Like "Yorknew city" isn't very subtle. Togashi is definitely better with writing/developing existing factions and character dynamics rather than world building.
What other problematic aspects does the series have? I'm interested to know.
I'm comparing it against the peaks of the genre, like JoJo and Kill la Kill where every fight is basically calvinball but they make it compelling anyways. I get the feeling HxH was genre-defining when it was written, but it just feels kind of standard now.
I was including stuff like Nen and the weirdness of the Hunter Association as worldbuilding. All the mechanical bits of how the world works, the factional landscape, whatever story is implied to be going on when the camera isn't looking, I'd put all that under the umbrella of worldbuilding.
You pointed one out yourself: the way the second half of the chimera ants arc took place in a racist caricature of the DPRK. I'd add onto that the way the first half of the same arc took place in a racist caricature of Latin American revolutionary states/movements that it portrayed as being some sort of anprim narco cartels who only tolerated technology when it had to do with selling drugs.
There's also some generic transphobic gags in the first season during the prison part of the hunter exam arc. Gon at one point casually mentioning having been hired as an escort/prostitute by female sailors was weird and felt like a pointless and creepy random throwaway line to put in. That's all that stands out in my memory, but it has been a long time since I saw it so there could be other things that I missed or that I've forgotten.
Killua only interprets Gon as being an escort, there's no actual confirmation of anything. The weirder part was the stuff around it like Palm wanting to date Gon.
The setting was kinda indecipherable for me when I first watched it but I see where you're coming from. HxH definitely reeks from the lib early 2000s brainworms. The caveat I'd like to put is that Togashi doesn't think liberalism is the answer though
chimera ant spoilers
The arc ends with the V5 (basically the world's NATO/Western hegemony) covering up everything and creating a huge refugee crisis (so instead of ants it's just that the racist caricature of Kim Ill sung wanted to do a mass murder-suicide still yikes but not as bad as other shonens that don't question the status quo at all). It's also implied that had the hunter association not stepped in that other countries would just nuke the ants and everything else out of existence.The very next major arc is where its revealed that the ants came from the V5's illegal expeditions into the Dark Continent (very much a nod to how Europeans sought to colonize Africa) and that all these catastrophes that happen are because the imperialist ruling class only seeks to elevate its own power rather than deal with the contradictions of neoliberalism.
It feels like a very post-soviet era story that's very nihilistic about humanity. Still a lot of Japanese brainworms though.
Which sucks because Togashi really does make an effort to draw gender-nonconforming + trans characters. The final season of the anime is centered around helping a trans girl get away from her terrible family so it's not all lost.
The girl with the wish magic powers? Somehow I either missed that she was trans or forgot about it, though my memory of that season is pretty hazy because I both had sort of mentally checked out after slogging through the chimera ants arc in a couple of days and because I switched from the dub to the sub partway through because the dub was something like five or six episodes behind at the time.