Hunter x Hunter Chimera Ant Arc

So, with the Hunter x Hunter game coming out, this is the first time I was exposed to opinions about Hunter x Hunter-the-show. And I was surprised to learn that the Chimera Ant arc seems to be pretty well-regarded?

(Unmarked spoilers below, title says it all. If you don’t feel like reading a bunch of whinging you can probably also skip it lmao)

Which is a huge surprise to me, because I thought it was actual dogshit lmao. It really felt like my guy just wanted to get a lifetime of shock scenes out of his system, but at the same time the true weekly shonen series pacing sets in.

It just didn’t work for me at all. And Freeza wannabe Meruem ultimately just wanting to play videogames with his prisoner of war/girlfriend is… not endearing, or nearly enough to address the entire rest of it. Yeah I get it, he got “defeated” by capital-H Humanity or whatever. I don’t care lol.

And there’s next to no progress of the main plot. The only major plot point is Gon continuing his trend of being a selfish Combat Autist™, which could’ve been addressed in a much more interesting fashion, especially after taking advantage of Killua’s trust/codependence so much during Greed Island.

But hey, it’s very shocking that that guy whose name I don’t remember died. That’s such a big motivating factor, totally. Gon saw him like three times in his life, so obviously there’s major emotional attachment.

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I liked PARTS of the Chimera Ant arc but I agree with 90% of what you’re saying yeah. end of CA was also when I finally felt Gon had ceased to resemble anyone I could ever sympathise with (admittedly a long time coming, and POSSIBLY intentional, but who knows?)

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Idk if intentional, but definitely in-character. The best way I’ve heard it described is that HxH is “the story of a boy whose father left to buy cigarettes and never came back; so he embarks on a journey, not to find his father, but to figure out what’s so cool about smoking.”

In the earlier arcs, when the stakes are lower (and Gon is still more purely a child), this special interest of his more often coincides with standard Power of Friendship shounen boy behaviour, like when he goes to “rescue” Killua from his parents. But even then, Killua is his friend mostly because the friendship is compatible with his pursuit of Hunterdom.

It’s very hard to unsee this distinction, even in earlier parts, if you look for it. And Chimera Ants, with its comically heightened stakes, completely obliterates any plausible deniability that it is anything other than that.

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