Hunter X Hunter

"I tried to watch [HunterXHunter] once," a friend said.  She then made a face that is difficult to describe, but I translated it as, "That was way too old school animation for me."

How sweet it is, this old school animation. 

I don't really hold this comment against her because I know that she's an artist herself, into yaoi and pretty boys and the more recent aesthetics.  I'm not sure why I even thought she might have been into such an old shonen jewel like HxH. I'm the omnivore who loves shojo and shonen, old and new, equally, the one who rarely notices art and lives mostly for the story (and characters). 

I think I just wanted someone to confirm for me that Hisoka is possibly the creepiest shonen antagonist in the history of the world. 

I've been reading the HxH manga since Viz started releasing it all those years ago (and before that, Yu Yu Hakusho, also by Yoshihiro Togashi and also an excellent shonen title in both manga and anime form), and Hisoka creeped me out to an extreme degree from day one.  He's a total sociopath.

It's not like that character type is unfamiliar.  There are a lot of sociopaths in manga and anime; they make great antagonists and villains.  So I'm not sure exactly why Hisoka makes me so . . .  unsettled, I guess. 

I think it's not the uniqueness of the character type so much as the world and characters who surround him that makes him so effectively unsettling.  I liked HXH's world from the start because it's so unsentimental.  Sure, the main protagonist is kind of a cute-looking kid, but he's tough as nails, stubborn, unreasonable, and committed to his own code of ethics, and there's really nothing traditionally cute about him.  The cutest character is almost a soulless killer, for Pete's sake.

The world of HXH is violent and hard, sometimes almost unspeakably brutal (man, that fight with Hanzo was tough to watch).  The main characters are really aware of this, aware that sometimes there are no easy answers and sometimes no right answers at all.  They're all driven.  The pace can be unrelenting; the situations appalling. 

Gon's father left him to be raised by his aunt; Gon left her behind to go find his father.  Leorio lost a friend because they couldn't afford medical help.  Kurapika's whole clan was slaughtered for money.  Killua is an assassin-from-birth who's trying to get a conscience.  It's way more complicated and awful than that, but you have to read it or watch it to see the depth and scope of the whole thing. 

I might recommend starting with Viz's second box set where things get really out of control.  There's an original arc that's actually good, and there are some fights that are amazing and sometimes hard to watch, though they did take the manga's violence down a notch.  I think I'm glad because I remember that fight with Hanzo being even worse in the manga . . .

The thing that keeps me reading is that Gon is not a simple person; lots of people in the story make the mistake of thinking he is, and I bet many readers who didn't stick with the series thought so, too.  I stay with it because at least once a volume, Gon reacts in a way that I just don't expect.  Most of his interactions with Hisoka fall under this category.

I guess I must be expecting the cutesy good boy shonen response.  For some reason.  Still.  Sometimes I think I have Gon figured out, but then he throws me with a reaction I couldn't have predicted that is nonetheless completely consistent with his character.  A lot of Togashi's characters in this series are like that.  It's kind of realistic in a way. 

Since you don't know everything about a person (you learn more as you know them longer), you can't predict what they'll do or how they'll react.  You don't know a lot of the whys for their behavior, so they surprise you more at first the more you get to know them.  The extreme situations the HXH characters are in make it seem a bit exaggerated, but not completely unrealistic.

It's that juxtaposition of cute, young-but-not-naive-or-as-innocent-as-you-think-he-should-be main character and brutal world that makes this a Shonen Jump Advanced title (OT/16+), and it's the interaction of all the characters in this world with Gon that makes me keep coming back. 

Or maybe I just want to know what Hisoka's up to next.  Shiver.


Have you seen the manga or the anime?  Any thoughts?