3 Things I HATE About Hunter X Hunter | New World Review

hello and welcome to the new world review your source for everything anime and manga so long as that anime and or manga is hunt hunter otherwise we seem to have difficulty making videos but today we are here once again to focus on one of my greatest loves in all of media hunter hunter but instead of seeing its well-earned praises as per usual i'd actually like to talk about some things that tend to really annoy me about hunt hunter because it is a really strange series that i both loved and hated when going through it for the first time and while i will say that those things i dislike to become much more clear and easier to accept with every reread or re-watch there are still features about it today that i do have difficulty reconciling hunter hunter is not perfect absolutely nowhere near it and in fact the way i think of it is that hunter hunter is one of the world's largest but uncut and unrefined gems it holds massive value but not in a particularly clean way and that by the way is not necessarily a bad thing nothing i'm going to be discussing here is objectively bad they're just things that do annoy me personally but at the same time i will begrudgingly admit that they are essential in making hunter hunter what it is just like how you dear viewer are essentially making this channel what it is by subscribing to the new world review and thus receiving regular hunt hunter content uploaded straight into your youtube feed so please do join our association and let's keep this series alive during the darkest of hiatuses um before i really get into things i just want to say that i will not be mentioning the art when talking about any detracting features of hunter hunter the manga art is probably one of the most commonly brought up which is usually only done so by people who have read online scans of the weekly releases published in shonen junk which to be fair they can be glorified storyboards however most of if not all of these issues are fixed in the volume releases so i have nothing to complain about there because it's no longer an issue amazing i'm not so sure i can say the same for everything else and with that smooth aft transition my first big annoyance with hunter hunter is very generally togashi's story structure so despite working in the often wanky and narratively questionable world of theater i actually really tend to enjoy classically structured narratives in particular the super simple concepts of setup and payoff and there are many times in hunter hunter where things are painstakingly set up only to be abandoned with no payoff or then there are times when payoff occurs with no setup sometimes they even operate in conjunction to one another for example during york new city we spend a lot of time following milikey's journey and in a typical story we would be setting him up to be a major part of the greed island arc as either an antagonist or an ally because that is how setup and payoff works instead what we experience is the setup and then abandonment of this entire story thread with milikey and examples of this are very common in hunt hunter where you could remove entire subplots that are never resolved and the series itself would probably feel no different and my wife refers to this in her reviews as the practice of pansing which basically means togashi making the story up as he goes which means he will set up certain elements and then decide how to use them later down the line rather than planning them in advance which does lead to some very interesting stuff but it also means that more often than not a lot of setup pieces don't fit very nicely in the overall puzzle meaning that tagashi is forced to throw them out usually rather unceremoniously which isn't to say that all of this is accidental and i will say that togashi does quite often engage in deliberate subversion by setting something up with the intention of not paying it off like the final phase of the hunter exam where he laid out the structure of an entire tournament only to effectively conclude both it and the entire arc right after the first fight and in fact come to think of it almost every arc in the series ends with a super jarring and sudden halt like greed island where the finale took place in the form of a delightful quiz or the zeldic family arc which ended with killerwork just casually leaving the estate when the setup seemed like it was headed towards more extended conflict and due to this it can leave viewers or readers with a feeling of many arcs being underexplored like pabst heaven's arena which introduces concepts like floor masters and battle olympia only to have our main characters completely ignore them which is fun and i think a great metaphor for tagashi being too distracted with his own desires to pay attention to generally accepted story structure and at this point i really do want to emphasize that there is no right or wrong way to tell a story and i'm not saying that togashi is doing things wrong here definitely not however there are certainly more efficient ways than others to tell stories and togashi lands on the less efficient side of that scale meaning that there is a lot of time and energy invested into things that don't provide narrative profit which i think hunt hunter can suffer quite a bit from on your second or third read or watch through because you know what is and what is not going to be relevant with all of this said though the panting strategy is very high risk but also high reward because it leads to a feeling of complete unpredictability where a strictly plotted series can become easy to read well in advance because you can see the structure being built and eventually if you have enough foundation you'll be able to picture the house however with togashi it's almost like watching a magician he distracts you with certain elements whilst preparing others to hit you within the shadows so it's a style of storytelling that is something i both love and hate but hunter hunter simply would not be what it is today without it now my next general dislike is very much related to this idea it's actually a knock-on effect of the panting style which is presented in the frequency of vanishing and under-explored characters once again in a plotted story everything is designed with a purpose and if a character is introduced then ideally they will have a purpose and additionally if they are major characters then they would assume that they have some sort of arc to follow over the course of the story and this sort of thing can be really tricky to pull off when you don't plan too far in advance which you can see very clearly in hunter hunter where every new arc introduces a large band of new faces who have varying degrees of relevance and then after the conclusion of the arc they are for the most part never to be seen again because we don't really plan that far ahead now the elephant in the room here is obviously leoria he is the standout example because he was most certainly created with the intention of being a series mainstay but instead togashi either ran out of ways to keep him in the mix or simply didn't want to because his focus evolved and thus slayario had no place in a rather incredible proportion of hunter hunter and while i do understand that it is a bit annoying because i invested time into larrio and i grew to really like him so his absence was very felt but he is far from the only example hunt hunter is also full of characters who were just there sort of for the sake of being there sometimes with maybe arc specific roles and then they just vanish into the ether and i think a great example of this would be zepio this man exists almost exclusively to explain the process of various types of auctions a subplot that never really actually goes anywhere because eventually we abandon the whole idea of participating in the auction which leaves up here with very little purpose in this world and rather fittingly the last thing we see of him is being useless and defeated on the floor of the hunter exam in a plotted story zeppiel would either have been instrumental in getting gone and killed a copy of greed island or he would have not existed at all instead we have this strange middle ground approach where a surprising amount of characters fall into and i do want to say that these are not forgotten characters as many will claim that would imply that togashi accidentally stopped including them i would actually like to give togashi more credit and say that they were purposely abandoned because there was simply nothing else to do with them and another random example would be guarano gorenu has shockingly little purpose other than to exist and fill a slot in a game several slots actually via nen beast but other than that he i why i don't know why he exists and i don't care either i mean i like gaureno but i i feel like i don't really know anything about him and furthermore i don't necessarily want to he's just there and then he's not now this idea does have its advantages though because as much as i prefer characters with a grand purpose what this does is create a more realistic impression of the hunt hunter world to illustrate we have individuals like wing who are incredibly important to a singular section of story and then they appear maybe a couple of times in irrelevant capacities afterwards and i actually really like that we leave wing and zushi behind to do their own thing while we continue with hunter hunter and i would say the same for karapika biski the hunter association at large and yes even laeria which is contradictory to how i start at this point but that's why it's conflicting i both love and hate togashi's willingness to let characters go in favor of introducing new ones whose inevitable fate is also to disappear in a weird way it makes the world feel so much richer because we have that expansive breadth of characters to work with but their implementation or lack thereof does irk me quite a bit which also kind of leads into my third big gripe which is that i honestly don't feel like i truly understand the world of hunter hunter the thing about the first two points introducing unexplored concepts or vanishing characters is that it leads to a shallow overall picture of this world and not only that but the very nature of this planet or whatever it is seems to change with every arc the hunter exam painted this world as a highly dangerous almost magical place whereby after leaving the safety of whale island anything goes and this idea is then immediately contrasted by an arc that takes place in a civilized metropolis with no hints of supernatural or bizarre happenings outside of secret menus these ideas could not be more of a stark contrast and it paints a very jagged picture of the world and looking at a map doesn't actually help me reconcile the hunt hunter world either firstly because so many well-known locations aren't even identified on the map for example i can't tell you where whale island is or meteor city or the luxo province where the kurt clan once lived i can't tell you where any of those things are they could be quite literally anywhere meanwhile in a very inconsistent nature i can give you the exact locations of every stage of the hunter exam they're all right here on unnamed continent number three which is very specific but also frustratingly vague i really don't like that i know exactly where some things are and i know nothing about where other things are and even the things that i know where are i don't like that i don't know the name of the continent that they're on and i also think the series does a very questionable job of differentiating between some major locations like the hunter association headquarters we just got shown a miscellaneous city and if you're not really paying attention to the series at this point you just go huh that's york new city because that's the only city i know of but it's not the association headquarters is in swadani city which is located on unnamed continent number four and this is also where heaven's arena is although once again heaven's arena is in a completely different unnamed city on an unnamed continent which is like three metropolises that are mostly only differentiated by one central building otherwise aesthetically culturally and just generally atmospherically they all feel like the same place and i get that stuff like this won't annoy everyone and most people probably don't care whatsoever but i personally like having an internal compass for the world i'm invested in stuff like game of thrones would be a beautiful example because i always know exactly where i am in relation to everything else because the map makes sense and isn't just a flipped world map with arbitrary designations but maps aren't even the key thing because even in a series with no maps like one piece i still feel like i more or less know where i am at any given point for example right now we're on wano which i can't point to exactly on a map but i can tell you that it's right here in the new world which is sandwiched by the red line on two sides as well as north and west blue on the other it's not overly specific but it's a good general enough idea and to be fair sometimes hunter hunt does really well in this respect like the locations of ngl and escorto during the chimera ant arc they are geographically remarkable planned and placeable i always know where i am and what sort of culture i'm involved in during the chimera ant arc meanwhile if we're on whale islands though i can't tell you where that is which means i have no compass in operation and that annoys me i really wish more effort was given to actually detailing this world because right now we've been told of this magical dark continent which is endlessly fascinating but at the same time i feel like we're heading there leaving the vast majority of this human realm completely unexplored so i don't know i just wish the series was more consistent with caring about the world itself but that would require more plotting which would mean togashi adopting an entirely different mechanism of storycrafting so i will take the shaky world in exchange for the fantastic work we do get this is in no way a deal breaker for me in fact nothing i've mentioned here today is which is odd because basically what i've said when you think about it is that in hunter hunter what annoys me is the story the characters and the world you know just the complete narrative trifecta togashi does all of these basic elements in very strange ways which more often than not do work to the advantage of hunt hunter but in a very unrefined way which to put into a positive term would be raw hunter hunter is a glimpse into tagashi's raw consciousness whatever or whoever he's interested in at the time he will put on page sometimes those stories and characters will lead absolutely nowhere but that's also a nice touch of tangible reality injected into hunt hunter because very often in real life endeavours lead nowhere and we lose track of the people around us leading us to discover new people and new paths forward horus on a manga hunter hunter is very reflective of life which means that it can be an unsatisfying story because in many ways it follows the whims of reality much more so than its nature as a story and i both love and hate that but what i will say is that it never delves too far into either of those areas togashi in an effort that can only be described as somehow straddles that line just perfectly enough to make hunter hunter one of the most unique experiences in all of media but what do you guys think please do leave your thoughts in the comments below or even join my discord server and if you're keen for some more hunt on to content then please do go and check out some of my other videos or even subscribe to the channel for regular hunt under glory delivered straight into your youtube feed but for now this has been the new world review and i'll see you next time

Channel: NewWorldReview

Views: 140,776

Keywords: newworldreview, new world review, hunter x hunter, hxh, hate hxh, hate hunter x hunter, does anybody hate hunter x hunter, dislike hunter x hunter, hunter x hunter is bad, why do people like hunter x hunter, chimer ant arc too long, chimera ant, manga, hxh manga, hunter x hunter art, bad art, togashi, lazy, togashi lazy, hiatus, hiatus x hiatus, forgotten characters, togashi forgot, greed island, hunter exam, boring, yorknew, heavens arena, dark continent, succession war, zoldyck

Id: aOMdJ_KW7-A

Length: 12min 48sec (768 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 14 2020