Hunter x hunter: thoughts and impressions.

 I have already written one long blog post today but I feel like trying to write another. So let’s see how this goes.

I discovered hunter x hunter in the scanlation scene of the early two thousands. On a site I believe that was called Toryama world. I read obscure one shots and the first few arcs of Naruto and the always present in my teenage and adult life hunter x hunter.

I have watched hunter x hunter the anime (ether the original 90s one or the recent one that has blown up on the anime scene over the last near twenty years) at least once a week for twenty years.

It is often considered the goat anime and to me it is… it’s my favorite work of art and I have tried two or three times write about it in fairly rambling and unproductive way at least for my goal of understanding why it mean so much to me. 

It is at it’s core more influenced by videogames culture and old cheezy horror films then most anything else… except Akira Toryama who Yoshihiro Togashi seems to be more fascinated by why young rookie of his generation responded so intensely to this naive battle manga (basically super hero stories without the moral delusional state of super man or any other the self righteous two dimensional marvel stuff we in the west use to impose an escape pod in our internal accountability.) 

It seems to be a generational trauma founded on nuclear holocaust. And a one eighty turn in cultural identity from collective identity of submission to the emperor towards a capitalist individual driven economy… all the while knowing when you grew up you would work yourself to death as a salary man. 

This is the missing context in most discussion around the morally grey extreme escapism that came from japan over the second half of the twentieth century. I am not an expert… I just watch a lot of Godzilla and Japanese cartoons and have been obsessed with the culture for most of life since I outgrew X-men at six years old.

Before there was anime there video games and most of them that I enjoyed were from japan excluding X com and some obscure apple shareware and games like quake and Duke nuke em 3d. I also played a lot of Warcraft two and three as a youth…. Until I discovered nes roms around eight or nine years old then I obsessively hunted down any jrpg or action game I could get my hand on. 

In the west our products are tame and sterile in the mainstream. In japan it was anarchy in a way that very unique and fulfilled a need for personal expression as a product. Don’t get me wrong most anime is very stupid as the rule of life is 90% of everything is shit but in Japanese pop culture terms is more life 70% is shit.

I have been reading a lot of Japan zen poetry over the last few years. So I know there is a very big gap between basho and Pokémon that is not what I am saying…. Closer to my statement it Yoshihiro Togashi is the Japanese comic book equivalent of a edger Alan Poe.  His writing is dark and near camp in how hyper analytical it is.

There is a depth that is founded on teaching a moral lesson that we are in a psychological war of bouncing between escape and reality. Reality the marble slab escape is thinking that if we meticulously carve a masterpiece out of it… that it will change anything. There is struggle and near struggle exclusively in this life. We have a futile struggle and yet we persist. 

We live in a world of carved marble and over abundance of opportunity for insignificant progress  if this sounds like a contradiction then you are starting to pick up on the ambiguous lesson of hunter x hunter.

Killua is a very absurd character like most all the character in the series… and he resonates so hard because the absurdism is treated dead-pan and purely serious. His arc is overcoming the trauma of being a preteen assassin. A severely abused serial killer of a child finding redemption because he makes that choice.

This arc is very much that of children in ww2 raised to near worship and faith in the country and emperor. All to be taken away by fat man and little boy. And after this genocidal bombing of brainwashed civilians the solders gave chocolate rations to children… who I have on good authority (oh I have seen grave of he fire flies) that the cultural zeitgeist is that of it is better to starve then shatter the illusion of the self.

 Now let’s talk Godzilla and the smuggling of ideas past the Americans. Because ultimately genocide and specifically nuking babies is bad (oh I have seen barefoot gen).

Because the Americans gave the Japanese government over to the yakuza and all kinds of other crazy crap that the rest of us in the usa have never even heard of much less have an opinion of.

My grandfather used to tell me the story about how one of his first memories was when the “japs” bombed Pearl Harbor.

And I often want to tell him as bad as that was it wasn’t nuking whole cities of civilians or fire bombing them.

Life is complicated and Hxh captures and makes an enriching fiction based simply on not allowing doors to close because the real world accommodates many a contradiction of perspective and identity.

I was twelve when in my “otaku” faze I read some fragments of interviews of survivors in china of Japanese war crimes. I never could articulate how much the meticulous rape and torture of a whole people created an impression on my twelve year old mind that darkness the standard mode of expression in life.

Like wise the fascination my dad had for serial killer documentaries  left deep wounds because I don’t know if it’s healthy for ten years to know the details of the Miranda tapes or the BTK killer (the fact I still know these names shows how much an impression they made.)

My sister responded to this bonding over the a&e Documentaries… by wanting to work in criminal forensics. Having photo albums from the local body farm as a teenager laying around watching serial killer documentaries and seeing decaying rotting corpses from the body farm books and anime was m childhood.

All that is to say I did not survive a war zone but… trauma is in escapable we live in a state of moving from one state of trauma to another. Hunter x hunter captures that.

Often in the fandom it is said Gon is average or normal and cannot cope with the horrors of his fictional life. But he is eccentric to the point of exceptionalism because purity includes all of the truth even the dark elements we want left under the rug. Gon is a kid surrounded by serial killers (hell his best friend is a skilled one) and yet he is fundamentally a good kid. Moving from trauma to trauma in pursuit of a father who openly and vocally expresses a desire of not eating him.

The enjoy the side trips quote is as close of the series is as close to Ging can get to admitting he was wrong. Acknowledging that Gon found things more important in his life than his father and yet the father learned his son was a good kid even if it had little to do with him. 

Life is a series of expectations and pursuits that abruptly ends and likely will be forgotten by everyone except the lord our God.

Though what other choice is there other than to wake up and live that trauma to its conclusion? 

Steven king once said “we’re all going to die and most of us in some pretty dirty and violent ways.”

Cormac McCarthy said “there is a lot of bad news out there and some of it is going to knock on your door”.

Yoshihiro Togashi gave us the quote “enjoy the side trips because you might find something more important than what your looking for on the side of the road.”