nah all that stuff rules. sometimes a good story is hanging out with the cool characters you like and not worrying about the broader plot or pacing (which are still good)
But that’s not what Hunter x Hunter does in the Chimera Ants arc. There it stops on a cliffhangar to go have background characters give Gon and Killua a Rocky training montage for ten hours while everything else treads water in the background, then just has someone come in out of left field and solve the whole thing with a nuclear bomb and some incoherent philosophizing over which is the bigger evil: the cannibal monsters with magic powers who want to eat the world, or like this guy who didn’t want them to do that who used “the most evil weapon ever conceived which is very illegal and bad” to kill one cannibal monster with radiation poisoning, solving everything through the power of Great Man theory and nuclear weapons.
That final fight before the nuclear bomb deus ex machina was probably the peak of the entire series in terms of fight choreography and animation, though. It just should have happened 50 episodes earlier and ended that arc then and there.
counterpoint: i think it’s funny and good to win a shonen battle by bringing a nuke. also i just generally think that’s a reductive view of the arc. im not like the number one huh fan or anything, i mostly just think stuff that’s good can have lots of fat and often the fat makes it better (though obviously not always)
nah all that stuff rules. sometimes a good story is hanging out with the cool characters you like and not worrying about the broader plot or pacing (which are still good)
But that’s not what Hunter x Hunter does in the Chimera Ants arc. There it stops on a cliffhangar to go have background characters give Gon and Killua a Rocky training montage for ten hours while everything else treads water in the background, then just has someone come in out of left field and solve the whole thing with a nuclear bomb and some incoherent philosophizing over which is the bigger evil: the cannibal monsters with magic powers who want to eat the world, or like this guy who didn’t want them to do that who used “the most evil weapon ever conceived which is very illegal and bad” to kill one cannibal monster with radiation poisoning, solving everything through the power of Great Man theory and nuclear weapons.
That final fight before the nuclear bomb deus ex machina was probably the peak of the entire series in terms of fight choreography and animation, though. It just should have happened 50 episodes earlier and ended that arc then and there.
counterpoint: i think it’s funny and good to win a shonen battle by bringing a nuke. also i just generally think that’s a reductive view of the arc. im not like the number one huh fan or anything, i mostly just think stuff that’s good can have lots of fat and often the fat makes it better (though obviously not always)
Agree with you on Chimera Ants being bad, though I was fine with Greed Island.