I just caught up to the current chapter of HxH (as of writing that’s chpt. 408) and I’m wondering what other hexbears have to think about HxH?

  • hello_hello [comrade/them]@hexbear.netOP
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    4 days ago

    Gon at one point casually mentioning having been hired as an escort/prostitute by female sailors was weird and felt like a pointless and creepy random throwaway line to put in.

    Killua only interprets Gon as being an escort, there’s no actual confirmation of anything. The weirder part was the stuff around it like Palm wanting to date Gon.

    took place in a racist caricature of Latin American revolutionary states/movements that it portrayed as being some sort of anprim narco cartels who only tolerated technology when it had to do with selling drugs.

    The setting was kinda indecipherable for me when I first watched it but I see where you’re coming from. HxH definitely reeks from the lib early 2000s brainworms. The caveat I’d like to put is that Togashi doesn’t think liberalism is the answer though

    chimera ant spoilers

    The arc ends with the V5 (basically the world’s NATO/Western hegemony) covering up everything and creating a huge refugee crisis (so instead of ants it’s just that the racist caricature of Kim Ill sung wanted to do a mass murder-suicide still yikes but not as bad as other shonens that don’t question the status quo at all). It’s also implied that had the hunter association not stepped in that other countries would just nuke the ants and everything else out of existence.

    The very next major arc is where its revealed that the ants came from the V5’s illegal expeditions into the Dark Continent (very much a nod to how Europeans sought to colonize Africa) and that all these catastrophes that happen are because the imperialist ruling class only seeks to elevate its own power rather than deal with the contradictions of neoliberalism.

    It feels like a very post-soviet era story that’s very nihilistic about humanity. Still a lot of Japanese brainworms though.

    generic transphobic gags in the first season

    Which sucks because Togashi really does make an effort to draw gender-nonconforming + trans characters. The final season of the anime is centered around helping a trans girl get away from her terrible family so it’s not all lost.

    • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      3 days ago

      The final season of the anime is centered around helping a trans girl get away from her terrible family so it’s not all lost.

      The girl with the wish magic powers? Somehow I either missed that she was trans or forgot about it, though my memory of that season is pretty hazy because I both had sort of mentally checked out after slogging through the chimera ants arc in a couple of days and because I switched from the dub to the sub partway through because the dub was something like five or six episodes behind at the time.