I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.

First and foremost is the stuff having to do with my ex-roommate doing a bunch of editorializing and summarizing so that he could skip what he described as “the boring parts” of the Chimera Ant arc. Turns out, there’s no boring bits of that arc and that everything going on is incredibly important even if it requires you to take a look beneath the surface in order to understand why. The show–and the manga–doesn’t coddle you. Most of the stuff in the story as a whole isn’t super complex, but it does require being able to figure out the metaphors and subtext in order to fully appreciate it. Sure, it might look like a typical Shonen-type manga and anime, but the violence and horrible injuries depicted in it are a pretty significant clue that maybe this show isn’t entirely what it seems to be based on its appearance. There’s a deal of depth to it, shown via its critique of typical shonen protagonist traits that it treats as worrying rather than simply heroic, that is absolutely within the ability of the older target audience for shonen media to grasp at least subconsciouly if not overtly, but there’s enough complexity in the show as it gets deeper and deeper in that it requires a decent amount of experience in the world to truly grasp. I mean, I completely missed one of the central metaphors of the beginning of the end of the Chimera Ant arc the first time I watched it despite being trained in critical analysis! Sure, it absolutely did not help that a lot of the stuff my roommate skipped over was in that section of the show and I’ll never truly know if I would have gotten it on my own the first time around, but I like to think I might have had at least an inkling of what was going on if I’d watched the whole thing rather than skip the parts my ex-roommate thought were unimportant.

Watching something repeatedly brings deeper understand, so it’s no surprise that I “get it” more now than I did the first time. Having already learned about Nen and it’s various uses from my first watch of the show, it was so much easier to grasp the second time around. Stuff made so much more sense now that I had the greater context of the entire rest of the show on-hand when Nen first got introduced this time, even if most of the information shared during the introduction wound up not being terribly useful to understanding the crazy Nen powers that show up later. Most of those seem like one-off abilities that aren’t related to anything else and while you can absolutely see the combination of types making up some of them, none of that really matters much since it’s not like there’s a type chart with weaknesses and strengths. And, most of the time, you’ve seen what the ability can do before you learn what type it is, so it’s not like you can figure it out ahead of time based on the underlying principles of the power. Still, it’s a very thorough and well-built power system and while most of the rules don’t matter much in the show, I would not be surprised to learn that they’re more relevant in the manga (either the stuff covered by the show or what covers the post-anime part of the story). It really would be a shame for such a complex system to be largely unnecessary.

Given that the anime is fourteen years old now, part of me hopes that we get to see it continued at some point. I’m not sure I’d want to see it redone again, since it’s not particularly dated or anything, but I am curious enough about the story that I’m considering reading the manga so I can get the full experience, long-waits-for-the-next-chapter included. The anime does a very good job of wrapping everything up at the point it chose while still leaving room for what might happen next, so it’s entirely possible we’ll see a continuation some day. I have no idea how much further along the manga is these days, so I have no idea if there’s anything there to work with in terms of additional story arcs or anything, but it’s just so fun and well-done, in terms of production value and storytelling, that it would be a pity for it to never return and wrap things up. That said, given how old the series’ creator is, and how poor his health has been over the last couple decades, there’s no way of knowing how the story will end or even how far the story might get towards it’s end. The unfortunate truth of the matter is that it might be a better idea to accept the end of the anime as the end of the story rather than as the conclusion to an arc of it. You can always find joy in more story later, but it’s difficult to avoid the excitement and anticipation of “when will there be more?” if you’re instantly devouring every new chapter that gets put out. I don’t know. We’ll see how things go. I’ve got tons of other books to read, games to play, and shows to watch, so I can easily put off deciding whether or not I’ll read the manga for a while longer. Still, knowing it exists out there is incredibly tempting. It could be so much fun to read through it all…