LogFAQs > #975957298

19. REASON - Hunter x Hunter 2011 ED3 (Hunter x Hunter song 3 of 5)
https://animethemes.moe/anime/hunter_x_hunter_2011/ED3-NCBD1080
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S8EWHxk_ls (includes intro)

I'm almost certain I hold EDs to a different standard than OPs, but to be fair, watching EDs has trained me differently. REASON might not be the greatest song here in a vacuum, but it has a long tail of good parts after the intro. And it is super-sentimental sounding. Visually it just focuses on these two kids and their friendship... and that's actually pretty great.

There is still more HxH stuff to come, so I'll save some further thoughts, but this arc - Greed Island - is actually considerably lighter in tone than the preceding arc. HxH as a series is fascinating how it just oscillates its plot depending on what its creator feels should happen. In general it's surprisingly subversive in how it handles climaxes of its stories despite conventional setups and buildups. Greed Island is almost certainly the most conventional arc of the series from front to back.

And yet - and this ties back to the two kids' friendship - it makes an incredibly bold move: it cuts Kurapika and Leorio from the story. There were definite hints that this series was about a quartet with your typical archetypes, but two major arcs deep, we just jettisoned them to tell a completely different, lower-stakes, lower-violence story. And it worked, and its ED made me want to be a kid.