LogFAQs > #904835757

The narrator is really, really bad, but it's compounded in badness because it's grinding the story to a halt. Six episodes have passed and no fight has advanced beyond avoiding blows. Four of the five active storylines don't even have a thrown punch yet. Narrator or not, that five-minute interlude of Netero's past was awful. Killua's gramps hype-job of Netero actually didn't involve a narrator, but it was also out of place and poorly paced.

Inner monologue is also telling isntead of showing, but hearing it in the character's voice is better because the character's opinions can be subject to biases. That said, they can get boring too - Knuckle's APR explanation was like eight times longer than it needed to be (it could have been summarized with "The number grows exponentially, and when it exceeds your remaining Nen, you're locked out of Nen!" plus a few other hype sentences), and nothing could have made that infodump about the elevator any good. If it's going to play a role later, that information should be dropped on us when it does play a role.

As a hard example - the narrator saying "Killua had no idea why he was doing this" is far, far less effective than the part when Gon wakes up and promises to heal Kite - there, his troubled inner thoughts about Gon belie the words he says to Gon. That combination of inner monologue and dialogue was killer-effective.
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yet all sailors of all sorts are more or less capricious and unreliable - they live in the varying outer weather, and they inhale its fickleness