Board 8 > So I started watching Hunter X Hunter

(+) Yeah! (+)

Yeah this is probably the fandom's favorite arc.

Not a bad point of view, imo!

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pretty sure theres another arc thats like widely considered the best by a large margin but everyone loves yorknew too

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Yeah, I heard people love Chimera Ant

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

Yeah this is probably the fandom's favorite arc

Definitely not, but it's excellent and up there.

There are people who have heard of Chimera Ant who don't even know it's from HxH.

Yorknew is my favorite early arc, Chimera Ant later arc.

I ponder if Togashi were in good health and could do a chapter a week, how further along the series would have been...

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Yeah all the arcs of Hunter x Hunter feel very different from one another honestly, which I'm pretty sure is deliberate. Overall I'd say it's a draw of the series, though unfortunately some of the arcs end up being not very good to me. (For example I find Heaven's Arena boring and think the Zoldyck Family mini-arc is just straight awful)

Yorknew and Chimera Ant are pretty easily my 2 favorite arcs from the anime
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I feel the number of people who love CA is not much bigger than the number who hate it. It is the most polarizing arc, by far.

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Yorknew is an incredible arc.

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

I feel the number of people who love CA is not much bigger than the number who hate it. It is the most polarizing arc, by far.

Hate to tell you this but you're wrong. CA is widely considered the best arc in HxH. It's just like the most popular of anything, where the people who disagree feel the need to be very vocal.

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Samurai7 posted...

Hate to tell you this but you're wrong. CA is widely considered the best arc in HxH. It's just like the most popular of anything, where the people who disagree feel the need to be very vocal.

Indeed, Chimera Ant is not only considered the best HxH arc by a country mile, it's generally considered on of the best shounen arcs period. It is legendary.

how far into yorknew are you?
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Samurai7 posted...

Hate to tell you this but you're wrong. CA is widely considered the best arc in HxH. It's just like the most popular of anything, where the people who disagree feel the need to be very vocal.

Eh no I don't think so

https://www.reddit.com/r/HunterXHunter/comments/4v2hva/the_chimera_ants_arc_and_its_polarizing_nature/

Maybe the lovers are the ones who are vocal. I see CA being widely remembered as the arc where the bad art and bad pacing started, and the middle third of it is pretty bad.

The first third is one of my favorite starts of any arc ever, though. And the last third is... good overall.

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

Its certainly one of the most criticized arcs but I have never been a part of any discussion where a majority of people don't say it's the best. It's happening in this topic right here. One loud person is insisting that it's obviously not the best while everyone else quietly agrees... "yeah it's considered the best"

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I don't know what to tell ya man, Chimera being incredible is so widely known that Ganon knew is before he even went in on this! Just common knowledge.

Samurai7 posted...

Its certainly one of the most criticized arcs but I have never been a part of any discussion where a majority of people don't say it's the best. It's happening in this topic right here. One loud person is insisting that it's obviously not the best while everyone else quietly agrees... "yeah it's considered the best"

Eh majority could still be something like 70-30. That makes the arc polarizing. Meanwhile Yorknew barely has any detractors whatsoever, which is why I say it's the consensus best arc.

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For the record neither are my favorite arc. It's Greed Island.

For being the only arc that has an actual ending without an anti-climax, while also being very fun overall.

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

Meanwhile Yorknew barely has any detractors whatsoever, which is why I say it's the consensus best arc.

Bruh that's not how it works. Everybody likes PB&J, doesn't mean it's a consensus best food.

ZeldaTPLink posted...

Eh majority could still be something like 70-30. That makes the arc polarizing. Meanwhile Yorknew barely has any detractors whatsoever, which is why I say it's the consensus best arc.

I could agree with the 70 30 split, I just think that it makes qualify as "widely accepted as the best. " I'm sure ranked choice voting would make this number closer but I still think CA would come ahead. I don't think widely accepted as the best and divisive are necessarily mutually exclusive

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SeabassDebeste posted...

how far into yorknew are you?

I just got to the episode where Gon/Killua/Leorio were reintroduced, and Kurappika become the leader of his little group and stayed behind to fight Uvogin.

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Man I REAAAAAAALLY wanna rewatch this show from the beginning now.

I watched a couple episodes from the tail end of Chimera Ant arc due to this topic!

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I have wanted to rewatch in quarantine as well, but I can't imagine sitting through the setup of the Chimera Ant arc again. The payoff is the peak for the series, but damn does the pacing in that arc suffer at times.

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You've made a

B
A
D

M
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Nen is so much better and more creative than stands are.

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I like how the rules of Nen couldn't even be followed for even like one story arc. Kurappika has 100% mastery of all nen branches from what seems to be like a few months of training. OK.... funny enough, the fact he's SO strong now makes more worried about his life than before. Usually characters this powerful get written out somehow. Maybe he accidnetally uses Chain Jail on someone not from the troupe?

His fight was very impressive though!

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Most shounen series have to come up with the most contrived BS to not have their strongest characters handle all the problems, I've never seen a series justify it as well as HxH on so many separate occasions. Hell, when they don't try to do it, the answer is "they actually do handle it". It's willingness to throw together such absurd power gaps constantly and still stay engaging is unrivaled.

It's kind of why I ranke Greed Island pretty low, even though I still love it. It's the most "traditional shounen" arc in the series.

GANON1025 posted...

I like how the rules of Nen couldn't even be followed for even like one story arc. Kurappika has 100% mastery of all nen branches from what seems to be like a few months of training. OK.... funny enough, the fact he's SO strong now makes more worried about his life than before. Usually characters this powerful get written out somehow. Maybe he accidnetally uses Chain Jail on someone not from the troupe?

His fight was very impressive though!

this is the big reason i'm not big on yorknew. bizarre power level matchups does wind up becoming kind of a staple of hxh though.
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Hot take: Hunter x Hunter would have been much better off if it didn't try so hard to explain the rules of its combat system.
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GANON1025 posted...

I like how the rules of Nen couldn't even be followed for even like one story arc. Kurappika has 100% mastery of all nen branches from what seems to be like a few months of training. OK.... funny enough, the fact he's SO strong now makes more worried about his life than before. Usually characters this powerful get written out somehow. Maybe he accidnetally uses Chain Jail on someone not from the troupe?

His fight was very impressive though!

He has all that mastery but it comes with a number of restrictions.

Granted one of the restrictions was only mentioned for the first time in the latest batch of manga chapters, so could be Togashi retconning Kurapika's abilities.

But one of the interesting things about nen is that anyone can turn into a god if they are willing to cripple themselves hard enough in another way. It's a system that allows for minmaxing.

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You mean his contract? I thought that literally just covered Chain Jail. Like he could use everything else, hell he can still hit people with chains all day. Its just specifically using his chains to hold and capture people he can only do to the phantom troupe or else the dagger next to his heart will kill him.

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GANON1025 posted...

You mean his contract? I thought that literally just covered Chain Jail. Like he could use everything else, hell he can still hit people with chains all day. Its just specifically using his chains to hold and capture people he can only do to the phantom troupe or else the dagger next to his heart will kill him.

Hitting people with chains is fairly limited though.

What makes him OP is the ability to use 6 types of nen, which he can only do when he has his red eye thing turned on. Which, about 6 arcs from where you are, will be revealed to have the downside of reducing his lifespan.

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Some interesting developments in these episodes. For one thing, I learned the finer points of forgery identification. Then I learned that for an elite groups of killers, this phantom troupe likes to keep it casual. I mean they weren't even going to kill Gon and Killua, the only reason they had to stay was because one of them wanted to nominate Gon as a member?? You'd think these assassins would kill anyone who were after them and now knew where theyre secret hideout was. Maybe that just goes to show how condifent they are.

I'm a little excited to see Big Daddy Zoldyck might be entering the story, that could be an interesting wrinkle I think.

ALSO, I continue to be highly suspicious of Leorio's continued non-combat and non-nen prowress. Every part of this story, even the OP and EDs, have been constructed to keep him out of fighting. But what is he hiding.....?

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I've started my own rewatch.

Looks like the dub on Netflix ends exactly where you don't want it too, lol.

The spider's unrivaled casualness is part of why I love them as a group. When things need to get serious they do, but when they're not worried at all they completely wear it on their sleeves.

The spiders' complete lack of care for human civilization extends into also not caring about killing people they don't have to.

They just don't give a shit.

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Obviously I was fully aware, but it's still nuts how many people just get casually merc'd during the Hunter Exam.

Yeah I incited that too. Everyone seemed very blas about death at that point.

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That is a general theme of the HxH universe, tbh. It's a dystopia. And the reason that's not bought up much because none of the protagonists are remotely interested in fixing it, either.

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its not a dystopia their values are just different

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Eh, to be fair, if you're a civilian, death still means a tragedy. But the series mostly follow the hunters and/or people who knowingly put their life in danger.

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MysticBrohan posted...

its not a dystopia their values are just different

Yeah they don't think there is anything wrong with a slum the size of a country where millions of people starve. Or that someone like Chrollo can kill hundreds of people to win a fight against someone else and not even have to run from the police after that.

The difference between HxH and other dystopias is that in other there is usually some character (usually the protagonists) wanting to improve the world. In HxH, the world is hell and nobody cares.

Their "values" being different just means it's an entire world incapable of empathy.

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ZeldaTPLink posted...

Yeah they don't think there is anything wrong with a slum the size of a country where millions of people starve.

Sounds like another place i know

And individuals show empathy all the time in HxH. It's just a cruel world where the strong survive and death is a natural occurrence. Maybe it's just semantics, but calling it dystopian feels off.

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MysticBrohan posted...

Sounds like another place i know

And individuals show empathy all the time in HxH. It's just a cruel world where the strong survive and death is a natural occurrence. Maybe it's just semantics, but calling it dystopian feels off.

Well real life is pretty dystopian too.

The difference is that here we see people trying to fix the world. While if those people exist in the HxH world, they aren't portrayed in the story.

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most stories set IRL don't really try to change the world either though. most underdog stories are about trying to beat the system, not dismantle it.
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Uh, I don't think you understand the meaning of a dystopia. Fictional dystopias are usually more like failed utopias - a society that is perfect from a certain perspective, but that perfection has been twisted into something dark and terrible.

HxH's world is mostly just a normal society.
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The fact that he called the real world a dystopia means you guys are really all on the same page.

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On 18.

Don't remember if this stays the same throughout, but another thing I appreciate is that this show does not give two shits about molding the content to fit cleanly into episodes. It just goes for its run time and covers what it can. Stuff starts 1/2 through an episode and stops 5 minutes into the next sometimes. It's like they scripted it out as one single long thing and just slotted the episodes starts and stops wherever they had to go.

Obviously that works out better as a marothon.

i have a download of the series spliced into the separate arcs with the openings and endings cut out. Perfect for marathoning, which im currently doing

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hxh's EDs are excellent tho!
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This boss guy sure loves this fortune poem, he can't shut up about it!!

The fight with him and the Zoldycks is really quite good. I am honestly unsure what the outcome is (episode ends on a cliffhanger). I feel like on most other shows, the Zoldycks would lost with one or both of them dead just to show how strong the Phantom Troupe boss is. But I dunno, I could actually see them winning.

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Also Silva has the same voice actor as Avdol from Jojo which I find a little funny. You know, I don't really recognize a lot of the voice actors in this show so far.

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