Current Events > The Chimera Ant arc of Hunter x Hunter is FUCKED

(+) Yeah! (+)

I kinda love it

---

I guess

---

Netero is amazing

---

angry gon is the best

---

Yeah...it gets super dark, even compared to the rest of the series. What happens to Pokkle and Ponzu is especially fucked up. Nobody asked Togashi to go that hard, but...apparently he really wanted us to suffer.

---

Knuckle best boy. He's my favorite kind of anime character

---

Yeah, it gets pretty dark, surprised me for something in Shonen Jump. I kind of want him to take the manga to a seinen magazine so he can really let loose.

---

It's an amazingly well written arc

---

It's awesome, shame the narrator becomes the main character at the end in the anime.

---

Too bad the narrator had to tell you every single thing as if you were blind.

It makes namek blowing up look short.
---

When the villain becomes more human than the protagonist, you know that is something special.

---

LordFarquad1312 posted...

It's awesome, shame the narrator becomes the main character at the end in the anime.

Honestly, it was a strange stylistic choice to kick in halfway through an arc and several arcs into the story...but it served the atmosphere very well to have a narrator. That way, moments like this one can exist, where the narrator tells us exactly how fucked Netero and Zeno really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBRNtKukSXo

---

Remember at the end when Kite came back as a loli?

---

Komugi is the worst character ever

---

I honestly think that scene would've worked better without the narrator.

Obviously they are fucked up for attacking and nearly killing a blind girl, and it speaks volumes that Meruem was still willing to negotiate with Netero after that.

---

LordFarquad1312 posted...

I honestly think that scene would've worked better without the narrator.

Obviously they are fucked up for attacking and nearly killing a blind girl, and it speaks volumes that Meruem was still willing to negotiate with Netero after that.

It probably could have worked either way, admittedly, but there are plenty of other scenes that explain the minutia of what's going on in a way that makes it amazingly epic.

---

I remember I as a kid I watched the 1999 anime through the Greed Island arc, then saw bits and pieces of the Chimera Arc in the manga and thought it was the lamest looking thing and was super disappointed. I remember just talking shit about how the villain was just a cell ripoff and who cares about a bunch of stupid ass bugs.

Then like 15 years later I watched the 2011 anime and oh boy I realized what a fucking idiot I was. Chimera Arc is actually the best arc of the show.

Dingydang166 posted...

I remember I as a kid I watched the 1999 anime through the Greed Island arc, then saw bits and pieces of the Chimera Arc in the manga and thought it was the lamest looking thing and was super disappointed. I remember just talking shit about how the villain was just a cell ripoff and who cares about a bunch of stupid ass bugs.

Then like 15 years later I watched the 2011 anime and oh boy I realized what a fucking idiot I was. Chimera Arc is actually the best arc of the show.

Nah Yorknew City

---

Irony posted...

Nah Yorknew City

12 year old me would have agreed with you

Irony posted...

Nah Yorknew City

I fucking hated the way that it ended

---

Turbam posted...

I fucking hated the way that it ended

Much better ending than Chimera Ant. Everything thing about the last couple of episodes is just fucking awful.

---

Narrator provided insight that the viewer wouldn't otherwise know. Try making sense of this video that removes him and shows you the events in real-time:

https://youtu.be/MjiHClo2rmc

I get that some people didn't like him but he was necessary, and he's also just cool anyways and makes the entire arc feel epic.


---

Irony posted...

Nah Yorknew City

Pretty good, and there are some knockout scenes in it...but it doesn't have the same stakes, nor the same storytelling brilliance as the Ant arc. Just look at the Ant arc and think about how many moving parts it has, how many characters have roles to play, how everything comes together and why it ends the way it ends--it's a very intricate web with several parallel story lines, and they all converge beautifully in a way that makes almost every character involved more interesting by the end.

---

For starters, making sense of 4 things at once is impossible. Secondly, it's on the anime team to make things make sense. Using a narrator may have been fine in the manga, but an anime should first and foremost show, not tell. Yes, it makes no sense if you remove the narrator because that's how it was made by design, what I'm saying is that was a bad decision and they should have worked around it.

I'm not saying having a narrator at all is bad, there are scenes like the ones where he says "It took them 0.02 seconds to resolve this scenario" where it makes sense to have him, but the episodes where it feels like they are 80% narrated are just baffling.

---

LordFarquad1312 posted...

Using a narrator may have been fine in the manga, but an anime should first and foremost show, not tell.

So, is it your argument that the anime should have changed a crucial element of the manga?

---

LordFarquad1312 posted...

For starters, making sense of 4 things at once is impossible. Secondly, it's on the anime team to make things make sense. Using a narrator may have been fine in the manga, but an anime should first and foremost show, not tell. Yes, it makes no sense if you remove the narrator because that's how it was made by design, what I'm saying is that was a bad decision and they should have worked around it.

I'm not saying having a narrator at all is bad, there are scenes like the ones where he says "It took them 0.02 seconds to resolve this scenario" where it makes sense to have him, but the episodes where it feels like they are 80% narrated are just baffling.

How can you say it was a bad decision when it led to the arc becoming one of the greatest in anime? I mean, its reputation speaks for itself.

---

Fantastic arc
https://youtu.be/q43wzP6A1CM

---

It is the best Hunter X Hunter does but it is still REALLY overrated.

---

I love the narrator

---

I haven't seen the anime, but I felt like it went on a bit too long in the manga. I can't really pinpoint specifically what could or should have been cut or condensed, though. I think I let the hype from other people get to me though, so the arc as a whole was kind of a letdown for me compared to its reputation.

---

The narrator was one of the best parts. Now read Jujutsu Kaisen for the Shibuya arc >_>

---

Gobstoppers12 posted...

So, is it your argument that the anime should have changed a crucial element of the manga?

Absolutely. Different storytelling techniques can work better or worse in different mediums.

And if changing a "crucial element" is such a bad thing, the the anime version of Chimera Ants fucked it from the start by introducing Kite in a completely different way.

---

NightRender posted...

And if changing a "crucial element" is such a bad thing, the the anime version of Chimera Ants fucked it from the start by introducing Kite in a completely different way.

Changing the timing and context of a character introduction is quite a far stretch away from excising like 60% of the exposition and mood of the climax of the arc. The narrator is part of the structure of the final portion of the arc; if you remove the narrator, you're essentially removing the support beams in a house. You can replace them, but you're then asking the anime team to completely re-write one of the most well-regarded segments of one of the most well-regarded manga stories of all time.

That seems kind of risky.

---

Togashi second best arc ever.


---

Saying "Gon was angry" 10 times when we can see that Gon was angry isn't useful.
---

LightningAce11 posted...

Saying "Gon was angry" 10 times when we can see that Gon was angry isn't useful.

This is a hyperbolic strawman, come on dude. You can do better.

---

There's very little narration in the arc that's actually useful. Madhouse made such a good looking anime, the visuals would have been enough to convey everything. The palace invasion could have been half as long.
---

LightningAce11 posted...

The palace invasion could have been half as long.

And half as epic.

---

Gobstoppers12 posted...

So, is it your argument that the anime should have changed a crucial element of the manga?

You're basically saying every movie adaptation of a book should keep the narrator

---

One of the scenes that shows the importance of the narrator is when Pitou uses Dr. Blythe to stall herself in the air. Because she's the only one of the three royal guards incapable of flight, she had no choice but to wait until she landed. She's able to keep her head straight and use En to properly survey the situation, something Pouf isn't able to do because he panicked and because he was able to act as the palace was bombed. Thus she was the first of the royal guards to find the King, and that's why the arc went down the way it did. The narration's needed because the arc is shaped by decisions the characters make, based on their knowledge of the situation and their own personal biases. Otherwise you would just have everyone internally monologuing why they feel a certain way, which I'd argue is more intrusive than a narrator. Sure some of the exposition isn't necessary, but quite a few times during the invasion a character makes an incorrect deduction, and narration is the easiest way to explain what lead to their misunderstanding and how they arrived at that conclusion.

i thought it was terrible. it drags on for far longer than it needed to ever be

---

The manga has basically become a novel, togashi is way too lazy to draw things anymore.

Just panels stuffed full of pseudo intellectual dialogue from characters trying to pull random conclusions out of their ass.
---

It looks boring

---

How could you hate this
https://youtu.be/QQDWV0GyCF8

---

Honestly I prefer a narrator to characters talking to themselves or their enemies all the time, squeezing in entire novels' worth of dialogue into what's supposed to be split second instances. That's typically what happens in shounen and the narrator doing it is a fresh change of pace IMO. And I think it worked even better animated than it did in the manga, since Togashi is a little too good at producing walls of text.

---

One of the most hype anime arcs ever

---

mcpwnia posted...

i thought it was terrible. it drags on for far longer than it needed to ever be

This. It's gotta be the most overhyped manga arc I've ever heard of.

I was excited to finally get to it since I had only heard good things about it, but it was just so fucking boring and went on for far too long. Half the fights being the narrator explaining stuff we could easily make out for ourselves made it even worse, and a bunch of the ants themselves just felt pointless or boring. It made me want to just drop the show so many times, but since it was so close to the end anyway I powered through.

---

I loved it.

Meruem ended up being my favorite character in the whole show.

---

I'll say something for the pacing--there's a lot of stuff the Ant arc. It's almost an entire anime series all to itself. It has its own arcs within the arc. I wouldn't personally trim any of it down, because it all feeds into the narrative in some way or another, but there's a lot of just...stuff...that happens in it, stuff that could have either been shortened or left out completely without damaging the main plot with Meruem and his royal guards.

---

It always astounds me that people paint Netero as a bad guy from this arc. Guy saved the human race from genocide and enslavement and all you'll have to say is that he was mean about it

Tbh though that's why the writing is uncharacteristically good for a shonen. You do get the feeling that the lines are very blurred. Gon becomes straight up unsettling, netero becomes cruel, meruem feels sympathetic.

---