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This thread is made for talking about how the current arc is different than what came before. There are several things fans claim is really different about this arc, but in the opening post, i want to describe a phenomenon I see, namely the change of the ideological point of view. But this is not supposed to be the only topic, so feel free to describe what you feel is very different about the current arc.
I think that the way the plots are presented changed from how a teen would look at things in the first part of hxh to how adults look at things starting in the voyage arc and in this thread I want to explain why I think that.
At first I want to outline why I think that HxH, while still having some darker contents, had a presentation of plots that would align more with a teen's point of view, for this, i will go through the dominant plotlines of the first parts of HxH arc by arc.
The hunter exam arc was a lot about growing. We had a kid that already started out far stronger than many adults due to his talent. But even when outmatched, if only Gon showed enough determination, he would surely succeed.
Gon was even able to save Killua from the grasp of the system of the Zoldyek family just by going there and never relenting. This 'determination trumps all' would later be given a dark turn in the CA arc, but for now, this is as teen as it gets. Gon is smart and strong, sure, but on simple terms,he is crazy talented and so determined and that is something a child or teen would like to see, a kid that is well equipped to change the world or be able to do everything what he wants if he just tries hard enough.
This goes on in heaven's arena. We get the confirmation (as if we needed one) that gon and kil are unique talents even among talented people. There are people who are nenusers since a long time, a vile system of persons. They are not strong, but still, they crush newbies in heaven's since a longer period of time, but Gon and Kil just need to go there, honestly study and fight and then they defeat them in a fair and square way. So again, as long as you study hard enough, there is no challenge you cannot meet.
Yorkshin would probably be the first arc where people disagree with my statement because yorkshin is a tad darker than the previous arcs. However, when we break it down, we see the following:There is a system in yorkshin that is so powerful that it has the whole city under control:The mafia. The ten most powerful underworld dons do an auction in yorkshin and put all their influence into it. They are able to hire the best killers in the world, too. Kurapika starts out working for a minor Don to get close to the spider. Now, this could be a story that is unlike the other two. This could be a story about trying to do your job and survive in this underworld jungle while searching for the spider. But that didn't happen. Kurapika relatively quickly becomes so important that he calls the shots and the spider relatively quickly fodderize the mafia. The old system in yorkshin is less important than the personal revenge fight between kurapika and the spider. At least when the ten dons die, it is clear that the only one who couldmaybe stop the spider is kurapika.
So what we have is a gang of young criminals who are able to beat powerful old men with relative ease and a young guy who goes from random henchmen to mob boss and takes up the fight successfully that the ten most powerful underworld bosses could not win over the course of like 40 chapters ( i know yorkshin had 60, but the transition took roughly 40 chaps) . Once again, this is what a teen would imagine joining an organization, rising in ranks and having his own personal story eclipse the giant system it takes place in.
Greed Island is probably the best example. There are several groups of Veterans that try to clear GI for years in a stale situation.They have ugly but efficient strategies and see Greed Island as a Job and not as a game.
Then our heroes arrive. They see greed Island as game and want to play it in legit ways and in the end, they are able to beat all these strong professionals and win the game. The protagonists and their convictions are bigger than the system and beat the system in the end.
Chimera ant arc is another arc that people might instinctively think as mature about and I agree to an extent that this is a minor turning point because it starts playing with what theprice of determination is. However, it still values personal choice as bigger than anything else.
Gon's transformation is not a positive thing, however, it is a personal choice that makes Gon and his revenge story so big that he is able to kill a very powerful fighter that is far out of his league. It is a thing you see in lots of teen fiction: If you really want to, even if it might not be a good thing, you can overcome this powerful enemy.
We have this existential attack on humanity come down to the fight of some flashy group of mostly (minus netero and morel) young people who have (by the end of it) their spirits up and their morale high.
It is true that Meruem is defeated by the vileness of humanity, so the opposite of what i claim (a nameless system bringing down the most perfect being) but this is only possible because that one champion of humanity, who trained all his life, decides to sacrifice his life to save humanity (so once again personal choice trumping all).
Meruem himself is a good example of my statement. He is born into perfection and quickly able to just take reign of a country.He was born into a rigid system in which he is king. But he abandons it for Komugi and by the end of it found his own thing to do. Meruem's story was a celebration of abandoning your fate in favour of doing what you really want in life, and this, once again, is as teen as it gets. The personal stories, even in CA arc, of the protagonists were bigger than
the system around them was. Because in the end, what mattered to Meruem was Komugi, not ant hierarchy.
Election arc is another example that plays a bit with this trope, but still has it mostly intact. It is the first time tho that there is something else because it did not really matter who wins the election at all. Pariston already has the xday planned, he would step down anyway because there are things far bigger than the election going on. However, we do not know that yet at that point. For all we know,Pariston is a guy who is so great that he alone as an individualcanplay with everyone else. He is the teen fantasy of a really smart guy, outclassing the more level headed and systematically thinking cheadle who is mroe of a conventional politician looking for compromise.
Aside from Pariston, we have Killua who thinks he and only he himself should and can save his best friend, confronts the system of the zoldyeks for Gon once again, saves his little sister from it and succeeds in saving Gon and it is only the personal action of Killua that decides the outcome of the election. Once again it is an example of a personal plot becoming bigger than a big system around it and eclipsing that system (even tho as i stated before, the election itself proved to be meaningless).
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
With this, I hope I could outline why I really see the first phase of HxH as a thing that aligns with the outlook a teen or child would have on the world. Personal plots are bigger than the system around it, if you try hard enough you can succeed (and if not succeed, than at least due to your pent up emotions you can wreck havoc against the people who wronged you) and generally there are almost no real limitations for the things you want to do in life.
This all changed in the DC phase of HxH because interestingly,we now have most characters want to keep the status quo and keep the system stable, while only beyond and his crew (who are, for now,villains) want to challenge this system that is in place for decades or millenia.
A good example of this is Gin's dialogue with pariston. Ging realizes it must make Pariston mad how cheadle leads the organization and how the conducted the hunter's exam. Pariston then says netero would just have challenged beyond to a fair duel, who can get to the DC first , so make it a fair and personal fight. This once again is a way of teens looking at things, why can't we just have a fair battle and then have the winner decide? Cheadle would never do that. Cheadle realizes that there certainly cannot be someone going to the DC and that the most efficient way of stopping Beyond is to babysit him nonstop to keep him under control in a mock expedition that is never meant to really go anywhere. For this, she uses the system around here to find compromise with everyone. A bunch of suit guys of which noone tells the truth and everyone has ulterior motives, held together by a system that keeps them from ripping into each other.
Even if you think cheadle is right in what she does (in fact she just wants to do the same thing netero did, keep people from going to the dc), one cannot deny that beyond's and pariston's approaches are far more noble and beautiful than her's is. The same goes for the other Zodiac.Even the simple ones realize there are things bigger than them and accept the systems of the zodiac and the system of the hunter world and they want to keep that system stable (while beyond and pariston want to crush it).
Even Ging, a very carefree guy, wants to make pariston give in and leave the system intact. Ging however, interestingly,take the approach netero would have (according to pariston): He will take it upon himself,in a ging vs pariston battle, to make pariston stop. This is something pariston can seemingly respect.
Still, as it is for now, the DC phase is a battle of old system vs young hotshots and the hotshots, for once, are the villains while our protags are on the status quo side of things.
This is illustrated very well in the succession war. The succession war has many, MANY characters, all with personal ambitions and dreams, but none of their plots (unlike in phase 1) is bigger than the war.
In yorkshin, Kurapika's plot was bigger than the auction stuff, the auction was just one station in his personal plotline and his personal fight influenced all the events in yorkshin.
In the DC arc, Kurapika is a player, but his plot hardly is the biggest influence on the proceedings of the battle. The most notable thing Kurapika did was the nentraining, but all Kurapika wants for now is to have woble and oito escape and get close to tserriednich.Simply put, the war is bigger than kurapika's eye story and this was different in yorkshin.
The same really is true for spider vs hisoka. Half the arc is over, and the spider had no interaction with hisoka yet but got tangled up in the mafia system. In yorkshin, the mafia played a role, but was quickly subdued by the spider. This time around, the Mafia is more in control and the spider work with it because they have to. They cannot move in this system without respecting the system at least some what.
I want to end this already long post with the example of Nasubi, who imo exemplifies this change best.
Nasubi starts out as your run of the mill fat and greedy king guy. Totally evil, makes his children fight to the death due to some old ceremony. However, as we saw, nasubi does not enjoy his children dying.He is somber when Momoze died and his dialogue with Halkenburg implies that he has no problem with Halkenburg's ways and even wishes him luck (he says Halkenburg needs to become king first, then can decide whatever he wants). He does the best he can to guide his children but he wants the best for kakin and would sacrifice his children and really a lot of innocent people for that.
Nasubi is a man who accepted there are things bigger than himself. Meruem was the perfect being who could do everything by himself and decided to abandon responsibility to do his own thing. Nasubi would never do that. Nasubi has the humility to accept that he is just one little branch in the great tree of kakin and that it is his responsibility to make this tree even stronger, no matter the cost. This is how an adult things. I cannot change the world, but I have responsibilities that i might hate, but they are still my responsibilities and I should do them well to hope they at least push things into a little better direction.
A lot of the nameless suit guys, when it comes down to it, seem to think like that and accept that there are things more important than their lives and ambitions and that is a clear change of ideological point of view compared to phase 1.
I think that the way the plots are presented changed from how a teen would look at things in the first part of hxh to how adults look at things starting in the voyage arc and in this thread I want to explain why I think that.
At first I want to outline why I think that HxH, while still having some darker contents, had a presentation of plots that would align more with a teen's point of view, for this, i will go through the dominant plotlines of the first parts of HxH arc by arc.
The hunter exam arc was a lot about growing. We had a kid that already started out far stronger than many adults due to his talent. But even when outmatched, if only Gon showed enough determination, he would surely succeed.
Gon was even able to save Killua from the grasp of the system of the Zoldyek family just by going there and never relenting. This 'determination trumps all' would later be given a dark turn in the CA arc, but for now, this is as teen as it gets. Gon is smart and strong, sure, but on simple terms,he is crazy talented and so determined and that is something a child or teen would like to see, a kid that is well equipped to change the world or be able to do everything what he wants if he just tries hard enough.
This goes on in heaven's arena. We get the confirmation (as if we needed one) that gon and kil are unique talents even among talented people. There are people who are nenusers since a long time, a vile system of persons. They are not strong, but still, they crush newbies in heaven's since a longer period of time, but Gon and Kil just need to go there, honestly study and fight and then they defeat them in a fair and square way. So again, as long as you study hard enough, there is no challenge you cannot meet.
Yorkshin would probably be the first arc where people disagree with my statement because yorkshin is a tad darker than the previous arcs. However, when we break it down, we see the following:There is a system in yorkshin that is so powerful that it has the whole city under control:The mafia. The ten most powerful underworld dons do an auction in yorkshin and put all their influence into it. They are able to hire the best killers in the world, too. Kurapika starts out working for a minor Don to get close to the spider. Now, this could be a story that is unlike the other two. This could be a story about trying to do your job and survive in this underworld jungle while searching for the spider. But that didn't happen. Kurapika relatively quickly becomes so important that he calls the shots and the spider relatively quickly fodderize the mafia. The old system in yorkshin is less important than the personal revenge fight between kurapika and the spider. At least when the ten dons die, it is clear that the only one who couldmaybe stop the spider is kurapika.
So what we have is a gang of young criminals who are able to beat powerful old men with relative ease and a young guy who goes from random henchmen to mob boss and takes up the fight successfully that the ten most powerful underworld bosses could not win over the course of like 40 chapters ( i know yorkshin had 60, but the transition took roughly 40 chaps) . Once again, this is what a teen would imagine joining an organization, rising in ranks and having his own personal story eclipse the giant system it takes place in.
Greed Island is probably the best example. There are several groups of Veterans that try to clear GI for years in a stale situation.They have ugly but efficient strategies and see Greed Island as a Job and not as a game.
Then our heroes arrive. They see greed Island as game and want to play it in legit ways and in the end, they are able to beat all these strong professionals and win the game. The protagonists and their convictions are bigger than the system and beat the system in the end.
Chimera ant arc is another arc that people might instinctively think as mature about and I agree to an extent that this is a minor turning point because it starts playing with what theprice of determination is. However, it still values personal choice as bigger than anything else.
Gon's transformation is not a positive thing, however, it is a personal choice that makes Gon and his revenge story so big that he is able to kill a very powerful fighter that is far out of his league. It is a thing you see in lots of teen fiction: If you really want to, even if it might not be a good thing, you can overcome this powerful enemy.
We have this existential attack on humanity come down to the fight of some flashy group of mostly (minus netero and morel) young people who have (by the end of it) their spirits up and their morale high.
It is true that Meruem is defeated by the vileness of humanity, so the opposite of what i claim (a nameless system bringing down the most perfect being) but this is only possible because that one champion of humanity, who trained all his life, decides to sacrifice his life to save humanity (so once again personal choice trumping all).
Meruem himself is a good example of my statement. He is born into perfection and quickly able to just take reign of a country.He was born into a rigid system in which he is king. But he abandons it for Komugi and by the end of it found his own thing to do. Meruem's story was a celebration of abandoning your fate in favour of doing what you really want in life, and this, once again, is as teen as it gets. The personal stories, even in CA arc, of the protagonists were bigger than
the system around them was. Because in the end, what mattered to Meruem was Komugi, not ant hierarchy.
Election arc is another example that plays a bit with this trope, but still has it mostly intact. It is the first time tho that there is something else because it did not really matter who wins the election at all. Pariston already has the xday planned, he would step down anyway because there are things far bigger than the election going on. However, we do not know that yet at that point. For all we know,Pariston is a guy who is so great that he alone as an individualcanplay with everyone else. He is the teen fantasy of a really smart guy, outclassing the more level headed and systematically thinking cheadle who is mroe of a conventional politician looking for compromise.
Aside from Pariston, we have Killua who thinks he and only he himself should and can save his best friend, confronts the system of the zoldyeks for Gon once again, saves his little sister from it and succeeds in saving Gon and it is only the personal action of Killua that decides the outcome of the election. Once again it is an example of a personal plot becoming bigger than a big system around it and eclipsing that system (even tho as i stated before, the election itself proved to be meaningless).
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
With this, I hope I could outline why I really see the first phase of HxH as a thing that aligns with the outlook a teen or child would have on the world. Personal plots are bigger than the system around it, if you try hard enough you can succeed (and if not succeed, than at least due to your pent up emotions you can wreck havoc against the people who wronged you) and generally there are almost no real limitations for the things you want to do in life.
This all changed in the DC phase of HxH because interestingly,we now have most characters want to keep the status quo and keep the system stable, while only beyond and his crew (who are, for now,villains) want to challenge this system that is in place for decades or millenia.
A good example of this is Gin's dialogue with pariston. Ging realizes it must make Pariston mad how cheadle leads the organization and how the conducted the hunter's exam. Pariston then says netero would just have challenged beyond to a fair duel, who can get to the DC first , so make it a fair and personal fight. This once again is a way of teens looking at things, why can't we just have a fair battle and then have the winner decide? Cheadle would never do that. Cheadle realizes that there certainly cannot be someone going to the DC and that the most efficient way of stopping Beyond is to babysit him nonstop to keep him under control in a mock expedition that is never meant to really go anywhere. For this, she uses the system around here to find compromise with everyone. A bunch of suit guys of which noone tells the truth and everyone has ulterior motives, held together by a system that keeps them from ripping into each other.
Even if you think cheadle is right in what she does (in fact she just wants to do the same thing netero did, keep people from going to the dc), one cannot deny that beyond's and pariston's approaches are far more noble and beautiful than her's is. The same goes for the other Zodiac.Even the simple ones realize there are things bigger than them and accept the systems of the zodiac and the system of the hunter world and they want to keep that system stable (while beyond and pariston want to crush it).
Even Ging, a very carefree guy, wants to make pariston give in and leave the system intact. Ging however, interestingly,take the approach netero would have (according to pariston): He will take it upon himself,in a ging vs pariston battle, to make pariston stop. This is something pariston can seemingly respect.
Still, as it is for now, the DC phase is a battle of old system vs young hotshots and the hotshots, for once, are the villains while our protags are on the status quo side of things.
This is illustrated very well in the succession war. The succession war has many, MANY characters, all with personal ambitions and dreams, but none of their plots (unlike in phase 1) is bigger than the war.
In yorkshin, Kurapika's plot was bigger than the auction stuff, the auction was just one station in his personal plotline and his personal fight influenced all the events in yorkshin.
In the DC arc, Kurapika is a player, but his plot hardly is the biggest influence on the proceedings of the battle. The most notable thing Kurapika did was the nentraining, but all Kurapika wants for now is to have woble and oito escape and get close to tserriednich.Simply put, the war is bigger than kurapika's eye story and this was different in yorkshin.
The same really is true for spider vs hisoka. Half the arc is over, and the spider had no interaction with hisoka yet but got tangled up in the mafia system. In yorkshin, the mafia played a role, but was quickly subdued by the spider. This time around, the Mafia is more in control and the spider work with it because they have to. They cannot move in this system without respecting the system at least some what.
I want to end this already long post with the example of Nasubi, who imo exemplifies this change best.
Nasubi starts out as your run of the mill fat and greedy king guy. Totally evil, makes his children fight to the death due to some old ceremony. However, as we saw, nasubi does not enjoy his children dying.He is somber when Momoze died and his dialogue with Halkenburg implies that he has no problem with Halkenburg's ways and even wishes him luck (he says Halkenburg needs to become king first, then can decide whatever he wants). He does the best he can to guide his children but he wants the best for kakin and would sacrifice his children and really a lot of innocent people for that.
Nasubi is a man who accepted there are things bigger than himself. Meruem was the perfect being who could do everything by himself and decided to abandon responsibility to do his own thing. Nasubi would never do that. Nasubi has the humility to accept that he is just one little branch in the great tree of kakin and that it is his responsibility to make this tree even stronger, no matter the cost. This is how an adult things. I cannot change the world, but I have responsibilities that i might hate, but they are still my responsibilities and I should do them well to hope they at least push things into a little better direction.
A lot of the nameless suit guys, when it comes down to it, seem to think like that and accept that there are things more important than their lives and ambitions and that is a clear change of ideological point of view compared to phase 1.
