Review of Hunter x Hunter

This anime is like perfection itself to me personally. Every character is so detailed, vivid, compelling, quirky, lively, and I can even recall very minor characters (cried during the match with Killua's girl butler and when the Octopus changed sides) which I can't say how rare it is to find in anime. Music, sound and voice acting is great. Sometimes the music doesn't quite capture what the scene is trying to do, but it's passable. Art is solid. The world mirrors our own quite closely, but it works since it makes the characters a lot more relatable than typical full-fantasy settings. Story begins as avery typical if well-panned and thought-out shonen work, so to be honest, this would not have received a 10/10 from me if not for the Chimera ant arc. The build-up, the battles, the villains, the down-spiralling of the looming dooming situation and the unexpected twist at the end was absolutely AMAZING, like I CAN'T BELIEVE YOU PULLED THAT OFF ONCE-IN-A-LIFETIME LEVEL of amazing. The Yorkshin Arc and Chimera ant arc transformed the typical shounen story so far into a work that dealt with complex and mature themes that are virtually unseen in previous shounen works. No one is "fully evil". All the villains are given sympathetic aspects of character that you can't help but admire them as much as the protagonists despite their evil deeds (afaik, Phantom members have quite amount of fans and you'll see why).

The characters are riveting and combine that with strategized battles -- it's not just brute force that wins the rounds, but observance, analysis, and creative use of your powers can help you overcome the most seemingly unbeatable enemy -- and this will literally get you so excited and you won't be able to stop watching just to see what happens next. The Aura-system impacted Shounen manga in uncountable ways and presents unlimited possibilities of powers.

Another big plus is -- and I notice not many say this -- it's so refreshing that female characters are not heavily sexualized. Ok, so the main cast is mostly male, but there are major female characters as well, and you don't remember female characters for their sex appeal or how big their boobs/butts are, or for their sexual catering to the male leads to fulfill some sort of sexual fantasy, or even get naked at some point (even Rumiko Takahashi does this, y'know). You remember them for their personalities. For their passions. For the way they handle problems thrown at them. For their quirks. A certain blonde pink-dressed lady reads adult male magazines while training Gon and Killua. In fact, this series has one of the most adorable female character who is bald, short, fat, buck-tooth'd and you can't even tell she was female until you know her. But she is a badass in her own right and also sweet thing as a human being, and I can't say not only many shounen anime, but even movies or anything that caters to the masses that would dare to feature a deformed woman stripped of all sexual recognition. To this, I can only applaud Togashi. I can't help but feel that it works because he sees the world with a sort of childish innocence that is far beyond the perceptive capacities of the orthodox adult (would a childish person be able to write something like Yorkshin or Chimera ant?) that makes his world both simpler and more true to the essence of human lives at the same time.

Truly, it's anime like this that makes you proud to be an Otaku.