Review of Hunter x Hunter

I've always loved long-running action-adventure battle shonens. Be it Dragon Ball, the love of my childhood, or be it One Piece, my juice to go by every week. And so I was bound to love Hunter X Hunter, a show that uses what I love about these types of shows beautifully. It is, at its core, a fun adventure with friends in extraordinary places. The best part of HxH lies in the humane relationships between the characters. Friendship as a concept for a story is overused to the point of being a complete meme, and yet it's overused because how beautiful it is when it's doneright. The show starts with Gon finding new friends and really kicks in when he meets with Kilua, while the show ends with the divergence of their paths. And everything we see in the middle is centred around their bond. But it's not limited to Gon and Killua. Kurapika prioritizing the safety of his friends over basically one of his life goals, the camaraderie between a group of bandits, a serial killer obsessed with some game prioritizing the life of his companion over his, or the romantic relationship between a fragile girl and a supposedly inhumane creature- bonds like these are the meat of this show.
If the bonds between the characters is the meat of the show, then the characters themselves can be called the bones. The individual stories of different characters as a whole form the overarching narrative of the show. The goals, desires, priorities and the growth of the characters drive the story forward. Killua, a child from an Assassin family who had no given choice in life but to keep killing according to orders, decided to run away from home to actually do something fun while finding his life chained and worthless. After becoming friends with Gon, he felt indebted to him and valued him more than anyone, while also fearing that his instincts would compel him to leave Gon to die one day. This show is as much or more about Killua discovering his self worth than Gon's initial goals. It's also about Kurapika's quest to avenge his brethren paralleled by the friends he come to value. It's about the Leorio's selfish motive of earning money for the selfless reason of being a doctor driven by the loss of his friend due to illness, about a bunch of bandits forsaken by society who found their own place and their own way of living in the world that rejected them, and it's also about a monster born to rule humans having an identity crisis and questioning his views, eventually discovering humanity in himself.
A common reason people don't seem to like HxH is its lack of an overarching story, and while it definitely does lack it, that doesn't make the plot bad. Rather Hunter X Hunter, by nature, focuses on the individual arcs and the stories of the characters from those specific arcs. It reflects the nature of our world, where there is no grand story that is happening on the scale of the entire world, but rather places waiting to be discovered waiting with their own people and stories, with the main cast, like us, being only a small part of it. Even friends don't stick around on other's journeys meaninglessly and instead pursue their own. And they meet back because they friends, they come rushing when their friends are in trouble. This as well reflects the type of friendship we experience, each on their own paths, we meet just to relax with the people we trust and are comfortable with. And due to this, the main cast of each arc usually changes, introducing fresh new characters along with new places and story with their own themes while fleshing them out on a personal level. This is why it can go from an exam arc to a martial arts tournament, to a chaotic thrilling mafia story, to an isekai game, to a war of survival, to a political battle, backed up by good world building and probably the most well written power system.
While Hunter X Hunter at times went quite dark, it is not a nihilistic show, it is more likely that things will still turn out good, to the point of dragging the show down. But still I love it for what it is. The animation is good enough, although some people prefer the color palate of the 1999 version, but I find the 2011 style more fitting of the philosophy of the show. It has good osts and despite basically only one opening, some of the endings are my favourite among all anime. Especially "Reason" and "Hyori Ittai" portray their individual arc very well. Of course there are still a lot more things I love about the show but I guess this is the limit of my expression for now.