Name(s): HUNTER × HUNTER（ハンター×ハンター）
Format: TV series (148 episodes)
Studio(s): Madhouse
Related: Hunter x Hunter: Phantom Rouge

I never wrote a formal review for this one, but here are some general off-the-cuff thoughts.

The beginning is extraordinarily bland. Everyone seems to acknowledge how much the show improves, but I would state more than most that the gap is simply enormous. I almost couldn’t believe any anecdote that said this show became something worth watching. Everything up to and including Heaven’s Arena (despite being the first signs of improvement) is maybe the dullest, least interesting shonen work I have ever come across. And I used to subscribe to Shonen Jump. It’s so devoid of unique ideas, and the chaotic in-cohesive character designs and world building only works against it when it doesn’t justify the range of expressions with ideas that deserve expounding upon. Every single episode of this is worse than any one episode of Yu Yu Hakusho with the exception of some with a Hisoka focus, and because it takes up such a large chunk of the show it can’t be called insignificant.

Perhaps worse is the genealogy of that lackluster start. Even when the scenario writing and new characters improve dramatically, we’re stuck with a story built around Gon, who is a clone of Goku from Dragon Ball but much less endearing. Every character in the series runs circles around him with anything from nuance to complexity, and he’s the biggest on-going issue with the entire show. Even hints of subverting his character arc later in the series end up going nowhere in the long-term.

Yorknew City arc is a contender for the tightest plotted saga of any shonen I’ve encountered. So many characters with individual goals plausibly crossing paths and having to deal with conflicts they never expected makes a for a real powder keg construction, and the scale of the events going on in the big city make the large cast actually suitable for the storyline while also allowing a reasonable death toll. The stakes are real, almost nothing is wasted. Every shonen could learn the most probably just from this arc.

Greed Island is strong overall, but pretty sloppy. Togashi can get self-indulgent whenever he tires of something he’s writing, and that completely shows here. The gamesmanship aspects of this arc that involve strategy are its distinctive and greatest characteristic, but this part of the plot gets thrown to the wayside near the end for montages in an excuse to get this shit over with after far too much time was spent on completely generic training episodes that explain to us for the 100th time how anime ki energy works.

The Chimera Ant arc is my personal favorite. It doesn’t come close to having the cohesion of Yorknew City, but it pays that off with its own merits. What I particularly like about this one is how well done the escalation of threat is. Hunter x Hunter had generally been building up a more serious tone, but the pacing on that becomes more urgent very quickly in this arc. The contrast between the light-hearted elements of the show it started out with and the predatory, monstrous nature of their new opponents adds what’s practically a horror element to the show. Excessive vulnerability helpless before overwhelming power becomes a major thing in this arc, and unlike shows like Dragon Ball Z, it’s not a thing to simply overcome, it’s something to struggle with and run from. Shit in this arc gets pretty fucking intense and brutal, particularly so because of how it stands out from what the show set your expectations to be. The pacing of the infiltration segment near the end is where the arc shows the most amount of fat, but I’m sympathetic. In an animated format, how easily can you portray the slow passing of time without actually applying it to the movement? Hunter x Hunter tries to compensate with the narration filling the dead space, but it still results in a sequence of events that unfold far slower than they possibly did in the manga, which can convey the slowing of time without having to match its pace in presentation. It’s a concession.