Do you think Killua and Gon will eventually reunite? And if so, what are your hopes for their reunion?
I've seen varied takes on the status of their friendship following their parting that range from pretty bleak to hopeful. Some people think Killua is mad at Gon for his behavior and is stepping away from their friendship and essentially replacing Gon with Alluka and may have no plans to reunite with him. Others think Killua carefully constructed the scenario of "I just want to hang with my sis for a bit, see ya later" so that Gon would not catch on to the fact that Illumi is pursuing Killua and Alluka, and that Killua only left because he wants to keep Gon safe from that situation. What are your thoughts?
Also, do you think Togashi is hinting/building up to killugon as a pairing, even if it is ambiguous?
Thanks for your hxh posts and meta!
these are great questions! first of all, i don't see any world in which killua is so mad at gon that he'd never want to reunite with him. killua loves him dearly, and i'm sure killua of all people understands how trauma can negatively impact your behavior and why gon in particular lashed out. we have to remember that killugon spent two years together, and most of those two years were filled with mutual encouragement, growth, adoration, etc. their loyalty to one another is pretty unbreakable and killua gives no indication he doesn't want to see gon again. on the contrary, it's implied the two of them agree their separation is necessary and needs to be quick because otherwise they wouldn't leave each other. but i also don't think killua's primary consideration atm is protecting gon from illumi.
i think, realistically, they both realized after CAA that they have an unhealthy codependency that was negatively impacting their capacity for growth, and that they accomplished all they really could together (caveat: at the stages in their lives they are currently at!! not permanently). killua and gon had two goals with their friendship: for gon to find his dad, and for killua to find something he wants to do beyond be friends with gon. gon found his father, and killua rekindled his relationship with his sister who he's now resolved himself to protect. i don't think killua is replacing gon consciously but i do think that's how it's played out thematically.
as gon said, they'll always be friends, but i think this time apart is necessary because they spent two years attached at the hip while going through severely traumatizing circumstances and clearly didn't really know how to Exist without one another. but while killua has experienced tremendous growth, the reset button has basically been hit on gon's life, and he doesn't seem impressed with his accomplishments. there's so much left unsaid and unfinished with gon's character in particular (and he seems to be more self loathing and empty than ever), so i do believe he'll be returning eventually (if not within the next 20 chapters).
now, if killugon do reunite, i don't think they'll ever be as reliant on one another. if they do return to the story as a duo i imagine alluka will be returning with killua and he might finally resolve things with kalluto, and i think their reunion would result in a core four reunion in general ( + bisky is back in the main plot) so they'd have a lot of other emotional support avenues available that would allow them to be together without engaging in the self destructive/codependent tendencies that resulted in their friendship becoming too complicated to be healthily maintained. what i wish for in my little killugonnie heart for their reunion is quite literally just a hug. i talk here about how little they touch each other throughout the series and i think a declaration of their bond through physical affection would actually prove they believe they can have a healthier bond. and of course, for them to actually communicate for one would be lovely, but hxh isn't a series necessarily hinged on catharsis so i can see a lot going unspoken between the two of them for the remainder of the story.
as for whether or not i think killugon will become romantic, i think togashi has already taken multiple avenues to at least confirm killua's feelings. togashi has an interest in BL and shoujo; he's cited mineo maya (a BL author) as one of his greatest inspirations, has often talked about his love for shoujo as a genre and how he likes incorporating it into his stories, and even tried to submit a BL story to shounen jump before it was rejected and he went ahead with hxh instead. togashi has written multiple queer characters in yu yu hakusho, level e, and hxh, and in general from telling anecdotes about his gay friends to working with and eventually marrying takeuchi (who also wrote queer stories) he just seems very tapped into the culture and genre. i mean we're at the point where we have an on page lesbian makeout in the current arc.
i would be genuinely shocked if togashi was not writing killua as gay intentionally. even beyond the shoujo tropes used in killugon's relationship, you have killua saying he'll commit "shinjuu" (an intimate suicide) with gon in the worst case scenario of CAA, have them deliberately paralleled with merukomu, have them compared to lovers by illumi and hisoka when discussing nanika's powers, have killua handing gon a card in greed island that references proposal, mariya ise (killua's 2011 VA) sharing her interpretation that "of course killua is in love with gon. otherwise, why would he go that far for him?", palm saying "love can just happen sometimes, don't you think?" directly to killua after the you are light scene, killua being the only one to not fall for the heteronormative tropes playing out on aiai, and not to mention all of the explicitly romantic teasing in the hunterpedias, stage plays, figures, movies, etc that togashi absolutely has an eye on. i would argue that we are at the point in canon where killua's feelings for gon are extremely explicit already.
the question is really whether or not gon reciprocates this. i think this is much clearer within thematic coding than it is within anything gon says. gon's internal world does not receive nearly as much focus as killua's, very intentionally, and this isn't just because his thoughts are being hidden, but because he simply thinks differently. he thinks based on instinct. i doubt if he did have feelings for killua that he's intentionally parsed through them. his view of intimacy is extremely skewed, which is expected from a child that has experienced being sexualized and adultified by the adults in his life. but despite all of this i do think killugon is written as a love story between two queer children.
their relationship is all about the isolation and loneliness they experience in their respective childhoods, understood by very few people, and how they can only find someone who reflects themselves in each other. the codependency they foster is very familiar to what many queer people experienced in their youth with one of the only other gay people they knew. that level of understanding just comes with an "outsider" narrative i believe is deliberately about queerness (it's relevant that it's alluka, a trans girl, who completes killua's arc wrt this). then of course you have the fact that killua's birthday is tanabata, which is literally about two romeo and juliet-esque star crossed lovers and directly parallels killua's experience with his family trying to separate him from gon. it'd be crazy if a flock of magpies laid down to bring killua back to gon, huh? i also thought it was funny the ending togashi gave that he said he'd scrapped was explicitly one where gon was in a marriage with a woman and was seemingly very miserable.
tl;dr togashi has HEAVILY queer coded their relationship and i think it's already crossed the threshold of "canon" in a lot of ways. whether or not they'll actually get together remains to be seen, because togashi doesn't always explicitly canonize pairings (a great example being merukomu) because he just expects the audience to understand how natural love, including queer love, is. i think killugon will probably end up the same way it's been for thirty years, which is two boys in love who are unsure how to express it. it's just been that way for so long i couldn't imagine the cultural shift wrt the series if there was a kiss or something. but you know...one can hope <3 togashi's really testing the waters with morena i feel and has been for his entire career, so who really knows?
