HxH 2011 rewatch (for the billionth time)
I love Yoshihiro Togashi. At the end of the Hunter Exam, the final round, the main character fights in the first match, loses (sort of), and then he just skips the rest of the fights! Screw it, we’ll do it all in flashbacks.
He also did this, sort of, in YYH during the Demon King arc. There’s all this stressful build-up of political manoeuvring and ultra-powerful demons scheming against each other and then maybe our protagonists will have to fight each other?! And then Urameshi is just like “lol nope” and does a tournament instead of an epic war. And THEN Togashi doesn’t even write the whole tournament, everybody important drops out in the early rounds and some random old friend of Urameshi’s dad wins. The End. Peace in the demon realm in our time.
Then I was thinking about the Chuunin exam arc in Naruto, which is obviously based off of the Hunter Exam. (For those who aren’t in the loop, the author of Naruto worked under the author of HxH/YYH as an assistant before getting Naruto serialized). In the last round, in the one-on-one battles, we do get quite a lot of blow-by-blow fights, but when the main fight we’ve been building up to is supposed to happen, everything goes to shit. And that’s actually my favourite arc, the chuunin exam and then the chasing-after-sasuke bit right after.
Basically Togashi is a master of the bait-and-switch. The bait is the normal-seeming shounen set-up. The switch is the “ha ha actually my family tortures me but it’s fine” moments. AND THEN CHIMERA ANT ARC. AND NOTHING IS FINE EVER AGAIN. *sobs into hands*