This is a weird question to ask but would you say Hisoka is a pretty shallow person when it comes to judging people, which kind of contradicts his personality? Like, for example, his Bungee Gum/Texture Surprise is all about finding creative ways to deceive people with simple abilities, and yet:
1. He underestimated Gotoh finding a way to use his coins to trap his Gum.
2. He failed to predict how Chrollo could exploit loopholes in his stolen Nen abilities (despite that usually being his MO).
3. And this is a stretch, but I believe the reason he didn't want to fight Razor is because his abilities isn't necessarily combat oriented (it could be but Razor was using them for a dodgeball match, and so Hisoka might have assumed that was the only thing they were good for).
4. He was caught off guard by how forward Netero was and lost his edge.
5. His whole Nen personality test, which by his own admission is not wholly accurate and is based on judgements about people he just met.
Like, Hisoka's whole thing is about deceiving people with appearances, and yet to me it seems like he is the biggest sucker of them all when it comes to accepting things at face value. I headcanon like he has some sort of ADHD (speaking as someone who has it) in which he devotes a lot of time to propping up his inner life but is clueless/inattentive when it comes to figuring out other people. (Of course, he did manage to trick Chrollo with the fake fortune so I could be wrong).
Sorry this is just a word salad I came up with out of nowhere and wanted to know what you would have thought.
Hello! 👋 thank you so much for getting in touch and giving me an excuse to think/write about my favourite boy and all the ways he’s both frighteningly sharp and also impressively stupid… I’m not sure if this really answers your question but hopefully, you’ll enjoy reading my thoughts/ramblings about the silly clown man.
Generally speaking, Hisoka is not stupid. He’s smart and very good at what he does. However, he has some pretty major personality flaws which can, at times, make him act like an absolute idiot (affectionate).
Let’s start with his ability to read people/assess their level of strength/ability. As we know has his own system for ranking/judging nen-users that he created himself and (surprisingly) even admitted is not a perfect system. However, typically it IS pretty reliable. Put him in a room with 100 random nen users and I reckon he’d probably be able to assess their power level/strength with a high degree of accuracy.
The real problem with his assessment system is that he over-relies on it. He doesn’t really do any further research on his opponents or plan ahead for anything, choosing instead to just show up and adapt to whatever situation is flung his way in the moment.
Because he’s very skilled and versatile and has a high degree of nen mastery, this approach USUALLY tends to work very well in his favour.
Unfortunately, it also serves as a form of confirmation bias providing ‘evidence’ for the idea that he doesn’t NEED to do any further research/planning ahead of his fights. This is (imo) example number one of how his own talent actually makes him stupid.
Moving on to Hisoka’s second big flaw. He is arrogant. He seems to genuinely believe that he’s the best at everything and seems to be incapable of taking the idea that someone else might be stronger/smarter/more adaptable than him seriously. The fact he’s won so many fights against so many strong opponents has only compounded his belief that he’s the best. (It’s why his interaction with Netero rattled him so much. He couldn’t fathom the idea that anyone could be stronger/wouldn’t be scared of him, much less an old man so Netero seeming so bored by him just… didn’t make sense!)
Like with his aversion to doing homework, Hisoka’s arrogance isn’t a problem for him 99% of the time because he IS strong and he DOES tend to win even if something takes him by surprise, as we saw in the example you gave of his fight against Gotoh. Gotoh did indeed catch Hisoka off guard with an unusual technique, however in the end Gotoh was no match for Hisoka who was just stronger and adapted to the unexpected bump in the road, seeing it as just part of the fun.
His arrogance only really became a weakness when he fought against someone smarter than him (urgh. I HATE to call Chrollo smart or compliment him in any way, but… he did outclass Hisoka on this one 😓).
Unlike Hisoka, Chrollo did his research ahead of their fight. He learned all he could about Hisoka’s style/methods and most importantly his arrogance and used all that research against him by going into the fight prepared and ready to throw as many curveballs as possible to make it impossible for Hisoka to win.
If Hisoka had done the same, and paid attention to Chrollo’s typical fight style ahead of their match, he could’ve set conditions that would’ve made it a fairer fight or learned some new techniques that Chrollo wouldn’t have expected.
If he’d done that he could have won. But he didn’t. He was too arrogant to think he needed to. His arrogance made him stupid and cost him the fight.
On a sidenote; whilst I agree, Hisoka definitely underestimated Netero and Chrollo, I disagree with you on his assessment of Razor. My opinion on that particular case is that he doesn’t want to fight Razor because he’s already beat him. The dodgeball game wasn’t the same as one of Hisoka’s typical fights, but I think it met enough of Hisoka’s conditions to count as a real challenge. Everyone involved in the game was allowed to use nen to their full capacity, the stakes were life and death and everyone who played was a strong nen-user. The game was set up to cater entirely to Razor’s abilities and strengths, giving Hisoka and the rest of his team no advantages. But – even with all the odds against them - Hisoka and his team still won. Hisoka COULD demand a second 1 v 1 fight against Razor in future, but what would be the point? He now knows Razor’s abilities and has already beat him once. A rematch would be boring and Hisoka would surely only win again. Second side-note; Speaking as a fellow ADHD-er, Hisoka is absolutely one of us!!! The way he hyperfixates on certain people/fights, and how quick he is to get ‘bored’ or to completely disengage with anything that doesn’t immediately provide entertainment to him is… painfully relatable (bro missed the events of the ENTIRE Chimera ant arc because they ‘didn’t interest him’ 😅).
It’s probably another weakness/flaw of his that I’ve failed to even consider in the rest of this reply, but I’ve already rambled far too much already, so I’ll leave it there for now. Sorry, this became such an essay, the whole thing kind of ran away from me! 🖤
