watched it four times and every time it's a different show, because every time i'm a different person watching it.
killua is the character. a kid raised to kill, by a family who loved him in the only language they knew, which was control. illumi put a needle in his head that said run when you're scared, you don't get to have friends, you don't get to want things, you were made for one job and the job is the family. that is what being an outcast actually feels like from the inside. not being hated, being pre-decided. he walks around the whole first season like someone who has already accepted he's the villain in everyone else's story before anyone's said a word to him.
and then gon. gon doesn't do a speech. he doesn't fix him. he just decides killua is his friend and never once reconsiders it, and goes and gets him from a house full of assassins like it's the obvious thing to do. killua spends the rest of the show slowly believing it. the yorknew "i'm glad i met you", the moment he rips the needle out of his own head to stay with gon, the goodbye at the world tree. i know exactly what it feels like to be the kid who was sure he didn't belong anywhere, and then one person acts like of course you do, and you spend years catching up to how normal they made it look. i've been that killua. i'm still catching up.
and that's just the friendship. the chimera ant arc is about what actually makes a person human and lets an insect answer it better than the humans. meruem and komugi is the best love story in anime and neither of them ever says the word. the election arc is a real politics essay about institutions that rot from the inside while everyone argues about rules. the zoldycks are a case study in how families manufacture people. netero, the phantom troupe, greed island, all of it is togashi asking one question from a new angle: what do people do with the power they didn't ask for.
people call it peak shonen. it's a masterclass essay wearing a shonen costume, and it only shows you how deep it goes if you're ready to look. five stars, and it'll be five stars on the fifth watch too.
on romeo’s shelf →
