To me, anything that involves fighting people is not very well done if you can't compare some characters from that story. What good is anything that involves in fighting if you can't even attempt to resolve the eternal question of "My favorite character is stronger than your character"? HXH certainly has a ton of 'who is the strongest character', though I find that HXH's combat system to be very subtle to the point that people miss a lot of intricaies, which is why you still get questions like "Can the Spiders defeat Meryem?" (if they could, they would be considered a threat to the existence of humanity like Meryem is). Random thoughts on the characters, mostly related to fighting ability but also some on the characters themselves. Since the Anime is supposed to be rebooted, maybe there will be more than Eric who actually knows what the heck is going on soon.
Meryem
I'm not sure how many times the author can go out and say, "This guy is the strongest guy in my universe" and yet people still question Meryem's unrivaled power. Even before he powered up he is undoubtedly the strongest character in the story by a significant margin. When he fought Netero (who is clearly one of those most powerful humans alive), he said he'll give him a handicap equivalent of playing without his Rooks and Bishop in Shogi (there are no Queens in Shogi, I think). He may strike some people as arrogant, but since he is the perfect being he's really just stating a fact. I really like the initial dialogue between him and Netero.
Meryem: There is no chance for you to defeat me.
Netero: You should not judge a book by its cover.
Meryem: Exactly. You don't look like someone who is so weak that he cannot see the futility of his actions.
It's true Meryem took a lot of hits against Netero, but he only did it because he wanted to figure out how to counter Netero's move (which is practically flawless). Given he has the highest physical ability rating by a landslide in the series, he can simply trade hits and win easily that way. It seems like he added an additional handicap to himself and pretended all of Netero's attacks can stun/knockback, even though they clearly can't do that. Of course, he still won rather easily like that.
Meryem is also super smart, and unlike your standard 'guy with IQ of 200' in Anime, he clearly puts that intelligence to good use. With the sole exception of him apparently unaware that nukes/bio weapons exist, he has trivially foiled every attempt of trickery, without even using his mind reading powers, including the betrayal of two of his Royal guards. The message is pretty clear. You can't outrun, outlast, or outsmart Meryem. Just hope that he's currently in his 'good' personality out of his two personalities, otherwise you're already dead.
Of course after his rebirth after getting nuked he is probably at Dragonball-like powerful. If he absorbed Pitou he might become Perfect Cell! It's not even clear to me why he has these powerups, since nobody in the story is a threat to him, except...
Super Saiyan Gon/Big Gon/Muscle Gon
There is no doubt Gon is destined to become the most powerful human alive. On the other hand, he is also only 12 years old. For some reason, in the world of HXH where you can use aura to reverse aging permanently with no side effects, most people find it unfathomable that the boy destined to become the most powerful human in the world can accelerate his aging and hit his peak prematurely. The funny thing is that since his transform is indeed very Super Saiyan like (fueled by extreme hatred), this means although he has the potential to defeat Meryem, it would never happen because Meryem doesn't have any motivation to kill people close to Gon. If he was the one who ran into Kite he'd probably offer the position of court jester to him, and if Kite said he'd rather die than submit, Meryem would probably just laugh and say it's your loss and tell him to take those two kids home.
Gon is really the anti-hero. He is unfathomably talented, even far more so than your generic manga hero character. He hates training, and is likely to waste his potential because he prefers fishing or hunting over doing anything productive if cirucmstanes didn't force him to stop slacking. He shows absolutely no mercy to his enemies and doesn't listen to your generic villian sob stories at all. He basically kidnapped Meryem's woman and use that advantage to abuse Pitou without feeling the least bit guilty. And you know, that's why he's an awesome hero. When you're trying to avenge for someone who was like your brother while fighting a threat that can wipe out humanity, and you know their power level starts off at least 10 times higher than any comparable human, this isn't the time to be nice and honorable. It's pretty clear Pitou must have studied extensively on how to deal with sappy, goody-two shoes heroes. In almost any other manga, whoever was faced against Pitou surely would have fell for the "Your transgression defiles the notion of love itself!" defense that Pitou used. But Gon isn't even remotely distracted by that. It is said quite a few times that Pitou is more than capable of killing pretty much everyone present if Gon didn't have Komugi as a hostage. It's actually pretty funny when you consider all the others are leaning toward returning Komugi since that'd be the honorable thing to do, even though they're all dead if they actually did that. He isn't a likeable hero, but what he does makes a ton of sense. If the fate of humanity hinges on one decisive battle against a group of incomprehensibly powerful beings, then yeah I'd definitely stick with Gon who is not afraid to kidnap Meryem's woman and use her as a bargaining chip. Even before he used transformed into Super Gon, he effectively neutralized 2 Royals since he never let Komugi go the whole time. While it doesn't seem to make any sense, there seems to be a strong connotion that dropping a nuke on Meryem would not have worked if ANY of the 3 Royals got back to Meryem on time, not to mention Gon was keeping Pitou busy, who is almost certainly the most powerful of the Royals and whose purpose in life is to die for Meryem.
Super Gon is not a very interesting character to analyze. He is probably second only to Meryem (initial), and based on Pitou's evaluation it'd appear that Super Gon could've done some serious damage to even Meryem, though I think Meryem would still win. This fight is clearly hypothetical, since Meryem will never do anything that'd provoke Gon (he simply doesn't care enough about humans). Since Meryem is the peak of evolution while Gon is merely the peak of humanity, I'd give Meryem the edge, but he'll definitely be hurting too.
Pitou (aka the missing female major character that is not actually female)
To be canonical to the story, one should refer to Pitou as 'he' or at least 'it'. But I don't know of anyone that actually thinks of Pitou as a guy unless you're trying to show off your knowledge of the original source book material, which is probably Togashi's idea of some sick joke. In Chinese, Pitou is referred to as 'she' half of the time, so clearly even official translators assumed there's no way Pitou can be a guy. When she was protecting Komugi, Killua observed that Pitou was protecting Komugi 'like a mother'. It's true all the Royal Guards all seem to have homosexual-like devotion to their leader, Meryem, but when Pitou starts talking about her devotion to Meryem it basically reads like a shojo manga love letter. Pitou is my favorite character in the current arc (I like Machi slightly better overall but she gets no air time). Whereas the other Royals all exhibit extreme jealousy toward Komugi becoming Meryem's woman, Pitou, who really should be the person with the biggest reason to object as you can argue that could've been her place, was also the only Royal who accepted Komugi as her Queen.
Although Pitou is a Special type natural, which means her ability to fight is the worst, she fights like the exact opposite. Similar to Meryem or Gon, her choice of attack is the simple but effective aura-charged swipe. Despite having a staggering 0.16 aura affinity modifier on all her aura-charged attacks, that's pretty much the only attack she used throughout the story. For comparison, Pufu which has an aura affnity of 0.36 pretty much never fights hand-to-hand, and it's pretty clear that even a human being with a high aura affinity modifier could've defeated him in hand to hand combat. Now, I don't think she'd beat Yupi in a straight up fight since Yupi has an aura affinity of 1.0, but I'm pretty sure that on a cumulative level, she is by far the strongest of the Royals, and probably the third strongest character overall, possibly second. When fighting against Netero (also 1.0 affinity) she took one of the hits head on, and had no noticeable damage but was knocked back a considerable distance.
It's interesting to note that Pitou is also the healer even though she also has an affinity of 0.16 there (healing comes from the Strength school). In short, she's one of the many characters in HXH who learned abilities that are totally incompatiable with her natural type. But whereas other characters who did this usually did so from sheer stupidity, it seemed like Pitou went this path in the same way that if you play a MMORPG with your friends, someone has to be the healer even if no one wants to play that role. After all, she's completely selfless when it comes to her role. She literally exists only to serve and protect Meryem.
In her favored schools, she is apparently better at controlling-type aura even compared to Pufu even though she only has an affinity of 0.64 (compared to Pufu's 1.0). Her mass animate dead or living ability can operate an army that can take over the entire world. It's kind of funny that the Hunters always assumed Pitou is a control-type natural since she clearly uses her abilities as if they're her natural school. If her aura type wasn't revealed the moment she showed up, it'd certainly be a very interesting discussion on what should be her natural type.
The encounter between Pitou and Gon is almost a satire on classical hero versus villian. For one thing, note that in the first encounter, the first thing Pitou did was chop off Kite's head because everyone knows if you let a good guy left for dead, he invariably recovers miraculously to become more powerful than he was before. In their second encounter, with Komugi as hostage, Pitou tried to appeal to Gon in the name of love, and actually failing since Gon too isn't your goody two shoe hero. Honestly the whole dialogue is actually pretty suggestive, i.e. Pitou saying she'll do 'anything' if they let Komugi go, or that Gon can abuse her all he wants. Now the actual fight has been said to be anticlimatic, and clearly most people do think Pitou is the most powerful of the Royal guards and found that her defeat to be unbelieveable. However, she might be the most powerful Royal Guard overall, but in hand to hand combat she's got a hopeless 0.16 aura modifier versus Gon's 1.0. Way back in the Arena, Hisoka said that one's capacity to learn aura ability is fixed and any ability charges their full value regardless of the modifier. So, Pitou could either learn a level 16 healing (Strengthen) ability, a level 36 projectile, a level 64 materialize, or a level 100 special. It's pretty clear she chose to learn abilities that would help Meryem but not necessarily herself, so her defeat was pretty much certain against Gon, whose abilities are clearly optimized for killing. He's roughly a level 100 offense/defense/healing and level 80ish projectile (it's stated that his projectile affinity is higher than the standard 0.64 for his type) and pretty much 0 in everything else.
Of course, Pitou's only combat special move where she animated her body after death, is presumably her level 100 ability. It's interesting to note that Gon smashed her head too, as he too is aware of the fact that you should decapitate your enemies to make sure they don't come back, but Pitou's special power is so high that she doesn't need her head to be intact to animate herself. If Killua didn't just happen to get there and intervened with his lightning mode, presumably Pitou's corpse would have finished off Gon and it'd be a double KO. A lot of manga talk about loyalty but I think Pitou is the best emdoiment of that as a character. She can easily be the second most powerful character in the world of HXH, but she chooses to throw away her potential to learn abilities that would help Meryem even if they do her no good. Yes originally she learned healing just for fun, but it's pretty clear that Pufu has the ability to reset the aura skills you have learned, so Pufu must have told her that she's learning completely the wrong abilities compared to her natural affinity. The one ability that matched her affinity can only be used when she's dead. Of all the Royals, she's the only one to die with dignity, and she neutralized the only person in the world who was a threat to Meryem (there's no way she could know that Gon would never have a reason to fight Meryem). I really like the fact that in the Gon versus Pitou, once Gon accelerated his aging to equalize their raw aura levels, Pitou was the one fighting against impossible odds, not Gon, and even against such insurmountable odds, she still managed to do what she was born to, which is to neutralize any threat to Meryem at the cost of her life.
Meryem
I'm not sure how many times the author can go out and say, "This guy is the strongest guy in my universe" and yet people still question Meryem's unrivaled power. Even before he powered up he is undoubtedly the strongest character in the story by a significant margin. When he fought Netero (who is clearly one of those most powerful humans alive), he said he'll give him a handicap equivalent of playing without his Rooks and Bishop in Shogi (there are no Queens in Shogi, I think). He may strike some people as arrogant, but since he is the perfect being he's really just stating a fact. I really like the initial dialogue between him and Netero.
Meryem: There is no chance for you to defeat me.
Netero: You should not judge a book by its cover.
Meryem: Exactly. You don't look like someone who is so weak that he cannot see the futility of his actions.
It's true Meryem took a lot of hits against Netero, but he only did it because he wanted to figure out how to counter Netero's move (which is practically flawless). Given he has the highest physical ability rating by a landslide in the series, he can simply trade hits and win easily that way. It seems like he added an additional handicap to himself and pretended all of Netero's attacks can stun/knockback, even though they clearly can't do that. Of course, he still won rather easily like that.
Meryem is also super smart, and unlike your standard 'guy with IQ of 200' in Anime, he clearly puts that intelligence to good use. With the sole exception of him apparently unaware that nukes/bio weapons exist, he has trivially foiled every attempt of trickery, without even using his mind reading powers, including the betrayal of two of his Royal guards. The message is pretty clear. You can't outrun, outlast, or outsmart Meryem. Just hope that he's currently in his 'good' personality out of his two personalities, otherwise you're already dead.
Of course after his rebirth after getting nuked he is probably at Dragonball-like powerful. If he absorbed Pitou he might become Perfect Cell! It's not even clear to me why he has these powerups, since nobody in the story is a threat to him, except...
Super Saiyan Gon/Big Gon/Muscle Gon
There is no doubt Gon is destined to become the most powerful human alive. On the other hand, he is also only 12 years old. For some reason, in the world of HXH where you can use aura to reverse aging permanently with no side effects, most people find it unfathomable that the boy destined to become the most powerful human in the world can accelerate his aging and hit his peak prematurely. The funny thing is that since his transform is indeed very Super Saiyan like (fueled by extreme hatred), this means although he has the potential to defeat Meryem, it would never happen because Meryem doesn't have any motivation to kill people close to Gon. If he was the one who ran into Kite he'd probably offer the position of court jester to him, and if Kite said he'd rather die than submit, Meryem would probably just laugh and say it's your loss and tell him to take those two kids home.
Gon is really the anti-hero. He is unfathomably talented, even far more so than your generic manga hero character. He hates training, and is likely to waste his potential because he prefers fishing or hunting over doing anything productive if cirucmstanes didn't force him to stop slacking. He shows absolutely no mercy to his enemies and doesn't listen to your generic villian sob stories at all. He basically kidnapped Meryem's woman and use that advantage to abuse Pitou without feeling the least bit guilty. And you know, that's why he's an awesome hero. When you're trying to avenge for someone who was like your brother while fighting a threat that can wipe out humanity, and you know their power level starts off at least 10 times higher than any comparable human, this isn't the time to be nice and honorable. It's pretty clear Pitou must have studied extensively on how to deal with sappy, goody-two shoes heroes. In almost any other manga, whoever was faced against Pitou surely would have fell for the "Your transgression defiles the notion of love itself!" defense that Pitou used. But Gon isn't even remotely distracted by that. It is said quite a few times that Pitou is more than capable of killing pretty much everyone present if Gon didn't have Komugi as a hostage. It's actually pretty funny when you consider all the others are leaning toward returning Komugi since that'd be the honorable thing to do, even though they're all dead if they actually did that. He isn't a likeable hero, but what he does makes a ton of sense. If the fate of humanity hinges on one decisive battle against a group of incomprehensibly powerful beings, then yeah I'd definitely stick with Gon who is not afraid to kidnap Meryem's woman and use her as a bargaining chip. Even before he used transformed into Super Gon, he effectively neutralized 2 Royals since he never let Komugi go the whole time. While it doesn't seem to make any sense, there seems to be a strong connotion that dropping a nuke on Meryem would not have worked if ANY of the 3 Royals got back to Meryem on time, not to mention Gon was keeping Pitou busy, who is almost certainly the most powerful of the Royals and whose purpose in life is to die for Meryem.
Super Gon is not a very interesting character to analyze. He is probably second only to Meryem (initial), and based on Pitou's evaluation it'd appear that Super Gon could've done some serious damage to even Meryem, though I think Meryem would still win. This fight is clearly hypothetical, since Meryem will never do anything that'd provoke Gon (he simply doesn't care enough about humans). Since Meryem is the peak of evolution while Gon is merely the peak of humanity, I'd give Meryem the edge, but he'll definitely be hurting too.
Pitou (aka the missing female major character that is not actually female)
To be canonical to the story, one should refer to Pitou as 'he' or at least 'it'. But I don't know of anyone that actually thinks of Pitou as a guy unless you're trying to show off your knowledge of the original source book material, which is probably Togashi's idea of some sick joke. In Chinese, Pitou is referred to as 'she' half of the time, so clearly even official translators assumed there's no way Pitou can be a guy. When she was protecting Komugi, Killua observed that Pitou was protecting Komugi 'like a mother'. It's true all the Royal Guards all seem to have homosexual-like devotion to their leader, Meryem, but when Pitou starts talking about her devotion to Meryem it basically reads like a shojo manga love letter. Pitou is my favorite character in the current arc (I like Machi slightly better overall but she gets no air time). Whereas the other Royals all exhibit extreme jealousy toward Komugi becoming Meryem's woman, Pitou, who really should be the person with the biggest reason to object as you can argue that could've been her place, was also the only Royal who accepted Komugi as her Queen.
Although Pitou is a Special type natural, which means her ability to fight is the worst, she fights like the exact opposite. Similar to Meryem or Gon, her choice of attack is the simple but effective aura-charged swipe. Despite having a staggering 0.16 aura affinity modifier on all her aura-charged attacks, that's pretty much the only attack she used throughout the story. For comparison, Pufu which has an aura affnity of 0.36 pretty much never fights hand-to-hand, and it's pretty clear that even a human being with a high aura affinity modifier could've defeated him in hand to hand combat. Now, I don't think she'd beat Yupi in a straight up fight since Yupi has an aura affinity of 1.0, but I'm pretty sure that on a cumulative level, she is by far the strongest of the Royals, and probably the third strongest character overall, possibly second. When fighting against Netero (also 1.0 affinity) she took one of the hits head on, and had no noticeable damage but was knocked back a considerable distance.
It's interesting to note that Pitou is also the healer even though she also has an affinity of 0.16 there (healing comes from the Strength school). In short, she's one of the many characters in HXH who learned abilities that are totally incompatiable with her natural type. But whereas other characters who did this usually did so from sheer stupidity, it seemed like Pitou went this path in the same way that if you play a MMORPG with your friends, someone has to be the healer even if no one wants to play that role. After all, she's completely selfless when it comes to her role. She literally exists only to serve and protect Meryem.
In her favored schools, she is apparently better at controlling-type aura even compared to Pufu even though she only has an affinity of 0.64 (compared to Pufu's 1.0). Her mass animate dead or living ability can operate an army that can take over the entire world. It's kind of funny that the Hunters always assumed Pitou is a control-type natural since she clearly uses her abilities as if they're her natural school. If her aura type wasn't revealed the moment she showed up, it'd certainly be a very interesting discussion on what should be her natural type.
The encounter between Pitou and Gon is almost a satire on classical hero versus villian. For one thing, note that in the first encounter, the first thing Pitou did was chop off Kite's head because everyone knows if you let a good guy left for dead, he invariably recovers miraculously to become more powerful than he was before. In their second encounter, with Komugi as hostage, Pitou tried to appeal to Gon in the name of love, and actually failing since Gon too isn't your goody two shoe hero. Honestly the whole dialogue is actually pretty suggestive, i.e. Pitou saying she'll do 'anything' if they let Komugi go, or that Gon can abuse her all he wants. Now the actual fight has been said to be anticlimatic, and clearly most people do think Pitou is the most powerful of the Royal guards and found that her defeat to be unbelieveable. However, she might be the most powerful Royal Guard overall, but in hand to hand combat she's got a hopeless 0.16 aura modifier versus Gon's 1.0. Way back in the Arena, Hisoka said that one's capacity to learn aura ability is fixed and any ability charges their full value regardless of the modifier. So, Pitou could either learn a level 16 healing (Strengthen) ability, a level 36 projectile, a level 64 materialize, or a level 100 special. It's pretty clear she chose to learn abilities that would help Meryem but not necessarily herself, so her defeat was pretty much certain against Gon, whose abilities are clearly optimized for killing. He's roughly a level 100 offense/defense/healing and level 80ish projectile (it's stated that his projectile affinity is higher than the standard 0.64 for his type) and pretty much 0 in everything else.
Of course, Pitou's only combat special move where she animated her body after death, is presumably her level 100 ability. It's interesting to note that Gon smashed her head too, as he too is aware of the fact that you should decapitate your enemies to make sure they don't come back, but Pitou's special power is so high that she doesn't need her head to be intact to animate herself. If Killua didn't just happen to get there and intervened with his lightning mode, presumably Pitou's corpse would have finished off Gon and it'd be a double KO. A lot of manga talk about loyalty but I think Pitou is the best emdoiment of that as a character. She can easily be the second most powerful character in the world of HXH, but she chooses to throw away her potential to learn abilities that would help Meryem even if they do her no good. Yes originally she learned healing just for fun, but it's pretty clear that Pufu has the ability to reset the aura skills you have learned, so Pufu must have told her that she's learning completely the wrong abilities compared to her natural affinity. The one ability that matched her affinity can only be used when she's dead. Of all the Royals, she's the only one to die with dignity, and she neutralized the only person in the world who was a threat to Meryem (there's no way she could know that Gon would never have a reason to fight Meryem). I really like the fact that in the Gon versus Pitou, once Gon accelerated his aging to equalize their raw aura levels, Pitou was the one fighting against impossible odds, not Gon, and even against such insurmountable odds, she still managed to do what she was born to, which is to neutralize any threat to Meryem at the cost of her life.
