this week's manga

[Don]

Hunter X Hunter finally resumes after an year+ of hiatus, but it's kind of disappointing. I guess you can't say it's bad, but people expect more than 'not bad' from Togashi especially with all these huge breaks in serialization. What exactly is the point to attach poison gas to the nukes? Just in case the nuke doesn't kill someone the poison will? Goku died from a heart attack so I don't necessarily believe superhuman beings are immune to stuff like disease, but spraying poison after a nuclear strike seems totally unbelieveable. You either believe the nuke will take them out (most logical), or if you really believe the poison will kill a guy who can take a nuke at point blank range then you should just use the poison and skip the nukes. Why doesn't Meryem launch his own nukes back? I assume he at least some nukes on hand, since the HXH world seems to be one where nuclear proliferation is widespread but checked by MAD. Otherwise why make the first nuclear strike look like a terrorist attack? Just have Netero call it multiple nuclear strikes and that'd be that.

This week's part also talks about how the Royals are split over Komugi. It's kind of late to talk about this after the Cat already died! The whole Royal split seems to be a lot like Asimov's Law of Robotics, i.e. all the Royals are always unconditionally loyal to Meryem but each of them has a different interpretation of what it means to be 'unconditionally loyal'. But having the Cat die very early sidesteps the conflict entirely.

Other manga...

One Piece: This week fails at the basic 'one guy versus a lot of weak guy' stuff. If you're having one guy fighting 10^(large) number of weak guys, you pretty much never have the one guy as your strongest guy because nobody is ever impressed with wiping out 10^(large) number of weak guys. If you want to use big numbers, at least use numbers like 99999999999999999999999999.9999999999 like they do in Hong Kong manga. I can buy it if Uesop or Chopper took out an army of 100K, but Luffy taking out such an army isn't an accomplishment. OP's concept of an 'army' is probably the weakest collection of individuals ever known to fiction. A 10 year old with a gun is almost certainly more dangerous than an army of any size. I can't think of a case where an 'army' in OP has ever done anything besides getting owned.

Bleach: The whole Excution arc makes no sense. I think next arc it will reveal the last 5 volumes were just all an illusion and they're still fighting Aizen.

Naruto: Still fighting... this week's arc reminds us that there's a guy named Sasuke who is still important to the story, in theory, even though no one is really sure why.

Ravages of Time: They should change the main character to Zhang Liao, since the alleged main characters never do anything of significance. Given that RoT pays relatively little respect to what actually happened in history, I think it's not too late to say that Zhang Liao has been infused with the spirit of Lu Bu and is going to create his new kingdom. It'd certainly be a lot more interesting than following the chronciles of how Sima Yi is dumber than a brick or Zhao Yun vowing to never lose another battle as long as he lives and then lose immediately.

New Prince of Tennis: This is the first time someone with the power of prescience saw themselves losing. It always bugged me how all these guys can see in the future but apparently they never see a future where they lost a game, even though it's established pretty clearly that prescience doesn't give you the ability to influence the future. Naruto characters can also learn from this month's NPOT where Yukimura's eye powers got countered by a mirror. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense.

[Don]

More thoughts on HXH...

I think what's often overlooked in the Chimaera Ant arc is that the battle against Meryem isn't difficult just because his battle power or brains. It's the fact that Meryem represents an entire nation so the usual ways to deal with a powerful individual are totally out. He is in control of a nation that's the equivalent of North Korea, and given nuclear/biological weapons have far greater proliferation compared to real life (indicated several times), it's safe to assume he is also in possession of nukes and biological terror weapons. Also note that Meryem has a presidental bunker and given his super genius powers there's no way he won't understand why the bunker was there for. Given his Super Saiyan-like abilities, and that the Cat royal has a circle radius of 2km, even if you launch a nuclear strike against Meryem's presidental palace, that's more than enough time for someone who basically moves at light speed to get into the bunker. So yes a massive nuclear attack would probably kill most if not all the Royals, but that'd leave Meryem intact and he will definitely launch nukes back to retaliate. He is the head of a nation that is apparently at peace, so the only way the Hunters can get rid of him is by assassination because any frontal assault with an army will be met with a nuclear retaliation for sure. Now obviously the Hunters have more nukes than Meryem but ending up with some kind of nuclear winter probably isn't their goal, not to mention Meryem can still escape rather easily and just puppet another nuclear-capable nation assuming either the Cat or the Butterfly royal survived. He's also stated that he's willing to use terror and force to create the new world envisioned, so clearly he could launch his nukes at his enemies if he felt threatened.

So the fact that Meryem is vulnerable to biological weapon isn't much of a stretch, but at this point I find it hard to justify how the fight can continue without provoking a nuclear retaliation. Yes the Cat died but the Butterfly is still around and presumably one of those two royals would have the launch code for nukes. It's a stretch to drop a nuke on Meryem and pretend that's a terrorist plot (Netero is basically a suicide bomber here except he's carrying a nuke with him), but I think when you get into bio weapon attack you can't handwave it anymore.

Let's just say that the bio weapon really works and Meryem would die in a few hours. However he is described as moving 'at the speed of light', and even if that's a slight hyperbole, there's more than enough time for him to spread the virus on him to a huge chunk of the world, so the outcome is probably no better than a nuclear retaliation. Now if the point was that all this fighting was for naught and everyone was going to die anyway, I guess that makes sense, but it seems like an odd way to be going. I'm pretty sure Meryem will have a way to deal with the bio weapon, but if so why even use it in the first place? Is Meryem going to die for humanity's sins? I don't dislike Meryem, but he's not supposed to be the good guy.

[Eric]

I think you're assuming Meryem has more control over the nation then he actually does. He took over the country..and none of the citizens really know about it. He's the "leader" of the nation in name only, he's just an overwhelmingly powerful nen user, I don't think him actually using technology ever crossed his mind, he's more the type to just swat away anyone he doesn't like with his tail.

I think they kind of painted themselves into a corner with the character in the first place, nobody can kill him, so they just side-step the issue by giving us a way in which he can die without some sort of random power-up at this point from one of the main characters that wouldn't really make sense considering HxH's combat system.

[Don]

In the world of HXH I'd expect the equivalent of Al Quida would have nukes on hand, let alone leader of a nation that was clearly meant to be a parallel of North Korea. I doubt the nukes are protected by any sophiscated methods unlike real life given the amount of nuclear proliferation is insane in HXH. In part 311 it pretty much shows you could have nukes going off while peopel are having dinner and it wouldn't even be a cause for panic. It's true that the HXH equivalent of nukes aren't very strong (killing power in tens-hundreds of thousands max, not millions) but it's not like you want a country to launch all its nukes just because it'd only kill half instead of 100% of your population. At any rate aura is more powerful than any technology so even if it's password-protected it can almost certainly be cracked by aura anyway.

Of course Meryem is like super proud and super honorable, so he wouldn't think of using nukes offensively but he's also basically the end of evolution and he knows pretty much everything there is to know. You can say that he is too proud to even think someone would try to drop a nuke on him and that's fine, but there's no way he wouldn't know that these weapons exist in the first place. Now the fact they used nukes on him is actually pretty clever, since technology always appeared to be trivialized in HXH even though nukes are clearly more powerful than any aura attack in terms of damage output. But now they go to this whole 'nukes comes with deadly poison cloud that can wipe out the entire world (the lethality + spreadability of the bio weapon they used on Meryem can easily destroy the entire world)' that is apparently something everyone would know, and none of the super geniuses on Meryem's side, including himself, is even aware that such deadly bio weapons exist.

I'm guessing there are supposed to be regular nukes and then there's the bio weapon version, and the former you can probably fake it as a terrorist attack, but the latter has to be a declaration of war, and the whole point of having politics of HXH is that you can't just declare war on a nuclear-capable nation without a pretext. I mean this would be exactly the same as if the UN preemptively nuked the capital of North Korea without provocation. There should never be the retrofit of 'some nukes can wipe out the planet', since it's pretty clear in HXH having regular nukes go off is no big deal, but the kind they used on Meryem is the planet-buster kind and that is clearly a big deal.

I'm guessing it's going to end up something like the bio weapon already got the entire nation (Pufu had the virus too and he was spreading the pollens) and then Meryem died like Jesus for the Hunter's sins and stopped the bio weapon.