The Shrine

If this is any other manga where you don't have to worry about the author or you dying of old age before finishing it might be okay. For HXH, it's pretty much inexcusable. The funny thing is that it's not bad. It's actually really good, and pretty clever. Togashi must have found the most irrelevent characters and wasted an entire week talking about what happened to them. Again, that's not a bad thing if you didn't have to worry about this series is going to get axed because Shonen Jump got tired of Togashi as a human being (HXH probably won't ever get axed due to popularity). Where is Gon? Killua? Meryem? Komugi? What about even the quasi important characters like Knuckles, Palm, or the octopus? What the heck happened to the contamination? Is there something deeper than that or did Togashi made a rare mistake of confusing nuclear radiation poisoning with poisoning even though the two really have nothing to do with each other? Is Komugi going to have a child? Did Meryem finally beat her in a game of gungi? Is Gon finally going to learn that he isn't always going to have a backup arm after getting another one of his arm blown up? Is Killua ever going to realize that he's actually the good guy in the story of HXH? Sure, wait for next week you can say, except knowing how HXH goes there is a very good chance you won't hear anything about any of the major characters for a couple of years (real life time). That's not acceptable from the fan's point of view. There is no question HXH is far superior to anything of comparable popularity, but right now the Emperor has no cloths and fans should not put up with this kind of service. Look, I don't even like most of the main characters and if they died in a fire that'd be a perfectly good ending for them, but they are still the main characters and after your epic battle for the survival of human race, you don't even know what happened to any of the participants?

And let's say next week something sensible actually happens, namely the major character's aftermath is resolved. Then what's the point of the switch? Shouldn't we want to know what happened to the major characters first? It'd be like you have a battle between Sasuke and Naruto and next week all you see is the ramen noodle shop owner reminiscing about what happened to the villager who used to buy his noodles.

By the way, I think the whole part about Reina is totally ridiculous. It's kind of touching that she somehow didn't die, but then what the heck is the purpose of her brother swearing on his dead sister's name that he won't fail again? You got this guy who is clearly trying to atone for his failure to protect his sister and then 5 years later (in real life time), it turned out that his sister never died and he was just watching the wrong place all this time. Since he's not returning to NGL he probably won't ever see his sister again anyway, even though she miraculously survived. At this rate we're going, probably 5 years later someone will tell Reina that her brother never died and he's just protecting a random piece of land in the middle of nowhere with the same dilgence as he would have protected her with, and Reina would get there just on time to see Gyro drive a tank over her brother. It's almost like the point of the story is that no good deed goes unpunished.

Overall, the conclusion reads a lot like a page out of Blizzard's book where apparently everyone turned out to be a good guy and was just misunderstood, and that the human Hunters who risked their life to fight Meryem were the bad guys, even though they were just er, fighting for the survival of the human race. I mean sure Meryem was always meant to be a good guy, but it's not like you can expect to negotiate with a nearly omnipotent leader who heads a race of beings that view humans as food. Never mind that 2 out of the 3 Royal Guards are utterly bloodthirsty and would stop at nothing short of the annihilation of the human race. Sure, you can say Meryem and his race can't be faulted because that's just their way of life, but there was never any possiblity of peace between human and Meryem's race.

I do like Werefin emerging as "The Man who defeated the King." I see a great career ahead for him, similar to Mr. Satan in Dragonball.

How hard would it be to end part 315 with Meryem saying, to Komugi, "My name is Meryem"? Everyone is expecting him to say that, and just because everyone is expecting it, doesn't mean it's somehow bad.

I agree with all of your points. HxH is a weird manga sometimes.

Wonder what it's rankings are like @ Shonen Jump.

HXH fell by a lot since even the most diehard guy have a hard time voting for a manga that doesn't come out, though its sales by volume is consistently #3 (below Naruto, above Bleach).

I think HXH is a bit like Blizzard. I don't think there is a necessary correlation between Blizzard games taking way longer than usually expected and their quality. It could be very well be that Blizzard produces good games but not as fast as they could due to some internal problem.

Also Togashi has always been the flagship of the 'if you don't get this manga you're just dumb' amongst fans. It's not like he chose to be the leader of this camp but it just happens all his works fall under the category. A lot of people must look at HXH and say that since it has random quotes from poets, and it talks about how nukes suck and humans are a parasite in the world, that it must somehow be deep. Honestly it's not all that different from say, Zeus talking about M$ is evil. It's not to say what he said doesn't make sense, but ultimately a lot of it is really just Internet-like rant backed by wikipedia.

On the other hand HXH is very complicated in its battle system, but it's basically a refinement of the eastern fictional martial arts wuxia that westerners have very little exposure to, and it's not something you can get if you don't have a history of where this stuff comes from. I've always said a good example of battle system would be one where the author can definitely argue successfully who are his top 10 most powerful characters, and probably rank them correctly outright. Jin Young can do this. The most powerful character in his story is the Lostseeker, even though all we know of him is from flashbacks. He is a guy who searched the world for someone to defeat him but never did, and just reading from his memories you could become the Goku of your world. Gou Long can do this. The most powerful character in his world is the Snowblower. He is the only fictional character with the undisputed title of 'Sword God', if you ignore the fact he fell off a cliff and died in one of the later books (Gou Long writes a lot of stuff while he's drunk, and it's easily observeable).

And you can do that in HXH too, but again it's not exactly easy. People tend to favor the 'Goku' choices, or the character that looks the coolest. I'm seeing a lot of people actually believe Netero can beat the Royals and is a match for Meryem, never mind that Meryem basically said, "Bring it on, newbie." when they fought (he referenced their difference as a handicap in Shogi that's greater than the best pro to the weakest pro). A lot of people still think you can somehow outperform the Royals let alone Meryem in any measureable field if you just 'train hard enough'. The whole point of these characters is that any measureable aspect of their ability is far beyond the reach of humans (minus Gon, and it's clear he's supposed to be the most powerful human in the world, and has always been described as someone who should not have been a human). The only advantage humans have is trickery and experience, and really the whole Meryem arc is about how experience and trickery is ultimately still useless against absolute power, unless you use a nuclear bomb.

I wonder if people ever watched Independence Day. When the president ordered a nuclear strike on the alien ships, he was basically like, "I got no choice now, probably going go down in history as worst president ever." When humans launched a nuclear strike against Meryem, it's basically a sign of defeat, that there is no longer any possible way to legitmately defeat him. The only difference is that the nuclear attack actually worked. The only Royal that was defeated by a human was Pitou (by Gon), and again I really wouldn't be surprised if Gon turned out to be a descendent of Saiyan race. His potential has long been described as impossible by human standards.

It's really ironic that the Meryem arc basically says human are scums of the earth, and that Meryem and his people are the superior race but were defeated by treachery and most importantly, nukes. Yet for some reason people thought humans (in HXH) were able to defeat them in a fair fight.

On the Chinese board one guy said there's 3 levels of HXH understanding.

Level 1 - DBZ level. Character X has more aura power, he must be more powerful. To improve your chances, train harder to improve your aura power.

Level 2 - Morel level. Morel once famously said, "Battle amongst aura users is not about a power level number." Obviously it's implied stuff like strategy, tactics, ingenuity, etc., can make up for being lower on the aura power level.

Level 3 - Return to DBZ level. Or, as the guy puts it, Itachi can take out Shikamaru in one hit even if the latter has an IQ of 200 (we'll assume for as cool as Itachi was, he wasn't a super genius). When Meryem was reborn, he basically says that nothing matters in the presence of his absolute power. Only he and Uber Gon are at this level in the story, though it is hoped that the reader, given their omniscient viewpoint, is aware that this is the true nature of HXH.

Note that Gon is always aware of the highest level of HXH. He always said he doesn't think you should have to resort to strategy to defeat your enemy, not because he's dumb, but that absolute power will never fail you, while strategy can.

Unfortunately most HXH readers are stuck at level 2, and it's actually a real sad state of affair since these guys are completely missing the point. The most powerful characters of HXH, namely Meryem, Royals, Netero, and Uber Gon, employ very little strategy in their fight. All their fighting style trends toward crushing the opposition with absolute power. It's true that Royals/Netero aren't quite at that level, but it's clear they get that if you can crush enemy with absolute power then do just that. They just don't think it's possible to get enough absolute power to crush any opposition with that, because they don't have that much absolute power. Uber Gon and Meryem, however, does have enough absolute power to crush all possible opposition (except each other, of course).