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Hunter × Hunter is a manga by Yoshihiro Togashi about a 12-year-old boy named Gon Freaks, and his quest to find his father, Ging Freaks. Ging is a Hunter, which in the setting of Hunter × Hunter means that he is a member of society's elite, with pretty much total license to go anywhere or do anything. It started running in Japan in Weekly Shonen Jump in the 14th issue of 1998.

Plot Summary

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Hunter Test Story Arc

In the first major story arc, Gon takes a series of bizarre tests to become a Hunter himself, which include such things as navigating a deadly jungle, hunting other applicants, killing a wild boar, and making sushi. During the Hunter Test, Gon meets and befriends three of the other applicants, who become the supporting characters:

• Killua Zaoldyeck (奇犽): Another 12-year old boy, raised in a family of assassins.
• Kurapika (酷拉皮卡): The last of his clan, and whose eyes turn scarlet when he is enraged.
• Leorio (里奧里多): A medical student who, although he's the oldest of the four, is always scrambling to catch up with the others.

Another of the applicants in the Hunter Test is Hisoka, a complex villain who uses playing cards as weapons, and who views Gon as an "unripe fruit" that he will take great pleasure in killing once he's grown up enough to present a challenge.

Zaoldyeck Family & Celestial Tower Story Arcs

The second story arc involves Gon, Kurapika, and Leorio springing Killua from his parents' mansion. At the end of the second story arc, Leorio leaves for medical school and Kurapika leaves to find work as a Hunter, taking both characters out of the story. In the third story arc, Gon and Killua go to the Celestial Tower, a 251-floor building where people can compete in fighting tournaments around the clock for cash. It is here they meet the Kungfu master Wing, who teaches them about nen, a chi-like energy that can be used to manifest superhuman powers. They fight in the tournament to gain money and experience. Hisoka defeats another powerful Nen user, Kastro, who was able to create and use a double made by his Materialization and Manipulation Nen ability. Hisoka loses both arms in the battle but Machi, a fellow nen user, uses her nen ability to sew them back on. Gon battles Hisoka and is able to land a few hits, but loses in the end.

Genei Ryodan Story Arc

The fourth story arc reunites the four main characters for the world's largest auction in a sprawling metropolis called York Shin City. While Gon, Killua, and Leorio try different methods to make enough money to buy Greed Island, a "Joystation" video game that could help Gon find his father, Kurapika takes center-stage. This story arc introduces the Genei Ryodan ("Phantom Brigade"), a group of thieves who, among many many other crimes, slaughtered all the other members of Kurapika's clan. Kurapika crosses paths with them while working as a bodyguard for a teenage girl named Neon, who has a clairvoyant nen ability. He spends the rest of the arc balancing his bodyguard duties with his goal to hunt down the Genei Ryodan. The Genei Ryodan 's 13 members are:

• Kuroro Lucifer: The leader of the Genei Ryodan; A young man with the ability to permanently steal other peoples' nen abilities, which he stores inside a Materialized book.
• Bonorenofu: Who does absolutely nothing in the Genei Ryodan story arc. Later, in the Chimera Ant story arc, it is revealed that his body is covered in holes, and by dancing he can play music with the holes to summon the powers of various gods.
• Feitan: A short 28-year-old man who is a true sadist. Like Bonorenofu, his true nen ability (to absorb and transform the damange an enermy inflicts on him into a powerful heat attack) is not revealed until the Chimera Ant story arc.
• Franklin: A giant whose fingertips pop off to reveal gun barrels from which he can emit nen bullets.
• Hisoka: The card-throwing, villainous magician from the Hunter Exam, who also showed up in the Celestial Tower story arc.
• Korutopi: A cousin It-like character who can materialize a perfect duplicate of anything (even skyscrapers and human bodies). His duplicates fade after 24 hours.
• Machi: The world's deadliest seamstress, who can mold her nen into threads. These threads can sew severed limbs back on perfectly or support immense weights.
• Nobunaga: A hot-tempered samurai.
• Shalnark: A young computer-whiz who can control people with his cell-phone after first attaching an antenna to them.
• Shizuku: A forgetful, thick-spectacled girl who can manifest a vacuum cleaner that can suck up anything non-living material (including dead bodies, of which there are a lot when the Genei Ryodan are around).
• Sphinx: A master of martial arts, who alternately dresses either like a pharaoh or in a designer jogging suit. In the Chimera Ant story arc, it is revealed that he can "wind up" his punch to make it devastatingly powerful.
• Pakunoda: A woman with the ability to read into the memories of others simply by touching them. She can also form memory bullets which can transfer memories into other people.
• Ubogin: The obligatory musclebounder, who strives to make his punch as powerful as an atomic bomb, and isn't far off.

By the end of the Genei Ryodan story arc, Kurapika has directly killed Ubogin, indirectly killed Pakunoda (via a deadly nen ability which killed her when she broke the conditions he had set onto her), and "sealed" Kuroro Lucifer's nen ability (via the same ability he used on Pakunoda). The latter two are accomplished via an unsteady alliance with Hisoka, who betrays the Genei Ryodan in exchange for a chance to fight Kuroro Lucifer. Once Kuroro's powers are "sealed", Hisoka completely loses interest and walks away.

Greed Island Story Arc

Gon, Killua, and Leorio return to help Kurapika at the end of the third story arc, after which Leorio and Kurapika leave again, returning the focus to Gon and Killua. The fifth story arc concerns Gon and Killua's adventures on Greed Island, the seemingly-magical video game that sucks its players physical bodies into its own world. It is later revealed that the game is actually set on an island in the real world (the physical game set is actually just a teleporting device), created and ran by a group of powerful nen users who are led by none other than Gon's own father Ging. The Greed Island story arc is very video-game-like. The game Greed Island runs on a complex card-based gaming system. The goal of the game is to collect a number of set cards, although almost everything in the game, from food to money, can be turned into cards. There are cards capable of doing anything, from making people pregnant regardless of gender, granting wishes, and magic spell cards that can warp you to specific towns. Inside Greed Island Gon and Killua are joined by Biscuit (nicknamed "Biske"), a 57-year-old woman who looks like a 12-year-old girl, and is a master and experienced teacher of nen. She continues the nen training Wing gave to Gon and Killua during the Celestial Tower arc.

Also during this arc, Killua's little brother, Karuto, joins the Genei Ryodan; replacing Hisoka as member number 4. (See Miscellany section of this article for details regarding Karuto's gender)

Chimera Ant Story Arc

After leaving Greed Island, Gon and Killua meet up with Kaito, the Hunter who told Gon about Ging and Hunters in the very first chapter. They are all hired to investigate a strange insect leg that washed up on a beach. Genetic testing determines that the leg belongs to an abnormally large queen Chimera Ant, an insect that eats other insects and animals, and then gives birth to children that are combinations of all the different insects and animals it has eaten. The queen Chimera Ant itself just happens to wash up on the shore of an island inhabited by a luddite culture, and proceeds to wipe most of them out and spawn hundreds of offspring before Gon, Killua, and Kaito arrive.

As a side story to the main plotline centered around Gon and Killua, one of the children of the queen Chimera Ant, Zazan, started a colony near Ryuuseigai (City of the Shooting Stars); the place that is the origin of the Genei Ryodan. Half of the group: Phinx, Feitan, Shalnark, Shizuku, Bonorenof and Karuto travel to the Ryuuseigai to halt the invasion. Upon reaching the colony, the team splits up, agreeing that whoever defeats Zazan will be the temporary leader of the Genei Ryodan until Kuroro Lucifer's return.

The manga is still a work in progress, and is currently nearing the end of the Chimera Ant story arc.

Media

The manga is currently published in Japan in Weekly Shonen Jump, and past episodes have been compiled into a set of 22 tankōbon and growing. The manga is currently being published in the United States by VIZ Media.

An early Hunter × Hunter OVA was shown only at the 1998 Jump Super Anime Tour.

An anime of Hunter × Hunter was broadcast on Fuji Television from mid October 1999 to March 2001, and ran for 62 episodes. The anime series removed the vast quantities of gore and severed limbs that filled the manga, added new scenes like the "Battleship Island" test in the Hunter Test, and fleshed out both the main characters and a few minor characters. The televised anime ended just before the end of the Genei Ryodan story arc. Three subsequent OVAs have carried the story through the end of the Genei Ryodan story arc (8 episodes), and through the Greed Island story arc (8 episodes, released from February through April 2003, and 14 episodes, released from March through August 2004). The anime is produced in English in Singapore by Odex.

Oddly, there also appears to have been a Takarazuka stage musical made of Hunter × Hunter, about which there is precious little information available.

As with practically every other anime series, Hunter × Hunter has spawned numerous video games (most of which take place on Greed Island),the most recent being Jump Superstars for the Nintendo DS, and a trading card game (which is not based on the cards used on Greed Island).

Miscellany

The "×" in the title is silent, and the name of the series is supposed to be spoken as just "Hunter Hunter". Yoshihiro Togashi got the idea for the title from a Japanese cop show in which the hero's sidekick always says everything twice.

Yoshihiro Togashi himself makes two cameo appearances in the anime as a man wearing a dog mask with square-rimmed glasses. In the first appearance, he gives the audience some very tangential exposition about Hisoka's childhood, and in the second appearance he gives the audience a brief, public-service-announcement-style warning about the perils of online auctions. Both appearances are completely superfluous to the plot, and the main characters are oblivious to his presence.

The manga is noticeably more talky and poorly-drawn through the middle of the Greed Island story arc. This is supposedly because Yoshihiro Togashi was "very sick" at the time (which in Japan, where illness is almost always left vague, could mean anything from "a bad flu" to "on chemotherapy").

Kurapika's gender is a major point of contention among fans of the series. Although Kurapika speaks "male Japanese", his features, clothes, and mannerisms are all very feminine, he is voiced by a woman in the anime, and he does numerous things (like refusing to undress in front of anyone else, becoming incredibly embarrassed when Leorio strips down to his underwear at one point in the anime, and showing complete sexual disinterest in either women or men) clearly designed to keep his gender ambiguous. In a scene that some fans feel resolves the issue, Kurapika dons a long-haired pink wig and even more feminine clothing as a disguise to capture someone. When his captive says "I didn't realize was a girl", Kurapika removes the wig and replies "you shouldn't make assumptions" which is, of course, probably the most ambiguous answer possible. This dispute is easily resolved by pointing out the cover to manga volume 14, which depicts him shirtless. He has also appeared shirtless in episodes of the anime, completely comfortable as thus, and without any indication of breasts. In addition to this, the Official Hunter x Hunter manga guidebook stats his gender as being male. This communicates that he is merely another in a long line of anime bishounen.

Hisoka is sexually aroused by people with very powerful nen ability, regardless of gender, and derives sexual satisfaction from fighting and killing them. At one point in the Celestial Tower story arc, when he's telling Gon how impressed he is with his power, he is depicted with beams of energy emenating from his crotch, and at another point in the Greed Island story arc, he holds an extended telescope against his crotch while talking about how arousingly powerful another character is.

While Killua's little brother Karuto appears to be female (i.e. dressing like a girl and being voiced by a female seiyuu in the anime), he addresses himself as "boku" (the male first-person pronoun in Japanese), and the manga guidebook for Hunter x Hunter distinctly states that Karuto is male. Also, there are only five Zoaldyeck children, and it is quite clearly stated in the manga that the Zoaldyeck's have 'five sons.'

In an official "Hunter's Guide" book, that was released in June 2004, the official spelling of several names by Yoshihiro Togashi were shown. They are mostly considered bizarre, since they make very little sense. And because of the bizarre spellings, translaters kept the original translation names based on pronunciation rather than the official ones. Here are a few examples of the names of the official spellings:

• Kurapika - Curarpikt
• Hisoka - Hyskoa
• Quoll/Kuroro Lucifer - Quwrof Wrlccywrlir
• Ubogin - Wbererguin
• Shizuku - Chzzok
• Pakunoda - Phalcnothdk

Music from the Anime

Openings:

1. "Ohayou" by Keno (episode 1 - 48)
2. "Taiyou wa Yoru mo Kagayaku" by WINO (episode 49 - 62)
3. "Pale Ale" by Kenichi Kurosawa (episode 63 - 70/OVA)
4. "Pray" by Wish (GI)
5. "Believe In Tomorrow" by Sunflower's Garden (GI Final)

Endings:

1. "Kaze no Uta" by Minako Honda (episode 1 - 31)
2. "E-Jan - Do You Feel Like I Feel" by Masato Nagai (episode 32 - 50)
3. "Hotaru" by Masato Nagai (episode 51 - 62)
4. "Carry On" by Kenichi Kurosawa (episode 63 - 70/OVA)
5. "Popcorn" by Mikuni Shimokawa (GI)
6. "Moshimo Kono Sekai de Kimi to Boku ga Deaenakatta Nara" by Sunflower's Garden (GI Final)

References

• Update HxH manga information
• French encyclopedia about hunter X hunter
• Japanese Hunter × Hunter website
• Official Jump Comics Web Site
• Official Anime Web Site
• Active Hunter x Hunter discussion forum

• Manga series
• Anime
• Manga