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Meanderings
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Sunday, 02 October 2011 22:14 |
Gon, a 12-year-old boy, fulfills his promise to Mito-san, the woman who raised him, in order to receive permission to set out on a journey to take the Hunter Exam and become a Hunter like his father was. This despite the fact that his father showed a remarkable lack of personal responsibility by abandoning him to be a Hunter, but let's not sweat the details. While sailing to the examination site, Gon meets Leorio and Kurapika, who are also trying to become Hunters. But the three of them get off to a rocky start...
One on end of my Big Sliding Scale of Anime are magical girl shows, where even if the general consensus is that they're utter crap, I can still watch them and get enjoyment out of them. I'm looking at you, Twin Angel: Twinkle Paradise. At the other end come shounen fighting / quest shows - Naruto, Bleach, Toriko... anything likely to grace the pages of Shounen Jump starts with a built-in disadvantage for me that they have to overcome before I'll even give them a fair hearing. Hunter x Hunter, then, has bit of work to do. It's a reboot of the 1999 series of the same name that ran for that ran for 62 episodes, and so far at least it's fairly typical shounen fair - young, idealistic hero, and already a few potential friends around him that have different outlooks on life - Leorio, who's just after the money that can be made from being a Hunter, and Kurapika, the sole survivor of his clan who's out for revenge. So far, so normal. Past that, there's really not a lot to go on yet - the setup seems to be typical shounen, suggesting there'll be plenty of opportunities for battles along the way. Looks like I'm going to have to give it some time. If there's anything that bothers me about it, it's some dubious morals - disagreements should clearly be settled with knives and batons, and abandoning your child to follow your dreams, never to be seen again, is seen as a great thing to do. forgive me if I utter a little "wtf!?" at that. But hey, it's only a cartoon.
THE GOOD: Some interesting things about the setting (a curious mix of historical and modern), and I do like Leorio's attitude.
THE BAD: It's shounen, which really isn't up my alley. And that's really enough for me.
That said, I'll give it a few more episodes - maybe even the season - and see how it plays out. I've been surprised with this sort of show on the odd occasion, and with Hunter x Hunter getting generally good first impressions from people with usually decent taste, that seems only fair...
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Backbites 
