| Super_Boom said: You didn't like the Chimera Ant arc? I...I don't...*walks around* The CA arc absolutely blew me away the first time I watched it. It was such huge shift in tone, and I thought it was so incredibly well written. The narration was everywhere, but it helped me to understand the thoughts of every character involved, and made the slow-down sequence much more impactful. The whole opening sequence in the palace was so absolutely intense, and knowing that any character could die at any point during that sequence...I can only think of a few anime that captured that same sense of tension for me. I can't really think of how the pacing could have been improved honestly...without removing the narration or the slow-down sequences, both of which were done intentionally to create the sense of tension. When I think of poor pacing, I think of long-running anime like One Piece or Dragonball that intentionally stretch out the source material with relentless stare-downs, flashbacks, or long recaps of the previous episode. Hunter x Hunter really didn't fall into that trap, at least to the point that it really bothered me. I think the part I loved the most was how the whole arc just flips your perceptions completely around. It starts off as humans fighting against these evil monsters...but as the arc goes on, you slowly start to empathize with the same monsters...to the point where you realize every character you previously hated has a very "real" motivation. And the way the arc spins to show how terrible humanity really is...my gosh. The social commentary during the Rose Bomb sequence had me speechless. I felt like I wasn't even watching an anime anymore. Shame you didn't like it though...I suppose it's not for everyone. |
Like I said, I didn't dislike the whole arc. I just absolutely hated what the over narration did to the pace of the show for those episodes it was present. I don't need every action spelled out for me. That is literally the purpose of changing something from paper to animation. You are removing the necessity to explain absolutely every character motivation down to why they chose to take a step forward at that precise moment in favor of using animation to get the point across. Over explanation is a poison and makes it feel like the creator is just so amateur that they have no confidence that they can actually parse down explanations to a point where you don't have to feel like the average IQ of the expected fanbase is approximately 7.
I otherwise enjoyed seeing the character development of the main Chimera Ant. I thought seeing Gon struggle to deal with everything happening around him made for a great tone shift, and I enjoyed the various fights and interactions. That narration for those episodes at the beginning of the castle storm was too much though. It was legitimately frustrating to watch because it felt like the creator and animators just decided their viewerbase was absolutely incapable of figuring out those things called context clues.
I do think the arc went on too long though. In relation to the author's other major work, Yu Yu Hakusho, as well as the rest of Hunter X Hunter up to that point, the arc was definitely too long. That's a problem I ended up having with Katekyo Hitman Reborn too. Around episode 70, one arc starts and although it shifts a bit here or there as major events conclude, it just goes on and on for around, oh, the last 130 episodes or so of the anime, when the rest of the show had maybe 10 to 25 episode arcs up to that point. It's just a jarring change of pace for the plot.
