on Gon Freecss

a long and personal essay on childhood, the act of leaving, and all the things passed down from all the apples coming before

Warning: this essay intensely discusses childhood trauma and abuse, and briefly mentions pedophilia, grooming, and death. It also includes spoilers for all of Hunter x Hunter.

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Mark Rothko, Earth Green (detail), 1955

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"The Leaving" by Brigit Pegeen Kelly

My father said I could not do it,
but all night I picked the peaches.
The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.
I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.
How many ladders to gather an orchard?
I had only one and a long patience with lit hands
and the looking of the stars which moved right through me
the way the water moved through the canals with a voice
that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering
and those who had gathered before me.
I put the peaches in the pond’s cold water,
all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands
twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,
all night my back a straight road to the sky.
And then out of its own goodness, out
of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,
and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses
just after it has been rung, before the metal
begins to long again for the clapper’s stroke.
The light came over the orchard.
The canals were silver and then were not.
and the pond was—I could see as I laid
the last peach in the water—full of fish and eyes.

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In an interview, Yoshihiro Togashi said about Gon Freecss, “I knew he was different. As soon as he declares he’ll abandon the one who raised him to work as a Hunter, we realize he’s not such a good boy after all. I thought, ‘Man, this guy is really edgy.’ (laughs) But since he has the blood of his father, a man who abandoned his child and became a Hunter himself, I thought it was fitting for him to declare this. I thought he was a very natural character.” When I was a teenager, my mantra was, “I’m going to become the sun.” It’s too easy. I was infatuated with the idea of being something blinding and bright, violently joyful.

Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about the song “Apple” by Charli XCX.

I’VE BEEN LOOKING AT YOU SO LONG NOW I ONLY SEE ME

Gon Freecss is twelve years old. He leaves his remote island to find his father who he doesn’t want to call his father anymore. He has a mother who is also his aunt; he has a best friend who is also in love with him. After around one hundred thirty episodes, he becomes a killer. I’ve watched this show several times straight through, and have watched certain arcs probably eight times, though I don’t watch the Chimera Ant arc so much because I refuse to watch it in pieces and as a whole is emotionally devastating.

What does Gon Freecss mean? It’s not that deep, you say, but I find it to be. I can’t let it go; the ideas become stuffed animals in my hands, I become three feet tall and snotty. I hide in the closet, I tell you I’m going to run away. When I was a child, I told my mother that I was going to run away from home. I remember doing it so that she would tell me that she didn’t want me to go; she scoffed as I sobbed and pretended to pack. She said, Oh, you’re really going to do it, are you?

Let’s split Gon into pieces and go from there. We have his desire to find his father, his desire to be a Hunter, his desire to see the world, his loyalty to his friends, his loyalty to his ideals, his child’s sense of wonder, his stubbornness, his grief. Is Gon defined by where he comes from? In some sense, yes. Hunter x Hunter is full of characters whose origins are unknown, especially when they’re Hunters, but, like Killua, Gon’s genesis is blatantly shown to us. An island where people don’t use the Internet, probably. A place with one other child that he doesn’t want to hang out with. The place his father dropped him off at. Gon’s pieces are forever intertwined, born from one another: his desire to find his father fuels his desire to be a Hunter which introduces him to his friends that he cares about so much. His ideals come from his desire to be a Hunter which comes from his father and his child’s sense of wonder, as well as his stubbornness.

His grief comes from every aspect of him. His loss of innocence comes from outside himself and yet is inevitable. The Gon we see up to Chimera Ant is an unavoidable tragedy. Once all the cogs start turning, we as the audience can only nod in horror. Yes, of course. All this time, he was heading towards this. Destruction, outward and inward. Hubristic violence. If you want to get to know someone, find out what makes them angry, Aunt Mito says. Gon Freecss gets healed by Nanika and doesn’t seem angry anymore, but we also don’t seem to know him like we once did.

There are a lot of bad video essays about how Gon Freecss is the real villain of Hunter x Hunter, about how he’s a manipulative, power-hungry creature that hurts Killua and everyone else on purpose. I’ve had multiple people push up their glasses before telling me that they know the true message of Hunter x Hunter: Gon Freecss is a monster! Ha. Well, Gon Freecss is inherently a display of black and white morals, yes, and this is mostly because he’s so young, surely, but I also believe that the depiction of Gon’s personality goes further than just writing a character who is a child, and that his core traits would be there in his adult self. Gon and Killua are depictions of children who are not like other children, too mature behind their facades of innocent youth, though those facades are not all false, to be clear. Gon and Killua are children, no doubt about it, they’re just powerful, capable children who people use because it’s too difficult for them not to. I think that they could manage not to, but I digress. The two of them play, they tease, they want things that children want, but they’re thrust into a world that tells them they have to be better, smarter, greedier to survive within it. This is at the crux of Hunter x Hunter to me, the true message of it: the world can be cruel to a child, and often it relishes in it. There’s another, somewhat separate message there too, just as large, but we’ll get to that. If we turn back to the idea that Gon is a monster, perhaps he is, but that doesn’t make him evil, nor does that make him irreparable, if you think that people need to be repaired. Hunter x Hunter seems to be unsure on what that means, exactly, that idea of a person being fixed, or fixing others. Or, perhaps more specifically, does not have much interest in keeping you comfortable inside a certain idea of right or wrong. The supposed villains of HxH become our buddies, we watch them play cards and cry over the deaths of their friends, they tell us where they came from and it’s always devastation. At the end of the anime, we are left with a cliffhanger. What has Gon become? What can he do to live on, after such sorrow? What can any of us do? We turn to the manga, and we are thrown into the middle of an ocean at the end of the world, where many are dying and everyone else is killing. Still, the characters find love. Still, the worst of them take our hand and say, grandly, This is what I want. Do you see it?

There are many characters who call Gon a monster in some shape or form, as they often do Killua as well. In Heaven’s Arena, Wing says, I fear I’ve created an incredible monster, and spends the latter part of the arc privately getting so excited about such a student that his bloodlust leaks out. Hisoka obviously is excited about Gon becoming a monster. Netero encourages it, gets called a monster himself. Netero is to Ging is to Gon, in a way. Think about those scenes where he returns to his dojo. An already descending Gon tells Meleoron that he’d kill him, no problem, and Meleoron describes Gon as having a beast inside him. Everyone looks at Gon and Killua with a horrified awe- how can such children exist? How can we ignore them? Where can something like that even be born? The answer is an island, or on top of a mountain. Far away from other people, formulated from certain seeds. Is this their fault? Of course not. We don’t blame flowers for blooming, and we don’t blame weeds for taking over other plants, for eating them alive. But the thing is that Gon and Killua are not flowers, or weeds: they are children.

I GUESS THE APPLE COULD TURN YELLOW OR GREEN

One important thing I want to write about is that Togashi has something specific to say about teachers. The place of role models in our lives, especially as young people, but not exclusively. Hunter x Hunter is reverent of teachers, and is also incredibly angry at them, even disgusted, but then, tucked within that disgust, is gratitude. It’s fucked up, a bit. Perhaps it’s just the product of writing a Shonen manga, which usually involves improbable violence between young boys and has the well-trodden trope of the teacher embedded in it, but Hunter x Hunter is a Shonen that starts out relatively lighthearted and slowly dunks us into a vat of intense social commentary and horror, so I think there’s a level of awareness in it that you objectively have to grant. Hisoka, upon his arrival to my first watch, was one of the scariest Shonen villains I’d seen: he was grounded in a real fear that crossed the expected boundary of the show. All the cartoonish deaths of the Hunter Exam seemed to pale in the face of him. Would a show actually depict pedophilia like this, I thought, horrified. I had no idea what he would do to Gon, or how far the story would go with its depictions. There was a dense fear fogging up the entire arc of Zevil Island, during which Gon goes through an obvious allegory for grooming that follows him throughout the entire show. When I rewatch the show, I’m not scared at all and in fact find Hisoka funny, very much defanged because I know what’s going to happen. But I also found upon further reflection that, yes, Hisoka was a teacher for Gon, quite obviously! That the events of Heaven’s Arena were clearly showing a child who had become worse through the influence of such a character, and that no one was stepping in to stop it. You could argue that Wing is the most normal teacher of the series; he is, and I like him, but he does make some wrong choices. What is a teacher to do, in that situation, but encourage his pupil? Should he have told Gon and Killua to go home, to come back when they’re eighteen? Should he have said, Hey, Gon, that guy’s kind of weird, maybe you shouldn’t fight him? Well, Togashi says flatly, through his work, then you wouldn’t have a show.

Of course, pretty much everyone else is a teacher for Gon, too, from Kurapika to Neferpitou to Zepile to Bisky to Chrollo to Palm. Palm is another pedophilic character who at first discomfited me and now I see the value of, though I think Togashi could have executed it differently with the same effect. I don’t one hundred percent love the way the anime sometimes frames characters like Hisoka and Palm, but that’s another essay. Gon is in many ways an amalgamation of the bad habits of a hundred different Hunters, many of who are insane people. Kurapika tells Gon about Nen contracts, which leads to Gon making the contract that essentially kills him at the end of Chimera Ant. In the face of children, we are all teachers, Togashi says, whether we choose to be or not. A child will absorb everything you give them, a willing sponge; even Hisoka talks happily, nostalgically about what his childhood had taught him, naming his Nen powers after his favorite candy. This depiction of unsettling childishness is meant to remind us of Gon, as much of Hisoka is meant to do, even moreso than Ging, who is rarely onscreen. At the start of Chimera Ant, Morel and Knov, teachers to full-grown adults, berate Killua (and Gon, though he’s passed out) about not being good enough to hang with the big boys. Rarely do teachers hold Killua or Gon back, instead propelling them forward into danger. Again, I’m aware that Shonen is not really grounded in realism, and that HxH is a fantastical story, but I don’t feel that it’s a hot take that the story is a coming of age moment for Gon, and that the climax of that is his fight with Pitou, who he can only beat by becoming an adult version of himself too early, almost dying because of it. It’s incredibly clear that Togashi wants us to feel upset by this, despite all the merch they make of Gon with long hair. And the only reason Gon is there is because of his father, yes, if you want to whittle it down to a small sliver of an idea, but he also is there because of all the people who have helped him along the way, a very Shonen idea, but Togashi turns it on its head, like, What if those people were sometimes really bad, actually! And it works!

I’M GONNA DRIVE, GONNA DRIVE ALL NIGHT

And there’s Ging Freecss. I’ve thought more and more about Ging Freecs with every HxH watch or read. He’s one of my favorite characters. Laugh it up, I know. Let’s split it all into symmetrical lines, if you will, once more: Ging leaves, Gon gets adopted (in the manga, Mito goes through the court to attain legal custody of Gon), Gon grows old and has a hole in his heart, who knows what that’s about, Gon becomes a Hunter, Ging comes back into his life through a tape recording that destroys itself when it’s played, Gon almost gets himself killed a hundred thousand times and plays his dad’s game and then reunites the guy who hit him once when he was a child and reminds him of his dad and then watches that guy get brutally murdered. And then all the other stuff happens. And then Gon gets to meet his dad in an anticlimactic, quiet set of scenes where it’s clear that they will remain as close as one is to an estranged uncle, and Ging tells him that he left so that he could forever chase after his desire, and Gon goes wide-eyed and we get the sense that the rest of the world is ahead of the two of them, in separate ways. We also get the sense that an era of Gon’s life is decidedly over.

Now, the bad video essays are going to tell you that Gon is exactly like his father, and you’re going to have to ignore them. There are similarities, yeah, but there are things about Gon that are plainly different from Ging. The extroversion, for one. Gon is so obviously energized by people where Ging is so obviously interested in escaping them. I’m convinced that Ging’s Nen power, when revealed, will involve disappearing or an intense sort of Zetsu (Killua muses about exactly that when they first meet Kite), but anyway. What is Ging if not leaving? What is Gon if not the same? Is there a beautiful, kind sort of leaving, or is it an innately cruel act? Is Ging so bad after all? The bad video essays will tell you that Ging is the worst guy in the HxH world. He sucks, but no, he’s not. At least, that’s what I think. Here we start to get too personal.

If Hunter x Hunter is interested in teachers, it is equally interested in the idea of charisma. Hunters attract other Hunters, but they are unique, and this uniqueness is part of their power. Nen rewards those with special personalities, wants, and histories, because Nen is the soul, or, more simply, the aura. The most fucked up guys in the show have the worst, most powerful auras, and all that. People either really hate Ging or really admire him- think of Satotz, at the beginning of the show, who seems to have some sort of crush on Gon’s dad. Surprise, Gon, your dad’s a baddie! Not really. Maybe. Every time Gon meets someone who knew Ging, there’s a devotion that hits similarly to the devotion people have for Gon, this blinding love of something they don’t totally understand but want to be close to. I’m not just talking about Killua- we are introduced to character after character who gets changed by Gon’s presence, which is shaped by his steadfast optimism and morality, again in typical Shonen fashion, but there’s something wrong there, the more we go along. There are people who Gon’s charisma cannot exactly reach, like Chrollo, but even Nobunaga is endeared by it, and wants to keep Gon for himself. There’s a lot of wanting to keep Gon or Killua for oneself, in these adult characters.

However! This aforementioned charisma is portrayed as a bit evil, a bit manipulative. This is why the video essays think Gon is the villain: Killua loves him so much that it hurts him, and the people that loved Ging are hurt by their love for him, too. Mito hates Ging, in a complex way, clearly adoring him as a child but resenting him for leaving. Ging leaves empty spaces everywhere, seen most strongly in Kite, who is left with the task of finding Ging again and hasn’t seen him for years. That’s his teacher, you see, this man in love with leaving. Ging is to Kite is to Gon, et cetera. In my opinion, Kite loves Ging but also resents him, an echo of Mito’s reaction. We also have Razor, the most obviously bad relationship that Ging left behind- he talks to Ging for all but a few hours and yet has accepted his fate of being trapped on Greed Island forever, clearly viewing it as a favor to a friend! It was like no one had ever said my name before. Doesn’t that remind us of someone? One of the most memorable quotes of Greed Island for me. That guy’s ten times more in love with Ging than Satotz was. Hunters in general are portrayed as morally dubious, obviously, but Ging - even while not being present - shows that he is only concerned with having fun. Gon is largely concerned with having fun, sure, but not always. We don’t know enough about Ging to conceive of whether he had a Hisoka in his life, but we do know that his parents died at a young age. What to make of this, I wonder. The other Greed Island friends - Dwun, List, Eta and Elena - are also irritated with Ging, to say the least, but stay anyway. The show nudges us to think about what kind of person could inspire such a feeling. Gon obviously thinks about it all the time. He says that he’s going to figure out what it is about being a Hunter that was more important than being his dad, but, if you’re going to put it more directly, he’s actually simply trying to figure out what kind of person his dad really is. He’s also quite obviously impressed with his dad and savors every piece about him being an amazing person, admiring his quote unquote charisma where others recoil. Or maybe it’s not charisma but ambition. That thing, hard to describe, is what a Hunter always has, what they are.

In some ways, people are teaching Gon to become more like his father. The branches intertwine and break off. Razor says “Your dad would be proud!” at the end of their dodgeball match, and Razor’s a crazy person, certainly, but sometimes I think about how many people react to Gon, all like, you’re suddenly here, good job! They don’t really know what he went through to get to that point, it’s always simply this awe. This is in contrast to a character like Netero who takes one look at Killua and knows what he went through to get his little assassin powers. What a dreadful child! What a monster. If Gon’s a monster, Killua is, too, but of course their roles as foils perform a masterful 180 by the end of the show. Anyway, when Gon gets a new teacher, they don’t ask about his past, they just take him at the present moment for fifteen minutes and wave him goodbye into the future. Every teacher takes him to a new step of self-mutilation. Again, it doesn’t feel that serious when we’re with Bisky, for example, but there’s something intentionally unsettling about the way she trains them with Binolt, and so on. There’s also a friction between what people envision Ging as and what Gon actually believes in. He does as he thinks his dad would want, especially on Greed Island, following the rules and believing in games as a concept of life. A true Hunter likes to have fun! Hisoka and even Chrollo have fun, in their own ways, you could say, and they’re killers. This is the moral weirdness that make people uncomfortable with Gon, and it’s also in Ging. That if you’re having fun, being a bit selfish, making out with your desire, then anything goes, really. That’s a Hunter. You just don’t get it. Gon loves this.

We don’t get much on Ging’s thoughts about anything. He doesn’t even really acknowledge the events of Chimera Ant when they’re on the World Tree. We don’t get much of a Gon internal POV, instead going into Killua’s head for a lot of Chimera Ant where Gon stays silent. Killua constantly wonders what Gon is thinking, this unapproachable love of his life who he can’t reach anymore. Gon leaves our perception for a large part of that arc; people complain that they don’t see their favorite main characters as much after Greed Island, and certainly not in the Dark Continent arc. But what would Gon even say to us? Everyone had pushed him towards this, he had no control, he was so young, he was going to leave, and when he does leave, in his own way, we think, ah, I see. It’s like that Carl Jung quote, ha, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” Killua was the only one who could’ve stopped it, really, but he was also, in the end, a child who was mistaken for something else.

I THINK THE APPLE’S ROTTEN RIGHT TO THE CORE

There’s this idea that floats around from time to time that Ging might’ve planned it all from the beginning: Gon’s trauma, his development, the Chimera Ants. It’s funny but untrue. Ging is not a mastermind who orchestrated everything, but I do believe he knew there would be some level of immense danger involved and treated Gon as he would treat himself. Ging is just fucked up and insane. And if I were Gon I’d think that’s awesome, yeah. Is trauma not the most important teacher, the biggest, most infallible tutor? What is greed but desire? What is desire but something beautiful? I saved this quote from Ask Polly, recently:

I am selfish because I have a huge heart. My greed reflects my unbearable love for every small leaf drifting down from the sky. My longing is a manifestation of my love of the beauty of this world. I am singularly good at welcoming the gifts of this life, I am uniquely attuned to the wisdom of this day, which so often disguises itself in mediocre distractions, in petty jealousies, in self-involved drivel.

Enough of the talk of Gon Freecss being a monster, you might say. Weren’t you saying he’s just a boy? Ging Freecss was once a boy, too. Gon was born from the kindness of the forest, molded by the love of the wind and the trees. But is nature not monstrous? Is nature not black and white, unshakeable in its morals? What is the father of nature? More nature? I don’t know. It’s two in the morning as I write this and I find myself numb to the implications of any of this. I’m concerned about what I’m becoming, you see. Am I a rotting person? Maybe rotting isn’t the right word- am I festering? Am I mutating? Is any of this okay? I am twenty four years old. I find myself back in the place I spent the latter part of my high school years in, living with my parents. I find myself feeling misunderstood more than I am understood; I long to leave this place, and I plan on leaving soon. I will miss my parents, but I won’t miss the cold, dark winter that I’m sitting in now, that I’ve experienced for seven years. I have gnarled dreams and candied nightmares, often of places I’ve been or of places I want to be. New York City becomes a shopping mall in my head. The ocean is a place I drown in, over and over again. I want to reach inside myself and show people the ugly stuff, but some of these people don’t even want the pretty stuff, so I want to run away. I didn’t use to want to run away. I climbed up trees when I was a kid but now I’m afraid of heights. I want to rebuild but I’m not sure it’s the right path. I know where I came from and I want it gone. I know what I want and it’s more wanting.

What to make of Gon’s memories? We don’t get many of them. His most important and visible memory is of meeting Kite, the person that actually implanted the idea of what a Hunter is in Gon’s mind. Kite arrives with violence. He reprimands Gon and reminds Gon that he is a stupid child. Kite isn’t equipped to deal with any of this. Kite is mostly concerned with nature, and was raised by a man who was mostly concerned with nature. What is a childhood memory, but a ghost? What is a childhood memory, but an act of leaving? Is a childhood memory simply something that shapes us into something ambitious?

Lately I am plagued by memory. It creeps up on me. It is a reaction to many somethings. I read this essay called “On Flirtation” by Adam Phillips. He starts by quoting Lacan: “The patient is not cured because he remembers. He remembers because he is cured.” Does Gon remember? He, too, is plagued by what he doesn’t remember - his father - and what he does - Kite, slapping him at a tender age. The essay mentions Freud’s idea that the significant experiences of childhood are forgotten - or omitted - but “the essential experiences are represented in memory by the inessential elements of the same experience”. This is an idea that these inane childhood memories are like dreams in that they show what the dreamer is thinking by showing them something else. They are allegories for the appalling. They are the stories we tell ourselves in our head, on a theatrical set. There are memories of me as a child in a non-important setting that show some mild discomfiting moment, and they are actually there as a nice replacement for what was actually a series of horrible moments. I think about Gon’s memory of Kite in this way, as much as I don’t. Gon is implied to have had a nice childhood in the woods, unmarred by much, but this memory, like a thesis statement in an essay, exemplifies everything wrong with his childhood. The overbearing presence of a violent, adult mentor. His need to prove himself to said mentor. The reveal of his father’s absence, more than the actual absence of his father itself. Do you see what I mean? Gon, I think, is pretty comfortable with having just Aunt Mito and the rest of Whale Island. It is certainly healthier than having Ging around. However, the delicious reveal of something more in the guise of the hole his father left, or whatever, is exciting to him. His obsession with his father is canonically not one that revolves around needing an actual father figure. He just wants to know. He doesn’t want Ging to be any different, or even to come back, he just wants to understand it all, or even in a lesser sense to just be a part of it. But the thrill of knowing that there is something missing is central to Gon Freecss. What is missing is not exactly important in a literal sense. It just happens to be his dad. The fetishization of leaving. You could argue that his dad being gone creates this “something’s missing and I want it” complex, though to me it’s a chicken and egg situation. Again, how does something like Gon Freecss get made? Like Ging? We see how Killua gets made, how Illumi does. But Hisoka, no. Characters like Gon or Hisoka (the purest form of Hunters, according to the work) are not given detailed backstories or flashbacks. They live entirely in the moment.

So there’s this leaving. When I write about leaving, by the way, I don’t mean just the leaving that involves going from one physical place to another, it’s just as much about emotional detachment. I wrote about this in my fancomic I made about Gon, but it still haunts me. Hence this essay. Perhaps I’m concerned about my own growing habit of leaving, or my growing romanticization of it. Perhaps this concern is unwarranted. Perhaps I’m becoming something awful. Is it because I moved states at important ages, as a child? Is it because of something deeper, something worse? Earlier this evening, I briefly read about avoidant attachment styles, afraid that I’m exhibiting this by ghosting people who I don’t want to speak to anymore. I’m aware that it’s silly, but I think of Ging, sometimes, in these situations, because I want to live a life where I’m in love with desire itself, genuinely, but it comes at a cost. Evidently. I started reading up about the attachment style thing because people on Twitter were getting furious about people not answering their messages quickly and saying they want to hang out in a month or two or whatever. I’m very wary of these sort of terms and brand of discourse, but still I wonder if I’m the asshole. I always wonder if I’m the asshole. Maybe I’m supposed to stop wondering about it? Maybe I should just go full throttle? Where am I going, I think. Some of my friends from my past don’t seem to get me, anymore. I want to drive to the airport.

The avoidant attachment style people apparently leave because of a fear of intimacy. Ging Freecss is all about that. But the thing about Gon is that he does not “leave” because of pure fear. He allows intimacy specifically from Killua, from the beginning (and Gon’s intimacy is strange, as it’s loyal and direct but also, you wouldn’t argue that he’s as close to Kurapika or anyone else as he is to Killua, who is a special case). Then there’s one of the biggest, most devastating moments of the Chimera Ant arc, where Gon says, You have it easy, Killua. You’re perfectly calm, since it means nothing to you. When things get overwhelming, he recoils from the intimacy, backtracking, and says Killua actually doesn’t understand any of it at all. Yes, this hurts Killua more than anything, because Killua’s idea of love is sharing a painful burden. You could say that Gon doesn’t see love like that, but to me he kind of does, and is truly angry because he feels that Killua does not understand him. Gon is in the throes of grief. I’m uninterested in defending him in a certain way to the bad video essay people. I’m assuming you have your own thoughts on Gon, dear reader. This scene is a complex one, as is most of Chimera Ant, and Killua is also having his own arc on what love means to him and his own trauma. I’ll be honest with you, and you might hate it, but my reaction to that scene has always been a lot of empathy towards Gon. Towards Killua as well, yes, but my first instinct has always been My god! Of course Gon feels that no one understands him! Not a single adult around him steps in or asks for anything but the mask he puts on. He is only rewarded for being a good boy - I think of the opening lines of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese” - and is unprepared for such mourning. No one truly talks to him about his grief. I think a lot about that scene where he says he was going to kill Morel, if Killua hadn’t stopped him. Killua, in many ways, really doesn’t understand, if you want to be cynical about the scope of human understanding. We die alone, all that stuff. Can Killua ever understand what it’s like to grow up with everyone lying to you about who your father is and where he went and telling you not to follow? Killua has his own issues, of course, and he had a tortured childhood. But does he have a Kite? No. So Gon takes that tangible, plain knowledge he has (he is an Enhancer, after all) and decides that Killua doesn’t understand.

No, but the problem is that Killua does: this is his love. He does know. And if he does not know, after all, he will do anything for Gon anyway. But Hunter x Hunter is about true knowing, and true understanding, especially in the face of no one else being able to, and so Gon struggles to see any of that. I’m sure he regrets it, after Election Arc. He is sad when they part. Things are left unsaid. And Killua knows things that Gon doesn’t- as I write this, I ask myself, what is the solution to such a thing? I guess it’s Gon trusting Killua to know him in ways that don’t make sense, and to trust that this intimacy will not hurt him.

As for the avoidant attachment style thing, well. I am constantly terrified that I will give someone too much and be made a fool. Everyone will laugh because it’ll definitely be my fault, for thinking someone understood. The thing is, I’m not afraid of a hard conversation. I have had hard conversations for years, and have had people tell me that I like them too much, in the past. I suddenly find myself tired. I tried very hard and still I was misinterpreted. I’ve had some bad friends. Have we all had bad friends? I don’t know. I’ve told people that I felt sad and disrespected, and the conversations were turned around on their heads so that they could tell me what I had done wrong instead. I make as many mistakes as the next person, yes, but I don’t know why I allowed that. I don’t know why I sat there and took it. I think I should have been stronger. I want to run away. I’ve never been the type to run away. I realize this isn’t about Gon Freecss, at the moment. I just- I would like some understanding. It is about Gon Freecss, I say, earnestly, cockily, because I understand what it means to be encouraged all your childhood to be someone they want and then have it not be enough. We’re just kidding, they say. We don’t like that one. Try again. I know I’m enough. I’m sorry I don’t answer some people’s texts. I Googled “is ghosting that bad” and a thousand Reddit and Quora posts told me that I am in fact the villain. I thought, Why do people treat me like some monolith of kindness and patience?

I’m telling you that Hunter x Hunter is about teachers, and so I’ll also tell you what I was like in elementary school: taller than my peers and smug about it. I stopped growing after middle school, and have remained 5’4” forever. I was naive and bad at social cues in a natural sense but good at studying. This meant that I learned what people needed at any given moment through pure observation. This meant that as I got older, people would tell me inadvertently that the better they got to know me, the more they realized that there was something wrong with me. Back to elementary school: my essays would get enlarged and hung up on the wall in giant frames. I was in leadership in fifth grade and I hung out with the principal. I went to meet the governor of our state and shook his hands. I won lots of awards and was consistently in the highest percentile of a state that had the worst curriculums in the country. The best park in our town had heroin needles littering the sidewalk. Our house was tiny and my dad was struggling with alcoholism. I grew up in a place called Carson City, Nevada. It was not an island, but islands don’t have to be surrounded by water to be islands. A monster can be formed in the desert, too. I know I’m being dramatic. I wish I could say this in a way that doesn’t hurt. On my mother’s side, my family is Venezuelan, and we didn’t have enough money to fly back to the country to visit them before the government got as bad as it is now. I saw my mother’s country when I was an infant, and so I don’t remember it. More islands. In elementary school, my parents diligently attended every single one of my parent-teacher meetings. For a semester, some of the kids in my class were pushed to use a computer program to train our math skills while the other kids studied the usual. I got to a college graduate level by the time the year was over after my mom scraped together money to buy a membership so that I could do it at home every day, forcing me to do it for hours after school after I did my homework. No, I couldn’t have sleepovers with my friends, unless I begged for weeks, because my mother was paranoid about pedophilia. I look back and wonder why I was close with so many full-grown adults. Our neighbor two doors down would sit with me, my much younger sibling, and her daughter at the playground across the street, and would vent to me for hours about her intimate issues. I was fourteen, maybe. Twelve, perhaps. I don’t remember well. In elementary school, I was great at math, but I was also great at anything else they threw at me, and my fourth grade teacher told my mother that I could get into some fancy magnet school in Reno, no problem. We didn’t have the money. The drive was too far. This teacher’s daughter was one of my closest friends and also hated me. I’m trying not to sound arrogant about this. She really did. She loved horses and her mother once showed our class a video of the helicopter they used to fly above their ranch, where they raised acres of alfalfa. I had another friend who was furious with me for getting into the GATE (gifted and talented education, ha) program when she didn’t, and who would steal all my friends and call me from their hangouts without me to tell me that they were doing it. I would buy a sweater at the Walmart and she would go the next day to buy the exact same sweater. This is not an exaggeration. She did this several times. Later, at age sixteen, one of those friends she stole would yell at me in a school hallway for saying that she was leaving me out of something that I don’t remember. Everyone stared. No one said anything. In elementary school, I had another friend who went off with the popular girls right before middle school, not exactly novel, but I have this vivid memory of doing one of those icebreaker things at the start of a class we both shared, during which she turned to me and said, in a voice that was not her own, with obvious, immense relish, “What’s your name again?” She’d been to my house at least a hundred times. We’d been to birthday party after birthday party together. I told my fifth grade teacher that I wanted to be the president, and she’d humor me, but even now, I remember the look of disdain and disapproval she gave me once, when I saw a book a girl said she was having trouble reading and said, I read that years ago! For reasons I can’t recall, I ended up performing a piano solo version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” for her class (it was a talent show or something), and everyone had goaded me into performing it again, this time with vocals. I could barely manage anything above a whisper. They weren’t even mean about it. Everyone had clapped politely.

My next-door neighbor growing up was named Stephen. The ph had been a point of contention; you had to pronounce it like that. My parents didn’t like me hanging out with Stephen, because his brother was older and did drugs and eventually got him into drugs, too. Things were complicated. I won’t get into it. I’d always liked Stephen, but in middle school he’d do stuff like ask to borrow my pencil and then stick it down the front of his pants before handing it back to me. He was a wild and stubborn child who came from little money, like me. His dog would escape their yard and fight our tiny terrier, as we got older. Stephen died at age twenty, years back, but by then I didn’t talk to people from our town much anymore. After I moved to Colorado in the middle of high school, things had gotten weird with a lot of my friends, and I’d become a sort of phantom in the place I’d been raised in. I now have no desire to go back there at all; I have nightmares where I’m running down the hallway to my fifth grade computer class, where I had developed a WPM of 120. I don’t know how to react to a death like Stephen’s. I didn’t know him that well, those last few years, and I have no desire to make it about me. He was a good person, and lives in my memories in a certain way. I just don’t know what to do with such a thing. I wish I could tell his family that I’m sorry, but I don’t know how. Our terrier is dead, and I suppose that his black Labrador retriever is dead by now, too. I imagine getting everyone to evacuate Carson City and then flooding it, flushing it out. Would grass grow out there, in the desert, or would time and fate make sure that it went back to the way it was, no matter what I do to it? Is the only way to leave such a place to leave it forever?

My piano teacher throughout middle and high school would often tell me, Alex, I feel like you’re hiding something from me. There’s a wall up between us. He then gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon and said I could read it if I wanted. I have no idea what I did with it. Looking back, I think he said that partially because I was always wary of adults and teachers in general. Perhaps it was my fear of music teachers, specifically. My middle school band teacher retired the first year he taught me, which was during my sixth grade year. He would throw stands across the room at us and shriek at the top of his lungs about our lack of musical skill, Whiplash-style, which was kind of funny because we were literally twelve, thirteen, whatever. Ten minutes into class, some baby teenager would whisper something to their friend and he’d storm over to his office and lock himself in there for the rest of the period. When the bell rang, he’d come back out and say, You guys won’t shut the fuck up! You’re lucky I’m not an alcoholic, because I would have drunk myself to death because of you by now! And somehow no one said anything, and somehow he was beloved by every other class! He retired with honors. Too easy, it’s too obvious, isn’t it! He would single me out in front of everyone, a solid thirty students, and say, Alex, you’re not tonguing your notes, which was true: I had chosen to play the saxophone in fifth grade, but our teacher had not actually taught us how to do anything. We learned literally nothing, I tell you. I had spent the entire year prior playing with my fingering formation totally wrong, one note too high. This middle school band teacher would tell everyone to be quiet and make me go through a long section of the song, all alone, and I’d try my hardest to tongue those fucking notes, I don’t know why it was so hard for me, but he wouldn’t explain it, and then he’d turn to my friend Joey, who sat in the chair next to me, and say, with a sweet voice, “Hey. Was she tonguing those notes?” And Joey would say nothing, until the teacher would yell and he’d fearfully go, “I don’t know.” Later in life, I’d have piano recitals and would be close to tears, if I messed anything up. It’s like you go somewhere else, my piano teacher would say, when I’d suddenly forget the next measure. Where do you go, Alex?

Have I humanized the monster enough for you? Have I told you enough about myself, for you to leave me alone? Is my avoidance digestible enough for you? Will you be my friend forever? Will the people in my DMs give me a few more days to reply, now? That’s mean of me. I know it’s not all about that. I think my brain is scrambled. I’m sorry I can be a lot. I wonder if I should even be sorry. I don’t think my life is the worst in the world, far from it. I know I was born into some level of privilege. My parents were kind and wanted the best for me, I think, but were sometimes unequipped to handle life in general. I suppose we’re all unequipped for life in general, from time to time. Where does that leave me, though. I’m twenty-four and I feel as if I’ve been sent back home to do some homework, no Nen and more grief than before. Believe me, I know it’s funny to talk about this stuff and also about anime. But art and storytelling have been the things to keep me going, all these years, and Hunter x Hunter and Gon Freecss have made me feel understood. So that’s why I’m talking about all this, I guess.

There’s this idea of leaving for your own sake. What is the right thing to do? To stick around until the end, with someone you don’t even like anymore? To sacrifice leaving for someone, instead of following your ambition? Is this what Killua hints at, when he leaves with Alluka, when leaving Gon? That when he has something to want, and when he won’t follow Gon anymore, Gon will have to confront this part of himself, this charismatic but ultimately destructive nature? When Killua leaves, Gon is visibly upset, though we don’t know quite what either character is thinking. Killua is more clear to us. Gon, though: how does one feel, when all that leaving catches up to you? When the people you expect to follow you stop following you, inevitably? Is this the life you choose, when you fall in love with leaving (but what about arriving)? All I want to is to go and see the world, and to meet new people, but in order to do this, I must let go of others. Most people don’t want to keep up a long-distance relationship with the same fervor as an in-person one. Most people want me to come visit, but I’m too busy, baby! And then we drift apart, or explode. I don’t know. I still have friends, but on certain nights I get really fucking sad about the ones I don’t talk to anymore. Is this what the Twitter people are talking about? Am I the problem? I don’t think I’m the most desirable person in the world, but I’ve gotten good at making a certain type of person think I am, for a day or two. But they might see the cracks. Is that what I’m doing? Leaving so people don’t get to know me better? Maybe they’re just not… fun, anymore. Maybe it’s not them, it’s me. What the hell is wrong with me? I might be an asshole? I’m so scared I’m actually an asshole. These days I feel like people have created a version of me in their head that I didn’t ask for, and then get angry when I’m not the thing they expected. Is that my fault? I know this sounds like I’m saying I’m a heartbreaker; I’m definitely not. I struggled at making certain boundaries when I was younger and had people cling to me in unhealthy ways, and I sometimes did the same to others. When I was in first grade, a kid had to switch out of my class because he had become obsessed with choking me on the playground. I remember thinking that we were just having fun.

I want to escape samsara, you know. I don’t like cutting people off, but I don’t like waiting, anymore. No, that’s not right, I do wait for people, I do, but it’s just more rare, and I value my time and energy. I have always considered myself a loyal friend, but now people have to prove themselves to me, which wasn’t a thing before. Before, I fancied myself enlightened, like, Everyone is on equal ground, innocent until proven guilty, I’m very patient, whatever, but these past few years I’ve come to realize that not everybody clicks with me, and that I shouldn’t waste anyone’s time, and that, also, some people just fucking suck, and I’m tired of being hurt for no reason. Why must I be patient? Why must I be good? I kind of want to be a badass. I kind of want to be untouchable. Maybe I’ll get to 30 or 40 and realize I had it all wrong, but that’s really what I think right now. I love with more fervor, but for the right people. Is that so wrong? That’s not full-on leaving, is it? I know some people hate me, now. Fuck! I hope I’m not just an obnoxious asshole. I think it’s fine. This is probably just a new healthy boundary I’m forming? Sure, sure. I keep thinking, if they can catch up to me, then fine. But it’s rare that they do. Maybe this is what Ging is about. I don’t want to be like Ging Freecss, but I kind of do? Laugh it up, again. I know it’s cringe to talk about Ging Freecss like that! I might be a huge bitch. It might be my favorite thing about myself. Oh, no. I’ve been alone for long periods of time in my life, and so I don’t get so scared of it anymore. I feel as if I can manage it easily. But, still, my beating heart, in the dead of the night, yelling something I don’t understand-

As Gon Freecss must be sympathized with, I must sympathize with myself. I must give myself kindness as I give it to others. If I want to speak about leaving, then I am forced by nature to consider arrival. Carl Phillips writes:

“That’s all that happens, I think, we stop moving forever.” So I said once, in a poem, to describe death. By that logic, life equals motion, we are as human beings by definition restless, dissatisfaction becomes a form of survival, to be dissatisfied with an empty stomach triggers an instinct to fill that emptiness with what in turn enables us to live a while longer. We resist dissatisfaction as we resist shapelessness; the impulse to know a thing—another form of survival—is an impulse toward recognizability, we give shape to shapelessness, and we call it meaning. And it feels like arrival. We forget for a moment that meaning itself is unfixed, ever changing. And the forgetting—isn’t this, too, survival?

Perhaps, I think, through my tears, this is that other thing I mentioned before, that other big message that Hunter x Hunter’s trying to tell us.

I WANNA KNOW WHERE YOU GO

Arriving, there you go. It happens when you leave. You have to go somewhere else. So I guess the solution is vulnerability. As it always has been. Again, I find the need for understanding. I might burn or get burned, I might become the sun and then die in a supernova. So it goes. I’ll reach for love. I’ll leave if I have to, and I’ll deal with the consequences. Togashi has written a story about people who find each other. Lately I think, that’s all life is. Finding one another. Challenging one another. Lovingly. Furiously. With so much hatred it consumes you. With so much adoration it does the same. Being a Hunter, more lightheartedly, is about being so passionate about something that you’ll do anything for it. Perhaps that’s cooking. You don’t have to be a killer, Togashi says, but you could be. Hunter x Hunter, baby, it’s in the name! It’s about the finding! The hunt! Perhaps it’s not so bleak after all. Indeed, the rest of the cast is out on the water, on a ship that will, in my opinion, lead to most of their deaths, but Gon is home, at least for now. The world is devouring itself, and will hunger for more even when it’s done, but he takes a second to breathe. He calls his dad and it’s pretty normal. Who knows what’s going to happen in the manga, and though I don’t hope for Gon to remain stagnant and Nen-less forever, I hope that he grows, that he’s happier. I think of Togashi and his health and this story he’s written for so much of his life, his opus, his darling. I think of the people in my life who do love me, and understand me, and the ones I will meet in the future. Is it so serious, after all? Do I let you hold my stuffed animal, pet its head and coo at it like I wanted to, long ago? Can someone not have multiple desires? Some people seem to believe Gon and Killua will never see each other again- did they not hear what Alluka said? That they’ll be back soon? How could you look at the two of them and think, There’s no future here. Do they not see the cycle of nature? The caring embrace of the breeze? I want to search for more. I want to be kinder to myself. I want to put my memories to peaceful rest when I can, and when they scream and writhe I want to try my best to make it through the storm. I want to hold a baby bird in the palm of my hand and then release it. I wanna know where you go when you’re feeling alone, do you?

I think again of Mary Oliver’s “Wild Geese”, this time as a whole:

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I think of: “The pond was—I could see as I laid the last peach in the water—full of fish and eyes.”

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