“That's not it! I want to become friends with Gon — I'm sick of killing people.”
Killua Zoldyck Quotes
4 quotes from Hunter x Hunter, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Gon, you are light. Sometimes you shine so brightly, I must look away. But even so, is it still okay if I stay by your side?”
This line circulates in at least three English wordings and they disagree in ways that matter. The version here is the only one set as prose by a source that is not repeating another; the competing renderings are title-cased headings on co-owned mastheads, one of which drops the closing question entirely and the other of which has him ask to stay at your side rather than by it. That preposition is doing real work. At is a position. By is a relation. And the question is the point of the whole speech, because Killua has just knocked Gon unconscious and carried him away from Neferpitou rather than watch him die, and Gon has woken up and thanked him for it. He is not asking permission to stand near somebody. He is asking whether gratitude he did not earn entitles him to stay.
“Do you know what happens if you break your word? If you know, slowly open your eyes, look at me in the mirror, and listen carefully. Never show your filthy face to us again.”
Everybody reads the Heavens Arena material as the assassin surfacing, and this is more specific than that. Sadaso, a fighter on Gon's floor, has been extorting him by threatening the people around him. What Killua does is not kill him. He removes him from the building permanently, using the instrument his family actually trained into him, which is not strength but the credible delivery of a threat. Note the staging inside it: the mirror, the eyes, the instruction to listen carefully. He is not intimidating a man, he is running a procedure, and he has run it before on people who had done nothing to deserve it. It reads as a boy protecting his friend. It is also a boy finding out that the thing he said he was sick of is extremely useful, which is the problem the rest of the series hands him.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Gon, I should thank you. I'm the one who is glad that I got to know you.”
The correction in that first clause is the entire arc. Gon has just thanked him, which is what happened at episode eighty-five as well and produced a much longer and much more anxious answer, and this time Killua asks nothing. He states a claim about himself instead. What it costs is in the next scene, because he leaves. Two seasons of a boy attaching himself to somebody brighter end with him walking away to go traveling with Alluka, the sister his family kept locked in a room, which is the first thing he has ever done that Gon was not standing next to. Gratitude with no request attached to it was the last thing he had to learn, and the story makes him say it on the way out the door.
Read Killua Zoldyck's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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He is answering Illumi, who has come to the exam to check on him and has just proposed that his little brother is here to test himself against strong opponents. The correction is the whole character in one sentence and it is delivered to the person who built him. Killua was raised as an assassin by a family that fed him electricity and poison from infancy and conditioned him to run from any fight he could not certainly win, and none of that is what he renounces here. What he rejects is his brother's account of his own motive. He does not say he wants to be good. He says he wants a friend and is sick of the work, which is a far smaller and far more credible claim, and it is close to the last honest sentence anyone in that family gets out of him.