Hunter x Hunter Quotes

Every list has it, which is the first problem, and it is spoken in the first episode, which is the second. A storm has left most of the applicants seasick, the ship's captain has pulled aside the three who are not, and Kurapika answers the question about why he wants a license by revealing that he is the last of the Kurta and intends to destroy the Phantom Troupe. The captain calls it suicide. So the most-quoted sentence in the series is a statement of intent delivered before the character has done anything, by a boy the story has not yet tested. What it promises is that he will hold on to the rage. Fifty-seven episodes later he has Chrollo Lucilfer captured, has to choose between the revenge he organized his whole life around and two friends being held elsewhere, and gives up the revenge. That is the better line and nobody quotes it.

Episode four, and he is swallowing an insult in a queue. The Hunter Exam is full of people who cannot be provoked because they are too strong to care, and Kurapika is not one of them: he is a teenager with a famously short fuse whose eyes physically change color when his temper goes, which is the least convenient trait available to somebody planning a long revenge. So the restraint here is not temperament, it is budgeting. He has decided in advance what his anger is for and declines to spend any of it on a stranger in a line. Read against the boy who admits a few episodes later that he knew a prisoner's spider tattoo was a fake from the moment he saw it and went red anyway, this is the discipline before it breaks, and the series takes care to show it holding first.

The whole Yorknew arc runs on this, and it is worth noticing that a teenager worked it out. Kurapika's problem is structural: his clan's eyes are scattered among private buyers who have no reason at all to advertise, and no amount of strength locates a man who does not wish to be found. So he stops hunting people and starts hunting a behavior. The second sentence is the operative one, because it says the market has a social function, and a market with a social function has an auction, and an auction has a guest list. Everything that follows, up to taking a bodyguard post with a mafia family, comes out of having correctly modeled the psychology of the men who bought his family's eyes. It is a detective's line in a series everyone remembers for a nuclear old man.

The scene is a ball game. Netero has agreed to hand a license to anyone who can take a ball off him, has set himself a handicap of one hand and one leg, and is playing three children on an airship. What makes it land is that six episodes have established him as unbeatable without ever giving the audience a number for it, and then he gets measured with a rule instead. Gon does not win. He forces the strongest human alive to break his own terms, notices that it happened, and celebrates the noticing. It is the series saying early what it will spend a hundred and forty episodes on: victory conditions are negotiable, and the fights worth watching are about what somebody had to give up rather than about who fell over.

Stubbornness is the flat reading: a boy refusing to follow instructions. The shape of it is more interesting. The gatekeeper at the Zoldyck estate is not being obstructive. He is offering the standard arrangement, in which access is earned through a trial, and that arrangement is what the previous twenty episodes were made of. Gon has just passed the Hunter Exam, an ordeal designed entirely around that premise, and won it. He is not refusing difficulty. He is refusing the idea that a friendship is a thing you qualify for, and he refuses it in front of a household whose whole structure is qualification, whose youngest son was tested with electricity by the people who raised him. Killua hears about this afterwards. It is the first argument anybody has ever made on his behalf.

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.

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.