December 2017

So do you think Killua is still angry and resentful towards Gon? And how do you think they can patch things up at this point since they’re not even together?

oh man. i’ve thought on this matter extensively, so here’s my hot take:

yes, he absolutely is still angry at gon. however, i firmly believe that he decided to leave gon behind largely because he blames himself for everything that had transpired during the ca arc. 

let me elaborate:

guilt and shame are recurrent themes when it comes to killua’s character. he is a child abuse survivor, with tons of great expectations piled upon him by his emotionally manipulative family, who won’t stop drilling two things into his head: one, he doesn’t deserve friends, and if he makes them, he will eventually betray them; two, family is the only thing in this world that he loves and loves him in return.

illumi is pretty blunt and frankly artless about it; as far as manipulation goes, his way of using it against killua is rather see-through. now, Silva is the one who is a master manipulator. he plays the god cop to illumi’s bad one, and killua, a child desperate for any kind of love and attention, falls for it completely. and once silva has killua’s trust, he makes killua swear that he will be strong enough to never betray his friends. do you see his tactic? if killua ever Does betray his friends, he will return back to his family, riddled with shame and now completely respecting his father’s authority – because his family has been right all along.

the sad thing is that it’s not only his family who keep insisting that killua is too weak, or too cold, or too much of a monster to have friends; he receives a similar message from a person who is in a position of power over him, and more importantly, a person whom he trusts – bisky. she is the one who tells him to leave gon if he doesn’t believe himself to be strong and brave enough to stay by his side, which only reinforces killua’s worst fears. 

that’s why killua kept following gon everywhere, borderline obsessed with the idea of protecting him. killua wanted to prove to the world, and most importantly, to himself, that he was worthy of staying by gon’s side.

then this concoction of fears, apprehension, love and desire to help crashes into gon’s impenetrable wall of “i am not weak, this is my fight, it’s me who is to blame for kite’s death” and killua feels devastated, because he has been shut out in the most desperate of times – exactly when friends are supposed to help each other. and then he sees gon after his fight with pitou, and the only thing he could be possibly thinking of is that he wasn’t there to save his friend when it mattered the most. it doesn’t matter that it was gon who refused his help; he still wound up practically dead on killua’s watch. he still blames himself for betraying his friend, just like his family had warned him.

and the most interesting thing and what i think of as brilliant writing? killua ends up symbolically fulfilling his father’s prophecy by coming back to his family – alluka and nanika. 

he decides to leave gon not because he wants to be apart from him. he fears that if he stays by gon’s side, he will betray him again.

i’ll even go as  far as to say that most of his anger (not all, but most of it) is performative. it’s his way of trying to disguise his perceived guilt, because just like gon, killua does not know how to deal with sadness, remorse and regret - both of them channel it into anger, or, in gon’s case, sometimes into over-the-top enthusiasm and restless energy.

as for patching things up… i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again: talking. that’s the only way. i don’t think they’ll keep things separate for much time, a year tops, because they are still young teenagers and a year is a long time for them. i hope alluka will be a positive influence on killua, will teach him to be more assertive and forthcoming with his discomfort. then it’s just the matter of him confronting gon, who will have hopefully worked through things on his own too (gon is in no way dense; he knows he fucked up and just needs time to access his sadness and learn to express it).

so yeah. thanks for the opportunity to ramble, i’ve got too many thoughts on this subject haha

Since Killua and Gon have been separated for a year now in the manga, and there’s no indication they reunited, do you think Killua might have left with no intention of reuniting and traveling with Gon again? It seems sad that one mistake dismantled all the good Gon did for Killua in Killua’s mind :(

well, first of all i’m not too worried about the passage of time in the manga because hunter x hunter in this regard is like an old greek epic. when togashi leaves some characters to focus on others, the narrative time stops for the former. which is somewhat silly, but charming, i guess… in an absent-minded, i-do-not-remember-the-milestones-of-the-timeline-in-my-own-story way. my speculation that it might take killua and gon no more than a year to come to their senses and work things through is just that - a speculation. togashi doesn’t put much stock into the ‘time heals’ concept; he appears much more proactive when it comes to resolving the conflicts that his characters face.

so no, i do not think that this is it for killua and gon, both because it seems rather unlikely for togashi to leave that plotline hanging (it’s the central unresolved conflict of the ca arc), and because of the nature of gon and killua’s relationship. people of their age meet and separate without ever looking back all the time, but killua and gon went through a number of formative, life-changing experiences together. try as they might, they won’t be able to just up and cut all ties with each other.

i do not think that killua wants to leave gon behind for good, either. he seems to realize that he needs some distance from gon, because he’s been putting his friend on the pedestal and shaping his entire existence around him for way too long. i think he knows that he needs some time to learn who killua is without gon, and frankly, it’s a healthy thing to do in my opinion.

and last but not least, for killua leaving with no intention to reunite and patch things up with gon would be a strange narrative choice to say the least, considering how much foreshadowing that scene under the world tree contained, both from the symbolic point of view (parting under the world tree, a mythical representation of the center of the world, where everything begins and ends, something people keep coming back to), and from the point of possible character development for alluka (she says that she’ll “return” killua to gon, implying that she will soon be independent enough not to need killua’s protection, and i like to think that she might even play a major role in killua’s development as a character, making him reevaluate his relationship with gon and come back to it with a healthier approach).

hi i had a mighty need to tell you that i'm in love with the way you draw gon he's beautiful

thank you

he is a handsome boy