Tag: hxh blogging

when does hxh talk abt self harm? i can’t seem to remember but that’s huge whoa

taluluto:

i got 3 asks about this so consider all of them answered with this!! 

it’s more of a brief mention rather than an overarching plot point, but there’s a scene during the chimera ant arc, while gon and killua and co. are sitting in knov’s “fourth dimensional mansion” immediately following the main invasion of the palace. off the top of my head i know it’s episode 110 in the 2011 anime— not sure about the manga chapter. the group is talking about the fact that they’ve noticed that the chimera ant king has been injured somehow, but because of circumstances at the time, the only logical conclusion was that he’d injured himself

morel asks the group at large why they think meruem might have injured himself, because he can’t think of a reason— the exact question he asks is “when would you ever purposefully hurt yourself?” i believe

gon then flashes back to the scene earlier where he saw kite’s possessed body and provoked it so it would attack him— after which he immediately responds “when i couldn’t forgive myself.” the rest of the group, especially killua, gets uncomfortably quiet for a moment before continuing

talking about real life, and demographically/statistically speaking, it’s more common for boys— especially younger adolescent boys— to self harm by bruising themselves/punching or banging their heads against walls/purposefully getting into fights/etc. as a coping mechanism [for negative feelings, pent-up stress or guilt, or as self-punishment]; (source on those statistics) and often, because when society thinks of “self harm” they think of cutting, this behavior often isn’t recognized as self harm, by others or even by the person doing it

considering gon’s behavior throughout the entire series as well as this scene in particular, i think it’s quite reasonable to interpret gon as using/having used pain as self-punishment and a guilt/stress coping mechanism, whether or not he realizes he’s doing it

So do you think there was a way to avoid what happened to Gon at the end of the chimera ants arc?

lyraklaude:

Yes, I do. It doesn’t sit well with me that Gon was never reprimanded, never admonished, and was allowed to take big, life-threatening decisions when he was clearly emotionally unstable by the end of episode 116. He was surrounded by several experienced adults – Hunters -, and yet nobody offered the resemblance of guidance or advice. I don’t care how dangerously angry and headstrong he was, Gon wasn’t supposed to leave alone with a Pitou. I don’t care if there was a risk in Pitou taking hostages, someone should have been there with him. Killua and Palm could have left together with him. Palm was a very strong Ant, wasn’t she? Anyway, point is, Gon wasn’t supposed to take decisions and be trusted to stalk off with a mega-powerful Royal Guard like it was perfectly okay. He was too far gone at that point, that he’d been twisted to the point where he’d do anything to get his way. 

Also, it confuses me that nobody suspected that Kite might be dead. Where was Killua’s skeptical conceptual view on the world? How come he couldn’t predict the mere possibility of Kite being gone? Or was he purposefully choosing to live in denial like Gon? I don’t know, honestly. Bottom line is: Gon Freecss was a kid going through a wide spectrum of raw emotions, and he wasn’t supposed to be left to handle them all by himself.