It is very difficult, perhaps for want of skill, for me to explain the sheer brilliance of HxH, because just like any other timeless work of art - Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Faust, etc - it will only be appreciated decades, if not centuries, after its generation. Thus, us living now cannot fully appreciate or understand it, because we suffer from a heuristic, post-latent modernity bias. But nevertheless I will try to explain what makes it the greatest work of fiction ever told. Ever. I’m not exaggerating. I’m being dead serious.
HxH requires a deep, intimate, almost PhD-level knowledge of Kant, Hegel, Aristotle, Plato, Nietzsche, Locke, Hume, Hobbes, Sartre, Kafka, Foucault, Heideggar, Schopenhauer, among a few others to have an adequate understand of most of its themes. The plot is in effect a synthesis of western and eastern philosophy, which is a feat no writer has ever accomplished. It’s the definition of innovation. The characters are... deep. Just... so fucking deep it hurts. They feel raw, real, three-dimensional, and when I’m reading them, it feels like Togashi is looking into my soul, my core, and lecturing me about the epistemological aspects of human nature. I usually spend my free time reading through Dostoevsky, Gogol, Derrida, and Laozi just to complement the psychological realism of even the minor characters, which any other writer would neglect.
The sheer dread, cynicism, and terror of the HxH world makes even Golden Age Berserk look like a fucking Saturday morning cartoon. It’s just so, SO dark, so... black. Togashi’s IQ must unironically be in the 99.99th percentile, if not higher.
HxH is not a manga, it’s not a mere story, it’s an attempt to express the reality of the world and the incomprehensible complexity of human beings into a visual form (See Meruem vs Netero as an example). Togashi has unironically surpassed Shakespeare.
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