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I'm pretty sure at some point loooong ago [mention]Captain Cadaver[/mention] asked me to make an HxH post in the challenge thread. I can't find it, because this board doesn't let you filter posts in a thread by the user the way Zetaboards did (at the very least, I'm not aware of how to do that) but I'll make the thread.
Powerscaling is an important thing to get right in a battle shounen imo. Some place far too much focus on it and many don't focus much on it at all, but good powerscaling is important in order to appropriately create dramatic stakes, and it's also just important to with regard to keeping the work internally consistent. HxH I think is...generally internally consistent in its powerscaling, but the main thing I find to be good is that there is a clear end goal in terms of power-ups that, in theory, negates the potential for power creep.
To show why power creep can be wack in a battle shounen that gets out of hand, I'll use Naruto as an example. The big shots of Naruto in Part 1 are the 3rd Hokage and the 3 Sannin, particularly Orochimaru, and maybe also Itachi Uchiha though his powers are a bit more of a mystery at this point (he fled from Jiraiya, but I think it's also stated that Orochimaru failed to get his eyes, so his standing's a bit unclear here). The 3rd Hokage, Hiruzen, is called "The God of Hokage" in Part 1 and is suggested to be not only the strongest Hokage ever, but also the strongest current Kage compared to the others (which at this point in time includes guys like Onoki, the overpowered as fuck Tsuchikage in Part 2 who would clearly wipe the fucking floor with Hiruzen). The big problem here is that although Hiruzen/Orochimaru are set up as the big powers here, Kishi chose to slowly build towards the Akatsuki by the end of Part 1 going into Part 2, and his vision for what kind of powers they should have and the way that Naruto/Sasuke would progress to match that clearly altered.
Itachi was sort of the catalyst for this imo. While Orochimaru had his pseudo-immortality, his other powers were "weak" enough that Hiruzen could believably take him on. Itachi introduced a dojutsu that could only be countered by other dojutsu (Tsukuyomi, which can allegedly only be countered by other Sharingan users) and hinted at another extremely strong ability (Amaterasu, which I believe is stated to be the highest level of fire release jutsu...and only a select few from one bloodline can use it) which opened the door for Kishi to introduce tons more bloodline-exclusive (or exclusive for some other reason) powers that are ridiculously over-the-top. Hiruzen, while powerful in Part 1, did not do anything that was particularly earth-shattering or over-the-top. But that was the direction that Kishi ultimately ended up taking. Guys like Sasori and Deidara had to come off as challenging when Part 2 began and Kishi probably thought it would look odd if they looked like chumps compared to Hiruzen/Orochimaru, but Kishi was having the main characters fight these guys (i.e. Naruto/Sakura/Sasuke), so as the series progressed Kishi couldn't help but force the enemies to grow stronger and stronger so that the main characters could have something to strive towards. This forced Itachi to be worlds stronger than Deidara, and naturally Pain had to be significantly stronger than that, and Obito even stronger than that. The power creep got so bad that Kishi retconned Hiruzen's god status and shifted it over to Hashirama instead. Hiruzen fighting in the 4th World War also just looks ridiculous because everyone has all these insane techniques now and he's just doing the same old "throw a really big shuriken" shit from Part 1. Obviously the current Kage who we hadn't seen up until now had to have ridiculous powers as well with which they would clearly decimate Hiruzen with (e.g. lightning cloak, corrosive vapor techniques, dust release).
HxH on the other hand creates narrative stakes by basically creating two "ladders" that need to be climbed by the main characters in terms of powerscaling -- one in the short term, and one in the long term. For example, in the Heavens Arena arc Gon and Killua have the goal of learning how to use their particular nen type, and Gon manages to have a relatively competitive fight with Hisoka after having mastered his enhancement nen to some degree, but it's made clear that Hisoka is still on another level compared to him, hence Hisoka being the long term goal. A better example would be the Spiders, wherein most of the Spiders are significantly stronger than the main characters, with Kurapika only being able to gain the upper hand on some of them through tactics and strict conditional powers, but then after having established the Spiders, Gon/Killua are given a more appropriate milestone to achieve in the form of The Bomber in the Greed Island arc.
There is some good and bad that comes to this power scaling in the Chimera Ant arc. It starts off well, with Gon and Killua actually failing to reach the heights of some of the top tier human powers in that arc, something most other shounen would not have done. Netero is clearly set up to be the top dog of the series in this arc à la Hiruzen, but is implied to be comparable to the likes of Zeno Zoldyck who we've seen before. In other words, there is an established upper hierarchy of power that has remained consistent. While Gon and Killua improve throughout the arc, they don't reach this level of power. The chimera ants can be seen as sort of a transcendent being that challenges humanity's position as the apex predator (though the strength of the non-RG/King make most of the Spiders look a bit weaker than I'd have liked), specifically the RG/King who are anomalies in the world of HxH, so the RG and King's strength is naturally a good milestone for what the main characters can hope to achieve power-wise (either below or equal to). And indeed, Netero impresses him somewhat though ultimately falls short and has to get crafty. His power is all but confirmed as a milestone, though, when Gon essentially taps into his big man future potential and turns out to be as strong as pre-zenkai Meruem.
There is some good and bad to the above. Unless Togashi fucks up, it is basically an explicit shield against powercreep that breaking that shield would likely be a retcon on the same level as the one(s) in Naruto, if not more so. On the other hand, it's sort of lame to just KNOW that this is the absolute peak that our main characters can feasibly achieve. Part of the journey in following characters in a battle shounen is seeing what possible heights they can achieve. We want it to be "reasonable," sure, and we all have our own definitions for what entails "reasonable" and when power-ups become an inherently negative "power creep," but seeing how far characters can push themselves is part of what makes upcoming battles with the strongest characters in the series hype. HxH luckily has a variety of different abilities that Togashi can come up with for the other characters, but in the case of Gon at the very least...meh. Gon is also an extremely rare talent, so we also know that almost any other human won't reach that level of power (which sort of puts a damper on how strongly we perceive, say, the Spiders).
As an addendum, the concept of the "Dark Continent" is a nice way to keep up the narrative stakes after having faced possibly the strongest thread in history. It's a pretty "shounen-y" way to do it, yeah, but it's not the worst thing I've ever seen. My hope though is that in spite of the unimaginable horrors we're bound to see here, Togashi can stick to the rules he's set in place prior. Hopefully problems in the Dark Continent are solved not through super hax power-ups but through crafty tactics and strategy.
Skimming over this post after having written it, it feels like an overly long incoherent mess of thoughts, so forgive me for that but I have no desire to rewrite it to be better.
Powerscaling is an important thing to get right in a battle shounen imo. Some place far too much focus on it and many don't focus much on it at all, but good powerscaling is important in order to appropriately create dramatic stakes, and it's also just important to with regard to keeping the work internally consistent. HxH I think is...generally internally consistent in its powerscaling, but the main thing I find to be good is that there is a clear end goal in terms of power-ups that, in theory, negates the potential for power creep.
To show why power creep can be wack in a battle shounen that gets out of hand, I'll use Naruto as an example. The big shots of Naruto in Part 1 are the 3rd Hokage and the 3 Sannin, particularly Orochimaru, and maybe also Itachi Uchiha though his powers are a bit more of a mystery at this point (he fled from Jiraiya, but I think it's also stated that Orochimaru failed to get his eyes, so his standing's a bit unclear here). The 3rd Hokage, Hiruzen, is called "The God of Hokage" in Part 1 and is suggested to be not only the strongest Hokage ever, but also the strongest current Kage compared to the others (which at this point in time includes guys like Onoki, the overpowered as fuck Tsuchikage in Part 2 who would clearly wipe the fucking floor with Hiruzen). The big problem here is that although Hiruzen/Orochimaru are set up as the big powers here, Kishi chose to slowly build towards the Akatsuki by the end of Part 1 going into Part 2, and his vision for what kind of powers they should have and the way that Naruto/Sasuke would progress to match that clearly altered.
Itachi was sort of the catalyst for this imo. While Orochimaru had his pseudo-immortality, his other powers were "weak" enough that Hiruzen could believably take him on. Itachi introduced a dojutsu that could only be countered by other dojutsu (Tsukuyomi, which can allegedly only be countered by other Sharingan users) and hinted at another extremely strong ability (Amaterasu, which I believe is stated to be the highest level of fire release jutsu...and only a select few from one bloodline can use it) which opened the door for Kishi to introduce tons more bloodline-exclusive (or exclusive for some other reason) powers that are ridiculously over-the-top. Hiruzen, while powerful in Part 1, did not do anything that was particularly earth-shattering or over-the-top. But that was the direction that Kishi ultimately ended up taking. Guys like Sasori and Deidara had to come off as challenging when Part 2 began and Kishi probably thought it would look odd if they looked like chumps compared to Hiruzen/Orochimaru, but Kishi was having the main characters fight these guys (i.e. Naruto/Sakura/Sasuke), so as the series progressed Kishi couldn't help but force the enemies to grow stronger and stronger so that the main characters could have something to strive towards. This forced Itachi to be worlds stronger than Deidara, and naturally Pain had to be significantly stronger than that, and Obito even stronger than that. The power creep got so bad that Kishi retconned Hiruzen's god status and shifted it over to Hashirama instead. Hiruzen fighting in the 4th World War also just looks ridiculous because everyone has all these insane techniques now and he's just doing the same old "throw a really big shuriken" shit from Part 1. Obviously the current Kage who we hadn't seen up until now had to have ridiculous powers as well with which they would clearly decimate Hiruzen with (e.g. lightning cloak, corrosive vapor techniques, dust release).
HxH on the other hand creates narrative stakes by basically creating two "ladders" that need to be climbed by the main characters in terms of powerscaling -- one in the short term, and one in the long term. For example, in the Heavens Arena arc Gon and Killua have the goal of learning how to use their particular nen type, and Gon manages to have a relatively competitive fight with Hisoka after having mastered his enhancement nen to some degree, but it's made clear that Hisoka is still on another level compared to him, hence Hisoka being the long term goal. A better example would be the Spiders, wherein most of the Spiders are significantly stronger than the main characters, with Kurapika only being able to gain the upper hand on some of them through tactics and strict conditional powers, but then after having established the Spiders, Gon/Killua are given a more appropriate milestone to achieve in the form of The Bomber in the Greed Island arc.
There is some good and bad that comes to this power scaling in the Chimera Ant arc. It starts off well, with Gon and Killua actually failing to reach the heights of some of the top tier human powers in that arc, something most other shounen would not have done. Netero is clearly set up to be the top dog of the series in this arc à la Hiruzen, but is implied to be comparable to the likes of Zeno Zoldyck who we've seen before. In other words, there is an established upper hierarchy of power that has remained consistent. While Gon and Killua improve throughout the arc, they don't reach this level of power. The chimera ants can be seen as sort of a transcendent being that challenges humanity's position as the apex predator (though the strength of the non-RG/King make most of the Spiders look a bit weaker than I'd have liked), specifically the RG/King who are anomalies in the world of HxH, so the RG and King's strength is naturally a good milestone for what the main characters can hope to achieve power-wise (either below or equal to). And indeed, Netero impresses him somewhat though ultimately falls short and has to get crafty. His power is all but confirmed as a milestone, though, when Gon essentially taps into his big man future potential and turns out to be as strong as pre-zenkai Meruem.
There is some good and bad to the above. Unless Togashi fucks up, it is basically an explicit shield against powercreep that breaking that shield would likely be a retcon on the same level as the one(s) in Naruto, if not more so. On the other hand, it's sort of lame to just KNOW that this is the absolute peak that our main characters can feasibly achieve. Part of the journey in following characters in a battle shounen is seeing what possible heights they can achieve. We want it to be "reasonable," sure, and we all have our own definitions for what entails "reasonable" and when power-ups become an inherently negative "power creep," but seeing how far characters can push themselves is part of what makes upcoming battles with the strongest characters in the series hype. HxH luckily has a variety of different abilities that Togashi can come up with for the other characters, but in the case of Gon at the very least...meh. Gon is also an extremely rare talent, so we also know that almost any other human won't reach that level of power (which sort of puts a damper on how strongly we perceive, say, the Spiders).
As an addendum, the concept of the "Dark Continent" is a nice way to keep up the narrative stakes after having faced possibly the strongest thread in history. It's a pretty "shounen-y" way to do it, yeah, but it's not the worst thing I've ever seen. My hope though is that in spite of the unimaginable horrors we're bound to see here, Togashi can stick to the rules he's set in place prior. Hopefully problems in the Dark Continent are solved not through super hax power-ups but through crafty tactics and strategy.
Skimming over this post after having written it, it feels like an overly long incoherent mess of thoughts, so forgive me for that but I have no desire to rewrite it to be better.
