'Hunter x Hunter' Creator Explains The Inspiration Behind Gon

Hunter x Hunter may currently be on hiatus, but fans are still supportive of the series and have fallen in love thanks to its well crafted world and main character Gon Freecss.

Hunter x Hunter series creator Yoshihiro Togashi recently sat down for Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump for an interview about the series, and thanks to a translation by Reddit user VeraciousCake, fans were able to read what Togashi's though process was when first creating Gon.

Togashi explained that "[he] wanted to make Gon a good boy that would dominate the polls for 'characters you want to have as a son'. But as soon as the serialization began... or rather, as soon as [he] started writing [his] draft, [he] felt like that wasn't quite it."

After breaking down Gon's motivations in becoming a Hunter to find his father, he figured that Gon being a "good boy" wouldn't do as he realized, "[a] boy who proclaimed that he would abandon his foster mother to become a Hunter isn't quite a good son, is he? I started thinking, 'This is one really crazy kid'...But I thought it couldn't be helped that he would behave that way, as he was in turn the son of a father who did indeed abandon his child to become a Hunter. To me, he was a natural character."

But at the end of the day, Togashi made sure to make Gon a character than fans of his battle style series would love to read, "If I had made my protagonist a 'right proper lad' and drawn a battle manga with it, it would have raised complications when he had to duke it out...I thought that wasn't where I wanted to go with this story."

Making Gon a kid with a few flaws and someone other than just a purely good kid leads to better conflicts. Togashi explains that adding those layers to Gon's personality allowed him to write fun fights, "I did not want to alienate my readers who would read for the fights. Thanks to making a 'crazy kid' like Gon the protagonist, I was able to write battles without having to depict moral conflicts within the character."

Hunter x Hunter has been celebrating its 20th Anniversary in a major way. Premium Bandai is now selling a special set of silver earrings modeled after Gon's big Nen transformation during the Chimera Ant arc. At about 3.5 inches long and 1.2mm wide, these earrings bearing Gon's silhouette are stylish yet how off how much you love the series. Premium Bandai will soon take pre-orders on their website (which you can find at the link here), and the earrings will set you back 9,999 yen (about $90 USD).

Premium Bandai has been offering plenty of other great items for fans as well as they are also currently selling a replica set of its Greed Island card game. It runs 8,800 yen (about $78 USD) and Premium Bandai will be taking orders with shipment beginning in April. If this seems like it would be too cumbersome but you still want to show off your love of Hunter x Hunter, you can do so with Premium Bandai's other replica offering, the Beatle 07.

For those unfamiliar with Hunter x Hunter, the series was originally created by Yoshihiro Togashi. The story follows a young boy named Gon Freecss, who discovers that his previously thought to be dead father is in fact alive. Not only is he alive, he is a famous Hunter, a professional traveler who specializes in finding rare treasures, exploring unidentified lands, and hunting down dangerous individuals. Gon then decides that in order to meet his father he has to become a licensed Hunter, but in that journey gets wrapped up in way more strangeness than he ever could have anticipated.