‘Hunter x Hunter’ Fans Cannot Unsee This ‘Creed II’ Connection

The promotional campaign for Creed II began this week, giving fans Ivan Drago’s son, more Tessa Thompson — and a pretty perfect anime connection.

On Tuesday, MGM released the first official poster for the upcoming film, which features Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan) standing in his boxing gear in front of a large “II”. With the whole poster in black-and-white silhouette, some fans quickly noticed a delightful detail – that the space between the numerals lined up perfectly with Jordan’s head, appearing to give him hair like Hunter x Hunter‘s Gon.

On it’s own, this connection would be pretty hilarious, but it’s almost even better when you consider just how much of an anime fan Jordan is. The actor has expressed a love for the medium quite a bit in interviews and online, prompting fans to fan-cast him in certain anime roles or create some pretty awesome mash-ups.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that fans have gotten creative with Gon’s hair, with the gravity-defying hairdo inspiring jewelry and other fan-made objects. But still, seeing a (probably unintentional) parallel to Gon in a major Hollywood movie is sure to delight those in the show’s fandom, especially considering the amount of effort that went to crafting the character.

“[Hunter x Hunter creator Yoshihiro Togashi] wanted to make Gon a good boy that would dominate the polls for ‘characters you want to have as a son’.” A recent interview revealed. “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.”

“[A] boy who proclaimed that he would abandon his foster mother to become a Hunter isn’t quite a good son, is he?” Togashi explained. “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. 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.” “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.”

What do you think of this connection between Creed II and Hunter x Hunter? Let us know what you think in the comments below.