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happy birthday, killua!

Gon pushed Killua away in part because he loves him so much, he realized he did not want Killua to die with him; Gon wanted Killua, who he viewed as innocent in Kite’s death, to live on, while he died to atone for what he viewed as his mistake. Killua, self-sacrificing as he is, could not fathom a life without Gon, and had always viewed himself as nothing but a tool, anyway—that’s how his parents raised him, to be their tool, and that’s the only way in which he can imagine being “loved”.

Gon actually loves him as a person, not as a tool, and thus did not want to use Killua as a means to an end; namely, killing Pitou. But as viewers, we’re mostly seeing through the perspective of Killua, not Gon, in this arc. It’s Killua’s hurt that we are feeling, and for many viewers, the fact that Gon is trying to push Killua out of this literal suicide mission—that’s what this is; when Killua says they’ll die in battle together, he’s being realistic—is taken only as a rejection, because that’s how Killua sees it. It’s established in the fish darts ordeal, wherein Killua is literally about to bleed out and his only regret is not being “more useful” to Gon, that dying for Gon is, in Killua’s mind, the way he’ll express his love.

When Gon says “this has nothing to do with you,” effectively telling Killua not to get involved, that comes across to Killua as a rejection of that love. But in truth, it’s Gon’s way of saying “this is my mistake, not yours, and *I* will die to atone for it, not you”. He knew it would hurt Killua. He wanted to push Killua away so he would live. Before literally imploding, when Gon said, “it’s okay, Killua,” he is trying to offer comfort: the comfort that Killua will live even as he dies, paying for what he perceives as his murder of Kite (remember that one of the thoughts going through Gon’s head upon finding out that Kite can’t be fixed was “I did this. I killed Kite”).

Killua isn’t the only one who thinks that, to love and be loved, he must get hurt. Gon thinks the same of himself, it just manifests differently. When he refuses to give up even as Hanzo breaks his arms, when he allows his arms to be blown off in order to defeat Genthru and thus Greed Island, when Pitou slashes his arm off, etc, Gon is reaching for Ging even as the hand he reaches with is literally broken or severed. He has accepted pain as part of the love that he should be given unconditionally and without pain. He wants so desperately for his father to love him, that he gets hurt over and over again in an attempt to earn that love. Finding that Kite can’t be fixed, to Gon, means that he has lost any hope of ever being loved by Ging. Feeling undeserving of affection, he can’t be with Killua anymore, either—not even in death.

Ultimately, Gon and Killua are in love, but because they have grown up feeling undeserving of unconditional love because of their respective parental situations, they collapse. In their separation, Killua and Gon will both receive unconditional love from family members that are not the parents that damaged their views of themselves, and thus be able to return to each other, open to the unconditional love they initially did not know how to accept from each other. Their story is that of two people who are very much in love, but needed to start healing from their respective traumas in order to really allow themselves to love and be loved romantically without self-destructing.

It’s a complex relationship between two complex characters, and tbh, the target audience of the story by and large just does not know how to handle it, at least in part because when reading shounen, you tend to expect the least complex explanations possible; there’s an inclination to not try to read too deeply into it, because shounen isn’t supposed to be deep.

Frank Wilbert Stokes

Moonlight, Starlight, Atlantic Ocean, 1902

The Phantom Ship, Atlantic Ocean, ca. 1903, oil on canvas

We can all use a little magic

Although Israel’s presence in Gaza and the West Bank has long been criticised and condemned by the UN and the international community (bar the US and a few other allied countries), Israel is now seizing the chance to make this official. Since the world is looking away, mostly turned inwards because of corona and poor economic circumstances, this significantly lessens international pressure on Israel.