u/Animeking1108

Hunter x Hunter has a problem with cast rotation, which makes it hard to get invested in a certain characters. The Chimera Ant suffered from this in spades. I really couldn't care about Invisible Arm Man, Giant Bong Dude, or TEMU Kuwabara. However, the Chimera Ant did reintroduce one character that appeared in the first chapter (IYKYK, manga readers), and that character was Kite. He was the man who inspired Gon to become a Hunter upon learning he was a close friend of his father.

If you only watched the anime, it would feel jarring why Gon was going ballistic over a guy he knew for barely a few days. However, even if you did read the manga, it was kind of hard to care about him. For one, when we're introduced to him, he, a grown man, punched a 9-year old boy with no life experience because he accidentally wandered into Fox Bear territory. What the hell is his problem? Does he also brain infants for sticking peas up their nose? Even if Gon was being careless, I think he got the message when he almost got ripped to pieces.

The next problem was his lack of screentime before he died. Now, you can give characters who were just introduced a sad death. A good example is>!Rengoku!< from Demon Slayer... Oh, I forgot Hunter x Hunter fans don't like it when the series is compared to a lesser manga for critique sake. Oh well. Anyway, for >!Rengoku!<, he was around just long enough for the audience to care about him and died at the end of the Mugen Train arc. For Kite, he was killed nine episodes into a sixty episode arc, half of those nine episodes took quite a few narrative detours. I feel like he should have either died much later into the arc, or maybe got reintroduced during the Greed Island arc so that the audience would have had more time to care about him.

"But you're supposed to care about Gon and how his death affects him," I'm sure some of you might be thinking. That's a fair point. Gon's arc was about processing his grief. People who have been following Gon throughout his journey are supposed to be shocked that this normally upbeat kid is snapping at his best friend and threatening to murder an injured blind girl unless his demands were met and want to see him pull through. It was almost an effective arc... And Togashi ruined it by having Kite come back to life as a Chimera Ant, and he even gets his memories back. So, Gon's arc of coming to terms with Kite's death was completely pointless.

We can say a lot about the Netflix adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, but to say that the writers didn't watch the original is very disingenuous. With all the nods and references to the moments that became memes, clearly somebody on the staff watched it. Some say that it changed too much, but I think its inherent problem was that it was a Schrodinger's Adaptation. It suffered from changing too much and not enough at the same time.

What do I mean? Well, let's look at how season 2 was structured. One change that I actually think made sense was that the Gaang had to escort refugees of Omashu to Ba Sing Se. It seemed odd that after the Return to Omashu, we don't know what happened to the people who lived there. Did they flee? Did Aang leave them to fend for themselves? Unfortunately, this change came at the cost of moving The Library to after they arrive in Ba Sing Se. However, they could still make that work. When Appa took some injured refugees during the Serpent's Pass, I thought maybe what was going to happen was that Appa got captured by the Dai Li there. Professor Zei was still in the cast, so maybe they learn about the Day Of Black Sun some other way from him. Unfortunately, that didn't happen. So, maybe Appa gets captured by the Fire Nation after Azula takes Ba Sing Se? Zuko could convince Ozai to let Appa live as bait for the surviving members of Team Avatar, and Zuko takes care of Appa during season 3. When Zuko finally decides to desert the Fire Nation, he releases Appa and helps the Gaang escape the Fire Nation as a peace offering... Yeah, that was giving the writer's too much credit. You see, the Library was too important to cut out, so instead of compromising, they just moved the Library to Ba Sing Se and Appa's capture occurred with only two episodes of the season left.

Another change that could have worked was combining the events of Lake Laogai and the finale. The Gaang rescuing Appa was a suitable stake for the climax, and it wouldn't be hard to believe that the Crystal Catacombs would be near Lake Laogai. However, Jet never gets reeducated at Lake Laogai, so instead, he dies at the Library. In the cartoon, Jet was integral to the Gaang finding Lake Laogai and the reunion with Appa, but here, Aang finds it after using Toph's teachings to sense the vibrations. That wasn't a bad change, but it came at the cost of Jet's arc being muddied. Why was he even in the show if they weren't going to incorporate that? See, what I would have done was have Jet's role play out like it did in the original. However, Jet dying during the final battle could have not only added stakes, but Katara would have had a moment of conflict where she had to choose between healing him and Aang with the Spirit Oasis water, instead of the original, where it never occurred to Katara to at least try using it to heal Jet.

Another wasted opportunity was the revelation that The Duke and Pipsqueak were killed between seasons 1 and 2. If Longshot and Smellerbee were captured by the Dai Li, it would have given Jet more motivation to help the Gaang and correct his past mistake. They could even partake in The Day Of Black Sun in The Duke and Pipsqueak's places. However, they just kind of disappear midway into the season.

This is what I mean. This show made changes, but it was afraid to change too much out of fear of fan backlash, and that led to some half-baked storytelling. See, the live-action version of One Piece worked was because despite cutting characters and plot elements out for pacing purposes, they made compromises so that the story could still be coherent while still following the source material. A good example is how it adapted the Baratie Arc. In the manga, Don Krieg was the villain, but some felt he was an underwhelming villain, not helped by Mihawk basically interrupting the fight and making more of an impression on viewers. The Netflix series changed it by having Mihawk be the villain of the Baratie Arc and having the Arlong crew wreck the place. That made sense, since Mihawk is an important character and it built up Arlong for the season finale.

Another change that worked was how the conflict with Laboon was resolved. In the manga, Luffy just punched Laboon and that stopped his rampage. In the Netflix series? We get introduced to Brook a few seasons early, and we hear him play Binks' Brew. So, Luffy calms Laboon down by singing Binks' Brew to him. The best part is that Luffy knowing the song isn't even an Ass Pull. In the flashback during the first episode, Binks' Brew can be heard playing in the background of the bar while Luffy is talking to Shanks. They took a little Easter Egg from season 1 and actually made it a plot point, all the while incorporating future events of the story that Oda probably didn't even think of when first writing the manga.

Now, I'm not saying NATLA should just change things freely for the sake of narrative coherence and avoiding being too safe. It's rumored that the reason Bryke left the Netflix series was because they wanted to make more extreme changes, like killing Ozai in season 1 or revealing Iroh as a twist villain, the latter of which was something they originally conceived for the cartoon. However, Netflix wanted a more safe adaptation. If this is true, then let's be honest here: fans would have hated those changes. "At least it would have did something new." Iroh being the only positive adult figure in Zuko's life was one of the major driving forces behind his redemption. Making Iroh evil would have fucked that up. I'm also willing to give NATLA some points for making changes that actually worked. Having Zuko's crew be the platoon Ozai wanted to sacrifice was a welcome change, as it deepened his bond with his crew and explained why Ozai would waste resources by giving him a crew for a wild goose chase unless he deemed them expendable. I know some people call blasphemy on making Ozai less spiteful towards Zuko, but it makes his abuse towards him feel more real by having a twisted mindset that he's doing what he thinks is best for his child. Having him make Zuko and Azula compete for his approval instead of cursing the former's existence and putting the latter on a pedestal also added more to Azula's perfectionist nature and further foreshadowed her descent into madness at the end of season 3. Also, we actually see Ozai and Iroh, who are canonically brothers, actually speak to each other in the Netflix series.