Hunter × Hunter
The "Hunter × Hunter" manga has received much praise for its plot and characters. In his 2007 book "", Jason Thompson described its storyline as "an almost random collection of psych-outs, battles, puzzles, and trickery" that works on both a chapter-by-chapter basis and a larger scale. Thompson elaborated that with all the goals and subplots of each of the main characters, the story could seemingly go on forever and is unpredictable enough to hold reader interest. In a different review for Anime News Network in 2012, Thompson wrote that it was hard to summarize the story because it is every "shōnen" manga in one, with training sequences, tournament battles, a crime-mystery story arc, and a virtual-reality, RPG-style story arc. But unlike most "shōnen" manga, he called "Hunter × Hunter" "incredibly dense." Examples being its fictional nen ability, which is explained "so thoroughly that you almost think it could exist," and the little challenges and games the characters face; "Over and over Togashi invents some little closed system or rules just so the heroes can break them; if he ever wants to change careers, I'd suggest game designer." Thompson praised the character art as great, pointing out how instead of alternating between realistic and chibi like other artists, Togashi has cartoony and realistic characters interacting in the same panels. Thompson did note how the artwork during its magazine run is often "sketchy" and missing backgrounds, but that Togashi goes back and fixes it for its collected "tankōbon" release. Mentioning Togashi's love of gore he stated "the whole manga is about the mixture of childish adventure and creepy, adult themes" and noted how some panels later in the manga are apparently censored for gore by being covered with screentone.
List of Hunter × Hunter characters
The Chimera Ant is the first chimera ant to be seen in the series, having mysteriously mutated to human size instead of being generally limited to ten centimeters like the rest of her kind. The Queen first appears in the story when she washes up injured on the shores of the autonomous region of Neo Green Life (or simply N.G.L.), a small insular nation located on an island known as the Mitene Union. Driven by her reproductive instincts to give birth to a Chimera Ant King with ideal traits, the Queen immediately begins to feed on small mammals and aquatic life in order to give birth to soldier ants to bring her larger prey in greater amounts. When one of her soldiers brings her two human children to feed on, noting them to be more nourishing then previous prey, she became obsessed and sends her soldiers to concentrate on gathering more humans to feed on. N.G.L.'s status as neo-Luddite enabled the Queen's offspring be unopposed before their activities are eventually learned by the outside world. The Queen is fatally injured when the Chimera Ant King's forced, premature birth damaged her organs with massive blood loss. Despite receiving treatment from the Hunters, dies while labeling her son Meruem. But after her death, the Queen is revealed to have birth a twin sister to Meruem who is later revealed to be Kite reborn as a new Chimera Ant Queen.