Quote:
Originally Posted by Dengar
Ummm... I'm going to try and make this my last comment on the Kite matter due to accidental spoilers and whatnot.
He isn't very important now. They can always add him in a flashback later. There is nothing weird about somebody who's never been onscreen before to become an important character.
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Both sides of this are just going to have to accept that they have different (subjective) viewpoints on exactly what impact removing Kaito has. There's no real point saying that the preference is motivated by bias for or against the new anime either, since that could just as well apply to both sides.
I'm not asking anyone else to agree, but it would be nice if people understood a little better why we think that episode 1's progression changes how the story will feel for us later on. For what it's worth, Togashi is constantly shuffling characters out of the story for long periods of time, leaving us to wonder what they're up to. That's one of the (many) things I really like about the manga. I could list a huge number of people whom this applies to; I won't, since it'd spoil, but suffice it to say that in a later arc Togashi inserts a story smack in the middle to reveal the backstory of a character that seems to have nothing to do with anything that's happening. It becomes more and more clear how much potential this character has for the story, which makes the initial foreshadowing that much more powerful.
And based on how Kaito was introduced and referenced, however sparsely, it was dead obvious he'd become important in the story later. The same way the reader would expect Ging to become important in the story later. Not referencing him when they did feels almost as bad to me as if they showed Gon, completely unambiguously, wanting to become a hunter only because someone told him about it and not because he learned a thing about Ging. So I think that Togashi knew very well what he was doing introducing him when he did (and the big impact he had - saving Gon's life, teaching him an important lesson, teaching him about his father and hunters, and giving him a model of what a hunter is) and I hardly think he was making it up as he went along. That is, I don't think he intended for Kaito to be a one-time character when he started the manga.
And that's kind of the problem with revealing Kaito in a flashback later, like in the time between the next two arcs. With the first episode presented like it was it's a natural conclusion for the viewer that Gon knows about the hunter exam and about Ging because Mito told him about it. There's no reason to think that Mito hid the truth from Gon, because that's not the more obvious thing that an adoptive parent would do. And because of this, Kaito's whole story feels superfluous to me when told well after the fact. I would actually prefer that they dropped the connection entirely, introducing Kaito (if they really do, and I'm sorry, I don't think an intro silhouette in a hunter splash is proof that they will) as a complete stranger to Gon, merely an acquaintance of Ging's. Mind you, I think this has a worse impact on how the plot progresses from here, but a reference to his manga appearance now (which would have to be altered at least, since he clearly didn't give Gon Ging's hunter card) would feel very unnatural to me.