@Robby:
And the ending of the Chimera Ant arc is STILL BS. Justifiable in-universe sure, but BS all the same. Both the nuke that took out the villain, and the magical panacea that cured Gon with zero costs.
I liked it. So brutal, killing the King off once he'd been finally redeemed as a charactered. And it completely subverted expectations. We didn't know who would kill the king, but we were sure there would be a big endgame battle with massive stakes ala DBZ… and then Togashi comes in left field and ends it all inconventionally.
It made the reader wonder whether there is really any meaning to ideals of 'strength', or 'power', so often put on a pedistal in shounen series, and made the King (and the reader) focus on the little things, like spending time with the one person you love/care about. It anticlimactically grounded the story in reality, removing it from DBZ level powerscaling we're all so used to.
And while it was somewhat cathartic, showing there are consequences to bad actions by killing the King, it also left things muddy, damaged, it didn't conveniently tie up all the loose ends. It left a bittersweet feeling in seeing Kaito as a little girl, it left Gon a wreck (for an arc, at least), it completely messed up the Hunter association's order, and it saw the remaining ants going to live in the wild, having adopted a morality of sorts. It was a dirty ending, it was a cheap ending, it wasn't 'satisfying' in the traditional sense, but it felt truly realistic, and grounded to earth, and it was unconventional and anticlimacticin the way you'd expect life, rather than a story, to be.
In a sense, I'm glad it didn't go for the typical shounen end fight (think Cell's defeat in DBZ, or even greed Island's end vs the Bomber), because it gave Togashi the chance to propose us something different than the norm, thus being a lot more interesting.
Of course, if we then look at the Alluka situation... perhaps we can question whether Gon should have been ressurrected in such an easy way. You might be right, in that regard, that it wasn't executed as well as it could have. There should have been some sort of payment, whether that be someone else's life (the butler got killed by Hisoka... couldn't Togashi have tied that with Alluka's powers to give the whole thing weight?)
But I digress, as I personally wouldn't consider that to be part of Ant Arc.
And it's not like the Alluka arc wasn't enjoyable. We got to meet Killua's family, we got to see cool Nen powers, it was only the very end resolution of Gon getting healed that felt cheap, not the whole arc… so I really don't feel like complaining too much about it. I mean, you didn't REALLY expect Gon to be gone for good now, did you? Sure, it would have been cool if he'd really died or something... but I think Shounen Jump wouldn't let Togashi do that to a flagship series' main character haha