@Ivotas:
While that is all true and well, ut still has nothing to do with the Deus Ex Machina argument. Let me summarize why I call it a bad take.
First you speak of DEM plot devices and bring up the spiders not being able to touch Kurapika as one of the example
I wasn't thinking of that as one of the DEMs. I was listing that as an arc that ended without a real conclusion and with a promise for follow up that's not come in two decades since.
I had zero problem with York New's conclusion at the time, the decades since are what has tainted it and retroactively made it weak since the follow up still has not come. If the chapters had kept coming and we'd gotten to where the story is currently in the year 2002, it'd be perfectly fine.
The DEMS that broke the series for me and made me stop caring were the gon powerup, the nuke, and the magic wish granting sister. Those three things all in a row in short order just permanently wrecked the story for me as cop outs that couldn't be solved in any other way. All the earlier elaborate mind games and subtle plays and tricks and cool moments like "I have the lung capacity of a whale" undone by three climaxes in a row that felt unearned and unfair. ONE of them would have been okay, but three in a row?
(That was also the time Togashi did a speedrun of Ging showing up and meeting Gon because why not, maybe the series was going to end there for a hot second. ""It defies expectations and you weren't expecting it!" doesn't make it satisfying.)
Which in turn made me look back and like earlier resolutions less. The Greed Island heal was fine originally, in its original context. It had a logical reason behind it and tied in with what the story had setup. It was not a DEM. But it IS now just the first of multiple magic cure-alls Gon gets to clear away his recklessness, it wasn't just a one-off.
(Naruto similarly lost me when Pain resurrected everyone in the village that had been killed. I'd stopped caring about it before then, but that was the point of no return and pure farce.)
"But you can explain it with the nen rules!" or "there was a tiny bit of foreshadowing many chapters earlier" let you rationalize it being fair within the world, but if the story has fallen apart and feels cheap now, it doesn't matter. It' lost your investment and your trust and its hard to get that back.
Luffy's fruit ACTUALLY being a legendary zoan instead of a rubber paramecia after all these years, and the government has just been totally incompetent in capturing it for 800 years, certainly has minor hints along the way and fits the rules of the world, but its still not a good twist nor is Luffy's magically reviving himself after being killed again. Even if Enel set a precedent for that.
I'm hoping really hard that Oda elaborates on and explains these things better after the fact, and that Luffy is in ROUGH shape to make up for this, ditto Zoro's miracle cure. If they just get some bandages and are fine the next day, that's lousy. If they're actually hurt and that affects what they have to do next? Hey, good, consequences!
Oh, that reminds me, and I had 100% forgotten this was a thing, after those three DEMs in a row and I had stopped caring about HxH, the next mini-arc Hisoka managed to be 100% killed by someone that was very thorough in making sure he was dead, and then he resurrected himself after dying. No plan or tricks, just suddenly alive again after a cheap fake out to surprise the readers. That was DEM #4 in a row. But its okay because Togashi did it, it's just bad writing when Oda does it?
It's bad when either of them do it.
It's why its so annoying that Oda cheats on death so much. It means I never ever ever believe when he kills someone now, so there's never any actual emotional weight or worry or sympathy and a huge part of the story's ongoing drama is just permanently lost, and has been lost for years. Like he's trying REAL hard to go "Yeah, Pedro is really dead! It's tragic! We built him a tombstone and Carrot cried and the minks avenged him!" and I'm just expecting him to show up at the party along with Pekoms (who no one thinks is dead) to make things happier. Five years now there was supposed to be emotional weight on that and I just don't believe it.
Yasuie, a character we knew for like 1 chapter, actually got me, because Oda made that one clear, on camera, and had emotional reactions immediately within the same chapter. He played that fair and I actually believe it.
ANYWAY, like I said, I'm done talking about HxH. I wasn't planning to spend the day going over a decade old argument. If the series ever actually does anything new to talk about there's a thread for it.