#its clearly not the 40 hour work week with shitty stressful conditions | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hunterxhell · 3 years

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Togashi entered the trend in Japan on Twitter because of Miura-sensei’s passing. I’m uncomfortable but at least I’m now seeing people talk about how messed up calling him lazy is.

The moment I saw that Miura passed I knew there would inevitably be discussion about Togashi, either people filled with despair that the same could happen to him or assholes "joking" that "he's next". I hope, more than the assholes out there, people are doing as you say and pointing out how disgusting it is to call him lazy.

Miura's cause of death, aortic heart dissection, can apparently be caused by high blood pressure. Miura has written extensively throughout his career just how unhealthy his working conditions were.

Hopefully you can open that image in a new tab to read it clearly? It's a list of comments over the years about how much work he was doing to the detriment of his health.

"I've come down with a high fever of 40 degrees celsius. Thinking about it, I've only had two days off this year." (1993, No. 12)

"I had a day off for the first time in a month and a half, and when I went out, I got heatstroke!" (1995, No. 17)

"I collapsed again from overwork. I missed Gwynn's Hundred Great Books. Ugh!" (2005, No. 9)

Togashi wrote in a self-published YYH doujin his fears of dying from overwork and how he decided he doesn't want to die this way.

"From when YYH began serialization up until the start of the Dark Tournament, I had half a day off every week in which I caught up on sleep. Other than that all I had time for were occasional naps, and I'd indulge in my hobbies by sleeping less. For a while, I quite enjoyed this. But my HP (as they say in RPGs) was gradually but surely falling, and around the time that I wrote a 31-page one-shot and simultaneously had to do color pages, my heart began to hurt every time I went without sleep -- and then it began to hurt more and more often.

"This was when I seriously started to think about the pace of production for manga. I thought, "I probably won't be able to keep regular hours, but if I sleep as much as I want to, when I want to, how much would I be able to produce?" I tried it out. I immediately began to fall behind on my schedule. But I tried to get some sleep every night. Around this time, my feelings about writing manga as a profession began to change. "I don't want to die from overwork. If I die, I want it to be when I'm having fun or when I'm drawing manga for fun. Color pages are scary. One-shots are scary." I also began to use some time before going to bed to relieve stress. I fell even more behind, and at the point where Sensui and Yusuke were fighting, this reached its first peak."

Before HXH even started serialization, Togashi had already identified how problematic a typical manga author schedule was for his health. I believe this is part of the reason why Togashi fully owns the rights to HXH and not Shueisha -- he no doubt fought Shueisha/Jump for this stipulation. This is why Togashi can do what he wants -- if Jump is shitty to him, he can just take HXH with him to a different publisher.

So what I hope this means is that Togashi has been taking care of himself ever since YYH ended back in 1994. What happened to Miura is his greatest fear and I admit that I also thought of Togashi when I read the news.

For what it's worth, I thought of an interview with Togashi from 2018. Here is a snippet (full interview translation here) where Togashi talks about his intentions to finish HXH:

"Still, that aside, I need to finish writing Hunter X Hunter. It has come to a point where either the story concludes first, or I die before that happens (lol). But I do intend to finish it. Although you can say that at one point in the story -- where Gon meets Ging -- I have completed the story once. I believe that some readers must have thought 'Wasn't that supposed to be the endgame?' and I did write it to seem that way. Still, I did not intend to cut off the flow of the story there, and I hope my readers could see that there was still room for continuation. As a reader of Jump myself, I also remember having thought 'Shouldn't this manga have just ended here?' and feeling pissed when it went on and on. I want to always be in touch with that feeling as a reader. But Hunter X Hunter as it is now has a lot in it that makes me want to keep on reading, even from my own perspective as a reader. And from my perspective as a writer, there are still many things in it left that I want to write, that I would enjoy writing. And so if anyone would be willing to enjoy this ride with me, that is all I can hope for."

Togashi is passionate about HXH and he intends to finish it, god willing that his health allow. People who say that he's "lazy" or "gave up on HXH" are assholes. I get it -- these people are upset and hurt because they miss HXH. I miss HXH as much (probably even more) than those guys, but let the man live his fucking life. Jesus.

#ask #togashi

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