So I Ended Up Pulling Out My Japanese Copy Of Vol 32 Bc I Was Curious About The Scar Thing And I Noticed

so i ended up pulling out my japanese copy of vol 32 bc i was curious about the scar thing and i noticed something else that was really interesting. also hella fucked up lmao. did you know that in illumi's fucking creepy scene when he sees the amount of power from nanika healing gon, nanika's name has "kore" in furigana? just to drive the dehumanization home. he literally says ナニカ（これ）はオレのものだ‼ (literal translation: this is my object)

OH THIS IS SUCH A GOOD CATCH, THANK YOU!!

So, to explain to everyone here who doesn’t know what furigana is, furigana is basically a reading aid in Japanese. So sometimes complicated kanji has text in hiragana (the basic alphabet) beside it to let readers know how to pronounce the word if they can’t read it.

I just googled ‘furigana’ to find some example images to better explain:

How it appears in manga:

So!! What @itsybitsyjoltik just pointed out is that, in the manga, Illumi’s dialogue is written as “Nanika belongs to me” but Nanika’s name has the furigana for the word “this” above it, so Illumi is clearly referring to Nanika but calling her “this”. He also uses the word ‘mono’ (もの/物), which refers to objects. (There is a way of using ‘mono’ to refer to people, but it’s written as 者 and almost always has a qualifier before it). So he is basically saying “this thing/object belongs to me”, and it’s VERY deliberately written by Togashi to drive home the point that Nanika is being treated as subhuman again.

Ahhh, I really need to buy all the Japanese manga volumes…! I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff like this I’m missing out on. Thanks for catching this!!