

![Yusuke & Gon](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DQfK8l.jpg)

Although Gon doesn't look similar by facial design, he is similar to the green
schemes that Yusuke has, and his hair color is similar.

![Killua & Hiei](https://i.stack.imgur.com/DxNgpl.jpg)

Killua is similar to Hiei's demeanor.

![Kurapika & Kurama](https://i.stack.imgur.com/3E5Y1l.jpg)

Both Kurapika and Kurama have androgynous appearances

![??? & Leorio](https://i.stack.imgur.com/6YNoyl.png)

Personalities are similar.


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2015-06-27T19:25:35.137
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question
hunter-x-hunter mangaka yu-yu-hakusho
Why did Yoshihiro Togashi recycle designs from Yu Yu Hakusho for his characters in Hunter x Hunter?


As you can see from these comments by me, @seijitsu, and @eha1234, there's a
considerable amount of skepticism over how "recycled" these designs really
are.

> Me: Personally, I don't think the characters in this question even look that
> similar, not compared to Ken Akamatsu's Naru and Asuna, or the Ai Yazawa and
> Naoko Takeuchi characters that seijitsu mentioned in regard to the "same
> faces" question.
>
> eha1234: Yusuke and Gon have very different personalities and I think the
> green scheme is only present in the anime - the manga is black and white.
> Hiei and Killua's demeanour isn't the same. Killua, when relaxed, is quite
> playful whilst Hiei is silent. They've both got tragic pasts though. Many of
> Togashi's characters have androgynous appearances, especially in Hunter x
> Hunter: Kalluto Zoldyck and Pitou for example. I would say although the
> character designs are similar in some respects, they're all unique and
> different too.
>
> seijitsu: Yuusuke does arguably wear [a green seifuku in the
> manga](http://cdn.myanimelist.net/images/manga/1/59865.jpg), but otherwise I
> agree with eha1234 that the characters' personalities are not very similar
> and with Torisuda that the characters do not look very similar.

If Yusuke and Gon both had hair which was a particular shade of periwinkle
only expressible in the CMYK color space, I might agree that the similarity
was significant, but black hair doesn't quite make it. You can see characters
which are much more similar in appearance in [seijitsu's answer to "Why do
anime and manga use the same
faces?"](https://anime.stackexchange.com/a/22641/7579). And if having multiple
characters with androgynous appearances constitutes recycling, then all shoujo
artists have been recycling the same male character design at least since the
1990s. If anything, Togashi is doing better than many mangaka at not recycling
character designs, as eha1234 points out.

There are answers to the question "Why would a mangaka recycle the characters'
visual appearances?" over at ["Is it common for mangaka to maintain the same
character design between different
titles?"](https://anime.stackexchange.com/q/8181/7579), so I'll focus on the
personality issue. At this point we're really talking about writing, which
cuts across all media. If you follow the works of individual writers of any
medium--literature, manga, Western graphic novels, visual novels--you'll
notice that it's quite common for writers to have characters with similar
personalities across several works. For example:

  * Stephen King often has a tough, brassy guy who swears a lot that everyone looked up to; he also likes to have a kid or intellectually disabled man with psychic powers.
  * Gen Urobuchi likes to have an idealistic character whose ideals are a little too rigid, and slowly destroy everything the character believed in before sending them to a miserable death (Sayaka in Madoka and Kariya Matou in Fate/Zero). I asked [a question](https://anime.stackexchange.com/q/21310/7579) about whether the similarities between another pair of Urobuchi characters was intentional.
  * Ken Akamatsu had three manga starring an energetic, caring, somewhat tsundere girl with thick eyebrows (Cindy in AI ga Tomaranai, Naru in Love Hina, Asuna in Negima). Two of these manga (AI and Love Hina) also had a young blonde troublemaker, and two of them (Love Hina and Negima) had a shy and quiet girl with short hair and a secret, passionate crush on the main character.

There are lots of reasons why writers do this. Sometimes it's because of a
theme that cuts across all of their work. Sometimes the character represents
some portion of the author's personality that keeps seeping into their work.
Sometimes the author wants to put similar characters into very different
situations and see how this changes things. I haven't read or watched Hunter x
Hunter, but from what I understand it's more lighthearted than Yu Yu Hakusho;
perhaps Togashi wanted to explore how similar characters would behave in a
more lighthearted story. From what eha1234 says in the comment quoted above,
there are also some quite profound differences in personality between the Yu
Yu Hakusho characters and the Hunter x Hunter characters; it's possible the
purported similarities are a complete coincidence. We can't know exactly
unless Togashi stated in an interview somewhere why he did it, or whether he
even intended to do it.

Of course, in a visual medium like manga, if the writer reuses a certain
personality, it often makes sense to give that character a similar appearance
as well, because appearance and personality are closely related in anime and
manga.


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2015-07-07T08:57:42.287
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answer