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illumi is not just a villain: a thread.
I’m back at this again, Togashi should give me recognition 
https://abs.twimg.com/emoji/v2/... draggable="false" alt="🙄" title="Gesicht mit rollenden Augen" aria-label="Emoji: Gesicht mit rollenden Augen"> Reminder: english is my third language and I apologize in advance for possible mistakes. Also, threads have a limit so I’ll say only the things I think are more important (and obvious) but there’s much more.
There’s not much to say about his personality — since he’s pretty much emotionless. I think is really important, first of all, to understand the center role of his family. Illumi’s past is not so unclear and it does not take long to understand where he comes from.
We saw in Killua the curse of being a Zoldyck, something that made me think a lot of times that Illumi is a perfect metaphor of manipulation. His ability is literally based on what they did to him since the beginning. People think that Killua’s pain is Illumi’s fault: it’s not.
Illumi is just doing what his family taught him in the most devoted way — remember how one of the Zoldycks rules is to not fight each other? They have no interest in hurting family members. Illumi has deeply absorbed beliefs that revolve around his family, he’s loyal and just do+
whatever they ask him, cause that’s how they made him be. He’s a logical, practical and smart person. The Zoldyck family is extremely organized but at the same time dysfuctional, in the end, and they gave every child his own place and lesson.
They probably tortured Illumi almost to death to make him understand what his place and meaning in the world is. The only member that they all wanted to see dead is Alluka cause she, someway, put in danger the strong family bonding that always existed +
(in the end we can see that Killua and Alluka go their own way, they somehow managed to escape their family at least for now).
It’s important to add that Alluka has, probably, always wanted to be a happy and normal child and that the only one able to feel real emotions is Killua — which is the reason no one in the family actually understood how to treat Alluka.
There’s no love and willing to love; a family member that lives off emotions is simply useless for them. That explains why Illumi is completely detached: in his case there was no one ready to save him. He’s just there to respect his family orders.
The similarity between Illumi and Killua is seen in the episode where Illumi hypnotizes Killua. We can see that Killua’s eyes become exactly like Illumi’s ones: black and emotionless. It’s obvious at this point to deduce why Illumi is the way he is.
llumi is just a Killua that never found a friend ready to die for him and was never able to, metaphorically, remove the pin from his forehead. This character was created to make us understand what Killua would have become if he never encountered Gon: the perfect Zoldyck child.
The only one that somehow represented a form of friend for Illumi is Hisoka, but we know how toxic he is, so it ended up being a give and take relationship. They’re killers that trust each other cause they both are perfectly aware of how much they’re powerful.
It’s useful for both of them to form an alliance. Nothing more, nothing less. Illumi does not feel much but the desire of being in control. He ended up being just a piece of the game: exactly what he’s able to make people become with his ability.
Powerful, but just a piece with no emotions and no real interest in anything besides protecting his family, defending himself and kill — not even for desire and lust like in Hisoka’s case, but just because his family convinced him that his nature is to be an assassin.
Illumi went through the things we hoped wouldn’t happen to Killua. At some point, Illumi was probably just a child but his family had the opportunity to twist his mind and remove every concept of emotions and normality from it.
In his head, the only thing that matters now is being in power and doing what’s good to protect his family. Don’t underestimate the trauma that probably made Illumi be what it is. To me, the way he always wanted to protect his family shows that, deep down, he can feel something.
I hope this makes sense, I don’t know, I just want to put my thoughts out there. This is everything I always thought of Illumi after seeing Killua being tortured for literally having a friend. Everything about this makes me sad.
