Hikaru no Go

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Fandom
Name: Hikaru no Go
Abbreviation(s): HnG, Hikago
Creator: Yumi Hotta, Takeshi Obata
Date(s): manga: 1998 - September 2003
anime: 10 October 2001 - 26 March 2003
drama: 27 October 2020 - 26 November 2020
Medium: manga, anime, drama
Country of Origin: Japan
External Links: Studio Pierrot's Hikaru no Go homepage, TVTokyo's Hikaru no Go homepage, Wikipedia
Hikaru no go.png
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Hikaru no Go (Japanese: ヒカルの碁) is a manga series by Obata Takeshi (artist) and Hotta Yumi (writer) that was serialized in Weekly Jump from 1998 to 2003. It was also adapted into an anime by Studio Pierrot, which aired in Japan from 2001 to 2003, and the live-action Chinese drama Qi Hun (also called Hikaru no Go in English), which aired in 2020.

Canon Overview

The series revolves around an elementary school student named Shindou Hikaru, who discovers a haunted Go board and meets the ghost of Fujiwara no Sai, a fictional go player from the Heian era. Initially, Sai plays go through Hikaru by telling him what moves to make, but after playing and defeating a young go prodigy by the name of Touya Akira, Hikaru becomes motivated to learn the game for himself. The series traces the story of Hikaru's relationship with the game, as he evolves from a beginner to a professional go player, and the rivalry he develops with Akira along the way.

Fandom

Hikaru no Go has a reasonably active fandom, especially on Livejournal and Fanfiction.net and recent immigrations to Dreamwidth and Archive of Our Own. In Japan, both the anime and manga came to a conclusion in 2003, meaning that Hikaru no Go is a closed canon. The official English translation of the manga is complete as of May 2011, but English scanlations of the entire manga had been available for English-speaking fans for several years by that time.

In English-language Hikaru no Go fandom, fic writing is the main activity, with occasional fanart, doujinshi, podfic and meta thrown into the mix. The fandom is very slash-friendly, perhaps because there are relatively few canonical female characters. One of the earliest English-language fan communities for the fandom was at the now-defunct Go-Luv site, which hosted doujinshi, fanart and fanfiction, as well as an extensive fan forum.

Akira/Hikaru is by far the most popular ship. Other popular ships include Waya/Isumi, Kaga/Tsutsui and Ogata/Ashiwara, and there are even more pairings that are regularly written.

Fanworks

Zines

  • Jump for the Stars - cinematic-style zine featuring shounen anime series as movie posters (2022)

Resources

Communities

LJ Communities

Off-LJ Communities