I Don't Want To Be Chairman - Hunter x Hunter ep. 143-145: Media Club Plus S01E46

Welcome to Media Club Plus, a podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us.

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This season, we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshihiro Tagashi, and we're almost not even watching that anymore.

It's almost over.

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find the let's plays that I do at youtube.com/slash run button.

With me, as always, is Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Blue Sky at Swandery3000.bsky.social.

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And thank you.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

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That's Blue Sky and Instagram mostly.

There's a Tumblr out there if you really want it, but I don't know.

Also, I think because this is going to be coming out in July, it's worth me mentioning that

my Screamo band is putting out an EP, and I would mean a lot if y'all check their

go to gutmachineband.bandcamp.com.

I believe that's the.

Can I pre-order it?

Well, we just got the masters back the day of recording, but the plan is to have a mastery.

You sent it out for real mastering.

Yeah,

we did like real mixing and mastering.

This is what people say that you're supposed to do.

You're supposed to send your music to another person to master it.

You're not supposed to listen to your own music when you master it because you know how it sounds too good.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

Yeah, gutmachineband.bandcamp.com should be coming out probably

close to the like third or fourth week of july would be my guess uh if you like loud music you will like this and even if you don't like loud music you might like it and even if you don't want to buy it you should buy it anyway you should please do

buy it anyway buy it anyway support five transgender people in the city of toronto ontario uh and jack to key hi i'm jack you can find any of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Today, which so last week for people listening, another episode of Side Story came out with that me and Dre were on.

You should take a listen to that.

We talked about

Night Rain and we talked about

Rune Factory.

Guardians of Azuma.

Guardians of Azuma.

There we go.

One day I'll remember how to say the name of that game.

And

check out streams that we do at Friends of the Table or twitch.tv slash Friends of the Table and youtube.com slash friends of the table

that's it

we watched three episodes today we sure did

fun episodes i i really enjoyed these i really enjoyed these tearing up a little bit at a couple times

oh my god me too um

this is a good show i like this show uh we get we we've been teasing um

gregory house uh jing freaks for a long time and we finally saw it today i think

Jack, if you're still confused about

what it means that Jink Freaks' house, that first scene in the first episode, is pretty much it.

Oh, wait, no, was it the first scene of the second episode?

Where he's in the hallway with the cheetah.

It's the second episode.

It's the second one.

I wrote down he's gregging out.

Yeah, half of the second episode that we watched basically is a long scene of Jink regging out.

Yeah.

Cheetah is cuddy.

Cheetah is cuddling.

Because Wilson.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

So Cheetle is Cuddy.

Beans is Wilson, you're saying.

Yeah.

That's the dynamic in that scene.

Yes.

I agree.

I agree.

Because I remember before we said that Cheadle is Wilson, and I wasn't sure if me disagreeing made it to air, but I did disagree.

No, I think it did.

I think Beans being Wilson made it to air because I said that to myself.

Beans is also Wilson in Castaway.

So is

Periston really good?

Is Pariston that one like private detective guy that like stalked House for a season though?

Oh yeah, the guy that tried to get him like arrested for drugs.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

The guy that tried to get him put in jail for prescription Vicodin.

Oh, wait, are you thinking?

Sorry, there were two.

There was the private investigator who went on to date and get engaged to Cuddy.

And then there was also the guy who got mad at House because he put a thermometer up his ass.

Yeah.

And that's the one you're talking about.

I'm talking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that's the one I was thinking of, too.

And I was probably confusing.

I was conflating both of them.

Because I was about to start talking about the weird sexual tension.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

His own too.

He's open to this.

Hey, it's 2025.

You got to embrace the prostate, you know?

It's real conclave hours.

You can jack.

It's real conclave hours in the chairman election chambers.

After an encounter with Jing, who gives her a big hint on why she's losing so badly to Pariston at every turn, Cheeto makes her first and only right move in the entire election arc, locking the doors.

No one is allowed out until a new chairman is elected.

Unfortunately, against Parison and a surging Leorio, that might not be enough.

Meanwhile, Killo is focused on getting Aluka to Goan despite losing the tail and all of the butlers.

Illumi is still able to find him immediately.

He's able to escape by tipping his hand slightly about Aluka's sort of secret rules.

And by the end of these episodes, Goan will be in the same room as Jing Freaks.

These are

odd episodes.

Or rather, they're episodes in which stuff is happening that it's fairly easy to follow.

It's interesting to see these characters orbit around each other, and they're doing so in interesting ways.

But something has happened to the show's structure and pacing that it can't really do anything about that has caused everything to become really weird, which is that we are now post-Chimera Ant,

which was an immensely long season focused on expanding very tiny segments of time to like long, beautiful, sweeping arcs.

And so purely by dint of following that up,

what has ended up happening is it feels like you're watching just like a series of things that have been squashed by a hydraulic press.

Not in the sense that Tagashi is trying to fit in more than he can get away with, but just in the sense that we've been so used to one kind of like epochal pacing for so long.

And now here we are, you know, back in fairly standard Hunter-Hunter pacing that just feels so much faster and so much

more bizarre.

I keep expecting to spend more time with these characters that I am being given.

I think that what I think you're right, Jack.

One of the things is that we got so used to how things moved in the Chimera Ant, and going back to the old normal feels new.

The other thing is that

we're in a zone where like

everybody is

Meroem.

Everybody is Karapika.

Like we're like everybody is having these sort of like galaxy brain inner monologues all the time.

And so instead of having like Gone, who's largely not sure what's going on, Kilua, who's like picking up on things and not really talking about it, but you can see him acting on what he's sort of developing in his brain, and then Karapika kind of explaining things out loud to the audience/slash gone.

Uh, we sort of get everybody is Sherlock Holmesing all the time.

Like, yeah, like, this is the episodes that reveal that, like, Jing and Pariston have been playing 4D chess a thousand moves ahead.

Like, they both

had

foreseen the various outcomes of the election arc since episode one of the election arc.

That is what we're.

And at the same time, as I'm like, this is lame.

A thousand people have tried to do this and failed.

When television does it, it's usually my least favorite shit of all time.

It's what became horrible about Doctor Who.

It's what was always horrible about Sherlock.

It's what was most annoying about House.

But I really like house,

even though it sucks.

Yeah, no, I agree.

I'm with you, bud.

And I really like this, too, even though it has all the hallmarks of something I would find very annoying.

I think I find the

stakes of the election are so peculiar because

it's really just, I mean, you know.

We described it earlier as essentially like a weird skeleton of an election, you know, in that like the actual voters aren't really important at all, and neither really is the platform, although the platform is becoming more and more important.

It's just an election as a way of kind of like expressing a series of power dynamics among like five people.

Um, and on some level, I find it difficult to get too engaged in the planning and the outmaneuvering because

I don't know how much any of this is going to matter, you know?

Right, and it it it also serves to be a um something that takes away time

from what the true a plot of the season is, which is Goan is dying in a bed and Kiluette has a silver bullet or a magic bullet.

Not a silver bullet.

Silver bullets kill werewolves.

Magic bullets heal sick boys.

He has a magic

podcast in the shape of a sister, demon.

Demon sister.

Yes.

All of that is true.

Yeah.

I think that where it does work is that

watching the weird little orbits around each other is fun.

And I think, especially towards the end of these episodes, as the, you know, we'd already heard about how the hunt for Ilumi is getting bolted on to

the election, you know, these things are being very consciously brought together by the characters, like, in the fiction.

The healing of Goan also becomes a kind of a key part of this election.

And I quite like that from a sort of...

Like narratological perspective, you know, we have Goan, a character so important that while lying incapacitated on a bed, he is, you know, like

causing the great machines of democracy to move around him.

I think that stuff's really good.

I, yeah, I really, I also, I just love watching Pariston do stuff.

Like, he's so

funny.

And Jing, too, to a lesser extent, only because there's less Jing.

There's way, there's more Pariston.

During these episodes, we will get our first real capital H hint at what Pariston is doing.

I will say that I am less confident than I have ever been about what it is.

Sure.

Yeah.

You're saying by getting information on it, it's made you more confused.

That is the Pariston Hill way.

Yeah.

But we actually start off these episodes in a pile of dead bodies.

We have a montage at the very top, the candidates giving their pitch on why they should be the next chairman,

starting, of course, with Cutie Beauty, who's voiced by Rachel Lillis,

who voiced Misty from Pokemon, who died last year really

suddenly.

At least it felt suddenly to me.

It was very sad.

I was a really big fan of hers.

Do we want to quickly sum up this sort of pre-credits arguments from everybody?

Cutie Beauty says, it doesn't really matter if I don't win.

Parriston will make the Hunter organization cuter.

This is, if anything, making tech something I've suspected since Cutie Beauty's introduction.

She is a stooch.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

Bisky takes a shot at Netero.

Sorry, I did have Cutie Beauty endorsing Periston is the RuPaul is fracking of the Hunter-Hunters.

Bisky takes a shot at Netero, but also then sort of comes down on Netero's side.

Yes.

Yes, she says,

you can't solve a crisis with lofty morals, and that's a fact.

She's essentially playing the

classic Biscuit-Kruger method of sometimes you just have to kick somebody's head.

Sometimes you just have to blow up the bomb in your chest.

Jing is the panda bear.

Yeah, Jing says he's nothing as a panda.

We don't know this yet, but he's also wishes

he's a panda because he wishes he had the same reproductive issues they do.

I got like little zingers all down my notes this week.

There's a lot of cutaways to characters, and I'm like, now's my chance.

Kobi Okawa reiterates that he's going to work behind the scenes even if elected, but that he's not going to name names.

I'm so confused about him.

I don't know what that means.

I have a lot of questions about a lot of different things.

Yeah.

Sambika, the doctor, nervously thanks people for voting for her.

And banks do not be voted for.

Again, now this is interesting because when they first introduce her, in my head, I'm like...

Oh, she's like too serious to be the chairman.

And then when they finally have her speak, it's like, no, she's too shy to be the chairman.

Yeah, she wants to be doing doctor business.

I look at her.

You think she'd be involved in this gone stuff?

I tried to look up her voice actor because she sounds to me just like

Luna from Virtue's Last Reward, a voice actress who is in a bunch of stuff.

Oh my god, but there was no one listed.

There is no only the German voice actor is listed for a song Vika Norton, so I could not get confirmation

that this is that same actress or not in the VO.

Um, and then uh, Lenore Derv is asleep, it's just asleep.

She needs to get to the home, someone help her out.

Yeah,

and then right off this pile of bodies, pile of bodies, Hisuka standing in a field of corpses.

He and Illumi have taken out.

Um, I wasn't 100% on this, it was six of the eight airships.

Is that correct?

Yeah, I think it's

two left.

I don't know if there's pretty sure there was, there were eight to start with.

Um, and Hisuka intends to doctor and send bad intel to Illumi to keep him from finding Kilua.

Illumi's already got the info.

He has a spy the whole time, which is how they reintroduce the spy thing.

It becomes briefly very important.

Though it seems like the traitor isn't among the butlers.

It's someone who's been tailing Tsubone, who catches wind that she's being followed and then uses her ability, finally named Rider's High, to transform into a power glider to follow Kiloa's ship out of of view of her, of the spy, like above the clouds.

She says, Fortunately for us, the clouds have come up tonight.

Master Killua is sure to use that to his advantage.

Once again, the Zeldic Butler's genuinely bizarre loyalties are some of my favorite things about this arc.

Suboni says that with a real like pride and excitement in her voice, where she's like, oh, this will be great for Killua.

Killua's smart.

He'll figure this out.

While also still being here to basically, you know, be the fly in the ointment for killer and we we also we get an even bigger statement of that loyalty in a little bit too it's just wild

um

now it's time for the pure paladin squad this stuff is moving very fast in this first episode sort of like recapping all of the moving pieces teraday neutral bushidora ambitious and loop highland uh the leadership of the pure paladin squad are discussing next steps uh for their organization uh after it appears that like all of them have already died.

They've all been killed by Illumi and Hisuka.

Illumi and Hisuka are no match for this gang of regular hunters.

And you know that we're no match for them because when we've seen them in the past getting deployed, this sort of like gang of hunter hunters.

Whoa!

Oh!

Oh!

Oh!

When we see this gang of hunter-hunters, they are

drawn very boringly.

And yoshihiro tagashi draws boring guys very deliberately you know and that it's just like well these are just some mooks these are some toadies you know yeah um like much like uh uh when you see a game that has a bunch of playable characters you can tell when someone's gonna be playable by how designed they are Yes.

This has the same thing.

You can tell if someone is going to matter based on like how much effort it looked like their clothing took to draw.

How stupid they look.

At one point, I think Terredine Neutral on the phone says, Are you saying he's already killed over 20 people in perhaps the wildest misreading of Ilumi Zeldic that has ever happened?

Right.

That's so funny.

It's so funny.

They've confirmed that it's Ilumi, right?

I feel like they know

who it is.

Yeah, they know that it's Illumi, but they haven't revealed to the public crucially.

Okay.

This is where the sort of like sinister lens that the camera has been viewing them comes into play a little bit.

Loop suggests that they hire some temp hunters to show that they're truly truly following in the legacy of the Hunter Association.

But actually, he wants those people to be killed to remove them from the voting pool because it's kind of crazy.

It's crazy because they're all Periston voters or like heavily implied to be indebted to Periston in some way that will force their vote

to Periston.

Pariston loves this.

It's exactly what Pariston wanted.

I actually have the call because I think it's, I think we should get some Periston.

I don't think that we've had a Peristin button.

You're telling me Mr.

Teradane has requested temp hunters?

Magnificent!

Yes, a wonderful request.

Do everything in your power to make it happen.

Oh, you don't need to be concerned about me.

In fact, if there's no upper limit on the number of temp hunters we can send, spread the word and take everyone you want.

If you come across anything you want to ask or tell me while on the job, just feel free to contact me anytime.

And if anything needs to be improved, I'm positive we'll be able to work it out.

What an excellent trio.

I do like them.

They're so easy.

This is our first time seeing Parison's mask slip.

It's so funny.

He is like.

Okay, do any of y'all know about the famous famous potato chip scene in Death Note?

Yes.

No.

That is the vibe I get from Periston.

Basically, there is a

in Death Note, a sort of cat and mouse anime about light Yagami, who is who I'm comparing Periston here

to, who gets his hands on

eponymous Death Note.

Yeah, mass murderer.

Boy Wander, Mass Murderer, in a cat and mouse game with the great detective L, who is also a

feminine shonen boy.

And there's just a really famous scene where he is being monitored, and he's trying to hide that he's writing names in the death note by keeping a TV screen in a chip bag while he's supposed to be studying because there's like cameras in his room.

It's a whole thing.

But just very famously the delivery of, and now I'll take a potato chip and eat it is like really, I can see Perriston saying it, and it's really funny to me.

I'll link it in the chat.

It is really funny.

It's so stupid.

The best thing about Death Note is how

he get he he should never have been even close to getting caught in a million years.

No one ever.

He's just very bad at it.

He's just very bad at it.

he's supposed to be this genius but we just like watch him ruin all of his chances by thinking he's so fucking smart the whole time

which the show i feel like barely addresses maybe i'm maybe i'm misremembering i feel like the show never addresses that actually light is a fucking idiot um but uh

but it's so it's super funny yeah uh he is pariston is so arch here um

and but it is fun to be like we don't know why he wants his people to die that yet We do figure it out.

Well, we might figure it out later in the show.

By the end of these episodes, I still don't fully know why he's going to be able to do it.

Oh,

we'll get there.

It is revealed in these episodes why he wanted those people to die.

At the time, though, it's very confusing because it seems to go exactly against what he wants, which is A, to have his people vote for him and B, to use those votes to win.

Neither of those end up being true.

The Temp Hunters are Paris, or appear to be Pariston's like armed wing, right?

He finds them not only very useful, but they're like a money-making scheme for him or something, right?

Like they're the association dogs, right?

This is, I mean, what's happening here?

Everyone is, everyone is trying

to,

everybody's looking at the Gungi board and thinking they know what Harrison is doing, and they have no, they have, they just have no idea.

This is, uh, this is

Right.

This is when.

Oh, my God.

I'm already forgetting her name.

How is it possible?

Cheetah?

Kamugi?

Kamugi.

Komugi?

Yeah.

I just kept thinking Gungi.

This is Komugi.

You really are Mary Will.

This is Komugi solving Kogriko at the end of...

This is like...

high-level gamesmanship that Periston is doing

in a way that borders on ludicrous, on the ludicrous side of bordering on ludicrous.

It's over the line

what the truth of the scenario is.

There is something really fun about,

and I don't know that this is deliberate,

something that we talked about a lot about the Gunki game in Chimera Ent is that we don't ever really like understand the rules of the game and very little dramatic tension is ever drawn from like how a game is going.

We get stuff like Kokariko, but that's much more like a discussion of like an individual.

It's more about Komagi than it is about Gungi.

Right, it's abstracted and it's the most that we even ever get and it's nothing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As opposed to the dodgeball game where he essentially teaches you how to play dodgeball from scratch.

Yeah, if you didn't know how to play dodgeball, you could learn from watching Green Island.

You'd be like, wow, when did the gorillas get involved?

This arc is...

Like a mechanical it is all about the Gungi play essentially It's all about like this like four-dimensional chess, people maneuvering and out-maneuvering.

You know, we're getting that finally rendered out to us in a big way.

Sending out the Temp Hunters goes exactly as planned.

What did I write down here?

Everybody is wiped out.

Members, members.

Members, the camera crew, and Bushidora killed off-screen.

So fucking funny they sent the camera crew.

It's so funny they killed Soul Hunter, isn't it?

Yeah.

They want to capture their big moment.

Yeah, sending the camera crew and sending the temp hunters in explicitly to die is some of the purest, like pure hunter behavior we've had in a long time.

You know, Keith, you said that it finally casts these guys in kind of a sinister light.

But I think that maneuver is just some real pristine hunter behavior.

That is how hunters operate in the world.

Well, crucially, Bushadora and Terradane are not part of Loop's plan.

And Loop specifically is like, I can't tell them what I'm really up to, which is to invalidate the next because Terradane wants the election to be over more than anything.

Luke wants to win.

And so he's like, I can't tell Terradaine he's too honest.

And I can't tell Bushidora because he's too stupid, basically.

So we need to sacrifice like 100 people to get another round of the election.

Yeah.

You will have gathered this, given that we keep saying it in every Media Club Plus episode, but a key part of this election arc is not just that an election is happening, it's that it is taking forever.

And

killing 100 people to just make sure it takes a bit longer is really excellent, and that does work.

The next vote is invalid.

We actually, in these episodes, we kind of brush over like three or four rounds or something happen like basically off-screen.

Um, when all of those people die, though, Terradan, he's freaking out, thinking Ilumi must have hired dozens of incredibly powerful soldiers.

And I know, Jack, this is one of your favorite Hisuka moves.

Hisuka breaks the fourth wall again, looks at the camera, and says, more like one magician.

Yeah.

Does anybody else do that?

Is it just him?

It's just him.

It's just him.

Yeah, I think it's just him.

Yeah.

It's great.

Actually,

Kilua has a really weird fourth wall break a little bit later

that I am curious.

Oh, Grandpa Zoldic breaks the fourth wall.

But that's a documentary.

Yeah, that was like a weird kind of structural gag.

That was like very weird.

But yeah, he totally does break, like speak into a camera that isn't there.

there.

I think the Hisaka break a little bit lighter is more like the grandpa one.

Sorry, the killer break.

Hiseka is looking directly at the camera and responding

to a line of dialogue.

Yeah, that someone that wasn't there said.

It's great.

I think it's really, it's really just.

It's fun writing to have only one person do it, only do it, you know, three times over the course of a show as long as this, and have the character be like a magician trickster.

In a post-Deadpool movie world, it's hard to have fourth wall breaking not seem tacky, and it doesn't seem tacky.

Although, a really good rule of thumb is: if you are thinking about breaking the fourth wall, don't.

Your first impulse should be,

ah, no, yeah,

then sleep on it, you know, see how you feel.

Um,

don't undo it, and then

it's still fine, you don't need to.

Uh, the

go ahead, Jack.

The clouds clear.

Killer is trying to reach Goto, and he is not able to.

He's worried about getting from the airship to the car and opening himself up to an attack.

Ilumi has sort of like dropped off the radar for Killer because he's too busy killing everybody the hunters send after him.

And there is a sort of clammy.

Killer Zeldik is the number one what's going on.

How in danger am I at all times?

That's what he's doing everywhere.

And no one lines up against his own brother much like the cat that he is often depicted as he's constantly looking around for danger we haven't had kitty cat killer for a while have we um no uh i think that we got one it's been too traumatized he's too sad yeah he's way too sad yeah you can't be a kitty cat while your boyfriend's in the hospital it's true That's true.

That's what they say.

I think it's probably been since like halfway through Chimera Ant, but there might be a time that I'm not thinking of.

Yeah.

His airship lands.

They are 60 kilometers from the hospital, and he is picked up by a driver in a Zordic car.

And the driver is not turning around.

And the first thing I thought was,

is this driver one of the needle people?

I'm sorry.

We missed something really important to do with vehicles.

Please.

Right?

Am I wrong about this?

We did pick up the game.

Time turned into a plane.

We discussed plane grammar.

We did talk about it.

We just talked about it.

I'm pretty sorry.

We moved so quick by it that I missed it.

I was looking at my notes to be like, okay, when do we talk about how grandma is Sonic All-Stars Racing transformed?

I can't.

She looks like a new generation legendary Pokemon.

It is an indictment of Pokemon that you are.

I agree.

Yeah.

I can't just.

I'm sorry to make a backtrack.

Backtrack.

I just can't keep that inside, you know?

Yeah.

Go ahead.

I knew both

my grandparents.

I think that my grandmother on my father's side is more likely to turn into a plane than the grandmother on my mother's side.

Sure.

What is she more likely to turn into, though?

Like

a responsible car.

Okay.

I will say that

power glider Subone

looks not totally unlike my paternal grandmother.

Was she also a power glider?

Did she have an engine?

No,

she was a Bostonian.

Okay.

Did she move a lot whenever you were close by because she was stealing all your nin aura?

No, she was old and I don't think had learned nin.

As a rule,

grandparents have tremendous nin,

I think.

You know, my grandmother was sort of a hunter.

She was, you know that, the thing, you know,

they,

my father's parents had this ability to bring in

everyone in their orbit, like for

holidays.

It's sort of like,

you know,

when someone gets married, and they like, will spend one Christmas with,

you know, the one side and then another, the next Christmas with the other side.

Yes.

My grandparents had this sort of social pull to be like, no, you spend Christmas with us.

If you want to see your wife's family, they will come here too.

Wow.

And they would just have these massive parties that just had everyone from every one side of the family.

And then when she died, that stopped.

So I think that she was a hunter.

I think that she was the closest person to a Jing Freaks that I've known.

Movable feast, grandmother.

I realize you're a double-star party hunter?

Yo.

Keith's grandmother's nun power is as follows.

She's a double-star party hunter.

Yep.

Yeah, so this car arrives, and the first thing I thought was, oh my god, is the driver a needleman?

That would be really bad.

And I was briefly relieved because two needle people approached the car and I was like, oh, thank God, those are the needle people.

There's no needleman in the car.

And then the driver turned around and he's also a needleman.

Wow.

And the car is surrounded in a

like a full standoff as Illumi himself approaches.

A brief note about the needle people here.

Needle people are possessed at the moment the needles strike them, which means that several of them are still in like family units kind of moving together.

Some of them are still carrying like purses and handbags.

It's really creepy.

I like that a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Illimi shows up.

This is also kind of framed like there's a lot of like

tonally it doesn't quite hit horror movie, at least not for me, but like there's framing stuff here that I really like with

with the headlights of the car, the like sort of this this side road that we're in for the next I guess the rest of this episode basically here is these are I think these are the these are real horror movie moments.

The first look back with the needles and then

the car surrounding with the headlights sort of

shining on the needleman and then Illumi approaching from the background.

It's a lot of

the slow reveal of Ilumi with him sort of like being

illuminated by the headlights of the car, just like

he's the slasher villain, you know?

And Illumi is doing creepy more than even usual.

He's turned the dial up.

Yeah,

here's one of our main creepy Illumis

movie game.

I don't like him.

Yeah, I don't like him.

He has bad vibes.

He's bad.

I think he's bad.

I think Illumi Zeldik is maybe.

What does Tsubone call him something great?

She says that he is sinister and mechanical.

Yeah, he is so depraved that he falls outside even the assassin's code.

That's right.

Yeah, that's what it was.

I think you're right, Sylvie, that there is a horror movie feel going on here, but it also, this standoff feels like

more reworking of the

Mafia stuff in the early parts of York New City.

The way that both Tagashi and the anime team are really good at staging these sorts of like Coen brothers standoffs, you know, whether that's in the canyon, the forever,

yeah, yeah, yeah, whether that's just like in a forest surrounded by you know enemies.

It's really neat.

Killua has ways out of this

in terms of like, I think this might be Ilumi who notices this, that Kilua has some pretty straightforward ways he could get out of this situation, but only alone.

Thinks Ilumi.

You know, Kilua having to care for Illumi, sorry,

Kilua having to care for Aluka makes him more vulnerable and kind of like restricts the palette of options available to him.

This is, of course, wildly ironic because having Alaka and knowing what Killua knows actually opens up a whole wing of options that the Zaldic family has never once considered prior to this point.

But I do like the classic thing that has come up again and again in Hunter Hunter, right?

Which is that like caring for somebody and caring deeply opens yourself up to a sort of vulnerability and time and again the show says it's worth it.

You know,

that is the cost of doing business and it's not something to be afraid of.

But regularly characters will be like oh um this would have been much easier for me if i didn't actually care yeah well there's there's there's a few things that cause illumi's analysis to be wrong um the first thing is that no one yet knows that aluka can't heal gone from here They all think that

Aluka's power extends to healing people in the same way that it would to destroying things, which isn't true.

So

the other option that Illumi leaves open to Kilua besides abandoning Aluka is

like, you could get rid of me

by wishing for it.

Thinking two things.

He can't make a wish twice in a row because you can't do that.

But that's not a rule that applies to Kilua.

And the other mistake is that, like, that that would help him at all, really.

Um,

Ilumi basically wants to trick him into killing him so that, what does he say?

If you say yes, I'll be happy to die.

Your intermission will have succeeded.

Killing is against the rules,

but the thing that would grant your wish isn't part of our family.

And then thinks to himself, even if it turns out that Rule 5 doesn't apply to Kiloa, I'll gladly die to save the rest of the family, and I'll do so without hesitation.

Kiloa will suffer for the rest of his life, and I will live on forever in his heart.

Crazy, amazing.

Honestly, really good character writing.

And it's only possible because of that misunderstanding, like the basic reality misunderstanding that they introduced in the last episode that we recorded, where Ilumi thinks that he should be Kilua's favorite person on earth.

Yes.

And it seems to me sort of twisted in a way to make that happen, to like force Kilua's heart to carry Ilumi inside of it.

Yep.

This is a show over and over and over again about like the bonds of love between people.

You know, Kilua is on a mission right now because of a very specific pair of bonds of love that he has.

And it is great.

to see Illumi also invoking something similar.

But in classic Zeldic way, the bond of love that he is trying to invoke is: I will die and trap myself in, or rather, Kilua will be trapped with me in his heart forever.

Yeah.

This is also creepy because we get some

macro Illumi character motivation here.

He says,

if it'll save the family, I'll be happy to die.

He's like a legit Zoldic.

You know, we've had characters say in the past

he's too cruel to be a Zoldic or whatever.

But something about that line where he does genuinely seem willing to sacrifice himself for the family

makes him a lot scarier in a way.

He's not a total wild card.

He's looking out for the Zoldic legacy in one way or another.

It's just that his idea of looking out for the Zaldic legacy is exploit my sister and kill hundreds of hunters.

I totally agree.

I think this is something that we talked about as far back as

I don't know, maybe even as far back as the

Zoldic family mansion rescue

before Heaven's Arena,

but that

Illumi understands that Kilua is the next boss, and that his goals as an antagonist to Kilua don't necessarily align with stopping that to happen out of ambition, but instead align with

his version of following his father's wishes, which is for Kilua to be the successor.

Yes.

And that makes every that colors everything he does

as a sort of twisted, like, I'm doing this for you kind of love that he has,

which is a particular kind of, or can be a particular kind of manipulation.

Yeah.

Right.

It would be so much easier and cleaner if like all of this was so that Ilumi could get to be the next Zoldic king.

But but Kilua really is the ascendant.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

I could.

Well, we probably won't, because I think that Yoshihir Tagashi post-anime is on to completely different stuff.

I could

read Hunter Hunter about the Zelda family forever.

I think they are so cool.

Yeah.

I would love to get more Silva.

I mean, I'm fascinated by Silva and like what his intentions are.

Yeah.

He's barely in the show.

He's barely in the show.

Yeah.

We bounce from this.

Oh, actually, no, we don't bounce from this.

There's one more big thing that happens.

Tsubone arrives.

Tsubone arrives, yeah.

And Nanika immediately is like, oh my God, finally.

I had these wishes I've been wanting.

I really, really needed

two more fingernails from you.

Which Tsubone,

you know, without hesitation, rips off two more fingernails, tosses them to Kiloa.

And apologizes.

Yeah,

apologizes to both to Aluka for depriving her of her lovely, lovely fingernails and

like frustrating Kilua's plan, right?

Yeah.

She also apologizes, she says, I was the fool who fell prey to this deception.

And very plainly, the spy is revealed as it becomes clear that the Zaldic butlers are tremendously under the thumb of the Zaldics, and Kikio Zaldic has been watching through Tsubone's.

Remember her one and a half glasses?

Yeah.

They have eyes on this situation.

This is great for two reasons.

First, Kikyo has been watching.

Secondly, she's been feeding that information to Ilumi.

Yeah.

I hate her.

I hate her.

The parents have joined the intra-family battle.

Silva says he's staying out of this.

Well, actually.

I don't know.

Silva opened it.

Opened the door to let Nana out.

Like, I feel like they've been in it from the start.

Oh, absolutely.

Like, Silva said that thing about, like, Silva both sort of warned and threatened Kilowa slash Alica with the

Nanaka isn't part of the family line, knowing about the rules of the sort of intra-family mission stuff,

which comes up later.

We'll get when we get to it.

I'll point it out.

And then, I mean, Kikio's just always been

her shadow's been cast over everything, right?

Like, I mean, remember how Kilowa got off the island, got off the mountain?

Like,

I think she had, you know, of course she wants Kilowa back.

She was so proud of him.

Um, I think that, uh,

like

they're so, they're such, like, immense figures, um, Kikio and Silva, that I do think that we can basically, like, tend to take them at their word for things.

Yeah.

Uh, and they do both seem to be acting in their own version of what's best for Kilowa specifically.

Kikyo is watching because she wants to keep her precious boy under her gaze.

What's Kiko's angle on this?

Because I can see Silva's.

I think that they think that Aluka is so dangerous that it is like we have to force Kiliwa to break the rules so that we can get Alica back and put her in jail.

Yeah.

Put her in demon jail.

And as

contrition for sort of unwittingly being this spy, it's here that Amane, so Nanaka is now ready for a wish, her demands have been met, and Amane and Tsubone say, we'll gladly pay the price ourselves for anything you want to do now.

And it's here that Ilumi has the great line, you know, if you can sacrifice those two to kill me, thereby, you know, both getting out of the situation and readying yourself for another wish, I'm sure you won't mind sacrificing a bunch of strangers to kill Goan.

But Kilua knows something they don't.

You want to talk this through?

Sure, yeah.

Killua sort of starts just by demonstrating.

Nanaka has got the nails, goes

hole mode in her head.

Mask mode is mask mode better?

Mask mode is better.

And

Kilua takes her over to Subone and is like, heal Subone's hand.

No one understands what's going on.

Nanika touches Subone's hand and heals it.

And

it, you know, tires Alika out.

She sort of passes out.

He explains she doesn't exact cruel punishments for like healing wishes.

After someone's made a wish to heal something, Nanika has never demanded anything cruel in return.

Not once.

Nanika is kinder than anyone.

The cursed ones are the ones who are making the wishes.

Treat Nanika like an object again, and you're no longer my brother.

He's going to kill Ilumi if he mistreats Alica again.

And I love that.

It's like a twist in a Victorian short story.

There is no evil demands if you use the power for good.

The really evil ones, it is.

It is a.

It's O'Henry.

It is an O'Henry.

It is an O'Henry twist.

It is a frank contrivance, but as we've talked in the past, Tagashi is able to deploy

these kinds of things that feel like a contrivance, in part because they snap together so elegantly with what else is going on elsewhere.

In this case, the fact that the Zaldics have twisted themselves into an appalling tangle based on a series of rules that not only do they not really understand, they are also like missing a crucial component.

Everything that they have ever thought about alaka has been,

you know, there's going to be this awful penalty, which is true because they've only ever been asking her, you know, horrifying things.

I thought this was really fun and really sad.

There's something kind of plain about Alaka when it's laid out like this.

You know, if you ask for bad things, you'll get bad things.

If you ask for like grace and well-being and love, you know,

none of these consequences will reach your door.

Well, crucially, if you ask for bad things, someone else will get bad things.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's a form of genie logic, too, right?

Like it's that sort of like a monkey's paw situation, right?

Where it's like, you gotta be so careful about what you wish for, else it'll backfire.

Unless it's good.

Unless it's good.

Unless it is morally pure.

Ilumi's response to this is great.

He says, I understand.

10-4, if you can heal Goan without any risk at all, I think that's wonderful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was asking that at first, but

he's just watching his whole anxiety kind of evaporate, right?

He makes some freak-ass faces during this, too, doesn't he?

I think so, yeah.

His, he makes a lot of freak-ass faces during these.

It's tragic because the calculus is like I could solve a lot of my own problems by just revealing what Alaka's true powers are, but that would then make her more of a tool for my family.

And what my main goal besides healing Goan is to stop having my family trying to utilize my sister.

You had a great line about that, and I think the third episode we watched today.

Yes, I think that's, I think you're right.

So, even though he had this as an option the whole time, he didn't use it until he was forced to by being caught.

Yes.

During this scene, Hisaka has been hiding in the bushes playing a silly Hisuka game.

Oh my god.

Who to make mad?

Who do I make mad?

Who do I make mad?

Mad so I can kill.

He's like, oh my god, this is tremendous.

Is it more fun

to kill Aluka

and infuriate Killua or save Gone and then make an enemy of Ilumi?

He's like choosing which delicious treat he wants, except because he's Hisaka, he's also kind of doing it so like nakedly stupidly that it comes across as a joke.

I want to bring back Austin's observation of Hiseka as like the dark audience surrogate.

He's now literally been reduced to watching the show from the bushes.

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

Being like he's probably more fun.

Who dying would be a better show?

for me.

Yeah, he's playing like

the falling sand game that you play in the library before they ban it from the school computers when you're 10 or whatever.

Where you're just like, oh,

what if I then put some gunpowder there and saw what happened?

Also, lemmings, this is lemmings for me.

Oh, this is also lemmings.

Yeah.

It's blowing up my little men for fun.

They don't let you play computer games in the library

at school.

At school.

Yeah.

I'm running into that problem all the time.

Well, I remember it being a number one concern of mine mine between the ages of like 12 and 14.

i actually think this was never a problem for me i i we we just we didn't have like a library period first of all

but up until high school i think i was always allowed to use the computers to play games It's such bullshit.

What do they think I'm going to do?

Research William Blake?

No, I'm 12.

No, I'm playing Math Circus.

I'm playing.

I don't even want to play Math Circus, Sylvie.

I want to play a game called Sniper Hell.

Yeah,

I think you're answering your questions.

I want to go on a mini clip and play a game about a ninja that's cutting everyone to pieces.

Cutting everyone to pieces, and it's black and white,

except for the blood.

It helps that you didn't go to school.

You shoot a bunch of shit.

It helps that you didn't go to school in the US.

But if you told anyone or someone found out that you were in school trying to play Sniper Hell, they would arrest you.

I mean, listen, we got the filter put on eventually.

in America.

Kids on the library computers would also, everyone was playing mini clip at that point, right?

Also, in America, yeah,

I just think the school shooting thing has gotten bad enough that, like, it is very bad.

Yeah, Keith, you misunderstand because the way that you get around it is because all of those games were like deeply xenophobic, and so you weren't shooting white people.

Because it was the Iraq war.

Yes, yes, that is what I'm gesturing at.

Was also the I remember Terrorist Hunter for the PS2.

Was that a PS2?

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Was it PS3?

I'd believe anything.

Well, it's not PS3 because there's no games on that.

No.

Maybe soon, though.

I heard that there might be one soon.

I doubt it.

Okay, what's next?

What's next?

Let me see.

Oh, right.

Hiseka's plan ultimately, before Killiwa really puts the cat among the pigeons with his wish, is

this is the gold standard plan that Hisuka ends up up with i'm going to kill alaka then i'm going to kill killiwa then i'm going to kill ilumi he calls this plan quote the best of both worlds

right because killing alaka would make kiluwa mad and then killing killua would make illumi mad so he gets to kill everybody and have it the most fun um

uh

A note here that I wrote is uh this whole realization about how Alaka's power works is this tremendous making a mountain out of a molehill precisely because you don't understand how to care for your own daughter,

which I think is true.

Ilumi still recognizes that something is being hidden.

It's why Rule 5, which is, which one is Miluki's Rule 5, Keith?

The same person can't make a wish twice in a row.

Oh, right, yes.

He says he doesn't really know what he's thinking to himself.

I don't know why that doesn't apply.

So until you tell me everything you know, Alaka will never be free.

This is his internal monologue.

Whereas Kiloa's internal monologue says, if I told them the last rule, all of you, the Zaldics, would put needles in my head and do it with smiles on your faces.

This is great.

It's really good.

Scary writing.

Did laugh at they're going to put needles in my head again.

Just like the matter-of-fact way of stating it.

Oh, those are going to put a sword in my head again.

Yeah, there's a certain sort of like frog in boiling water aspect of watching this show where you're just like, yeah, no, they're going to put needles in your head again.

Oh, that's terrible.

I understand completely what that means.

Yeah.

The needle has, you know, although we've talked about how the Zeldics

know that Kilo had a needle in his head, it has been Ilumi's project.

You know, it's been associated with Ilumi.

And so the idea of all of the Zaldics being like, well, we got to put needles back in that guy's head is really scary.

Let's see.

The hunters.

Okay, let's put needles in his head.

Okay.

Everyone, gather around.

Let's put needles in his head.

I do it with smiles on our faces.

Let's put needles in his head with hammers.

The hunters announce the death of Bushidora.

Is it announced or is it a phone call to Terradane?

Oh, it's a phone call to Terradane, who says, this is proof positive that a cold-blooded evil is lurking among us.

But...

Teradane makes the argument that part of the reason they're not able to bring this, quote, cold-blooded hunter to justice is that they don't have a maturity, which is kind of true.

Your problem really is that he's a Lumi.

Yeah, there's like some talk about like the pure Paladin squad does not have the power to bring this to justice, so we need everyone to vote.

It's like, no, you guys need to get your money up.

Like, you're not, you're not strong enough.

You need to hire more assassins.

Get crowded.

It's very funny that, like, after all of the sort of netero ideology that we've that, like, has filtered into the Hunter Association, at the end of the day, they have like no juice.

Yeah, no juice.

All of these scenes are so confusing to me as to like what the fuck the Hunter Association actually is as like an organization and what the people in it look like.

Because it feels like this show is like focused on like 1% and then everybody else in the Hunter organization is just like 600 dude.

And then when that normal dude sees a monster that we've been watching the whole time, they're always shocked.

Like Terradine's a double star hunter, right?

How does he not know that Illumi's gonna fuck all their shit up?

Well, I think

you can't trust HR.

That's true.

That's very true.

I think it's that.

I think it's also like

he got his stars.

Yeah, he got his stars in HR, not in martial arts.

You know, like, yeah, like,

I'm a black belt HR manager.

Yeah.

Like, oh, so you can fight and you're in HR.

It's like, no, no, no.

I'm just really good at HR.

I'm great at HR.

Yeah.

Minimizing people's pain, all of that kind of business.

It is,

yeah, it's very.

The other thing is that I think that like swimming in the ponds of the Zoldics and the Chimera Ants and Netaro and his close friends, like it has made

the

people that could like

one-shot everybody that took the hunter exam with gone seem like random background characters

um we've just like leveled up it's like one of those games

it's like one of those games that you see streamers who they're the only thing they do is like beg for um money like and then

like like literally the whole stream is like begging for money and they they play games uh twitch.tv slash friends at the table just yeah we don't do that

we don't do that no we beg for patreon subscriptions it's very different it's this is not comparable i know what you mean i know what you mean uh they play they play games where you can basically just like let the game play itself so that you can spend 100 of your time like talking to the chat and like being like come on we gotta get we gotta get more come on guys come on we can make it to 100k that stuff they play games where like a little fish eats a bigger fish eats a bigger fish eats a bigger fish and then you just like eventually you have like a gigantic fish and the fish that used to be big fish are tiny little fish and you eat them all.

I want to play this game.

It sounds pleasant.

There's dozens of them, I think.

I'll try and find one.

I'll send it to you.

But

they're called roguelike deck builders.

We have got, we're just like, the fish that we're playing with are so big that the old great whites are minnows.

Yes.

Yeah.

I think you're absolutely right.

Terradane on the phone telephones Morel to try and get him to be the leader of the

pure paladin squad.

Morel's response, I would have thought, is I just nearly lost my life over and over again in the Chimera Antark.

Instead, what he says is, I'm not the warrior you think I am.

Me, sure, okay, he's traumatized from the Chimera Antark and Stand.

Then he says, I am a sea hunter.

You know what I can't tolerate?

Dry land, and I won't be tied to it.

What the fuck?

He just wants to be surfing and smoking and fucking in the sun

like and

too probably

funny there is like a little bit of more moral it's like the tiniest bit of moral characterization but i love it like both the because i was under the impression that they asked moral they they mentioned moral like backing them and he said no when uh is like he i swear he says something like i told you i said no to that when he calls him yeah it's the David Lynch is the executive producer on Canada.

Yes, exactly.

And then he's like, I'm a beach guy.

I only care about sand and sun, baby.

They asked him.

He said no.

Then they did

a television presentation about how they're in negotiations with him.

And then he's like, what the fuck?

I said no.

And they're like, come on, you don't mean that, though.

Come on.

Come on.

I understand that he fought

Leol in the water

and was pretty cool there.

But I can't help but feel like they originally wrote a version of the day's shooting script where they were like, and we'll have a really cool pirate hunter, but the costume department was like on strike or something.

So they couldn't get the pirate guy in from Central Casting.

And they were like, oh, fuck.

Is the guy who plays Morel on set?

And they were like, okay, fine.

But they didn't change any of the lines.

Him being like, basically saying, I hate land lovers.

This is not morale.

Yeah,

they never said that he was a sea hunter until

like a couple episodes ago.

I don't think that it doesn't make sense.

I just think it's funny to lean on that as if it's such an obvious thing about him.

Yes, he doesn't even look like a pirate.

He has the hair of a pirate and he smokes a pipe.

Yeah.

He's got the vibes of a pirate.

Any kind of definition of pirates.

Hair like a pirate and smokes a pipe are low qualifiers.

Right.

I think.

It's more important you've got to have like a peg leg and a parrot is a really big one.

No, a peg leg is a sign of

a pirate who's who's failed.

No, Long John Silver hasn't failed.

I think he fails in there.

He drowns, right?

Yeah,

if he hadn't failed, why aren't I hearing about him these days?

Yeah.

he hadn't failed.

What happened so long, John Silver?

Don't they hang him?

I don't know.

That sounds like a fancy.

That's another kind of failing.

So, going by Muppet Treasure Island, he tries to escape with the treasure in a rowboat, and he drowns because

the rowboat is faulty.

Let me see.

No, he escapes.

He survives.

In the book,

the expedition members.

So the last cannon for each other.

Let's disport of the treasure into Hispaniola and depart the island with Silver as their only prisoner.

At their first port in Spanish America, Silva steals a bag of money and escapes.

Oh, so it's the exact same except for the gag about the faulty rowboats that then, lifeboats, that then comes back later.

And he's escaped.

He is escaping after being arrested,

but he's escaping

in a faulty lifeboat.

Yes.

That's a great adaptive move there to have him.

I will never forget Long John Silver's face,

Tim Curry, as he's like frantically

bucketing water out of his lifeboat full of gold.

He goes, this is the exact noise he makes.

Ah!

That's a pretty good Tim Curry.

Thank you.

I think Tim Curry's great.

I've never had a bad time watching Tim Curry.

I haven't never seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Really?

It's fine.

It's fine.

It's surprising for how fun it is for when it was made and how

and the kind of people that love it.

Yes, that is the most when it when you watch it and you're like, oh, that was fun.

The people who love it really start to confound you because you're like, well, those guys are so annoying, though.

Yeah.

Ah, me looking at Undertale.

Don't get me started.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, Clue is fantastic, though.

Yeah, Flames on the Side of My Face, etc.

Flames on the Side of My Face, etc.

He's also really good in

it.

His pennywise.

In what?

In it.

It.

In what?

In it.

Oh, my god.

I was like, you guys aren't saying the name.

Fucking who's on first tier?

Sorry, they're putting needles in my head.

I'm sorry, everybody.

Then Hiseka kills Terradane midway through a telephone call.

Yeah, as in Morel

as Morel on the other end of the line says revealing the identities of the killers will lead to a lot of death.

Yeah.

This is like a this is like a gory death.

I think he has his throat cut and he like bleeds out over his desk.

Oh, yeah.

Blood treating

a super bloody desk.

Yeah.

And him like

I think his body's there.

The impression I got was thrown, the Joker card thrown into the head.

That was what I had a bit of.

They don't show the moment of death, but that's sort of what I that he never even came into the room.

But I could be wrong.

It could be.

He loves to slash a throat.

He does love to slash a throat.

I think that in general,

Takashi and the anime team do really well with the like weird outre violence of the show in terms of like scaling it up and down.

I think that in order to make a shounen work, they have to be capable of depicting violence in a way that is cinematic and enjoyable and kind of minimized as people are just kicking the shit out of each other all the time.

But then, when they really want to put their foot on the gas, and I think this has got to come from Tagashi based on the way we've seen him draw like head trauma and stuff, they are like very prepared to have some really upsetting images to underscore the violence.

I think it works really well.

Yeah.

The end of this episode

is just a quick recap of the seventh election for the 13th chairman.

The closest, I think, so far, Pariston with 46.1% of the vote.

Leorio in number two with 95% of the vote.

Overtaken Cheadle.

He's overtaken Cheadle, who has actually he overtook Cheadle a few rounds ago.

Cheadle has 87.

Mizaistum has 72.

Teradane

death confirmed during voting, it says, with 45.

Is what it says?

Yeah.

Death confirmed during voting.

Oh, that's really good.

Yeah.

Episode 144 begins as Jing is leaving.

Keeps up his lifetime practice of starting something he was briefly interested in and then walking away from it as he departs the hunter organization.

This is where the house episode begins.

Games,

video games, election, children,

all of these boring things.

If it sucks, hit the bricks.

If it sucks, hit the bricks.

Just leave.

He is stopped by Cheeto.

Cheeto

twice.

But yes.

Beans takes a completely unwarranted shot here as Jing is leaving.

Jing accuses Beans of letting Cheadle know that he is leaving and calls him, I've written it down here, that bald shrimp.

Totally wrong food group.

Totally wrong food group.

Bald lagoon.

Very cruel to beans.

Jing is leaving and he sees meeting Leorio as the real highlight of this whole election.

A brief marker here on Jing is

a cruel weirdo, but is just as complicated a cruel weirdo as everybody else.

I initially took this meeting Leorio was the highlight as a sort of like joke, but as the episode begins and the election kind of comes to an end, we get a sense of what he meant when he said that.

He sees in Leorio like a very direct representation of the network of care that his son has around him in his absence.

I really like that line from him.

He says, you already know the outcome.

I've had my fun, so I'm going.

Meeting that Leorio guy was the highlight.

He's got huge potential, no doubt about that.

Meeting Leorio.

I'm going to go online and making a YouTube video called Is Leorio the Strongest Hunter and an A-theory

in episode 144 of Hunter Hunter.

The only kind of

potential is physical strength.

There's no other kind of potential.

That's it.

Yes.

Hey, man, man, I'm doing an impression of a Shonen fan.

They believe that.

No, they totally do.

Yes, I 100% agree that they believe that.

Jing announces that he is now going to start voting for Cheeto, but he also says, essentially, the road is long.

We are not going to be done today.

Yeah.

This is where I said Jing enters house mode.

And Sylvia, you have something very similar.

What did you write down?

We independently wrote these lines.

I wrote.

it.

Jing is just dressing down Cheetles' campaign is really funny.

They're just house and cuddy.

I wrote Jing is Gregging Out.

Greg is House's first name for anyone unaware.

Dr.

Greggory.

My friend woke Greg.

Yeah.

Gregory House.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Can we pause and just do like a one-sentence...

What do you mean when you talk about being house?

So there's a lot.

It is both the affect, the sort of like bristly affect of saying things that someone is not aware of as if they should be aware of it he's gruff dr.

Sherlock and everyone else is Watson yes like

he's sure like to make it even simpler he's just doing Sherlock like Sherlock Holmes with attitude like that is very much it like it's the condescending it's the the like yeah i've seen i've seen the links between all these events already and no one else has but let me ex i guess i can explain it to you even though it's such a chore at the end of this he says uh figure out the rest for yourself.

You're a hunter, right?

That is like straight out of Greg House.

Yeah.

So

this conversation kind of takes two angles.

The first is you ran a bad campaign, and I will explain why.

He says, if I had warned you about this earlier, you'd have done the opposite.

This is some classic Jing Freaks abdication of responsibility here.

Just being like, well, I would have told you, but you wouldn't have listened.

This is possibly true, but I think when you are as powerful as Jing Freaks and in a situation as delicate as the 13th Hunter election, you got to push past that, man.

Although Jing Freaks refuses to push past any complicated emotion he feels.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If I'm trying to sort of laser beam into his brain, it sort of wouldn't recommend it.

Sort of like if

they would have ended up here anyway, and he just had to give the same advice a second time.

And

she's a hunter.

She should be able to beat Pariston without his help.

Jing believes that about the world, but like if Cheeto can't figure it out, then she shouldn't win.

This is the real sort of

hunter supremacy is ultimately eating itself at this point, right?

Where like the hunters believe as a unit that they are the smartest and cleverest people and that might makes right, you know, through and through.

But this also means that

I'm not familiar enough with this to understand that, but I believe you.

They had to make rules about who is allowed to fight who because they kept getting into fights to the death to see who

Parriston Skywalker.

And they have a lot of, you know, they have a lot of might makes right ideology.

Yeah, and this just falls apart completely anytime they have to.

Jing's son is missing a hand.

They have to do an intra-family mission.

So Cheetle says, all right, fine.

Let's...

So Jing also says, you're going to lose and you're going to lose badly.

And Cheeto says, All right, fine.

Tell me how to win.

I'll do it.

I'll do anything.

I've written down here, Jing is finally making himself useful at a cost.

The cost being we have to listen to Jing talk about his plan.

The first thing he notices about he mentions about Pariston, and this is going to come up again and again in these episodes, is that Pariston, quote, doesn't want to win, but he doesn't want to lose.

This is not just a good statement about the kind of bizarre manipulation that Pariston offers, but our first clue into

Pariston's maneuvering here, right?

Like, Jing is pointing out that Pariston seems to be taking actions that are getting him both closer to victory and further away from victory, and is doing so happily.

It's

this really like, and I might maybe I've brought this up before, I don't know, but this, this really felt like a spotlight on how Jing and Pariston are kind of both perfect heirs for Netaro in a weird way to me.

Yeah.

And to an extent, also very similar to Hisuka, where their entertainment is sort of, and like the curiosity of seeing what happens when they set a spark or like when they push over the dominoes, like that is more what they're here for than an actual end goal.

And it also, Jing sort of admits this, but he's like, but I'm not really cut out for it because I'm not, I don't have the patience.

Like Harrison has the patience to be the hunter chairman.

Netero barely had the patience to be the hunter chairman.

So if Netero barely had it, Jing certainly doesn't.

Jing says he gets bored very easily.

This is a Goan Freaks trait as well.

This is like, this is the

completed version of Steam coming out of Goan's ears, right?

Yeah.

This is that as well.

You just learn how to close your ears.

Yeah, exactly.

Actually, we see Jing's version of Steam coming out of Goan's ears, which is he falls asleep

in these episodes.

Yeah.

He also says that

he calls the election a game several times.

Cheetah Yorkshire is a real top tier.

I've mentioned this over and over during the show because he keeps fucking doing it.

Tagashi can like spin up a character very, very quickly when he wants to, can kind of get you into that character's head, get you understanding their motivations, get you feeling a variety of ways about the characters.

We get this here with Cheetah, where she is, I think, maybe the first character in Hunter Hunter to take issue with the fact that all these idiots keep calling things games.

Yes.

And nobody more literally than Jing, like, because

Cheetle respects the election and the Hunter Association for some reason.

It's so funny.

She comes across as so level-headed and likable in that she is one of Cheetah's funniest traits is, and Keith mentioned this in a previous episode, how she will regularly in her inner monologue be like, I'm going to fucking kill Parriston.

Which is great because outwardly she's just expressing like, I want the election to go well, etc.

But she also has the beans problem, right?

Which is that she is a seemingly level-headed,

apparently intelligent who is also high-ranking in the most evil organization on the planet.

Yeah.

There is, there's a lot of, there's a lot of Democrats in the Hunter Association at this level.

Oh, yeah.

Like, Harriston.

Harrison's last name is neutral.

I know, yes.

But Pariston specifically seems like the platonic ideal of a Democrat to me.

Like, he doesn't care if he wins or loses.

He just wants to twist everything in his favor, even if that means someone worse than him wins.

And what makes you say that about the Democratic Party in 2025?

It's probably worth saying that right now, right now, we are recording this episode on the 24th of June, 2025 as New Yorkers are going to the polls in the mayoral election primary.

Watching and writing notes on these episodes while all this has been happening in the middle of a heat wave has been one of the

simultaneously my stomach hurts and also I'm grateful that I'm doing this work at this time, you know, and that like my brain is thinking through all this kind of stuff.

And it's very funny.

It's great to have, I think that this analogy will break down when we get further into the show.

But there is this sort of like

wait further into the show?

Keith, we have one more episode.

Yeah, that's so next episode.

This will start, this analogy will start to break down, um, in service of the plot over the like uh

uh you know, not to say that that there's anything plot is becoming more important than characterization.

We just like get new information that changes things a little bit.

But Cheadle to me is so like idealistic,

young liberal who doesn't understand

why

nobody cares about the rules or winning or having good ideas or not seeming evil

and why

being kind of level-headed and intelligent and principled is only distancing her from the levers of power.

Yes.

Yes.

She wants the game to be different

in a big way.

She wants the game to be what it says on the box.

And doesn't understand why.

Yeah, it doesn't understand why.

It seems like Pariston can open the box, set up the board, everyone agrees on the rules, and then he just gets to make them up as he goes, and no one can stop him.

There's some amazing Pariston making up the rules.

There is, yes.

And I love the final

monologue that he delivers to Cheetah.

And

unbelievable stuff.

I think it's so

good.

Yeah, it's really, really good.

Jing says, you

You want to know how many days until this is over you and Mizai are in this to win But if you really wanted to win you should have tried a lot harder before you should have used any means necessary in rounds two or three

Which is very annoying.

I don't want to hear this shit

It is it's annoying to cheatle too cheadle hates this

And also, and Jing is being so mean to her also is being like, you should act more like a dog.

It's hard to talk to you when you keep switching back and forth.

Your dog persona.

And I was like, damn, he's just straight up calling it Kayfabe.

That's crazy.

He complained that he's like, I don't want to tell you these things because you're mean to me.

She says, why are you telling me this?

That's easy to say in hindsight.

And then eventually he does agree to tell her what Periston is thinking.

That's that he doesn't want to win stuff.

Your common sense tells you that your will to win makes you the stronger one.

And that's why you're so easy to read, especially when you want to win a game.

You can't win a game unless you have more votes.

He's so clinical about this that it drives her crazy.

He'll drag this out till the very last day.

He's just like Netero, except I get bored a lot faster.

And Jack, do you have the quote?

Because you talked about...

being very confused about Pariston's goals, even after some of Pariston's goals were explicitly talked about.

Do you have this quote about like what Pariston might be up to?

Yes, this is crazy to me.

Also, off mic during a break, I figured out why Pariston wants the Temp Hunters all killed.

And it is linked in part to something that Jing points out here.

You know, he says Pariston is, quote, wanting to drag this out until the last day.

He just wants to have fun.

Also, before I move on to Pariston's plan, we've talked about this a bit in the past episode about Jing's sort of like famous charisma.

I really love that a lot of the lengthiest Jing

duologues that we have had in this show, he is tooth-gratingly annoying to everybody else he's in the scene with.

Yeah.

I think that's really funny.

But the other thing is, we know that he makes friends everywhere he goes.

He even references it in this thing that you're about to talk about because, like, when he's not around people that have to deal with him in a sort of managerial way, he's likable and friendly, and people give him information and time and resources.

I've forgotten about that tiny note.

I think that that's really a key thing to understanding the Jing character.

The people that we see hate him, it's so fun because they know him.

Well,

that's

well, is what I mean.

They know him, but they're not his friends, and he's not trying to be their friends.

They're his coworkers and bosses,

People who are trying to wrangle him professionally.

They all hate him.

But the people that he just meets or the people who like sees his effects in the world or the people he goes out of his way to spend time with, those people all love him.

But here is a crucial thing.

He then goes on to exploit them.

Yeah, totally.

Oh, yeah, of course.

You know, the people who made Greed Island were like in love with him, and they were also having their names changed by D.C.

Key point: who's he sitting next to the entire time they're locked in the conclave?

It's so weird.

We'll talk about this, but it's yeah, it's or in my notes, it's Dune and Jing's Butler

named List.

And then Jing says something crazy that made me sit up in my chair.

He says, The day Notero blew up,

also crazy way to say that, Jing.

The day Notero blew up, 100 hunter airships departed for East Gorteau.

No record of their departure.

They were apparently like the records said that the airships were being stored for maintenance.

And Cheadle says, How did you know this?

And Jink's just like, You should make friends with some like airmen.

Yeah.

You know, like airship mechanics or whatever.

He's a real hunter.

He does the ground.

He's a real hunter.

Pariston has recovered

5,000 half-human, half-beast cocoons from the ruined palace.

The implication here is these are the sorts of things that they were trying to, that the ants were trying to make that produced number one, Palm's evil ant version, that then got fixed by Kilua, and are probably also semi-related to the hybrids that Zazan

created, but apparently better, because

Jing says these people have probably hatched by now and they know Nen.

Pariston plans to, quote, have a little fun with them.

He says the day of reckoning will be the next hunter exam.

Although, obviously, if the bylaws change, remember this is all fucking tied into everything, um, this won't go as planned.

And then he says, figure the rest out.

Yeah, mine, my um text here says, however, if the bylaws are reformed, the situation situation might change some, which is a little bit like wormier.

It is wormier.

Um,

what the hell is going on here?

Hey, I wish I could tell you.

Does Takashi know how many episodes are left?

He, no, he crucially, he doesn't.

No, yeah, because he's writing a manga, not a TV show.

Yeah, right, but the animators know how many episodes are left.

Yeah, they have to make that decision.

Well, I think that that also might be a no.

Why?

I don't.

By the time they're writing the

time they get into like script supervision, they would know what was what they were going to animate, right?

No, you're right, but I don't, you know, you know how TV works.

You don't know if you're going to know if you're getting renewed or not sometimes.

I feel like this might be a conversation for next week when we actually finish the show.

Because like...

Yep, fair enough.

It's just, it's hard to talk about, at least personally, without getting into how things wrap up in the animation.

A brief note here is that I initially misread the subtitle and thought that Pariston had recovered 500,000 half-human, half-beast cocoons.

That's too many.

That's a lot.

When I learned that it was 5,000, I was a little disappointed.

And then Jing says, yeah, all right.

Good luck.

Bye.

Bye.

I'm leaving the next round of voting.

It's time for speeches.

Leorio's first speech.

No, Leorio, standing on the stage, is thinking to himself, as he continues to think

for the rest of this section.

How the hell did this happen?

Why am I here?

Did I do something wrong?

I don't want to be here.

I hate this.

I don't want to be chairman.

Let me go.

Let me go see Goan.

He's a Tim Robinson character, kind of.

He is a Tim Robinson character, but he's sort of like one of the more normal Tim Robinson characters.

Yeah, like you'd have to change how he is.

He's in a situation a Tim Robinson character would be in, I guess, is more the vibe.

Yes.

You're right.

And though there is a little bit of his speech that it does fit within.

There is.

There is.

I have his speech to play because of how good it is.

First, we'll talk about the other speeches.

The candidates who didn't qualify also get to make a statement, and they almost exclusively use this to throw weight behind other candidates.

We are in ping

territory here.

Yes, first up, we have the hacker who says, your world is not my reality.

Do your own thing.

Jing, you never gave me a chance.

Get back here.

We actually have the dragon guy first, but he's so forgettable that I didn't write him down.

He basically endorses Cheetah.

He just says he should vote for Cheetah.

Um, I'm with her, is what he says.

He says, I'm with her.

Yeah,

and then someone else says, But her emails, he says, Greed Island, go to the polls.

Uh, it's at this point that Peon says, All right, everyone is now locked in until the results is discovered.

Oh, did we talk about the second thing that the hacker said?

That tells Jing to stay, to note.

Yeah, you never gave me a chance, I think, of the words exactly, which is like, I don't know if that ever gets

mentioned.

They were dating what he means by that.

They were dating.

That's what I wrote down too, Keith.

You and me.

We're on the same page, both with house and with

this hacker.

This is my note.

It says, Jing is sitting next to Dune and the other one in the crowd.

Sorry, List.

I didn't write your name down the first time because I thought you were a butler, and I didn't write down your name in any substance.

I forgot that you briefly thought that List actually was a butler instead of one of the creators of Greed Island.

Who is there to

throw water on Dune's fire when Dune is so mad about the name and List is like, yeah, it was fine.

Don't worry about it.

List underrated character design.

They appear very infrequently in the show, but their character design's really cute.

Yeah.

Great outfit, great face.

Meanwhile, inside inside the

written down here, it's a false parking lot hospital, but you know what I mean, right?

They've sort of like built

a hospital.

A portable hospital.

Yeah.

Except I

look like a tent.

Everybody go to the breakout hospital.

Instead, it just looks like a smaller hospital.

Yeah, it's got like real walls and everything.

It even has a hospital sign.

Amane and the car arrive, and waiting outside the hospital are all of our A-tier hunters.

A normal car.

Not her grandmother, just to be clear.

A normal car, not her grandmother, just to be clear.

Oh, right, yeah.

This isn't a Subone car.

Yeah, Palm is there.

Biscuit's there.

Knuckles are there.

Melody's there.

Hanzo is there.

Curveball.

He was there.

Calgo is the last time we recorded.

We talked about him.

We did.

We saw him vote.

We saw him vote.

And we saw him visiting Gone.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I forgot about it.

He was banging on the glass.

Yeah.

And then Garn commands respect, even from people who at the time really, really wanted to kill him.

They were, they, they were trauma bonded, though.

Yeah.

Garreno being here is like,

I wish I could do something to help.

He doesn't actually say this.

This is what I think.

I wish I could do something to help Gone, but my power is summoning two gorillas.

Two gorillas.

And neither one's a doctor.

Neither one.

Maybe one of his doctors should go to school with Leorio.

Oh, sorry.

Maybe one of his gorillas should go to school with Leorio.

Leorio wouldn't realize that, like, it'd be

like they'd put the the gorilla in, like, person clothes, and Leorio wouldn't realize that it's a gorilla until, like, they're graduating together.

I would watch a Leorio

Nen.

A Leorio Nen gorilla doctor sitcom.

Oh, yeah.

Doctor Beast.

How does Nen Beasts work like that?

I think if you summoned

white Gorenu and trained him to become a doctor, and then desummoned him, and then summoned him again, he wouldn't have any of that knowledge.

It would be completely wasted time.

I feel like this runs counter to demon world World theory.

Are the gorillas related to Demon World theory?

Don't you think?

Wouldn't Jack DeKeete say that the gorillas are summoned from Demon World?

I think Jack Dakeet can decide that.

No, I do actually, unfortunately, I do think you might be right.

Yeah.

I think I'm being fact-checked.

Yeah,

I've been paying attention.

We've been doing the show for a long time.

I think the gorillas are summoned from Demon World, probably.

This hospital set is really great for two reasons.

One reason I think is a really nice set design, and the other reason is I think it's really economical set design, which in turn is funny.

The nice set design bit is that inside the doors of the parking lot hospital, remember that the plan was that they are going to drive the car directly into the hospital?

What they've ended up doing is sort of like constructing like a double-shelled building where Amane drives the car inside and it's this like wide road with another hospital built inside it.

I think that's just a really nice, fun detail.

The other thing for Sam Gohn

and for soundproofing.

The other detail is that Goan's room in the other hospital is literally exactly the same set that they used for all the previous Goan hospital appearances,

just without the big window.

This is the Nathan Fielder's there too doing their rehearsal.

You've already got your backgrounds painted, you know.

Which hacker looks like under the mask.

It's Nathan Fielder yeah um did you see the interview recently uh on some red carpet or another where Nathan Fielder said that uh the rehearsal is good for people of all ages children middle-aged people old people even very very old people who are maybe days hours away from death I think the rehearsal would be a good show for them

he's so funny

um Killua and Alica get out of the car.

Killua has this incredible look on his face through these through these whole scenes that is kind of like changed in one crucial moment but on this final approach to the hospital and as he's sitting on the bench waiting for alaka to wake up he has this like beautifully drawn like anticipation and nervousness and excitement and kind of like sort of like um

he's he's like he's like drunk in the power of what it is that he's about to do and and the reunion that's about to happen i think it's really really well drawn um but actually we bounce back before we even do anything here.

We do.

Uh, peon explains that they're prepared to keep the hunters locked in the voting chamber for multiple days in order to secure a resolution to the election.

Um, the vibe for Pariston is that this was unexpected to him, and um, also, I think that this is like Cheadle kind of taking Goan's advice or Jing's advice seriously.

Uh, Jing, though, does not like this because he wanted to leave.

Yeah, I want to leave.

I, hey, have you heard that my son is in the hospital?

I want to get out of here before he wakes up.

I want to go and ride a horse that rides a dog that rides a cow.

Incredibly normal sentence up until I have to leave because I don't want to see him.

Yeah.

I mean, that is like, it's never said, but it is pretty clear that that is specifically, he understands that this is happening and he's trying to get out before it happens.

Yes, it's really good.

I hate drinks so much.

Yeah, he's so fun to hate.

Yeah.

Also, his character design is so understated.

He's just a guy with messy hair in like a head wrap.

That's it.

He's also, we keep saying this, but it really does bear mentioning.

He's small.

He is a short guy.

He is.

He's like,

we know his canonical height, right?

We talked about this in like episode eight or nine, I thought.

We talked about the various heights of Hunter-Hunter characters.

Oh, I wish I could remember.

Yeah.

Here, I'm going to go Jing Fu's height.

5'3.

How tall is Crowlow?

Crowlo is

5'10.

Which is which also we talked about.

I can work with that.

Who do we think is tall?

I mean, I'll be looking at a lesson storm and stuff who are gigantic.

I'm six foot tall.

Who am I as tall as?

You are as tall as

you're one inch shorter than Illumi.

You're as tall as

Nobunaga

and Goto.

I would have thought Nobunaga would be taller.

Nobunaga is 153 centimeters.

Goto is 182 centimeters.

Akunoda also 182 centimeters.

Maluki also 182 centimeters.

Maluki is tall.

Uvogin, Jack, do you have a guess on how tall Uvogin is?

Uvogin is

six foot eight.

He is eight foot five and a half.

Uvogin should have been trying to kill people.

He stands two heads taller than Franklin at 7'2.

Who's the tallest character?

Uvogin.

Uvogien.

And then

Silva is

the tallest person of normal height, which is 6'6.

Still wildly tall, but not

like not 7'2, not 8'5.

Leorio, 6'4.

Second, second, sorry, fourth tallest.

Second tallest in the six-feet range.

Wow.

Yep.

Gon's five.

Who's the smallest?

Kaluto is four, eight.

Oh,

Kaluka is not on this list and is probably shorter than Kaluto.

Well, there was a baby who could fit in a hand, so there was a baby.

Who even knows how tall that baby is now?

Meroim is quite short.

How tall's Poof?

Poof is

not pictured.

This is all complete garbage.

Yeah, this is like stuff from like a supplemental book that's like a fan, not written by fans.

This is a technically canon book, I believe.

Yeah, but it doesn't.

This happens in a lot of things, especially animated stuff.

It does not line up

one-to-one because, for example, like

Krolo and Karapika on screen definitely look like they have more than a three-inch difference in their heights.

Yeah, that is what this, what it says is that

character official heights are wildly inconsistent from how they're drawn.

Yes.

Yes, because if you're drawing them,

you're trying to get eyelines.

You're trying to make eyelines interesting more than you're trying to be like, Hisuka has to be 5'10 or whatever.

Yeah.

I think Hisuka's probably like 6'3.

6'10.

Hisuka is 6'1.5.

So pretty close.

All right.

It's the hair.

It's totally the hair.

Visually on this chart, he's looks taller because of the hair than Leoria, who's 6'4.

It's time for the speeches.

And the speeches are

two apiece hilarious.

Ms.

Istom stands up and immediately endorses Cheadle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I quit.

This is

in formal resignation because they can't, they're not technically allowed to resign.

No, it's at this point that I went to the Media Club Plus chat and typed Calvin Bull ass election.

I knew that this was the moment that made you say that.

That's really funny.

I was not sure what that was going to be about because so much of it is.

It's time for Cheetah's speech.

She stands up and immediately endorses Leorio.

Yes,

Dr.

Warmhearted Miser players.

Dr.

Warmhearted Miser plays.

This is also really fun because something that

Jing said that was kind of hackneyed in his house speech was like, you're so predictable and you need to

wrong foot Pariston.

And obviously Cheetah has her other reasons for endorsing Leorio, but I think a primary one here is that she thinks Pariston will not expect this.

Leorio sits silently.

It's not clear whether he's asleep.

He might be.

I think he's just lost in thought until Pion wakes him up.

He can't think of anything to say.

How much of the speech do you have, Keith?

I have 100% of the speech.

It's fairly long.

Would you like

to listen?

I have 90% of the speech.

I cut out a few lines in the middle.

To Leorio's speech.

Yeah.

Hit it.

If I'm

Finally, a platform.

The truth is.

It's not like I could help Ghon if I were with him anyway.

Ghon is a friend, a buddy.

And right now, while I'm here with you, he's dying.

I just

recently realized it, though.

While I was off studying, not thinking of anyone but myself.

Drinking, moving from place to place.

Wanking off, partying with girls, surfing the net.

He was putting his life on the line, fighting to save others

from Montague's

team.

And now, even as we speak, one of them is risking his own life to save Goans.

I wish there was more I could have done besides talk to him.

Please, help save Goan!

Use your heads!

If you have an idea, do it!

Tell me how I can save him, please!

I'll do it!

Gene,

I think I understand why you didn't dodge when he punched you.

Reveal!

Even in that moment, you already knew he might have a chance to win.

I'm perfectly fine with having him as chairman.

Damn.

Sorry.

Think I said more than I needed to.

Forget the wanking part.

He's the fucking best.

He is the best.

Round of applause.

Forget

the wanking part.

Round of applause.

I'm sure.

Slow clap into round of applause.

Started by

Greed Island.

Tesgara?

Tesguera, yes.

Oh, yeah.

I almost said the name of a manga character.

Leorio is Hunter-Hunter internet key in a lot of ways, and I feel like that speech from the high melodrama of

I command all of you to help save Goan, the sort of like fun twist of I'll abuse my authority, but really to help save someone, the

over-the-top,

he was, I couldn't do anything, I'm begging you to tell me how to save him, The throwaway reference to

actually, it's not just the throwaway, it's the extended list.

Leorio's activities, not thinking of anyone but himself, drinking, moving from place to place, wanking off, partying with girls and stuff like the net in the middle of it.

And then the punchline at the end being after Cheadle's clear-headed, I'm perfectly fine with having him as the chairman.

Leorio's, forget the wanking part, I'm done.

It's great.

Please remember the partying with girls part, though.

That's really important.

Super important.

It wasn't.

wasn't just wanking.

It was also partying.

Actually, actually, you should know that.

He also said surfing the net, which might as well have been saying wanking again.

Yeah.

Leorio was in the goon cave when he should have been making a gone save, is what he's saying.

I feel like the pace, the dialogue pace, the kind of like the cadence of the way Leario speaks sometimes is very similar to the way Tagashi writes when he writes out of character.

If you read his like intros and outros to the manga where he is complaining about one thing or another, or like when we read the thing where he was playing that like extended dice game with everybody,

I feel like he and the Leorio exam that he did

speak in very similar ways.

Pariston steps up to make a speech.

Cheadle thinks that this is a done deal, and Pariston cannot be beaten by Leorio.

Cheadle is doing constant election math in her head, like this many people vote for this,

which is like Cheeto is still playing the wrong game.

She was like not really able to take Jing's advice to try not to win.

Instead, she did stuff that was unexpected, like locking everyone in and endorsing Leorio, which were they were unexpected, but they were to try to win.

She just stopped trying to win for herself and started trying to win for Leorio.

Yeah,

people are like taking out their cell cell phones because I think they're like wildly bored of the election proceedings at this point.

And

I read that as that they're like trying to take videos of Leario to be like talking about the phone.

Yeah, that could be it.

I couldn't remember what it actually was.

Yo, check out this based wanker.

Leario, Twitch username, the based wanker.

The based wanker.

Peon yells everyone to stop using their cell phones, and Pariston, I fucking hate Pariston, He begins his speech by saying, everyone, feel free to keep using your cell phones.

That's the true hunter spirit.

Ring the bell.

We have found it.

What is a hunter?

Someone who keeps using their cell phone, even when they're asked not to.

Don't go watch movies with them.

I want to go watch movies with them.

I would like to call back.

I want to compliment myself.

Sorry.

But one of the first times that we were asking what a hunter was, I can't remember, I started or ended an episode with the Goodfellas speech of always wanted to be a gangster, but just replaced the word gangster with hunter.

Yeah.

That is such a through line of

the show, though.

Like,

we just want to be able to do

what we want when we want.

Fuck the rules.

We're the fuck the rules rules committee.

Yes.

Yeah.

There there is

owe nothing to anybody outside of the hunters, and frankly, we owe nothing to anybody outside of ourselves, as it's been demonstrated.

The hunters will tear each other apart if they need to.

With the

like

highlight that

by creating a culture like that and trying to create sort of an ideological

way of filtering people through, that you'll end up with ideally people like Jing

who the thing that they want to do

yes the thing that they want to do is like uncover ancient temples and open up public museums which is good to do but it just seems like a lot of weird steps to get there and it also seems like that's not what most hunters are doing No, instead what they've ended up with is the guy saying, well, what do you mean I can't use two seats?

I want a seat to put my feet up on, but also he can melt you with his mind.

Yeah.

The hunter is the guy who is watching TikToks at full volume in the airport lounge and sees absolutely no reason why that is problematic.

It's what people who tell you the boys is good thinks the boys is.

Oh my god, is the boys good?

It's probably not.

It can't be.

I'm not going to find out.

I'm not going to.

tell you.

I don't need to find out.

Yeah.

It has that guy.

That guy would be a pretty good Pariston, though, wouldn't he?

That actor?

The guy who plays the guy they always

plays Holman in the Gifter?

Yeah, the gift of the gifts.

The one in the gifts.

Yeah.

Sure.

He's a bit too hard-faced for Parriston.

Pariston needs to have a soft, smiley face.

Yeah.

I'll never forgive the boys for replacing The Tick, a much better show.

Oh, The Tick was pretty good with Peter Sarafinovitz.

It was really, really good.

Although Peter Sarafinovitz is a British comedian, so you're on fucking thin ice, mate.

Yeah, watch yourself, Peter Sarafinowitz, and your long-ass fucking name.

Griffin Newman also is Arthur, really good.

Oh, he was really good in that show.

Yeah.

Put Griffin Newman in more stuff.

Hey, you know who are Hunters?

Who?

Greg Davis and Alex Horn.

Sure, yeah, totally.

Yeah.

The Taskmaster and the Taskmaster's assistant are both absolutely hunters.

They're also a stand user and a stand.

stand.

Who is who?

Which is which?

I think Greg is Alex's stand, right?

That'd be, I don't know, because I don't think Alex has the strength of will for that.

Greg would not have Relics as a stand.

He would, but he would think he was.

You don't get to choose your stand.

Y'all saw that.

Yeah, remember that came out of that boy.

Sure.

Also, I mean, I feel like the running joke in Hunter Hunter is that Alex is the evil one.

alex is the one you mean intact master

the running joke in hunter hunter is that alex horn is evil

alex is alex is the evil one all right um moving on bob mortimer should play jing in a live-action hunter hunter bob mortimer is a hunter through and through yeah anyway um

okay hang on thanks and we need a video about bob mortimer yeah uh parriston uh gives his speech it's also about voting for someone else he says forget about me.

You should vote for Mizaistam because he embodies the three characteristics that a good leader should have, which is combat ability, experience, and caliber.

In my translation, caliber is translated as, quote, having what it takes.

Yeah, I saw that one too.

I chose caliber because I think having what it takes is not, I think it's kind of clunky.

Keep talking.

I'm looking for something in my notes.

And he makes a hilarious joke that nobody laughs at, which is that Cheadle doesn't have the combat ability.

Leorio doesn't have the experience.

He also doesn't have the combat ability, but he doesn't know that.

And that Pariston doesn't have any of those three.

You were supposed to laugh.

He had a please clap moment.

He had a Jeb push.

Oh my

God.

Ask myself, I laugh all three.

You were supposed to laugh there.

We've made a lot of election jokes, but I really was not expecting a Jeb mention.

And from Pariston, who doesn't seem like a Jeb at all.

No, he's not.

No.

Ms.

Eistom is a Jeb.

Ms.

Eistom is a Jeb, yeah.

The cow that no one cares about.

During Pariston's speech, Cheetah is having a total breakdown

and concludes that the reason that she can't stand...

Pariston, every time he opens his mouth, she gets so mad and why she fucking hates him and why she wish he would shut the fuck up is that he never says what he's truly thinking, which to me I'm like

Yeah, that's what we that's the thought that I thought we all had that in our heads that that's what he is

She's doing more I think go ahead.

I think you're right, but also the fact that we made a point on media club plus of noticing the first time we saw Pariston's mask drop I think I think it is worth

Highlighting how dramatic it is that he really does never say what he is he never says but I but I feel like she's been saying he's so full of shit for 10 episodes yes you're right uh but uh she's still doing election math in her head being like he still doesn't have it leorio's still gonna come out number one

um

uh and then her and mizaistom have a sort of psychic link they say uh this election has one purpose this is where we destroy pariston's regime um they're convinced that he has like underworld ties uh they have no evidence for this but they're like we fucking know know that if he gets elected chairman, it's over.

Like, they've got underworld theory.

Also, Cheadle has been given like one piece of really concerning information,

which is that 500,000 hunter cocoons.

I believe they were.

500,000 and cocoons.

No, I thought it was 500,000.

The actual number is 5,000.

No, I was just going the wrong way on purpose.

From East Koto.

Cheetah is not really thinking about this.

She's doing election math, but I do think that she is, you know, Jing has given her a very scary piece of information.

The thing that I went into my notes to look up is, do you remember when Chairman Natero was staging the Battle Royale fight at the end of the Hunter exam that turned into Break This Boy's Legs 2025?

The

loser moves on battle royale.

Yes.

He was scoring each of them in three categories and those categories were physical strength mental acuity and overall impression oh shit wow isn't that great yeah that's really good i didn't put that together by the time we get to pariston he is talking about

uh let me write see see exactly what i wrote down here um

combat strength, experience, and having what it takes.

The apple does not fall far from the tree.

And he does explicitly tie wisdom or experience to wisdom.

So it basically is like mental acuity.

It's really good.

And Caliber is pretty analogous to

what was it?

General impression?

Yeah, overall impression.

General impression, yeah.

Okay.

Voting 45s.

Yeah.

Yes, but can I grab a LaCroix?

Yes.

You may.

I will be right back.

I'm going to fill up my water.

145 begins with a real vote of confidence.

All these votes have been painstakingly counted by Beans.

Just one.

Just one what?

One.

Just one guy?

Just one bean counting every single vote.

How can one bean count all those votes?

Do you think beans knows nen?

Yeah, oh, that's a great question.

Probably.

Also, is Beans counting the votes like a Bean counter joke?

Oh, I think it's spilling the beans from earlier.

Yeah.

Beans and his sister T.

He has to be a hunter, a hunter.

And because he knows about the Hunter Association, he must have passed the secret hunter exam, which is learning Nen.

Yeah, I bet Netaro taught him.

Oh, you think that he was recruited, handpicked by Netaro.

I mean, I don't know that, but I think that like Netaro would, at the very least, be like, you're going to be my toady.

You need to know Nan.

What if, after we conclude Hunter Hunter Media Club Plus, we go through the extremely lengthy and convoluted process that it would require to interview Yoshihiro Tagashi and only ask him one question, which is, what's going on with beans?

I listen.

I'm down.

He gives his answer.

We say, thank you very much for your time, Takashi-san.

Goodbye.

Thank you for your work.

Take it easy.

Take it easy.

After this round of the election, Leorio is on top.

Unfortunately, he is only on top with 44%.

It is another first time that someone besides Pariston has been on top.

Yes, and the hunters make note of this as being like, this is exciting.

This means that we are down to the final two.

It is Pariston Hill and Leorio Paradonite, a guy who showed up purely because he punched Jing freaks in the head.

And it cannot be emphasized enough.

Leario cannot believe this and does not want to be here.

He does not want to be chairman.

He is muttering under his breath, what am I supposed to do?

I don't fucking want to be here.

I don't want to be chairman.

What is going on?

Jing is still asleep.

At the hospital, Alaka wakes up.

Kiluwa looks so happy to see her, still in this kind of like jittery, excited state.

And he explains in very plain terms gone's sickness to alaka something i really like here is that alaka's ability is so powerful that she doesn't actually require a lot of information here ghoan doesn't need to tell her about how you know he used up all his nen for one big attack or anything he just says my friend is sick and he doesn't have to check do you think you can do this no because it will work there is absolutely

there is at no point any doubt that this will work

Well, doubt sets in for what, or possibly doubts in just a moment.

But beforehand,

Alaka says, So I have to switch with Nanika?

No, fair.

I never get to spend any time with you.

And this is when we learn a little bit about how this works, right?

Like a sort of a final wrinkle on the rule, which is that Alaka is only awake when Nanika is asleep.

And so she actually spends less time than you would think.

This is when Killua briefly breaks the fourth wall in narration.

He says

she spends less time as Alaka than you'd think.

And it's not clear who he's talking to here.

And it never seems, we don't cut away to like him explaining this to somebody.

This is just Killua addressing the viewer briefly.

I don't know what this is about.

Yeah.

I don't think it's like meaningful, but I did think it was an interesting choice of words.

Did you also get that use of you there, Keith?

It didn't strike me as as odd,

although it is odd.

I think it's just that there's not a PowerPoint target.

And so the

characters who love PowerPoints just duel anything.

So there's a sort of like you understood of like,

if there was someone else here, I would have to explain this to them.

Yes.

They're desperate to do PowerPoints at almost any point.

Yeah.

But Kilo says, we're always going to be together from now on, and that's a promise.

Um after one of Nanaka's demands fails and people die, Alaka is awake until Nanaka makes the next level one demand.

If the person Nanaka is making demands on leaves her side, the demand is put on hold, and Alika wakes up until that person comes back.

After she heals someone, she goes to sleep.

Then Alika is awake until the next wish.

I want to make this wish the last, so Nanaka will never awaken again.

We are closing off Demon World in the final moments of this show.

What do you think about this plan, Jack?

I love it.

I think it's very sweet.

What do you mean?

Which bit of the plan?

I think the idea of like you can live as a person now and not as a wish creature is really sweet.

I think that the like sleeping and waking Nen abilities, I think that there's some fun paralleling going on here where Goan spent all of his Nen and would never be able to use Nen again to do this final attack for Pito.

And instead, Killer is kind of giving his sister a gift that she never has to use her abilities again.

Although we don't know that what Alaka does is Nen.

I still don't really think it is.

But yeah, I like it.

Why do you ask?

Just that it's like a lot of exposition to put into this bit.

There's the

way Alaka Nanaka works.

There's the using the Nanaka to heal Goan.

And then there's this like secondary objective of sealing Nanaka away.

I think that it is delivered a little clumsily, and we kind of got to that by talking about the PowerPoint that happens, even though there's no PowerPoint target.

But I think what's actually happening is really clear, and I think it matches well, or it meshes well, with

how slight the explanation of the nature of the wish to alaka is.

It is as simple as

please heal my friend, Gun, is how the wish works in the end.

they uh when they something interesting happening here tsubone is watching the scene take place and so is ilumi because tsubone is still wearing her

glass right they say zaldic butler bullshit they say this um in the in the standoff scene we didn't talk about it but um they mention how like illumi's like wow you figured out what was going on but because of your loyalty, you didn't take off the glass.

You knew that I was fucking things up, and you still let me do that because you're a good one.

She's still doing it.

Yeah, she's still doing it.

Yeah.

The loyalty to the Zelda family is, it turns out, greater than loyalty to Kilua.

And I think that that might not necessarily have been true for Goto.

Definitely isn't true for Canary.

Right.

Who doesn't appear in these episodes at all?

There's a sub

uh voice does.

There's an underlying detail, which is that

we do have on screen subone saying like

killua has this like i don't think that illumi can touch him

yes so i i think that her i think it's an easier choice and who knows is this self-delusion are you just like giving yourself an out to keep doing your job and keep taking orders uh regardless of if it's that true we do have her saying out loud like

i don't need to stack the deck for kilua because because it's it's a done deal.

Because he can beat Illumi, yeah.

Yeah, this is when she calls Ilumi sinister and mechanical.

They enter Gohan's ventilated room.

We have some close-ups here on Goan's bandages before we see

going.

This is so bad.

He is

desiccated.

I don't want to get too gross.

He is,

even under his bandages, his bandages are soiled with blood.

What is happening to Goan is kind of continuing to happen such that changing his bandages is

almost like a fool's game.

He's got Nanaka.

He's got teeth fingers.

Yeah, Nanaka quietly says, hand, hand.

They look like tree branches almost.

He looks all made of bark.

Goan's hand and arm is completely ruined.

It is like dry bark.

It's also like Notaro's body in his final moments.

And this is presented as like a complete body horror moment.

We look up at Killua and his face is just awful.

Like all color drained from it.

His eyes are massive.

He's got the like scratchy lines around his irises.

The horror in seeing his friend like this is so immense that even knowing Alaka's kind of like frankly unstoppable capability, his faith is kind of like shaken.

in this moment.

And it's here that he makes the wish.

Alaka's Hands Glow and the Nen cue plays.

We have in the past called this cue like mystical Nen.

I think we heard it for the first time when

Wing did the divination.

Yeah, this is like the Mystery of Nen kind of

like special song.

There's two.

There's Latent Power, which is what's playing leading up, and that's the sort of creepier one.

And then this is Auras,

which is the like, this this is like nen miracles happening i really liked this uh my subtitles in this moment uh called this surreal music which is great i couldn't have called it that but it's kind of like that i think i'd have said like choral music or like um

surreal's not so bad weird weird music yeah weird music i don't have a button for it but i'll i'll put i'll put a little bit under it is one of my favorite tracks in the thing it's so beautiful

anyway oh there's an amazing Hirano track later that I think is a drum break from something else, but could also just be new at this point in the show.

And there is no new stuff until the very last episode, and it's only

a sort of reorchestration of

Hiori Itai.

Nanika's hands glow.

There is a bright white light, and from the outside of the hospital, a butler is like knocked back by the sheer force of magic, um, kind of pouring off the hospital.

It burns in this sort of like purgative black and white fire.

It's it's like black dust is pouring upwards off the hospital while it's also burning white.

Everyone looks shocked.

It evokes the nen that Gon used in the coming and arc too with this, but

yeah, but they've added this sort of like white energy to it as well.

Um, yeah,

yeah,

it's really good.

No one knows what's going on because they don't know about Alaka.

Morel has this look on his face.

Just like, what the fuck is happening?

Even the Zaldic family watching through the eye react in shock.

And Mizaistom in the locked election room senses something.

massive happening.

And the thing that they're sensing is kind of twofold, right?

They are sensing not just the immense power of Alaka as she brings Goan back to life, but they are are also feeling the rebirth of the protagonist.

Goan is re-entering the world.

Three days later.

Three days later.

But this is like a world-shaking event.

You know, as the show has gone on and on, Goan's kind of like

lethal charisma and terrifying capability to draw people.

uh into his orbit even as they are kind of like seeing him as a beautiful object of manipulation as like a very very powerful gun that they can point at people um

is,

you know, that is the way that God operates within the language of the show, and he has been inert for the last chunk of show, and here people are feeling the prodigal son returning.

Except Leorio, who doesn't seem to sense it and is still mad that he is winning.

He's locked in the conclave.

Can't go to the Gon Cave.

Jing, awake, closes his eyes and smiles.

There's something really odd about the way this power is depicted inside the hotel room.

It's very static.

Not in the sense of static electricity, but static in the sense of stillness.

No hair moves on character.

Sometimes when we see powerful Nen, we see it in these episodes as well.

Ilumi has like a big rush of Nen later and his hair goes billowing up around him.

The Chimera ants, Pito's hair, ruffles.

Killer's hair spikes up when he uses his electricity powers.

But nothing moves in the hotel room.

Everybody's clothes are still, um, nobody's hair is moving.

Uh, Ilumi, sorry, Alaka and Kilua are stationary.

I think it's really great because

the ground is shaking and this power is rushing off Alaka, and they're just standing there.

That stillness adds to the sort of like miraculous energy of it, honestly.

Yeah, definitely.

I think I really enjoy it.

I'm glad you pointed that out.

Um,

Ilumi loves this.

Watching through the glass, he says, ah, it's magnificent.

I want this.

I want this power.

This belongs to me.

He spreads his arms out and his hair pours upwards off his head, almost like

the burning smoke of Gohn's hair during Ghan's very bad time.

Except Ilumi is laughing.

Big wide, crazy smile.

He loves it.

He loves it.

Oh, yeah.

He's a sicko.

He's a freak, and I hate him.

Yeah, this is so grim and so evil that on seeing his sister's like reparative power, his thought isn't, you know,

we did wrong by her.

She had this great capability in her all along that we never, you know,

spent any time thinking about.

We're too busy feeding tourists to her.

He thinks, oh, this is the most powerful thing and it belongs to me.

Yeah, it's the the same way that he thinks about Kilua, right?

Except it's the same way that he thinks about Kilua, yeah.

At least with Kilua, it's the same way that he thinks about most people, it seems right.

That's the thing, too, but at least with Kilua, he does sort of occasionally treat Kilua like a person, a person he's abusing, but a person, right?

Yeah, it is the thing that Kilua was worried about, which is that she that she would go from something that is like too dangerous to use and thus must must be kept like locked away, which is bad, to someone who is not too dangerous to use and then a tool.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's some great scary Zeldic behavior that previously Aluka was really scary because the Zelda's were going to use her for destructive purposes, and immediately on learning that she has this other power, they're like, oh, we'll use that too.

This is great.

Meanwhile, in the election room, the candidates are allowed two more speeches.

Peon sort of makes a gesture at Leorio here and says, if the candidates want, because she can see that Leorio is both tuned out and going to win.

The funniest possible outcome.

Pariston wants to make a speech.

He begins by saying, well, it feels like we're winding down here.

I cannot overstate how slimy this guy is.

It's so good.

Picture the slimiest used car salesman you can think of and add another layer of slime.

But also shiny.

With that twinkling shine.

There's glitter in the slime.

That's where the glitter goes.

Remember when people were like, where's all the glitter going?

Oh, Pariston Hill.

He's slim to Pariston Hill.

Yeah.

That's his nun power.

He's covered in a light film of slime that collects the glitter.

Pariston Hill's nun power works like this.

He

sparkle slime surprise.

He starts pressing Leorio on specifics.

He's like, all right, so again, I'm going to ask you what you're going to do if you're elected.

And Leorio says, I'll save Goan and you'll help.

And Pariston briefly thinks to him, so he looks up at the back of the room and he thinks, ah, this would have been perfect timing.

Yeah.

Oh, well, I'm not God, but I try.

I love this because it's the only thing that we get that tells us exactly what's happening and exactly the mistake that Cheadle is about to make.

Yeah.

Yes, Pariston is waiting for Goan.

Yeah.

And more,

the next maneuver, because Cheadle is like, everybody already knows that Leorio doesn't know what he's talking about.

That's why they're voting for him,

which is very funny in and of itself.

He's got good vibes.

But

then he tries to start changing the hunter bylaws.

He's just like, now, let's revote.

Yeah, let's do it.

I'm calling an emergency council, is what he says.

Council

election to try to change the hunter exam rules and the bylaws.

Kansai, the tiger, gets all mad.

It's like, you can't do that.

We already voted, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then Cheadle identifies this mistake.

Parison's like, no, no, you don't understand.

I'm not trying to do this as a member of the Zodiacs.

I'm trying to do it as the vice chairman and as a candidate.

This is the only time.

And he's talking very slowly and deliberately and explaining everything because he's really trying to run down the clock.

This is the only time I'm going to get to do this.

I really, really want to just help,

you know, a kinder, gentler Hunter Association.

I'm just the vice chairman, and it's my birthday.

And I'm wearing glasses.

You wouldn't hit me, would you?

This is where it hits Cheadle for the last time, I think.

He doesn't want to win.

He doesn't want to lose either.

I have to say, Jing, looks like you were right.

What a creep.

He doesn't care about winning or losing at all.

So nothing.

With nothing of his own at risk, he can always stay dispassionate and calm while he manipulates others and plays the rules against us in the worst way any of us us could possibly imagine.

Sound familiar?

Does it sound familiar?

He, um, this is some lovely Pariston planning as well, actually, because, you know, you're right, Keith.

His number one goal here is to run down the clock.

Wait for Goan to return.

Goan freaks, the return of the protagonist is going to seal this for Pariston.

But it's also really clever, because this is also a play for Teradane's voting block, because that was what he always wanted to do.

And also, reforming the bylaws now in this moment would let Parriston arrange the Hunter exam in ways that would be most beneficial for whatever it is that he's got planning with the 500 billion.

But then, what does he say to Cheetah every time we say it?

He looks at Cheadle and he's like, Don't worry, when I win, I'm not really going to change anything.

Yeah,

he's like, This is really just a play, yeah, play for time.

Cheadle kind of makes her final desperate play here.

She raises her hand and volunteers to be Leorio's advisor if he wins.

And she says, he doesn't care about shit, pointing at Leorio, but I will conduct a full review of the bylaws and exam.

Leorio's response to this is,

and I wrote this down exactly, I don't know what you guys are talking about.

I love him.

She offers, they are trying to make a 20-year-old the Pope.

She even offers to resign from the zodiacs if it means that she's allowed to be

advisor, which is very funny because it sort of sounds, without thinking about it, like a sacrifice.

But actually, what she's saying is,

I will volunteer to be the king regent.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'll be the man behind the throne.

Even if it means I have to quit my job on the council.

Oh, no, guys.

I have to stop doing the dog gimmick.

Oh, no.

Oh, you guys.

Yeah, once again, sort of like intent, but unable to identify which direction Periston is moving.

She thinks that he's trying to win Teradane's votes, which I'm sure he would be happy to have.

But really, we know he's trying to run down the clock and that by

trying to assuage voters and keep them from running to Pariston, it's actually doing the exact opposite.

Yes.

Hundred ability would be called best in show.

I love that.

I love that.

Moral throws open the door to the chamber here and shouts for Leorio.

It's great.

Everybody turns.

Pariston looks down.

Morel raises a thumb and gives a big thumbs up to Leorio.

Tiny smile from Pariston.

Yeah, this is tears start to appear in Leorio's eyes.

And at this point, Morrel.

I was going to say, Morel showed up because he heard the wanking comment and he wanted to show his support for it.

That's why he's so emotional.

Sorry, you can keep talking about the show in a serious manner.

An incredible drum cue is playing at this point.

Keith, what is this drum cue pulled from?

I have always loved

the way Hirana writes electric guitars and drums.

He is killing it in this moment.

I believe that this is the track, What's Going On Here?

I'm going to link this, Jack.

You can tell me if this is what you're thinking of.

I see some fun.

He's so fun.

Oh, it's an adverb.

He's very bombastic with the drums.

It's so fun.

Get a lot of reverb.

Oh, like, there's always like one drum that has a lot of reverb on it.

Like, I really like his, um, it came up earlier, but like, not his work on it specifically, but his death note composing I really enjoy as well.

Is it also very

bit more

I think that's just like a thing with him, if I'm remembering correctly, but to me it reminds me a lot of his York New era composing.

It's so beautiful.

He has these like

You're right, Keith.

He has like a big taiko drum kind of like anchoring, like a big reverb heavy drum, anchoring the beat in a lot of his drum work.

And then rather than giving

the

accompaniment to like cymbals or snares, he gives it to these sort of just like

little metal toms or something, like orchestral drums

that give it this great sort of like little shimmery.

And then as this continues, there's this tiny little clave pattern of just two wooden sticks being clicked together.

And it's really panned, really wide as well.

You know, each of the drum kind of instances are coming from places all around you even when he's working really really good even when he's working with um like a more traditional kit uh like a like a rock kit uh there they'll be like the snare will be like big reverb snare and then everything else will kind of be like kind of dry or like straight dry drum sound or maybe there'll be like a big reverb there's always something in the drums that sounds huge and cavernous and everything else is like yeah kind of typical

yeah he's also when he plays with the rock kit, he or his drummer.

I don't know whether or not the digital or if he's got a live drummer or if he is the live drummer.

I'm not sure how this soundtrack was recorded.

It sounds digital to me.

I'm not sure.

His stuff on the hi-hat with the rock kit is really good as well.

He has these beautiful, like syncopated hi-hat rolls ticking away in the back of all that stuff.

I would listen to Hirano write drum parts all the time.

Goan emerges into the light, silhouetted against the kind of like the bright white of the door.

This is not the golden light of like Goan, you are like the sun.

This is just Goan against the thing.

He is wearing a hospital gown and slippers.

It is genuinely great to see him back.

And then every, it's so good.

And then everyone sort of fades in behind him, too.

Yeah, the hunters all appear behind.

Not Killer.

Goan looks great.

Not only does he look healthy, he is like bright-eyed, smiling.

Yeah, he looks happy and bashful.

Yeah, he's embarrassed about

the hubbub.

Leorio wails that he was so worried about him.

This is when I wrote down, he is in the same room as Jing, because it's true.

There is a big leap from Goan.

It's adorable.

It is the cutest shit in the show.

He is delighted.

Jing has

his eyes shut, and he collides with Leorio in midair, and they hug.

Goan makes a noise as the air is knocked out of him.

I was worried about how to properly communicate this, but then I remembered that I'm on a call with someone who can make any noise in the world.

Keith, do you recall the noise that Goan makes when he impacts Leorio?

Oh, I don't remember it.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I didn't pick up this.

I was too busy watching

how

well this is rendered in the animation, like this kind of full and

hug.

Yeah.

And it's, it's so good that Leorio has spent so long being like grumpy and sad about Goan.

And he's such a curmudgeon.

And we've known that forever.

But the other thing that we've known forever is how

you know, Machi has a heart of gold.

And they, it really

works like to finally show Leorio kind of totally unbound from whatever his kind of like uh shithe act that he does is

like we've already known that this is who Leorio is, but it's the first time he really shows it.

Why focus on oh, sorry, Sylvia.

I was just gonna say, I love the way he's animated here.

He becomes like he, all of his limbs are wet spaghetti.

Like, they're like, he's so noodly, he's so floppy, and just like

he has completely just come apart because he sees his little buddy again i wrote that oh it's so nice that gone gets to be in the same room and his as his dad and his real dad um

like leorio loves that boy so much and it comes across so well in the animation and it really it's you know who else loves scone freaks everybody killua zeldic yeah that's true that's true where is he He's got a little sister to take care of.

Where is Kilua?

And in fact, Morel has a little moment here.

He tells Leorio not to tell Goan that Killua healed him for Killua's sake.

I don't know about this.

This whole scene.

Okay, I've got it.

I've got the noise.

You ready?

Yeah.

Wow.

It's pretty good.

It's pretty good.

It really is what it sounds like.

This whole scene to me has a little bit of the feeling in the horror movie when the character improbably escapes from the terrible situation that they're in.

Say, for example, um, caving accident that's gone horribly wrong, and you're being pursued by strange pale creatures down in the dark.

There's a summer camp, and there's a guy in a hockey mask.

Yeah, and you've escaped from the situation, and everything seems really good, but it kind of feels kind of dreamlike.

People are just like,

you know, you go back to your job where you're an author, and your agent calls and says that, you know, so-and-so is giving you a book deal with a $400,000 advance, and that's never happened before.

And your wife, who you'd previously been estranged from, returns home and she's happy to see you.

And your apartment is slightly bigger than it always was.

And then, you know, you look over and maybe, you know, like a painting on the wall is dripping blood or something.

And it's that moment here for me, which is Morel saying to Leorio, don't

let him know that Killiua saved him for his sake.

And of course, what ends up happening in those movies is that we learn that we are still in the cave, you know, we're still in the summer camp.

This has been some sort of dreamlike hallucination in your very depths of despair.

But this is paced so strangely and is so celebratory that it really does have this sort of slightly unsettling feeling about it to me.

I don't think that's where we're going.

And I'm really curious to see

how this continues because so much of the

the kind of the the the power and the horror of the end of Chimera, right?

Was that like Goan was able to do this

at a terrible cost

and and

he was pulled out of a tailspin by the love and care of his friends

But the the the the the reveal that there is no cost to be you know and I had assumed it it was going to be set up where it's like, well, bringing Goan back to life is going to incur a terrible cost on Killiwa.

And we're going to have a plot about how we work through that cost.

I did not think that this show was getting to an end where we just we're just stuck in the pit forever.

You know, like,

the cost is going to be paid.

We're going to get out of this well.

But I had thought we're, it's going to be about paying the cost.

But with the discovery, the revelation that good Alaka doesn't demand a cost,

part of me is like, is this just Goan's arm getting healed by the angel at the end of Greed Island?

We did.

Now, when we mentioned that, when we talked about that originally, we might have been like, huh, maybe hold that in your head.

Yeah, because

now, there's a way you frame this, right?

Which is like, well, the thing that it's actually about is getting Alica out and getting Goan healed, kind of like squaring off the board.

And I don't mean that necessarily pejoratively, saying, you know, this is a story about the transformative power of love in situations where people are desperately in need of it or have been deprived of it

um or or you know are looking for a family that they have been denied or or love that they've been denied sorry can you repeat that i i lost internet for a second uh this is a story about was what i the transformative power of love for people who have have have been denied it

or have been lacking it or have been searching for it and been unable to find it the way those relationships can kind of transform each other.

And so there's a way of coming to the end of this show where you're like, we have essentially rounded the whole thing off by showing Goan go through absolute destructive hell in Chimera Ant and being brought back by Killior, who simultaneously uses this as an opportunity to rescue his sister.

Hey, oh no.

We can kind of use the same moment for the whole time.

No.

In short, shows about love,

transforming people.

Got it.

So, the thing I

don't know, maybe this is like a preview for a conversation we can have next time.

Sure.

I don't necessarily like you were, Jack, were talking about how you were worried about there being like sort of a cost incurred in healing Goan and like or not having a cost or not having a cost.

The thing is, I feel like the

cost

has already been paid in a lot of ways like i feel like we can't look at kilowa's arc and say that there wasn't really like a toll paid for for what's happened i don't know and same with gone and like i i think that just because

gone has

again we have to see how these last three episodes shake out i don't want to give too much away just because gone is physically back in one piece seems like fit as a fiddle you know um

doesn't necessarily wipe away the

last 140 episodes of

everything that he's had to go through, right?

Like, there is still, there is still, like,

an effect and a, like,

a mark that has been left on the journey that he took with Killowa.

And I also think that, like,

Killow isn't you pointed out very deftly that like

Killowa is not in this scene.

Not at all.

And maybe, like,

maybe that's part of the cost with all this stuff, right?

He certainly seemed like he would be here.

Yes,

it makes perfect sense, right?

Because of his love bordering on obsession.

Well, like, you picture this, say, say, like, obviously you wouldn't tell someone that this scene happens when they're watching, like...

Greed Island or Yorknew or whatever.

But, like, if you knew that there was a big moment where Gone is like, like, brought back, like, rescued or whatever, brought back, and everyone's there to celebrate him.

And, like, it's a touching reunion with people, you would expect Killowa to be right there next to him.

You'd expect a bedside scene, right?

Yeah.

Yes, but we don't get any of that.

And I think it's like actually a really,

again,

I might need to...

put a put a lid on it here, but I think it is a really good

way of once again showing that there has been a strain on the friendship between these two from

like both intentional and not you know like they've both been through a lot and it has really strained the relationship and like

this is one of the ways it comes out on screen

definitely and i think from the start the hunter hunter adaptation team and possibly tagashi have been absolute masters of cutting the camera.

You know, right from like, we don't actually see the end of the hunter exam.

That all happens off screen.

The last thing we see of Kilua and Alaka is them standing motionless in the room as the power kind of like works its way through Goan.

Yeah.

And then Goan enters the election.

It is a stunning level of restraint from Tagashi to pull the camera away from moments that other shows would spend several episodes working towards to give you the payoff of being able to see them.

And then to time and time again, all the way back from the very first arc, cutting away from those moments is

it's there's a lot of discipline there.

It comes, I think, from a place of like really understanding how stories are told and really being willing to like work with the medium that lets you show, literally show whatever you want and

take control of the framing.

Yeah, in a way that is rare on television specifically.

Pariston applauds.

Goan has no idea.

Getting him to be chairman.

Everyone's turning around, and it's in this moment.

Goan bows.

It's in this moment that Cheadle realizes, quote, he got us.

Pariston wanted Leorio to be his final opponent.

Now Leorio has no motive nor support to be the next chairman.

And it's here that Pariston, that Cheadle asks Parriston when he kind of predicted this individual outcome.

To which Pariston says, I don't have the ability to predict.

This was all pure coincidence.

And to her credit, Cheadle says, bullshit.

Yeah.

No one has ever delivered a line less convincingly.

And I'm saying that it's Pariston that's delivering the line, not Garrison's voice actor.

Me?

Oh, moi?

Like,

he would say moi.

That's very important.

He would immediately go French.

Yeah, Cheetos says, please tell me I want to know.

It hurts to admit this, but I've been defeated.

I don't have it here.

I think she says, I've been defeated utterly.

Yes.

She is.

My note, I wrote down here, she is mad and defeated.

Yeah.

It was when Jing said he would run for chairman.

After he said he would run, I asked a question to provoke him.

And he responded that Goan wouldn't die, right?

And they do a little flashback.

In that moment, I could see the scene that just

transpired before us.

Well, I anticipated Jing would stand on stage and Jing would ultimately win, at least in my vision.

Yeah, man, your vision involved Jing Freaks hugging his child.

That's not right.

I think that this vision involved Goan in the hospital still.

First, since Jing said Goan wouldn't die, I knew that that meant there was a way to heal him.

And if he became part of the election, I would never win.

do you understand that was the moment i was defeated but then jing gave up on the election and leorio arrived and hit him and when he took the stage and talked about uh his friends risking their lives to save gone i finally saw the complete picture i was assured of my moment of victory uh when i felt that immense power i could sense gone's friends had saved him all that remained was to delay the vote until he arrived oh i'll retract that earlier motion so there's nothing for you to worry about um and then cheetah says that was all the information you had.

You put your trust in someone you'd never met before.

I really love these lines.

I trust Jing as an enemy.

And these are the friends that Jing trusted to save his son.

I trust them.

Why wouldn't I?

It's great.

This is kind of part of what I mean about like the rebirth of the protagonist into the story.

The blending of the plot lines happening here, you know, having to delay until Goan can get back in and Goan's mere presence, you know, like shifts the story around him completely.

And Pariston is aware of that.

Pariston is aware that that is going to happen.

This is also what I was alluding to when I said that

Jing really liked meeting Leorio.

Because, you know, it was the extension of what Pariston is saying here.

You know, these are the same, I trust Jing as a worthy enemy, and these are the same friends that Jing trusted to save his son.

It speaks to how much I like the way they've threaded this needle, that I like this episode, considering it takes away one of my favorite things that happens in the entire series, which is Leorio getting a punch-in on Jing.

That this scene specifically reframes that as Jing letting Leorio hit him.

Right.

Which seems true.

If we weren't mad at Jing freaks, you know, we wouldn't be doing the show.

Yeah.

The crowd

is going

wild.

Everyone wants a selfie with Goan.

Everyone wants Goan to be the chairman.

Goan has no idea what is going on.

In the background, Nuku is choking out hands-up.

That's so funny if Goan ends up being the chairman from all this.

It's like, yeah, we made a...

We thought it was a bad idea to make the 20-year-old Pope, so we made the 12-year-old Pope instead.

Well, he wanks off too much.

Yeah, a kid entering puberty is not going to have that problem.

No.

Oh, my God.

Why is Knuckle attacking Hanzo?

What's happening?

He knows what he did.

I could be honest, I didn't even see that.

He knows what he did.

First thing Gon did when he woke up was tell Knuckle what happened in the hunter exam.

Yeah.

And Knuckle was like, I'm going to fucking get off.

I'm going to kill this.

Me and the dog that kills Kilua.

And then he goes, hey, wait, where's my dog?

Wait, where's Killua?

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

There's a really touching shot here, just in terms of just like good construction of an image.

Jing notices Dune cheering.

And List is pointing.

Sorry, Goan notices Dune cheering.

And List is pointing at Jing's head.

Jing is not turning, but the silent, like, he's here.

This is the one you're looking for.

List is really good.

I think is

really sweet.

Goan realizes.

And as the episode comes to an end, Jing thinks,

this is bad.

But I guess I always knew this was going to happen.

This is an insane and also

deeply understandable way to end the dad quest.

I talked about this a bit in the previous episode where, like, all the business of Jing's game, the Nen box, Greed Island, evading my son left and right.

Would you like to know more about your mother?

No, the tape immediately destroys itself.

That coming down to like running in a local government election with Goan's friend was

one thing.

Goan finally encountering his dad after, dazed, he exits hospital straight into the closing stages of a papal conclave and his dad is sitting in the front row is really is the only way this could have gone in Hunter Hunter.

You know, part of me had envisaged it happening, you know, I'm like an island with a volcano with an island in it or something.

No, it's happening at the election.

Um, it's really good,

yeah.

It's very

Jing basically gets stuck in a traffic jam, and Goan runs into him trying to find Leorio.

It's wonderful, yeah.

Um,

because as much as the show loves big

uh like gonzo structural moves, it also really does just love weird coincidences.

This person was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This person was in the right place at the right time.

This tiny thing that one person remembered about another person is the linchpin on which this all works, etc., etc.

Most of Chimera Ant was watching a series of dominoes be set up and then fall in like very subtly odd ways that then produced completely other domino runs.

So it is no surprise.

Jing masterminding a 50,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and right at the end, his empathy for cheetah and his distaste for parriston

he accidentally lost the last piece which was leave the hunters or leave the election before i get caught because he really says you know cheetah's like please jing help me and he's like this is very out of character i.e this is i did not predict that you would come to me for help for the first time i didn't predict something i'm gregory house uh and he was fine fine i'll help you do something unexpected what's the unexpected thing i'm locking the doors

Yeah.

Hoist by his own batard, ultimately.

Hoisted.

But hoist by his own batard because of the

bit of humanity that Jing has in him that sort of commands him to try to help his, you know, sort of friend.

Yes.

Oops.

Now you have to meet your son.

Now you've got to meet your son.

Suck your hair.

Unfortunately.

Um

Next time.

Next time.

We're going to finish the show.

Before that,

next, next time, we have a whole new thing.

And you have to listen.

Let's talk about that before I tell you about the episodes.

Well, next, next time.

Oh, next time we're doing a Q ⁇ A.

Yeah, I thought that's what you were hinting at.

Right.

I had both of these, but you're right that this should be the order.

Next, next time we're doing a Q ⁇ A, you should be after the finale.

It'll be after the final.

You should send in questions that you have or things that you want to talk about about Hunter Hunter to friendsofthetable at gmail.com.

That's the right email, right?

I believe so.

Friendsofthetable gmail.com.

Yes.

Put Media Club Plus in the subject, please, so that I can search for Media Club Plus and find all of them.

You can get as fun and interesting as you want in the body of the email.

Right.

And we encourage it.

Please be to the point with your title.

Be boring.

Do just Media Club Plus.

I haven't seen a big problem with that in the past.

No, but it's worth saying because, you know, people like to do, I love a bit.

It's save it for the body.

We need to, we got to do some admin, you know, we got to take care of the titles, need to be organizable so we can look through your emails.

And I think

we have some emails that I haven't read because I don't really look at the friends of the table email ever.

Yeah.

We do, I know that we have like some hunter hunter questions from before.

Someone actually a couple months ago messaged me on Blue Sky saying that they had a Hunter Hunter thing that was really interesting.

And I told them to send that to the Gmail.

So I'll dig that up.

So if you've sent us an email about Hunter Hunter, I'll try and find that and try to fit it into the show.

Any other Q ⁇ A?

It's worth saying,

we're really excited to do a Q ⁇ A.

We did one kind of in the early portion of the season, and I think it's good to do one in the latter portion of the season.

It's worth saying, if you have questions about Greed Island or you have questions about, I don't remember, did we do our last Q ⁇ A at the end of the year?

The last one we did it at the end of York Noob.

It was one episode before the start of Greed Island was our

so if you have questions about that stuff, early Chimera and etc., you know, these aren't just questions about what was it like to watch all of Hunter Hunter, although we are going to focus a lot on that.

But if you're like, what was your favorite Greed Island card or something?

Although, I'm sure we've answered that.

My favorite's the one with the Panda Bear on it.

Pregnancy Stones, obviously.

The way the gone was conceived.

Have we talked about that?

Yes, the Jing Emprag.

Yeah, we've talked about this.

I was meant to be like, hold on.

Have I failed as a podcaster?

The Jing Mprag card.

Okay, cool.

Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool.

We have to.

We can move on.

And then we're going to take a very...

I don't exactly know how long of a break we are going to take.

We are not going to be going on a big break because we have something new planned.

Oh,

you're...

Yes, we are.

Yeah.

Jack, you are talking about the mini-season that happens between seasons one and season two.

I am.

Sure.

So that will actually take about six months to do.

Yep.

Five months, six months, something like that.

We're doing a mini-season where we're covering a wide selection.

So not every, this is not all-encompassing, but a wide selection.

Filmography.

Selected filmography of M-Night Shyamalan as brought to us by Alicia Akamporo, whose idea this was.

We're going to be watching

10 or 11 M-Night movies with maybe a couple thrown into

the bonuses.

Although we also still have some season one bonuses to take care of, and we will not forget about those.

Absolutely.

Please don't.

Absolutely.

We will not forget about those.

Sylvie will never forgive us if she had to watch the Hunter Hunter movie and we don't.

I was like, this would be a really fun exercise in talking about filler episodes and then it just never happened.

It never happened.

Well, I think that there's still time for that because we've talked about

in some limited capacity, we will talk about the manga of Hunter Hunter.

And

whatever Jack learns about anime between now and then will be relevant for those, I think.

For sure.

Just to quickly run through, this is a non-finalized list.

I would say this is like 95% locked in.

We're going to be watching The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, After Earth, The Visit,

Old, Knock at the Cabin, and Trap.

Woo!

Very exciting.

I am so excited.

I am so excited for this.

I believe, now correct me if I'm wrong, and I'll cut it out.

This is going to be me,

Sylvie, Allie, and Art, who has not appeared.

Exciting.

Who has not appeared on Media Club Plus?

Very exciting.

I wasn't sure if we were, I thought we were having people rotate, but I wasn't sure if we were.

We sort of voted on having a regular cast, but of course we will have guests.

And because it's not anime, I think that there's a broader appeal for anyone anyone to be on any given episode because all they have to do is watch one movie also yeah also it's movies which is like right aside from if we get into the whole fucking unbreakable

which we are not we specifically were watching unbreakable because art requested it and we're not watching any of the others trilogy because no one else wanted to watch it.

I don't want, yeah, I don't want to watch that shit.

But Unbreakable makes sense because it was like 16 years between Unbreakable and its sequel, and it's part of like the original run of sort of Golden Boy M-Night era.

The rise.

Yeah, the rise of M-Night.

Yeah.

The brief rise in Quick Fall, as far as I think his public perception is concerned.

Yeah.

But

I have only seen one M-Night movie and not start to finish.

Which one?

Did every time?

Signs?

Okay, I'm so curious because I actually haven't seen Signs.

Wow.

Yeah, I saw about two-thirds of Signs in like 2004.

The Sixth Sense for the first time in theaters about eight months ago.

Yeah.

And I cried

so hard.

Good movie.

So referring Kingdom Hearts as the little boy.

He's fucking great in that film.

Haley Joe Osmond's great in that movie, yeah.

In any case, we are really excited about this season.

This, as we have said, is going to take us about six months to do.

We have a full season of Media Club Plus planned afterwards that we are not going to talk about right now.

We are just as excited for it yet.

Yes,

it's in the pre-production stages.

We're still figuring out a lot of stuff.

It's the Canterbury Tales.

It's the Canterbury Tales.

You can't say that because I did see someone who thought we were serious about doing a Bergman series, and I'm really sorry to disappoint you that we're not doing the movies of Ingrid Bergman next.

Although, judging by how we behave before recordings of podcasts or in the middle of streams of anything, at least anything that I'm on.

The thing that I think we were really born to do is to do just a regular ass movies podcast.

Time to find out just watch movies.

Well, this isn't a regular movies podcast.

This is a movie podcast where you watch a guy who rose to stardom, who skyrocketed to stardom, directorial stardom, and then sort of drifted down like the feather at the start of a DreamWorks movie.

It is not a feather, It's a fishing bob.

Oh, am I thinking.

Oh, you were talking about the DreamWorks logo.

I was talking about M9 Shamala and I was like, well, no, the feather thing works because a feather gets picked up by the breeze again, and that breeze is called old.

Is it another...

Is it another studio that has the feather that drifts down?

Is that maybe Dreamworks on the other side?

I watched Dreamwork.

There's a box feather in the Dreamworks one, too.

And I think it's next to the

Bob.

And what I also think is that instead of DreamWorks animation, this is Dreamworks Studios, which like did Mouse Hunt and Amistad in the 90s.

And maybe has a different thing.

Possible.

Possible.

You could say.

Yeah.

It's not the DreamWorks logo.

The camera moves out and up in the DreamWorks logo, not the direction a feather goes.

What the fuck?

I got a review.

Oh, yeah.

Just a quick one from Chelsea D Sound System.

Ashamed of my words and deeds.

Five stars.

Almost a decade ago, in my ignorant youth, I stopped watching Hunter Hunter during the Chimera Ant arc.

The pacing changed, the many new characters, and a co-worker saying you can skip it led me astray.

Thank you, Media Club Plus, for showing me that I missed the point and the entire point of Hunter Hunter.

I have begun a rewatch in Penance, and thanks for all the laughs and amazing insight.

Looking forward to whatever's next for Media Club Plus.

I think it's great that our show didn't make people who skipped Chimera Ant mad and instead inspired them to go watch it.

Yeah, I'm actually very pleased about that because I was aggressive.

Yes, and I was slightly less aggressive, but definitely not kind.

Sort of a sort of

a bad cop, mediocre cop situation.

We are the anime cops.

This is our spin-off podcast.

Sylvie and I are doing anime cops now.

Oh my god.

Do we want to know

about a heart attack?

I would have a heart attack if we just had a dedicated anime show.

I would get so angry every year.

The slogan's the anime cops podcast is We Love Anime and We Love Cops.

It's the worst podcast you've ever heard.

Do we want to know what we're doing?

Too retired to these sergeants.

Yes, yes, please.

All of it.

All the rest of it.

We're doing the rest of it.

Chairman and release, salvation and future, past and future.

Those are 146, 147, 148.

Those are the last three episodes of Hunter Hunter.

I'm very sad that it's ending.

I'm also proud that it's ending because it means that we did it.

Congratulations to us.

Yeah.

It took exactly as long as I thought it would, and yet still somehow it took forever.

It'll be almost exactly two years from when we started recording to when we ended.

Yeah, that's kind of like.

The release schedule is a little bit wide, is a little bit narrower.

I think we didn't start releasing until September, but I think we started recording in like July.

And it's right now, it's June.

Baby

didn't exist.

No, it was a year off.

Wow.

And now she's one.

Now she's one.

You think of Arts Baby as Midway Through Media Club Plus.

Yeah.

Well, that's because that's her name.

Yeah.

We all said, we said don't do that.

We were like, that's kind of weird.

Midway through media club plus Martinez Tabel.

It's like a lot of, it's, it's just like and then you're also not even you can just name her like like me media

maybe media yeah or you can name your child media don't name your child media

but also

she's that great lady who uh killed that children

media that's kind of a fun name media that's kind of funny do we have anything else before we wrap friendsofetable.cash friendsofetable.cash friends of the table.cash what a great way to tell us that you enjoyed this last two years of podcasting.

It's a great way to show us that you enjoyed it by going to friendsofthetable.cash and signing up for any level of our Patreon just to be like, this was great.

Thank you for doing this.

Also, we dropped the ball a little.

Oh.

And because we dropped the ball a little, you dropped the ball a little and stopped reviewing us on Apple Podcasts.

So, once again, I am calling you people who were born in the month of June, this very month that we are recording.

Also, people whose name is Billy.

Billy, get on in.

Billy, you little puppet motherfucker.

And

I want to make a second shout-out about reviewing.

If you are like me and you have the sickness in your brain that says, I don't need to like this video, I don't need to review this.

I don't need to retweet

because they don't mean me when they're saying that stuff.

You're wrong.

I'm wrong.

They mean me.

We mean you.

We mean you.

It's you.

You're the only one.

If you listen to this show and you haven't reviewed, you're the only one left.

Everyone else was convinced already.

That means if you don't do it, no one's going to do it.

You're the most resistant to reviews, to reviewing that anyone could possibly be.

It's been two years.

If you review us on Apple Podcasts, I will give you a location, a map to the location of the cave with the gems inside.

Also, just in general, you know, this is probably, I imagine, given our recording schedule, this episode might not be up by the time we record the next episode,

I think.

So this is, we're going to see these for the Q ⁇ A.

And if you want to, I'm not saying send a question in.

If you send a question in as a review, I will ignore that.

However, if you want to say something nice as we come to the end of the show, I'd really appreciate it.

Yeah, that'd be great.

If you have nothing to say, and that's the reason why you haven't reviewed, you're like, well, I have nothing really to say.

I love the show.

I like the show, but I don't, it's not like I have like words.

Just say whatever.

Just make it, just be nonsense.

It doesn't matter.

It can be bad.

You can make the title bad review and then write gobbledygook, and it'll be fine.

But give it five stars.

Sorry, give it five stars.

Maybe don't say bad review like because it means negative review, but you could say like

this review could have used work.

Yeah, say tight, like title pending, something, something to denote that you really have no words to actually give us.

Okay, bye.