Go Live a Human Life - Hunter x Hunter ep. 134-136: Media Club Plus S01E43

I don't actually know what a chimera ant's perception of time is, but I have some guesses.

I

don't even know what a chimera ant is.

Well, it's

a new type of magical beast.

It's a new.

Yeah, just act like a new type of magical beast.

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

As always, we are brought to you by friends of the table, and this season we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshihiro Tagashi.

My name is Keith 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, where we're uploading a replay of our original Silent Hill Let's Play alongside

playing Silent Hill 2 Remake.

And we just did a podcast for the first time in a year.

Kyle messaged me after they got off work.

It was like, let's do a podcast about the Switch 2.

And I said, okay, when?

And they said, now.

And I said, okay, fine.

And so that's up.

You can watch that or listen to it in your podcast app.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Keith.

You've been doing your own video game podcast.

I have.

Well, it's our

video game podcast.

I've been doing our video game podcasts.

But you're the only one here that's done it.

Side story.

I am.

Although that will change at some point.

Side Story is a new podcast about games and the stories they make us want to tell.

It's hosted by Austin, who has returned to the world of talking about video games.

It's very exciting.

Right now it's Austin, Janine, and I, but there's going to be a kind of a rotating cast of the cast of Friends at the Table.

And also, it's going to be the first Friends at the Table show that we make consciously that guests.

We really want to talk to a bunch of really interesting people who have interesting things to say about games or have made interesting games.

You can go to sidestory.show to listen to that, and it's pretty good.

Oh, also worth saying that as part of Sidestory, Austin, Janine, and I are doing an ongoing Patreon-exclusive LP of the bizarre open-world action RPG Outwood.

Outwood is an action RPG inspired as much by or in conversation with things like Morrowind, Death Stranding,

bits of Caves of Cud, really weird systemic stuff in that game.

It's fascinating, and it's available to anybody who supports us at the $10 tier over at friendsatthetable.cash.

Now, here's a question.

Do you enjoy playing the game?

Tremendously.

Tremendously.

That's great to hear.

That's great because I love watching you play it.

I'm glad to hear it.

This will not surprise anybody who has listened to Hunter Hunter or has listened to us talk about Hunter Hunter.

But I spent the first episode sort of being like, I remember Outward being really good, but I'm kind of looking forward to it getting to the good parts.

And then the game immediately got to the good parts.

And I went, oh, yeah, this fucking rules.

Good, cool.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me on the internet at Sylvie Bullet on most places.

You should check out friendsofthetable.cash, where, like we said, there's that

outward let's play.

There's realised still going strong.

Y'all have no idea what you're in for with Realis.

There is so much Realis recorded.

There is

great.

I'm working on some music for Realis right now that is the most cursed music I have written since Sunfiel.

I cannot

wait.

I need to hear this ASAP.

I'm so excited.

What else we got up there?

We got Clapcast up there for just a dollar.

You should check that out.

It's very fun.

We got some bonuses for this.

I think, think, Keith, you mentioned that the last Dragon Ball bonus episode should be up in a little while.

Yes.

I should also say, I think that between the end of this episode and the start of the next one, there's probably going to be

a month off.

So one skipped episode, I believe,

just because of scheduling reasons.

And it'll be good to not have to do it one week.

I really, I wait till the last minute.

I don't wait till the last minute i insist on doing it at the last minute uh okay

due to user errors due to mental problems uh and then i do it all in a row and then i go wow i hate doing that i should do it spread out over the course of two weeks and then i don't

that's weird huh it is yes um

so it'll be nice to have a month to reset um but uh dre andrew lee swan hey uh you can find me on Blue Sky, Swan Dre 3000, and I think the only plug we haven't done is friendsatthetable.shop.

That's true.

Which is where you can go to check out Friends at the Table merch.

Dre, you did a NBA 2K 16 stream like a week ago on the Twitch.

That was really fun.

That'll probably be on the YouTube by the time this is up.

And then I did Virtue's Last Reward recently with Sylvie, and I did a Crusader Kings

with

Jack and those were all really fun and you should watch

and watch the VODs on the YouTube.

Yeah,

do it.

Do it.

NBA 2K16, that was with Austin and Art, right?

Art.

Yeah.

And hopefully we'll be streaming that again soon.

Yeah, that was cool.

I would love to get to the to the spike leap parts of the game.

Yeah.

I know.

Me too.

There is a lot of playing shitty high school basketball in a shitty high school basketball court.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know,

that's the grind.

That's the grind.

That's the grind.

That is

the virtual currency.

Look, you start off with a Motorola rocker, and eventually you get

some stupid smartphone.

I don't know.

Do you actually start out with a Motorola rocker in that game?

Your friend has what looks to me like a Motorola rocker.

I remember you pointing this out in the chat.

R-O-K-R.

It was a phone that I envied as a kid.

The idea of having a phone that was also an MP3 player was very appealing.

Oh, wow.

That's the dream.

Yeah.

And now I want an MP3 player that's just that.

Yes, it has come full circle.

Yeah, I was wrong as a kid.

We shouldn't have combined them.

Okay, these episodes.

What the fucking hell?

What?

These episodes are crazy.

Oh, my God.

What a way to get into it.

Chimera Ant.

When you finish the Chimera Ant arc.

Hey, congratulations.

You've seen every ant.

You have been wondering, like me, how do you end the Chimera Ant arc?

The answer is, weirdly, elegantly.

Weirdly, we're getting Sylvia's heart out and crushing it in your hand.

It's simply the pinnacle of the genre.

After 61 episodes, a year of television,

some steam finally starts to get out of the valve.

It's awful, tragic steam, usually, and sometimes very sacred steam.

These episodes are so good.

It's one of the all-time conclusions to one of the all-time seasons of television, and it's hard to even talk about it in a recap

without undermining them.

But what I will say, and feel free to add if anybody sees fit, the biggest implication from the last set of episodes plays itself out tragically, like really tragically with the king's death, which we'll talk all about.

We meet.

I kept track of how many times I cried during that episode.

Three for me.

Well, not that episode, three across two episodes.

Oh, no, it was three for that episode, and then I had like a little extra afterwards.

So maybe four times, if you include all three, once, twice, once.

Which, again, I think quadruples the total.

Maybe it doubles the total of all the other episodes combined.

Maybe I've cried twice up to now.

We also meet up with all of the still living Straggler ants, basically, except Ikalgo, who gets like almost no screen time.

Like, there's one scene

where Icalgo gets talked to.

He's eating his little kid lunch up on the bottom.

Yeah, he's eating his little kid lunch in his little kid outfit.

He's wearing his winter day

from his centipede, right that sensipie.

We learn in some detail about the geopolitical ramifications of the Chimera Ants.

And we see Goan's current condition and Kilua's current condition.

And we get a big tease for the next and final arc of the anime, a special election to determine the new chairman of the Hunter Association.

And by the way, who do we see?

Timing with

go ahead, Sylvie.

I was going to say, say, timing with real-world events happening with our starting of the election arc.

Really funny.

What happened?

We're recording, Sylvie.

What did you alert me of today?

Pope Dead, which I did.

I did alert both you and Austin by posting about in the Peto Bricks chat about it.

Yeah,

not heard.

I got a message at three o'clock in the morning from my friend.

Neither them nor I are Catholic.

And they said, the Pope has died.

I wanted to be the first Italian.

I have a group chat with some old elementary school friends of mine.

And

my friend Ben was talking about how many memories he has of like being.

in and around my home, which also a lot of my family lived in the same area, spending time at my grandparents' house with my friend Ben.

And he said that he has vivid memories of watching the last, no, two popes ago, two popes ago, he watched Pope John Paul die in my grandma's living room.

Two whole popes ago.

Hey, Pope deaths are,

you know, events in the lives of people.

People remember Pope deaths.

They do.

It's true.

Even, oh, Ben is Jewish.

That's also why.

After finishing these episodes, so firstly, I feel like these episodes were some really good examples of you knew what was about to happen and I didn't.

I did not know going into these episodes.

In a way, every episode is like that.

Yes.

I suspected that what we were going to see was sad.

I didn't know that the show was going to really start playing the like high melodrama and tragedy of the, you know, we have known for a while that the Chimera Ant Arc is going to end in tragedy.

Yeah.

The show really puts its foot on that pedal in a big way, and you knew that at the end of the last recording when you said, we're going to watch 134, 135, and 136.

And I said, hmm, okay.

And I wrote them down.

After finishing these episodes, the first thing I wanted to do was talk about them immediately, was start recording Media Club Plus.

And the other thing that I wanted to do was like lie down and not talk about them at all.

Not really in the sense that I think

that it's too meaningful or that the art is devalued by talking about it.

But the...

I felt like a sponge that had been wrung out, you know?

And on finishing the episodes, the thing I wanted to do was kind of just like s sit quietly for a while.

You want to know what I did after these?

I immediately went out and I got myself an ice cream cone.

Yeah, that makes that

way to do it.

That's a good response.

Yeah.

I started doing this podcast.

You might, the viewer, the viewer, the listener, the viewer listener who has been joining us might be able to catch me out here because I'm forgetting whether or not I've said.

I think that 1.35 was the first time I've cried during this show.

That sounds right to me.

I remember that the other obvious times that someone would cry and the times of those that I did, and at least you didn't say anything, so I just figured that you hadn't.

Right, but here, definitely, um, at the very end of 135, 135, and we'll talk about it.

The end of 135 has a horrible trick, has a little formal trick that is brilliant and really nasty, and and yeah realizing what they were doing there got me yeah

I'm actually glad I almost like messaged to make sure that you didn't miss it no no no no I was I was keyed into what was happening as soon as the credits started and then I just ran out the rest of the episode in part because actually the thing I was thinking was hey are they gonna play a next time on after this with Goan being chipper and they sort of do they sort of do yeah they give like a five second beat and then they go bamboo

it's so funny.

I'm very funny.

Sobbing, like fucking blowing my nose and shit, and then all of a sudden I just hear the goddamn bap, bap, bad, bad, babe, baby.

I'm like, this is why TV is good.

Because in a movie theater, the lights go down and they play the credits over however they want, you know, and then you're just left there in the dark as the lights come back up.

But here, they got more TV to play after this, you know?

Keep moving.

Yeah.

It's another, hey, there's another week next week.

We can't just stop.

We can't just stop with this.

I was surprised that the end of 134 really got me.

It's probably because I've seen it so many times and was so aware of what was coming, how hard

the king's

very sudden change at the end of 134 hits, which we'll get to.

But

I was more impressed with that scene than I had ever been in any other time watching it.

I really, really, really liked the end of 134, which again, we will get to.

So just keep in mind, Keith likes that.

We begin with

no reprieve from where we're at.

The narrator picks up Palm's we are no different to the ants, we're worse line.

It's wild how this episode starts.

Yeah.

Do you want to talk about what we see as the episode begins?

The literal first shot is bombs being dropped from an airplane.

Yeah.

After it replays Palm's the human human stepping on

the carcass of the beetle being eaten by the ants.

And then it goes on to show

people who have been clearly victims of being in a war zone,

men with guns.

It's like a montage basically of the atrocities of humanity.

It's chapter black for my Yu Yu Hagi.

It is after.

There's another really big chapter black moment later.

I was thinking the same thing since you brought it up.

Yeah.

I don't know if it was last episode or the episode episode we did with Austin.

I was like, I was the episode with Allie.

Okay.

Was last episode the one we...

Did we?

Wasn't it?

Austin was last episode.

Austin was last episode.

Life has been so busy.

Hundreds of bombs being dropped from these ships.

Yeah, sculpture.

Yeah.

I think that's a really interesting

tactic they use, too.

There's a couple of times in these episodes where they're like, this is

it one is more like blatantly, this is like a diegetic film being shown in the world, but they both feel like

this it's supposed to be like archival footage or like filmed footage from within the world of Hunter Hunter.

Ken Burnsian,

they also like do like Ken Burns stuff over still images, which is an interesting choice.

Based on the manga, they could have animated every panel that was drawn and instead they like they animate the bombs dropping, they animate children dirty, huddled in a dark corner.

Uh, and then, but there's tons of it that is just like still images, sort of panned across still images.

This is very interesting.

That's something I think about a lot with this show, and with a lot of anime and animation, is like how much of that, like, how much of this interesting stylistic stuff is deliberate choice, and how much of it comes out of like budgetary or time concerns.

Because I think, regardless, I mean, regardless, I think it turns out really well, but it's one of those things where people

I promise I'm not going to talk about the way people react to Hunter Hunter that much this episode.

I was getting kind of annoyed at myself for harping on it so much.

But that is something that I will see anime fans and fans of animated media harp on about is like, oh, wow, they ran out of budget here.

This isn't animated very well.

I'm like, well, yeah, but like

the animation can be many things.

And

your limitations or like working within your limitations can result in something much more effective.

And I think this is an example of that.

Still images

are a part of

film and visual media.

Yes.

Sorry, you also were to say a sentence that starts with still images.

I'm going to say exactly the same thing you're about to say, right?

Which is like

both of your hands.

Visual language.

From a foundational point, I mean,

it is literally assembled still images.

Like, foundationally, the still image comprises 100% of all film and television.

It does.

But then a trick is played on you.

Right.

And then a trick is played on you.

Your brain

goes behind your back with the screen and decides to tell you a little lie.

But then, even then, that you could use one of those images as a series of frames in itself is like

one of the oldest things you could do.

It's such an old technique.

And I do also hate the like they ran out of budget thing, which I understand

what people say when they say that because it does

happen.

Yeah.

I didn't watch it, but I understand that that Junji Ito thing that came out recently.

Yeah.

Those poor fucking guys.

Basically just one episode of like, oh, wow, yeah, no, they really, they got their shit together, and then everyone was like, yeah, no, we spent all the money on that one.

But it's also like, there's also

when you

save money in an episode, you're giving money to a future episode.

Yeah.

Which I think is something that is like lost on people.

And we got some moments of really nice animation in these episodes as well to go along with that, I think.

But these, these images are extremely interesting.

It starts off, it's just

explicitly not just a war zone, but like a

totally bombed-out civilian area, you know,

huddled children, destroyed buildings.

And then it gets a little bit abstract.

There's like a butcher.

There's like some sort of like military police thing going on.

There's like the

smashed sort of husk of a of a bug, like in close-up.

There's a graveyard, like a ramshackle graveyard, but then there's jewelry and runways

and champagne.

And then you see that outside of

that,

it looks just like it did in the war zone, huddled children in the dark.

This is

the city that was destroyed by the terrorists using the rose.

Yeah.

There's a great match cut moment of the two champagne glasses clinking while the bomb goes off that I was like, yeah.

Very

rules of the game.

I think it's funny with rules of the game.

Oh my God.

Rules of the game.

It's one of the best movies.

It is about rich French people who have retreated to the hills to have interpersonal melodrama while the Nazis invade France.

Oh, this sounds wonderful.

It is amazing.

It is so, it is.

I mean, I'm not telling anybody, like anybody, it's from 1939.

It's from 1939.

Jesus.

So, so let that sink in.

But this is, I think,

when somebody has like a list of the best movies of all time and they're going even half a step beyond Citizen Kane number one, it's like rules of the game number one, Citizen Kane number two.

That's like interesting.

It's it's very

top of the list kind of movie.

Say again, Sylvie?

Just saying, I've heard the name a ton.

I just never

have a really, really a good movie.

Over this awful footage, you know, broadening out atrocity from like the specific atrocity of a bomb.

Oh, sorry, from the specific atrocity of the Poor Man's Rose to the atrocity of bombs in general.

You know, the bombs falling from

the airships are not the Poor Man's Rose,

to things like the slaughter of animals, massive wealth inequality.

Over this, the narrator remains mostly silent before chiming in to say that the rose had, quote, poison thorns stronger than toxins present in nature.

You know, we're here in, I think, a lot of post-nuclear writing positions the nuclear bomb and, you know, nuclear war as something like wildly unnatural, like a perversion of nature.

And in a place where we have

poisonous ants, various kinds of natural poison, he is being as clear as possible in saying that the thing that we have made is an unnatural thing.

It eats you away from the inside.

We get, again, more of this sort of like...

part medical, part abstract imagery of cells being destroyed.

It reminded me a lot of the really beautiful imagery of the king getting revivified with the rainbow light a few episodes ago.

And then he tells us something that we didn't know about the poisoning, which is that it turns you into a carrier who goes on to contaminate new victims.

And the rate of the poison, you know, the speed at which the poison kills you, is specifically designed to spread it.

And then the narrator says, right down the camera, it was a weapon expressly engineered to be the ultimate evil.

And it is from this opening sequence that we cut to Poof's blood

dripping from his mouth.

He like coughs in his hand and then puts his hand to one side, which he tries to hide from the king.

Yeah, he tries to hide it from the king.

Uh, Jack, I read this line for you.

Uh, the other translation that I have says, uh, it was a demonic weapon, more inhumane than any other.

Can I read a note that I wrote here?

Yeah,

me when everybody else is succumbing to the poor man's rose side effects.

Oh, no, this is awful.

This is horrific.

Me when Poof is having it happen to him.

Yes.

I think later that Poof is like a really good heel.

I have so much fun hating Poof.

I don't want people to think that I dislike when Poof's on screen.

I think he is really fun to be rooting against.

He's one of the best characters in the show.

I agree.

There's some really good moments in this first episode with him.

He has a really sad ending, too.

Yes, he does.

Yeah.

No doubts get out of this show.

I don't think that's a spoiler.

But yeah, Poof's ending is also especially sad.

The king, meanwhile, let's check in with the plan right quick.

UP is dead.

The king has just been told UP is dead.

And Poof is saying, you know, we can proceed with the plan or we can get you out of here.

The king thinks to himself, no, no, we're going to see this thing through.

And as the episode continues, you can sort of tell that he knows that the game is...

He knows that he is running the clock down.

And the early portions of this episode, as they sort of build into this first big conversation with

an unlikely Chimera end.

Are about the king kind of like coming to terms with what do I want to do now the clock is running down.

But he doesn't really say that to Poof.

Instead, he just sort of says, all right, game's still on.

Let's go.

And he expresses his N, he sends it out, rainbow light, you know, pouring off him.

And we get, I love

the way we are let into the way the king sees the world with N here.

We've seen people's N, even heroes, and throughout the show as being sort of like a

wave that they send out from themselves.

And, you know, if you think about

when,

I can do it.

The Ronin from the Phantom Troop.

Oh my god, what's the matter?

Nobunaga.

Nobunaga.

When Nobunaga uses his N, we sort of see it as these like dark shapes in the buildings around.

But when the king uses his N in this moment, it's like...

It's like he has access to the narrative camera, you know?

We just see these incredible flashes of the palace, the various situations he breaks down what's going on here are footprints here's the door to the underground opened up they really tried to drive home the meaning in his name given to him by his mother in this one the light that illuminates all

from from this and then from when he invents a new n technique from whole cloth and turns his n into literal photons

later on by the way i love that yeah

but already here poof is saying things like he's already using the final N search he's permitted.

And there's a really elegant, sad weaving together of like playing the game and walking towards your death happening here, right?

Where it's like, Poof is still thinking about, you know, it wouldn't matter if the king used another N.

He could.

The king can do what he wants.

The king is choosing to play the game.

But I think it's notable that Poof takes the moment to be like, oh, this is his final available N that he's allowed to use.

You know, as their death gets closer.

If anyone knows how important games are,

it's

the king, it's poof.

Okay.

Sorry, say, what was that?

I was like, I wasn't sure if you were saying that was, I just, the pause threw me off.

I was like, it's poof, right?

You're saying, yeah, yeah.

Poof knows exactly how important games are to the king.

Critically, critically, unfortunately important.

One of the best scary king moments happens here as he sees Welfin in the crowd with his N and immediately, almost like moving through the cut of the camera, like steps into the scene with Welfin, and it's wonderful.

So good.

It's so good.

How do they actually do that shot?

What is happening?

It happens so fast.

I actually have it

right here.

Let me see.

I'm watching a door that has been opened and someone responding to my N who did not previously.

Yeah, so it's watching Welfin

and

it's in a wide shot and then it cuts to an offset shot where you're closer to Welfin, but suddenly the king is there, where we just like jumping into frame, where suddenly

one frame ago, he was not there at all.

It was empty space we saw.

I really love the effect they do when the king uses his end, by the way.

Like, I think it looks really gorgeous.

The sort of like white outline of the king and the

like rainbow lights behind him.

It has like a real cosmic feeling to it.

Yeah.

While we're talking about visual flare.

We enjoyed this is also very um takeuchi in Sailor Moon, right?

She will use color in these wonderful psychedelic and sometimes kind of like visually upsetting ways.

She has a character called Wiseman.

Let me see if I can find who is

sorry.

I have like Sailor Moon fun trivia.

Oh, yeah,

so Gone's voice actor, one,

I found out that this was this is uh Megami Han, Gon's uh, Japanese voice actress.

I found out, one, this was like her second major role

was playing Gun and Hunter Hunter.

She's so good.

She's very good.

She is also

in the modern parlance, Nepo Baby, because her mother is a voice actor who voices Mito Freaks and Luna in Sailor Moon.

Wow.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Can we go on?

Oh, you know, I think that I've heard that before.

It's really fun finding that out.

The Mito fact specifically, I think that I had seen before.

That's my favorite part of it.

It's the Mito bit.

But I like that there's also, we can still connect Sailor Moon and Hunter-Hunter in more ways.

I think it's very cute to do that.

Yes, this is obviously from the anime team of working on Sailor Moon, but taking cues from the way that presumably Takeuchi is instructing them or collaborating with them.

Oh my god, why do they make it so fucking hard to copy and paste GIFs?

I'm getting old.

And then they invented the,

was it WebM?

Web P?

Web WebM or WebPs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They decided it wasn't hard enough to copy and paste a GIF.

They need to have a version of a GIF that you only realize is broken when you try and share it

to literally anyone, anywhere.

Wiseman has this incredible sort of like marbling on his

head that like swirls and moves.

This sort of like psychedelic imagery.

I've always really loved the rainbow light around the world.

I think it's also,

you know, the king can still produce an extremely evil-looking aura, and he does.

But a lot of the time when we see the king's aura, it's like bright white light, or it's this like rainbow sparkle.

It's really, really nice subversion of like this extremely evil man.

Yeah, there's a couple very good evil moments.

There's a shot where he like looks like a Thresher Shark.

It's really good later.

It's not N-based or Nen-based, but he just has a crazy look.

Actually, I'll wait to call it out in this moment.

Who would have thought that the Chimera Ant arc would have ended in like a pivotal conversation between the king and Welfin?

Sometimes you just

love it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Welfin's so normal for all of it.

Before we leave the Chimera Ant arc, it's time to get another Welfin breakdown.

This one's a real doozy.

By the way, before we actually talk about the really great Welfin stuff, can I say that there's a part later on where Welfin is like,

you know, he basically has an did who here saw Argo?

I did.

Oh, I saw, I saw like half of it before, and I was like, I don't really like this.

Who here remembers Argo fuck yourself and how?

I remember Argo, fuck yourself, the only thing in that movie that really

has like a big Argo fuck yourself moment in these that I think isn't hysterically funny.

Is it his favorite phrase?

It's his favorite phrase.

Thank you.

It might as well.

He might as well be saying, Argo, fuck yourself.

Welfin's fucking great.

We hear from Welfin, who is immediately terrified of the king.

You know, reminder: Welfin was sent to deliver the message, but has it seems gone off piste upon realizing that Chimera ants are evil.

And when we encounter him in the crowd, he seems to just be leaving.

He,

on seeing the king, uh,

reconsiders this words and teeth.

He

starts, he's like, um,

he's absolutely the boss.

There's, there's no going around that.

Um, and he sort of outright says, he hit, we hear about how Yupi died, uh, and it's really sad.

He fired his missiles at Yupi, but before he could ask him a question, Yupi just simply doubled over and died.

Uh, um,

can I read some of Welfin's anxiety-ridden internal monologue?

Because it's so funny.

Please, yeah, of course.

How do I escape from this monster?

Damn it.

I didn't realize he was this powerful.

I should have run away right off the bat.

Temptation got the better of me when I saw the giant Yupi shrunken down like some bug and then he dropped dead.

I had actually had the delusion I could beat the king, so I stayed.

I was drunk on my delusion.

I felt almighty like some sheltered little kid.

I felt alive.

Yeah, I'm an idiot.

I was drunk.

Too many things happened simultaneously.

And then I remember gyro.

I panicked and I got sentimental and I wanted to be a hero.

He's

so good.

You know how people are posting about like Puzzin Boost?

This is such a realistic depiction of a panic attack.

This is how I feel about Welfin.

This is such a realistic depiction of a panic attack.

Wow.

And throughout all of this, the king, you know, Deathly Calm is

both listening to what Welfin is saying, is demanding the truth from Welfin, but, you know, taking the time to listen to what he's saying.

And also keeps coming back to this fact that, like, I can sense the emotions of people my N has touched, and I can tell that you despise me.

There is some reason why

you have this enmity to me, which is amazing.

Even as Welfin is saying, like, I'm the world's stupidest idiot.

This guy's the most powerful person on the planet.

It's that octopus's fault.

He threw me off my game.

He threw my emotions out of whack.

He led me astray.

It's that octopus's fault is my favorite line in these episodes.

It's so funny.

So funny.

And he's like lit in like a bright red light during this.

He's so good.

He's like thrashing around.

He's screaming and shouting.

He's gnashing his teeth.

His eyes are going really big.

Occasionally, he appears upside down in the frame.

Nothing in this scene, in terms of Welfin's meltdown, can beat.

His best wrong supposition, which is that he starts believing Poof can read people's minds.

I love the Poof and Welfin, like, both of them seeing each other and being like, oh, this is bad for me.

Well, Poof

can sort of read people's minds.

He can read people.

Like, it's, we see it with the king, too, because the king is basically using Poof's ability.

Yeah, where it's like, read your thoughts, but he can tell when you're lying because you're composed of deception.

Yeah, he can read your emotions and you're like, you're, he's great at reading the vibe, you know?

Yeah, I was going to say, it's a vibe check, 100%.

It's the guy with the worst vibe, but the greatest vibe check.

Yeah.

This is also consistent with the like poof as an abusive or like sheltering parent thing going on, where like the parent can just see straight through you, even though they can't figure out exactly what's going on.

There's like a familiarity.

Because here's the situation.

Welfin is carrying.

Something that he is not telling the king.

What we know is that that is the message.

Poof believes that the thing that Welfin might be carrying is information about Komaki.

And so, Poof, poor Poof, is now in this situation where, like, Welfin is a very useful scapegoat, a very good target for the king's ire in this moment, but he can't be allowed to say too much because it might expose Poof.

Briefly, Poof is like, I just have to kill him right now.

Um,

Poof is also wondering why his heart is, quote, filled with such overwhelming anxiety.

This is some really good reverse killiwa business going on here.

We know the thing that he's feeling is the poison already starting to take effect.

But we also know that he is anxious.

He's maybe the most anxious.

The thing that he's happy about, the reason why he's confused why he's so anxious, is that...

The king showing off of this power is like

extremely exciting for Poof.

Poof loves it when the king is strong

and

and so that the king has managed to take spiritual message and make it so much better is like very exciting and then he's like but why am i dreading and it i think it is the poison we see like the roses like go black on the vine uh i love that which is because it goes from it goes from the sort of like uh i think i've i've called it like clamp vision before the like very showjoe-esque like scene the romantic interest there's flower petals there's the roses coming up yeah and and then it's like, wait a minute, roses have a different meaning in this show, and then it just goes to they start turning black and fading and so good.

And my favorite part of this is that in that in the clamp vision, his nose starts to bleed in what feels symbolic, but then it goes cuts back to reality.

And he touches his face and realizes that his nose actually is bleeding.

And there's just this moment of surprise, like he didn't know that that was real.

It's so good.

It's so good.

But the other thing is, yes, the realization that

if the king is going to interrogate Welfin, Welfin knows about Komegee because he used

Komegi

to trick Poof in front of Welfin.

Which is bad news.

And this is very bad news.

The king is still barreling on with the interrogation.

Very calmly, but very forcefully.

He says to Welfin, speak but lie to me and you will regret it.

This is lovely.

This is the inverse of Welfin's own power.

So much of this episode is Welfin having the

beam of someone truly capable turned on him for the first time and kind of like freaking out underneath it.

And I really love the king sort of using Welfin's own nen ability against him without any of the necessary, you know, he doesn't need missiles.

The king can just look at you and demand.

Yeah, he doesn't need missiles to kill you instantly.

He has that already.

I've written down here, Poof is very worried about this.

There's some of my all-time favorite Meroem animation in this scene.

So it's staged with Poof is, I think, by this point is like fallen to his knees in like joy and supplication.

And also like, this is not going well for me.

On the left-hand side of the screen, the king is in the middle, and Welfin is on the right.

And the king is kind of turning to look between the two of them.

And on two or three occasions, we get this really high-detail, high-frame-rate rate animation of the king's head turning from a three-quarter view to face the camera and the expression on his face.

Is this the expression, Jack?

Let me check.

Yes, but we see it in close-up, actually.

This is the one where I feel like he looks like a Thresher Shark.

Yeah, he looks terrifying in this shot.

Oh, he does.

He looks like a Thresher Shark.

Famous for their long tails.

But yeah, there's there's this horror of the king kind of like turning to look at you.

And then Poof has a brainwave.

We are like deep in the everyone knows whether or not they're admitting to themselves that their time is limited.

So it's some real like

panicking as the house burns down or just like burning the match right down

to your fingertips in an attempt to keep it going.

Poof says, okay.

He, Welfin, is deeply involved in my secret.

The thing that, remember, you are playing to win.

And I love this idea that now the secret as being brought into the game and also being central to the king's

identity.

The king knows that the secret is very important to him.

He wants to know the secret.

Yes.

But we're now at a point where the idea of the secret as a thing,

regardless of whether or not

regardless of whether or not the participants know its nature, the kind of like the secret as an object can now be traded about and like used as a like a piece in this game.

Because Poof is trying to play on the king's love of the game, says, you know, it would be just no fair if he just tells you.

Yeah.

Wilfin's response to this is so impressive.

What the hell is this guy talking about?

The first time I saw this, I was so impressed by this spit of writing, the just like

instrumentalizing the secret and the truth as another piece of the puzzle to keep the king away from Komagi longer.

It's gorgeous.

Yeah.

And it's some real classic desperate Poof planning.

Poof is capable of producing a plan

out of nowhere.

And the plan is often not very good, but it is a bit like Grommit laying the tracks of the train in the chase with the penguin.

You know, he's putting the tracks down really quickly and the train is going over them.

It's working alright.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine if he was up against someone that wasn't the king, that was his true mistake.

And I think what is the most fun thing about Poof's character, which is that more than any other royal guard, he puts the king on this outrageous pedestal, but then is always trying to undermine him

in the name of some weird loyalty.

It is very funny and weird and interesting.

It, I mean, it is.

It's To me, this really crystallized like how good the writing of Poof is because it just makes me think of like, oh, this is how people are.

I have seen a lot of people who you could like very quickly write out in three sentences.

This is what's wrong with your life.

But reading that sentence and accepting it is really fucking hard.

Yeah.

That's

the business.

And that's, and that's like Poof's whole character, right?

Is that

to us, people who are relatively detached from the type of derangement that Poof has, all of Poof's plans are just like, what the fuck are you doing?

This is so pointless.

This is so

fruitless.

There's no reason to be doing this.

The plan is in shambles.

You're both dying.

Like, what's the point?

But the point is, is that Poof, like, to his death, cannot.

deal with the fact that like the world is not the way he needs it to be.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we get this as the king asks poof to come clean about welfin's relationship to the secret if this

this is some real like the whole edifice is tumbling and this is like this is the end of a mountain goat's divorce song you know everything is just

hand in unlovable hand hand in unlovable hand people are just saying the things that are like working away at their hearts um

And Poof remains silent.

He has this beautiful line.

I think to himself, I don't think he says this out loud.

He says, I will sacrifice myself to my own loyalty.

I have no words left to say.

Yeah, that whole thing is an internal monologue.

We are in the middle of our match.

Nothing less, nothing more.

The jumping around between like finality and being in the middle is really great here.

I think I will sacrifice myself to my own loyalty is wonderful.

By the time we get to the end of the Chimera Ant arc,

these last three episodes.

You see someone actually do that, by the way.

Sacrifice themselves to their own loyalty?

Yes.

Yes, we do.

I was going to say that, like, I feel like these episodes really crystallize for me

the thinking that

the Chimera Ant king that we saw nascent bubbling bubbling away, decapitating people's heads as a sort of

like political and holy and like holy H-O-L-Y

and like

world-changing entity

was always a dream of poofs.

You know,

the path that we were on was the path that we were on, that we have seen with the Gungi games, with all of that,

was going to produce Meroem as we we see him.

I mean, he says as much at the end of 35, I feel like I was born for this moment or whatever.

And there was a Chimera Ant King out there.

You know, there was

someone like that could have been.

And for most of the show, it existed in the brain of Poof.

And we've been seeing these wonderful instances of Poof turning and looking at the king and saying, there he is.

You know,

he's arrived.

He has appeared.

And I think that Poof in these moments saying, I will sacrifice myself to my own loyalty.

He is talking about his loyalty to the king that doesn't exist and couldn't have existed, you know, given the way that the tiles fell.

It's really good, it's really sad.

Yeah,

um, this whole thing, by the way, so there's this great moment where more welfin stuff, where he's like,

I have one word, I have one chance to say one thing to save my life.

Like,

this all hinges on the first thing that comes out of my mouth when I open it, or else I'm dead.

And that is true for Welfin, but it's also true for Poof because

when

Poof admits that there's a connection between Welfin and his secret,

the king now wants to know, well, is there a connection between your secret and why Welfin wants to kill me?

And

so it's Welfin who says the next word out of my mouth will decide whether I live or die.

But the first person who actually demonstrates that is Poof, who just sort of kneels by the king as the king like absolutely blasts his aura for a very, very long time during that whole monologue that we were just going over, Jack, that you read most of.

And then in the end, according to what the narrator calls his insanity, he says absolutely nothing.

And the king just kind of quits.

The king is really moved by his loyalty, and you can kind of get the sense that

that structure of the chimera ants that i talked about as kind of like not really existing the king can also sense that it's there i mean the king has spent a lot of a lot of this arc going oh my god what am i what do i do yeah what's my name who am i why am i here but in moments like this when the king sees his royal guard and his most devoted his most loyal royal guard holding onto something that he can't say

out of loyalty out of like poof is trying to produce a particular kind of me and he has some information that is so dangerous that it might end that, that he's remaining silent up to the moment of his death.

That gives the king pause.

Um, this is a really different king to the king that, um, God, what does, what does he do?

He, he kills a child in a field, and Poof says, Maybe, maybe you should not do that.

Maybe, what, maybe you could get better information and better power from people like that.

And the king nearly kills Peter in that, you know, during a different time.

Yeah.

Um, then the king says, I'm really hungry.

Time for breakdown number two.

Time for Welfin lunch.

Do you think the king was going to eat Welfin in this moment?

Yeah, I do.

I kind of do.

Yeah.

You think that I'm hungry and he turns?

Welfin is actually onto something here.

I mean, I have a couple reads on that.

I also was like, oh, is the hunger a side effect of the rose?

Oh, no.

Oh,

that's always in my head throughout these episodes.

Yeah, I think he used, he's got...

It has to do, to me, it has to do with the rose in as much as like, how long would the king have lived if he didn't burn all that energy being intimidating?

Yes.

Instead of having.

Yeah, he can't replenish energy like you normally can.

Yeah.

Because he's dying.

I also was wondering if I'm hungry was in relation to like, or was meant for poof.

Because he literally did eat of poof

not that long ago.

Maybe.

And this was like after Poof is like, you know, I will, I'll die for my honor.

And then, oh, okay.

The king's going to eat poof.

The way he looks at the way he looks at him, he looks so hungry.

And

monstrous.

He does.

Yeah.

Remember when Gone Freaks aged extremely quickly?

Kind of like poured all of his nen ability in like the pivotal moment of his character arc?

Yeah, that's pretty much the pretty recent do that.

Welfin

is so afraid that he ages rapidly out of fear.

This is a different thing to the thing that happens to Gohan.

Goan kind of buys his future.

Yeah, I wrote that he knew's out.

He does.

He does.

He does.

100%.

It is basically one-to-one with what happens to Nov in a lot of ways.

His character model is amazing.

Tagashi and the anime team have never not had a blast drawing poof.

He turns into this sort of like,

kind of like shrunken bulldog type thing.

Yeah, he changes dog breeds.

He does.

He does change the dogs,

yeah.

Well, he goes from being a wolf to a dog is the big thing.

He's domesticated.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

And he really, he freaks out a lot more.

He's still...

This is so lovely.

This is like the apotheosis of the Welfin breakdown of like, oh my god, it's actually...

You know how they're like...

This is the 1,000 monkeys, 1 million monkeys, 1 million typewriters somehow actually producing Hamlet.

He has a Donkey House moment, is really.

Yeah.

Shut the fuck up.

He's thinking it through.

He's trying to put it together.

We get these great shots of his brain, the overlapping dialogue of things the king has said, things that Ikalgo said,

and then he keeps repeating, like, I have one word, I have one word.

And of course, the word that he chooses, he puts it together and he says, Komagi.

And the king remembers.

It's in a beautiful sequence.

Yeah, you want to talk about how this is shot?

It's we get the it.

It

I need to like look at the actual images that show up behind because there's a bunch of framed images behind Welfin after he says this, like in the background.

And I didn't get a good look at those.

I've got it here.

Let me see.

But there is this really beautiful flash to this image that the king has of him

playing Goongi in a like golden-lit field with Komugi.

And like, even, I think even Poof is aware of it, or at least he's aware of the emotion.

Poof can see this.

Yeah.

I called it a semi-reality in my notes.

It's it's beautiful.

It like really,

I got choked up when I saw it.

Like, just him, the two of them, like, in their happy place, basically.

Oh, you know what's behind Welfin?

Please.

It's photographs of his human life.

Oh.

That rules.

It rules.

It's photographs of his human life that explode into a kind of fire of

butterflies while he's trying to think of one word.

And then his brain pulsing.

You see his literal brain pulsing.

I love it.

And then visual representations of each of the pieces.

Message for the king,

stuff we discussed with Pito, the word Komugi, proof secret, all that stuff kind of flashing.

Some really nice framing of Merowim's face here.

It looks like he's almost having like a religious experience while he's remembering Komugi.

Like he's looking up, his eyes are like twinkling.

It's one of the ways that we haven't really seen him rendered before.

And there's a few of those in these episodes,

if I'm remembering right, where it's like, oh, this is, yeah, this Meroim has changed a lot just by having his memories come back.

I love how

the

he and Komigi get rendered in black and white in sketches and then get filled in.

It's so good.

I also have this whole thing as the longest clip that I've ever clipped for the show because it kept being too good to stop.

I think that probably the best way to do it would be to play half of it and then talk about it and then play the other half rather than play the whole thing in a row.

What do you think?

Yeah, let's talk about whatever, man.

Yeah.

This is how intensely he cares for her.

Poof.

So this is your secret?

Yes.

He cares more than I feared.

I will accept any punishment.

You know what it shall be.

I do not have to speak it.

You and I are of one mind.

I do not blame you.

I never had a chance.

Yes.

Continue searching for Peto.

The two captured intruders may know something.

Once you are done, let them go.

I have nothing else to ask of them.

I love that.

I love...

There's a lot I really like about this sequence.

There's some one thing I really enjoy is

poof.

There's like a like

we've already talked about how the there's the sort of like semi-real semi-reality state of of um Marilyn seeing Komugi and like thinking about her.

There's also Poof uh kneeling nude.

Yeah, thank you, Keith.

He posted a screenshot of it.

And I love that he is like literally like in Marilyn's mind, in both their minds, really.

He's stripped bare completely now that his secret's out in the open.

Uh, he's like, his loyalty to the king is, is all he's got.

Um,

100% vulnerable, vulnerable.

Accepts, like, it's unspoken, but he accepts his death that, like, the king is sentencing him to.

And, like,

it is ambiguous when the king is aware of the fact that he's dying or not.

I believe that this is what is implied, that he knows what his punishment is.

I agree.

I really agree.

I don't have to punish you.

We're both already dead.

Yeah, which makes the then continue the search for poof thing all the sadder.

Jack, you got very quiet for me.

Oh, you did?

You're fucking kidding me.

It's a fucking dial.

I couldn't hear you at all.

I didn't know you were talking at all.

Oh, no, it's okay.

It's just my stupid mixer dial.

Um, what I was gonna say was that I think you're absolutely right.

It makes the um

the go and search for Peto thing all the sadder, right?

Because this is the moment of goodbye on some level, right?

Yes.

The king saying, all right, we're done, you know.

But at the same time, you you and I are of one mind.

I do not blame you.

It's really sad.

The release the two captured intruders once you have talked to them.

I have no further need of them.

It's amazing.

Is our first real, like, cut glass, crystal clear, spoken down the camera post-Komegi Revelation King, and it is release the prisoners.

All he needs to do is remember Komagi, and the it's like he was never gone, or not only like he was never gone but the the changes in the king were progressing within him underneath his conscious memory without him even knowing he's come back sort of more

human quote unquote than ever yeah and i think also the um

in the same way that pito was transformed by seeing the king's love for komagi

and the king's willingness to like act and protect Komegi, I think that there is something to be said for the king getting brought back to life by the love and loyalty of Yupi and Poof that taught him something, you know?

Um, like more than just being like a, I had a near-death experience and I was fixed, instead it being this sort of like this deep connection, this like um he had a second chance at having a mother.

A second chance of having a mother and also sort of being a mother.

It's not terribly clear.

But he did have a second chance at being a mother, you know.

Um

uh

he then he looks at Welfin and he says, Please be at ease.

Because Welfin, who has now become a

puppy dog, yeah, is really not feeling it.

Uh, I've got this whole thing still, so I can get the rest of this.

All I can do is nod in assent,

Sire.

The opened door,

the footprints leading inside.

The resolve of those I sensed with my N.

All signs lead to one solution.

Welfin.

Sire, I, what is it?

Komogi is in the underground warehouse, along with the woman and the octopus.

You were to deliver that information to me or my guards.

But how did you know that?

I have come to believe that you took on the task at the behest of the octopus.

But I am unsure why you failed to carry it out.

Is it connected to your deep and sudden hatred of me by any chance?

Ah, yes.

Now please be at ease.

Just answer my question, and you are free to go wherever you wish.

You have my thanks.

It's because of you that I remembered something important.

Ariati, they said they'd wait in Bizef's courtyard.

Gyro is the only man I will ever call king!

You!

All of you!

Your enemies!

Do you hear me?

Is that so?

I hope you see him.

I truly do.

And, if possible,

go live a human life.

Unbelievable.

Yeah, that go live a human lifeline.

And then

that line kills Poof.

Yeah, almost there.

I've written down Poof wailing, disaster.

Sort of like

a scream and then like a silent scream.

He's got his head on the ground in his hands.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Hey, what is a Chimera ant?

A chimera ant is a different.

This, I guess.

This.

Yeah.

I mean, it's great because we've been doing the We're Not So Different You and I

thing for, you know, 50 episodes now.

Maybe more.

But I feel like we're going...

just more and more depths of

a chimera and is a socially constructed thing, a chimera and is a cultural thing, a chimera ant is not really a thing at all, it's just like a like a choice of

neuron.

Yeah, chimera ants are evil, the wet world is the enemy, I am of the dry world.

It's great, and as the narrator says, Netero once believed the king was wavering on the line, but now uh we we cut to credits.

We will get in the next episode

the

king

displaying humility in a way that is like

extremely notable to the characters around him.

This is like another version of that.

Like, this is

if you haven't seen the show, then you won't know until we get there.

But if you have seen the show, then you probably know what happens to the next episode.

We'll get there in a few.

But

when

Welfin declares him the king his his enemy, sort of, I think, understanding that he's going to be killed for saying that, but not being able to stop himself.

And the king just goes,

I hope you could be happy.

It's so good.

It hit me so hard that I started crying and then started cracking up at how good it is.

I was literally laughing about, like, I can't believe how good this moment is,

which is funny.

It It was my third time seeing it.

I've never reacted that.

I've always liked this scene, but for some reason this time, it really

got to me how good it is.

It's fantastic.

Especially because the way that the narrator doesn't finish the line, and especially given the, if possible, go live a human life thing.

You know,

the...

The natural way that you are expected to finish the line is, you know, Natera once believed the king was wavering on the line, but now he has crossed it.

You know, the king has

moved towards humanity or whatever.

But there's no way that the show is saying, and this means that the humans have won, humanity triumphed over the chimera ants

in a sense.

Because it was, you know, the other place that we're getting here is

we keep saying, what is a chimera ant?

Hey, what is a what is a human here?

What do we mean when we first self-human?

Yeah, that's absolutely true.

The delivery of the line

leaves open

that there is no brink

between

the human world and that of the ants, except just a coincidence, like geographical.

Like, it's just, it is just that they're from this place and they're new.

That's the difference.

And they're powerful.

They're like, you know, the king is sort of

born of Nen in

a sort of genuinely like messianic way that, you know, for him, Nen, which is like a secret art for humans, is like breathing.

Yes.

And there's a little sadness bubbling away here, right?

When the king says, if possible, go live a human life.

And we've spent the last five episodes talking about how, like Dre said,

there is a deep malice in the human heart, you know?

But hey,

if nothing else, the next, this episode, 135 that we're about to start, is about how is about living a human life in a good way.

Yeah.

You know, having a mom that cares about you.

135 begins

in Bizef's village underground in the dark.

And as the king kind of starts to move silently through this village, the credits play silently over these images.

This has a narrative function, you you know.

It sets things up as different.

It sets a different tone than playing the big Hunter-Hunter title sequence.

It also has a structural reason, because you get more time.

And if the thing you are spending the time on are these silent shots of the king just like moving through this underground facsimile of a human village, it's really lovely.

It was also kind of the first sign that this episode was going to really go for it, and it does.

This is where Merowem uses N to turn his Nen into

light, literal light, and sends the light out through.

Because what Palm realized was that the N can't sense something that's inside something else, which is kind of funny.

It doesn't mean, it doesn't make perfect sense, I don't think, but that's fine.

I love all the light stuff with Merowem's N here all the way to the end of of the episode just because of his name, the light that illuminates all.

I think it's really good.

And they use it to

an amazing way at the end.

Oh, unbelievable the way they use it.

It's so good.

But Palm learns this.

And because Meroem is a genius, he learns it too.

He also realizes that he can't see inside of things.

And so he's like, well, I'll just solve it by inventing a new way to do N, and I'll just send my N out as little particles, like poofs, like little poofs.

He has little nen poofs that can go into nooks and crannies

and find exactly where Palm is, which he does.

Does do.

She's hiding in a closet, and

the king's opening move is, are there any conditions for Komegi's safe return?

And then he says some wild stuff.

He says, if it is humanity's survival that you are fighting for, fight no more.

You are victorious.

The battle is over.

Yeah,

it's so good.

Palm hates to hear this.

Yeah.

Yeah, she's like at war with her internal monologue.

There's a, are they doing a human and ant thing here?

The ant that knows the truth and the human that won't see it.

There's like a.

I think it's both.

I think it's like both ways.

Yeah.

There's that.

I also think that there's a degree of like,

oh no, I can't, you can't have changed like this because then

what we've done is terrible.

You know, that's the way I read it.

Yeah.

That's how I,

that's how I'm most

about it.

And I just love that Palm is so uniquely equipped to be the only person to see all of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like she see she is high enough with the hunters and the humans to have like seen that plan and to have been like

understanding of the plan, right?

Because it's like, well, what else are you going to do?

Like these are, these are monstrous creatures that are going to try and eat us all.

Like, of course, if the only way to kill it is to use this awful bomb, like, of course, that's what we have to do.

Right, right.

And then becomes one of those creatures herself and then sees the king as, like,

and isn't, isn't this where the king also says, like, something along the lines of like, wow, if only I was this way sooner.

Yeah, yeah, if only I was this way from the beginning.

Yeah.

An omnipotent king would never lie to himself in order to fool someone as lowly as me.

After all the killing that you've done and that you plan to do, a creature such as you

the king admits defeat.

He cares for a human.

No,

it doesn't make sense.

He's doing this because it's the truth.

I believe that it was only a minimal change.

Something somewhere shifted.

If only I had been this way from the beginning.

While I am no god, what is it that I could do with this world?

No.

These last two clips that I played, by the way, it's the last new song of the Chimera Ant Arc.

It's called Elegy of the Dynast.

Good name.

Yeah.

Good song to it.

It is good.

It's very...

It's touching on a lot of other really good stuff from Hunter-Hunter back catalog soundtrack.

It's also beginning to move us into the melodramatic tragedy.

It's it is the soundtrack register of melodramatic tragedy in cinema.

Here,

the king says, you know, I wanted to ask you instead of searching myself.

Oh, you know what?

Sorry, Jack, to interrupt you.

There's one before we move on too far, there's one more soundtrack thing that I meant to bring up at the beginning of the last episode, but didn't.

The song that plays during the montage of the war and the bombs dropping and the rose was Kingdom of Predators, which is such a good song.

It's this one.

Yeah.

And the thing that I love about Kingdom of Predators,

it's the song that

so early tips the hand of what is now constantly being stated as fact about the hunter or the chimera ant arc, which is Kingdom of of Predators.

It's a very Chimera Ant sounding title.

It almost exclusively gets played when talking about humans.

It's the first time it appears is the backstory of Gyro.

It gets played.

And it does get played for ants also.

But yeah, it gets played for gyro.

It gets played when they explain the rose.

It gets played in the last episode talking about the poison in the rose.

It's like, it is very much the humans are evil to

song.

The king explicitly asks for Palm's assistance in locating Karmagi.

And then he bows to her.

This act of bowing is terrifying.

to Palm.

I think she says, no, don't.

She screams it as he bows.

And I think that this horror is just the

deep in the realms of the what have we done horror at this point.

I think there is also the,

you know, here at the end of everything feel

to this where

the king bowing means that Palm is feeling her heart get swayed like Natero.

And it it really hurts to feel that being swayed with the knowledge that not only did you commit an atrocity, but also your plan, even your recent plan, is now doomed to failure.

The king is bowing to you, and you are going to show him where Komagi is.

She says, I know what you mean to us as a species as much as I hate it.

And then she sort of recognizes in this moment, this is another great moment of like characters seeing the king's love for Komagi and it being sort of transformative.

She says, he loves her so much to go to such lengths.

Anything but that.

Speaking about the bow.

Yeah.

This is sort of what I was talking about with Welfin.

This is the

that the king would go to such lengths of human humility, he's a totally different person than, yeah, 100%.

But the implications of that are horrifying.

Yes, yes.

I really like that.

I don't think he completes the kneeling to her, by the way.

He screams it right before he can, which I think is like

an interesting

facet of it.

Stands back up.

Yeah.

Yep.

Oh, wow.

It's great.

It reminds me a lot of Peto

prostrating themselves before Goan

and like breaking their arm.

Yeah.

There's a lot of kneeling in the last 10 episodes.

There is.

The condition Palm sets is that she wants to use her ability, Wink Blue, Blue, to see the king's final moments with Karmaki.

This is just setting ourselves up so cleanly and at the same time, so

it's like a hammer blow, right?

Like setting you up for the tragedy.

We knew the path that we were on, but Palm's eye is going to be our camera in it.

And there's still, even now, something disturbingly practical about it, considering the scene that follows this scene.

What do you mean by practical there?

I'm talking about Green Green Jelly Bean Man.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

Her job is to witness the king die.

She has to tell them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess

it makes me

see it a little differently because I do agree with you.

That's a big part of it.

Yeah.

But then afterwards, she apologizes to Kiluwa.

Yeah.

Well, because she wasn't supposed to give a komugi to him.

Okay.

He said, whatever you do, don't let them get komugi.

I was also wondering, I think you're right, and I think I just misremembered this part, but I was also trying to remember if there was like a limit on how many people she could watch.

There is.

And by watching the king, she had to give up like watching Goan.

I think that that's possible.

I also thought...

I also was wondering who she gave up watching.

Oh, Poof?

That makes the most sense.

Because Poof was dead.

Because you saw, when you look at Wink Blue, you can see that he was lying dead in Wink Blue.

I want to talk about this shot, actually, yeah.

So

she's sobbing, she's crying.

It's a really good, like, indelible image.

We know Tagashi is so skilled at producing

like

a really good image on the face of it.

Outside of context, he is able to produce an arresting.

In a way, that's how this podcast starts.

It is.

It is how this podcast starts.

Yeah, with the screenshot stream.

Three pictures.

Yeah.

Wow.

But this is Palm

covering an eye and crying.

I think you can see tears coming from below her hand and her free eye.

It's a really good image.

Yeah.

There's just something about...

the palm scene that I think hits differently for me

as someone living in like the political times we're living in now, or it is impossible for me not to read Palm as also like

she is forced to look at all of this in a way that I think like a lot of folks are gonna have to if things are gonna get better.

Um, and I just I love the emotional depth that this scene in the writing of Palm like evokes, like just like how much it actually takes to radically shift your worldview and to understand

how the world works is horrifying.

I think they do a really good job turning Palm around from a butt-of-the-joke character and a character who's denied a lot of agency to without really changing that that's true, without making

her all of a sudden have a bunch of agency, uh, writing her, giving her a lot of

meaning in the plot and

like

taking action, thinking things through, like being a voice of the viewer,

like

not being a psycho with a knife, not trying to date any boys.

Also, improbably.

That's her.

Oh, sorry, Dre.

Oh, go ahead, Jay.

I was just going to say, that's her nin power, right?

She gets to watch everything.

yeah yeah and she yes um

improbably

it's we come back to devotion with palm again right like yes this is yeah this is the uh the

the bizarre like gleeful monkeys paw of tagashi's characterization sometimes right which is that like he has found a way to

Like strike the broken bell in a way that it rings really clearly when he needs it to...

You know, so much of the,

can you believe how fucking good he is?

I can't believe how good.

I've seen Hunter Hunter so many times.

I still can't believe how good it is.

I've actually, I've, I've, I've, Palm's weird, like, um,

sapping love, Palm's weird sapping devotion, has been the bits of the character of her character.

That's in her move, right?

Her ned move.

It comes up in text on the screen, Palm's weird sapping devotion.

I've always broadly liked that.

That's been a part of her characterization that I've liked quite a lot.

And it was really cool to see.

But at the same time, you know, Palm is the butt of a joke in her early things, right?

It's the, I don't love him.

No, I don't love him.

Yeah.

But I can't wait to slide

Palm in the show.

But there were so many things.

Like, you could tell, okay, like all of, it was just like a bunch of bad shit, all kind of combined.

Okay, there's not a lot of women in the show at all.

You've got Bisky, who has like a very intense and very specific thing going on, and you have Palm, and that's kind of it.

And then Palm is like the butt of a joke.

She's like kind of crazy.

She's like boy crazy.

She's like in love with her teacher, but also she's in love with this kid.

She's like a horror villain, but also like a pretty girl, but also like,

you know,

an ant experiment, but it felt like a possible victim of sexual peril, etc.

There's so much like,

it felt like the plot just kept using her for whatever it needed in a way that was, even though she was like fun on screen, was like sloppy and like kind of fucked.

But it feels like it settled.

And the way that it settled was by her becoming a chimera it.

But I think coming back to love in that in that moment is really

neat.

And, you know, sometimes when I say neat, I mean, ugh, it was too neat.

I think that clean.

The way stuff is drawn together here is really pleasing.

All the best stuff.

Whenever someone can write in a way where they've pulled something back from before and you're like, holy shit, like, oh, yeah, that stuff.

It all fits.

Like,

that works in every genre across time.

There's no genre

where that's not appreciated, I think.

Watching it go.

Watching the machine go.

Yeah.

As the music swells, we see Poof's body.

Poof has died.

This is

really heartbreaking and really odd.

There's a high wind blowing across the field where all the people are, I think, still standing.

Yeah, still standing.

Still standing.

It's like a rushing wind, and we see Poof lying dead.

He has like a trail of blue ant blood behind him.

He only managed to get about 10 feet after the king left.

And as he lies there,

the wind catches his blue cape and blows it up over his head as he's lying down and then tears it loose and

kind of like scatters it into the wind.

The like.

You know, we'd seen Yupi's corpse, but Yupi's corpse was witnessed by somebody.

You know, Yupi's corpse was seen by Welfin and by Poof and was this real sort of like

presaging of things going bad.

There's something really almost like a ruined statue or a ruined building or a ruined piece of infrastructure about seeing Poof's body unobserved, the cape, you know, blowing off his body and out into the wind.

I thought it was a really good

visual to end this character on.

Pouring one out for a real one.

Eh.

A real

a real fucked up one.

Yeah.

A real fucked up one.

Goodbye, Shaw.

Particularly gruesomely drawn, too.

Oh, God.

For having, like, presumably died

relatively, like, in pain, organs failing, being eaten from the inside by toxin.

But in the terms of Hunter-Hunter, relatively peacefully.

Yeah.

Especially considering some other deaths by this same

toxin that didn't seem so horrifically drawn.

Yeah.

Kumigi is dreaming about Gungi.

It's very cute.

It's so cute.

I love Merrowim's smile when he hears it.

Yes, even Merrowem thinks that it is cute.

Yeah.

It's maybe his first time he's ever thought that.

Waking her up.

The way he wakes her up is by saying, let's play.

Mark that this is the Sylvia cry counter number one.

Wow.

They have been been left alone in the warehouse.

Yeah.

The sort of the like,

all right, have your time.

It's so sad.

It's very sad.

Yeah, wake up Come again, it's time to play

And then we cut away and we get the news.

Can I read the whole news update?

Really?

Could we just take like five really quick?

I'm so sorry to do it in the middle of an episode.

But I really

think this is a natural point for it.

Okay, cool.

I'll be right back.

Bye.

The next thing we see after Wake Up Kumagi, it's time to play, which I don't want to brush past that, Sylvie.

That was also heartbreaking.

It's so good.

That's when the knife goes in to you, and soon it will be twisting.

It's one of the few times where you feel how young the king is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

I mean, the king is.

Poor the king.

Poor the king.

The next thing we see is maybe 20 Hunter Association balloons flying against a blue sky.

Now that the mask is off and we know what

we know what Hunter Hunter thinks humans are, we've had our suspicions, but now that we know and we know specifically what they think hunters are, the sight of

they can really pull the mask off.

They can say, we're going to show you 20 hunter balloons in the sky now.

You know, we've previously only seen like one or two

chairmans.

In a little while, we're going to see chairman isaac netero

on tv in times square this the live chairman extraordinary yeah keith do you want to read this this news broadcast i'm going to read the entire news broadcast i'm a sucker for um all of the like geopolitical stuff and all the hunter association politicking that we get in hunter hunter uh and i want to make sure that people don't who aren't watching don't miss any of this stuff but i just think it's really really fun

We have a shocking news update.

The true purpose of the summoning of all of the Republic of Iscorto's citizens to the capital was a plot by the Supreme Leader to massacre them.

The body of Supreme Leader Diego was discovered under the rubble, suggesting that the victims were likely forced into mass suicide.

But the second command secretary Bizef is still missing, so some authorities believe a revolution is the greater likelihood.

Meanwhile, there has been some trouble in NGL region of the Mitine Union as international peacekeepers have sent queries regarding refugees and have received no response.

There have been rumors of illicit dealings between East Corteau and NGL, and the international community seeks to use this incident as an opportunity to conduct a more forceful investigation.

Hey, remember

when we were saying, what's gonna happen after the Chimera and Ark?

The most frightening answer that that Takashi is throwing himself into full-throatedly is both

nothing has changed and

the people who won are using this as an opportunity to consolidate power.

Yes, I absolutely, there's there's very there's shades of Iraq war here.

Oh,

yeah,

yeah,

they may as well have been saying,

you know, like a flashing Iraq war.

These, by the way,

I didn't want to write all this down while I was watching.

I knew that I wanted to read the whole thing, so I just went to

subs likes script, subs, subslikescript.com to find the subtitles.

These are not my subtitles, so they were a little bit different than what my thing has

and worse, it seems like.

I don't know where these subs came from.

But

yeah, it might as well have said this is Iraq.

Yeah, the line

that was really noticeably different for me is the newsreader said, the reason the crowd was assembled has been revealed by our sources to be genocide.

Yes, yeah, mine also said that.

Was this a planned murder-suicide on a national level?

The very specific evocation in the newsreader as well,

or by the newsreader as well, of like different...

It's much more a newsreader saying, there's been a genocide and we're going to use this to carve up the country.

is a very different thing to saying there's been a mass murder.

Yeah.

And we just see these shots of really ominous shots of like soldiers at the border of the NGL.

Nobody knows what has happened.

They re-emphasize that this is an opportunity to conduct a forceful investigation.

We're going to learn later what that forceful investigation looks like.

Meanwhile, you never want to hear that there's international peacekeepers.

That's some new animals

showing up to it's weird how it always seems to benefit the international peacekeepers.

Yeah.

Morel in hospital is looking a bit better.

I think he's attached to an IV drip.

He is.

His hair is long as fuck, too.

That's a comedy bit with the IV.

It's really funny.

He does, yeah.

When, God, I have more buttons.

This is the buttoniest episode in a while, but it's fine because we haven't been pressing a lot of buttons recently.

He calls Colt to tell Colt what's been going on.

Oh, wait, that's later.

Oh, no, that's later.

That's later.

That's later.

We don't want to get ahead of ourselves.

That's much later.

That's Wild County bit.

Who is back, Jack?

Who's Green, Green Jelly Bean Man?

Green Green Jelly Bean Man is.

He is

back.

It's great.

I knew he was going to come back because Yoshihiro Tagashi never forgets.

He never forgets.

He never forgets.

There was a time when you were really sure, but it was so long ago, and you've learned so much about Tagashi's writing.

I feel like, I really do feel like he probably does forget.

And the way that sometimes his pacing works makes me think that he does forget.

forget i think he is constantly reading his own stuff and reading his notebook you think so reading his notes yeah i think that i think that what happens sometimes is that takashi wakes up in the middle of the night and goes oh

yes i've got it but that

i think that that's just a version of never forgetting Yeah, I do think that's a case of never forgetting.

And I mean, I think in this case,

it's clear that as soon as he started doing the hunter organization stuff, Green Green Jellybean Man was going to come back.

Yeah.

And he's complicit.

And it's super complicit.

He's super complicit.

Green Jellybean Man is

involved in war crimes.

He's involved in war crimes.

He's involved in prosecuting.

Oh, sorry.

He's involved in prosecuting hunters.

How do we know this?

He says he's.

So basically, what happens.

Oh, Sylvie, do you want to explain it?

No, you go ahead.

I think you probably got a better handle on it.

It turns out that the organization dogs that Morrill has been complaining about since he was introduced as a character includes the pencil-pushing green, green, jellybean man,

who is sitting at a desk wearing a suit with a bunch of little H's on it.

I don't remember

that, but I don't think

he wasn't.

Okay, yeah, this is a new suit to us, new to us suit.

I love the suit because the clasps on it are little H's.

They're little H's, yeah, it's great.

Yeah,

and

Green, Green, Jelly Bean Man is like, are you sure that the king is dead?

Can you really trust Palm?

Wasn't she turned into an ant?

And Moral's like, listen, man, you don't know what it's like out in the field.

You sit there at your desk doing paperwork.

And he's like, look, I get it.

Hey, I understand, but that's not going to fly with the vice chairman.

And if he finds out that you're basing that the king is dead off of another ant,

you're going to be put on trial.

Now, this is the second, I think, mention of the vice chairman.

Yeah.

The previous mention was during the first encounter with hunter dogs.

What did he call them?

Low dogs?

The organization dogs.

Organization dogs.

Oh, it's so good.

And now in the power vacuum of Natari, you know, we have known that the power vacuum is opening up.

This conversation with beans, sorry, with green, green, joli bean man, please only

serves to

solidify that.

Isn't it a beautiful inevitability that this is what the next thing is about, Jack?

Oh, I can't.

We have to wait until the end of 136 to talk about this.

Because there is a thing that happens, viewer listener, that we have not mentioned yet.

That is the most Yoshihiro Tagashi move that you could possibly do.

Did I not say to you?

Do you know what I'm beginning?

No, you might have forgotten that he did this.

Oh.

Because we've been in the Chimera End for so long.

But

Yoshihiro Tagashi is going to return to some classic Yoshihiro Tagashi.

Keith, delete this.

You talked about the

didn't mention that he.

Oh,

I did write the word

in my notes, but not at the beginning.

Okay, coming back.

Let's see.

Morel says, and we spoke about this briefly, but I want to make sure we hit it.

He says, the boss did his job.

Yep, he was a man built with a bomb in his heart.

He was always sent in to, to, you know, this is how it was going to go.

Yep.

Inside a safe that Beans opens is a video from Notero.

And as Beans watches it, he cries.

He says, Rest in peace, you've certainly earned it.

As we watch atrocity getting laundered out through the pencil pushers, the diplomats, the chair people, the people behind the desks saying, you fought so hard and you did so well.

I love that Beans is the one doing this.

The cute mascot character is the one like washing the hands of everybody involved in this it's like yeah no you do you do like him he has sympathy like you see him on screen and you go oh cute but oh guess what he's he's a cog in the machine too and you you even like netarow

yeah you do come on i like bits of natero i think no i liked i he was a fun character but like who could die

netero's absolutely inexplicable telephone game that he plays at one point and we still don't know how he did that.

That was really funny how he did that.

That's really good.

There's also a magic trick that will go forever unrevealed.

A video is streamed online.

There's something really pleasing about.

Narratively pleasing.

Psychically upsetting.

There's something really pleasing about the way that the scope is changing as we pull out of this

deeply personal, deeply sad ending of the Chimera and Arc.

You know, the Chimera and Arc is essentially about five people by the end, you know, if that.

And, you know, going from Poof's body on the field, wake up, Kermagi, it's time to play.

And then it's like the lens clicks out, and now we're seeing like normal life resuming outside.

As a video is being streamed of Chairman Natero announcing his resignation and giving instructions for choosing his successor.

And then the narrator says, but

government-run media largely drowned it out.

The propaganda machine is

working at pace.

Even in the non-Mitian Union countries, in the quote-unquote good countries where the Hunter Association is from, the government-run media is

quietening this stuff down.

It's so good.

And I think that it's an important part

of

the tapestry of the question, what is a hunter?

That a hunter is the hunter organization, and and it's people like Morrow who don't seem really to trust the whole apparatus, but also are deeply involved in it.

I mean, it couldn't be more involved.

He's criticizing the cover-up that he was involved in.

He did it.

Yeah.

He explicitly did, and not just, he didn't just act about it.

He spoke about the necessity of the cover-up in the earlier sequences with the

commissioner.

He orchestrated

the whole thing with fucking Marco.

And

Bisef, yeah.

Yeah, it's great.

A man sitting on a porch

drinks to, quote, a creature called man.

And then he recites a poem.

And as he recites the poem, we see it like laid out on screen.

Yeah.

Written out.

Do we have poem is?

Okay, here we go.

Yeah.

Good, evil, both are repeated over and over in an endless cycle.

The great spiral of time where a lifetime is too long for peace, yet too short for war.

That is why they yearn and why they.

I've written down here Foster, but I think that's my own typo.

No, no, that's true.

That's in there.

That's true, okay.

If only they knew that all one needs is life in the sun, the soil, and of course, poetry.

And then, I love this, this isn't the narrator.

Text on screen demonstrates this to be the real supreme leader Diego in his 30th year of retirement on a farm in an unnamed country.

So funny.

What a crazy What is happening here?

This is like Blowback the Chimera Ant thing, right?

This is like, yeah.

It was a puppet government even further than we understood it to be a puppet.

The DCIA was funding.

This is like very much the conspiracy theory that Hitler was actually able to flee and live elsewhere in South America.

Yeah, totally.

Is what this is playing off.

And it's like,

I actually forget about this all the time that this is like a thing because it's just so it's in the middle of one, the episode, an episode that is constantly punching me in the face.

And two, like, not like super significant, like materially.

It's just like a little like thing Tagashi throws in.

So every time I'm watching through the Chimera Antarctic, which this is, I think, the fourth time I've done it when

with Media Club.

Plus, it's called Media Club Plus.

Media Club Plus.

Shut the fuck up.

You know what I mean, dickhead.

Yes, it came out of nowhere.

It comes out of nowhere.

And I'm like, oh, right.

Yeah.

Diego's a thing.

Like, Dre, you mentioned, oh, I'm so curious to see how Jack is going to react to the Diego thing in the group chat we have.

There's a Diego.

Oh, right.

There's a Diego thing.

It's such a bitter pill as well.

Like a real, you know, you've kept the aspirin in your mouth for for too long and now it's it's awful of like

the person giving this

this is the uh this is morel's distaste for the the pencil pushes as well right like the guy who has uh escaped all of this and left this massive atrocity behind uh that he is co-signing he is the one saying you know good evil both are repeated over and over in an endless cycle um uh a lifetime is too long for peace yet too short for war it's you are doing this man my brother in christ you're creating the war You're in the people clinking champagne at the beginning of the last episode we talked about.

Like, this is

the.

I mentioned at the beginning that there's another chapter, Black Moment.

This is it.

This is the like.

I guess it's sort of like this.

There's like an interesting push and pull here from Tagashi where he simultaneously is saying this.

He uses, you know, villains to deliver this message over and over again.

He genuinely believes good and evil are both repeated over and over again in an endless cycle, the great spiral of time where a lifetime is too short for peace or too long for peace, yet too short for war.

But there's like a, even within the message, there's a good and evil version.

There is a,

you know, thinking about the like

the Japanese fascist Buddhists from World War II who like, you know, emptied their mind of meaning in order to go and slaughter people, uh,

like

for versus someone who's not like that, uh,

and who's like, who like is able to find meaning in the world despite uh

the evil of it.

Um,

there's uh

there's something really interesting about using using

his own villains to deliver the dark side aspect of this message while also insisting that it's true, while also insisting that it doesn't have to be an evil message.

It doesn't have to be nihilistic

in the case of Diego, and it doesn't have to be, you know, vengeful like in Yuyuhaka Show.

Right.

Yeah.

And then, you know, we go to where we were always going to go.

Palm stands up and looks at Ikalgo and says, it's over.

The king has died.

Except we, you know, moving

because we are a narrative camera, we're able to move through time slightly differently.

It could be that Palm is...

No, Palm is...

Palm is talking about the King's death.

Oh, go on.

The way we cut back to this with Komugi humming to herself while she's setting up the board destroyed me.

This is when I started crying for the second time.

I'm keeping people, I'm keeping track for people.

She says, feels like you and I haven't played in forever as they start to play.

It seems like she considers her.

Firstly, she was, you know, she's talking about how it's much more fun to play Googie and it's very different to play Goongie than dream about playing Goongie.

And then she kind of like uses that dream as a jumping off point to describe her experiences since getting wounded.

She says, you know, I feel like I was kicked really hard in the stomach.

She says, I,

what else does she say?

I think I was kidding.

I think I was kidnapped, which is really funny.

It's very clear that she was kidnapped.

And then I feel like you must have rescued me.

Or maybe it was.

And Merim says, no, no, no, it was my gods.

And he recalls his gods, the royal gods, and says, they were too good for me.

And Kamiki says, well, thank them.

And he says, you know, I'll relay your gratitude.

I'll see them soon.

This part rules.

I love that Merrillam gets the like shounen hero thinking about his fallen friends.

He's framing of it.

It's like, it doesn't work unless they frame it the way that they do.

It's so touching that even that after all of it,

he forgives

Poof.

And Yupi.

He doesn't have to do that.

No,

he does it.

You don't have to hand it to Poof.

He doesn't get this moment without Poof and Yupi, right?

Like, he doesn't get this without them sacrificing so much of themselves, quite literally,

to bring him back so he can spend his last few moments the way that he wants to.

It is true, but he would have had a lot more last moments without, you know, if they had done that, but then not sabotaged him.

Fair enough.

But he also wouldn't have gotten any if they didn't do that because of the poor man's rose.

So it's like, we're, you know.

Yeah.

He tells her his name.

And as he tells her his name, he's sort of like coming to the point of like, this is what really matters.

This thing here, not just my relationship with Komegi, Komagi, but also like

here in the warehouse playing.

You might call it this person and this moment, which is the title of the episode.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And then he's really sweet.

First, you know, she's saying, you know, she calls him like

Mariam Sama.

And he says, you know, if I beat you at Gungi, you will no longer use the honorific.

And then he says, I am not the same as I was before, so you should be prepared for innumerable losses i love it there's a lot of meruam smiling in these episodes in a way that we don't see him ever smile before yeah right i also want to mention because like he we've seen him smile in the past and it's always been the sort of he's frieza-esque with it you know it's either him like

being menacing because he's smiling at how powerful he is or it's like when he

the very iconic image of him biting into that piece of meat and grinning and he has a he has a princely smugness that he, where he'll smile and sort of self-satisfaction.

In both, it starts when he hears Komugi sleep talking, and it continues through this whole sequence that there is like a real warmth to all of his affect here.

That, like, I think, you know, I've talked about how much I cried at this episode.

It really hits.

It really, really lands for me.

Meru might be like one of the

best characters.

I don't know if I'm going to go.

I think I'm going to go and say anything.

Say anything.

You're right.

I'll just lean into it.

I really,

I,

I think I said, you will cry for this ant at some point to somebody, or you will cry for ant ant, and this is the ant I'm talking about.

This is the ant.

There are multiple times in my notes where I just wrote, wow, wow, wow, wow, wow, bro.

I think that, like, you can have,

like whatever reservations you want

about like

like manga and anime or TV

or any genre you any genre that you want to pick apart you can pick apart as like oh well, you know, it does this wrong or it's annoying in this way or it's like I understand not wanting to go Merrowem is one of the all-time characters in anything, but if there's one thing that Hunter Hunter is like

totally unassailable on, it is remarkably good characterization.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, I haven't read or watched Yuhaki Showyo like you have, Keith.

I think that's just something consistent with Tagashi, yeah?

Or

I love his characters.

I just think he's so good with characters.

He's really, really good with

bringing the facts of the world into the characters and having them react to it.

Like, it's even in Hunter Hunter, or even in Yuyuhaka Show, which is like

a less, it's like his less mature work, if you want to

speak in those terms.

Um,

uh, even then, like, Yuke Yurameshi is like crystal clear drawn character, like perfectly executed,

um,

with kind of like over and over again, impressing with how he

is able to shift the way that he thinks and behaves without shifting who he is as a person.

And then also like having

equally crystal clear foils for him to be reacting to and fighting against and forming alliances with, etc.

Great show.

Great show.

Great show.

As before, the king asks Komagi what she would like to choose with her prize.

Komegi says, I want another match.

And the king says, foolish question.

Wow, wow, wow, wow, wow.

Can I press some buttons?

Yeah, please.

Yeah, I'll try and hold it together.

Oh, um,

oh, I have just this one.

A novelty buster.

Buster?

Just some high-level nen play.

Sorry, Gungi play that we're going to hear in a second.

As they play, the king notices something.

This is the technique that Komagi invented way back when and then found a way to kill.

And the king has noticed that Komagi, seemingly without thinking, is starting to play this technique.

Again, she was essentially in a coma for a while.

I think, you know, she gets past.

The king says, Are you mocking me?

And she says, No, this is Goongi.

I never joke when I play Goongi.

Uh, okay, I found the button that I actually meant to press.

Um, wonderful.

If if this one, I, the next buttons that I'm pressing, those are the real ones.

I might edit this one out if it doesn't, if it's not if it's too many buttons when I'm editing.

My name is Komogi, Lord Merrowam.

It's such a great honor to make your acquaintance.

I know it is,

but no,

that's a lie.

I knew nothing.

The truth of the matter is,

I didn't understand what truly mattered.

Um, Lord Merwim, I.

Just Merwam.

But do not make me repeat myself, Komugi.

I'm sorry, but I could never do that.

I wouldn't dare address you so casually, dear leader.

Silence.

If I beat you at Goongi, you will no longer use the honorific.

I understand.

But if I address you without it, is that when I die?

Ah,

that's right.

There is no need for you to die.

See, I am not the same as I was before.

So you should be prepared for innumerable losses.

Right.

What do you want if you win?

You may choose your prize.

I know.

I want another match.

It's so good.

it's perfect so good they are i

i

i would die for these two

yeah unfortunately you won't have to they beat me to a unfortunately

oh sorry go on sylphy no go ahead you're go ahead um

you know after komagi says i i never joke when i play gungi and the king kind of realizes that he might he might have gotten her uh he says very well you lose and i will take your life this is a reference to komagi equating losing at gungi to death right the king has absolutely at this point

where is the i will take your life coming from in this moment i think he's just kidding around i think he's just being yeah

sishin the the problem with merowam is that his affect is so intense

yeah

intense is the right word yeah i think he's he's performing as the king

yes yes and at that point Komigi does her incredible looking Gungi Nen.

We've only seen this a couple of times.

It seems to be Nen only for playing Gungi.

This is this sort of like beautiful.

She's going to do a specialized specialist.

Yes, iridescent

thing.

And then she finds her way out.

She finds her way out of this trap that first she discovered, then she found a way to counter, and now she's found another way out of it.

I need to talk about this.

I need to talk about Coco Riko and

what it represents.

So Coco Iko, there's like a lot of...

This is like such a layered thing that I think Tagashi is doing here, and I really love it.

First of all, the move itself is based around the isolated king, which like I think I don't really even need to elaborate on that that much.

Fair enough.

It's like

it is a metaphor for the entire arc, right?

And it's

not only is she able to, like,

did she invent it and whatever, but like here, she's...

This is her precious baby that she killed.

This is her precious baby that she killed.

I'm getting to that.

She's able to improve on the isolated king.

Do I need to say any more?

No.

Which has been her entire arc.

Being able to get it back.

But also the fact that,

like you said, she refers to it as her baby, right?

Like the baby that she had to kill.

And then there is a moment earlier in the arc where when he plays it, when he calls it detached castling,

she says it was like seeing my baby come back to life.

And I think that, like, them doing that here in a moment that, like, is

to me, like, I don't read this as any way other than like romantic between the two.

I know that some people think it's, it's a different type of love.

Fair enough.

It's crazy.

No, it's crazy.

It's crazy to me.

Listen, I just, I'm trying to be nice.

I think that it is.

My translation, I mean,

granted, it doesn't have to be romantic if someone says love, but

Palm literally says that he loves her.

Yeah.

It is, it is, these two are soulmates in my mind, you know?

Like, that's just how it reads.

And, like, you can make a really good case that Merwem doesn't have like literally the

time on earth necessary to like untangle the complicated web of emotions in order to distill it into something recognizable as romantic love, but it's essentially romantic love.

I'm using spiritual message.

It's romantic love.

Yeah.

Thank you, Keith.

Thank you.

This, to me, like, it's, they don't get to have a life together.

Like, they don't get to live the human life that he wants Welfin to live.

They don't get to,

you know, and maybe I'm getting a little too, you know, nuclear family shit with this, but like they get to have like a

this is the closest they get to having a child together in a lot of ways.

There you go.

She brings back her baby.

Yeah.

She brings back her baby and wins with it.

They would name their child Goongie.

They would absolutely name their child Goongi.

Are you kidding me?

It's my sweet baby Goongi.

Yeah.

No, no doubt in my mind.

As the king counts as.

Oh, sorry, go on.

No, I just, I really love this whole thing.

I think that, like, there's more visuals that we can get into and more like pacing stuff to the conversation.

I'm crazy now that for

three episodes in a row, I keep going, like, yeah,

I think that this is the best that the show gets.

I think

the best that the show gets.

I have been thinking so hard about this.

I'm like,

which do I think is better, 131, 135?

And

a, it's a photo finish, like winning by a nose thing.

But I do think that this episode is the one that is like above the rest for me.

It's more impressive.

I think it's, uh,

I think it's fun to think about, and also I think it fundamentally doesn't matter.

No, because it's all part of the arc, right?

But yes, but it is fun to think about.

It's fun to rank things in your mind.

This is why people read listicles.

Yeah, that's why people power scale.

But

these episodes are like fundamentally impressive for the genre specifically.

Yeah, I really, I really agree.

I think this has been my favorite.

I think uh 135.

And I should note that uh I stopped keeping track of how much I was crying because it's from here on out, I was

fucking wreck.

Yeah, yeah, no, dude, like I was looking like Kamugi with the snot coming out of my nose.

Like, dude, it was bad.

It was ugly crying too.

Um, the king counters and Komigi starts crying and she says, Do I really deserve to be so happy?

So many wonderful things keep happening to someone like me.

And it's at this point that the king says,

I have terrible dudes.

He kind of spells out his poisoning and then he says, you know, the poison is contagious.

He says, stay by my side too long and you will also.

And then Komigi puts down a Gungi tile.

You know, she just, she keeps playing.

And it's as she that's the novelty buster buster.

That's the old me.

Tagashi is not just spinning the knife.

He's got like a drill attached to it, and it's

going crazy.

The recognition that

Komagi is going to sacrifice herself here is really

wildly sad.

It's really sad.

It's also like Marilyn giving her a chance to

possibly leave and not suffer the same fate as him is another reason why this ends up feeling so romantic to me.

Like Romeo and Juliet, who, am I right?

I was going to say Romeo and Juliet.

You know, the mechanics of the sacrifice, the sort of the suicide and the sacrifice in Romeo and Juliet are very specific.

Yeah.

And don't kind of map one-to-one scenario.

No, not at all.

Juliet and Juliet.

It's sort of Juliet and Juliet.

But that's your question of like a death is.

Mariwomen Kamugi, congratulations.

You're lesbians.

You're lesbians now.

It was actually during this scene that I was thinking, is Kamugi a a chimera ant?

We've now broadened out what chimera ants are, or rather, you know, the palette of what a chimera ant can be and what a human can be.

That I was watching this, and I was like, yeah, she's probably a chimera ant.

She is, well, sort of.

The queen is also kind of specific.

The queen is also kind of specific, but she's the king's wife to me.

And she's sobbing.

She's telling the king how happy she is.

She says, please let me go with you.

I believe that I was born so that I could be here today.

This is wildly sad, especially when you think about what this experience is like for Komegi.

Because Komegi hasn't had the last,

what,

20 episodes, 30 episodes?

Komegi's experience of the king has really only been over the Goongie board.

And it speaks to the things that she values in her heart, the kinds of expressions, the kinds of care that she feels that

her comparatively short

and meaningful encounters with the king get her to this point, right?

Yeah, it's also tragic that.

Oh, sorry, go ahead, Sylvie.

No, I have like a translate, an interesting translation thing to talk about.

So you guys finish up and then I'll talk about it.

Just that it's it, it's also tragic that Komagi has lived a life that's prepared her to die at any moment.

You know, she's been living her life on the knife's edge of a gungi loss for since she was a kid.

And,

you know, I think that

two people with different experiences might have found a way to, like, not have both of them die.

And I think this is the Juliet and Juliet of it as well: is that, like,

the only way these two can find out it is not just,

you know, capital R and lowercase R romantic.

Uh, it is also

uh ironic and

uh

like

like tragically ironic in that, like, um,

you know, anybody watching this could have been like, surely there is a way out of it without Komugi dying.

They're like, surely they could have figured out, but, but they had, they were, they just,

but then it wouldn't be what it is, it wouldn't be this, and that's and this is what it is.

It's what it's meant to be and where it was going.

This is also the power of Romeo and Juliet.

We've talked about this in the kind of like Proto-Media Club Plus that we did in the past, uh, where we discussed, among other films, um, Baz Luhrmann's excellent Romeo and Juliet.

And in that, I talked about how, you know, so much

puke.

You don't like that film?

I hate it.

I love that film.

I think you're the only, the only friend at the table.

I hate everything Baz Luhrmann's ever done with my whole heart.

I hate everything Boz Luhrmann's ever done except for Romeo and Juliet.

I mean,

the power in the play is sure.

Sure, yes.

As you approach the end of Romeo and Juliet, all you can think is maybe it's going to go differently.

And

the power in the play is that it never does, you know?

And I was watching this and I was thinking,

I want Komegi to get out of here

to not throw this away.

But of course, she doesn't see it as throwing it away, and how could she, you know?

She

they're both happy in this moment, and over a

like a life flashing before your eyes, kind of schmoltzy

montage of the king and Komagi's experiences playing Gungi, threatening each other, tearing his arm off.

You know, the credits roll.

And they finish.

And then I look down at the timer, and there's three minutes left in the episode.

Yeah.

I love the real twist of the knife.

I love it.

Can I say something really quick about

the transition thing?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I've been trying to fact-check this.

So I'm sorry if I'm saying something that is apocryphal and is going off like secondhand stuff that people have been saying online.

Just to cover my ass a little bit here.

So Kamugi says,

I saw this the

first time I watched this show and it broke me.

And I have tracked down the post that I read it on, which

is on Reddit too.

So shout out.

Kamugi says, I may not be much, but please let me accompany you, which is apparently an old-fashioned way for Japanese women to accept a marriage proposal, which I would love to have that one fact checks by someone listening to the show who knows more about both Japanese culture and the language, because I am not a speaker and I am Canadian.

But

I want to point it out because there is very much, it ties into what we've been talking about with the sort of like tragic, tragic lover's death thing.

Yeah.

And then I also found something that is unrelated, but I will forget to mention if I don't bring it up.

So

someone found a snippet of an interview from the, from, uh, Kojina Hiroshi, the director of the 2020, uh, the 2011 Hunter-Hunter anime, uh, who compares Gone and Kiloa to a mature married couple.

And, like, that, knowing that the director sees them like that is really fun to me.

Um, yeah, there's also Gone and Kilua here in this moment, right?

There's Killua.

Very much.

They're a mirror here, too.

I'm going to link this so people can look at it later.

And we get this a little bit at the end of 136.

We'll talk about it in a second.

But I think that anytime in Hunter Hunter, we have a character saying, you know,

I'll go with you.

I'm thinking of my dear friend, Kayla Wasaltic.

By the way, that's a, you said old-fashioned Japanese way.

That's an old-fashioned American way, also.

Well, yeah, for sure.

But I think that it is like the

phrasing in the actual Japanese words might.

The languages are different.

So I don't know if what she's saying in her voice acting is mirrored properly and the way it's translated literally stuff like that um let us know if you know that would be that would be great even

if the thing you're letting us know is nope that's not accurate yeah yeah

i i i love to be wrong you know i learn that way it's it's great to be wrong except being wrong um

as the credits finish and the music stops They are still playing Goongie in the dark.

All the lights in the warehouse have gone off.

And the kings...

this is so beautifully shot.

The king's tiny particles of N,

the light that, you know, once illuminated all, is now just like fireflies.

And the show is really

during the opening portion of this scene,

really sticks to it.

You have a very limited view as the light kind of like dances around this underground village.

You see some dead flowers too, hinting at the other.

Yeah, because the rose targets all living things.

Yeah.

And the king just is repeatedly asking if Komugi is still there, asking for reassurance and comfort.

The implication is very strong that he's lost his eyesight.

Yeah.

Which again is like

Komugi is also blind.

They're like, they have become equals even more so.

We've talked about how...

Sorry, I said that very clumsily.

We've talked about how the king is like at the physical peak of everything, and Kamui is very frail and like has disabilities and stuff like that.

And now the king is mirroring her physical state more.

He's come down to sort of a more mortal state while he's dying.

And I think that's really beautiful.

Something that we missed or that we just didn't talk about is that

the king heavily implies during his

discussion with Palm that he is weaker than her at that point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's like, you'll have to torture it out of me.

And he's like, I like,

you have powerful and beautiful aura.

I can't do that.

That's not going to happen.

It's not going to happen.

I do have.

Oh, go ahead, Jack.

Oh, no.

You're going.

Do you have a clip?

I have clips of this.

Oh, you're going to kill me.

I have two clips.

I've cut it down.

to sort of get the vibe of this because it does go on for a few minutes.

So I'm just going to play these two back-to-back, one of them from the first third and one of them from the last third of this little bit.

I also put in the chat the way this is drawn in the manga, which I love, is just text bubbles on total darkness.

It's beautiful.

Like, again, people get on Takashi for using a lot of text.

Go to hell.

He's really effective with it.

He uses it where it's appropriate to use it.

Like, it's always stylish and interesting.

And the moats of light are also in the uh

um here.

I'll share this are also in the manga.

It's so beautiful.

Here's here's that.

This is how the moats look

really cool.

Yeah.

Thank you, Keith.

This is great.

Yes, yes, I'm here.

Let's play another match.

The loser goes first.

Komogi.

Yes, what is it?

It would appear that I never defeated you.

Not even once.

What are you talking about?

Come on, we're just getting started.

Perhaps.

Komogi.

Komogi, are you there?

I can hear you.

Alright.

Like this?

I shall wake up shortly.

Will you

stay by my side until then?

I've never left your side.

Don't worry, we'll always be together.

Komoki, yes, yes.

What is it?

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Will you

yes?

Will you say my name

one last time?

Good night,

Meroham.

It'll be all right.

I'll be joining you soon.

It's so sad.

I don't like it.

It is.

It's

it's it's It's so.

It is so

crushingly sentimental.

And then in the middle of that sentimentality is something so directly, achingly sad.

I mean, this is why

a high tragedy works so well, right?

It's that, like, even as you can see that they are putting the pieces out in front of you to break your heart, it is,

you know,

the machine is still working.

It's such a great, sad way to end this arc.

It's, it's, it

is so unpredictable.

It's the perfect thing where it's like totally unpredictable and then inevitable at the same time.

Yeah.

Um, yeah.

And, you know, I'm not.

Indigo fucking Goongie game.

It's so good.

It's not just a googie game.

I had to cut it out, but they're in the dark.

You know, she's holding his hand and he's lying in her lap.

And they're playing Goongie out in their minds out loud because he can't use the table anymore.

We also get her touching his face to see what he looks like for the first and only time.

It's so good.

It's beautiful.

It's like really beautiful.

It's while he's saying that he just wants to hear her say his name and hold his hand.

And then the line she says that like breaks me and is it is trying to break me again right now is Good Nightmare Wim.

I'll be joining you soon.

It's so sad.

The one that really got me was

We're Just Getting Started.

No,

it was

We're Just Getting Started and it's

never defeated you.

No, Loser goes first in the next game or something.

You know, she's just

time for another game.

Loser starts first.

She does.

They just love Gelgi.

Did anybody else see the end splash for this episode, by the way?

No, I didn't.

Okay, hold on.

I got a screenshot.

There's like the big horn cue, and Goan comes in really chipper to introduce.

Oh, it's the, it's a, like, a, it's like a fully rendered image of the king and Komagi walking hand in hand through the kind of like golden field towards, towards a bright light.

Yeah, it's, it's gorgeous.

It is also just like such a gut punch right at the end of this episode.

Like,

oh my God.

They knew what they were doing, and they stuck the landing in every way.

Yeah, there's bits of.

I feel like I must have talked about this on the show before, but if I haven't, there is a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs that was written in...

It's an English graphic novel.

I'll forget the exact date.

It was written in 1982.

It's called When the Wind Blows, and it is a story about an elderly British couple in the immediate aftermath of a nuclear strike on Britain.

And it is,

you know, it is a direct anti-nuclear tragedy

that,

again, just absolutely destroys me in a very similar way here as these two old people,

Hilda and I think it's Jim, are

starting to come to terms with what has happened to them and what is going to happen to them, while at the same time not really having any sort of like preparation or sense of it.

They are consistently reminiscing about their experience in the Second World War, and that is not serving them well.

And it ends very similarly

to this end of 135.

It's tough to recommend.

Well, no, it's easy to recommend When the Wind Blows because it's fantastic, but it is.

I recommend it in the same way that someone recommends Grave of the Fireflies, you know?

Right.

Would you like a horrible time?

Would you like a horrible time?

There's bits of when the wind blows.

Oh, it's worth saying, and I'll paste a picture in the chat.

It has this extraordinary

art style.

It is rendered very

straightforwardly.

I'm going to paste it in the chat.

This sort of like semi-naive,

very gentle drawing that is nevertheless

just awful.

All right, let's move on to 136, which is a coda to the Chimera and Arc.

And in the way that the world moves on, the wheel keeps turning.

People seek to exploit the situation.

Other people try and pick their lives up.

Other people look for some sort of shred of closure.

The world is continuing to move.

And this is a real episode of

God.

almost want to say, like, getting back to business as usual, Tagashi knows that you have to keep writing the thing.

There's more Hunter Hunter to tell.

There's one in the world that happens in this episode.

Yeah, there's one thing that happens in this episode that I'm so curious, Jack, what you thought about it.

Uh, I think I can think of two things that you might be thinking of.

It's it's got to do with cult,

yep,

and

and it's the funnier one.

Okay, it begins with

a long narrative explanation of

global political ramifications for the war with the Chimera Ants.

Exactly what you think would happen has happened.

East Goteau and the NGL have been placed under the provisional rule of the International Security Agency.

There are five million displaced refugees.

The assets of both countries are divided equally among the rest of the Metean Union, and they share joint control over the territory.

In order to apparently lessen the possibility of hostilities, a proposal has been signed which will set all uninhabited land, whatever that means, as a nature reserve under the jurisdiction of the Hunter Organization.

That cuts like a rusty serrated knife.

They're doing fucking Crusader King shit.

They fucking...

Yeah, they fully did Crusader King on this.

Yeah.

it's so gross i mean it's worth saying it now so we can kind of like uh move more expeditiously uh later um they're covering up the chimera ends all together yeah they're just saying like uh uh what's the the thing they say magical beasts so they're a new kind of magical beast they're a new kind of magical beasts and you just uh

make sure you're a good one and you'll be

a good magical beast be a good magical beast Just be one of the good ones.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

It's crazy.

It's so good.

It's the best possible way this horrible fucking universe would have, you know, we're going to get to end this.

He's a guy who knows how to put politics into his thing.

Like, put like actual politics into his thing.

Yeah.

Yes.

Bluster has decided to remain in this quote-unquote nature reserve.

He says, one look at me and the peacekeepers would arrest me on the spot.

There is a lot of stuff just going implied here, you know,

as to the world that the powers that be, and again, Hunter Hunter is sort of vague at this point.

We'll see if the next arc changes this about what exactly the powers that be are.

We know there are the countries in the Metean Union, and then there are sort of like vague other countries out there.

There's the G7 guys,

yeah, there's there is a sort of G7,

but it's America, you know, it's NATO, it's

the UN.

Talking about the international international community several times.

That's sort of like the mafia community.

There's also, yeah, they're very similar to the mafia community.

Way less fun.

Way less fun, but a lot bigger criminal.

Yeah.

We're here in this

legitimacy

with a

what's that vehicle called?

It's like an RV.

An RV, right?

I couldn't remember what Americans call it.

We have to call it a camper sometimes.

What do you call it?

I think we call it a caravan.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh.

We would call,

I guess someone might call it a caravan.

I wouldn't be like a British

Canadian.

No, even Americans called it a caravan to me, I would be like, yeah, okay.

So we have a big caravan.

In the caravan is

Hina.

She is pissing everybody off.

Yeah.

Her approach to this is.

Yes, we're out.

You gotta look at what's next in life, and we're gonna go and find gyro, probably,

and we can start like a cool new world.

Isn't that great?

Also in the van is director Bzaf who says, I think I'm a wanted war criminal.

Yeah.

And I think I'm sad.

And I think I'm sad.

But not sad because of my conscience.

I think sad because my project collapsed.

Yeah, sad because of my squid, my lowly state.

Yeah.

There is welfare.

He's got to go to Meteor City.

Oh, yeah, he's going to go to Meteor City.

He's going to lie low in Meteor City.

I think that's also why they're thinking of hunting for Gyro.

Yeah, they want to go to Meteor City to meet up with Gyro, who Welfin assumes has gone there to

orchestrate a new

producing

two of his plan.

Yeah, which is great because, once again, Gyro is evil.

Gyro is evil.

Yeah, a horrible person who just wants to bring evil into the world.

Gyroscope is implicitly more evil than the Chimera ants.

Yes.

Maybe less capacity for evil, but they're going to build a new world.

But this is pretty high capacity for evil.

It's literally implied that he's so evil.

That's why he couldn't stay as a Chimera ant.

Because he woke up and he's like, ah, I'm so evil.

I could never lose my identity.

Too evil to become a Chimera ant.

Yeah.

Also in the van is Welfin, who drinks a beer and hates it.

Yeah.

His approach.

Let's spell out his approach now.

Welford has a new phrase.

He learned this phrase from Gyro, and the phrase is...

Argo, fuck yourself.

It's Argo, fuck yourself.

It's don't die until you're dead.

This is what he says to Bloster as he sort of like waves off Bloster and the last man, but who we'll talk about in a second, being like, live a good life.

And Bloster's response to this is sort of like, oh, yeah.

Sort of like sees the day, I guess.

Yeah.

And Welfin ignores him.

And Welford is just sort of like...

Yeah, whatever.

All right.

But yeah, the big thing here is Welford is kind of like starting to live the high life.

He's still using his crutches.

He drinks a bit of beer.

He drinks it and he hates it.

He's like, ah.

The last member of the troop who has now left with Bluster is Shidore.

Now, do you remember Shidore?

I sure do.

How soon, Jack, after seeing Shidore, did you go, ah, I know what's happening here?

It was with the line, Shidore is a lot more like you than me, so Bluster doesn't remember his past, you know.

Bluster says, I can kind of just tell sometimes I can look at someone and say, that guy remembers his past.

That's a hilarious line.

I love the idea of looking at a guy and being like, ah, now there's a guy who remembers his past.

And he can tell that Shidori remembers too.

And she says,

it's not that she doesn't.

It's like she can't talk about it.

It's not that she can't talk.

It's that she doesn't.

She doesn't want to.

And he says, she's probably a little kid.

And then I put it together.

Yes.

And the first thing I thought when I put it together is too neat, too neat.

And then as the episode continued, I thought, this is great.

You've done it again, Tagashi.

This is actually working really well.

This is

the cult thing that I didn't, I wasn't curious about because I suspected this exact thing of being like, oh, of course, they put a little bow on it, you know, whatever.

Except for that it's really perfectly executed and it's very sweet.

It executed really well and it ties together the arc.

Something that you don't need to do.

I'm not saying that this makes it a better story,

but when you have an arc this long, watching the little loops he chooses to close and the little loops he leaves open is really illuminating.

And, you know, viewer, you can see it now.

Colt

was the chimera ant spawn of Kurt, and

Shidore is the one for Reyna.

The two kids are back.

This killed me.

This is the most...

This is so touching in, again, a really nakedly sentimental way that after

however long we have been on this violent,

regularly bizarre,

strangely paced train, this is the roller coaster coming into the station and like someone waving at me as the train pulls in, and me just bursting into tears because I'm like, they were there at the end.

And it does, it speaks to so many things that the Chimera arc tries to touch on: that there isn't a meaningful difference between ants and humans, that humans are

not

good or evil, but are the entire spectrum of morality.

And in an arc that focused so much on

rapidly increasing tensions with no outlet, you know, the ending,

I think, sort of has to

sort of

show the

show the hand show the other hand.

Like, here,

look at it.

It's not all bad.

Here's the good stuff.

It is nakedly sentimental,

but it just works so well.

And it does feel so in tune with what the whole thing is.

What this thing is trying to say.

Yeah.

Look, you could write down on a piece of paper, my story is going to be about

how humanity is complicated.

And

there's gray areas between black and white.

And I'd be like, okay, man, cool.

You've got to see him do it.

Proofs in the pudding.

Proof of its own zone is in the pudding.

The proof it was in the pudding, yeah.

So let's talk.

We talk about how it's executed, executed, or we talk about that it's executed.

Let's talk about how it's executed.

Yeah, and let's let's leave the other cult thing.

Yeah, um, bloster sort of sweetly is sort of guiding Shidore back to

this village, so nice.

Um,

a very un-bloster-like thing to be doing, it seems like.

And Bloster also seems to be feeling that way.

Um, and kind of just like shows up and is trying to parlay.

Obviously, everyone runs terrified because this place was attacked by Blosters.

Yeah.

It's a specific echo of

the first assault.

I wonder if Bloster was there.

I can't remember.

But he was just like, was he just like a friend at that time?

Would have been, right?

I don't think so.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't remember.

I remember that it gets attacked.

I think Bloster came around after they started eating humans more, and this is at the beginning of when they started.

Yeah, maybe the humans.

Because Colt is like one of the first humanoid, like ants with human memory.

Yeah.

But

he just sort of stands

in the fields and is like, Hey, can anybody out here come and talk to me, please?

I promise

I won't kill you.

It's fine.

Yeah, as he sees them.

I'll be chill if you'll be chill.

Just go talk to me.

As he sees them running, he says, Well, can't blame him.

And out comes a woman wielding like a

fork, like a farming fork.

Yeah, a metal rake.

And as she approaches Bloster, the camera shifts in such a way that we see that her focus is on Shidore,

and she has recognized that this is Reyna.

I love, yeah, even that even this woman, not just the mother, but another one of the people in the video.

They can just see.

They can just see that it's reina

yeah

and then we're back with the greaming the grieving oh my god the grieving woman who lost both her children she's in this room you know we've seen her uh to a few times at the beginning of the chimera ant arc just in the depths of grief you can see someone's brought her a whole chicken yes uh there's a sense of the community is like

um

there was a little conversation earlier where they were like she's really struggling isn't she and someone else was like yeah

look at what happened to her you know Yeah, why wouldn't she be?

I believe one of them was that woman with the metal rake.

Yeah, uh,

and she recognizes Shidore

and they both start crying.

And Shidore speaks and says, How did you know?

And she says, I'm your mother.

How could I not tell?

And they are both sobbing and hugging.

It's fantastic.

It's so good.

It's really, really good.

And the whole time,

it's you've got in your head because they just showed you cult for the first time in like 20 episodes.

And so you're like, Colt's out there.

Kurt is there.

The brother is there.

They can get him too.

They can.

And here we have finally the like apotheosis of like ants as a transformation of people.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Like a chimera ant is a process sometimes that is worked on a spirit.

And it's, yeah, it's sort of the proof of the journey that Ikalgo and Welfin are on.

We see Reina concluding the journey that you can become a Chimera ant and then just slot yourself back into your old life.

And it's so moving.

The mother and child thing again, first with Meroem and the queen, and then with Reina and her mother, and then with

Poof and Yupi and the king,

and then finally with Komegi and Meroem and the Gungi board,

seeing these two embracing and there being like

this has not been foreclosed.

You know, there is something ahead for these people.

Two things great.

There's something really sad about Shidore's spirally, crying eyes.

Their scratchy black swirls, and they're just tragic.

They're very, very sad to look at.

I don't know know how they did that.

There's just something especially heartbreaking about them.

But then, yeah, I do love how this sort of like adds another loop to an arc that

is largely about the healing power of motherhood in the face of a show that is about the destructive nature of fatherhood.

Yes.

Yep.

And then I'm your mother, how could I not know?

Set against blosters.

Sometimes you look at a guy and you can tell that guy remembers his past.

There's like

there's like a different kind of warmth there, right?

There's a different kind of like love and recognition.

And another echo of gyro too.

Gyro, too evil to become

sublimated by the ant identity.

And like

Reyna, too pure.

to be for the same it's sort of like the opposite end of the spectrum like like the the

uh the

all the way back to the hunter exam the power in the extremes

look uh you know two different kinds of pure heart a hopeless sentimentalist but uh as a human on earth i do like to see a reunion between a parent and child i think that

gets me every time it's good stuff

um

morrell is on the phone with cult

quote officially the ants had nothing to do with with recent events.

Colt has a great line here.

He says, I didn't realize they could do that.

Like the powers that be.

But it's post-truth.

You know, you get to say what happens.

And this is where we get the, you'll be classified as a new kind of magical beast.

But Colt has a problem on his own hands, which is that he has been calling this little ant baby.

Remember the remember the remember the ant baby?

Do you remember the

hand baby?

Hand baby.

Hand baby.

He has been calling the baby Reyna.

Uh-huh.

I'm not sure why.

Do you think that he is calling that not out of a recognition that this baby might be Reyna, but that it's like a like a like a rebirth of his sister?

Like a yeah, exactly.

That's how I read it is.

It's in tribute to his sister that he thinks is dead.

I have a very short button here.

Please.

Because this kid is cute as hell.

Reyna.

You're wrong, you dummy.

I told you!

She keeps saying her name's not Reyna.

Okay, what is it then?

For the last time, my name is not Reyna, alright?

So stop it!

Don't call me that!

My name is Kite!

Well now, what are we gonna do here?

The drums are so good.

This is a comedy beat.

Oh, right, that's Morel ripping his IV out as hell.

He rips his IV out and pulls it and throws it on the ground and then falls to go Talgon and Kilua.

I don't know what to do with this.

Firstly, I think that the character design on the ant kid is great.

It's just another really sharp Yashihir Tagashi character design.

She has like a shock of red hair and this like long whip-like bug tail.

And she's like...

waving around a rapier or something.

She's got like a little sword on her.

I don't know what to do with this.

Isn't it it very confusing and strange?

This is very confusing and possibly weakening what we've been doing.

The futility of the thing

works if kite dies.

At the same time,

yeah, I do not know what is happening here.

I was about to be like, at the same time, we know that a key part of the Chimera ant

arc, you know, the palette of storytelling is the like reprocessing of humans through ants and then something bubbling up on the other side.

You know, we saw this with Shidore, we saw this with Welfin, we saw this with all the ants, with Peggy and Maliarone.

Very notably, recently, we saw this with Palm, right?

Palm is a human who gets reprocessed through an ant, has that really great, scary fight with Killior, and then kind of like bubbles up out of it again.

Kite was a corpse that was piloted by Peto.

Sure.

And does not seem to have been.

There's two ways that I can take issue with this.

And I don't even know if I am taking issue with it.

In general, with Tagashi plotting, the thing I want to do is kind of like go, all right, man,

where are we going with this?

And I don't want this to be reading.

I think that's a good instinct.

Yes.

I don't want this to be read as like

at the last moment, Jack condemns Yoshira.

We don't need to get the cinema sins like ding bells ready for what you're about to say.

Right, but there's two kind of ways that I could look at this.

The first is I don't really understand what has happened narratively.

I don't really understand the process by which we would get a baby born as the sibling of Meroem

now from the queen.

Now, I'll tell you this.

I understand it.

I understand how we get that.

Okay.

Can you tell me or do is this?

No,

I cannot.

Okay, good.

Good to know.

Good to know.

The second thing is: well, what are we doing here, like structurally, right?

Like, part of the horror and the power and the sadness and the like

the like grace of Goan and Killiwa's arc and the sort of like the general like bloody futility of the end of the Chimera and arc is rooted in the loss, is rooted in the moment that Kite's body slumps down, is rooted in the moment that pito says i'm sorry but this man is dead you know um and so much of of what makes the king go is that he is both

lonely and isolated and unique he is

one of one

And in that, he finds initially a kind of great power and then a confusion and a bafflement and a horror.

That's great.

The fact that the king is the leader of his figures and he's also just like alone,

that works really well.

So now we have like

a sister or a brother to the king born of the same mother.

You could say all the ants were born of the queen, but the arrival of the hand baby was kind of like simultaneous with the.

Not quite simultaneous.

It was in the wreckage of the birth of the king.

I don't know what we do with this.

I will say this.

The rug moves under your feet whether you want it to or not, you know?

Yeah.

I think,

regardless of

how you feel about how this concludes, it's a very fun bit of

explaining that they do.

It's very fun.

I also think that

something that I know Tagashi is really good at is this reprocessing of characters through other characters, either through a literal reprocessing, see palm number one, palm ant,

or

the way we just keep seeing fun echoes of Jing, we keep seeing fun echoes of kite and killua.

Something Tagashi is really good at and has a really good eye for is like using characters as like mirrors facing one another, right?

To like reflect interesting different bits.

So I am excited to see that this little weirdie is on the map.

I'm excited to see Tagashi write a child.

Generally, he kind of uses children as like, I mean, a child younger than Gun and Kiliua.

Generally, he uses like these young kids as like

blunt instruments that he kind of points in the direction of an emotion and lets go.

Yeah.

Another thing is, just a flag of something to look forward to.

There's a, there's someone that I think that we've forgotten.

By we, I mean you, and by you, I mean you all, Jack, and the listeners who are not, who have not seen Hunter Hunter,

that shares

a scene with

Ant Kite that is

so

good.

It's so good.

I've been looking forward to it forever.

I'm so excited.

I'm also really excited about the fact that when Morel saw Ant Kite be born, he was like,

this is it.

This is what you have to do.

You have to look after this thing forever, which is really cool If it's also like a senior, like a reprocessing of a senior hunter, there's some fun.

Maybe this is a pathway towards Morel atoning for whatever the hell it was that he did to Goan.

Although, based on the scene we're about to see,

I don't feel confident.

Goan is in critical condition in a breathing tent.

He's in a room in the Hunter Association.

We do not see Goan at any point during these episodes.

We hear his breathing.

We do, and it doesn't sound good.

Well,

we hear his breathing apparatus.

It rules.

It's so good that Goan is just, you know, Goan

spent his life and vanished.

Yeah.

Shoot is alive.

He has his neg, he has his leg elevated.

Melierone is hanging out with his head down, sort of like sitting next to him with his hoodie up.

Nove is as pale as usual, but is now wearing a big newsie cap.

And I just wrote down here, Knuckles fine.

Knuckles fine.

Yeah, Knuckles fine.

gone is in life support and uh the doctor says i've seen a lot in my time but the 12-year-old transformed like that in one day there's something so good about the fact that he is saying that to the group of adults who transformed him like that over a period of ooh several months to a year

yeah

this is the hunter doctor though he's seen some shit

Yeah, I also think he's probably a hunter.

Yeah, I think he's...

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He's like a.

He's like a Leorio.

He's like a future Leorio.

Yeah, he's not.

To be clear, he's not a hunter doctor in the sense that he's a doctor employed by the hunters.

He is a hunter doctor.

A hunter who has specialized in being a doctor.

Yeah.

If like a chef hunter is called a gourmet hunter, would he be called like a like a like a health hunter, a vitality hunter?

A vitality hunter.

I bet that one's that's someone who finds herbs in the jungle or something.

Yeah, fair enough.

I mean, there's probably some crossover.

Yeah.

I was about to be like, did we ever go to the jungle in Hunter Hunter?

We've been in the jungle several times.

Several times, yeah,

a lot of them during this arc.

Yes.

Nove is prepared to pay a huge amount of money to bring the specialists who will be able to cure Goan, question mark.

Again, Goan is off-screen.

We don't know the condition he's in.

He says, if necessary, we'll rebuild the hospital.

We owe it to him after what he did.

Yeah, I really get there.

There's a guilt, I think,

in November.

Absolutely.

That he's like.

Or better be.

Right.

And not just over his shitty hat.

I have to.

Look, he's got a new look, and he needs to figure out how to style it.

He stole his hat from a Guilty Gear character, and he needs to give it back to her.

Most people who are bald had a long time to figure out how to look while bald.

That's true.

That is true.

Just rock it, man.

You basically look like Northern Lion.

Like, just roll with it.

I will say, I think

you absolutely do not have to hand it to Mr.

Nove.

However, the Splinter Cell scene, Nov's little mini arc was one of the coolest bits of the show.

It was really fun.

Oh, yeah.

I just also do not like Nove very much as a person.

Yeah.

No.

He doesn't have the charm of morale.

He doesn't have the charm of morale.

He doesn't have the skill.

He doesn't have the the temperament.

Although, you know,

I think Moral, sorry, Jack is infected me.

His name's Moral.

He's moral.

But,

you know, Moral also fucking sucks, even though he's good.

He does.

He does.

He really does.

They both suck.

The thing with Nove is he's way more.

One, he's way less charming than Morrell, but he's also way more explicit about the, like,

we have to eradicate the ants stuff, whereas Moral gets some moments to sort of like have that shaken he does more so than no does he's very he's very much like knuckle in that way uh and like how gone seemed for a while who's nove's pupil shoot knuckle uh yeah shoot well palm i think because knuckle and shoot are both morals

yeah i think so yeah um

but uh

yeah he's he's waving he says that he'll if he needs to he'll pay to have the hospital like built around gone

Doesn't Morrill have a really amazing surname?

McArnathy?

Yeah.

Moral McArnacey.

It's really good.

Nove, I believe, is a mononym.

It's a mononym.

I think we've discussed this.

Meanwhile, Kilua sits in an observation room remembering Goan striking Pito.

That is tremendous.

In the end, you took care of it all by yourself.

It's so good the way that Yoshihiro Tagashi can remember how to write Kilua on a dime.

Yeah.

He says I had it.

Yeah.

He says, I get it.

Kite saved your life and it wasn't my fight.

Wrong.

Classic Killua.

Yeah.

Internalizing,

you know, Goan's shitty behavior.

Yeah, and very explicitly here, right?

Like, Kiliwa is addressing Goan in his own thoughts.

I mean, I think Kiliwa is probably always doing this, but I think the traps that Goan falls into in terms of the weird relationship they have come through so clearly when he is thinking through how he feels about goan he says then he says so he says uh kite saved your life and it wasn't my fight but still i wish you'd said let's get him together oh kill your breaking killio you're starting to you're under something here and then they they finally answer the question of that confusing thing from episode like 114.

You say that to me as a teammate or as a

yeah, here let me so this is when oh you have a clip I do have a clip.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

But still,

I'd wish you'd said, let's get him together.

Let's go.

This is Goan as he moves in to fight Pito in the tower.

I know.

I'm just sulking.

Watch it, Kellya.

You're on the edge of a breakthrough.

Every time

it's the same,

you keep running ahead while I stay behind and clean up after you.

Uh-oh, this music's sounding a bit triumphant.

It's the same as always.

And I'll do it again.

Oh, shit.

But this time, I won't let you off the hook.

Huh?

You better apologize.

Yeah, I'm going to make you better.

You hear me?

I swear, I'm gonna make you apologize.

My note for this bit was

Killuwa, wah wah wah wah wah

He's really kind of onto something, much like the king

figuring out ideology life on the balance.

He is onto something for tragedy here, but he's not quite there.

Him really starting to feel out those frustrations with Goan and then dismissing it to himself as I'm just sulking, which is something that Goan has said about Killier in the early days days as well.

Remember, like, Killier feeling a little bit shit.

He is, but also,

um,

you're not wrong.

And then he really hits at the heart of it.

You know, he says, you keep running ahead while I stay behind and clean up after you.

It's the same every time.

And then his resolve breaks and he says, and I'll do it again.

But then he's sort of like...

It's this sort of like awful little compromised journey back towards the relationship that's not good for you again, right?

He's like, I'll do it again, but this time I won't let you off the hook.

You have to apologize.

I'll make it better.

Sorry, I'll make you better.

I swear, I'll make you apologize.

It's like he is re-entering the ring once again, saying it'll be different this time.

Have some Killie with Zelda.

I don't know how much it's always sunny in Philadelphia we've watched as a group.

If anyone's seen.

This is going to hit for me.

If anyone's seen the episode, The Gang Gets Analyzed with the hilarious Carrie Kinney playing Sweet D's therapist.

Have you seen this episode, Sylvie?

I haven't.

Maybe.

It's

Danny DeVito's best acting in it.

It's the you unzipped me scene.

I like that scene.

He really is acting, like actually acting in it.

And then the you unzip me is like the punchline where he's like now overacting.

It's a great, it's a great episode.

It's a pretty good episode to watch if you haven't seen a lot of It's Always Sunny because it's one of the episodes that like

really goes into the character archetypes archetypes heavy and it's like about who they are as characters anyway there's a part where mac is being um

uh uh interviewed i guess by the therapist and um uh he's wildly uh uh mood swinging and is like talking about sometimes i think they're not even my friends And he's like all angry.

And then he just sits there and he starts laughing.

And he's like, ha ha ha,

god damn them.

God damn them for making me think that.

And this is how I feel about Kilua in this scene.

Yes.

Yes.

It's really sad.

It's also great.

It's great that Yoshi Heritagashi has not yet let the machine of what is going on between these two weirdos rest.

He is not done with that.

What is interesting to me is that the anime is nearly done with that.

Yeah.

have...

How many episodes do we have left in the anime?

Like 12 or 13.

Yeah, we only have a couple more episodes left.

So

of this show, I mean, for the anime audience,

you know, I'm not going to discount the room that we've got.

You know, they need to wrap the show up.

But to a certain extent, this is where we're going to leave Killiua.

Unless, you know, they...

pull a real rug out from under me, right?

Where it's like

Killiua saying, I'm going back into the fray again, but this time it's going to be all right.

Is this

the good place that we're going to leave Kilua Zelda at the end of the anime?

Um,

we'll see, but I'm so curious.

This plays very differently, knowing that there is a lot more Hunter-Hunter, you know?

Um,

although, like, not a lot more Hunter-Hunter that has Gone in it,

yeah,

or Kilua, from what I understand.

Wow,

what a guy!

And by what a guy, I mean Yoshihiro Tagashi.

And Kilua.

I can't say any more on this because I'll get too into

spoilers.

When you make the project of the 2011 anime, that anime has to end with the characters of Goan and Kilua in a place.

You have to say, right, that's where we're closing their book.

And if the place we're closing Kilua Zoldic's book is a recognition that his relationship with Goan is deeply flawed, but he's saying, and I'll do it again, I'll do it every time.

I mean, it's not the end of the world, but it's not the most

joyful place to leave Killiwer in, right?

Right.

Yeah.

I am just going to say I'm very excited to see how you react to where we leave it, and I won't touch on it anymore.

Yeah, because I really want to be

cognizant of the fact that it's not like it's ending in the next episode.

We have some more Hunter Hunter to go.

Well, a lot can happen in 12 episodes.

A lot can happen in 12 episodes.

And where we've just seen that suddenly unfolds in front of me.

Really quick before we keep moving, when Nove comes in to talk to Kiloa, and Kiloa is

he's got his hair covering his eyes, but he was clearly crying.

He's like wiping the tears away when Nove walks in and trying to play it off.

It's really good.

Did we talk about

the name of that post from Forever Go in the last episode?

Did I finally say the name of that post?

10 times Killua Cried and the Zero Times Gone Freak saw it or whatever.

Yeah, fanfick

tally on the thing

yeah this doesn't count quite as collecting a sad killua because for me a sad killer requires that we see his face yeah this is a this is a this is collecting killua sadness but not a sad killua right sure i i think that this is a

um

it's a just a low rarity card Is collecting sad killuas a thing that we came up with, or is that a hunter-hunter meme?

No, I came up with that, I think.

I feel like we came up with that.

meme.

Because it feels like a, it does feel like a very normal way to interact with the show.

It does, yeah.

It does seem like past a certain point, any viewer, whether they know they're doing it or not, is collecting sad Killiwas.

I love when Killiwa Big Times Nov here.

Yes, great.

Go ahead and get the doctors because he's going to need them right up until I get back.

Not clear what Killiwa's plan is.

Nope, not at all.

He's going to

go and get something that'll save Goan.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

And he's saying it with like his murder eyes.

Yes.

He does say it.

He has Zeldic eyes when he says it.

He does have Zelda.

He hits Nov with the Zoldic stare.

And there's an extremely pointed Nov footsteps scene where he walks past Nov.

You can hear Nov turn, and there's like the light footstep of Nov turning matched with Kilua's absolutely silent walk all the way from where he's standing to the door.

Kilua's Zelda Zero Footsteps thing being revealed to me that that was something that had been going on during the Peto attack was such a great late Media Club Plus twist.

Yeah.

It's such a.

I had not noticed that they were doing that at all.

And now I like it.

I actually think that it came up, Jack, but like a hundred episodes ago.

It came up early on when we were talking about like, I think it comes up in the Phantom Troop arc because Melody talks about it.

Oh yeah, she talks about it.

I guess I just had never realized that.

Oh, weird, I guess I had just never realized that Killer Zaldic was unable to turn off or get rid of his

assassin training.

What's the thing called?

What's the Zelda move called?

Shadow Step?

I believe it is called Shadow Step.

How do you follow the Chimera and Arc?

The answer is actually extremely clear if you remember the man we're dealing with.

The man we're dealing with is Yoshihiro Tagashi, and after 80-ish episodes of a marathon arc, the thing he decides to pull back out is a classic Hunter-Hunter maneuver or going back to another game.

This is.

If the Chimera Ant arc is

what's it called in a where data, where one spike of data is

like a barrel.

What do you call it?

It's like a...

An outlier?

An outlier.

If the Chimera Ant arc is an outlier, like

the way Hunter-Hunter arcs work is so

beautiful and straightforward, even setting aside the game-like thing.

They are almost always games, but they're things like climb a tower, do the hunter exam,

fight a bizarre

sort of like murder cult in a town that escalates into a hostage system.

Play a video game.

Play a video game.

And then he goes, like, all right, hang on, wait a second, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

I have to do Crusader Kings about the human soul.

Let's go.

And then he gets to the end of that and he says, we're going to do an election.

We're going to combine the two.

We're going to do Crusader Kings about human soul, but make it a game.

But it's gonna be lighter by the looks of things, and we know that it might be lighter because he's remembered the thing that he can do after

spending so much effort making 1,000 weird little freaks-you know, a unique chimera.

And every time it arrives, he's gone back to the well.

As soon as he is free, he can't resist.

He has introduced a new gang of uniquely named, uniquely designed.

freaks.

He says, My name is Chairman Netero.

I'm resigning as chairman, so please take care.

The next chairman will be chosen by special election, and I am setting the condition that all hunters must cast a vote.

If you don't reach a 95% quorum, then call for a revote.

All the other details, such as the exact date and method, can be determined by the zodiacs.

As soon as he said determined by the zodiacs, I like punched the air.

Once he'd started talking, I was like, oh, this is the next arc.

We're going to do a really cool all the hunters have to vote election arc.

Oh,

thank you, thank you, thank you.

But then when he said

the zodiacs, I was like, thank God.

And then we see them.

The zodiacs are the leaders of the Hunter Association.

They are a Yoshihira Tagashi gang of weirdos.

Do you want to describe what we have from the...

Oh, you were to do that?

I wrote them down.

Perfect.

Wonderful.

Oh, I'm so happy.

A tall figure in a black and white Dalmatian spotted outfit.

We see them from behind.

They're standing outside the Hunter organization building.

Someone wearing what looks like a green and black baseball jersey.

A small person wearing a green dress.

A tall Ronin in purple.

You might be thinking, I know a tall Ronin in purple.

Different tall Ronin.

Different guy.

A spiky-crowned lady wearing a white dress.

This was covered by the subtitle, so I wrote indistinct black shape, but then when the subtitle moved, it's just a lady with black.

Yeah, and still fairly indistinct.

A really big guy with an afro wearing jeans and a singlet.

A tall man, much very, very tall, clad in red, almost like a samurai, but not quite.

A bunny girl.

I've written down here, small-tailed alien.

And then approaching the camera as it turns around and we see his face, Jing Freaks.

Jing Freaks.

Deadbeat motherfucker.

12th zodiac.

Jing Freaks being one of the leaders of the Hunter organization both makes a lot of sense and makes this whole thing so grim in retrospect.

Your son was right there and your dad was right there.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

The

I don't know a ton about this and it's not a spoiler and I think it's it's appropriate for the way that this image is presented, Jack.

But I will give you the option to decline knowing which zodiac Jing Freaks is.

Oh, no.

Tell me.

I think this is fun information.

He is the boar or the pig

who, and I don't know a lot about this, but he's famous for being the last to arrive and

is nicknamed the lazy pig.

In the Chinese Zodiac?

Yeah.

That is consistent with.

And he is the late to arrive.

I know the last Chinese zodiac very well.

This is going to be exciting.

So you do or don't?

No, I don't know my Chinese zodiac very well.

This is another.

I mean, obviously, we've got a game here.

An election is a kind of game in Yoshi Heritagashi's world.

And also, also we have this like beautifully systematized gang of weirdos it is not enough for Tagashi to say I've got 13 weirdies they have to be the ten dons or the shadow beasts or the phantom troop or the assorted chimera ants um

i do think it's it's fun to have another run at the shadow beasts um obviously also animal themed because he's like fuck i killed them all before i could even reveal them

no the joke was that he killed them all, right?

He must have drawn them knowing that he...

Well,

you're totally.

It's totally true, but I just think that in his heart, he was like, I really want to draw some animal guys.

I think that you could say to Yoshihiro Tagashi, you can have one wish, and he'd say, just let me draw discreet gangs of weirdies for the rest of my life.

I think he might like that more than making manga.

I think he sees making manga as

the shortest as the crow flies routes.

That's right.

It's the only way they'll let me get away with this and pay me for it.

And it takes fucking forever, but it's really good and I get to keep it.

And it hurts my back.

You could just draw them, Takashi.

It's not the same.

It's not the same.

It's not the same.

It's not the same.

I want to put them in

an evil magazine.

That was Chimera Ant.

That was Chimera Ant.

It's an old-timer.

It's so.

It really is.

I'm so happy that

it landed.

I didn't really doubt that it would land, but I am so happy with how much it landed with you, Jack.

Yeah.

It's so joyful.

It was such a...

Yeah, it was such a joyful experience getting to watch it through with you guys.

Yeah.

I had a blast.

I would not have...

I mean, I'd have stuck with it if I was on it, but like...

Getting to do this thing makes the show work on such a different level.

And

I had such a good time.

The joy as well is knowing that there's more, right?

That he can write that and that

the story keeps going.

Yeah.

If you've enjoyed Media Club Plus, tell your friends, post about it online, talk about it.

Bordering on too much.

Be annoying.

Be annoying.

Honestly.

Because you're probably not actually being annoying.

You just think you are.

But you're just telling people about a thing you like.

Yeah.

It is now the only way to do a podcast is to have people who will not shut up about you.

Are you?

Oh, go on.

Now, I think you were going to transition to the same thing I was going to start talking about.

I was going to briefly say: if you, the viewer,

are thinking,

I'd like them to

summarize their feelings about the Chimera and Arc.

I would invite you to listen to the media that we produce over the next year and a half.

And also,

and also,

we kind of just did it.

We kind of just did it.

We didn't summarize it.

We did talk about it much longer than it would take to watch it.

But I mean, I did basically sneak the

Hunter Association into Perpetua.

You did do that.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

Sylvie, I have not put that together.

They are the Hunter Association.

That's so funny.

Yeah.

I didn't really think about it at the time, but now I'm like, oh, no, they are.

I thought that was on purpose.

Oh, no.

I think in my brain.

Yeah, definitely.

I thought you were drawing from from like

stuff like the Thalmor, right?

The like the high elf.

Yeah.

There's a lot of companies that I know that there's two things I know Sylvie was watching at the same time, and it was Hunter Hunter and the X-Files.

Yeah.

And I was just like,

Sylvie is playing the Fox Mulder of the Hunters.

That's right.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

I just started listening to

the other side.

Yeah, it's so cool.

I'm sorry to hear the other side.

I haven't had a chance.

Do you have a review?

I have, yes, I do.

And one of them ties into what we were saying about recommending this show to your friends.

This is a review from Citrus Lesbian.

Shout out.

Good name.

Titled Extremely Tailored Podcast Recommendation.

A little over a month ago, upon seeing the beautiful Karapika tapestry I have hung up in my home, which, by the way,

I own that tapestry.

It's a good tapestry.

I'm pretty sure it's the same one.

A friend of mine asked the serendipitous question, are you a podcast person?

And recommended Media Club Plus.

I usually do a lot of my podcast listening before bed, but quickly realized I can't do that with MCP since I just end up enraptured, staying awake until my sleep timer pauses the playback.

I've since binged the entire podcast, made another friend start the anime with me, and been Hunter Hunter-pilled in a way that I haven't really been since I first watched it in 2015.

Getting into MCP has fully reawakened a decade-long love of Hunter Hunter, and I've so enjoyed returning to the anime as an adult and examining it with new depth with the cast.

While I appreciate the perspective everyone on the podcast brings, from Dre's insightful comments on characters' psychological states to Sylvie's equally important Fujo moments, I have to shout out Jack in particular.

To say nothing of how much I love to hear them talk about the amazing soundtrack work on Hunter Hunter, they also inspired me to pick up something else I haven't spent much time with since the mid-2010s.

My clarinet.

Yes!

I'm so excited to be watching and listening.

It's so cute, right?

I'm so excited to be watching and listening along in real time as the podcast gets to the end of the series and some of the best episodes of anime ever made.

True.

In the meantime, I think it is time for me to finally get into friends at the table and start becoming as insufferable about it as I am about Hunter Hunter.

Thank you so much.

Sitters up to the bottom of every word about it.

You said from Dre to Sylvie and then Jack, there's only one more person here.

You've missed me.

There's only four of us.

I appreciate the perspective everyone on the podcast brings.

That includes you.

Yeah, that's you.

Yeah, from Dre to Sylvie and then Jack.

Keith Wisely knows that if his name doesn't appear in the credits, it doesn't count as like a...

Look, I've been doing this for a long time.

I've been talking to microphones since 2009.

I don't get the credit I deserve.

Oh, Keith.

Keith, you do a wonderful job.

Thank you for

hosting this show.

It's fine.

I like it when you make Don Quixote jokes.

Me too.

Yeah, me too.

I like it when you act like we need to clap, but we don't.

And that I also pretty good bit.

Thank you.

And I got a quick one here if we want to do a double review because we mentioned sort of offering clemency to reviewers who miss their

days and the months.

And there's a couple people who did that.

I'm just saying it all to you now.

You have received a benediction from me, the new Pope.

And like I said last week, there's no way to prove when you heard the episode where I offered clemency.

Yeah, so just leave a review.

And yeah, I will grant anyone

forgiveness.

Happy forgivement.

Happy forgivement.

Thank you.

Many, many thanks, many forgivements to you all.

This review is from Lexi Was Already Taken.

Thank you for the clemency as the title.

First off, I would like to thank the demons of Demon World for granting those of us that missed our birth month with clemency.

Second, shout out to this podcast for constantly making me think deeper about my favorite anime.

And finally, thank you, Karapika, for transling my gender.

Oh, thank you.

Five stars.

Wonderful review.

Thank you, Karapika.

Thank you for both of those reviews and for everyone else who's left a review.

It means quite a bit to me, honestly.

We're three away from 600 five-star ratings.

Yeah,

I thought

around Christmas that for saying I hope that we could get to 600 by my birthday, which is the end of June.

But I was like, no, I don't, I genuinely don't think that we get there.

And I don't want to ask and then not hit it because that would make me sad.

But we're actually way overshooting it because the reviews have come in really quickly recently.

Yeah.

Were you born in the frosty month of January?

It's the start of the year.

And in the Chinese Zodiac, it is.

Please hold.

Yeah, her little tippy title.

That's not year-based.

Jack?

That's yearbas.

That's every Chinese Zodiac sign.

Do you all know Yuri's?

I'm the dog.

I got that dog in me.

I'm looking at a graph now after I made a horrible discovery about the Chinese Zodiac.

Jack cured 1992, right?

We are the monkey.

Sounds about right.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

You two are Gordonu's apes.

Yes.

It turns out that where are the apes?

It was us all along.

All along.

That's beautiful.

Yeah.

I'm the rabbit.

That's a good one.

Sorry, which one are you, Sylvie?

I'm the dog.

Oh, right.

You have that dog in you.

Right.

Yeah, I have that dog in me, and I'm very excited for us to talk about the Zodiac member that corresponds to that.

Because I'm a fan.

It's such a trick for me.

Oh, yeah.

Big fan.

Big fan.

We have to keep.

Yeah,

we got what.

How many more episodes of this do we got, Keith, of Media Club Plus?

It's either three or four.

You know, I'll tell you right now, I right now have three and then

four and then five to watch.

We will not be doing that.

We talked about it.

There's only three.

But

it really is tough to split those up.

But I've had since the very beginning four to 12.

We could find a better way

of

for the show of doing it.

I don't know about for Hunter Hunter, but for Media Club Plus, I would love to get four episodes out of the election arc instead of three.

But it really, really maps to four to seven and then eight to twelve as the end.

The election arc.

The election arc.

That is what it's called.

This is how we're following Chimera ends.

But it makes perfect sense.

When you said

I know who we're dealing with and you meant Tagashi, I thought you were talking about Isaac Netero, which also is true.

That yesterday here.

Did I have a, what was my going theory on how Chimera was going to end?

Did you ever ask me this?

I don't remember.

Because I feel like we have asked you it, we have asked you at least once, and you were like, I have no idea

about where things are going, but I don't remember specific

questions.

That's basically my memory, also.

By the way, next time we're watching episodes 137, 138, and 139.

Oh, this will be fun.

Those are titled Debate Among Zodiacs, Request and Wish, and Aluka and Something.

Have you redacted it, or is it actually called Aluka and Something?

It's actually called Aluka and Something.

How is Aluka spelt?

A-L-L-U-K-A.

What could that mean?

What could that mean?

Oh, my God.

Bye.

Bye.