And This... Is To Go Even Further Beyond - Hunter x Hunter ep. 131-133: Media Club Plus S01E42

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 at the table.

This season or watching in 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshiker Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me online at KeithJ Carberry.

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

And I'm excited to present the penultimate episode of Media Club Plus covering the Chimera Ant Arc.

What a whirlwind it's been.

I don't know how many episodes we've done on just this arc, but I've really felt it.

You can really feel how long it is when you're forced to do them chunk style like this.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeith.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

You can get any of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Also, that music is Gonzeme.

Where have we gone?

What has happened to my boy?

I feel like there's nothing

to add.

It totally encompasses who he is.

Yeah, and have it play over it instead of what does.

Also here today is Sylvie Bullet.

Hello.

I'm Sylvia.

You can find me on Blue Sky, Sylvie Bullet.

And you can check out any of the bonus content for Media Club Plus, Friends of the Table, and Side Story at friendsofthetable.cash.

And we'll hear more about Side Story in a second.

I assume

that's Andrew Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Blue Sky.

I'm at Swan Terry 3000.

You can also find me on SoundCloud.

I'm going to drop my new single, Doing It Chunk Style, coming soon.

That's not here every way to have tuna.

It's not here every way to listen to tracks.

And second guest week in a row, guest week, Austin Walker.

Hi, Austin.

Hi.

Glad to be here.

I think this makes me, based on the previous episode, the sixth most

guest of all time.

Sixthest guest of all time.

Please, please.

dude.

Yeah, my bad.

I was so close.

I was so close.

I would have said ever.

Right.

The most sixth ever.

Yeah.

Which puts you at double Allie, who is right now the second thirdest.

Oh, oh, I see.

Now I see there is there are there are elements of this I did not understand even until just this moment.

Yeah.

Second thirdest is either like a class and an RPG I've never, like, that nobody's ever played, or it's a nen ability.

I think it sounds like a cult to me.

Oh,

are you saying thirdist?

It sounds like a character from My Hero Academia.

Yeah, it was because they're best genius.

Oh, I guess, yeah, I guess it is where I went to immediately.

Austin, what is Side Story?

Discuss Side Story is a new podcast that you can listen to featuring the members of Friends of the Table and Media Club Plus talking about video games.

The first episode, when does this come out?

First episode will be this will be out when Side Story has

been going for

two episodes, probably.

Two episodes, yeah.

So I think the first two episodes are going to be me, Jack, and Janine.

In the first episode, we talked about Repo, the excellent comedy horror extraction game.

Yeah.

And

we talk about Soulframe.

We should stream more of it.

We talked about Soul Frame, the new game from Digital Extremes, the Warframes, folks.

We have not yet recorded the second episode, but I want to talk about Atom Fall.

I think Janine's going to talk about Inzoy, the Sims-like game that just came out.

She told me the other day that she has a story to tell, which is kind of the point of Side Story, really focusing in on anecdotes and like the way the games make us tell stories and the way that they generate stories.

So, Side Story, you can support it by going to friendsofthetable.cash.

And in fact, if you support us at the newly remade or newly re

debuted $10 level, you'll get access to a Let's Play that I've been editing.

That's Jack and I playing through Outward as Janine

guides us and tells us facts about fish.

It has been a joy to play.

It's been a joy to edit.

I will say I'm taking kind of high effort, I think a mid-effort route on the

thing.

It's not edited down at all, but it is filled with stupid jokes.

So

I appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, I really enjoyed the fish diversion in episode two.

Yeah, I wanted to make sure I got some of those details on screen so people can read along and learn some important names about the fish.

What editor are you using?

I'm using CapCut.

CapCut.

How come?

Why CapCut?

Because it was cheap enough and it was better than using ClipChamp.

Sure.

Which is free and

will not let you edit.

I mean, you can try, but it's effectively a web browser that cannot handle a big video file.

Sure, yeah.

I was expecting you to be using like

a big real editor.

I don't know anything about CapCut except for for that I know that it's what people use on TikTok, which is very funny that that's what you just ended up saying.

You know, and it's filled with, I literally told Janine the other day, I was like, all those fucking YouTube shorts I've watched in the last year.

And now

the big editing bit from the first episode makes way more sense to me now.

It's like from that space.

It's from that.

So is like, so is like,

so is like text appearing over someone's head as they move across a screen.

You know what I mean?

Like, I just, I was so surprised to see like a big

kinetic text thing.

That's so much work unless it's built into your head.

It's so easy in that fucking edit.

I could have gone harder.

I'm mad at there's one that pops up very briefly in the second episode that I think is a lot easier, or it's actually a little bit more, a little bit more complex.

Um, but uh, only it was easier because I've already did the first one.

I wish I could go back and redo the first one better.

In DaVinci, I think it turned out great, but in DaVinci Resolve, which is what I use, um, there's tons of...

It sounds like a conspiracy novel.

It does sound like a conspiracy novel.

A mission in Hitman.

But

instead, it's what people use when they don't like Adobe.

Whether they're students or making movies, I guess.

At any level, if you hate Adobe, you could use DaVinci Resolve.

I like it.

It has a ton of...

you know, ways to do audio processing that I really like,

which is what I like about it.

But on the downside,

I did did one visual joke in an episode of

a stream that went up, the

first Dreamcast reading list thing, where I wrote over a screen cap of Sonic the Hedgehog crying.

And that took like 25 minutes to just get in.

That is, I'll show you how it works in CapCut later.

It's super easy.

There's a text button.

You just pop it off.

The text button is fine, but as soon as you want to manipulate it at all,

in CapCut, you can give it keyframes and move it, and it will move between those keyframes.

This does that, yeah.

This does that too.

It's just it just sucks.

You can even auto-track in CapCut if you have, for instance, auto-track a crab moving or a shrimp moving across the screen or some bandits, and you want to be like, There, there's the bandits.

Yeah, there's a there's a run by most of the way there, YouTube short where I did like a keyframe thing where I edited a guy into a window in Sonic in a Sonic the Hedgehog level, uh, and uh, that took like 45 minutes to do a nightmare, yeah, it was a nightmare.

But nothing compared to that video I saw today of

someone made a video that's like four seconds long.

And it's like the text.

The text is like when you move an image in a Microsoft Word file.

Oh my God.

Slides the table to like two inches.

And all of her furniture in the room doesn't just move around, but like, it's like on the roof.

It's on the ceiling.

It goes upside down.

There's photos on the ceiling.

Yeah.

It's so.

If you know that was 90 minutes of work moving the entire room around for literally a second long punchline.

Yeah.

Perfect video.

Jack has been on Side Story.

Janine's been on Side Story.

Theoretically, any of us could be on Side Story.

I would love everybody to be on anytime.

Who could say?

I really want some new blood in there for episode three.

Well,

as far as video game podcasts are concerned, I'm old blood.

Right.

Yes.

Oldest blood you could have.

The old blood.

Yeah, from software ass.

Yeah.

what a crazy episode you guys yeah speaking of blood oh my god merrowam king of the ants you really don't have any idea do you you know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart uh in these episodes we see the beginning and quick conclusion of gon's fight with never pito gon who would use up his own life uh his own life energy his his like accumulated uh nen as life force to deal a killing blow, just like his teacher's teacher did only a few episodes ago.

We also see Poof and now UP scrambling to build the king a new Komagilis world

while

making and breaking plans

over and over again.

And Palm and Ikago kind of in the background trying to stay alive.

while they protect, slash, instrumentalize their increasingly important hostage

while

Knuckle and Meliorone lay unconscious in the palace, captured instantly by a Merowem, who has decided it would be more fun to start hunting the intruders than to sit around doing nothing.

Yeah, these are really...

There is one very big, very simple, and very violent thing.

in this group of episodes, and it is surrounded by everybody else, just like flailing and planning and counterplanning and moving and trying to figure out where people are going.

And, you know,

the sharp edge of the spear is moving so precisely and frighteningly, kind of at the core of these episodes.

And I think

notably for Tagashi, who

I was going to say, Tagashi tends to take one episode to get going.

Tagashi and the anime team move in like these blocks, and Keith tends to organize the blocks in such a way that they take one episode to like work up to something.

131 begins with the big thing, you know,

the conflict between

Ghoan and Pito.

And then, as he so often does, we pull the focus away from it and back into the ongoing mess inside the palace, which is now just

you know that like Conway's game of life thing where the little cellular automata move and start rippling into each other or whatever.

I feel like the dragon dive falling on the palace started a game of cellular automata that has just been going nuts for the last 30 episodes.

And every time we think a little branch of the automata has failed, it like catches onto something else and starts up again.

It's great.

And you know, a thing that we don't need to get into the particulars of here, but of course, the final thing we learn here is that all of that, you know, maneuvering and planning and counter-planning,

there's a huge new factor that undercuts all of it.

A new piece of information that means that everything that's moving might face a new wall that Tagashi's trick anticipated.

Well, we may have anticipated at this point.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

About these episodes, you know, there's definitely a world where episode 30 and 31 came in the same batch,

but it just didn't really fit with like the episode after this one to like not have that and to like have one extra from the next set.

And it also wouldn't wouldn't have allowed getting Allie on the last one to talk about kite stuff and to get Austin on this one, which was requested months and months ago.

Maybe at the beginning of the show, frankly.

You may have requested this right away.

I don't potentially.

I can't say for sure, but I certainly, when the show was conceived, I was like, I want to be there for 131.

And I...

Also, it lets you have the next episode as three episodes, and then you could also talk about just like Chimera and Arc as a whole whole without it being too

you know

film i really do think that seeing what happens to gone in 131 and then cutting away from it mid-block produces a great effect it's very

good if if you gave us 131 as the cliffhanger of a media club plus block and then we picked up with 132 yeah would feel um

coming back to the palace and not seeing gone would feel strange but like flowing um

one into the other other really did produce this moment of just like sudden dazzling distance from 131.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

As we begin, there are immediate sinister.

Sometimes the episodes begin fairly relaxed.

This does not.

There's the like rattling Hirano sinister score.

We begin with Palm and Killua continuing to worry after they saw Goan slumped on the floor next to Pito.

And Poof interrupts with a deal.

The deal that he offers is: is,

you can't stop Pito.

Pito's going to kill Ghon.

I can stop Pito, and I will do it in exchange for Komagi.

And they dispense with any negotiation here.

Killua punches him in the face.

He crushes him.

Yeah, he lightnings over instantly and crushes him.

It's so good.

And then sort of uses this as like, oh, now I can go figure out what's going on with Goan.

And just sort of like zooms, you know, God speeds his way back to the hideout,

which is where I think the whole rest of the episode takes place with

Goan and Peto and then Kilua

over outside of

the.

What is that building that they're staying in?

I guess it's a castle.

Yeah,

it is.

It is in.

Sorry,

what is the name of their fake Beijing?

Peiki?

Beijing.

Peijing.

And

it's based on a real castle from Germany.

I was going to say it looked really Germanic with the statues inside.

It is based on, I have it written down here,

Neuschwanstein Castle.

I'll send you a picture of it.

Oh, Neuschwanstein Castle.

I can't believe I didn't recognize it.

Yeah.

You'll see it and you'll go like, oh, yeah, right.

This.

I think Jack and I have probably talked about this castle

on a microphone of the camera.

It sounds like Magic Kingdom.

This is an extremely famous castle.

This It's a German castle.

Yeah, this is the German castle.

I don't know if this, I think we've ref the big two references for the paint shop in Palisade are this and also Castle Gormengast from Rights Right, of course.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

Um,

yeah, uh, Pito begins by apologizing to Goan.

The change in Pito's affect through their whole

the journey that we have gone on with Nef Pito from the like grinning, um,

you know, like spirit, the evil spirit that launched itself through through the sky towards Kite, to

healing their arm.

We actually enter the palace, first hearing the sound of Goan crying, and then the sound of the surgical tools working on Pito's arm.

And then they just kind of like flex their arm and test it.

They say, I have to kill you now for the sake of the king.

And at this point, Ghan

sort of barely understands what is happening.

He sort of barely appears to understand what is happening.

He's

still in that place thinking,

says, So you're not going to heal him.

You're just leaving him there.

And then as he's,

this stuff is, I just want to shout this out because I think once we're in it, we're going to have to be fucking in it.

Yeah, there's no way.

And I don't want to rewind to be like, oh, this reminds me of this other thing.

And we're moving pretty quick.

I want to say there's two things here.

One is like, this transformation takes quite a bit of time visually, but it's about what we're about to describe.

It is six pages in the manga.

It is like nothing in the WAL.

That's still a lot.

yeah but i'll show you and i'll send those pages over and you'll be like oh this is compared to what we get here um this reminds me where gone is here reminds me so much of shinji and some of the lowest of low moments in ava um not just the literal like dissociation from reality but also the dub actors delivery.

I've watched the

sub of this also, but I have not watched the Ava sub in fucking forever, so I can't make that comparison.

But this, I, and there's an overlap here.

We've done a lot of comparing Goan to like Goku, but there are lots of characters in the history of uh shonen that are not in battle shounen that have to deal with a very core um uh thematic question, which is what does it mean to grow up and why do I have to grow up so fast and situations that force that.

I mean, mecha anime uh is huge with that going back to Amoro, honestly predating Omaro into even some of the super robot stuff, but like Amuro in Gundam and then Shinji and Ava are both really compelling characters around this question of what happens when you make a child have to go to war, which is what the fiction in general is about.

Fiction in general, yes.

But this particular delivery is really hot.

It really draws on those depictions, I think, or is really in conversation with those depictions.

It's funny you bring up Shinji because do you know the Japanese title for this episode?

No, what is it?

Ikari to Hikari.

Like,

okay, it's

Shinji's surname.

It's last name.

Yeah, surname.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well,

I feel way smarter now.

Yeah, yeah.

For sure.

And at least in the Japanese,

you describe the vocal performance being distinctive, Austin.

Goan's voice actor is kind of defined by this precision and projection in the way that she plays her lines generally.

Goan

comes straight down the microphone towards you.

He is a character that is shouting or laughing or talking with a kind of impetus in his diaphragm.

And here it's like right down in the bottom of his register.

There's very little breath put into the words.

It's not quite whispering.

He's sort of like choking out the lines right down in the bottom of the register.

And it's a really cool effect, especially from Goan.

We tend to hear Killua being the one that goes quiet in the moments of like horror.

But here, you know, Goan's just sort of coming apart, feeling that way.

And even when he says, you're such a liar, which is sort of the line that begins to

cue what happens,

it's not shouted, I don't think.

It's still kept quiet.

We see this sort of like, have we seen this effect before?

The black and white, the swirling.

The red, the red.

Oh, yeah.

One of my big notes here is after an entire arc, or mini arc of the Meroem

and Netero stuff, where we're like, ah, yes, you see, Netero has the golden aura and Meroem has the evil intent purple and black aura.

Here we get just a different run at it, reminding us that Tagashi and the animation team don't have a single trick up their sleeves.

They have many and they're willing to take different runs at big ideas.

Peto has a red aura, like a dark red aura.

And then Goan begins to emit a, what seems like a red aura at first, but quickly becomes a black aura with red surrounding it like outlining it and that red highlight looks like blood too like it has almost like liquid quality to it we've talked about uh nen having a sort of liquid quality before um i think with i think most prominently we talked about it with kito's pen

when it like sort of rained down on the castle at one point um and i think that just serves to sort of continue continue the um connection you're making there um another notable thing about the oh sorry dre go ahead I was going to say, I think I'm checking it now.

Uvakin had red nin, but it looks very different than this.

Yeah, this has like a chicken scratch kind of like

you know, nib kind of digging into a page kind of

like skittery look to it.

It's awful.

It looks a lot like

the images that we found of

the devil from

York New City.

Oh, right.

This thing looks extraordinary.

It is the show moves into uh, you know, the show does this pretty regularly, but uh,

it hasn't done it with this kind of intensity for a long time.

The show moves into a new art style exclusively for Goan in this moment.

It is as though, you know, if we check Tagashi's pages, you can see that he's drawing with this very almost like a brush, he's probably drawing with a brush rather than a

pen.

Uh, and uh, Goan's outline becomes sketched and hoarse and squiggly and loose.

And it's really strange because we're cutting back to Peter, who is animated like they usually are.

Always are.

Goan looks like

the

film or not the film, but the screen is like breaking through the anime.

Like the white of the of the L C D that I'm looking at or whatever, the LED is like breaking.

Like, you know, it's not quite HDR bright but it it really feels like the the light photons have broken through the animation and then like all that's left is like the black of his

you know a lot of his features again for people who are not watching this they should you should look up gone's transformation uh it is a black and white being that is constantly scratching in and out of focus in a way that's really hard to describe because there's not too much else to directly compare it to

he's flashing like where the definitions on his body is changing based on like where the light and the black is.

If you want to see what this looks like, you can go to friendsatable.cash for the screenshot post is.

There's a link in the description of this video.

Keith, can you, when you do that, will you include a few frames of just the same composition so that people can see like, oh, it's not like he is a single set of scratches and brushstrokes.

Yeah, you know, for the first time ever, I will record a GIF of this.

Oh, wow.

Put a GIF in there.

Thank you.

Because it is astoundingly different from anything that's happened on the show.

It's an achievement.

I really think it is in style.

There are two levels of what's happening.

The first is that

it is frightening as an image, kind of in and of itself.

Its indistinctness is upsetting, and it only gets more upsetting when two round lamplight eyes appear on Go's face.

Something about getting more definition makes it more frightening.

Right.

It's also.

Have we mentioned also that he's grown into a hulking beast?

We have not.

He's definitely bigger.

I mean, he has grown, but he's going to, it's, his growth is going to become more

obvious.

Yeah, it's specifically what's happened.

Yeah.

But to that point,

the visual language of what's happening here in the shot choices is communicating transformation or possession as much as it's communicating something weird weird is going on with his aura.

You know, we've seen this before where characters' auras will do really interesting things, and then the aura will dissipate, and the character will remain much the same.

What is happening here is the visual language, and specifically, I think, the horror language, of an actual bodily transformation.

Doors fly open, wind comes rushing into the room and gutters the candles, paintings flap on the wall.

Peto, the absolute master of the world's most frightening nen, looks up and says,

What is going on?

You know, I think one of the first things they say is, Oh, I'm right.

This is why I have to kill him because he's going to kill the kill the king.

There's a really good shot I like of Gon's eye getting like filled in by

it's filling up with a liquid as well

while this transformation is happening.

While his soul is going from boomer to Kiki.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, he says,

Sorry, Sylvie.

No, you go ahead.

He says,

I don't care what happens to me now as his pupils turn black, kind of fill up with the liquid.

And then he says, I'll need all the power I'll ever have.

Yep.

Who said that recently?

Who said something similar to that when they used a maneuver?

This was our dear friend, our dear friend Chairman Natera.

How bad could the bottomless malice in a human heart be?

You know, sometimes the bottomless malice in a human heart is

a metaphor for the bomb that you've put there.

And sometimes it's just the malice.

No, somebody has, and sometimes the bomb is the metaphor.

And then when you get to see the real malice, you are reminded that the malice came first.

The rose was an approximation, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's always been there.

This is also,

this happens enough in Shonen, in Battle Shonen, and outside of Shonen in media that I'm reluctant to say this is referencing that.

But in the context of the additional material that we have done for Media Club Plus, it's worth bringing up going Super Saiyan.

I was literally, Jack, I have a note that says, I'm so glad Jack knows what a Super Saiyan is.

This is more than anything else,

this is why we had to see Goku go Super Saiyan.

Yes.

And why we had to talk about how Super Saiyan is

inherently malicious.

Yeah,

I know that you are hedging import carefully here because transformations are a thing that happened throughout fiction, etc.

But uh, it would be like he took out a

sword hilt and then it went boon, and then a light beam came out, and you're like, This could be a reference to a lightsaber, like from Star Wars.

I don't mean that in terms of sorry, I want to be clear, I don't mean that in terms of closeness, like yes, the hair, the hair grows, etc.

I mean that in terms of cultural suffusion, right?

The Super Saiyan is

it's so

everywhere inside of the culture, especially inside of Shonen.

It's defining,

it is universally known.

It is a key part of what Shounen, you know,

in a real way, in this era, you have the moment where, like, who will be the successor of Dragon Ball Z in manga while this is coming out?

And Hunter Hunter is not.

winning that fight, though it's well loved in some ways.

But like, so, so it is the context in which Hunter Hunter is emerging.

Not to mention

Yu Hakasho's own history with transformations, which include person who has long hair and that stuff is there already.

And so

it is referencing the shounen transformation, and Super Saiyan is the shounen transformation.

We're talking about the atavism of the Bazoku.

Of course, right.

Sorry.

My bad.

I'm sorry to, what's his face from Yu Yu Hakasho?

Yuke.

Yusuke.

The atavism himself.

Urumashi.

Urimashi, of course.

Right.

This is also like kind of,

you know, one of the main spokes on the wheel of like

why

at the beginning of the show we're talking about like what

Hunter Hunter is like doing with the Goku archetype and like being like what like what is Hunter Hunter doing with like taking like making a Goku character kind of like real and like with consequences that don't exist in the Dragon Ball Z universe.

Like this is the thing that I have in my head when we're talking about that is that eventually like Goan uses his kind of rage to transform in the same way that Goku does.

But it's not like the most badass awesome thing in the world.

It's like scary and terrifying and evil.

And he's able to do it because like he's been like taught all these horrible lessons by people that you know should have been taking care of him uh and he's like been fed all these you know uh inverse priorities uh

and you know even some accidents like um uh you know learning about nen contracts from karapica who's able to use them uh you know for his own revenge in a way that like it was bad you know it was bad when kropica did it but he did it in a way where he knew what he was doing and where he had like kind of very carefully calculated a bunch of risks and possibilities and potentials and how to go about this and that.

Like, Goan is just kind of snapping his fingers and making the rashest decision of all time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I really like thinking about this in contrast to a million things.

One being what makes Goku go Super Saiyan, right?

Which is the immediate death of his best friend in front of him by the arch villain and the arch villain Frieza.

Whereas here, this is a death that was already established, a death that Ghan refused to accept, a death that other people should have and could have made Goan confront earlier on if they were doing right by him, and they should have prevented him from ever getting to this place to begin with.

And

it's not even against Meriweth that he does this.

And Pito is keenly aware of that, too.

Yes.

Like that comes up, that is crucial to Peto.

Actually, it's great to point out that Krillin was killed by Frieza in front of Goku, which is what triggers his Super Saiyan transformation.

In a way, Kite also dies for the first time in front of him here.

But it's only because of those failings

that no one was able to...

talk him into accepting that Kite was already dead that Kite is able to die here again for him.

And the other thing it's worth, I think, contrasting this with, this specifically the part where he's like, I need all of my power right now.

Obviously, non contract, nen condition type stuff.

But it's also interesting to put it into conversation with the previous fight that we just had, the Meroem and Netero stuff, where Netaro explicitly is the, I stood in the field and prayed for 1,000 days or however many years

until I got this power.

And Meroem, his entire strategy against Netaro was, I will get hit over and over again, and his entire strategy with Gungi and with all of his game playing, I will lose until I win.

Right, Goan will not lose, he will lose Gohan's trick.

Again, you know, Gohan's uh, what's it what do you call it?

Actually, it's not Goan's trick,

I will not lose, I will not lose, I will, I refuse to lose, yeah.

Uh, and Meroem and Netero, evil though they may both be, um, you know, at least in big, big swings, uh, both come from a place of patience and a

place of, I will become more powerful if I can lose again and again until it's, I have what I need.

Goan will not do that.

I mean, more mirror with Netero's stuff, where like Netero's power specifically comes from like having carefully squirreled away Aura for 75 years into a special pocket that he calls Zero Hand, where Goan is like, I'm going to borrow against my entire future for this year now.

If only he didn't learn what APR was.

If only he didn't understand.

I think, too,

it's all your fault about

Meroem and Natero knowing the value of patience.

One of the most distinctive things in the whole Goan Will Not Lose, you know, Goan's Mistake playbook, it's a two-page playbook,

is, you know, in those sort of like the torture sequences where he throws himself again and again at Hanzo and again and again at Canary

and again and again at Genthru and gets his arms blown off and his legs broken and things like that.

But critically,

compared to

Meroem, who is saying, I am going to get hit by Zero Hand because I am waiting patiently for the moment to strike, Goan is saying, I'm going to keep getting hit until I win one of these times.

You know?

Yeah.

This is going to work.

They're both entities getting hit, but within Meroem's calculus,

there's like a plan.

Right.

He's getting hit so he can like each hit is a little more information about.

It's also Killua getting hit by the sniper bullets by Kalgo's bullish.

Sure.

Yeah.

And the

darts.

Yeah.

And as if to make clear, you know, the whole journey that we've been going on, you know, what does it mean to send a child to war?

What does it mean when a child is told over and over again?

By an adult that they are ready to take on things that they are not ready for and we have Gone Freak saying, I need all the power I will ever have now.

He stops being animated like an awful black pen and ink scratched figure and is instead animated as an adult.

Gone Freaks as an adult is here standing in front of us.

He looks a bit like Jing, but not quite like Jing.

His hair has grown

so long that it exits the frame in almost every shot.

We never see the end of it, I don't think.

Yeah.

It is like burning up from his head like a candle.

I think this is so beautiful, given all the

first the gonua like light imagery and then all the candle imagery of the candles going out during this transformation.

Now we have someone burning with golden nen fire.

It's amazing.

First things we learned about nen, which was that it leaks from people from their head.

It's just

he's good at it.

It's gotcha.

You're good at Pakalan back.

There's more of those later.

I do want to say something because this came up on a recent episode, which was, and I, and I mostly agree with it.

You were talking about how, like,

there's no way Togashi could have, Togashi wasn't planning for this from the first issue or whatever.

You, you discovered along the way and you recognize the things that you can pull forward and line up.

And I think that that's probably 99% right.

I'm a strong believer in that.

Go listen to us talk about like Gene Wolf on Shelf by genre.

Like, I really don't, and I'm, and I write stories.

It is, it is, most of the time you find something along the way.

Sometimes, though, you have an image and you then build to that image.

And I want to open the possibility that Tagashi knew broadly that in this story about a little boy being forced to grow up too soon, there is a real chance that he had bits of this early.

And then

part of what's happening is you're building the scaffolding to reach the landing that you know is up there, you know?

Yeah.

And some of this is just so sharp that it feels hard for me to imagine that he didn't have any of it all the way back in the early goings i agree how early but you know i i think one of the really fascinating things about tagashi as a writer and as like a plotter uh is

how

we've talked about a lot how his stories kind of come together in these like puzzle piece bits where like at the same time you know he shocks you that a piece fits where it does and then it seems inevitable and so it's really hard to draw a line of like how far ahead did you have to build the puzzle to get this piece?

But then, the other thing is that he gets bored so easily of his own work, and he's constantly changing things up and being like, I don't want to do that, I want to do this now.

Uh, and uh, you know, one of his big criticisms of Yu Yu Hakusho is like not being able to end it the way that he wanted, which was to like start kind of deconstructing all the characters.

He says this like in an interview, like they kind of wouldn't let me do this, so I just gave it a more traditional final act.

And then Hunter Hunter came along.

And then Hunter Hunter came along.

I'm going to go crazy.

Yeah, totally.

And it is genuinely.

It is kind of like this bizarre mix of like spontaneous insanity and like meticulously crafted plot.

And it's hard to look at any piece and go, this is one and this is the other.

Yeah, the way I always come down on it is that

I think thematically, he's always had it in mind what he's been wanting to do.

And then the specifics of the pieces and how it fits together are something that probably

comes up more organically in the writing process, especially when you're telling a serialized story like this.

Yeah.

And there's a really good, strong argument based on how things seem to wildly veer off, not off course, but onto a new course after the anime ends.

That like, that maybe there, there was like

a different early thread that gets picked up, or

I've run out of like my long track from that I had from the start.

I need to like start building a new road.

And I don't know, I haven't read that stuff, but that's sort of the impression that I get it's one of those two things, maybe.

I have a question for y'all, which is, Goan says that he's, he's, he'll need all the power he'll ever have.

Yeah.

The other translation, by the way, which I like, is: I don't care if this is the end, so I'll use everything.

That's what I can do.

And then there's another bit a little later where Peto learns this by being kicked.

Somehow the kick is enough for them to know, oh shit,

this is what...

What they basically say is like, oh, thank God it's me.

I'm going to die instead of the king.

To do this, they must have used all the strength

they would ever have.

And so there's, I think, a sort of thematic question more than a mechanical question.

I think the mechanics of it are pretty clear.

But, you know, when I first watched this, I left this episode feeling like, oh my God, like

Goan used Nen to become the

Jing slash netero version of himself, who he would be 20 years from now, 15 years from now, when he's a grown man.

But I also wonder if instead it might be, and I'm curious what y'all think or if different translations suggest this differently,

that he

is actually stronger than he would ever be.

Yeah.

Because he's not just borrowing from, he's not just saying, I'm going to become who I am at 25.

He's saying, I'm using every bit of Nen I would, or you know, every bit of my aura that I would ever have access to.

He's all him next year, the year after that.

Exactly.

All of him is all at once.

And I think, interestingly,

that's

even with all of that,

he's still not Netaro or Meriwam.

Like, I think he might be able to surprise Meriham.

You know, Peter is like, oh, he could get his fangs in.

This is where different translations cause issues for people because that early line, when they're still, this is before any fighting, they're still in the castle.

And Pito says one of two things, depending on which translation you have,

the more common his fangs might sink into the king, and the more definitive his power is now equal to that of the king.

Holy lord.

Yeah, it's pretty definitive.

Pretty definitive.

Now,

I think that that is a bad, not a bad translation, but I think it's like a misleading statement because later in this set of episodes, we watch the king like power up and surpass what,

you know, clearly what Poof had thought the king's limit was.

Sure.

So why would Peto also not have been surprised by that?

Pito is not a unbiased.

Pito hasn't seen the king since after he consumed the royal guards, though.

True.

Oh, it's also true.

Yeah, that's true.

That's the same thing that lets Merrim have that Oma.

Like, I described Merrowim in the next episode using his N as like looking at a biblical angel is the vibe that they give.

Yeah.

And I don't, and we also have that moment of him using Yupi's like rage blast, but focusing it.

Like, I don't think, I think.

We have to remember that Pito is thinking of

pre-guard consumption Merrim, which is still terrifyingly powerful, but we've also established that Merohim gets stronger by consuming things.

And we've also,

because the thing here for me is not like, I'm not trying to power scale Goan.

What I'm trying to get to is, I mean, you know, some people have, a lot of people have fun doing that.

As I dug around to see how other people think about these episodes and these manga chapters, I learned a lot of people are just going to power scale and use slurs for Peto.

And like,

don't read what people think about this it's bad don't engage with anime fans unless they're us that's right but

the thing that i was the thing that i'm actually more interested in is like is the

is what what shade of tragedy is apply are we applying here because there's one version which is like

oh this is who gone could have grown up to be and in some ways it's almost a relief that he spends it all now and now he will he'll get to live a world where he doesn't have to become this.

And then the other version of it is he never gets to see who he could have been because this isn't who he would have been.

He would have grown to be someone different if not for being pushed to have to

being pushed/slash allowing himself to be put, you know, other people failing him.

And now he's in a position where he pushes himself to become this other version of himself, not who he would have been at 25 or whatever, but instead this compression that's all hard angles and violence, which, by the way, is different a little bit than the manga presentation.

The facial design in the anime is way more angular and hard than the manga version.

I actually like the manga version more because he still looks like a child with an adult's body.

Yeah.

It's creepy.

It really hits the uncanniness.

It hits the

very obvious theme of him being forced to grow up too soon.

Yeah.

Do you know what you animate that is?

Do you think this is future gone or do you think this is

compressed gone?

I think this is.

I tend to go towards this as compressed gone.

This is the thing that I really think about more is just like

he's never going to know if this is future gone or not, right?

The future is taken from him by doing this

or the potential future that everyone saw for him

when he was doing the hunter exam, when he was training with Biskey, stuff like that.

It is gone.

Not a pun.

It's like,

I don't know.

It's extremely self-destructive what's happening here.

Both literally and like with the nen and then later even more so when the actual conflict is happening.

I think it's maybe intentionally ambiguous here because when

Kilua shows up, he also seems to think that this is future gone.

He says something like

this is what he would be if he, you know, trained non-stop for

years and years.

This is

how many years, more than 10 decades.

This is what he would look like after training for years and years.

What price did he have to pay to obtain this much aura?

And visually, like the thing that I get from this design, which is like, I think that

there's like this thing underlining the whole thing, which is that the hair, I believe, is

silly.

It's truly silly the way that his hair is.

And but what it looks like is like, what if you pulled your future body onto yourself without like,

you know, he hasn't been able to get a haircut.

He hasn't been able to change clothes.

So his, you know, his shirt is tiny and ripped.

Like it is, it is his future length of it's the amount of hair that he would have grown in the time from when he would have had this form.

But also it's like hypothetical because it's nen magic, basically.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, but they're all, i think it's sort of both i think it's unclear

it's the mastery of it right there's another reason why it's ambiguous yeah

uh who's missing for like almost all this episode

the narrator right oh yeah narrator shut the up in this episode until until pito gets kicked um and and the narrator is finally like they go back to the narrator goes back to pito and explains their situation with terpsakora there's a kind of

taking your hands off the wheel to watch the car crash thing happening here.

The narrator

loves to act as the omniscient additional character who knows everything that's going on or whatever.

But here in the kind of like the nadir of Gon's

mistake, he goes quiet as if to say, all right, just watch.

You know, there's nothing I can do here.

There's no involvement that I can make.

And I hold your hand through those the way that I have through other things.

But that's also another adult abandoning Goan or, you know,

a particular moment.

You know, the most authoritative voice in the show goes quiet.

God forsaken him.

Yeah.

God doesn't.

He gets abandoned by the narrator.

You know,

it is

telling, and the metaphor is not

being minced,

but in order for Goan to even attain this awful power, you know,

this sudden, terrible growth and power, he has to go through the scratchy black and white form first.

There is literally

like he, yes, there is an absolute coming apart

before he is reformed.

And not the fun kind of coming apart that Poof does inside the cocoon.

But, you know, he's just, he's just torn apart.

There's lots of new.

Oh, I was going to.

If you want to do music stuff, go ahead.

I was going to ask if I could read the quote that Pito.

Okay.

First line here, I'm going to read the narrator, or deadbeat narrator coming back.

Sinking deeply into unconsciousness, Pito felt a sense of relief.

And then here's Pete, what Pito is saying.

Thank goodness this power could only be achieved through the sacrifice of his own life energy.

He was prepared to never use Nen again.

That was the resolve required to perform this feat.

He was born with a gift and was willing to throw that gift away.

This seems like the time to mention it because it really applies to the conversation we're having.

Yeah.

One more thing that I love about this.

This is a very small detail, but when Goan kicks Pito up into the air and charges his Jajan Ken to like then punch them on their way down into the tree where they deliver that line.

How many times it was established that when Pito's in the air, they have to just fall.

They can't alter their course in any way.

Yeah, that's great.

God, I'd forgotten that.

I think something else from the manga that's interesting is like, as

again, there's only the first part of the transformation, the transformation that is like the scratchy stuff, that's barely in the manga, like stylistically.

There is one panel that I think is really close to that stuff.

towards the end of the issue where that happens.

Yeah, where he says, I need all the power.

I need all the power, exactly.

And Peter is watching, like, what the the fuck is going on?

But throughout the ensuing fight, there are a number of times where, you know, Peter is watching him or whatever, and he is just the black silhouette.

Or he's drawn in those other instances that in a scratchy,

there's lots of hatching and cross-hatching throughout these, I mean, throughout Hunter Hunter as a manga, but really throughout the transformation stuff.

And it feels like the animation team is drawing on some of those depictions to go backwards into the details of the transformation that we get in the first half of this episode.

There's some really fantastic adaptive moves they make with these chapters.

If anyone is curious or either if you're watching along or not, I'd recommend you can find a manga versus anime comparison of the Gon versus Pito.

If you just search manga versus anime, Gon versus Pito.

If you're curious about seeing how Tagashi renders this, I definitely recommend it.

It's a good side-by-side.

Oh, and hey, I know there was just a conversation a few weeks ago about

how you don't need to call out when you stumble to a spoiler because it maybe makes it something more clear than it should be.

But you may remember that early on in the Chimera Antarctic, maybe in the beginning of it, we had a conversation about the intro.

Yeah.

Do you remember this?

I remember that you said, don't look, you have to stop looking at the intro.

Do you want to see why you have to stop listening to the intro?

Yeah, okay,

here you go.

Whoa,

it's just where the whole time

gone with his hair burning and then a close-up of those like awful white eyes as he transforms.

God, that's so good.

And for anyone else in any other context, it would be fine.

But we've specifically asked Jack to look at this show and decide what things are.

And we had gone over intros of what do you think you're seeing here in this intro before, which is something we didn't want.

to happen for this one.

I think it makes a lot of sense to

stop you from seeing this.

It's a split second, and you know, like even in the pan, or not the panel, but the uh, the beat right before the transformation bit is like Peto exploding and looking terrified in Ghan's hair.

Uh, it's just like their huge, open-eyed look.

Um, and it's like, okay, it's all there.

Like, and I don't think that you would have gotten here with it necessarily, but you might have started asking, ah, when are we gonna get to this?

Yes, you know,

yeah, instead of last episode being like,

maybe they're gonna kill Goan,

you might have been saying maybe Goan is gonna turn scary purple gone.

Well,

I still the jury is still firmly out on deciding whether or not to kill Goan.

They're all sitting in the little jury room.

I would like to we can continue to talk about the transformation, and we will until the end of the fucking

time.

I would like to like shift the focus just like 10 degrees from talking about a transformation to talking about a fight, the long-awaited fight between Gone Freaks and Nefer Peter Bricks.

Sorry, Jack, are you going to work in the music stuff that you had to say to this, or did you need a second to talk about this?

Oh, no.

Let's talk about the music very briefly.

I have the tapestry of tracks that they use for this fight, but like immediately before and during.

There's like a bunch of new little songs.

Saluting the sound team for everything they've done.

From sound design to soundtrack.

Like it's so well done.

Yeah.

We have this choral music playing during the transformation.

I believe this is new, right, Keith?

These are all new.

All of these cracks are new.

They're composing for Goan like he is the whole Phantom troop now.

They are.

All right.

Hit it.

This is during the transformation.

This is...

Actually, this is right before when Peter says, Goan, I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I have to kill you for the sake of the king

I love that they cue it then right you the viewer if you've never seen this before you can't figure out which way this is gonna go this was this was me.

Yeah, exactly.

But unlike the phantom troop who are given um

showy exciting uh uh like Gregorian chant or mystical chant or even a sort of like there's like a Victorian gothic that sometimes comes through yeah with the phantom troop.

Here we're like deep in this like atonal late uh

uh I'm getting my years, late 19th century, early 20th century, kind of like expressionist opera.

Yeah, but then we do get that more gothic thing.

So that first one was uh theme of Kage, and then this one is uh uh Rosetsu.

I mean, how

phantom troop is that?

This is just, yeah, this is absolutely the Phantom Troop.

This is Zurich.

As he's swirling with that, like, black and white energy.

Yeah, really, really simple.

You know, just moving through the chords.

There is an inevitability to the music that is kind of carrying us there.

And then.

My heart!

As Kite's body lies in the room and Ghoan is kind of like standing in, like burning with the fire, we get this like melancholy guitar for the first time.

Yeah, I think this is from a track called Anxiety.

I might have to scrub through it, but I'll edit it down.

But it's interplayed between an acoustic guitar and a bass, I think an electric bass,

which is...

Oh, you know, that might be

Shin and Anxiety Act.

There is another song called Anxiety that's in there, which I don't have on the board.

We'll find it.

I think it's that.

Keith, are you able to name the song that you haven't been able to name yet?

We have, yes.

Do you remember what it was?

I made it last time.

I haven't heard that episode yet.

It's called The Old Man is Crucified.

Okay.

Pretty clear.

I think it's pretty clear.

The sound I wanted to talk about this queue is primarily that the distinctive musical hallmark of the Chimera Ants is this like big electric bass.

I've described it in my notes as like a liquid bass.

Yeah, it's like boom, boom, boom.

Like that.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's exactly what it's like.

Any sound.

And here we have, it's not a new arrangement of that.

You know, it is a completely new track, but we have this sort of like electric bass playing against against an acoustic guitar.

I've been wondering how a Goan Freaks versus Pito fight would go.

Over and over.

You predicted all of it.

You

predicted every second of it.

You knew

every two seconds.

First, Pito launches themselves at Goan, and Goan dodges and kicks them into the sky so violently that as Pito is falling, they are already, you know, deeply wounded.

Sometimes in

Shonen fights, someone will launch a kick at somebody.

We saw this a lot during the Terra Merrowam fight.

And it's more like a positioning thing rather than like a wound.

Goan's first blow on Pito here is devastating.

And it knocks them into the sky.

There's a Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation Dragon Ball Z game called, I want to say it's Legends.

Am I right about this?

I guess I'm not sure because there are already other games called Legends that are like mobile games.

So that doesn't fucking help.

In any case, it's a fighting game where you throwing punches and kicks does no damage to your opponent.

Instead, you are like charging, you're doing a tug of war on an energy meter.

And when the energy meter like gets high enough up, you then get to do a real move.

You get to do like the,

and that's the only thing that actually causes damage.

And to me, that is like, oh yeah, that is is how these go.

That's actually how shounen fights tend to actually work out.

Is this Dragon Ball Z Idenau Dragon Ball Denetsu?

Or Denetsu?

I don't think so.

Because

I think as a kid, I was able to say the entire thing without struggling too much.

Is it potentially called in English The Legend?

Dragon Ball Z, The Legend?

It might be.

It might be.

The thing that's sort of like it is the DS,

or maybe it's not a DS game.

Maybe it's

a

GBA game, Supersonic something, something.

Supersonic Warriors has a very similar vibe

and fighting system.

So if

you want to play it in English, that version of it kind of has the same system.

Anyway.

Yeah, okay.

I think it is Dragon Ball Z The Legend, which is that other game that I was saying.

That makes perfect sense.

A brief note back on the transformation that I think is really important as Goan charges

his rock to take Pito out of the sky.

The emotional core of the last

chunk with Goan was Ghan's internal monologue as he flitted between kite's death is my fault.

No, it was Pito.

Pito was the one that did it.

We do not see a visible end to that conversation.

I mean, it is not depicted on screen.

An end is reached, and we see Goan transform, but I think that so often when that kind of internal turmoil is staged in a story, you have the like dreadful moment of the character going, no, actually, here's how it is.

We are not, we are denied Ghon's position there.

Instead, we just see him begin to transform, and the answer is kind of made clear to us.

Peter falls, and Goan hits them with the ball of rock.

This is when we get Peter.

My note here says,

summons the rock, immense ball of light, hits Peter with it as they fall.

Ant blood.

The narrator arrives.

This is when the narrator says, Peter was relieved, and we hear Peter's, you know, thank goodness monologue.

Absolutely.

Oh, it's terrible.

It's so disgusting.

Sorry, I'm not relieved by the gruesome face and the violence.

Peter looks.

It's so gross.

It's so, so, so brutal.

It's like one of the grossest things

and also is kind of in the show.

slumped against

the tree in, I think, a very visually similar way to when they were sitting by the tree with Kite's head.

Yep.

100%.

100%.

The other thing I think that's really

heartbreaking here,

and I think that helps with the Goan versus Pedo thematic matchup, is Pedo's powers are these complex names, these worldly names, Terpsikora and Dr.

Blythe, and they are able to summon these other creatures to do things like, you know, heal people, do surgery.

I love when they say people

dance beyond my limit.

That's so good.

It's so sick.

Goan says, show me rock.

Goan is a little boy still.

Goan did not did not steal from the complexity and nuance of an adult who maybe would have changed to a different power set.

Just their ability.

Just that.

Just the raw power.

Yeah.

retroactively, it makes that it makes all the rock, paper, scissors stuff so much stronger for me that this is where it kind of cashes out.

Yeah, is a grown-hulking man being like, Show me rock, and it's like, oh no,

this is as far as we can.

Remember, this is time for me to activate Sylvie's trick.

Hey, do you guys remember when he came up with that name, how Bisky explained the origin of Rock, Paper, of John Ken specifically?

The martial arts,

yeah, law, and it sure was called Evil Fist, Evil Fist.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Man,

been thinking about that a lot.

We don't need to go into detail in this moment, but he hits Peter.

I think it is important to mention that the show does this.

He hits Pito so hard that their face is ruined.

And Tagashi, King of Head Trauma,

really makes clear the violent outcome of Goan's action.

This is not a punch that atomizes somebody or a punch that makes them disappear in a puff of smoke.

This is like immediate physical violence rendered out on screen as Pito is slumped against the tree.

Yeah.

As much as I think it's not really important if Ghoan could fight or be killed by or kill the king.

It is awesome, like you said, the like, what kind of tragic is it?

Is it tragic because he wastes it on Pito without ever having to actually help, or is it tragic because, even with all of this, the ants are still

no match for the ants.

Um, but it does remind me of when uh

the king uh unambiguously tries to cut Pito's head off, uh, and you know, instead accidentally sort of makes a mark on uh their head, uh, with um their tail.

Uh,

and

this is worse than that.

That's for sure.

Oh, yeah.

This terrifying.

Repeated hits are really terrifying.

Yeah.

Oh, let's talk about the repeated hits.

And the way they reveal the repeated hits is brutal, where we see Killua trying to find Goan and sees flashes of aura off in the distance, you know, like, you know, here's a yellow flash, yellow flash, yellow flash, realizing it's Goan and heads there, and we we just see, is it from

we just see Kilua watching.

All we can do is we hear what Goan is doing.

Is that how they play it?

I think crucially, we just see the light in the forest, and Kilua straight up says which one of them is doing that.

Right.

He doesn't know that it's Goan.

He doesn't think it's a different person altogether.

Yeah, because he doesn't recognize him when he gets there.

That's right.

There's a weird timeline here.

So at first, he's like, who's doing that?

When he's like looking at the flashes, then he realizes it's Goan before he shows shows up and then he shows up and goes wait this isn't gone who is this yeah yeah a silhouette that looked nothing like the person he'd known swinging a fist bloodied from countless punches downward toward the skull of an already broken pito

he has decapitated pito uh but well no actually pulverized not decapitated pito yeah pulverized pito disintegrated i'm not saying this to be uh to be violent and lurid into the microphone i think it is a critical distinction that the thing that Pito does is decapitate Kite so that they can continue to use their body

as like a

fighting unit.

Goan

obliterates Pito's head and it still doesn't work because as we will see in a second, Residual Nen, remember that?

Tagashi pulling a thing from his Rolodex.

How much York new can they stuff into this arc?

Goan is talking to himself.

Well, he's talking to Kite.

He says, Kite, I made sure to finish it just like you taught me.

Oh my God.

If it has not been clear yet how adults have led Gohan freaks down the wrong path, look at what he is doing in this moment as he says, I made sure to finish it just like you taught me.

He told him to destroy the head.

How to destroy the head of a Chimera ant.

Otherwise, it's a kid die.

That's right.

This episode is crazy.

This episode might be the best episode of anime ever made.

This episode might be the best episode of anime ever made.

Yes.

every time, Jack, that we've said, and it gets better,

this is the, this is the, it gets better.

This is the one that we've all had of like, well, maybe this isn't the best one because there's still episode 131.

Yeah.

We haven't even gotten to the part yet where the real heartbreak hits, which is Killer shows up and sees it.

Yeah.

The tragedy of Killowa's Zoltic is completed.

I have like a whole, I wrote like a whole paragraph about Killer's

arc.

Break my heart, Silver.

Okay, I'll just read what I have.

Yeah.

Imagine going on a journey with the boy who helped free you from your abusive family's grip, finally experiencing friendship and getting to see the world.

He's a boy who shines so brightly, it's like looking at the sun when you're around him.

Then something horrible happens that you both blame yourselves for, and it starts to wedge a gap between the two of you.

That gets wider and wider while you both try to fix the unfixable until you see him completely lose himself in a moment of explosive, violent grief.

You have to watch that boy who shone like the sun throw his entire future away, put himself through physical and mental torture and become just as monstrous as the thing that ripped the two of you apart.

You're too late to save his soul, but you can at least save his life.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

Woof.

And Killua

finds himself immediately doing the thing that Killiwa always does, right?

Which is first attempting to pull Goan out of a hole emotionally, and then when it becomes clear that that's never really going to do anything, launching himself bodily to protect Goan as Pito's body is lifted up by the puppet.

Killua, I think, knocks Goan out of the way so that the blow that would have pierced...

In this moment, I was like, oh my God, Killua Zeldik is going to die.

This is it.

This is the dart happens.

This is the dark.

This is the dart.

Killua launches.

It puts his body in front of the blow that would kill Goan, and Killua is killed.

Instead,

he knocks Goan, and Goan's right arm is severed.

We've seen this before several times.

Yeah, we have.

Also, this is the first time we ever hear Killua's footsteps in the entire show.

Oh, really?

When he moves to get

to get Goan out of the way, Killua Zoldek has audible footsteps.

They are very, very particular about that.

That's so good.

Yeah.

In this moment, Killiwa swore he heard Goan speak, says the narrator.

You know, the damage has been done, so the narrator can re-enter the room.

Goan says, it's okay.

I'm fine.

It doesn't hurt.

I'm not bluffing.

I'm actually kind of happy.

Finally, I can be just like Kite was in the end.

I feel a little better now.

At which point, oh, Pito is headless at this point.

There is something that might be blood and might be aura pouring out of Pito's head during this whole, pouring out of Pito's neck.

They're being puppeted by Terpsicora at this point.

As a Nen ghost, yeah.

Yeah.

Residual Nen, as we learned about ages ago.

There's, like Kite said, destroy the head, Chimera ants will keep coming.

Of course, the reason that the Chimera Ant is keeping coming here is not

ant biology.

It's just Nen.

You know,

it's the same as a human would be doing the same with Nen strong enough.

And I think it's great that Pito has a power that seems specifically geared to Residual Nan.

Yeah, I mean, this has been foreshadowed since we saw zombie kite, right?

Like

Pito become in this,

the reversal is completely done.

Hey, to give her Marionette Life also is the...

Yeah.

Well, yeah, Pito is kite.

Gotin is trying to be kite with the severed arm, but is not granted the apotheosis.

Oh, she summons the Shomi Rock from the

empty arm.

And it's like, oh, and evil.

This is the last corrupted show me rock where it's like black and red and crackling.

It looks like it's his blood.

Like dark side energy in any Star Wars game.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Well, and again, we are just coming off of four episodes ago or whatever, Netteru doing Zero Hand with the missing arm.

Yeah.

Summoning a power, like an explosive energy power.

So good.

You know, really good.

So good.

Have we?

No, we have not.

The music during this scene is a piano rendition.

Yeah,

which is.

It's called Lamento for Piano.

It sure is.

It's heart-rending.

Yeah, this is like the whole time where Kilua is

like looking at Goan at this,

you know, this thing that is Goan

and kind of trying to figure out what's going on.

You know, he looks like Bisky, but it's not Bisky because, you know, Bisky wasn't more powerful.

Like, the big Bisky was the real Bisky.

This is different.

You know, how many years, more than 10 decades?

This is what he would have looked like after years and years of training.

Yeah.

I just want to note that, you know, so much of, I think, what many of us love about Hunter Hunter and about this arc and this moment is about its relationship with Shounen and the way that it's critiquing or playing with or deconstructing Shounen.

But I think an important thing that we also have to keep coming back to is Tagashi and in choices like the music supervision gear.

It's not just that, it's also a pivot into other or introduction of other elements from other genre.

Here we are in the realm of pure melodrama.

The soft piano version of the end theme is playing.

Killer's hair is being blown back by the power coming off of

who I, at one point, would have said his boyfriend, but these days, I don't know.

You know, we are in playing with the pure signs of an established genre in melodrama without any sort of, there's no apologia for that.

There's no like, oh, but it's only, no, like we are, you're supposed to be fucking crying here.

And that's just the way.

It literally ends on Goan's face.

You know, the scene ends on Goan's face, you know, solidifying with tears welling up before the explosion hits, you know?

Yeah.

Austin, I cried like a fucking baby.

Oh, yeah, me too.

Me too.

Me too.

It's if I talk too much about it too close, it'll hit me again.

You know,

when Kilua shows up and yells to Goan and Goan turns around, he's already crying.

Yeah, we see him start crying.

Like he's kind of starting to get like racked with sobs.

And then

and that's a great bit where it changes.

That's it.

That is an intervention from the animation team because in the manga, we just get the shots and the, we just get the kind of like muscular back of Goan.

Here we see the heaves start up from behind before he turns.

And there's like all sorts of little decisions like that being made in the show, and especially here.

It makes it like

hit even harder that he's, it feels like he's trying to keep them from coming out when he sees Kiloa there, too.

Like, it really feels like he's about to start bawling, and then Kiloa is there.

It's technically a little early to read this, but

all the way back in September of last year,

I sent a screen cap of like an old Reddit thread

to the Peto Bricks chat,

which was titled

The Seven Times Killua Cried for Gone, The Zero Times Gone Saw, warning this blog contains spoilers for Hunter Hunter.

And

crucially, the time that Goan is crying, it's not for Killua, but it's like totally separate.

Killua is not even there.

Kiloa finds Goan, sees the crying.

Actually, every time that Goan cries, Kilua sees it.

But it's always for something else, someone else, some other thing.

It's so fucking rough.

It's so Kiloa.

I want to give you a hug so bad, but I know you just call me a hag or something.

Probably.

That's one of the reasons why I love him.

Yeah.

It's also worth saying two things we didn't note about Goan during this.

I think this is the first time we've heard Goan say something like, I'm going to kill you.

Well, okay, sure.

In the last set of episodes, he did threaten to kill Komugi.

Yeah, but that's a different, this is,

this isn't a threat in the sense of, if you don't do A, I will do B.

Right.

This is a declaration about what I'm about to do to you.

And the second time is

we

he delivers that line.

That's like, you can have my hand and stabs them in the chest with the hand that they cut off of him.

Yeah.

And that's just like, it's so miserable.

It's so

he's such, he's bad.

Hunters are evil.

Hunters are evil.

Yeah.

There's something here about how, and I appreciate that you

that we did some errata at the beginning of the last block about whether or not this was the first time the bomb was dropped.

And, you know, learning that it wasn't, that it's been dropped about 10 times or whatever.

I do think that there is something to be said for

the way that you can't unring that bell, if not for the first time in the fictional world, but for the first time in the narrative.

Notero takes this destructive and self-destructive violent act, this explosion of pure malice rooted in your heart.

And, you know, not three episodes later, we see it reproduced again.

you know um and not just with the bomb it would be a it would be a particular kind of tragedy if it was like, and now more bombs fall.

But instead, that's not the way of it.

You know, the violence is reproducing itself in different forms.

It is worming its way into people's bodies.

It is getting pushed out into the world in different ways.

And again, the thing for me is like, and I'm sure you already talked about this last episode, but I haven't gotten to that one yet.

Like, it starts here and goes the other way, right?

Like.

I'm not taking away from the thing that you just said, which is like, it's important that we see Nedera do it first and then we see it with Goan.

But then the loop around is like, this isn't the first time someone's done this, you know.

Um, Goan is unique in has a unique power in the way that a great prodigy has a unique power, but but a great prodigy is,

despite being one in a million, only one in a million and not one in all history.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

Um, and so you've to understand the poor man's rose

in a world with nen,

a poor man's rose partly exists because nen exists, exists, right?

Like the bomb, you build the bomb because netaro exists.

And sometimes you have to find, you need to have a weapon to kill a netaro.

Um, you, you, you, because someone's already used that.

Someone who doesn't have nen can look at someone who has nen and be like, or maybe doesn't have nen because we don't really know what the nature of knowledge, the knowledge around nen is necessarily.

But when you think about someone who maybe we'll talk about momentarily, uh, gyro, someone who seems to have knowledge about the world somehow, um, uh, former former dictator of the NGL, Gyro,

or the group that calls the Hunter Association and sends Netaro in.

And you have to start thinking about the weapons they build in relation to the Hunter Association and to hunters and the terrible things that hunters can do.

Yeah.

The invention of the Nen user is also the invention of the bomb to destroy the nen user.

Yes.

One second.

My Audacity has not been recording, it looks like, unless I fucked something up on my view.

One second.

You have my view of the backup going right here.

I do, yeah.

Phew.

Let you keep going.

I'm going to figure out why this isn't recording.

As Gun begins to summon this

even worse version of rock from the

stump where his arm was.

And blood kind of like wheels around it.

Again, it's like not clear whether or not this is aura or a kind of blood.

Killua starts begging him to stop.

He says, don't use any more power.

How much will you have to pay?

And it's this that causes Goan to stop and turn.

And we see tears well up in his eyes.

And then the audiovisual order of operations here is wonderful.

We cut out wide to see the forest and we see the kind of like burgeoning nen glow of the rock stop and cease.

And the credits music begins to play.

And then the explosion goes off.

And it is immense.

This is just this, this, uh, it reminds me a lot, actually, of

the one-time kite rolled crazy slots correctly and still complained about it, uh, and used the power of the moon to destroy like 400 ants.

You know, this is, this is an impossibly large explosion.

Um, and then the screen explodes into light, and we see the familiar image of Ghon and Kellyua as children is the opening frames of the credit sequence.

It's so good.

It's masterfully done.

I know that when we were talking about the poor man's rose, we talked about how, well, wait, they dropped more than one bomb.

And then here we go.

Like, this is a nuclear blast.

This is what it looked like.

That

I cannot stop thinking about the look that Gon gives Killua right before he is consumed by the flames.

Or like the Nen flames, you know.

Um,

I think that is the most

like we talked about how

in the anime, he's rendered a bit more angularly in the face, like, he looks a bit more like an adult in the face compared to the manga.

I think that moment when he's looking back at Kiloa is the most, he looks like a kid in the adult's body in the anime adaptation.

And I think that I wouldn't be shocked if that's by design, right?

Um,

as the sort of like final blow to

his future, I guess, is happening.

You know, when

in what situation would you hurt yourself, says Moral.

And then Gon says, when you can't forgive yourself

after thinking very seriously about it.

Well, and that's such a big part of, I think, this.

So much of this, and specifically the bit where Gone is like, it's okay.

And actually, I'm actually kind of relieved after losing his arm.

Like, there is something so self-destructive about all of this.

There is a real,

um, you know, I don't know that it's self-harm necessarily, feels like it, though, but it kind of there are bits that feel like driven by such a terrible frustration that the world isn't fair, that the world, you know, he's lost this person he cares about, that, you know, the person that that he's been, he's wanted to put it all on, just like apologized to him for needing to try to kill him.

All of that stuff, you know, I don't need the bit where there's a bit early on where Peto sees the transformation happening and they say, what is this?

And Goan says, enough.

I don't care what happens to me now as he begins to draw on the power.

And the two things there is one is like, oh my God, like, yeah, big mood, that is how it feels when you're really in it like that.

I don't even care what happens to me now.

I'm in such pain.

I don't care.

I don't care.

I don't care.

The other thing is,

you know,

I'm going to go back to a thing I said months and months and months ago, which was like, ah, yes, Hsoka, the audience surrogate, right?

Here, Goan is in some ways the audience surrogate.

Goan is a certain type of reader or viewer who says, no more big plot.

No more, you know, delaying the fight.

I'm going to fight you and kill you now.

I'm ready to see the action scene.

I'm going to give, I'm going to put the blood on the page.

And I say that partly because I went back to try to find responses to this to this episode and to this issue and mostly couldn't find that stuff.

That stuff is 14, 15 years old now from the from the issue at least.

But what I did find was a lot of people talking about having talked about it.

back then um and people talking about it now uh on like their first read-through or their first watch.

Um, and I wouldn't want to characterize it as monolithic because it very becomes very clear very quickly that you've different types of people talking about it on different platforms, right?

The conversation on Reddit is way different than on Naruto forms, for instance.

But uh, reportedly, the prevailing mood on Naruto forms was as these issues were coming out: one, they look like shit, um, crazy, they look, they look like uh scratchy, they look half-finished, they look unfinished in general.

Uh, two,

um, shameful,

yeah, deeply shameful.

Two, um, I can't believe Togashi did this cheap transformation.

This is like, this is so boring.

This is a Deus Ex Machina.

Of course, Goan is going to win the fight.

Blah, blah, blah.

Like, huge amounts of that.

And then, and then the other type, you know, also, again, this is where you get people, you know, calling Pito a bitch, for instance, right?

Like, huge, complete, like, it is so important as we watch this to remember that there is a reader and a viewer for whom none of the stuff about the ants becoming more like humans or or the deep malice of the human heart hits at all it doesn't hit at all for a lot of people yeah mostly they go it was sick when gone got that power i i hope he gets it again um like truly that person is a huge part of the viewing audience there are also readers who are simply like oh okay

it didn't hit at the time partly because the show was on and off, or the manga was on and off of hiatus for so long that it became hard to hold it all in your head, reportedly.

That, like, okay, now wait, where are they now?

What's this castle?

Oh, is this, this is sort of like a nen condition thing?

Um, we are, we have the benefit of watching it, knowing, one, with music and editing and everything else.

Two, it's episode 131, and we know that episode 136 is the end of the arc.

So we have the sort of creeping finality of it all coming up on us.

We know that there's an ending to the show, if not the manga.

And so there was just a different approach to it.

Now, my understanding is also there's some people who are like, yo, this hits.

Obviously, those people exist.

But I would resist.

I'm not going to be able to five homes right here.

Of course, totally.

But I would resist any urge to render that response monolithic.

Because if it were, the show would be bigger, right?

We would all be.

But

I think that it's interesting to think about all of that stuff in relation to to Goan being like, enough, it's time to go do the violence now.

That's what I'm talking about.

A message for the people who are in the, this looked like shit.

The pacing's bad.

Why isn't Tagashi drawing backgrounds?

Meet me outside.

Well, you know, a lot of that is.

I will get a transformation for you.

Can I tell you the part that's going to complicate this and make it your heartbreaking shonen showdown with people?

Yeah.

It's a lot of people who are saying, I miss Krilla.

I miss Kroni.

That's fine.

I know that there are a lot of mid-Phantom Thief fans out there.

Yes, there are.

I know.

I understand completely.

But

also, you're idiots.

I think it's so.

This is the, I love York New, and I would never hold it against someone for.

for like for that being someone's favorite part of the show.

It is so good.

I find it so strange that there's people who not just who don't like the Chimera Ant arc, but who love the York New arc and see them as versus each other.

As like, no,

I like York New instead of liking the Chimera Ant arc, instead of taking the Chimera Ant arc, especially in the last quarter, as like, oh, you know, a tragic perversion of the plot.

Reviation or, yeah.

Which is so interesting.

And there's another person who's used up all who's lost access to Nen.

Isn't what you want to see the themes from your favorite thing taken and spun into

a horrible new direction?

It's so fucking sad that Pito goes out like this.

I feel like one of the big conversation points that y'all have had over the last three or four episodes of the podcast, over the last 12 or so episodes of the show, is like Pito in seeing Meroem's relationship with Komugi and especially with the moment where she's injured, when Pito sees the response of Merouem to that and it like unlocks something in them about like what it means to be a person and have feelings about the world and maybe other people.

And there's all of this like potential that's unlocked in that moment.

And you have to start asking like, well, what could that do?

Where could Pito go from here?

Where could the king go from here, etc.?

And you could have imagined in those moments, like, oh, I see there's going to be like, you know, interesting drama between Poof and Pito and the heart of the king.

And there is that stuff.

We'll talk more about that stuff in the rest of the episode, I'm sure.

But it's not direct.

It happens largely in Poof's mind.

It's like a lot of things.

But at the time, the first time I watched through it, I was like, oh, Pito is going to help save the soul.

Maybe Pito does die for the king in order to save his, you know, his moral, you know, soul and let him become the verdict.

No, no.

They just get their head smashed in by Goan

in an act of kind of like impotent revenge.

You know?

Yeah,

it's heartbreaking.

And it's.

Oh, sorry, go on, Keith.

Just, it is the other side of it, though, it's hard to see a way out for Goan

besides this

in order to make that happen pito would have killed gone

yeah i mean that door gets closed when everyone abandons their responsibility to go and freaks the child yeah right yeah

um gone freaks can't believe in forgiveness or change because no one has taught him about loss yet right and unlike knuckle gone was not able to appear

as not a threat.

Knuckle was able to not seem like a threat to Yupi.

Oh, to Yupi, I see.

But Gohan was not able to do the same.

Not just not able, unwilling was like trying to be the biggest threat possible to Pito and to Komugi.

And it's amazing as the show kind of continued, as the art continued, we got...

And I think what was happening here was more nuance than just like Pito becomes increasingly good.

But we got more and more shades of different kinds of

ways that they express themselves.

Like you say, Austin, right?

Starting with the injury, with the arm injury, and then kind of like beginning to move in that direction.

If you think about when we see Pito first, they are like truly monstrous.

Not just monstrous in the way that Ghon becomes monstrous, but they were shot like a horror movie monster

against our heroes.

And over the course of the show, we start to see Pito doing things like

I keep thinking about all the little trolley problem, Pito pulling the lever moments, where they are trying to be like, I'll break my own arm, you know, or like, wait a second, we need to talk about this.

Even before they can form the words, you know, we need to talk about this.

Pito is already starting to think of alternatives.

Right down to even as, well, firstly, Peter willingly says to Goan, I'm so sorry.

I can't bring him back.

He is, you know, he's gone.

I keep thinking about, you know, know, what you were saying just a second ago, right?

About like Goan is unwilling to take any off-ramp or even consider that any off-ramp exists.

And it is incredible that the person offering those off-ramps by the end is Pito, given how they are introduced, right?

And, you know, even when Peto goes to Kill Goan, fixes their arm and goes to Kill Goan, they're still apologizing.

They're saying, you know, this is just what I have to do at this point.

But they give Goan the grace of explaining their actions to him, you know?

Well, and then I hadn't even thought about this until you just pointed it out, and maybe y'all have said this already, but like Pito breaking their arm is the Goan freaks maneuver.

Goan is constantly

getting his arm destroyed or broken or damaged in a bad arm wrestling scheme or like the whole show

is Goan's arm getting broken again and again and again.

And it's like it's one step on the path from Pito from for Pito on the path from they're a little cat who likes to pounce and play with their food to they are a loyal and more broadly perspective, you know, royal guard, you know, person in the world.

Yeah.

The Pito's armbreak thing, and we discussed this when it happened in the episode, but I had no idea how

like uh fruitful an image it was going to be as well, also aligns them with the king in terms of their sacrifice.

We had talked about Pito's arm break bringing them in line with the king as well, by being like,

Pito's body is representative of the king's body in that moment.

You know,

Pito believes Goan is seeking to do violence to the king, so they break their own arm to forestall Goan from that action.

But, you know, in retrospect, it's even clearer, right?

Because it's Pito's body that is, that is,

they believe,

in a sort of like doomed relief as they die, in the way of Goan's violence against the king.

You know,

as they die, they say,

they actually don't say they were relieved.

The Peter was relieved line is coming from the narrator.

And we hear that Peter is relieved.

They say, thank goodness, you know,

he was willing to throw that gift away.

Thank goodness I was the one to die.

But I think the specific

evocation of the word relief is coming from the narrator in that moment.

I'm sending a link to Peter Brick's chat because there's an image of it you can't see yet, Jack.

But I will tell you the other images here are things that are

the

all the way back to left arm broken by Hanzo,

Agido's tops broke Goan's arm too.

And then, of course, Goan loses the arm.

Pito, you know, cuts the arm off in this fight.

Yeah.

Post

death as well.

You know, the...

Yes, yes.

You're right.

Not Pito, the dog.

The dual nen of Terminus.

Right, yes, yes.

But, you know, as we've talked about Nen as being like a thing that...

A thing...

There's a tendency, right, to say, well, it wasn't Pito doing that.

It was the Nen.

But, I mean, I think the Nen and the person are...

The Nen is the thing animating the person on some level, right?

Yeah, I mean, the person is the one animating the Nen.

Yeah, Residual Nen, when discussed originally, is something that is like...

the will of the user living on beyond them, right?

Yeah.

I think it's easy to say that's an extension of Peto.

Well, that's what makes me you framing it around the will of the user is kind of the thing.

I'm like, what are the, what's all these broken arms and broken hands?

And what's that about?

And like the hand as a symbol of action, the hand as a symbol of choice.

You know, do you make a fist?

Do you shake someone's hand?

Do you lift something with your hand?

The hand lets you touch the world.

You know, we're in the realm of deep kind of like mythic storytelling metaphor here.

But Ghosn's trick has historically been, I actually don't need need to use my hand to touch the world.

I can force you to do something to me, and that is my choice.

You know, I can make you break my arm, and that is stronger than if I tried to break yours with mine.

You know, Netero's trick, too.

Fuck.

Yeah, it is Netarimo's trick.

Prayer is an act of the heart.

Yeah.

What else did we see do

someone else did a Goan torture sequence recently?

It might have been Peter.

It might have been Pito breaking that arm.

I'm trying to remember back to the episodes.

I think it's also telling that.

So two things here.

First, the show knows this is sad.

The show is playing this to the hilt.

It's made us like Pito, so it would be sad.

Yes, absolutely.

And

the sadness and the skill lives in the abruptness, lives in the brutality.

It's going to sound like what I am about to say is speaking against the show, but I think this is part of what makes this characterization work so well.

Over and over through the Chimera and Arc, we have seen hunters brought right to the brink of death, right to the moment where we're about to say, goodbye, shoot.

This is the end of you.

Goodbye, Knuckle.

Goodbye, Morrel.

And they're saved, either through the hard work of their friends or their enemies

throwing their hands up and saying, all right, you know,

you can take this one.

No such thing is afforded to Pito.

Pito is kicked out of the sky, kicked out of a jump by Goan, and then hit so hard with the punch, and then has their head taken off.

You know,

the ants never get that sort of like human heroism of coming right to the brink of failure and then being saved from it.

Well,

you know, we have to talk more about a Kalgo.

We have to talk more about, you know,

Welfin.

There are ants.

It's not, it's just the Royal Guards, maybe not, but I feel like...

The Royal Guards are a different kind of ant.

Yes, that's what I mean.

I mean, this is when we get into what is a Chimera ant, which we're going to continue to do.

I kind of see it with Yupi was like seconds away from having APR go off

and put him into den jail.

And what I love about that stuff is how

kind of Yupi and Knuckle kind of do the...

the shonen protagonist thing or the gone freaks thing to each other where they're like they

as they're coming to terms with each other, Goan is refusing to come to terms with Pito and like, you know, never, never gives it a shot.

And then Pito, I think probably

the path that they're on feels like they would be receptive to some sort of thing.

Like if Goan shows up and is like, we don't want to hurt a girl, a human girl.

This is not.

Could you imagine?

This is not what we're here about.

We would like to help you protect the girl.

and then we can discuss what the deal is with the king.

Um,

where's the gone that like made friends with the Kiriko?

Where is that guy?

Where'd he go?

I think I know when he went.

I think he left by the end of the hunter exam.

We had lost Goan already, you know.

Um, the gone that comes out of the fight with Hanzo.

Could you see Goan being the one who makes friends with the Kiriko post

hunter exam?

The end of the hunter exam.

Maybe, because

I think that he makes those kinds of friends throughout the show.

Greed Island with the, with the like, you know, he's able to do the quests in Greed Island where he's talking to the NPCs and the sick village that's on him.

I mean, no one had thought to help the villagers before.

That's how he wins.

There's the thing with the bombers at the end of that arc, too, right?

Yeah, there's a lot of things.

That's consistent with the

luck that Gon has early on, too.

I do think that there's like a handshake between

his attitude at the end of Greed Island and the lessons that he learns from Kite that like put the final nail in the coffin.

Yes, when Kite is like, this stuff is hell, you have to

smash their heads,

you know, a contest is like a battle of life and death that is determined by the victor.

You know, the rules are determined by the victor.

Like, like

that is the kind of

the fatal dose of poison that Goan had been taking manageable doses of up until then.

Yeah.

Well, and then there's just like the transformation into the tiger, right?

The, like,

the whole, the whole training arc, so to speak, with Knuckle and Goan,

and the, like, can you fight with the strength you need to go to be part of the extermination team, which then leads into Moral's big test of Goan.

The like, I want you to like punch me as hard as you can.

I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

Moral Durden said this.

And he's going to do it.

He's going to fucking kill Morrell, you know?

He has it in him like that.

And again, no one in that room went, no, wait, now, wait a second.

Is that a little, maybe we should, maybe we shouldn't point this missile at him.

They went, oh, this is sick.

Tito.

This

them.

You're right.

Almost all of them.

Kilua didn't.

Kilua was.

Kilua knew immediately.

Goan, stop.

Goan, I'm begging you.

The other thing, you know, not to stay on sad Goan instead of the thing I brought up, which was sad Peto, but this scene or this whole sequence made me think one more terrible thing, which is so much of this show has been,

for me, even on the rewatch, oh my God, what if Goan grows up to be like Jing, right?

And we've only seen a little bit of what Jing is like, but just from Green Island stuff, we know that he's an asshole, and we know just from Goan's life that he's an asshole.

And this scene, this sequence, this episode, made me wonder for the first time, what if he'll grow up to be worse?

That, yes.

Did you?

Sorry, did you already see what I had just wrote?

No, I had not.

Let me click over here.

Yeah,

yeah.

Definitely.

I want to know here.

This is a sort of like selfish fan request.

I really want to know Jing's honest thoughts about Kite.

Oh, man.

Big time.

Big time.

What if Jing doesn't even like Kite that much?

He runs away from him.

His, hey, I got a test for you.

Never hang around me.

Hold on.

Jing freaks, ran away from something?

There's like a real distinct.

I don't know about like doesn't like him, but have we ever heard someone talk about their relationship with Jing and it hasn't become clear that Jing was like aloof and distant and kind of transactional with them

it really seems like he he worked on Greed Island with those people

with at least with at least some of them but

it's very unfortunate you need to change your name yeah

um

but then also like we see the real I can't remember their names right now of the twins in Greed Island who are the like girls that like when you get there

you see them and something along those lines because they were the E's I believe the enter and exit girls ED maybe oh right I like enter and exit honestly I just realized both E's yeah

Edda and Elena yeah I the relationship that he has there's a scene where he has with one of them where they're able to like read him yeah they psychoanalyze him yeah and that's the type of thing that i think only comes when you know somebody yeah like to a degree so i i think that there is some

probably probably

i don't know this is all speculation but it's also ground for for that to believe that they have a relationship that's like a deeper than than what we've seen jing have with other people going back to the scene with um

uh moral where uh

gone is one about to punch his head off

the way that killua stops that from happening where he just like pops in behind him and puts his hand on his shoulder and like brings gone back to reality he was like gone.

He was gone from the world.

He was like, oh, sorry, Mr.

Moral.

I was about to fucking punch your head off.

Sorry, bro.

First of all, that's scary.

It's also sad

that

he's able to get to that place.

But then what's also sad is the way that now at the end of the Chimera Ant Arc, he keeps leaving Killua behind.

Not just because Killua wants to be near him, but Kilua is like literally his tether to reality.

And he doesn't, he either knows it and doesn't want that

or doesn't see it.

Which does then,

if you can build back from Goan to Jing,

you can get to that sort of Jing distancing behavior.

I can't be around anybody because they might make me different than the way I want to be.

Because I might end up like because they could stop me.

and I don't want to be stopped speaking of Killua or ghans that we don't know where they are anymore that where's the uh I want to find my dad so I can show him my best friend Kilua where's that gone

ow why'd you say that to me why'd you do that Keith what the fuck

do you think

and this is deep stupid psychoanalysis it's not even psychoanalysis it's just like

do you think part of the reason that Goan takes Kite's death so seriously is because he intuitively reads Kite as his father's Kiloa?

And it's like,

what if he lost Kiloa?

What if someone, what if someone who, what if he had a son and that son somehow led to Kiloa's death?

You know what I mean?

Like, there's a sort of like...

So you're saying that he's putting his feelings about killing onto kite.

Onto kite.

Exactly.

He's sublimating.

Earlier we were saying that he was putting his feelings about Jing onto Kite.

He was...

Oh, I think Kite is sort of the universal sublimation of both.

Yeah, he's kind of all.

Because of how Goan is 11.

Yeah.

And Goan is,

you know, Dre, on a previous episode, you've talked about

the way that children go through this period of not understanding that the world doesn't revolve around them.

And I am not trained like you, but my understanding of a lot of different psychological theories is that like part of that process is about an expanding network of who else counts.

And so it's like, oh, my parents count as maybe not as real people, but like, I don't want my mom to be sad.

Right.

Like, and not just, I don't want my mom to be sad because that means she'll be a bad mom to me because she's sad.

But like, oh, I care about someone else and their experience in the world.

I care about my best friend.

Fuck all those other kids, but I care about my best friend.

And it feels a lot like Kite has had to be a lot of those things all at once because, you know, because Goan does not really have other parental figures in his life at this point.

Or a lot of peers even.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

Yeah, here's the other here's the other big one.

How does any of this stuff go if Leorio and Karapica are here?

Oh my God.

Leorio?

I wish Leorio was there.

I've had.

Leorio could have healed

healing.

Leorio would have solved this whole problem.

Leorio would have solved it.

Karapika might have not helped very much, actually.

Dr.

Blades shows up, but Leorio says, oh, oh, no, I am a medical doctor.

This is unnecessary.

He pulls out like a doctor's bag.

Here's what

I'm talking about.

A doctor without money?

If Karapika was there, he would have spun out in the guilt of seeing the connection between

himself in York New and Goan in

Tamaran.

He would have seen the damage that he did,

which couldn't have happened because

I'm now thinking a lot about what's going to happen in the manga and trying to figure out what, because I know that it's super Karapika focused.

Yeah.

And I'm trying to think of like, what would Tagashi want to do to Karapika?

And I think that the answer is that

Goan.

This is my guess.

This is just a total shot in the dark.

Goan's like run during the Chimera Ant arc, like

speed ran Karapika's arc from York New to his inevitable conclusion.

And so we're, I think we're going to get like the exact same Goan arc that was condensed into the Chimera Ant arc spread from the Karapika story from the beginning of York New to the end of whatever happens in Chimera Ant.

Uh, I saw a thing the other day that was

at the end of Hunter Hunter.

Hunter Hunter, right, yeah, right.

I see what you're saying.

There was a thing, and the previous episode, I think, Jack, you mentioned that someone you were talking to who's right ahead,

who's just read the manga, told you that Chimera Ant arc is baby shit compared to where the manga is at now or something like that.

Maybe not baby shit, but you know, you were a baby if you were still at the Chimera Ant.

And I saw a post the other day that explained, it listed out, I didn't do an actual deep read because it was a long post, all of the active plot lines in the current Hunter-Hunter arc, and it listed them like from A to whatever to the last letter, and it was from A to V.

It was 22 active plot lines in the current argument

in the current manga arc.

It's so different.

Yeah.

There are so many ways to do serialized storytelling.

Yeah.

And that definitely is one of them.

And I had scrolled through it, and it was like not only names I didn't understand or know, but all sorts of titles for characters.

I was like, okay, if you say so.

I know.

Can I say the name of one of the arcs that I know the name of?

It's called the Succession Arc.

What the fuck is that?

So I imagine that there's some sort of place that has some sort of...

That is in line with the sort of titles I was seeing, where it was like the seventh prince, so-and-so.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was like, what the fuck are you talking about?

Kendall Roy, yeah.

You read one of them, it's just like Prezhnev's reversal, and you're like, damn, I guess.

Let's do it.

Here's a pitch for what he could do at the manga: he could just do Chimera End again.

A second unique branch of Chimera End

start.

Yeah.

And they make their own king.

I'm so excited to see what's going to happen.

It's Ikalgo.

Ikalgo succeeds.

Listen, you haven't finished the Chimera End Arc yet, Jack.

What if Ikongo becomes king of the NGL?

Oh.

Yep.

Pacific King of the Ocean.

Yeah.

I mean, we got to hear his kingly voice.

Yeah, so yeah, we should actually keep moving so we can actually talk about the kingly voice.

I'm the king now.

Within expected parameters.

Episode 132 begins, and we are out of this conflict.

It never fails to charm charm me when Tagashi does this.

It is such perverse, beautiful pacing.

There is a kind of courage with which he will say, oh no, no, no, no, no, no.

We have to go and look at Ikalgo.

I feel like that deeply I do love Ikalgo.

All hell is breaking loose in sort of like frantic, nervous ways throughout the palace.

The king has arrived in Komagi's chamber, the locus of all the terrible events of the last 20 episodes or whatever.

It is now empty.

The king is still sensing that something is missing.

There's this strange sort of like ringing sound in his ears that for most of these episodes, I was associating with the sense that something is missing.

I don't know that it's exclusively that, as we will come to see.

The effect is very cool.

There's like this sort of pink overlay that is like shifted off of his face, of his

outline.

It's very cool.

I've written down a note here that just says APR has joined the gang of small flying dudes.

So funny.

He's the biggest of the small flying dudes.

It's staged so well because Poof is now a small poof segment.

UP has become cheapified for some reason.

And APR is bobbing along next to Poof at all times.

It's great.

I love that Poof is so quickly hoisted by his own petard.

His arrogance and desperation to deprive the king of his memories in order to save him is

like almost totally baseless.

He is

making all these plans.

Like, oh, as long as we can make it through this last room without him remembering, then he'll never remember her ever again.

And it's like, Poof, you just made that up.

You just literally made it up in your fucking head.

Yeah, he's just playing Calvin Ball these whole two episodes.

And then perfectly, in just minutes after this, he learns like, oh my god, he doesn't have to see something to remember it.

He can also just hear the words.

After Gone has finally accepted

that his delusions are incorrect vis-a-vis kite surviving, we had to have another character come in with some real delusional thinking.

And Poof's always got our back.

Always got our back.

Yupi and Poof silently have this great little silent conference where they're both like, yeah, he can't know about Komegi.

I won't mention Komagi.

He's much better this way.

There's a great moment from Yupi where he sort of says, I would like it if things stayed like this forever, demonstrating that we have not quite, you know, we are still firmly in the realm of this strange, like rapturous joining that the three of them had

in 129 or whatever.

It's also funny, they still sort of have diverging interest.

Like, Poof really wants to do the take over the world thing and Yupi's like I just want to hang out as two little guys and their boss and also this weird third guy that I know belongs to that But

I had a weird fight with but that guy was kind of cool So maybe maybe this guy's kind of cool

Yeah, and I was really mad when he killed the king But it turned out that he hadn't killed the king So maybe it's cool.

I don't know

Then

so yeah, the king thinks about Pito for the first time.

Everyone sort of has this moment of like

Where is Pito?

this is both great dramatic irony we will occasionally cut back to Pito's you know decapitated body lying in the forest in just sort of like a like a ruined charred wreckage but it's also really good Royal Guard narcissism the Royal Guards especially Poof really only like to think about Pito in terms of like where is Pito I gotta gotta figure out where that cat is and what they're doing.

You're right.

He can get memories back by hearing names.

So we are now once again in a situation where a Chimera Ant's name is plot critical.

That like the knowledge of that name is really important.

If we hear Komagi's name, it all comes flooding back.

The king remembers

that

he needed Pito for something.

So he says to Yupi, all right, off you go.

Go and get Pito.

And then he's like, ah, no, actually, I'm kind of feeling pretty good.

I'll hunt for Pito and I'll kill the stragglers.

And his aura goes crazy.

It's so good.

The image of him in where his whole body is just white

is unbelievable.

And like the beams are coming off of him.

Yeah.

He says, he basically says, do you think there's a chance these intruders could best me?

And UP is, sorry, Poof is delighted.

This is the king in, as far as he is concerned, king of chimera ant mode.

He says, you are the very pinnacle of being, that much is certain, and now we are sort of like, um,

um, like the story is mirroring itself backwards, you know, like we hit the point of symmetry and we're mirroring itself backwards again.

The king's aura floods through the palace, uh, just as the characters reacted to Peto's N

that long ago.

We get these like shocked, awful, um, faces.

It's a totally new way of doing N, also.

Like, the king has his own N that is totally different than anybody else's.

It's gigantic.

Remember when they were like, his, um, uh, what's his name?

I can do it.

I can do it.

I can remember all the phantom troops' names.

Nobunaga's N.

It's like,

you can do it.

Nobunaga can get one building with his N.

And it's like, the king seems to be hunting a country, you know.

Down in

the crowd where Knuckle and Maliarone are hiding,

Knuckle immediately decides that it's time to retreat uh he says you would need an entire nation's military to handle something of this magnitude they tried this first with the hunter organization and then with a nuclear bomb neither worked although this did kind of make clear to me something that is worth saying into the microphone it was up and poof that saved the king's life not the king's own strength

The king didn't withstand.

I mean, the king withstood a nuclear bomb, sort of.

He was alive enough for.

I mean, you know, we saw his eyes open, but it was that kind of like a bad thing.

That's not what I meant, but that's, yeah, okay.

Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.

I don't know.

Did he?

We'll find out, right?

Can he kill an idea?

Um,

so it's time to leave.

He tells Maliron to run for it.

Uh, we'll head back to the capital under the cover of the crowd.

As soon as the chairman was beaten, we should have notified the committee so they could start working on plan B.

What is is your

plan B?

Okay, take time out because one, do we think there's already a plan B and begin working on it means like, all right, bring in the boats.

We didn't want to have to bring in the warships, but we, that's our plan B.

Or do you think plan B is, or do you think that what he means is it's time to go develop the plan B and they need time to do that.

And if so, what do you think it is?

I think it's different.

I think it's neither.

I think that it's

knowing anything about what's going on is above my pay grade.

He didn't even know about Dragon Dive.

No, but he does know the chairman's dead.

He does.

So I think that he said, I have valuable information for the association.

What I should have done is report to them what I knew, which is that the plan failed.

It's their job

to be doing stuff.

I don't know.

He didn't know about Dragon Dive.

He didn't know about the bomb.

Like, Nove had to tell him about this stuff last minute.

And so, you know, I think that Knuckle is like, I wouldn't know about a plan B if there is one, but at least I should be telling them, which is true.

This is tremendous.

I think Ali had a great point in the last recording of like,

the world has changed.

You know,

you defeat the king.

You are now living in a post-Chimera ant world.

And there's a kind of...

Like a kind of naivety or optimism or or desperation in Knuckle saying, all right, it's time for plan B.

You had one plan, you had one shot.

This is not a world in which you could make a plan B that you feel comfortable about right now.

You know, plan B is going to look like a complete reshaping of the world.

Um, we learn later that Palm has actually figured out a plan B that is kind of concerning.

Um,

there is a distance growing between between Knuckle and Maliorone, and the narrator kind of draws attention to it, the distance between like

a duty to see this through versus like a preservation or a duty to desire for a gross scale

it was a desire yeah desire to revenge and a duty to retreat

yeah it's great um but it is fruitless because one second after the n floods the palace the king arrives knocks out so the king sees them and he says i will begin with these two he knocks them unconscious almost immediately apr bursts and he says i shall be interrogating these two later on.

Once again, a hostage situation is developing.

Yoshi Oratagashi knows that a hostage situation is a really like fertile ground for tense storytelling.

I have three consecutive notes here.

The first one says, God, I love that it comes down to these four knuckleheads.

Knuckle, Bellearone, Palm, and Ikago.

And then the second note is the big thing I just asked about plan B.

And then the third note is, God, I love that it comes down to these two knuckleheads.

And then Knuckle and Bellerone are crossed out and it says palm and it calls

It's a real

on some level it is a vindication of and on some level it is a repudiation of Morel and Nove's we have to get some new hunters in here.

You know

go ahead Jack.

Oh, it's just they bring in the A team Nove and Morel chairman Notero.

They bring in yeah, they bring in the B team gone

killua and then sort of alongside them, Knuckle,

and then Shoot.

You think Knuckle and Shoot are the C team?

I think Gone and Kilua are the C team.

The way I always read that stuff.

I was thinking Netaro is the A team and everyone else is the B team.

Sure, yeah.

Fair.

Maybe Grandpa gets to be A team honorable.

Oh, sure, yeah.

He's a dragon car.

Yeah, he is the A team's car.

I was mistaken in my order, but what I am not mistaken about is that then the

sub-teams immediately find a further sub-team comprising Chimera ants who they just pick up along the way.

So they are now trapped as Palm and Kalgo flee.

Poof knows that one of them is carrying Komegi and is completely stuck kind of momentarily on what to do.

Talk about someone who's scratching out his notes as he's writing them.

Yeah.

He's like sort of desperately trying to figure out how to keep the king from going to look for things.

Then he remembers that he's a character in a Yoshihiro Tagashi script and turns over his index card on which is written the single word game.

Yeah, try game.

That the king will like to say

over and over.

I can't believe that the king is regaining his memory because of his gamer girlfriend.

You know, that's the power.

Every time Poof Poof is scrambling to go with a new plan, I keep remembering Sheeves plan by Sullivan, formerly on co-host.

Pivot.

Poof is constantly like...

All right, all right.

First,

I have to kill Komugi.

Okay, no, she's been taken away.

Okay, now I have to send Pivot.

I have to go send all of my little guys to clean up the room.

Okay, Pivot, we have to start a game.

We have to start a little game.

That way I can distract the king.

I'll pretend to be Komugi on the phone so Keto will.

That's right.

Yeah.

What are those things?

We literally have to do the sorting.

Oh, shit.

That means I have to, like, use the scales to pacify the people who keep flooding.

One of the funniest things about Merim is he kind of treats all his interactions like

a procedural.

Like he's always being a detective in every scene that he's in, and no more so than in these episodes where like he knows, and he will reveal later that something is off with he's playing a game of werewolf or mafia.

Yeah,

yes, he knows something's off with his two little guys.

And when someone is like actively looking for deception and also constantly remembering things about the world, it's very difficult to like hide things from a person like that, especially when they're you know, like a genius.

Um, and especially when they have six-sevenths of your body inside of them, and you have some sort of strange nin/slash love link.

And so, when it's a double-edged sword, when

uh, poof suggests that they play a game,

and it makes sense that the king would accept a game because he loves games.

We know that he loves games, but the fact that he loves games is like inherently suspicious to him.

Yes, he's like, Why do a game?

Why do I like that?

Why do I like game?

I'm asking myself that all the time.

We should marrow him on Side Story.

Yeah, we'll We'll see if we can get Merrowam and all to talk about any good games he's played lately.

They've made Goongie for the phone.

They put micro transactions in Goongi, in Goongi Mobile.

Two days in, Merrowam has spent $143,000 on little hat transaction pieces.

Trying to pull the special Marshall.

The developer has studied what Meroem's tastes are and is starting to put in entire cosmetics just for Meroam.

Yeah.

Home

voiceovers.

Yeah.

Why is my girlfriend an announcer pack in this game now?

Yeah, 100%.

So here are the rules of Poof's game.

Just before we begin the rules of Poof's game, because I think some important context for the viewer here is that this game is on some level handing your little brother a controller that is not plugged in.

Yeah, a little bit.

It is very much doing that.

Keith, begin the rules that Poof describes as he hands Maroam an unplugged in control.

So it's important to remember that behind this game is a misunderstanding about Pito in that they're alive.

Yes.

It's crucial for Poof's plan that Pito isn't currently Smithereens.

So Poof says, look, King.

It would be such a waste of your time to just go instantly win against the intruders.

Obviously, you want to have a bit of fun.

So, why don't we do a game where one,

let me go hypnotize all the other humans real quick, and then you wait here, buying time for Pito to come back.

You wait here until that's done, and then me and Yupi will go find Pito.

And you can use your N one more time, or else it will be too easy.

And then you can go and find the other intruders.

And whoever wins

wins.

And that's all that Poof has thought through.

Because as far as he's concerned, as long as he can get to Peto and Komagi first by buying time, then that's enough.

The king introduces his own wrinkle to the game.

Because the king loves games.

Because it's frankly, it's not a good enough game.

Yes, it's kind of a shit game.

How about this?

If you win, I'll grant you each one wish,

which at first you're like, the king can grant wishes, but he already knows what they're going to wish for, which is great.

If I win,

you two will tell me what the fuck you're keeping from me.

You little sneaks.

So good.

They both react like they have just, you know, touched a hot stove.

They are simultaneously like, this guy is the supreme being.

He is the god of the universe, and we have merged with him.

And also, I am going to be able to keep a secret from him for, you know,

a bunch of episodes.

It's so funny, because all Poof has really done is just jump-started the, like, disco Elysium thought catalog in Marowom's brain that's labeled Goongie Friend.

Like.

Yeah, it's great.

The king basically says, you buffoons thought you could hide something from me, but I suspect that what you are hiding from me, you are doing out of loyalty now he is

broadly correct here however the definition of loyalty is something that the chimera and arc is very interested in um

he says did you think that i would not notice your guilt your anxiety i love uh in the same way that there was a kind of like cathartic freedom in the first time the characters of the show acknowledged that Hiseka was being a sexual pervert, there was this kind of moment of like, oh, finally, they're actually saying it in the show.

There is a real catharsis in hearing someone describe Poof as anxious using those words for the first time.

You're like, that is what is happening here.

This guy is just a ball of anxiety.

All right.

Poof goes off to go and spread the scales and then prep to go and find Peter.

He says, Place your trust in me, to Yupi.

I will not fail.

It is now time to introduce my favorite new Chimera ant character, Little Baby Komaki.

Oh my god, and her papoose!

And her hair papoose.

Her hair papus.

It's a shame she's unconscious, because I bet that feels great.

Wrapped up beautifully in

Palm's hair being carried along at high speed.

Palm covers her eye for Wink Blue and sees Killua also carrying a weird bundle on his back.

A weird bundle of hair.

Normal sized bundle.

No, not quite normal sized.

He is very thin and long.

Sure, much closer to normal sized than he was before.

Yeah.

Much closer to normal sized.

Doesn't look good.

I am reminding how Natero looked bodily even before he activated the bomb.

This is bad news.

It is good that there is something left of Gone Freaks to carry.

I was briefly worried that this might have been the end.

Palm has a plan here, which is

great.

Great.

I don't know that it's a good plan, but it's a scary plan in the story, which is that I'm going to aim for the basement, deep underground, and hope to avoid the king's N next time it fires.

And it's as she's wondering what to do here, you know, do I try and flee and maybe get caught by the N on the plane?

Or do I head down into the basement?

That Ikalgo approaches her.

We are right back in nuclear vibes again.

Do I try and run?

Or do I try and, you know, I might be able to run and get away from the shockwave or the radiation?

Or I could just try and hunker down, like deep underground and try and wait it out.

Really resonant tension here.

They're driving a truck.

Ikalgo has vowed to set a trap to get Knuckle and Melirone back.

And we're back down in the fake village again.

Kumagi lying in a little bed.

Just the like, every element, every set is being reused,

if not recontextualized, we are like returning to the palace in different modes, different anxieties.

It's great.

Yeah, this set of the fake town really takes on a different character post and green.

It really does, doesn't it?

Yeah.

You want to spell that out literally into the microphone, Austin?

Oh, what is it?

What is the fucking name of the place in New Mexico?

The

Trinity.

Trinity, Trinity.

Yeah, during the Trinity tests for the atomic bomb,

you got these kind of classic,

how would this bomb affect the world?

And in order to demonstrate that, they would build these sort of mock towns, this kind of like traditional American, you know, main street little suburban, you know, we're kind of pre the big suburban sprawl of America, but it's like that style of

small town.

And it looks just like these little villages, or this little, this little underground town in the warehouse.

Sorry, I think we defined a good way to describe this a few episodes ago where I said the place where Oppenheimer happens.

Yes.

And the place where that one Indiana Jones movie starts.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Fridgetown.

Yeah, Fridgetown.

Yeah, the Fridge.

The king is still up in his room,

both feeling that strange ringing in his ears again and thinking, game.

Game.

Why does this...

Why does this mean so much to me?

I've heard tell of game.

I've heard tell of

game.

Poof had figured out getting rid of the gunky board was really important, but he had forgotten.

Poof had forgotten that games existed.

Oh, I'd forgotten that games existed.

Yeah.

At the time,

operating under the principle that as long as the king didn't see anything, it would be fine.

Which just ended up immediately not being true.

All this shit with the king standing in the room thinking game to himself makes Poof's initial plan, wouldn't you like to eat some human grapes, seem even

more useless.

Yeah.

You were bucking up the wrong tree.

133 begins.

I was surprised to see that Poof is actually scattering the scales.

I thought that Poof was going to go out and immediately begin cheating, but Poof is still operating in the world where the best thing that Chimera Ants could possibly do is complete the sorting, the thing I have been trying to get him to do for a hundred episodes.

So he's like, alright, I'm going to go out and pacify all the humans.

I really like the crowd talking here, the new people who have arrived.

Hunter Hunter briefly remembers that humans without Nen are real.

And we have this like overlapping dialogue of people being like, well, we could just go and run.

And then they're like, no, no, no, the soldiers are there.

And they're like, no, haven't you heard?

The soldiers have all just like collapsed, have all fallen over, uh, because Peto's control of them has gone.

And we get these great shots of them just like slumped over their tanks.

Um, but then just as they start putting that together, Poof is like, Ah, wow, the fight with Gone must be really hard.

Yeah, if they must have had to deactivate their purpose, yeah, they must have needed to bring all their power to bear against Gone.

That's why.

How could that even be possible?

He's just a dumb kid.

I looked at him.

That's right.

And just as they realize this, they

start to become hypnotized.

It's all coming together so cleverly.

And bits of it that are contrivances are at least coming together in kind of like elegant little contrivances.

As Poof is saying to themselves, oh man, this is exhausting.

I've lost so much of my power by giving it to the king.

We're now starting to get pieces on the board such that we could have rematches that would be successful.

This is really elegant stuff.

You get your first fight that they can't win, that they have to give up on, and then kind of naturally events take place, and we find the

power levels getting

reshaped.

Down in the village, Ikalgo and Palm discuss rescuing the other women.

Ikalgo wants the women to be blindfolded so that they don't see him.

Is this because he's an octopus?

And they don't want to panic them?

Or is there something

that I'm not?

Yeah.

But hiding them from Welfin isn't part of his plan.

No, they're blindfolded when they see Welfin, too.

Oh, but I thought, but Welfin looks at them and goes, okay, take off your blindfolds and get out of here.

Well, I think he says that, like, I'm going to look at one side do that.

Yeah.

I don't know what that's about.

I think that they mentioned at some other point already, Ikago being like, I can't let the humans

see me that don't know about Chimera ants, or they'll freak out and make it difficult to do the thing that we have to do.

I believe that that is what is happening.

That was from like a dozen episodes ago.

Also got the wounded body of Welfin.

Welfin has crutches.

The like

there is something that I've always loved about how

like prosaic the regular chimera ants are depicted right from the time we saw the crocodile in the singlet or whatever.

So now we have Welfin like a wolfman walking around on crutches because of course that's what you're going to use if you've been wounded.

You know ants.

Mm-hmm.

They're regular crutches.

Yeah, they're regular.

Do you remember what that singlet-wearing crocodile's name was?

Crocodile.

Alligator.

Alligator?

Oh, so close.

So close.

Look at him.

I'm 1550 odds there.

Really?

I rolled the dice.

Speaking of names,

we get another one for Welfin here.

Oh, you sure do.

Zykahal.

And this name is deployed tactically, as names are often deployed with chimera ants.

Ikalga has a plan.

Welfin, you should go and deliver a message to the king.

We want to negotiate a deal.

Welfin says, This is probably a trap, isn't it?

And that's what I'm going to tell the king.

Not in a way to betray you, but because if I don't say that, he's going to be really suspicious.

And then Welfin starts thinking to himself, maybe I should betray them.

Am I digging my own grave here?

And Ikalga says, No, and then uses his name.

This line is so good because

I,

at least in the dub, I can't remember.

It happens in the sub too, but I don't know if it happens here specifically.

Ikago's voice actor, like, is always going between all these different voices, and he totally changes up his delivery when he becomes

the NGL guy.

It reminds me so much of his singing voice.

It is more like a singing voice.

And then, when we, I guess we haven't talked about the flashback, but in the flashback,

in the flashback, I call it human form kind of looks like the sniper.

He does.

He does.

He has also, but he has Ikalgo's eyebrows.

He does.

Yeah, that's true.

It's very important.

That's how you know it's him.

Yeah, I just love this where he's just all of a sudden he's like very, because he has such a cartoonish voice, you know, 85% of the time.

And then he has like an even more cartoonish voice.

And then this one is like, I know your name.

It's Zykaho.

Ants are enemies.

Yeah, he keeps saying this.

Chimera ants are enemies.

First, he says, you know, once this is done, you'll be free.

You can go and find Gyro.

Welfin takes violent issue with this, and it's then that the name is kind of deployed.

But yeah, he says, we were friends from before.

The ants are our enemies.

Enemies of the NGL.

And he also tells him to take the body of Bloster with him.

Bloster's not dead.

He's sleeping gas from the time he had Bloster's wild adventure with the elevator

way back when.

But he basically says something like, you know, Bluster might not be able to remember, but, you know,

he's a good soul.

We were all buds back then.

Yeah, we were all friends.

He says,

I don't remember my human name.

I suppose I never will.

But that they were friends.

All of this stuff where I'm being reminded of the early NGL stuff and Gyro and the drugs.

You know, y'all have talked at length about the connection to World War II and the dropping of the bombs and stuff.

But But I think it's probably also worth thinking about that Hunter Hunter comes out between 2000, or not 2000, between, sorry, this arc runs between 2003 and 2010, the kind of height of the war on terror, quote unquote,

which you can draw lines backwards from to the war in the 80s between the Soviets and

the

kind of predecessors to the Taliban in Afghanistan and the U.S.

weapon shipments

to the Mujahideen and all that stuff.

Uh, and you can start drawing different readings out of the text around

it's still the same,

right?

It's still, it's still Western power, right?

It's still the ants are refle.

The Hunter Association is the West

and is,

you know,

where the metaphor ends up going is a slightly different place, which is that, like, oh, Western involvement, in this case, the hunters coming to investigate this place, leads to the development of new techniques, which is the ants learning nen, which then in turn leads to,

you know, an overthrow of the people who already live in a place and da-da-da-da-da.

And then the incorporation of their

military.

And you can tell, you can also do that reading here.

And I think that like, to some degree, that reading even works with the

poor man's rose in the sense that one of the great weapons that the West has had historically is that we're allowed to use the bad weapons.

We're allowed to do the bad things that we would then say another place is evil for doing, whether that is torture or atomic weapons or other types of gas mines, sonic weapons,

you know, internet wounds, cluster bombs,

cluster bombs, phosphorus,

yep, uh-huh, uh-huh.

All sorts of things like that.

Targeting civilian populations directly, for instance.

The West and its allies are constantly in that mode.

And those things are all acceptable.

They're the acceptable cost of doing business in pursuit of stability, right?

Which is why the hunters are sent here.

It's what the call between Netero and the world leaders seems to have been about, right?

Netero, famous, I don't, again, I don't remember if you talked about it, I haven't heard the episode before this one yet, but in that episode or in that initial call, Netaro is getting the go-ahead to be able to do whatever he thinks is necessary, right?

Or whatever is necessary, which now we know means includes this.

Right.

Deployment.

Almost

like

is the main plan.

Right, exactly.

It is the that is plan A.

It is plan A.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure.

If you can beat him in a fight, why not?

But like, put the bomb in your chest.

You know, that's the reason.

Don't go without the bomb.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So I do think that there's this other reading.

Again, especially when you think about the history of,

you know, Afghanistan and Pakistan with relation to drugs, the kind kind of history of heroin in the world.

If you look at the history of Pakistan,

and

heroin is like nightmarish, the West's involvement, America specifically's involvement in developing that trade there.

You can start to build other sorts of

readings here that I think are also pretty effective.

I think this is like, you know, it speaks to how graceful of a plot that it is that like the whole, like, we're,

part of me talking about Chapter Black from a couple episodes ago is also like Yu Yu Haka Show being about not just violence, but like cyclical violence, like

and not just like violence that begets other violence, but also

patterns that repeat across time.

And we see that in Hunter Hunter that starts on personal levels, like with this oldyx and with, you know, Ghan's like slow transformation, his like drive to sort of emulate his father's path that

isn't even conscious.

It's sort of like

a byproduct of his sort of active goal of just finding his father.

And then that stuff gets sort of exploded out into

geopolitical issues where it's like,

I think that

you're seeing.

the show talking about different things across time as you know, Netero calling back to all of these different things that have happened throughout history: the bombs, the

way that

those patterns repeat in the same way that personal patterns repeat, sort of like

tied into loops.

Gone Freaks is not the first boy in history who, in order to find his father, became a bomb, right?

Like, this is

a billion times.

I mean, that's what I say.

So,

yeah.

Um

he's sending he's sending out Welfo.

Yeah, Welfin.

Yes.

I couldn't remember Ikalgo's name.

In my brain, I was like, the octopus, beautiful octopus man.

He says, I know Jaira is alive.

I just know he has to be.

He wouldn't let himself get digested.

We've talked about this a bit over the past episodes.

The language around what a Chimera ant is and how it is made is just getting muddier and muddier.

We're now talking about ants getting like

your body getting digested, but your mind not getting digested.

This is sort of the standard by how we've come to talk about chimera ants now, but it's interesting hearing it spoken out so explicitly by an ant.

An ant is now

like an ideology or a layout.

Right.

Yeah, they've like erased ants.

Like, there are no ants anymore.

There's like, there's just like the people that were ants and the king and the guards.

I've written down here, checking in with another Welfin meltdown for the road as the Chimera

comes to an end.

Welfin has another lovely little meltdown.

The women use the trucks to flee.

Welfin agrees to be Ikalgo's messenger.

Chimera ants are evil, he keeps saying repeatedly.

This reminds me a lot of the really excellent tweet by Ali, not our Allie, Ali A L L Y.

They They handle this tragic ally, I suppose, here.

Before I take a shower, I hate it in there.

The wet world is a bad place.

While in the shower, I remember now that this is a good place.

It is the dry world that is the enemy.

This is wealth and sink.

I mentioned it.

And by the way, that's fucking some big talk from an NGL, like, you know,

Gyro's

stated purpose was to fill the world with misery.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

UP sees the truck leave and swoops down after it.

Welfin has a great line.

Look at that.

I already found a royal god.

Welfin's great.

I love it.

I have now gotten to the point where Welfin is one of the real top Chimera ants.

It's like often said it's come down to these knuckleheads, except you're now appending Welfin.

Welfin gets tagged in.

These three knuckleheads.

Something that hit me here was like, oh, yeah, whenever Welfin, I've watched this show like three or four times now.

And when Welfin first shows up, he is always annoying to me.

He always pisses me off.

And then by the end, I'm like, right, I love this guy.

Yeah.

I love this guy.

That's Welfin.

That's my buddy Welfin.

Yeah, I mean, I think that aligns with like Welfin remembering that, like, oh, right, I have, I learned that emotions are okay, and I don't just have to be angry and hostile to everyone and everything.

And there's also, there's such a whittling down of the cast over the course of, you know, 40 episodes.

And,

you know, Tigashi starts to have to, having to put like all his characterization eggs in fewer and fewer baskets.

But boy, does he

bury it efficiently?

He tells Yupi,

and

Yupi has a great internal line to himself.

He says, we're having a contest, so I don't really need to tell the king.

Because Waffen's like, you have to go and tell the king.

And Yupi, as if reminding himself that this is a game, says, I don't, I don't really have to do that.

Yeah.

Which is extra funny because he never had to do that.

No, he doesn't take words from Welfin.

No.

Welfin, I've written down here in my notes, Welfin, possibly blowing it, asks Yupie if he has any memories from his past life.

Yupie's line, you're kidding, of course not.

I'm Yupi, the royal guard, and that's all I've ever been.

Stop asking stupid questions.

But

importantly, this is the one ant who definitely would answer no.

Right.

Yeah.

Yupi zombies.

Because, yeah, Yupi is the only one who has no human in there.

Yeah.

All magical beasts.

I love the.

Oh, no, wait.

I'm getting ahead of things.

Not that magical beasts couldn't have memories, but you know.

Yeah.

I did re-watch this.

In my mind, I was like, does Yupi say, like, yeah, I remember galloping across the savannah?

You know, like something deep in the city.

I remember skewering meat with my forehead horn and roasting it over a fire.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

Oh, man.

Shout out to the camp tigers.

Time ago.

I love the camp tigers.

Time ago, I was a frog that hid under the ground and then closed my massive mouth over somebody.

I was a noggin-lugging tortoise.

Oh, my God.

He may have been a noggin.

He's very not.

He gives noggin-lugging.

He really does.

It's giving noggin-lugging.

It's giving noggin-lugging.

Then he's called back again, and as we turn around, we see that Welford is now crouching on the floor with Missile Man.

What's it called?

Is it just called Missile Man?

It's called the Megman.

Missile Man.

Powered up.

He says, if you try and attack me, I'll fight back.

I have some questions for you.

Yupie's face here is amazing.

He gets like wild round eyes and very sharp pointed teeth.

He says something like, stop playing around, you little punk.

His nose starts bleeding.

And then his nose starts bleeding.

Oh, wow.

And in fact, even before this, something was happening with Yupi.

He's coughing.

He's got a little cough.

He's got a little cough.

Oh, buddy.

Yeah, but I don't don't hear a cough.

Yubi has a little cough for some reason, period.

Everybody's wondering what Peto's up to, period.

Then the king finds a googie tile.

He remembers that he was playing somebody at a Gungi board.

There's a lovely inverse of the shot of Komegi not being able to see the king.

So in those early things, we saw Komegi at the board and this like shadowed figure opposite her, human figure.

And now we can see the king at the board and this like disembodied hand, like a ghostly hand, playing Goongie on the other side.

And then he starts bleeding from his nose.

Yeah.

Normal.

It's because he's sad, chat.

Yeah.

It's sad.

It's a sad nosebleed.

It is a sad nosebleed.

I get those all the time.

Someone who tries, I might, I have yet to defeat, even one single time.

Maybe it's like in, you know, comedy gag anime from the 90s when like a guy gets horny, he starts bleeding from his nose.

He's got a bone because he's remembering his gamer girlfriend.

From a comedy gang

from the 90s or any other anime.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah.

Uh-huh.

It's like not really around these days.

The youth won't remember this.

They don't know about this.

I don't think so.

I don't think the nose, the horny nosebleed, is it still around?

I think

that it's in that it's in that it's in Demon Splayer.

I've been Demon's Player.

I've never been in the middle of the money that's not the best.

Demon's Player is the most fucking late 90s, early 2000s shit in the world.

Can you get out of my face.

Demon Slayer is freely bleached out crazy.

I don't even dislike that show.

I think it's fine, but I do accept that it is empty calories through and through.

Oh, they asked me about it in Lund League.

Oh, I got the question right.

It has the exact formula that all popular anime have now, which is have three good episodes and then coast forever on nothing.

I liked the end of that train arc.

I liked that last episode.

Yeah, the train stuff had some good train arc.

It is perking up.

They put a train in it.

They put an evil train.

It took me 15 seconds to find.

Mitsuli makes Tanjiro nosebleed.

So yeah, you're right.

Yeah, so of course.

Nightmare.

While the blood is coming out of the king's nose and while he is continuing his a game.

Game speech,

Poof's theme is playing.

More specifically, the theme that plays when Poof has a wild idea.

I love that there's a real like Stephen King, evil will defeat itself as thing happening here, where not only is it Poof's first mention of let's play a game uh that causes this initial spiral, but also Poof's theme is the one that is playing as the king starts to put this together.

It's not just evil will defeat itself.

There is something that I think really came into focus for me watching these episodes.

Evil will defeat.

I mean, but specifically around the nosebleeds and the time scale of everything and the wealth in Icargo, suddenly they're not Chimera ants because Chimera Ant is cultural instead of like biological,

which is there's no time has passed.

Nothing has happened yet.

We are like, this has all happened so fast that the reality, no norm has been actually established yet in terms of what it means to be a chimera ant in the world.

Right.

Because at this point, at the end of whatever, 60 episodes.

We now have people who you would look at and say, well, that's a chimera ant because it's an animal person are now saying we are not chimera ants.

Chimera ants are evil.

They're the enemy um and meanwhile you have plum hatching from an egg right like a human you know 85 90 being like i'm a chimera ant now a hundred percent and so the the reason i say that is because part of i think you know poof could never make a plan that is that is foolproof against history against time.

Things are going to develop.

It's not simply like, oh, Poof's plan doesn't come together.

It's like

the way any of this was going to shake out was going to continue to develop via them getting more complex, them becoming more

ingrained into human culture, into earth culture, world culture in some way.

We're so zoomed in on these particular events that everything feels monumental when in fact it's blips in the moments of history unfolding.

And

when you start to drop atomic bombs, when the poor man's rose gets deployed, you remember that history is not simply, you know, you go the other way, you can talk about Goan and Goan being the sort of like history is shaped by moments where individuals make big choices or whatever.

But the bomb in Netero's chest or the NGL existing and then its soldiers remembering that even after becoming Chimera Ants, these are broader systemic, cultural, historical movements and moments.

And those are the things that exert the sort of pressure that can shape things.

You know, like you talked about how, like, well, whatever plan B is, it means like a whole new,

you know, it probably means outright war.

It probably means more bombs being dropped.

Plane bombs.

Whatever that was.

Instead of man bomb.

Yeah.

Instead of man bomb, maybe missile, maybe ICBM bomb.

You know, like, who knows?

I don't know if those exist in this world or not.

But like those,

that is how this sort of conflict would eventually be talked about.

And it might be the case that like eventually Chimera ants are just in the world, you know, or they're all killed and they're all killed.

They're all gathered up and killed in a genocide.

And then that's the like historical moment.

But we're so zoomed in at such a small individual personal level that when Palm, for instance, explains her new, new plan,

it's striking because it's like, oh, wait, right.

Time doesn't simply exist at the

time, is not always at the we're so close to death that it slowed down

Togashi's trick, you know, version.

Sometimes time is,

you just got to wait 20 minutes.

And if we just wait 20 minutes, something else is going to happen.

We are in

the famous, for so long in Hunter-Hunter,

weeks that feel like years,

or weeks that feel like decades.

And now

when you zoom out and take that other view,

you can start to think about the Chimera Antarct in this other, more historical way.

Historical in shape, not historical in

affect or something, you know.

But it's not just, it's not just evil defeats itself.

It's that time defeats outliers.

You know, things will revert to some sort of mean.

Chimera ants, even, you know, whoever they are, will eventually learn to love game and will learn to love friend.

And

that seems to be the most powerful force in the world of Hunter-Hunter is not even bomb.

It's it's culture, you know?

Right.

And we, we had, we we started to i mean we've been seeing that developing all along and it's continuing to develop but it was only 10 15 episodes ago that we had yup saying wait a second i think i'm a i think i'm a person and i think people can like start to feel things oh my god this is great and now we find yup lying on the floor next to the truck blood pouring from his nose and mouth seemingly dead.

Like someone swatted him

with a big fly swatter.

Poofs?

With the one that Somi wanted to hit Poof with.

Poof's delivery here is amazing.

I've not heard this performer deliver a line like this before.

They just go, Yupie.

It's so sad.

It is.

They say, it can't be.

And they go and tell the king.

They like rock up into the room, you know, now poof, full anxiety.

Sire, terrible news.

UP is dead.

Great news.

This means you don't have to go out looking for anyone.

And the king says, well, the game is off.

Then that means I have won.

This is some classic I'm the king.

This is some

King Merrowem Fiat here.

Game is off.

I've won.

You will tell me all you know.

And we look behind him to see that he has drawn a Gungi board

in the dirt.

Really good, just like balancing of the spinning plates or like balancing of the tension in an episode.

You know, Poof has just been shocked by the discovery of the death of Yupi.

The viewer has been shocked by the discovery of the death for Yupi.

The king, as always, moving at his own pace in his own internal clock, draws a gungie board on the floor and says, Okay, game's over.

You need to tell me all you know about whatever you're hiding from me.

This is great.

Down in the basement, Palm recaps the value of Komagi to Ikalgo.

She calls her a double-edged sword for the king.

Yeah.

And, you know, something important is unstated here.

At least I think it was unstated.

Palm had already sort of figured out with Killua that some of the Chimera ants want to save Komagi and some of the Chimera ants want to kill Komagi.

But there's one issue, which was Yupi.

Yupi was like a variable that it didn't know.

She didn't know which way he fell.

And so when she sees that Yupi's dead, it immediately is like, okay, I now know who's on whose side.

It's Pito versus.

It's the hidden information game again, right?

It's like you described it as like Mafia or Werewolf Austin, right?

And like, this allows her to perform that leap of logic.

Yeah.

And she's like, we're just going to wait a little longer.

Yeah.

We're safe because we have Komugi.

And she comes like, she walks right up to let me do a PowerPoint presentation about mutual exclusive.

She doesn't do it.

She doesn't do it.

She comes close, but she doesn't do it.

She just explains it right.

She reads it off her phone.

That's right.

Because Ikalo is like,

what do you mean that there's infighting among the royal guards?

They're extremely loyal to the king.

They would never do anything wrong.

And she has two great points, which is, first of all, you're a chimera and are you loyal to the king?

And he's like, okay.

And then she's like, they each want to protect the king.

It's just that some of them think that they're protecting him by saving her, and some of them think they're protecting him by killing her, which is a, which is true.

And she says, I got a plan.

My new plan, we're going to offer to negotiate.

They already kind of set this up by sending Welford out with the information.

That's like where that was going to go.

Obviously, you know, the idea would be they would get in contact.

And she says, you know, because this girl is so important, we can negotiate with either one of them, right?

Because if it's the king, then she's important to him and if it's poof then poof wants her dead which gives them leverage right um and so it's like okay and then uh uh you know we don't have to really even worry anymore about knuckle and uh uh melearone and ikago's like you're just gonna trade their lives like you're willing to let them die and she's like no we're just gonna i'm gonna have the negotiation we're gonna make it take as long as possible And Ikago is like, what are you talking about?

And she says, well, because, you know, they're about to die.

They'll be dead soon.

Actually, she doesn't say, she says, we'll just wait until they die.

And Ikago's like, what are you talking about?

Like, yeah, he'll die someday.

But

great lion.

Yeah.

He says, the king will, or she says, the king will die soon.

He doesn't have very much time left.

In just a few hours, the king will be dead.

And then they store Komigi in the Indiana.

We'll get a wild shot.

Yeah, we can't.

The shot of, she's like, he'll be dead.

She'll be dead in a number of hours.

And it's like her and Icalgo in full color standing against a sort of mural of a skeletal hand.

Oh, yes.

A rose.

Totally.

You know, energy in space, Meriwem's, you know, silhouette or Meriam's profile on the side and his profile picture.

That's very funny.

Merrim's

dating profile app picture.

Merrowem clicking through the picaroo being like, there's no weird green and purple helmet for me up here.

That's right.

Yes.

You know, as if it wasn't clear enough at this point, the rose imagery.

Palm has figured out they

took a blast from a sort of something like radiation.

Something like radiation.

I have no doubt in my mind that over the next few episodes, someone is going to look into the camera, possibly the narrator, and say, a property of the poor man's rose is that even after its blast, a deadly poison seeps through the landscape.

I really appreciated that we didn't get that in this moment.

I mean, we get the image, which makes it extremely clear, but at no point is Palm saying, Poor Man's Rose leaves a poison, you know, right?

They just kind of leave you with

everything that a Yupi being dead would

mean to someone like Palm who knows about the rose.

It is lovely to see Palm Siberia patiently, comfortably hinging her plan on, all I have to do is wait.

I'm happy to wait, and then my enemy will die.

This is lovely.

Cutback to Palm of, you know, fucking 80 episodes ago, holding a knife and vibrating, being like, if I don't act, I'm gonna kill.

You don't have to go back that far.

You have to go back two episodes to Goan not being willing to wait.

Yeah, yeah.

In the time that it's taken from Palm's dread date with Goan to now, Palm has grown and Goan has receded, right?

Goan has become

monstrous.

If only they had captured Goan and turned him into a Chimera ant.

Truly.

Maybe he would have learned.

Number Goan.

That's what they're calling.

Imagine if they turned him into a Chimera ant and they'd given him exactly the same powers as Palm.

With the long hair.

Yeah, with the long hair.

He gave him hair powers.

Yeah.

We should say something about the hair, Jack, because we didn't say it at the time.

People make really annoying shit with the hair.

No one...

Fuck.

Everyone is wrong about how goofy it is.

It is a little goofy.

It's goofy.

But it's so scary at the same time and so sad.

Which is

a tape thread.

Needle to thread.

You will, you know, Keith, you pointed out that I think that it's his final move, or it's like super move in the upcoming show.

Oh, yeah, Sylvie Tall.

I didn't know about that.

Sylvie said that it wasn't.

Yeah, okay, Sylvie.

In an impact, it is his special finisher move.

Which is his ultimate meter move.

Because the whole show is about how you shouldn't do it, and the whole point of it is that you can only do it once.

It doesn't make any sense.

This is Fallout 76 making the main quest being get the bombs.

That's, you know.

Dre, can you post the thing that you shared with us earlier?

I was waiting to paste it.

Welcome to Suffering, Joe.

All right, let me click this.

I would argue this is the only good merch.

Oh, no, no, no.

No.

What i'm looking at is a fellow is a photograph of a fellow writing in his notebook with a pen the nib of the pen is the top of ghan's hair and then there is oh maybe a foot and a half of hair yeah and then ghan upside down um

it's very funny it's just this sort of terrible the the the horror of this and you know uh this happens over and over again in meteor of all kinds.

Yeah, like

this is why I mentioned Ava earlier, too, by the way.

This happened

times a thousand for Avon Galleon.

Death Star beanbag chair, you know what I mean?

It's all the same stuff.

A hundred percent.

I find it like psychically upsetting, and also at the same time, it is such a

like a it's like an oxbow lake of culture.

It's just like a weird, frustrated little thing that we just keep doing over and over again.

You know, what's to do?

At least this is funny.

It is, it is.

But they shouldn't have made it his finishing move.

His finishing move should be

supposed to be.

That's like

cool.

Goan Freaks' finishing move should be Jan Can Rock again, but bigger.

That's Goan.

Yeah.

Although the idea of a fighting game is kind of already

weird.

When that comes out, I'm going to play it.

That would be the first fighting game I ever play.

No, that's not true.

I think

we're not there yet.

You cannot watch any gameplay still.

Oh, no, I'm not watching it.

We're getting there.

No, I know.

We're getting there.

But there's still something.

I was going to say this for everyone listening at home and for the rest of the crew here.

There is still something very important that Jack can't see in that game yet.

I hope that one reminds us.

Is it

a one that's really funny?

I think we, but we are.

I honestly, I don't, because I haven't seen enough, I don't know what you're talking about, but there's very few things left.

Yep, there's only two that I can think of.

It's one of those.

It's the dog.

It's the dog.

It's the dog that kills Killua.

Yeah.

And the finishing moves that he kills Killua at you, and then you die.

How many fights is there announced?

Oh, I should note really quick.

I realized something a few episodes ago, y'all were talking about

how often we talk in Peto Bricks, our little side channel, about

funny things that you say, Jack, or about

things that we're teasing or that we're winking at the audience for.

And it made me realize we are the little poofs

floating around and like chuckling to each other, you know?

So, get the kinky board.

Get it.

I've actually been saying that even before this podcast: that we are the little poofs.

Yeah, Yes, I am.

Okay, Little Baby Kumagi, sweet baby Kumagi is now being placed in something that looks a lot like a coffin.

She gets put in the Raiders of the Lost Arquare.

It literally is the Raider.

Yeah, I also have that in my notes.

They can't even wipe her nose once before they lock her in there.

They have.

It just keeps happening.

I think it's like when you have a cold.

It's only going to be a temporary measure, and then you're just going to be, you know, wiping the mouse forever.

Better not start down that road.

It's very funny to think, though, that the king who has very limited experience with humans and even more limited experience with humans that he likes, he just sort of like thinks that there's that, oh, having an extremely runny nose is a sign of like a high-quality human.

Yeah.

It's like dogs.

The nose is wet.

Yeah.

Palm says, I know what we're doing is ruthless.

We're no different from the ants.

No, we are far worse.

Sometimes you just gotta say it.

You gotta

tweet it out, you know.

And still, these fucking people don't get it.

And still, they don't get it.

Drives me up the wall.

The cutaway to like the beetle being eaten by hundreds of ants and then the human foot coming down on top of it.

And then the poor man's rose again.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

The poor man's rose is one of those ideas that's so potent and sharp visually and aesthetically that it makes me fucking furious.

It's up there with in, God, what's the most recent Jordan Peele movie called again?

Nope.

Nope.

Nope.

In Nope, where he says, what's the opposite of a miracle?

And I heard that and I like screamed that I hadn't thought of it first because it's an all-time line.

The Poor Man's Rose in visual design is like so crisp.

It's so clear.

It's so perfect.

It drives me crazy.

I just want to say again, just more broadly, I said this before.

Nope Nope is wildly underrated as a movie.

It's so underrated as a movie.

One of the great movies of the world.

It's unbelievable.

It convinces me all.

It's the same people who don't like this.

It's the same people who are.

It's the same people.

One-to-one, same people.

None of it happens.

It would be one thing if you saw what the show is doing and didn't like it based on what it said that it was doing.

But they tell you exactly what they're doing, and then you don't like it, and you're still wrong about what it even is.

If you were like, no, I think good stories are ones where heroes overcome and they find the deep well of strength inside of themselves.

And this is so cynical.

I'd at least understand what your position is.

I think you'd be wrong.

And I think that you might be, in fact, fascist.

But

at the very least, that is fascist aesthetics.

But

a lot of people just don't get it.

It's not everyone.

My guess is if you're listening to this podcast, you are not part of the audience that is mid, but it's just, it's everywhere.

It drives me up a wall.

And obviously, you know, we've made it our lives work greater and lesser to think deeply about stories.

And

we're deeply biased in this.

You know, we've been mean on the podcast about...

people not liking the show, but I've tried to say what I think are like fair things to not like about the Chimera Ant Arc.

Like, I do think it's paced weirdly.

I do think it's very very long.

I do think there's times where you could go like, oh, we're spending a lot of time with this character that didn't work for me.

You know, like, I do think it's suddenly pretty cruel as a show in places, in ways that are shocking.

If you haven't, you know, if you haven't been told where we're going broadly, there were some early deaths that are like, whoa, wait a second.

Is this the same show I was just watching, you know, in the same way that just erased, for instance, the end of the Greed Island arc's

consequences so quickly?

You know, like, there's a viewer or a reader for whom that is comforting, you know, and they like that mode or they like a mode, you know, there's just there are plenty of reasonable reasons to not like the Chimera and Harker Hunter Hunter.

And by the way, there is like a long view of the erasure of the damage from the end of Green Island that like helps propel Ghoan into this worst place.

So like, like the ways that it wasn't cruel before are productive in making it cruel now, which are then productive in like telling a complete story about how people are changed by like the people in their lives, the experiences they have, the lessons that they learn, the motivations of the people who are trying to teach them those lessons.

Yeah, I'm so excited.

Going back to that exchange is the mad bomber, I forget who's what that guy's name.

Genthru with Genthru is so good on the second time through.

Yeah, we just couldn't say any of that then, Jack.

Well, remember when I was like, I'm so disappointed that he, and I stand by that disappointment.

Sure.

You know, there goes Gonz's arm again.

There goes Gohan's arm again.

He's been dying to lose that arm, huh?

Walker, wager, wager.

He keeps interacting with people who want to tell him the world is a fucking game.

Yeah.

You know?

Yep.

Obsessed with it.

It's so good.

The bomb isn't actually the last image we see.

The image we see is Poof starting to lose it, wondering where Peto is, and bleeding from the mouth as the credits play.

It's good stuff.

It's good stuff.

It's good stuff.

What a show.

This is a great fucking show.

I cannot wait

to see what this guy is drawing right now.

I want to say

two things.

I think that this might be the real high point of the show.

Yeah.

And there's not a lot of show left, so they really nailed it.

You know, we're less than 20 episodes from the end.

that's what you want to put it, Hunter Hunter, yeah, totally.

But very early on in the series, Jack, I told you that there were two moments of Hunter Hunter where I like stood up from my seat and cheered alone in my office watching on my computer monitor.

That second moment has not happened yet.

Oh, hell yeah.

It's going to be when the dog gets killer because killer has gone bad.

Killer has gone so bad that I'm not even conflicted about it.

I'm just excited.

I learned some wild stuff about the 99 anime and what would have been in it but was not at the last second.

Not the last second, but what they planned.

And I'm going to save all that for when we finish the show.

Okay.

Okay.

Exciting.

Wild stuff.

What if they went back?

You know, people want more Hunter-Hunter anime.

What if they went back and did more 99 anime instead of more 2011 anime?

And they just did Chimera Ant again.

Me Meanwhile.

And Green, Green, Jelly Bean Man was like,

Jelly, mean, Bink.

How's Beans doing, you think, after everything?

Like, does he know?

Oh, Beans,

does he know?

Does he know?

Does he know?

He had a little, he had a tiny bomb in his heart.

At the same time, it was like the

parade of all the servants down into the tomb.

Jack, what would it take to bring beans back, do you think?

We'd have to go back to to the hunter organization we'd have to be like uh

we have to get out of chimera ant and be like let's debrief or something right

right like a big debrief just like and here's how it all went everybody or alternately

jelly bean man you know the the airship lands and green green jellybean man comes out and he says where's the boss um he knows does he know he knows he knows uh

sorry what about you next time keith uh next time, we're watching the final three episodes of the Chimera Ant Arc,

which has been going on

since episode 88 or something like that.

Does that sound right?

Something like that.

76.

76.

Yeah, it's like all the time.

76 to 136.

Yeah.

So we're watching 134, 135, and 136, which are titled The Word is You, This Person, and This Moment, and Homecoming and True Nature.

I will simply say that I had utterly forgotten about how the next episode starts.

And that's it.

I also don't know how the next one starts.

Okay.

You'll see it and be like, holy shit.

So that's awesome.

Okay.

I have a guess.

Here's how I would start the next episode with like a holy shit.

Is it's just Poof's body.

Like, Poof has died in the interim.

It's just Poof slumped over a chair or something.

You know, we're not going to get any of the, it's now just the king and the hunters.

Um,

but we'll see.

Um, uh,

reviews?

It's reviews time.

There's one more thing that I wanted to talk about at the beginning, uh, but I forgot about it, which was, uh, Jack, at the end of the last episode, you talked about, like,

the work that would have to do to, like, like bring you back on gone's side for a fight with pito and how if they don't end up killing gone the thing that they'd have to do is like like make you

like recontextualize how he's feeling to put you back in his shoes because of how they've made you think that he's evil for so many episodes How do you feel about like what happened instead?

Just kind of broadly.

Like, I know we talked about the specifics, but excellence.

Excellent.

I feel like the, this is, this is Tagashi said, what if I push you further?

What if I push him further away from the gone that you thought you were going to see and further towards the gone that we have been building this whole time?

What if instead of closing the distance, I push it further and further out, play harder and harder into the sorrow, right through a victorious fight?

This is, to me, some classic Yoshihiro Tagashi character work.

It's great.

Watching Tagashi take the most exciting swings at at every opportunity and or get really into art forgery is the joy of this show.

Allie's not on the next episode, right?

No.

Okay, I just want to give an update.

Allie, I swear I'm not betraying you here, but Allie finished Chimera Ant as soon as the last recording ended.

Yes, yes, and that she also gave me

a bit good

and explicitly called out the fact that she had been like, what are even the stakes with Pito going to be?

How could they get to a satisfying conclusion?

And she simply said, And my God.

So,

yeah, that's really funny.

That's good.

Great stuff.

Really great stuff.

We're doing reviews, Sylvie.

Yeah.

So I believe last, I think it was either last time or the one before where we said clemency month, I believe, was the word.

There were so many

clemency reviews I saw.

Yes, we have gotten many a clemency review.

I'm going to just read a couple here.

We've gone,

shockingly, we've gone long.

So I'm going to just read a couple short ones.

And one of them is from a friend of mine because I love nepotism.

Thank you and I'm sorry from Kid Firebrand.

Thank you for the amazing criticism that unfurls Hunter Hunter before me like some sort of beautiful flower.

Sorry for missing my month.

Receive benediction.

And the other one, where did I just had another one?

Yeah, okay.

Clemency review from a serial procrastinator.

I failed to leave a review when they called on January birthdays.

I failed a second time when they called on non-binary people.

I can only apologize for waiting so long to leave a five-star review on this.

A fantastic podcast about an anime I have seen maybe a dozen episodes of.

Brackets, I know.

I am allergic to the concept of paying attention to a television show, but that hasn't stopped me from listening to every episode of this podcast a few times over.

It has kept me company for many hours of processing DNA, writing my dissertation, sifting roots out of buckets of soil, and any number of mind-numbing, repetitive tasks that come with getting a PhD.

All that to say, great media analysis, extremely funny jokes, and one of the podcasts I most look forward to seeing in my feed.

Absolutely worth your time.

Thank you.

Receive benediction.

Thank you.

Receive benediction.

Yeah.

I want to say that

there's...

There's

a slot of believability.

If you want to get in to Clemency Month, there's nothing stopping me from thinking that you didn't just listen to that episode now.

So there's still a little bit of time if you want to be sort of karmically forgiven.

However, it is no longer Clemency Month.

If you were born in the merry month of January,

it is time.

And if your name is,

Austin, do you have a name?

Not a real one.

What's your name is

Keto Brick.

This is a Clemency.

Of course, I was like, oh, yeah, that's a name that could exist.

Best friends of the table.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Clemency Cash.

Yeah.

Oh, if she was named for that, that would have been a different season.

No benediction received.

None.

Mary.

Do we remember Mary before?

I've not done a Mary, I don't think.

Mary.

Mary.

Mary.

Or any sort of Mary Maria.

I'm broadening it.

It's a new year, and so I'm doing related names also.

Oh, any promotations.

If you're a Mary Ann, if you're Meredith, yeah.

If you can trace your name back to a Mary root,

you know?

Yeah.

Or

Clemency.

Mary like

it could be nobody.

Who could say?

If you have a little lamb, right in.

Oh, yeah.

Tell us

what its fleece is like.

Is it where it's

where if you go, it goes.

Anything else?

Any other business?

I just want to say really quick.

I've been shit talking the reader/slash viewer, and I want to say that if you have not been like, oh my god, it's World War II.

That does not make you a shitty reader or viewer.

I think there's a listener who could think that that's what I was saying.

I think the person who refuses to even have the conversation around that stuff or who thinks that the show is bad or pretentious or something because it's trying to do those ideas

that is the reader or who like is not paying attention when they say chimera ants are humans are more evil than chimera ants and misses that and is like it's sick when gone has superpowers that is the the viewer who i have beef with it's the people who won't engage with it at all that we have beef with right not necessarily people who even like i i talk a lot i i might have said I'd kill people who don't like it.

I don't actually really mean that unless you're being a hater for really stupid or ableist towards Tagashi reasons.

Yeah, I mean that stuff is all over the place and sucks also.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It also it's

it also changes

how much you have to think about stuff to do a podcast about.

100%.

So it's like somebody who's just watching TV for fun or just because they really like it and they're just like, I'm engaging with this a normal human amount.

It doesn't make you a bad person.

Yeah,

we're doing a deep read here.

Like, there's a reason these episodes are so long.

We're not expecting everybody to be like, oh, yes, I also had these thoughts.

You wouldn't be listening to the podcast if you had the exact same thoughts as us.

They're saying all the stuff I'm thinking all the time.

Yeah, you should say that.

Although there's a certain pleasure to that, too.

I mean, yeah.

These people are thinking the exact same things I'm thinking.

That's great.

Hey, I didn't have a lot of of these thoughts the first time I watched Hunter Hunter on my own, never talking to anyone else about it.

Oh, yeah.

And there's also, you know, people have their shows that they're specifically interested in.

You know, like the other show that I could talk about, like, I talk about Hunter Hunter is the X-Files.

I could talk about it for hours and hours and hours and hours.

Or Star Wars.

But, like, I couldn't talk about every show like this.

Even a good show.

I think I could.

You think you could?

Guys,

yeah, probably.

Yeah.

Jack, don't threaten me with a good fucking time.

Also about World War II, by the way.

Yeah, as always.

It's true.

All right.

We'll see you next time.

Bye.

Oh, wait, no, wait, oh, wait, no, wait, no, wait.

Oh.

Friends at the table.cash.

You should go to friends at the table.cash.

Every dollar you give to friendsatable.cash, except for the stuff that goes to the payment processors for stupid reasons, goes to our ability to buy bread.

I love bread.

I love bread so much.

I bought some bread the other day

with your money.

And reminder, do not sign up for anything on Patreon via the iOS.

Apple app, yeah.

Right, please.

I'm hoping that people...

Who are like interested in signing up for the Patreon of things have like heard about that, but it is significantly more expensive just do it in a browser you can still get all the stuff from the app

did I say into the microphone that I pasted my foil kiloa Zaldic Union Arena card up onto the wall next to

I have mine up there I can look up and be reminded of who we're doing this for I have a I have like a Kilua keychain bookmark that uh Isaac got me that I have on my desk which I think I showed you one side of ages and ages ago,

Jack, but I couldn't show the other side because it was a godspeed killer.

Yes.

Right.

Oh.

I was gifted from Tyler Crumrine, the publisher of Realis, a physical copy from the Hunter-Hunter.

What is the actual name of that card game?

Union Arena, right?

Union Arena, right?

You just said it.

I was given risky dice.

Which you may recall from.

It's like a hollow risky dice.

I have it in a nice sleeve just in case I ever need to roll a 20-sided die and try to roll the star.

Well, I'll just get other people to roll it for me.

I was rolling some real risky dice on the last perpetua.

We were part of friends at the table.net.

We're almost there.

We're almost to Fabula, which certainly has some hunter-hunter vibes in it.

So go listen.

Fabulous has been really good, so you should listen to that.

You should.

Agreed.

And we've been streaming more too.

Twitch.tv/slash friends at the table.

Yeah.

We have been.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Please go watch the incredibly fun NBA 2K16 stream that

Art, Austin, and Dre did.

It was very fun.

It was great.

I got to be like, why is PJ Tucker the guy that they have in the Raptors jersey on the main menu?

It's very funny.

It's really funny.

And then it's probably not up there quite yet, but maybe it is.

Maybe it is, actually.

The Dreamcast streams continue.

Jack, you just got to play Jet Sai Radio

for the first time.

And we get to see it work on you.

Because there was a point during the tutorial where you were not having a great time.

And then two and a half hours later, you were like, well, one more level.

One more level.

Let's just do one more level.

Let me just get stuck on this thing for 30 minutes until I crack it.

And then you did it.

And that's the game.

That's it.

Behind the scenes on that, I think that at least half of us had a turn.

being like, maybe I should be the one to put Jet Set Radio on here.

That's how big of a Dreamcast game it was.

You're welcome, everybody.

Yeah.

I almost did it.

Sylvie did end up doing it.

Art almost.

I almost did it.

Yeah.

I thought about it, but then five other people had already thought about it.

Sometimes when people say to me,

this video game has really good music,

they are wrong.

Or the music is fine, and there's lots of good music out there in the world.

You know,

Jetzet Radio, people have been saying to me all my life, it has really good music.

It might have the best music a video game has ever had.

It has a reading.

It probably does have the best video game

games ever.

Oh, good.

It's probably good.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

See you in two weeks for the end of the Chimera Antharch.