Unconditional Love - Hunter x Hunter ep. 127-130: Media Club Plus S01E41

Everybody basically good to go?

Yeah, pretty much.

I think I'm basically good to go.

Basically.

Basically.

Basically.

Basically.

Oh shit.

Is everyone recording?

Yeah.

That's what good to go meant.

Not everybody said yes.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

Dre, are you here?

Yeah, I'm ready.

Were you good to go?

Yeah, no, I've been recording.

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

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

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Hey, have you been watching Run Button's Let's Play of Halo?

Halo 1 from the Master Chief Collection that we've been doing for five years?

Because another episode of that went up.

It's a great episode.

And we spend the first 25 minutes explaining how we had to replay the same section three times because we kept losing all of our recording progress.

Oh my God.

If that doesn't sound fun, it actually is.

It was a great episode.

So go watch that.

I think that our Halo,

our Halo Let's Play is probably like our most underrated Let's Play.

I think it's really good.

This week, we have a special guest, which we'll get to at the end.

But with me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

I'm not the special guest.

I'm here every time.

Normal guest, unspecial guest.

Normal guest.

I'm Jack.

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

Sylvie Bullet?

I like to think that I'm still special, even though I'm here every week.

Hey, Sylvia.

You can find me on Blue Sky at Sylvie Bullet.

I'm going to plug

because we have a bunch of shows coming up.

Go follow Gut Machine Band on Instagram.

It's a Screamo band I'm in.

I just want to say, not being a special guest doesn't make you not special.

It just makes you not a special guest.

It's just a special regular.

A special regular.

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, thank you.

And you should also go to friends of the table.cash and check out the bonus content for this and friends of the table.

We are constantly putting stuff up on there.

It's true.

You're doing yourself a disservice by not checking it out.

Third special regular, Andre Lee Swan.

Hey,

you can find me on Blue Sky, Swan Drake 3000.

I think that's all I've got to plug right now.

And

the much vaunted special guest, the third

appearance of Ali Agampura.

Hello.

Third?

I'm the special guest.

Is this your third term?

I believe so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hi, welcome.

My name is Luciakampura.

You can find me not posting over on

online.bluesky.com.

I thought you deleted it.

Did you undelete it?

You just I undeleted it and then I made another one.

Oh my god.

Um, you could also find me on um uh friends of the table, obviously, and um

a more civilized age, which is a Star Wars uh rewatch podcast.

Around the time this comes out, we'll probably be finishing Rebels.

That's exciting.

Here's how I feel about Star Wars Rebels.

I watched every single episode except for the last episode and never went back and watched it.

Wow.

I watched 99% of Star Wars Rebels.

Wow.

Yeah.

Is that strange?

For you?

I mean, I haven't watched the very end of it yet.

And I guess a spoiler for you.

Oh, this is a comment on the whole more than the end.

Yeah, I'm sort of feeling as I'm getting to the final season: like, is only the final season good?

Oh, no, it's the same.

If anything, the final season is slightly worse.

I guess it depends.

Oh, cool.

It depends.

For me, it depends.

Do you like what Star Wars Rogue One did?

A lot of people do.

Not me.

Yeah.

A lot of people do.

And one of the main things that it does is like be so up Star Wars One's ass, ass, a new hope.

It's very influential.

Star Wars 4.

Right, yeah, one or four, depending on your perspective.

Both valid.

And that is how I feel about the End of Rebels.

It's so much about a new hope in a way that for me is like irritating.

Oh, sure.

Well, that's sort of the point.

Hey, sometimes you have an ill-conceived point.

Hey, what's your favorite Star Wars movie, Keith?

I don't know if I've ever asked that.

I'm curious.

It's New Hope, actually.

Okay, well, then

podcasts.

This is amazing.

No, most civilization people are going to do hunter-hunter.

I listen to that.

I mean, I'm at every second of my day stopping myself from talking about Star Wars.

So, what if Komugi played Pazak?

Welcome to the next three hours of this podcast.

She would clean up.

What kind of uh, what kind of nin type do you think Glup Shitto uses?

Is that that circle.

Yeah.

Born an enhancer and developed a specialist due to the trauma of being associated.

Of being glupping.

Of glupping.

Yeah.

Of glupping.

Yeah.

Not to get us back on topic, but I would briefly like to imagine a type of listener together.

And the type of listener is this.

They are the one who has only been listening to episodes of Media Club Plus and only watching episodes of Hunter Hunter that Ali is on.

It's a three-episode TV series.

And it'll be four by the end.

And their

experience of Hunter Hunter has got to be extraordinary.

Because, you know, we've seen this, there's some sort of like boiling frog by degrees happening with Chimera Ant as it goes.

There are definitely these moments where it shifts into higher gears or whatever.

But I think if you were to watch all of Ali's episodes back to back,

you would experience something extraordinary.

There is a through line, though, to Allie's appearances.

Do you

know the through line attack?

I think Allie just said it.

Is it our different

Palm Siberia?

No, it's Kite.

Allie's been on like all the big kite episodes.

Are you a big kite fan?

No, I just did this.

Well, sorry, Ali, you go ahead.

There's an answer.

There's an answer for why it happened, but go ahead, Al.

Keith did just do this, but I do think I, I mean, mean, I was initially drawn to the relationship that we see of Kite and Goan.

I mean, from the beginning, I was going to be the manga head, and I was the first person to meet Kite.

Technically,

right.

Um,

and then the, you know, at the beginning of the Chimera Ant stuff, the relationship that sort of blooms between Kite and Goan was really intriguing.

So, yeah, there's a moment where Allie was going to be on Allie, who had to cancel a couple times, was going to be on two more episodes than happened.

And so there was a period where I just, I wanted to have Allie on and I gave her the choice of like, hey, these are three episodes I think that you'll like.

Which one of these are you interested in?

And

it was like a kite episode.

And I was like, oh, we've already talked a lot about kite with Allie, so that makes sense.

And so

now bringing her back for this kite episode.

And then

I have in my head that there will be a future.

future i invited allie back without asking uh hey allie would you like back on before i was i just assumed you'd say yes so i'm just yeah i'm confirming ahead of time allie's going to be on this episode later very interesting

did you have a recap tvping maybe i did

now you'll be there uh

yes i do have a recap hey so episode 127 this is a classic starting episode for a Media Club Plus recording.

I know exactly what Jack is going to say about this episode, I think.

Everyone is regrouping and setting up for three total corkers.

It starts off slow.

More information about Poor Man's Rose and its sort of position in the Hunter-Hunterverse.

We let it be implied last time we recorded that this was like the first Rose and Jack made some guesses about like what is going to happen to the world now that like this sort of thing has been unleashed on it but we learn in this episode that's already happened this is not the first rows it's like the 11th it's either the 10th or the 11th something like that so we get that information we get pito finishing surgery on komagi and being taken by going to see kite

we get the other royal guards finding merwem's charred head and torso

And then we get an entire episode about what if the best thing in the world is if your boss ate you and if that was so good to be eaten that you were sexually gratified by this competitive vor.

Competitive vor.

Yes, competitive vor.

And what if I think it was tag team vor, I'm sorry.

Poof was absolutely being competitive.

Poof is being competitive for sure.

But this could be an example where only Poof is being competitive.

Yes, I think this is.

Well,

you can, so this might be a difference in the anime.

You can see, I think, on Yupi's face feeling left out that he wasn't also being eaten and was not receiving the king's grace.

Like, oh, yeah, I agree.

I agree.

And

what if filling your boss up with yourself was so powerful emotionally that you became like a mother.

You experienced motherhood.

That's what that episode is about.

Which is insane.

Yep.

After this, the healed amnesiac king and the diminished royal guards, uh, oh, by the way, the king lost most of his memories.

Uh, they start heading back to the palace.

Uh, we re-established our new relationship as sort of existing as a part of each other.

The king is battling his internal war, uh, but he doesn't remember what that war is or why he's uh battling it.

He just knows something is wrong.

The thing, of course, is what Poof is keenly aware of, Komugi, uh, which puts Poof on a mission to destroy all evidence that Komugi's ever existed before the king returns and allows that stuff to trigger his memory.

And then we get an episode that is sort of equally about Goan Freaks reaching Kite with Pito, and then also a series of complicated mind games and power plays existing around Pito, Goan, Komegi, and the King.

Even by Hunter-Hunter standards, these feel weird.

Following the detonation of the bomb, the world has changed, and the

way that we are moving through it, especially in 128, although the kind of reverberations of 128 kind of like filter through all of these, give everything this dreamlike, hazy, representative feel.

Spaces that were familiar to us have been cast in a new light.

Not literally, it's not like we're bopping around discovering secret passages in the castle or whatever, but the

reincarnation of the king, the Lazarus moment of this guy, guy, has

set the table in a completely new way and the kind of key figures moving within it, that is to say Poof, Yupi, the King,

and a revived Komagi and a anxious Peto, are now all moving as though they have been cast in a very slightly different play.

Did this feel odd to other I mean, setting aside the events, did you all feel like a tonal shift had happened?

Or is this just me seeing it for the first time?

There

is two things.

There is a carnival mirror, like a funhouse mirror aspect to episode 128 specifically.

There's a lot of like

haunting images, stretched characters sort of floating across the screen, not animated, screaming.

Yeah, a lot of screaming and yelling in anger, fear, joy, again, sexual sexual gratification explicitly, basically.

There's,

and then the rest of it, it's so much through Poof's perspective that we get this sort of like shattered

time and place feeling to a lot of it, where it's like, we're bouncing from poof segment to poof segment.

He could just be anywhere at any time.

And we, so we get a lot of like.

really jarring moving from place to place to place.

We weirdly enough have the same experience in in watching these that Palm describes in one of the episodes of like looking at the people that she's seen with her crystal ball ability.

Yes, the camera is Wink Blue.

Wink Blue, sorry.

Who was my favorite Canadian-only game show host, Wink Blue.

Yeah, I don't know.

I like the sort of weird, disjointed POV that we get in these episodes.

I guess not super disjointed because it's mostly through Poof, like you said, but because of the way that he functions now, it's disjointed.

Yeah.

We get really fun scenes of him like watching other characters from under a leaf.

Yeah, monologuing to himself about his evil plans, laughing men.

Yeah, there's two things happening, which is the first, the events of 128, this sort of like mingling and like

literally becoming a kind of

a literal and spiritual mother to the king and you know all that stuff

shatters Poof's already pretty fragile sense of self.

And the other thing that's interesting is that we are, as the viewer, massively wrong-footed by

the outcome of the bomb going off.

It has ostensibly not worked.

We don't know when Atero is, but he is almost certainly dead, and Meroem is not.

Yeah, I mean, the bomb triggers when his heart stops.

Yeah,

it's pretty tough to come back from that, but also it's pretty tough to come back from what Meroem is.

Although we'll talk about the mechanics,

yeah, that needs an underlink to pee aura into his mouth.

Okay,

all right.

Literally, what happens, though?

Okay,

um,

Allie, sorry to reuse

the game.

It comes from his finger, it comes from his order.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can tell.

Look, sometimes your finger isn't.

It's just lifeblood.

It's like ether.

It's fine.

I mean, they explain it.

He literally just melted his cells.

And then...

Yeah, it was just genetic information.

There's nothing sexual about that.

We'll talk more about what happens

as it happens in 128.

I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but it's also worth saying that Meroem has begun his favorite game, which is starting to rapidly change his ideology.

Right.

Over the course of these episodes, Merrim is saying some new stuff, and it's fairly concerning.

It is.

Allie, I want to just double-check in about the manga specifically.

Because these episodes were so weird in the anime, did they come across at like structurally weird in the manga as well?

Or did it just sort of feel like other episodes with weirder content, maybe, but not weirder

structure?

Yes, structurally, they didn't feel

like

from a design perspective, like, you know,

you're trying to have this other experience or like offering other point of views or whatever.

I think because like the pages jump between

like perspective all of the time and paneling and everything also makes everything feel really disembodied and stuff when it needs to be that like, you know, it was kind of, it was kind of standard.

Yeah.

I guess that it makes sense actually because what is so weird about these episodes of the anime is that it felt more like manga than any other episodes.

Lots of static images, like just jumping from static image to static image.

I can see Tagashi, I didn't read these pages, but I can see like just drawing a bunch of overlapping weird poses against a bunch of like white space.

Like,

that's what I can imagine happening.

In episode 127, though, we start off with

one of the best sort of montage narration soundtrack combos that I think the show does, where the narrator comes in and describes the history of the Rose, set to Kingdom of Predators, which is an awesome song.

Here's the part of that song that is set to

talking a lot about what the Rose is like.

And I think this track works really, really good.

Really, really, really well.

The narrator says, After terrorists used the bomb in the center of an enemy nation's capital, causing more than 110,000 casualties, an international treaty was quickly introduced, which effectively banned the bomb's production.

However, over 80% of countries rejected the proposal to discard the existing roses that had already been produced.

This means that even today, in far too many countries, hundreds upon thousands of seeds still wait silently for their chance to bloom.

Were humans really nail on the head time?

Were humans really so different from ants when Netero decided to use his last resort?

Could this thought have crossed his mind?

Unfortunately, it was far too late to ask.

They just tweeted it out.

They just tweeted it out.

Yeah.

They really did just tweet it out.

And over this montage, we are seeing the bombs

all over, you know, in all kinds of different settings, landscapes, cities.

We are seeing it from distant perspectives as it obliterates parts of the world.

We're seeing it from right close up on people as they turn to look at the bomb.

The kind of the scope of this weapon as a destructive entity, you know, the montage is being very clear about the breadth of damage that this kind of bomb can do.

It's claimed over five million lives.

This is the tenth rose to blossom is what they call it in the episode.

And also,

yeah, it's set to like people living their daily lives kind of watching the instant of the bomb going off in all of these different places and settings.

It's tragic.

And even more tragic is the story about the narrow-mindedness of powerful humans.

actually underselling the reality of nuclear proliferation.

We live in a world where there's nuclear bombs and no one ever made any rule about not making them.

We make them here all the time.

We have, what, thousands of nuclear weapons in this country?

So I think it says something specific about humans, like, oh, they wouldn't make any more bombs, but they wouldn't get rid of the bombs that they already had.

But that's actually, that actually would be an improvement on the current situation.

Yes.

And over and over, people on both sides of the political spectrum spectrum as well, you know, you see liberal governments coming into power saying, well, we're going to do our best to curb our nuclear arsenal or whatever.

You see this in the UK over and over again.

And then in comes a Labour government or a Liberal Democrat government, and it's all about, you know, bolstering our nuclear arsenal or it's about, you know, fixing our broken or old trident missile systems or whatever.

You know,

we're on this.

Humans are on this train.

Yeah, having to, we have to keep, but we can't get rid of them.

We have to keep up with other people who are making them still.

And at least some people are allowed to make them.

God, you know,

the amount of American saber rattling over like Iranian fears that Iran is going to get nuclear weapons at all times, etc.

The evil behind just the thought process of like,

I'm willing to go to war so that you can't have one of the thing that I have 1500 of.

Yep.

It's a very American perspective.

Poof and UP see the bomb explode and almost immediately know that something very, very bad has happened.

It's not clear whether or not they know about these bombs and in seeing the detonation are like, well, shit, that's it for the king.

But there is a look on Yupi's face as he sees the detonation that says that he's got the measure of the situation.

Yeah.

I

love every

time you brought up, Jack, the paranoid ants thinking about hunters or enemies bringing a bomb and just blowing up the king or something did I like you brought that up like five times yeah you kept bringing enemies

oh and I was right and the

yeah the ants were right yeah yeah it was it was

you're casting it as funny at how paranoid they were about something like that it was it was that it was that them being paranoid about someone bringing a bomb into the palace or someone teleporting and kidnapping the king and it's sort of like both of those things did happen.

Yeah, they did both happen, did they?

They did both happen.

They did both happen.

Hey, well done, Jack.

This is Tagashi's trick, though, and we've talked about this since the early days, which is that regularly I can predict what Tagashi is going to do, but not the way in which he's going to do it.

Right.

Then something odd happens.

Okay, so it's worth saying for the listener.

We've sort of ended at this.

Poof is all over the place right now.

He's got segments in the palace.

he's got segments flying towards the king.

Sometimes those segments are the sort of little greebly terrors, the little horrid fucks that we've seen in the past, and some of them are, you know, big poof.

And

Knuckle sees one of Poof's segments

turning to look at him inside the palace, and half of Poof's face has become sort of bug-like.

It's as though the, like, the human structure of the face has torn apart, and the look on Poof's face is this this sort of like mad terror as he leaps into the sky and flies away on these like awful black wings.

And the narrator talks about...

It really does.

The narrator talks about this as being a moment of like revealing...

the true nature of Poof.

And I really can't tell whether or not what is happening here is gestural or we are to understand it is happening literally.

One of these bug-like poof segments appears later in the episode, but throughout this block, we are also seeing what I will call standard poof.

So

I don't know how to read this, and I really like it.

This is part of what contributes to like, there is a breakdown in image happening here, you know?

The narrator says when he looked into Poof's face, he saw something he did not expect, an insurmountable barrier.

This is Knuckles sort of going like, wow, even if the king is dead, which at this point he sort of thinks may be true.

It doesn't matter because we can't even beat Poof.

Yep.

And the thing we were able to have with Yupi, that moment that I had with Yupi, any chance of that is gone now.

Yeah.

Maybe even with Yupi, you know, that the barrier might extend further than Poof.

Yeah, how do you all feel about half bug poof?

I love half bug poof.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love it so much.

I don't remember like what else we get about that.

My memory is that it remains a sort of like confusing

and

idea that is left abstract, but I could be wrong in that it could answer it later.

I don't remember.

Although, there is one hint in episode 130 about why Poof can look like an ant sometimes.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, and it's crazy.

And it's crazy.

It is crazy.

Ikalgo emerges from the ruins and he looks up to see the shockwave from the bomb pass over him and destroy the palace's tower finally.

This poor tower, first, you know, like wobbling and being held up by Smoky Jail and then falling and landing on its side.

And now, with the shockwave from the bomb, you know, coming apart completely,

I think it's Ikalgo who says it only took them 30 minutes to wreck the whole palace.

I love the periodic, like, like chiming in with the canonical length of time that it's been.

It's so good.

Yeah, yeah, it's been 20 episodes.

Sure, it's been 30 minutes.

Don't worry about it.

This, um, this comes up in the manga as just like a digital clock screen that's like in the

placed on the pages.

It's so good.

That's real.

So instead of characters saying it, it just has a little clock to tell you.

How often does the clock show up?

Um, I, it feels like when it needs to be, like, it was happening a lot when they first entered the palace.

And there was, you know, all of the moving parts in terms of like, how was the plan doing?

So it felt like there was a lot of like, oh, the audience should know, you know, that we are going to raise the tension in having this come up a lot.

I mean, characters do still say it because there is sort of that like.

in-character anxiety of like,

what are our choices at this moment?

What's the best action we can take?

But the digital clock is very fun.

I enjoyed it very much.

And it speaks to the level of planning that had to go into this sequence from Tagashi.

Yeah, I think how much is this stuff being planned out has been a recurring, like

low-level question about just sort of a curiosity of like, how do you, how does one go about

constructing this?

How early do you need to know what happens and where?

You know, especially because of the sort of mousetrap nature of the plot in the latter third of the Chimerant arc.

There's like a very kind of Rube Goldbergian-ness to it.

Right.

And sometimes I get the sense that Takashi has not planned some stuff.

Even at this point,

we'll talk about that later.

I think that we hinted at it well with Poof is going to have some stuff going on towards the end of these that I would have liked to have known learned about earlier.

But Ikalgo for the moment is relieved to see Palm and Killier and the three of them sort of join up.

This is a nice moment of stability in these episodes.

These episodes feel anything but stable.

And so encountering these three is good.

Palm.

Am I right, by the way, Jack, in my guess

during the intro that you were going to watch this episode and be like, oh, you slowed down a little bit here.

No, the bomb, I mean, I can see why you would be right, having done this for so long.

The bomb is so

weird.

The bomb is such a moment that my immediate thought going into this episode was like, well, what the hell is going to happen now?

I thought this episode was basically okay.

It had a lot of really fun moments, like Palm saying that she wants to be respectful of Ghon's wishes.

Really funny.

She finally figured out how.

Yeah, it's too late, though, unfortunately.

Oh, it's definitely too late.

But hey, she did figure it out.

This is a really sad.

This is like Ikalgo's over-analytical sort of,

you know, the anxious friend of an anxious friend moment where Kilua says, like, Palm decided to stay.

It turns out she wants to say she ought to be useful in a fight.

I mean, in terms of raw power, she's got me beat, probably.

Kind of angrily admitting that

Palm has got strong punches.

And then then ikago's like by stay he means die and goes into this hole yeah even if gone uses all the power he had right now it won't be enough he still won't be able to beat pito in fact even if all three of us join him pito still has us outmatched and knows that just as well as we do to stay together means we die together and then they have a scene of sort of everyone agreeing to stay they sort of like reaffirm like uh that you know gone staying or sorry uh killo is staying palm is staying ikago staying, Melioran's staying, Knuckle is staying.

Pito is going to kill them.

This is a genre move.

Oh, sorry.

No, no, no, you guys.

It's back to what Killua said the other episode about I'm willing to go down in flames with

Goan.

It's just more of that, which I think it's good that he's consistent about wanting to die for his gay crush.

Yeah, this is a genre move, too, right?

Like in the war film or the disaster film or whatever, the moment of linking hands and realizing that there's no way out, but you would prefer to both make the brave fight and like die together as comrades.

I think it's very in keeping with the tone that the chimera and arc has taken.

I found this really moving.

I thought it was really sweet.

The recognition finally, Akilo has the line,

once Goan has made up his mind, he won't budge.

But if Goan's in trouble, we'll all rush to help him out.

So this is, as far as Killior is concerned, at this point, the end point of ghan's obstinacy right this is a losing fight and they're all gonna take the loss together

uh

and then pito continu pito continues to work and then gone says you're finished right to which pito thinks how could he have known that i had finished the surgery i was trying to hide my progress from him to like i guess figure out what the move is

yeah because last we saw pito pito's plan is get komagi to a safe place kill kill Goan Freaks.

And there's also, there's the layer that Pito has sort of established that there's the like heal Komugi's most critical, like save her life,

and then there's a second layer of finish, like fixing her, like fix her all the way.

And so I think there's maybe this sort of like ambiguity of like, even though she's, even though she's healed, there's maybe still some stuff to do.

I don't know.

Yeah, it's sort of left ambiguous how done Pito is.

Kamaki seems broadly fine, at least physically.

She wakes up and is immediately confused.

She doesn't know where she is.

She doesn't know where the dear leader is.

Pito goes to explain, and Goan says, Next time you speak out of line, I'll kill her.

Totally psychotic.

Yeah, I don't think it'd be normal if he said that while he had like a tail with a needle at the end, maybe.

But yeah, he didn't.

So, like, it's weird shit.

Gone.

gone

goan's willingness to kill komagi and hatred for komagi a character that us and the camera has only ever loved has been a sort of unspoken subtext in the goan pito standoff but goan saying pito if you speak out of line i'll kill komagi really does just make it yeah and especially after the scene where everyone sort of joins hands to go like we're gonna help goan

yeah it kind of really takes the wind out of the sales of, like, are you sure that this is how you want to help him?

Yeah.

Like, it's, it's,

this is the end point of this character.

You know, this is the end point of where we have been walking with Goan over the last, I don't know.

I couldn't tell you how long Goan was in that room, if I'm honest.

A long time?

Four, four, five episodes?

No, I think it's like, I think it's like 18 episodes, maybe like 16.

Dear God.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yeah.

Okay.

Pito could decapitate Goan with one arm in this moment, but something is stopping them.

And the thing that is stopping them is they can't guarantee Komagi's safety.

They are still

deep in the lesson they learned about their relationship with the king and the king's relationship with Komagi.

And it is at this moment that Kiliua and Knuckle arrive.

And Goan, immediately...

and with a kind of laser-focused precision that we only really see when Goan Goan is in trouble,

engineers a hostage situation.

To the shock, equal shock of Pito and Knuckle, and to the

stony-faced resignation of Kilua, who they cut back to multiple times to make sure you see him not reacting to this.

Oh, yeah.

Which I think you got, you gotta get some sad Kilua moments.

They're like, we've got a quota to hit.

I think it's especially powerful that they show you Kilua not reacting to the request that they take this

innocent girl hostage

because

you just know that he's torn up inside about this.

You just know.

Killua's all he is.

Sorry, Killiwa's all directed.

You want to

be turned back on Freakstep?

That doesn't sound right.

It just shows, you know, it's the confidence of a show that's willing to show you a character reacting one way, knowing that they're feeling something else, and hoping that you'll just connect those two dots.

Kiloa does not care about this.

He cares deeply about this.

He's just fucking weird.

Yeah.

I love the context that Karapika's brilliant, beautiful, glittering hostage situation gives this hostage situation.

You know, Karapika's hostage situation is like born out of a series of mistakes and coincidences that are like rapidly exploited by both sides of the hostage exchange.

It is like a

kaleidoscope, you know, that you turn over and you can see all these like beautiful patterns of reaction and interaction, really smart choices from the King of the PowerPoint, Karapica, etc.

This is as simple as: I need this person to heal, kite, and if they attack or kill me, you need to kill this child.

There's so it's tragic that from the perspective of Goan,

it probably looks very similar.

I'm taking someone hostage in order to save my friend.

But in practice, it is brutally different.

It's so different and worse.

Yes.

It's really something.

And it's really, you know, this has been part of the Goan character forever, but watching Goan act with precision has always been really scary.

Yeah.

You know, it's it's uh uh Goan is usually so um

I don't know, Goan is like a like a pinball bouncing around in there a lot of the time, and sometimes he just he's a sniper shot.

Um,

Pito is also shocked by this because uh, the terms of the hostage uh arrangement are: once Pito heals Kite, we'll release her.

And then we get a look of absolute horror on Pito's face.

Um,

I've suspected for a long time that Kite is not coming back.

What makes you say that?

I don't think.

The person who said we can get Kite back is gone.

Right.

That is the only person who has said that.

And we also saw Kite's head come off.

True.

I forgot about that for a second.

We saw them sitting with Kite's head, sort of holding it.

in their lap.

And there's a kind of hope still flickering away in my heart at this moment of like, well, so maybe Kite will come back.

But the look on Peter's face in that moment of the kind of the stakes that their ward has been put in,

now relying on them successfully healing Kite, it really doesn't feel good.

Does not inspire confidence.

No, I really.

This is a hard line to toe, like this sort of dreadful feeling throughout the Chimera Ant arc that Kite is dead and that

all of the moves that are being made to save him are for nothing.

But then also, you still have to have the shred of, like, well, maybe, I don't know, maybe.

Oh, they do a rule.

Why are we doing this?

Yes, because the answer to what

because otherwise it would be completely futile, and it sure would be a shame if we were moving towards a place of violent futility.

But

they really do tease you with it, right?

Between

knowing over and over, restoring the arm, restoring the king's arm, Dr.

Blythe working on Komegi, and then the like biblical

restoration to life that we see in the next episode.

There is enough gentle breeze being fanned on this flame to keep it alive.

Just.

They said the king was dead.

Yep.

In the episode,

they say the king is dead at the very end of 127, and then halfway halfway through 128, or, you know, maybe not halfway, like a few minutes into 128, we see that he opens his eyes.

Yep.

Who has the line, even though Go knew Killua would die with him, he was so dismissive of Killuwa and his father?

Yeah,

he says,

let's see.

Oh, by the way, I just have a couple quotes here.

Let me read through them, and I think I have that as a button to press.

I can play.

When Komuki wakes up,

what she says is, and she hears people arguing, including Pito,

oh, I'm sorry.

I'm so rude.

Am I interrupting?

Forgive me, but I don't think I understand what's going on.

She sure doesn't.

Yeah, this is where.

That is after.

That is after Ghon says, next time you speak out of line, I promise to kill her.

So too nice, Komuki.

Too nice.

And then, let's see, I have

to go with Goan?

We were.

No, Kiloa was prepared to die with Goan.

And even though he knew that was the case, Goan was so dismissive.

It's fine.

Leave the rest of Pitu and me.

It's okay.

That was always the plan, wasn't it?

Truth is, I feel better after hearing what he's doing.

What, like about the hostage, you mean?

Yeah.

If I went along, it'd be pretty risky.

Pito might ambush and capture me.

And the last thing we want right now is the hostage situation.

You've got to be kidding me.

How many bloodbaths did they have to endure to start thinking like that?

I love that all of the side characters have become the audience.

Yes.

Like,

they're reacting to Gonan Kilua's sort of,

you know,

descent into this sort of like horrible,

you know, synapse is firing the way that no child synapse should be fired.

Like, kids shouldn't be thinking about hostage situations.

Knuckle, who trained Gonan Kilua.

whose whole thing was how much experience he has

is like Jesus Christ these kids have seen some shit.

It's just so painfully sad as well.

That's really sad.

Killua's,

this was always the plan, wasn't it?

You know,

they never spoke this to each other, but they knew it was always going to be Goan versus Pito in the end and Killua watching.

Also, Kilua thinking of himself, his role in this would be to be a hostage.

But also sort of retroactively

justifying what's happening.

Like, I don't have to be angry or upset at what Ghana's doing if I convince myself that this is where it was, where I knew it was headed.

That's how it reads to me, right?

Where that he's kind of convincing himself that it's like, oh, yeah, no, the reason I'm not coming with is because Gone's like worried about a hostage situation and like wants to like, there's a bit of a denial in it that um

it makes it extra sad.

Yeah, weirdly, the the dub that I recorded,

Killiwa calls it a hostage situation.

In my sub, it, I think, more accurately calls it the last says the last thing we want is a hostage exchange, which I think is more because it's already a hostage situation.

Yeah.

I don't know why they would change it from situation to or from exchange to situation, which is way more descriptive.

This is the heart of the dysfunction in Gun and Killiwa's relationship as well, right?

Like Killiwa retroactively trying to make the situation okay.

Right.

To sort of be like, you know, what Goan says goes, and then it is Killiua's job to rationalize it.

Normal, healthy friendship.

This is, hey, this is just what Goan does.

This is just a sort of stubbornness that, you know, he's always been like, remember when

he wouldn't give up fighting Netero, even though it didn't even make sense that he would try.

It's the same thing.

It's just always been the same old Goan.

Same thing.

It's the same.

It's It's the same.

Do you think there's a bit of Killiwa who thinks this has gone horribly wrong?

I think, yes.

I think absolutely.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of Killua that thinks.

Specifically with his relationship with Goan.

I mean, Killiua is regularly thinking this has gone horribly wrong about the sort of the state of the world.

Do you think he is able to locate part of that in Goan?

I know, I stand by what I said.

I think that there's a lot of Killua who is

being like, oh, this is all gone to shit now.

Yeah.

But I can't say anything.

Oh, my God.

Because it'll go.

And

yeah, totally.

Because there is that episode.

I wish I remembered what episode it was

when

they first see Netaro and

Zeno sort of across the

thing.

That's what I was thinking of, too.

And

Kilua is like, I have this question that I want to ask, but I can't say it, or else, you know, the whole thing will change.

And I wish I could remember what the quote was.

That comes back up later, I think,

where they explain sort of this ambiguous thing that Killowa was afraid to ask.

But the gist of it is like, I can't question this too much, or he will leave me behind for questioning him.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Man.

The wreckage of where the bomb fell.

It's just awful here.

The narrator says, you know, there's bubbling lava.

The narrator says there's a perpetual cloud of black smoke driving all life away.

Yupie tells Poof to get a grip.

People should constantly be telling Poof to get a grip.

It's surprising it's sticking this long.

I'm a little late for that, honestly.

We need a self-actualized Yupi to finally say poof.

Chill.

Although he doesn't quite say chill.

He sort of says get control of yourself because the next thing he says is, you know, I was wrong.

We'll kill every last one of them.

Not a single one will be spared.

You know, I think that

not, again, this is not me defending the actions of the Chimera Ant group.

I do think that is kind of an understandable emotional response to someone you love being caught in the shockwave of a nuclear blast.

Yeah, I mean, blood begets blood, you know?

Exactly, right?

It's not good.

It's no, it's not good, but I do like that consistency with the guards that there is like

this overflowing love for the king and the way that it motivates them and the way that the hunters' fucking horrible actions keep

having consequences for them.

Because Knuckle

Knuckle got through to Yupi, basically.

Yep, he was making progress there.

And this is Natera's whole thing as well, right?

You know, like

Knuckle got through to Yupi, and then unilaterally, Natera detonates a nuclear bomb.

And here's the thing.

This is, I think, what those episodes want you to ask: is you watch Netero's fight with

Meroem, where Meroem wants to talk, and Netero says no.

And he says no because he's afraid that if they talk,

he will take advantage of his heart and

make Netero make a mistake due to sympathizing with Meroem's situation.

But the question is,

what if it worked the other way around just as much or more?

The king is rapidly evolving all the time.

What would have happened if Netero sat down?

Like, I don't think that that's always a productive thing to worry about in a show, but in specific instances, I think you've got to slow down and be like,

what would have happened if Netaro talked for a half hour with Meriwim?

Yeah.

At any point, he could have stabbed himself in the heart and accomplished the exact same amount as he did with the fight.

I don't know.

And this, like, harden your heart is

at the heart of so much like nuclear logic, right?

As well, of like so so much of what you see specifically in American language around nuclear weapons and at the time around the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is like an understanding that this is sort of like unilaterally horrible, that the cost, you know, they talk so much about like the cost is so high, but we can't let our heart be swayed.

You know, the stakes are so great or whatever.

And we see Natero,

the voice of the organization, reproducing that in that moment so, so perfectly.

And just, you know, to your point, Keith, of like, well, what would have happened if it had gone the other way?

In the eye of the state, that nuclear logic

is never overcome, right?

You know,

the fact that it is an atrocity, the fact that there is so much civilian death is something that you weigh, is something that you consider.

You know, you responsibly say, well, this will be a terrible thing to do.

And then you say, but we must harden our hearts, you know?

And I think it really reflects the sort of like American foreign policy position of

absolute refusal to take part in diplomacy at any level for decades and decades and decades.

Drone war as well, right?

This is this thing of like, well, this is ugly war, but unfortunately, we have been driven to the position of ugly war.

Yeah.

I mean, I feel like a lot of the Chimera Antarctic has been really interested in the ideas of like the, quote, necessary evil, right?

Like, right.

yeah.

And I would say too, just like Keith, you're saying like, you know, the example you gave is Netaro.

What if Netaro stopped and talked for 30 minutes?

But I feel like the whole Chimera Ant arc is just like inviting that question over and over again between like every character.

What if everybody just stopped and talked about things for 30 minutes?

I mean, Ikalgo and Kiloa had a chat and look where that was right now.

Great.

Same thing with Goan and Melioron.

Now, don't worry about what's going on with Goan Goan now.

Or to go even more recently, Ikago and Welfin.

Killing God, yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

It works.

Like it does.

Like it.

There is an argument to be made that, like, yeah, this could have been solved by just having a chat.

Which is

a naive point of view, to be fair.

Like, that's not how...

The conflict actually works.

No, but it is borne out in the history specifically of World War II and specifically of the nuclear bombs that were dropped in Japan, of

an active decision by the United States to drop bombs despite signs that they did not necessarily need to do.

Yes.

That is the crucial thing here.

Yeah.

What I think is fascinating is that these episodes are

towing such a weird and difficult line of neither absolving the ants nor

sorry, neither forgiving the ants nor absolving absolving the hunters sure yeah it's really

stranger

as you know we move into 120 120 well so um up transforms into the fire he he he turns into this wonderful sort of like strange monstrous mode it's so cool it's gorgeous looking i really like his like when he's got all the eyes on the tentacles coming out of his back looking around and the like heat waves in front of like there's like a an effect basically overlaid on things that

wings look like the leaves of like an aloe plant covered in eyeballs.

Yeah.

And he finds something in the wreckage and screams.

And the narrator says, before he even realized it, tears were streaming down Poof's face.

And as we see the sort of the like burnt

body of the the king's head and torso, the big chimera ant bass plays that like that sort of liquid bass part

and then comes to silence as we pan as we pan out Jesus Christ Christ, as we cut out to look at a far view of the mushroom cloud over silence, which I think is a mushroom cloud at this point.

It has sort of like dissipated from the rose

at the very end of 127.

Yeah, it's weird.

There is a sort of like morphing.

It always starts as a mushroom cloud and then it morphs into the rose and then it sort of like goes back to the it's not subtle.

It's not subtle, but as we've said several times, the audience is mid and sometimes you just need to say it straight down the camera.

Sure.

Not even, I mean, it is an anime thing, but it's not even an anime thing.

I can't believe that the king is alive.

I could not believe how

sure you were that the king was dead.

And what I wanted to say at the end of the last recording session, Jack, was

because of

the metaphor that we were talking about, because of the like

the highly mappable metaphor of

the ants as you know, World War II Japan,

you know,

the emperor of Japan didn't die when those bombs were dropped.

No, but the bombs produced an immense

and total loss of life.

Correct.

But what you, but what you need for the metaphor to complete is for an emperor who acts

after the bombs go off.

Yes, that is what you need for the metaphor to complete, but we get into interesting territory where the metaphor starts getting a little mixed.

And we talked about this in the last episode, right?

Which is that the bombs weren't dropped on the emperor.

No.

You don't dropped on civilian bombs.

Yeah.

And so the show is

kind of wanting to have its cake and eat it.

And it produces this

really

odd sensation.

This is not something that you tend to see in fiction.

Is someone take a direct hit from a nuclear bomb, especially in a story about the atrocity of nuclear warfare, and then...

Well, it's not just that he has survived, because the king is alive, but only just.

He opens his eyes and kind of like moves his lips.

At which point,

Poof first thinks, well, let's get Peto involved.

And then thinks, well, we can't get him back to Pito.

And also, this is like the perfect...

You know, the stakes are now so much higher, but this is the perfect culmination of Poof's willingness to like jettison Pito in the last couple of episodes.

We don't need Dr.

Blythe anymore.

He says, I will save the king myself.

I will let him consume me.

Yes, it's as simple as that.

And then he says this line that I think really starts

keying the episode into this bizarre, mythic, dreamlike, sexual

place that it gets to.

He says, I'm going to permeate the king and heal him.

Permeate is such a wild verb here.

And then they show it.

They show

like poof going into like his veins and his, like, like the, like, the, you can see like this muscular structure, and it, yeah, and it all just sort of like kind of revivifies.

Uh, yeah, Allie described this as like, is this when we see it coming off his finger, right?

No, this is not that's uh, Yuti Yubi does the finger.

Yeah, um, uh, Poof is able to transform into particles so small that he just goes right into the king.

Yeah.

Yeah, but then one of them, like.

Well, so the king wakes up.

He opens his eyes.

And is it at this point that he starts burning?

Yes, he becomes like a flame.

His body turns to light.

And he says, an exquisite delicacy beyond all description.

It feels like I'm breathing the air of paradise.

Turns into Chairman Kaga from Iron Chef.

He says, I can feel my energy.

He looks like a child.

He looks like a flame.

He looks like an angel.

At this point, I just wrote down in Buddha.

Or the Buddha imagery, I think, in his design comes through a lot here.

Yeah.

He looks like a like before the fire starts.

He looks like a statue, like a carved statue of a Buddha.

Bold.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, he says, uh, I wrote down in my notes here, psychedelic imagery.

This is one of the least useful notes I've written, but it does convey what is.

It's true, though.

Yeah, it's very true.

Yeah, and you did mail it.

It's at this point that we sort of get our first sign that this is this is extremely sexual, as

that I've just titled here Bliss.

Yeah,

yeah.

Now that I

have experienced this taste,

I'll never

ever be able to eat anything else that in my life.

This heavenly bliss, I can't take any more of it.

Please stop.

No more.

You simply gotta hand it to the English VA for Pooh.

He's so good.

When you feel so crazier, just an audio.

When you dunno, the sire and the sire keep eating, you know?

There's like a flaw.

There's like a the imagery here is crazy, too.

There's like a big like it keeps cutting to like almost like heavenly like they look like Greek columns to me or some shit in the background.

Yes.

And then like a tidal wave comes through.

There's a couple shots where you see

there's a couple shots where you see a nude poof like being emaciated by this.

Also, like there's like a skinniness to him.

Yeah.

That is that like is uh

it's crazy by the way if you haven't been going to friendsofthetable.cash and looking at the screen caps for the episodes, and you also haven't been watching the show, this is an episode to do that.

Yeah,

last one, too, but this one, yeah.

Did you guys not get any fairies?

No, we got the fair fairies.

Yeah, so yeah, one of the main things, Allie, actually, why don't you talk about how it appears in the manga?

Because I think that's the thing.

Yeah, let me open this up

because

the voice acting sexualizes this in a way that the manga does not, especially since Poof's face is so childlike through this.

Oh, we see full-grown poof for a lot of these, yeah.

That's

okay, yeah, no, no, no, but not all of them

basically, all of the section poof is little guy-moded.

Um, they both are, it's

but from the like

start of the birding here,

um,

It's sort of Poof and Ippy,

Yubi, sorry.

Yubi

sort of

coming across this figure and the whatever.

And then

the pages I've shared, sort of immediately after you're seeing all of Poof's like cells slash life energy slash this like smoke of light kind of going into the the king's body.

But what you get is like

the figure burning and seemingly looking a little bit more human.

Like

the cheeks are fuller and there's like sort of a drawing of the jaw now

with

the two ants looking on and then

Ippy going, excellent sire, eat as much as you please.

We have plenty more.

as as fine as soon as the king sort of compliments uh poof this like half page of poop's childish face like screaming and crying and then another full panel of ah sire sire sire please no more i can't take any more of this heavenly bliss um and then you know you you you really don't get like the the i'm getting mixed messages yeah

i kept talking about this heavenly bliss but it wasn't sexual you're saying?

Well, because

I, you know, I feel like the motherhood metaphor gets so much stronger here when Poof is like chibbified the whole time.

Like, sure.

Like, full cheeks, like, child face, like, this fantasy section that you get.

Like, the only psychedelic bit we get is

sort of the kings, the outline of the king's just eyes and mouth over a panel of like a lush green field, and you know, um,

I'm not sure what you call this sort of weed, but like floating in the sky, and there's a fairy playing a flute, and the like

you know, sounds of the flute seem to also be this like floral element, and it's like there's this vision of paradise, but Poof is sort of like interrupting these panels by being like so happy they're crying.

Yeah,

um,

I think all of this stuff is just tremendous.

It's exactly.

This is like they have

pulled out all the stops on the organ at the same time.

Because we, yeah, you're right.

We have this motherhood stuff.

We have the sexualization of it.

We have that sort of like

the way that religious rapture is often written about as sort of like an orgasmic experience as well.

I'm thinking of like Hildegard of Bingen's visions where she was sort of like

taken up up by the Holy Spirit in this sort of like orgasmic rapture.

And then we also the joy that

Poof is feeling in this moment is

not just that he is able to

help the king, that the king is praising him.

You know, we've known that Poof really loves this stuff.

Anytime the king is like, nice work, which is to say, never.

Whenever he thinks about the king saying, nice work, Poof,

he's absolutely delighted.

But it's also that he is like becoming one with the king.

He's like giving up his body to the king.

And this is like, this is really good stuff for Poof.

And in fact, it seems like Poof is having such a good time with it that Yupi joins in.

My note here says Yupi also offers some of his spirit, period.

Poof now a little jealous.

Yeah, yeah.

Poof's definitely jealous.

He says, I think he goes like,

nicely played, Yupie.

It's so good.

The ongoing,

the fact that Poof has now become a sort of

like biblical mother figure to the king,

and also is still his usual deeply compromised, petty self.

Like, these two things go to war with each other in these episodes, and it's always so entertaining.

Judas and Mary did the fusion dance for me

there's such a bizarre mixed metaphor here between

um

like

yupie and poof as the sort of like um

the good and bad child of the king like yupie voluntarily sort of putting himself in a con in a in a uh potentially bad situation by um confessing something later on in this episode versus Poof, who's like using the king's amnesia to kind of

mold him to what he wants.

Like, these are, but also they're both like experiencing this sort of this motherhood for the king.

Like, I have they literally like show them against the backdrop of like a mother breastfeeding a child, a horse,

a horse doing the same, doing like a bunch of animals.

There's all of nature, like, oh, we understand unconditional love, the unconditional love of a mother for their child, like the queen had for the king.

We have become that at the same time as we were also underneath him, subjugated his, you know, his loyal subjects, his children.

But yeah, it doesn't help Poof not

concoct schemes constantly.

It's his main thing.

And that is true.

That's true of some others too, though.

I love my child, but I am always concocting schemes against

the lion says, by facing the king, the narrator, by facing the king's near death and revival, and sharing the essence of their own being, they underwent a transformation and became equals to the queen, the mother of their species.

That's when we see them bowing to them, all bowing to a big human woman.

The king says, From this point on, you will always refer to me as Meroem.

There's wonderful imagery.

At one point, the ant queen's claw crosses the sun,

and everything gets dark.

And this is amazing because we don't yet know that he doesn't remember why he knows his name now.

It's so good.

So he emerges from the flames alive and reborn, and UP says, We are a part of him now.

We're even able to share in the king's thoughts.

Because of that, we can tell the king is currently extremely confused.

Oh, I'm extremely confused.

The king has lost his memory.

He says, Even as I wandered through the waning light, I heard someone call my name.

Whether it was a dream or reality, I cannot say.

And now I cannot remember why I'm here.

They fill in Meroem about what happened.

Sort of.

Well, partially.

They fill him in with the about the bomb, right?

Yes,

to lie,

and the king does not like them.

No, the king can tell that he

lied.

They haven't explicitly said it yet, but they can read each other's minds now.

Sort of.

And feel each other's thoughts.

They still skipped at least.

Yeah, they can feel each other's thoughts.

And the king is like,

if you lied to me, I will consider that a breach of trust, I think is what he he says.

Fair enough, man.

It's like, yeah, that is what that is usually.

And

the implication being, if you breach my trust, I will kill you.

And this is when they sort of confess, like, the reason you're healed is because we just fed ourselves to you.

And which he had forgotten.

He didn't even know that that had happened fully.

And Poof says, I think the most poof thing maybe that he says in these episodes: our bodies are not our own.

They belong entirely to you.

We merely returned what was already yours in the first place.

Yeah,

it's wild hearing them talk about like we have become equals to the queen and then also just reproducing the antierarchy.

When we talk about this episode being

a real sort of

collage of metaphors and feelings, and a literal collage,

yes, and a literal collage of bizarre imagery.

Um, this is kind of what we're talking about, and it's at this point that Poof has a brainwave.

Ten seconds after saying, I'm now the same as the king, kind of, like we're together, uh, he's like, oh my god, he doesn't remember Komaki, and I can just go and kill her.

Uh, yeah, they fill him in on the bomb and the fighting and the palace attack.

Yeah, he dashes back towards the palace.

If I return to the palace first, I can dispose of it.

He does not remember her.

I've written down poof, hyper-focusing on Komegi as usual.

This will require convincing Peto and getting rid of that meddling human talking about Goan.

If I can kill her, everything else will fall into place.

Lovely moment here as the king finally sprouts wings, big wings like Yupi.

He has chimera anted himself.

He is now

able to fly in that way.

Yeah, like we learned dozens of episodes ago, he can absorb the power and ability of the things that he eats

like a chimera ant.

Yeah.

He sort of senses the answer I seek, because he can feel there's this kind of a pain, like something missing.

The answer that he seeks is within the palace.

Poof has a different idea.

He'll see the massive crowds of tasty, tasty, yummy, yummy, delicious combat humans.

And he'll remember that his job is to rule over all living creatures.

And if that doesn't work, he can show him the human grapes.

Yeah, don't you like that?

Don't you like the human grapes, sire?

Sire, don't you like the human grapes?

We made them just for you ages and ages ago.

No,

I like some other thing that I can't remember.

But he arrives and sees that Komagi is gone.

Palm is gone.

Oh, sorry, Peto is gone.

And so is Gone.

Gone is also gone.

And at that point, Knuckle punches him.

Yeah.

And Palm's out of nowhere, I think with Meliorone, it's an invisible punch, right?

Yeah, invisibly punch.

And Palm also arrives to fight him.

And in that moment, they all sense that the king is returning.

Yeah, Palm is able to use

Wink Blue to see

the main poof body, which of course is with the king.

Which is bad.

I fear of that being.

They had just thought maybe that the king was dead.

Just now.

Yeah, and he is very definitely not.

And also, things are really, really weird now.

If anything, bigger than before.

Bigger than before.

Bigger than before.

Oh, they got to be careful in case he gets blue.

So last step.

That's worrying.

I'm trying to remember.

His character model hasn't changed too much.

He mostly just looks like the king again, right?

Yeah, with wings.

Basically the same.

Yeah.

Just the wings are the big difference.

Which is its own kind of terror.

He's just back.

You know, he got hit by a nuclear bomb, and the thing that has returned is the king.

They specifically say, I think UB specifically notes that he's stronger than he was, even.

Yeah.

Which is also a genre move.

Absorbing the power of a nuclear bomb and coming back stronger is like a classic thing that happens to things that survive the music.

Well, you've also got a

drink from your friends.

Of your friends.

A tasty drink of my dear friends.

Kermigi, riding on Killua's back, wants people to tell her what's happening.

Oh, I feel so bad for her.

Yeah.

She's having a bad time.

She has no idea what's going on.

She wants to see the dear leader.

This is going to be exploited in a really fun way later.

But for now, she's just having a real bad time of it.

APR has appeared on the main body of UP.

This is the case.

And the king.

Sorry, of the body of Poof.

And the king is baffled and annoyed.

Baffled and annoyed and quickly deducing.

He immediately starts deducing.

What is his deduction here?

I'm trying to remember.

So they say, oh, you can't get rid of this thing.

It's

invulnerable

to attacks because it's really just a manifestation of this other guy.

And the king is like, we'll see about that.

Not sarcastically, Jennifer's like, well, we'll see about that.

So he attacks it with

one of the few Dragon Ball Z style attacks in the entire series.

You know, I love this stuff because I have a sick brain and I like to see the strongest guy in the world be, you know, about the tier of a early

Dragon Ball Z villain.

You like a beam cannon.

I like a beam cannon.

Well, I specifically like how it contextually, you know, I think that you can't make this stuff without knowing, like, Tagashi has to know in his mind

where these guys sit in terms of Dragon Ball Z power level.

I believe that this, I believe that these people think like this.

And I like him going, I'm

I'm showing him being like Piccolo,

you know, season one level guy.

And that's in my head how this stuff works.

I think it was intentional.

It doesn't do shit.

It doesn't do shit to APR.

As usual.

And so the deduction comes in, right, as usual.

APR can't do anything to it.

Nen has rules.

It's from Demon World.

The deduction comes in when he goes, wait a second, you've seen this, which means it would have had to happen to you or to someone who you saw.

So why do you not still have it?

Or why does the guy who did it still live?

And Yubi has to come clean and say, I made a deal with this guy.

He said he would take it off if I spared his comrade.

And if I had gone back on my word, I would have felt like I had lost because I knew these guys couldn't really do anything in the first place.

Poof is like kind of excited that this means that Yubi is about to be killed by the king for his insolence.

It's really good.

But instead, the king sort of takes him sweetly onto his tail to be like, you did a good job by telling me the truth.

Oh, they're small now.

We should probably say that.

They're small now.

They're both small.

Poof and Yubi are the chibi.

Yubi has been made.

For some reason, it's just a fact that when poof splits up he becomes kind of chibified that was not necessarily a given that when you be fed all of his energy to the king he also would become chibified instead of just smaller but he is he's a he's a cute little chibi now uh and he sits on the king's tail and goes thank you for saying i did good

An important piece of context about watching these episodes is that I'm hosting a friend right now,

and the last hunter-hunter that they saw was midway through Greed Island.

And we sat down to watch this episode together.

And it was a wild wise.

That's insane.

It was that great.

Is that why you had your thought experiment of the person who's only listened to Ali episodes?

No, that was separate.

But it was great because they kept saying things like, why is he small now?

Or have they done that before?

Or could Poof always do that?

And the answer is, no.

No, no, yes.

Yes.

The king forgiving Yupi, he says, he says, man, what does he say?

I only ordered that you not lie to me.

I won't punish you for the truth.

Our relationships have become quite complex.

It seems that our bodies and souls have become intertwined.

There can be no more secrets between us.

This is honestly more scary than killing Yupi.

Yeah.

But it means something specific

to Poof.

Who says

to Poof?

Does he know?

Does he know?

Is he saying this because does he know?

Does he know?

I do like

the

narcissism of

this direct statement to Yupi.

Is it actually a secret message to me?

Yeah, it's really good.

It's great.

Well,

the juice of these episodes, the thing that makes these episodes go is exactly that, right?

It's that you have this

one-part maternal, one-part biblical, one-part sexual communion immediately followed by some of the most straightforward, petty, narcissistic poof bullshit that we have seen so far.

That is delightful.

The segments, poof segments, are running all around the palace.

I love this.

In this episode, desperately trying to search for Komegi, the segments all have this amazing overlapping dialogue.

They're all just like, where is he?

Quick, quick, let's go.

Find him, find him, find him, find him.

Look,

Knuckle tries to confront these segments, and

he just goes right past him.

He's like, I'm not interested in fighting Knuckle.

This is an echo of Yupi turning away from the fight with Shoot.

Yeah.

Or the fight with Knuckle and Shoot.

But

very Tagashi-like, it becomes extremely part of the plot that that he walks past Knuckle without engaging because it leads Knuckle to believe if he's not looking for me, he must be looking for someone else.

Probably the traitor, Meliorone,

because he'd be with Yupi and Yupi would have explained what's going on.

And then we come back to Poof and Poof's like, ha ha ha, they'll think that I'm looking for Meliorone when I'm actually looking for Komugi.

This business is a little tiresome, but it's fine.

Well, but the whole, the crux of it, I think, is to get another mental win for Killua, who goes, well, we really should double check on this because we don't actually know.

We shouldn't be making any assumptions, which is why they do a really funny trick of like drawing Poof out, making him think that they're leading him in two different directions to find

Meliorone, but actually, Kilua jumps out with Komugi to be like, is it her maybe that you're looking for?

And it is.

It is.

But it is still under misunderstanding that Poof is out to save Komugi.

It's really good.

So the humans not quite figuring it out.

Right.

Really enjoyable.

So

it is kind of like a little bit too much at the start, but I think it all serves this greater purpose of like the key thing is Kilua still has to work out that Poof, for some some reason wants to kill Komagi while Peto for some reason wants to save Komagi

which is strange to the from their perspective there is there is some involved thinking that needs to happen there because it's it doesn't seem particularly straightforward why that would be the case um meanwhile you pea warns the king about melarone and the king has a really scary response to this he sort of says well look

it's just how it goes.

I wrote down, this is a trial we Chimera ants must overcome if we are to continue in our evolution.

We must accept these things and move forward.

Humans are a stepping stone meant to help us attain the next level of evolution, the perfect sacrifice.

This is a transitional phase to our final form.

I don't feel super good about this.

Why, why not?

Why is the king starting to talk about this now?

Previously, the king was like, Well, I'm the king, now we're at the top of the pyramid, and I'm going to usher in you know a new society.

And now the king seems to think that there is something else.

I have a thought about it, which is that the king is operating

with his feelings and instincts,

but without

the

foreknowledge of

his own socialization,

he's sort of trying to reinvent being the king from first principles.

And I think he's trying to figure out why do I feel the way that I feel?

Why,

what could be the reason why I have an instinct to forgive

the traitor?

It must be because it doesn't matter because we're going to move past him.

him.

And we're going to move past where we are now.

It doesn't matter that I'm in this position of like vagueness and uncertainty.

There is something waiting for me on the other side once I resolve this strange nagging feeling that I have.

That's what I'm how I read it.

That the king needs to figure out he has he's lost sort of like a huge chunk of his identity and he's lost the memories that led to the forming of that identity.

And so,

which I think also explains Poof's like desperate

drive to like prevent that identity from reforming.

Yeah, the king has sort of become multi once again.

You've got to take advantage of that.

This is as Killua starts leaving

with Komegi on his back.

You know, it's at this moment that Poof realizes that he has been outplayed.

He can either pursue the traitor or the girl and goes after the girl.

This is another moment where uh, Poof's face appears bug-like.

I think this is the only other time it appears.

It's when Knuckles sees him and when he begins his chase with Killer and Komugi.

It's at this point that Poof comes up with an evil plan.

Poof?

Evil plan?

You know what?

Tell us about Poof's evil plan, Sylvie.

Uh, yeah, I mean, it's

we're talking about his larger plan here of hiding.

One, he wants to hide the Goongie board and then kill komugi um

oh you're talking about when his poison plan where we get like a beginning at the beginning of the episode where we see like

poof being like oh the poison already worked and then uh we see later at the end of the episode why

yes yeah uh well his plan is to talk a bunch of shit and make it and say a bunch of nice things because komugi doesn't realize that he's a weird ant

and in doing so, when she hears it, she sort of starts to push back against Kilua trying to rescue her because she wants to see her dear leader.

Who she very comedically

has to make the connection that the dear leader is also the king.

It's really funny.

How is that a leap that you need to make?

Very funny.

At one point, Killua describes the insects, and Komugi says, insect?

What insect are you talking about?

Talking about?

What is this guy on?

Then she gets knocked out somehow.

I can't tell whether or not she gets knocked out by a blow from Poof that he makes her kill her and hits her.

Yeah, totally.

That's exactly it.

Oh, is it?

I thought that when she was trying to get off Killoa, he kind of balked her with the back of his head, but maybe I'm misreading some animation stuff there.

That was the alternative to what I thought had happened.

Is there a.

Do we have manga help here, Ali?

How does Komigi get knocked out during the chase?

I don't know that you see the, like,

blast

or whatever,

um, but you sort of have Kilua's

internal monologue saying, like, oh, that's what they were doing or whatever, you know, like the sort of like,

I, I'm, I'm realizing this while explaining it to the audience, sort of like,

that's what she's doing.

Classic Kilua move.

Yeah, yeah.

Um, he draws a circle of electricity around her and warns Poof as they sort of start to square off that if he steps inside, he'll die.

I love the sudden,

you know, this has been where the show has been going for a long time, but now we have Kiliwazoldic desperately trying to protect Komegi.

Just a few short episodes after Gone Freaks was like, if you speak out of turn, I will kill her.

Yeah.

I love that Kilo Wazoldic loves to fight people inside circles.

Yeah, that's true.

I immediately thought of the pirates on Green Island.

I thought about the sort of like ring out rules and

Heaven's Arena.

Even the hunter exam

fighting the take when he takes the heart out of that guy.

Oh my God, instantly.

Bro excels in circles.

He excels in circles.

He excels in circles.

Killa evaporates Poof's eye?

How does he do this?

Well, he's lightning.

He's a bug zapper.

Yeah.

What a shoot.

Oh, God.

He's a bug zapper.

Yeah, he creates a current between his two fingers and uses that to like singe away a part of his face.

More Tagashi head trauma.

He likes it and he's good at it.

Is Yoshi here with Tagashi?

Merouem is shown the crowds by Poof, who says, remember these?

Don't you love this?

Don't you love how they're here for you?

And the king looks at the palace and goes, something is missing.

Something that isn't this, these huge crowds people.

He's like, why is the palace ruined?

And they're like, oh, they tried to attack you.

And he says, where do I spend most of my time?

And as Poof offers to give the king a tour, he remembers the Goongie board.

What I love about this is that he needs to leave.

I love that

Yupi is not in on any of this shit that has been going on in Poof's head.

He's just been sort of a silent partner,

hanging back, and just, we're all just here to go back to the palace with the king, like totally normal.

So, Yupi keeps saying stuff like,

maybe something in the palace will jog your memory, or let's hurry back.

And

meanwhile, Yupi is, or Poof is like, ah,

stop saying that.

I really love watching Poof be in mental anguish and suffering.

The true villain of the Chimera Antarc is Poof.

Yeah.

I think that is

a good argument.

Once again,

squadron leaders shifting goals to their main objective.

The Poof that is getting into a fight with Killua leaves to go and get the Gungi Board.

And meanwhile, as the episode ends, we see Peto and Gon walking towards a forest, towards this big castle on the hill, where Kite is being kept.

Oh, boy.

Could we take five minutes and then come back?

Sure.

Yeah.

We're going to need the five.

Yeah.

All right.

Bye.

Knuckle and Meliarone are hiding among the humans.

After episode on episode on episode where this crowd has been a background element, it is suddenly starting to bubble back up into the story again.

Isn't that great how he does it?

He does it.

He does it over and over again.

We are now like close up in the crowd with Knuckle and Mel.

Everyone sees the king returning

and Knuckle and Mal say, you know, when the king and Poof split up, that's when our real problems begin.

This is when Poof has his little, don't you like human grapes?

Don't you like them like them?

I'm not trying to distract you.

I'm not trying to get an extra six seconds.

Did you ever eat a grape?

Was that nice?

The king doesn't even react to this.

He just continues.

He like slows down a little bit to look at what Poof is pointing at, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't even say anything.

No.

No.

He's not interested in the human grapes.

Don't you know?

Why would I be?

More of all the segments yelling the same thing.

Like, get the pieces, find all the pieces.

It's very funny.

They're also wondering where Welfin is.

I'm not sure what's happening here.

Are you not sure?

That gets, that's very, that becomes very big part of it.

Yes.

Yes.

Now I know why.

Now you know why.

It is confusing for the four seconds where, or sorry, the four minutes where like Poof is like, where's Welfin?

And then that's not part of it because Ikago goes looking for usable

living dead dolls.

That part's so funny.

Oh my god, just him being like, ah, nah, this one's too fucked up.

I can't use that one.

It's me playing Hitman and being like, like, no, they know that disguise.

Nah, can't use that one.

Already you killed someone in broad daylight wearing that.

Wow, we play Hitman very different.

I play Hitman.

I will play Hitman in many different ways.

Sometimes I'll do it well and sometimes I'll do it poorly because it's funny.

I am compulsive silent assassin Hitman.

Silent assassin?

Yeah,

if I get noticed one time in an episode or in a level, I restart the level every time.

I do that with most stealth games, Keith.

Keith yeah so sometimes I just free myself from that I will have a crazy run for fun but I won't finish it I'll restart at the end

to do it right to do it real

yeah here we get a lot of business that is a slow setup to how Palm's eye works you know we've sort of known about this you know palm can see uh

once she has seen a person she can continue to track them we get frankly too much detail to set up the simple fact that Palm is now able to not only look at Goan and Pito in the room, but also can only look at so many things at once.

It's a one-in-one-out system.

This is some classic Tagashi overexplaining, but you know.

I'll say two things to is that the first thing is that Wink Blue works differently than her old power.

Because she used to have to feed her blood to a fish in order to see something.

That's true.

Oh, yeah.

And she could see whoever she wanted as long as you've seen them before.

So

there's a very new aspect to how her power works as an ant.

And then

I believe that it becomes pretty important later that we know how Wink Blue works in a very Tagashi way.

Oh, yeah.

This tends to be how he does it.

Right.

I've annoyed you earlier with too much information.

So later, I can just do the awesome thing extremely quickly.

The biggest use case for this is NEM.

Right.

Yeah.

Sort of like the foundational use case.

Yeah.

Going is guiding Pito like a hostage.

You know, like he's in the,

you know, walk in front of me.

It's the door on the right at the very end as they pass through this castle.

And then we intercut this with Welfin, still very injured on bed, looking up and seeing Poof standing there.

This rubs me the wrong way.

This phone call business.

In what way does it rub you the wrong way?

We have established so thoroughly how sharp Gone's senses are right now.

He was able to tell that

surgery on Komegi was finished, even though he doesn't know what the surgery was, wasn't able to see what was happening, and Peter was actively trying to disguise what they were doing.

And the fact that the phone rang in their pocket and they answered it

and

listened to this conversation from Welfin and Goan didn't pick up on it is so, it's just too hard for me to totally buy.

Yeah, I agree.

I agree.

This is a weird contrivance.

It produces an interesting situation, but it is nevertheless a weird contrivance.

Pito's cell rings, they answer it, and they hear Welfin's voice.

And Welfin says, you should know, Bloster and I have recaptured the girl.

And,

you know,

they hear Come again's voice saying, I'm fine.

Yeah.

I've been captured.

I'm all good.

It's all good.

You can go thicko mode.

Go thicko mode on the child.

Yeah.

And I wrote, how have they managed this?

Because I, I, I.

And he wrote it very quickly because they tell you right away.

And then I did a character turn and I wrote, apparently Poof can, quote, be different people.

Yeah.

I don't care for this.

This is the opposite of Tagashi's trick, right?

Where you establish something very carefully in a way that is annoying so you can do something cool later.

This is, he needs to engineer this situation so Poof develops a new power out of nowhere that allows him to mimic somebody else.

The entire assault on the palace would have gone completely differently if

he could shapeshift in this way.

I think that that's probably true.

The thing that I think, and I also don't love this,

the thing that I think helps it is that

since York New, there's been a lot of business about intentionally concealing the extent of your ability from other people.

And we have seen the ants do that before.

But not the viewer.

Well, the viewer, too.

Is that true?

Yeah, I feel like.

It kind of happens all at once, typically.

Yeah, that's true.

And once one power has been revealed, you sort of get the full extent of it.

And the other half of it is

Poof's quick explanation is, well, I can transmogrify my body and always have been able to do that.

So it's only natural that I'm able to do this.

I still think they take it too far and it's a little bit goofy.

It is a keystone part of the plot from here on out, though.

So it just has to be.

Yeah.

I think that's why it might not be bugging me as much is because I know where things go.

And I'm like, I'm more bothered by Go not noticing the phone than I am by Peter's silly ability.

I'm chilling.

Al are, are you chilling?

I'm also chilling.

Nice.

That's good.

Hell yeah.

I mean, we're through.

I just threw the three chillies.

So that's good.

I'm just, I'm asked to accept so much shit in the Chimera Ant arc, and I do so joyfully most of the time, that when it is such a transparent piece of machinery just falling into place with, you know, no, no, before,

I'm sort of like, you could, you could make me believe something so much more stylishly.

You know?

If I'm twisting myself

to like this, another thing that I would say is it's very Looney Tunes, which Poof is like very Looney Tunes as a character.

He is.

Yes.

It is very Looney Tunes.

And the majesty of the Chimera Ant Arg is we're going to do Looney Tunes along with Crusader Kings, along with an allegory for the dropping of the nuclear bomb, and it's somehow going to work.

Yeah.

Poof has a great line here.

He says, my lie.

He keeps talking.

He's so self-aggrandizing.

He says, my lie is like a magic trick that will release him from that girl.

There's a bit of hiseker sometimes in the way that Poof talks.

What this made me think of was a line Killiwa has, which is, I have a magic spell called Kite.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

A magic spell is like.

A magic spell called kite.

Killua says that, where it's like talking about handling gone.

And

I'm just always happy to be drawing lines lines between Merrowim and Goan.

Yes, I think that's a very intentional thing Tagashi's doing as well.

And we have Yupi saying, keep watching Goan and Pito to Palm.

You'll soon see something very interesting.

This is also Poof talking to the viewer.

You know, we talked in the past about how often the hunter side characters are the viewer, saying things like, oh my God, Goan really did that or whatever.

Here we have Yupi, sorry, oh my god, we have have Poof sort of like explicitly saying, you know,

watch the magic trick unfold.

And then we'll help break it down.

This is, yeah, this stuff is, this is sad stuff.

Can I let someone else take the lead here?

Because I know that folks are really excited to talk this through, and I don't want to blast through it.

I also don't want to blast through it by accident.

I'm not going to do this justice.

Hey, I'm happy to talk about it.

Dre, I know that you had some stuff.

Do you want me to start and we can?

Yeah, because I don't have like a summary written down.

So

Goan is able to lead

Peto into the chamber where Kite is being kept

and

explains, like, hey, you know, it's time to fix Kite.

If you fix Kite, I'll let Komengi go.

And this part happens really really slowly.

I think that maybe

Poof was expecting the phone call to release Pito in such a way that they were immediately just going to kill Goan and come back.

But actually, what happens is Pito says, Goan, well, first, they say, what's your name again?

And he says, Goan.

Goan's very important to answer.

Goan, you respected my wishes and waited for me.

So I feel like I should at least be honest with you.

I owe you that.

This man is already dead.

The truth is, he died during our fight.

I remember,

or the truth is, he died during our fight.

I remember back then, you were, and then they get cut off.

And I'm dying to know what Peter was going to say

back then.

You were what?

What Pito was going to say?

I don't know.

What was so broad?

What was Goan back then that was different?

I don't know.

It could be back then you were different, right?

It could be.

That's what comes to my head.

That is exactly what I...

But does Pito have enough information to know that?

I think even just from the scenes we got in the room with Komugi that

Pito would have enough because, like, Goan did not have this sort of menacing air to him that

set Pito so on edge in that scene.

Like, I think it's that far much of a stretch to make

like Pito believe that.

What they explain is,

you know, I can heal things that are broken, but when someone's already dead, all I can do is prolong decomposition.

And I think what's clear in this scene is that

Pito understands Goan's feelings about Kite and how they relate to their own feelings or the king's own feelings about

Komugi in a way that Goan cannot do the reverse.

Goan is not able to see the same, draw the same line between Pito and Komugi or the king and Komugi, which is very sad.

Yes.

And Goan takes this news as his cue to completely break down.

The note I wrote down is this is like immediate, like white-hot horror from Goan.

Like wind blows in the chamber.

The edifice starts crumbling immediately.

And what's really striking is it's not

an immediate flash of anger, although that kind of comes a little later.

It's as though it is all falling apart for him in this moment, this realization, you know.

He stops really even being able to understand what's happening around him because he's so consumed internally by

grief and guilt.

It's come up before like

Ghosn saying he's fine, that he's processed things, that he's normal now.

He wants to do that.

And

what is obviously happening is like

the sort of suppressed guilt of feeling responsible for what happened to Kite that has been displaced

onto the ants is like

it's not threatening to break free.

It's like broken, it's broken free.

But the anger is still there, trying to like, no,

don't be guilty, don't be sad, you know, keep being angry.

And it happens very literally.

This is a.

I wrote in my notes, Gollum Freaks.

He is literally having sort of like an internal shouting match with like this new

the

if you if you've seen the closing credits you can see like

he is red and

uh Kilo is blue the king is red and blue there's this sort of like the uh uh komagi is blue like they sort of have this like sort of like

anger and feeling, anger and empathy sort of red and blue thing that they've been doing in the season, but especially in the closing credits.

And you can see like these two, the red and blue aspects of Ghone sort of like

not combating each other.

One of them is breaking down and the other one is freaking out.

It's sort of like the human and beast sides of his personality are in conflict and one.

Weird.

Has anybody heard that before somewhere I'm drawing a blank

like Disney yeah

it's just like kingdom hearts yeah

last time I described the detonation of the nuclear bomb going off and the death of Notero and the king as like a kind of double grief you know like a like a grief in the immediate and then sort of like in the in the broader metaphorical level and there's another kind of double grief happening here for gone right where it's like first it is the loss of kite the loss of his friend and mentor and then also the realization that

not only was the thing you were doing futile, but

you were chasing after an empty person.

You know, during this scene, Kite's body falls over, just slumps to one side.

Not only was Kite long gone, but you have been watching a puppet this whole time.

And there was nothing more than that.

And the author of that puppet is the person who right now is very calmly, very sorrowfully giving you the courtesy of telling you, you know,

his soul isn't here, not anymore, and I can't bring him back.

Your friend is gone.

You know, we talked about the futility of this.

It's not just the futility because Kite is dead.

It's that he's just been a piece on a game board this whole time.

You know,

no soul, nothing there, just Peter.

Yeah.

The thing I wanted to bring up.

about around this around like going's like

you know these two sides of him arguing with himself.

Um,

are how many of you all, if at all, are familiar with Piaget's theory of cognitive development?

Uh,

steam just came out of my ears, like gone doing math.

Yeah, that's not very familiar.

Talk us through it, yeah, please do.

I'm very, I don't want to like go super in-depth into it because,

one, it's child development, and I don't work a lot with children as a therapist, and so I don't know the full ins and outs of this.

Uh, and two, it is an old theory from like uh early 19, mid-1900s.

So I'm sure that there is a lot of like useful criticism and thought about this, but the basics are interesting.

One of the most important things is he was one of the first people, if not the first, to talk about the idea of egocentrism as an important marker of like childhood development and that specifically

When we are born, we think about the world in a very egocentric view.

Not necessarily like, I'm the best and coolest kind of ego but like as a kid it is hard for you to understand that there are other people who have their own independent thoughts feelings actions separate from you as an adult it just seems like it's hard for people to have that well you know so there's that too

And here we're talking literally, though, that like, you know, the kid's brain is still growing, right?

So there's like, there are literal governors on how much you can think about the world around you.

I just need the thing to put the food in.

Yeah, totally, right?

Um, this is also one of the theories as to why divorce is so hard on younger kids is because it is harder for them to understand that something can't be their fault

because they view the world through very much like, okay, I do this and then this happens, or you know, everything that people are doing has some effect on me, and so I'm thinking about it that way.

Um,

and so when I see Goan in this place, I think very much about like, oh, yeah, Goan's a kid.

Goan's like 11 or 12.

I think at this point, yeah, he's 13 because he was 12 and it's been like a year and change.

Yeah.

Still, same, same idea, same, very young.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so like

this, I mean, that scene also reminded me a lot of like, obviously I can't give details, but like work of clients where they are.

processing something that happened to when they were younger.

And a lot of times with trauma, we assume responsibility.

My theory for that is that if something's your fault, you can change it or you could have changed it.

And

so all of that I feel like is happening with Goan here, right?

He is a child who is trying to understand a trauma and a level of responsibility that he should never have had and that a lot of adults could have not given him, but went, no, you should have this.

Actually, I think it's good and cool that you'll have all this responsibility on you.

And as a side effect, it happens to be very useful for me that you actually have this responsibility.

For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's just sad.

It's just sad.

And it's, I feel like it is one of the few times in the show where the show like holds the mirror up to Gunn and is like, hey, this is a fucking kid, man.

This is just a kid.

Definitely.

And performance is really good here with Gunn.

Yeah, I wrote a lot of people.

It really drives home,

Dre.

Sorry, sorry, what you say, Sylvia?

I was just saying it really drives home what Dre's saying about he's a kid.

He's a fucking kid dealing with all this.

For me, this is where the Japanese VA really shines.

These high-emotion scenes over the dubs for Gonz Voice.

I think like there is an extra level of selling it for me.

Able, you know, hitting

the

simultaneousness of the anger and the sadness, not this sort of like

mix of angry, sad.

It's sort of like like doing both instead of like combining them.

I don't know if that makes sense, but that's sort of my lead on the two performances.

I think we talked about this with

the

scene when Goan first confronts Peto.

I think we mentioned similarly about the Japanese VA being able to really get a lot of depth in the performance.

Yeah, for sure.

It's really elegant.

Oh, go on.

Just

the other thing about the kite situation is like how clear it is that like, you know,

Goan's sort of transformation, especially since meeting Kite, has, you know, been about

redirecting and

masking or like finding stand-ins for like real emotion that he should be feeling.

Instead of feeling it, he's putting it on something else or like burying it.

And

like Kite shows up as kind of a connection to, but also a stand-in for his father, who from the very beginning of the series, Goan's relationship to Jing has been very confusing and seems like not fully.

He seems not sort of cognizant of how bizarre his relationship to his dad is at the beginning.

And like Kite's death sort of serves as an outlet, not just for grieving Kite, his friend who is his connection to his father, but also, like, this is Ghon's first expression of, like, uh,

sadness for losing that kind of person in his life.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is the first, like,

friend that Ghon has had that's died too, right?

Am I misremembering someone else?

That's

this kind of like

we've had people that were like allied with our protagonists who have died, but never someone who he's been like personally involved with.

Yeah, a lot of people in Greed Island died.

A lot of people in Greed Island.

We had some like, we had like Karapika's co-workers and if

the Phantom Type of the College of He never even met them, I don't think.

He never even met them, right?

Like that's what I was trying to think.

I was like,

who have been like sympathetic characters that have died?

And it's like, oh, yeah, this is also a kid dealing with

serious grief for the first time on top of all the complicated stuff that comes from

the relationship with his dad.

Yeah, I was gonna ask for

this.

It's kind of like a

combo Ali and Jack question because you've we were both coming at this from different ways.

Where Ali reading the manga, Kite shows up like super early on, right?

Like first chapter.

And Jack, you didn't get kite until we got to the Chimera ant arc.

Right.

And I'm wondering how,

like,

does that have does that basically affect affect with how this hits in any way?

Do you think, like, would if

the anime adaptation had Kite earlier on, do you think this would have gone, like, not gone smoother?

Because I think it is still effective.

Like, we've talked about it enough that I know that this still affects you, but I guess, would it have carried extra punch if you had known that in the background, Gon has always sort of had this character that is a

surrogate father figure that he's looked up to

versus getting him introduced

like two-thirds of the way through the show, more than that, and

having to really like backload a lot of that stuff.

I guess my question is: do you think it could be better if they had done that GOG way?

I think absolutely, and I'm curious to hear how it went from Ali's perspective.

I think this scene is really emotive, and I think it works really well, but I think I would be

feeling it with a different kind of intensity if I had been with kite from the start

yeah i mean like it's

the the idea of like comparing the beginning of hunter hunter to where we have ended up um where there's this like

it's so childlike it's so serene that you sort of have gone and kite um

and going in this like beautiful forest with like meeting the bear and stuff and it's like well you know this is fun this is cute what's going on here um you know that like the the story has grown in this way and like kite is sort of both the first

like obviously a part of goat's family but also you're sort of like first conduit into this like

this setting and all um

god that yeah i didn't even think of that that like yeah it it it is it is really tough um i think the thing that's interesting comparing the the

what your experiences of the show is versus how it appears in the show is that, I mean, how it appears in the manga at least, is that there is not,

there isn't this back and forth.

There is actually just this like complete breakdown of what

sort of is expected in a manga where it's like basically just text on the screen.

There's like very minimal.

Sorry, I'm sending these images to myself now.

There's very

minimal, like even doing the like paneling effect of like

Goan speaking to himself or like two figures of Goan's emotions is not something that we get.

It is just

like portraits on a page and full screen text.

Let me just

shot jump at.

While Allie gets these screenshots, I just want to read some of the dialogue that we get while

Gona's freaking out and

Pito is starting to use Dr.

Blythe to heal their own arm.

Help.

Someone help.

Talking to no one.

Kite is gone.

I can't get him back to normal.

Kite is no, no, no, but, but, oh, wait.

Kite being dead is a lie.

Pito will heal him.

Wait.

why is it healing Pito's arm?

Turn Kite back to normal.

There's like a complete,

it's terrifying, like, cognitive breakdown, you know, like not an exaggeration to say that he has lost his ability to like interpret his immediate surroundings and the reality of the situation.

Yeah, these people.

When you say talking to no one, that's internal dialogue, too, right?

I don't know if we've mentioned that.

Sorry, yes, both it's internal dialogue and also like there is no one here.

Like like help someone help it doesn't mean anything it is like it's like purely reaction

mental overload you know

these pages that allie linked are really special you know as chapter 305 which is called sorry begins we see that that kind of classic pose of kite tipping his hat and the line all good hunters get along well with animals and gone saying i did this i killed kite oh they did the red and blue with with black and white

beginning to fix their arm uh and then gone and again just these bubbles Yeah, like rather than playing it in that sort of like classic setup that Golem really made very clear, very legible to audiences,

we do just have this all piled up on the screen.

I love the moves.

Yeah, yeah, there's something really.

Oh, go on.

I just want to add the one final thing: is that the photo that you get of Kite here is actually from like page 24 of

the Flash Chapter.

Like, this is like damn a flashback.

capital F

which again, why I wanted to ask that earlier because like we got the flashbacks too, but it doesn't like

it if it hadn't we got flashbacks to a flashback sequence as opposed to flashbacks to the first like few episodes of the show.

It really helps, I think, even just that we've talked so much about

how the manga introduces kite early because

I can't be sure when it was.

I looked it up, but when I was watching the Chimera Ant arc, it could have been this episode,

or it could have been

like

a little bit after Kite dies when it becomes very central to Goan's character.

I remember looking up, like, why does

Goan care so much about Kite?

Like, I understand caring about Kite.

You just met this guy.

I mean, you just met.

And

I was happy to find that there was an obvious answer to this, which is that in the manga, Kite was there the whole time.

And, you know, I think it's easy to let that just change how you feel about.

At least it was for me.

Like, I was able to just go, okay, they cut this out for some reason.

That's actually part of the story.

I get it now.

It explains why the anime is weaker in this particular way.

And it's a shame how intense that storyline goes with that they happened to cut, you know, six minutes, it would have been six minutes, you could have done it in six minutes, guys.

Yeah, I, it just seems weird because, like, it, you know, the

kite is so obviously a surrogate father to Goan, yeah, that, like, not having that context

is bizarre to me.

Like,

I, like,

especially because, like, the, this, the, the version of the show that we're watching is post so much of this releasing, right?

Like, the,

you could forgive the, what was it, 1997 anime for not knowing where the story goes.

99.

Yeah.

The production of this starts

after the Chimera Ants arc is released.

Right?

The 2011 anime started concurrently with Chimera Ant being released, or maybe towards the end of Greed Island.

Keith, I feel like you know more about this, but I'm not, if you don't know it, don't worry about it.

I think that you're right, but I'm not 100% sure.

I can do some fact-checking while we keep talking about this,

right?

Yeah, it's just like such a like a

so much of

Goan's grief here is attached to

Kite being a part of their

so much of Kite being a part of their entire life, you know,

that it's just

a weird decision to me.

Yeah.

And there's, there's, um,

there's been something, and, you know, whether or not it was intended or whether or not that was the way that the character was written in that, in that moment, you know,

I'm almost certain that Takashi was not thinking that far ahead.

But there's been a weird little worm in the apple from the start, right?

Like, Kite hits him across the face in that first encounter.

Which is interesting.

You know, Gohan's relationship to father figures has always been kind of fucked.

I think that this breakdown,

the

this is my fault.

You know, I killed Kite.

You know, Gohan has the line,

Peter was the one who killed him.

Not me, Beat, but it was me.

Somebody help me.

Please, anybody help me.

There are a lot of avenues that you could target Goan freaks on in terms of his selfishness, his narcissism, his unwillingness to think of somebody other than himself.

There are a series of like

damaging and consequential mistakes that Gohan has made over the last, you know, two and a half arcs or whatever.

He did not, this is not his fault.

You know, this is transparently not his fault.

And I think it is a really

fertile way to set up this scene to be that

the thing that is causing Goan to come apart is something that we can be very clear on as an audience.

I mean, if it had been the case that there was a way that you could view this as Goan's fault, that this was one of the ways that Goan's selfishness had led him and his friends into violence, you know, this would read very differently if we were watching this scene thinking to ourselves, well, you know, he kind of is right.

Yeah.

But

but this was Kite.

This was Kite and Peter.

You know?

And Kite was the one who said,

you're going to go into hell with me.

The final, I think,

piece of the puzzle here, too, is like

there's another person that was there with them who also was like, this is our fault.

And he, while Goan was busy sort of like burying this and like birthing the, you know, the rage version of him that we've seen for the last 20 episodes like kilua was dealing with this learning from biskey learning from moral

like oh no kite wouldn't have brought us if he didn't think that we could handle it and he was wrong and he gave his life to save us to prevent us from being hurt by his mistake Kilua understands this because instead of running away from the feeling, he like figured it out slash also

stuck a needle in his or ripped a needle out of his brain.

Speaking of figuring something out, I did my fact-checking to see when

the Hunter Hunter 2011 anime started and where the manga was.

Wow.

There is a one-day difference between so October 2nd, 2011, the first episode of the Hunter Hunter 2011 anime airs.

October 3rd, 2011, the Chimera Ant Arc ends in the manga.

Whoa!

Wow.

Oh, God, that has got to have been an incredible time to be a current Hunter-Hunter fan, right?

Because you're like, I've just finished reading Chimera Ant, and now they've, I get to, like, turn on my TV.

What do I see?

That's got to feel wild.

It's feel, I feel, finding that out right now has me feeling crazy.

Yeah.

But to the point of, like,

okay.

to my point of, you know,

this is not Ghon's fault and we know it.

The show asks us so often to sit with characters like deep in the mud of actions that they are partially responsible for or are totally responsible for.

And there's something about the

it is the combination of kindness and cruelty with which they treat Gone in this moment to let us join him in this grief, knowing that there was nothing he could do.

I'm curious about what what is the foundation of Goan's belief that it is his fault?

And the answer to that might be, good fucking question.

That's Goan freaks, you know, thinking that he's he is the cause and the solution to everything.

I'm trying to like reverse engineer what Goan thinks means he killed Kite.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's tough because

we've also been sitting with this feeling

of Goan's anxiety and sort of like intensity of purpose

for so long.

Like, I wasn't in these episodes, but some of my favorite chapters are when

Nav, is that his name?

When he's going into the

palace, placing the entrances and exits, and then you get everybody else sort of sitting in this room, just like boiler room, like going through all the steps.

Like the plan has

is coming together, and everyone has their own sort of anxiety about it.

And like the entire time,

there's this sort of like uncertainty and this, like,

oh, we don't know what to do with Goan.

Like, we have the plan set out, but nobody can interact with them because they, yes, they don't know how to.

Yeah.

And like,

I think to Dre's point,

before this sort of of like,

well, I'm going to save him.

The thing that I can do is save him.

And like, if you tell yourself for days or weeks on end of like,

I am in control of the situation and I am going to

make a mark on it.

And suddenly that option is just like, take it away.

Yeah.

It's like,

you know, just soul crushing.

I don't have to worry about what the truth is because I'm going to reverse the situation entirely.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, I, you know, I

am going to put my mark on this and fix these things.

And the fact that, like, you know, the, the, the, the point of view gets so molded into, like, I can be the one to save kite

that I can't save kite becomes I failed at saving kite.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's also like a little hint, and I don't think he's, I don't think he's quite piecing this together because he really is in the

soup.

My note here is really caught in a bind here, Goan.

I think the only thing that he's that he's sort of beginning to intuit, even if he can't quite name it yet, is that his own optimism is not the engine that he thought it was.

You know?

To Ali's point of like, sort of like wanting it so much that you make it true.

We have sort of always seen Goan as this like

bullet train of optimism and obstinacy, and this is it hitting a wall.

And I think something interesting about specifically this situation is that in every other case,

Goan's optimism and obstinacy was convincing.

But when he looks at the camera and say, Kite's going to be all right, we're going to save him.

Nobody believes that.

Nobody believed it.

It didn't work.

It didn't work from that moment and it never started working.

No one ever thought it could happen.

Like, like we talked about earlier, there's a shred

because you need the shred to do serial drama.

But to do good serial drama, you need to not be able to solve every problem with a guy who really believes.

Yeah, I, you know,

and again they're these are plot points and conversations that i maybe wasn't here for so maybe it was discussed at the time but like when you see the the more senior hunters behaving in the palace and the sort of like

we knew what the mission was going to be here we you know i can run even though i know he's going to die because

we're sort of on the same page about this or like

the knuckle thing of like oh it was such an affront that he, you know, did, he punched my friend and now I have to stay here and whatever.

Like it is, it is shocking to me that like there's such a failure of

like mentorship here that none of them were like, oh, this is what it's like to lose someone in battle.

Like let's have the conversation about what happens when we get in there and Kite isn't able to be saved if the plan has to change or something.

Like There's this so like, like, you know,

the, you know,

Goan is such like a hot stove that they can't even touch it.

And this like failure to even try to get through to him, to reason with him at all is like such a tremendous failure that like leads to this breakdown because there's not any.

you know, so many pages spent being like, well, what are we not considering?

Like, how could the plan go wrong?

Like, there's always something that you can't account for.

What are we not accounting for?

And, like, Goan is just sitting there the entire time, and nobody's accounting for him.

Well, and I think part of it, you know, what makes it even worse is like,

you know, Goan is a hot stove, and Morrill is like, well, we need a hot stove.

So we can't, that's a kind of thing, too, right?

But

his whole point was, I wasn't sure about Goan, but I realized that he is a horrible ball of tension, and we need to fire him in the right direction.

We need young tigers, and

we can't fix him, or he won't fire right.

To make some synergy with Allie's podcast, AMCA, you guys talk a lot about how Luke Skywalker is like a weapon being fashioned to shoot at

the Empire.

They're kind of doing that Tagon, where it's like, yeah, you're saying, kind of.

Yeah, but

the thing that makes Hunter Hunter evil and Star Wars not evil is that

Goan is a kid and they never thought it would be a finishing blow.

They were sharpening him to be maybe a glancing blow on the number three guy.

Yeah, they were going to sacrifice this 12-year-old.

At least they fashioned Luke Skywalker into a guy that could kill Darth Vader.

Yeah.

And then Yoda even tries to stop him from going to fight Darth Vader.

Yeah, it's true.

Yeah, I think that, like, oh my God, even thinking about Luke Skywalker here compared to Goan is so sad because like the

it feels like

especially with the Goan that we saw earlier the the sort of like intense kindness the sort of like

maybe not always kindness, but like

optimism straightforwardness, optimism.

Yeah, the there's a brightness to both of them, right?

Like, you would, when you, when you consider Goan, there's always this expectation that there would be like enough plot armor around his purity of heart.

Yeah, you know, like, we would, you know, the hero would win at the end of the day.

We would constantly see the sort of like, you know,

niceness.

And, like,

Luke Skywalker's power is that he loves his father.

And that, like, yeah, which also is kind of

power, right?

Like,

you know, that is Gowen's like fatal flaw, really, honestly.

Well, there's there's another interesting parallel with them where, um, you know, my uh, second favorite Star Wars movie, Return of the Jedi,

um,

uh,

Luke Skywalker shows up dressed in black, forced, force-choking Gamorians, you know, this is a, he, he hunted out.

He, let's say, I'll say it.

Yeah, Exactly.

I think that we're all on the same page.

We were all thinking the exact same words, which is Luke Skywalker was cunted out.

I saw the Chanel boots.

Yeah.

And the shirt that I have that says that.

Sorry.

Luke Skywalker, he shows up.

under the negative influence of the dark side of the force.

However, Star Wars conceives of that as as an idea.

Luce Guywalker is doing that.

He has let the anger of the end of the last movie change who he is, convince him that his anger is a strength, convince him that by giving into that anger, he can accomplish his goals.

And his goals were specifically violent.

And

by the end of that movie, he has cast that off.

He's He's like reintegrated the, you know, the light side of the force to the extent that the movie doesn't even allow him to be the one who kills the bad guy.

He doesn't kill the bad guy.

He doesn't kill either of the two bad guys.

They kill each other.

And

Hunter Hunter does not give you that.

Hunter Hunter is like.

Not at all.

This guy is fucked.

And it's like, I really, yeah, I really wonder, like, what the, because I, you know, I have gotten as far as we, we've gotten here.

So, like, the intention, there's either the, the hero's journey, the Star Wars thing of like,

oh, you face adversary, you get through it, you grow up, you still become the hero, you know, things are fine.

But, like, with Togashi

going back to these sort of like shonen

ideas and, you know, trademarks or whatever else, tropes, I guess is the word I'm looking for.

Is it like what you're really seeing is just like the decay of this person?

Um, so, like, I, you know, I'm so curious to know what like the full thesis is because I don't know,

I have no idea where it could go from here because it seems pretty low, like it just

and like the constant sort of subversion of what you might

expect to have, like what would be a triumph, especially through Chimera Arc,

you know, specifically.

These sort of like trigger points of where there should be victory and just aren't.

And then like even the like monster race that we're all supposed to be rooting against are like becoming more and more human, whereas like Ghost's

personality is like, you know,

decaying.

Yeah.

And I think anytime you're watching TV or, you know,

reading any sort of like mass market like material for

the last who knows how many decades, I think viewers and readers are kind of trained to be like,

you know, consciously or unconsciously, like, okay, where do they let the steam out?

Like, where's the valve here?

Like, when is the pressure?

Where do they lower the pressure?

And consistently, we've seen,

you know, maybe like little tiny bits of that here and there.

But on the big questions of like

the big overarching plot points, the big character movements, you know, we're building and building and building pressure

non-stop since the end of the Green Island arc.

Like,

yeah.

It's

crazy.

It's crazy.

Like, I don't know how much, how valuable it is to still talk about like ants versus humans, and they're becoming more human.

But, like, hey, the show is still talking about it.

Right.

When we were talking about the

reactions from Poof and

the anti-name, I can't pronounce.

Yupi.

It's like many, but what do you mean?

Oh, you're talking about men to the Yupi.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When they're like, oh, i know what we have to do now we have to kill everybody i think in that panel there's there's like the sort of narrator voice talking and being like and in that moment they chose to be ants whereas with the um fight with the king and the old guy um the master i guess there was the sort of like oh i can see he's still choosing between

what he's going to become yeah

um

And this sort of like,

I don't know, this like the constant shifting of the dichotomy of like, oh, they've become this sort of force together and like have this like

new understanding of like sympathy and relation to each other.

But three pages ago or whatever, it was definitive they have decided to become ants.

They have, they've committed themselves to the mission of killing humanity.

Yeah.

Is

like the constant swirling around that idea is

getting interesting.

And I don't know if where Cohn is going to end up on the like

the political scale of

capable of feeling sympathy.

Um,

so something your political alignment chart of ant, human, nice, not nice.

Something that is that this scene does that is both

really entertaining to watch happen and really useful narratively is that it begins to move us back towards wanting the I mean we've always wanted the best for Goan freaks but there was a there was a moment during this block of episodes where he was like if you talk I will kill that civilian it's as evil as he's been

and now as we have Peto going to summoning Dr.

Blythe to heal their arm and Goan saying of course kite was never dead that was all a lie pito's going to fix him now why Why are you healing your arm?

Please, you can do that after you finish fixing Kite.

This is the moment that, you know, John Williams' Jaws score starts coming up in the soundtrack.

And, you know, the camera starts to position itself, finally, back behind Goan Freaks as something other than, like, a pure terror, as we start to move towards a fight that we want to feel.

You know, if Peter had lashed out at Goan in that moment when Goan said, you know,

act again and I'll kill the girl,

we'd have been excited for and probably rooting for Goan because he is our capital P protagonist that we've been with, you know, he's in the cover of the goddamn thing.

And that's how you know who the protagonist is.

Being sneak attacked is sort of a loaded thing.

Yes, but here in this scene, we are journeying more naturally towards the restoration of Goan as someone we would feel tense and afraid and excited for in a big Shonen fight.

Is that

to do that?

Are you saying this as sort of a prediction?

I'm saying that I suspect that that's what's happening here, that we need to move expeditiously towards Goan as someone we feel good about against.

Or the consequences of a fight between the two characters would be

pull at the tension like even harder.

Yeah, yes, definitely.

And it's very Tagashi that the way that we get there is we reduce Goan to a broken child.

Yeah, that gets us back on site.

But, you know,

we end by Palm seeing this and basically saying, fuck.

And Killer is saying, what?

And Palm says, Goan is slumped on the floor next to Pito.

Now,

that's the sound of someone slumping.

There's two ways that you could read this, and I would put either either of them past Tagashi.

One, Goan has slumped on the floor because he is midway through his Gollum breakdown.

Pito is preparing Dr.

Blythe to attack Goan.

Two, he's hunter-exammed us again, and the fight is going to have happened off-screen.

And Goan is slumped on the floor because Pito has beaten him.

Sorry, the first thing is...

The slumping that we've already seen.

That's what you're...

Yes.

Okay.

And the second one is that there's a new kind of slumping.

produced by an off-screen rice.

Okay, gotcha.

Gotcha.

I thought this was great.

Yeah, I do want to make one final point about Pito and Goan, which I've found really interesting going through the manga, which is that

in previous pages

between the you have to stop doing that.

Sorry, my cat keeps knocking into my XLR cable because she wants to walk back and forth.

Wow.

In previous pages, post the

fight with Puppet Kite, Pito has appeared as this sort of like

smoke of antagonism.

Like whenever

anyone mentions Pito or thinks of Peto, there's this like unclarity in the way that they are drawn

in this sort of like squiggly smoke cloud like

is too evil to even consider.

And the way that that sort of drawing,

like,

technique gets reversed when Pito is on screen and Goan is staring them down as they're healing Kagomi is incredible.

Like, Goan is the one drawn with these, like, really harsh lines and, like, face completely covered in shadow, whereas Pito is like

the most detailed they've ever been, like full, like, like

full clarity of face.

Like, their eye ducks are being drawn, like this, like, stone, like, I am under threat here, and I am actually, like, intimidated and afraid.

Yeah.

Um, that I think has been super successful.

They do that in the anime, too.

It's not quite as stylized from Pito's perspective, but Goan is definitely drawn, like, shadowed over, like crossed-hatched, you know, darkened,

like literally a shadow cast over him versus like Pito, who had been appearing purple and evil and malevolent and sort of half visible, instead like looking afraid and sad and scared.

It's extremely good.

It's been extremely good.

Do we have any final thoughts?

Well, so something I've been thinking about as we've talked about this is we're talking kind of the like reset of of Gone being someone that we're not afraid of, but afraid for is like a really it's like a really it's interesting how like it quickly

um

throughout this arc, I'm gonna rewind.

Throughout this arc, um, Tagashi has been slowly doing this with both the king and with Goan of like

sort of flipping the audience perspective on them very slowly through what we see of them.

With with Goan, it's seeing how like far he's willing to go for his revenge.

with merouam it's seeing him sort of like

become more of a person not in terms of like oh he's becoming more human but like he's literally like developing as a like right he's developing a personality and interests and stuff as opposed to just being the like all-powerful bug man and then this scene is just basically like tagashi pulling the rug out on a lot of the gone stuff.

Not to be like, oh, you shouldn't have been afraid of him, but it's like, you were afraid of a child this whole time.

Like, you were afraid of someone who is a hurt, scared, like 12-year-old.

And that's like, I think that's really effective.

I think it's really, I think it's why this scene, like, almost like, I was tearing up when Gon was having his freak out.

I was, uh, I was like really feeling it.

And I was like, yeah, it's because

Throughout this whole thing, we've been trying, we've been talking, I mean, us especially, have been talking a lot about how, I don't know if i'm rooting for gone in this situation oh pito's the protagonist and all this stuff and then you get this scene and in an instant it's just all sort of melts away into

um

like like pathos for gone

and like i think it's really effectively done and i just wanted to to give that a quick shout out as um

another form of tagachi tricking us it's something very cruel that's been done to gone by the people

which i think that we've been

insistent on,

like

being instrumentalized, being kind of

sidelined by adults, being sort of taught the wrong lessons, being taught to learn the wrong lessons from things.

And we can see even now is learning the wrong lessons from things.

What do you mean?

He's a full-blown tiger.

What do you mean?

Like Jack said, even his moment of sort of understanding is misunderstanding.

Yeah,

it's really sad.

Yeah, and it's so interesting because it's like, I don't know what the opposite of writing yourself into a corner is,

but it's created a situation where it's like,

is there even a satisfying outcome between a showdown between Pito and Goan here?

Like,

I don't have a

feeling of what it means for Goan to win.

Like, the measure of success has been so removed from the board

that, like,

you know, what is even Goan's goal in this situation anymore?

Um,

like.

Like, from like a show's perspective or from like an audience perspective, like, if I had to write on a little envelope, like, what,

what would the the healthiest and best and,

you know,

triumphant thing to happen is, like, you know,

like leaning on Kiloa in some way, like, being emotionally vulnerable, like being able to just get out of the situation and somehow rekindling that relationship.

Yeah, I mean, the terrifying thing.

The terrifying thing is that we've already heard about a Goan and Pito fight, like, as formidable as they've made Ghon seem in these episodes, it was only

in episode 127, which you just watched, where Okalgo says, even if Goan uses all the power he has right now, it won't be enough.

He still won't be able to beat Pito.

In fact, even if all three of us join him, Pito still has us outmatched

and knows that just as well as we do.

That honestly really surprised me because we did get the moment earlier.

I don't remember the the exact episode but it was when

gone was negotiating quote negotiating threatening uh threatening pito and komugi and we got the like flash of the the tiger face on screen and pito being like i can't let him get to the king um

which made me like i was like oh okay so Gone is a threat.

And then it's it's back now to no Gone is a human child and that is a evil cat ant who is going to destroy him.

Yeah, I think that I think that

Peto was in a peculiar state during that.

It was like

anything

that happens wrong could happen wrong for Komugi.

And so like everything that he could do is a threat instead of like

in a controlled environment, maybe not the case.

Sorry, or i guess in a not controlled environment

yeah

should we briefly raise the possibility that the show might kill gone

i want to i want to talk about this briefly okay

i

do not believe that tagashi would kill gone

in the anime.

Maybe somewhere down the line, you know, maybe Hunter Hunter ends with Goan Dying.

I don't believe this because I think that for all of Tagashi's acrobatic

intensity and narrative bravery, killing the Shounen character who is in many ways the mascot character of your franchise is not the thing you do.

You know, Hunter Hunter key art is Goan Freaks.

Yeah.

I think that part of...

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Part of what makes Hunter Hunter so good is that Tagashi looks down the camera and says, I can do worse than kill him.

Watch this.

Watch what I can make this 12-year-old do.

However.

And you know, I feel like I'm sure I have heard people talk about, you know, the running joke about the current

manga is that he's forgotten about Goan and Killia, which makes me think that Goan is still alive.

It could be that there's been a bizarre long game being played on me, and Goan isn't going to make it out i think it's telling that i am genuinely starting to entertain the question does goan make it out of this anime even though i think that the answer is of course he does it's it's gone freaks you don't kill go

um they actually kill goku all the time

but but then what happens but not in any way

comes back in like a week yeah

Yeah, what were you going to say, Keith?

So I actually, I was entertaining the possibility of reminding you of something just to be annoying that I know that you know, which is the absence of

Goan from

in the manga.

Just to

bother you.

Yeah, there's a weird thing happening here, which is that some people might be thinking, how could Jack

know whether or not this is the case or not?

But my experience of Hunter Hunter is that I watch the episodes and I talk to you about it on the recording, which means that my understanding of what is happening, and you know, of course I see stuff getting retweeted or whatever, you know, I exist in the world, but I'm never seeking out information, which leads to this strange thing where I'm like, I'm fairly sure Goan is alive right now, off somewhere in the manga, but I can't be sure, you know?

Sure, yeah.

I don't know.

You said,

you know, Tagashi's Tagashi's trick is that he'll say, I can do something worse than kill this 12-year-old.

And we have seen Tagashi working with really surprising outcomes to things.

But so would killing a main character be surprising.

And I mean, other, you know, main characters get killed in fiction all the fucking time.

But there is something about killing your shiny protagonist permanently.

Yeah.

What if Naruto Shibuden didn't have Naruto in it?

Because he died at the end of Naruto.

Because he died.

And not like he died at the end of, you know, like,

you know, I could see Hunter-Hunter the manga ending by killing one of these characters.

I think it is unlikely that

at the point that the

point that the

manga was at when they started adapting 2011, you know?

I don't know.

I love that I have to ask this question.

It's a good show that makes you think

maybe.

Hmm.

Hey, maybe.

Hey, maybe.

You know, but I'm watching.

Yeah,

you know.

We'll see.

Maybe.

I don't know.

We're not even sure who the good guys are.

Yeah.

Jack, can I ask how often you've been texting?

Oh, yeah.

Infrequently.

I don't think it's come up on the show.

He's been reading the new stuff and really enjoying it.

So I need to.

I'm so jealous.

The stuff that he's reading now,

he knows where I am in the Chimera and Arc.

We just haven't been talking about it.

But I said, oh, you're enjoying the new stuff.

And he said, it makes where you are in the Chimera and Arc look like the Hunter exam or something.

He was like, he would say,

what?

I can't even imagine it.

Especially, especially knowing what happens next time we're recording.

Yeah.

What?

He's like, this is baby time.

You know?

My impression is that there's basically.

Here's my impression.

Again, I don't know.

I genuinely don't know.

My impression is that the stuff, it's either the stuff right after the anime or the stuff right after that is like some sort of awful combination of the Chimera Ant, awful as in...

in the biblical sense.

A little awe-inspiring.

Yeah.

Awful combination of the York New arc and the Chimera Ant arc have some sort of horrible baby.

That's like my broadest impressions of the vibe.

We need to speed up our recording schedule so I can start reading this.

This is what's happening now.

I'm like holding my head in my hands.

I need to know what Tagashi's putting.

I'm so excited to read Tagashi, like

the pure

essence of Tagashi, unfiltered.

You know,

I'm dreading it, but I'm still looking forward to knowing what happens.

I'm so excited.

Yeah, I don't know, because we know that once he invented the Phantom Troop, he couldn't put that genie back in the bottle, and he got so excited that he brought them back midway through Chimera and.

By the way, how true was it about that

hot air balloon ride?

Yeah, true.

You have no idea.

It's amazing.

So barring the possibility that he ends the Chimera Ant arc, killing every Chimera ant, he's going to have Chimera Ants on the board for stuff to do in future.

And I wouldn't put it past it.

Remember how far we got through the chimera ant arc and then he was like, this chimera ant fish, and he introduced a calgo.

Like, I wonder if he did.

You know, at some point, way down in the manga, he's going to be like, there was a chimera ant I never told you about.

He's called Prisbin.

He's called Gyro.

Can I?

Right.

Yes.

Can I.

I want to lay,

I want to plant a seed

for stuff that I, again,

I don't know.

I have like one little fact that is not a spoiler, but it is.

Please.

I believe that the post-anime stuff is predicated upon

a sort of metaphysical realignment of what it means to be in this world that is like what learning then was like.

Oh my god.

Yeah,

this brings to like another possibility that

like

I think is just taken for granted as you read this and you think, oh, the chimera ants, like that is a situation we are going to get through and then the world is going to move on.

But like

the world state has changed so significantly

that you, there isn't really a status quo to go back to.

They destroyed a continent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean,

everyone on a continent.

Keith has already told us.

Oh, sorry.

Go on.

Well, yeah, I just think that there's, there's a bit either in these chapters or, or maybe it came up in the episodes that, like,

or no, it would have been earlier because the thing of the guy with the big pipe being like, oh, it's a good thing that all of the humans are like playsated by

weird spell or whatever, because we thought that they were all going to panic and a bunch of them would die, but we just kind of have to do this anyway, right?

And like the idea that like, you know, there's this sort of like,

oh, I have to do this to save the world because the hunter,

you know, organization says that I have to.

This sort of understanding of like, what even is the world anymore?

Like, what sort of care is even going to be taken to bring these people back to their homes or rehabilitate them?

And like, part of the setting that some of this even takes place in was like, this is just a big part of the continent that like people who can't go anywhere else go to.

Yeah.

And it's covered in trash.

Like, what are we doing, man?

I think one of the, like, one of the casualties of writing a story at this scope is like how Tagashi moves in and out of caring about regular people.

Like the, when we're talking about, you know, Poor Man's Rose and all of these people who were killed by it, like we get these kind of tragic snapshots of normal people living normal lives the instant before they're snuffed out of existence.

But as a minute-to-minute experience, the show is like so minimally concerned with like anyone who doesn't have Nen to the point of like, I was thinking about this, Jack, when you were talking about

how they didn't drop nuclear bombs on the Emperor.

They dropped them on people.

And

what I was thinking of like, well, what people would they drop them on that would matter to the story.

Like, obviously, it would be horrible to watch the show do that to a bunch of people,

but that's just not the kind of thing that the that the story is interested in.

And so you have to have this sort of like combining of like, well, the emperor is the people.

Like, those

aren't his subjects in any meaningful way.

Like, Komugi is his subject.

That's why she was hurt and almost killed.

Right.

I think the language we've used in the show before is having Nen makes you real.

Yeah.

In a different way.

Yeah.

Sorry, Dre, I think you were going to say something.

Oh, no, I was just talking.

Okay.

It was from before Allie said something.

I thought that I heard you.

Maybe I'm someone else.

We'd be saying stuff.

Yeah, we're always talking on this.

Do we have anything else?

Allie, how are you liking Gonan Kilua

as a pair of characters that were were sort of the impetus for your interest in?

Yeah, I mean, it's tough to, well, yeah, I was going to say that it's tough to think of them as a pair of characters still, but like, Kilowa's

sad jetization.

That's so sad.

Like, Kilua's whole identity is so attached to this that, like,

it's just tough.

That's like, you know, that's sort of like the question of like, what's even going to happen with the ants?

What's going to happen with this Pito stuff?

Like, the only thing really worth being invested in now, it feels like, is going in Kiloa's relationship.

And, like, the

forecast

does not look good.

It does not look like this is, they're going to continue being positive influences in each other's lives.

It's been a while since that was true.

Yeah.

You know,

the moment that I was really thinking about this is when

Kiloa is having the conversation with

Ikago, the octopus ant.

And then just sort of like really plainly saying, like, this is what friendship is like.

You don't have to thank me because we're just going to do these things for each other.

And also, I'm taking you into a life where

you're definitely going to

be,

you know, risking your life all of the time unless you are willing to take an almost lethal dose of poison.

Don't even like talk to me or follow me or whatever.

First, I was like, God, I have to play Animal Crossing again because this is my guy Zucker.

And then, secondly, I was like,

it is so devastating that, like, there's

that Killewa's

like

perception of friendship has become so

like

just

torn through by yeah,

and that came up in these episodes.

That came up in these episodes where he's like kind of embarrassed to

like thank Paul for stopping.

But we did not mention this at all.

We didn't mention this at all.

And he's like, it was like, it was very sad.

It was also kind of cute.

And he's like, thanks for stuff.

Like, whatever.

Stop it.

And Paul's getting mad, like, what are you talking about?

And Kayla Wesley, like, we're friends now, so don't get used to me saying thanks.

I remember during the Ikago stuff bringing up, like, is this maybe bad?

And everyone, everyone, I think that I was alone on this, uh, uh, but it comes back up with the palm stuff, and I'm like, yeah, something's wrong here.

This is not normal.

Yeah, I mean, I do think, like, the, the sort of like,

you know, because we have this bond, it is sort of assumed that we will have each other's back is fine.

Right.

But this sort of, like, the, the, like.

He was taught to feel that way by an ungrateful friend.

Right.

Yeah.

Like putting words to it in that way and feeling like seeing how cleanly he sees it.

Yeah.

And does not, and is not going to reach a part of like,

is this a healthy relationship?

I know is is tough.

Understated on this podcast, I think, is how like

it is tough to want your friend to treat you in a specific way.

and

like

uh you know like everyone wants gone to be nicer to killua but there is this second half of it of like killua needs gone in a very specific way that like isn't happening and so

like maybe rethink like your whole shit

you can't be wrapping yourself up in this sort of like I just have to make him treat me this specific way.

Or, I don't know.

I don't know what's going to happen, but he just has to.

That's also not good.

Hey, I know that this is how adaptation works.

And, you know,

I don't think that there is a big sinister thing happening here or even a particularly unusual thing happening here, but it's crazy that they're making this into a fighting game, huh?

That's almost all.

This is like the ninth one.

There is some crazy stuff about that that we can't even talk about yet.

Oh, really?

Oh, I'm like, yeah.

Oh, I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

But the idea of being like, point them at each other.

Go.

Go.

It does under.

It sells the wrong product.

And also, simultaneously, the product that the show is very interested in talking through.

All right.

What are we watching next time?

Next time, we're watching three episodes.

An easy, breezy, threesy.

Yeah, thank you for spending a four with us.

Yeah, thanks for spending a four, Ali.

Oh, I was thinking Allie.

Listeners, too.

Oh, and Allie, too.

I think the listeners prefer the fours, but I guess I don't know.

We're watching episodes 131, 132, and 133,

which I swear to God I had the titles for a second ago, but I always just close it for no reason.

There we go.

Anger and Light, Flash and Start, and deadline to live.

Oh.

Hmm.

Well, that's interesting.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Okay.

So, do you have a review for us?

Oh, I do.

It's a bit of a long one, but it's a fun one.

This is titled The Narrator's Review.

From

someone whose name is Fredgar.

There's a question mark at the end.

I guess I'll try and read this in.

I think this is supposed to be done in the narrator voice, so.

Keith's Nen power.

They're giving us all nen powers, by the way.

Keith's Nen power works like this.

Through focused preparation, he is able to create a soundscape that summarizes important developments in dialogue and soundtrack in a way that

sympathetically resonates with a listener's end offenses, rendering it vulnerable to future strikes.

Yep.

From Media Club Plus, Omniscient Soundboard, Chain Blaster.

Also, he can can make any sound.

Organic soundborg.

Sorry.

Organic soundboard.

Impossible impressionist.

I would be an organic soundborg.

Yeah.

There's more, obviously.

But, you know, I just wanted to...

I'm going to let everyone breathe after their ability gets read.

Yeah.

Sylvia's net ability allows her to connect emotionally to almost any character, except, rightfully, to clown perverts.

Thank you.

Any character, whether initially presented as a friend or foe, hero, or villain, or especially a dreamy guy named after the devil, can be recontextualized through her analysis.

And when she utters a striking blow, such as, I would die for blank, the ritual is complete, and the listener cannot escape.

Their emotions, bound by Sylvie, with her own.

Protagonist reversal, true feelings for false husband.

Really good.

Dre waits patiently, strengthening their nen attacks through listening and observing, a technique learned through years of study and practice.

When the time is right, they strike by delivering knowledgeable insights into human thoughts and behaviors.

These blows are made more powerful by the binding nen condition they set upon themselves to avoid cheap armchair psychology takes.

It has been 30 minutes since the start of your session.

Actual professional with actual years of training.

From it has been to 30 minutes to the end there, that is all the name of your ability, Dre.

Perfect.

To be clear.

Perfect.

Jack's unique ability allows them to catch fleeting glimpses into the nun realm.

Though they may not have yet found the words to articulate their visions, they approximate it as a sort of demon world.

This realm is hard to recall and harder to describe, which means that Jack's predictions are simultaneously erroneous and scarily accurate.

This results in their spoken words and musical performances being infused with an additional deep power from the nun realm, favorite herald of the abyss.

We got one more, one more paragraph for a collective here.

Collectively, it is widely known that each each of Media Club Plus' words are imbued with an amount of aura so small that a listener cannot detect its presence even while using N.

After absorbing literally

hundreds of hours of content, their collective powers will activate and combine as this aura manifests into compelling a listener to leave a glowing podcast review, even if they have never reviewed any podcast before.

Dripping Water Voices Five-Star Flood.

However, unbeknownst to most, the collective possesses another ability.

By channeling and merging their full strengths, they are able to loud, long beeping noise.

And that's the end of the review.

Thank you for that.

I really enjoyed that one.

That was great.

I want to say I only ever received three complaints about the beeps, but I did take them to heart.

Only three.

They were from Yupi, Peto, and

Poof.

Yeah.

And I did make them way quieter.

They're like minus 17 dB from everything else.

So I think some people have, you know, sensitive beep hearing.

DB stands for damn beep.

Damn beep.

Who are we calling to action this time?

Allie, do you have a name that you would like to ask someone to review?

No, not review the name.

You know what I mean.

Review the name if you want to come in and review the name.

Have we had a Robert yet?

No.

I don't believe so.

I want to get every Bob.

I want to get every Billy.

I want to get a Robert.

I want to get Rob.

I want to get the Robbies.

Get them in here.

Write a review.

If you're a William that goes by Bob.

Oh, if you, well, okay, sure.

Okay, sure.

Why not?

Yeah.

It's weird that you do.

If you're a William that goes by Bob,

you know, et cetera.

It's beautiful.

Also, if you're a Robbie whose last name is Williams, could you shout out our podcast?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Are you also, did you turn into a monkey in that movie because of Nen?

Oh, was that like your Nen ability?

Are you, do you know, Gorinu?

Or, yeah, are you Nen?

Are you someone else's nen?

Oh,

thank you for joining us, Ali.

I can only imagine that when you join us again,

you know, I don't even fucking know what's going to happen.

I do.

Yeah, I have to wait for Keith's invitation, it seems like.

So, you've got it.

You've got it.

You're coming back.

Okay.

Hey, it's fine.

You can just, if you don't want to come back, just say.

I did not like my experience here and do not listen again to this.

Sally is going to leave our first one-star review.

I was on this date.

I was on this podcast with

me come back again without asking.

Would not recommend going on.

Speaking of going on,

to give Jack, to give you some feelings about what might be happening next time, Austin will be here.

That'll be fun.

We'll have a two-gester in a row,

which we haven't done before.

There's usually a handful of apps at least between guest appearances.

I think that that's it.

I think that we have no other words to say.

You should support us at friendsatthetable.cash if you like the work that we do.

We really appreciate it.

And it helps us

episodes in the Chimera Anarch.

Oh my god.

Yeah, we're in it.

Will I say something?

This is the first time that I have guested on the show and caught up on these episodes and then immediately needed to read more on Tagashi.

Yeah.

Oh, and you're in for a treat, Allie.

Yeah.

Tagashi's treat.

Tagashi's treaty.

Finally.

Yeah, finally.

Tagashi's treat.

Time and time again, he's chosen Trek, and finally, he's chosen

chosen tweet.

I personally love to read a manga.

I wish.

I wish I was there.

I love to read a book.

Fair enough.

I like when there's pictures.

The pictures make it hard for me to read because of how many pictures there are and how few words.

We've sort of got opposite brain going on with this one.

Yeah.

I think it's the no

mental images thing.

I find it really hard to remember events in pictures.

Fam.

So

it becomes very difficult to like.

Remember things that are only told in pictures because I don't have a memory of the pictures.

Like movie.

Hey, Jack.

Movies are different because they're a continuous reality.

And so there's like non-stop visual information.

TV shows are the same way.

But like when there's still images, it becomes so abstract in my memory that

I end up having to reread.

Like

I was following a Star Wars comic in like 2012.

And every new episode, every new issue that came out, I would have to reread like the last five or six issues to remember what was going on with the nightmares.

Yeah, it's tough because you're really only like thinking about an image for like

three seconds at a time, really.

Yeah, um,

and I hate to say it, but

I really think that I'm in like the absolute bottom percentile in like appreciating visual arts, like the actual visual aspect of them.

Uh, like

I just,

it's not true, but it's like

almost true to say I don't care about art.

I think you're doing yourself a disservice.

Yeah, I to call yourself bottom percentile is pretty rough.

Like,

when I see people talking about, like, oh my God, I love this artist.

I'm like, I literally can't relate.

I don't love any artist.

Okay.

I mean, I think that's different than saying that you just don't like art.

I know, not that I don't like it, I don't appreciate it.

What about the beautiful works of Vincent Van Gogh?

I think he's very nice.

He seems like he's had a sad life.

Yeah.

He seems like a very nice young man.

Oh, the guy from Doctor Who.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've never, I've really liked the painting i've never been emotional about a piece of visual art um still crazy yeah it's i've never been affected emotionally by by still visual art

keith do you think it would help if we went to an art museum together and we stood in front of every painting and i looked like very intensely at you and said do you like this one

No, but I've been to museums.

I love museums.

I like looking at them, but I don't feel anything.

I mean, I feel

like,

oh, that's a nice one.

That's part of the feeling.

That's serious.

But that's the extent.

That's like the, that's as far as I go is, oh, that's a nice one.

You know what I mean?

But you have an internal sense of what you think is a nice one and what.

Oh, for sure.

I'm like

deeply critical.

positive and negative about what I'm seeing all the time.

That's it,

buddy.

That's appreciating art.

Yeah.

But

I think you might be doing the thing where you assume other people are experiencing something more than you are.

Like that, there's like it almost sounds like you're saying there's a version of appreciating art that other people do that I just don't do.

And I don't know if that's that is where people don't look at something and become like emotional.

They don't, they look at it and they're like, I'm happy

if this makes me

yeah, I don't get that.

It happens less often than it than it doesn't.

But usually when I go to a museum, I'll see some stuff that moves me.

Yeah.

I like, you know,

I occasionally would go to the Isabel Spier Garden Museum in Boston, which I think is a great museum.

Is that the one that had the heist?

Yes, it is the one that had the heist.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, they were subject to the heist.

They were subject.

Right.

They didn't do it.

Hold it.

It's an extraordinarily rich woman whose extraordinarily rich husband died and used her money to turn her home into a museum.

And

it's a fascinating building.

And they've, you know, kept all the art hanging up.

And

they kept all the art hanging up.

It's wildly famous artists, you know, like full of Rembrandts.

Actually, that was mostly what was stolen was Rembrandts.

But, you know, I like to go there.

I like to look at the paintings.

Who doesn't like to see three versions of The Rape of Europa?

You know what I mean?

Yeah, that's the one you picked, huh?

Just randomly.

It's a really really good one.

It is a really good one.

It's famously good.

But

like, yeah, I'll go.

None of them, I'm like, oh, this is like

really doing it for me.

I need to find the

comic image that's like...

Someone's standing next to like

art.

And it's like, what does it mean?

What do you beat?

Yeah.

I don't think I've seen this.

I don't think I've seen it.

There's also the really good one of lifting up the kid.

Oh,

that one makes me have the emotional experience that Keith can't.

I love that one.

It's a mother and her kid looking at a painting of, I think, Mary holding Jesus and saying, what do you think it means?

Lift me up so I can have a better look.

And she lifts her up and, you know, it's really good.

There's a side Tumbly piece called The Four Seasons that I would always just sort of been like, oh, that painting's that painting's all right, it's okay, you know, if you like side twumbly stuff.

And then I was in, I think, the

museum in DC or something, and I came around a corner and I saw that painting, and it made me cry.

And that was a real baffling moment because I was like, I did not realize that I would have this emotional response to this painting.

Yeah, and I can't explain that.

I have very positive responses to like the technical aspects of

paintings uh

like um

why am i banking on his name the guy who uh who drew the like um

uh

like the

the the two paintings he was he was poor dutch painter who was commissioned to do like the uh

uh like the the sisters and the brothers of these two charities that gave him you know like fuel for fire for the winter why can i not remember his name

I saw it in Ways of Seeing.

That's where I saw it.

Shout out to John.

I love, that's like my favorite thing in the world, by the way.

So I am saying this at the same time as like watching Ways of Seeing is like my favorite thing to do.

Oh, man.

I do like art.

I think it's pretty good.

I think we did pretty well.

Sure.

In the invention of art.

Yeah.

Or the discovery of art.

Sure.

It's a good chat.

Immediately.

I think we get extra credits.

Yeah.

Visual art.

I saw

Halls.

Is that who I'm talking about?

I do not know who you're talking about.

I saw a Leonardo da Vinci

sketch that he had done where he was sketching a thing and then he got bored or he ran out of time and he just doodled a figure in the bottom right.

That was very moving.

Leonardo being like, let me just draw a little guy.

Everyone does it.

Yeah.

During this recording, I've been doodling and I drew a snail, an eagle, a bird, a dolphin, and a llama.

Here we go.

It's

your favorite.

Franz Hall's Regents of Old Men's Alms House.

And then there's one, there's women's regents as well.

There's those two.

Those are the paint pictures.

Pretty sick.

They're pretty sick.

It's kind of austere.

Very austere.

Well, let's get back to it.

That's the part of it I like.

He had to draw these so that he wouldn't die in the cold.

That's the good part to me.

You're an interesting critter, bro.

I'm being bad on purpose.