Bottomless Malice - Hunter x Hunter ep. 125+126: Media Club Plus S01E40

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.

This season, we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshikira Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

But more importantly, what's happening right now is that the newest season of Friends of the Table Perpetua is, I think it's just dropped into podcast feeds.

There is a uh a day of date live stream on twitch that's all stuff that you've missed you idiot uh

hold on you've seen it all the podcast you lovely little person maybe you saw it but if you saw it then you know that this doesn't apply so you don't have to worry about that uh but if you're um

one of the missers Don't worry, that podcast is still there, like how podcasts are sitting in the feed waiting for you to listen to it.

Why don't you check it out?

You don't need any previous Friends of the Table experience to hop into this season.

We're starting with like a six or something episode long prelude world building thing.

Yeah.

And then in a month and a half, the actual body of the main series will be starting.

So very exciting stuff.

With me, as always, is Jack Takeet, who does the music for such a lovely season as this.

Hello, I'm Jack.

I do the music for such a lovely season as this.

And you can get that music at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Although, given that Perpetua is launching with a prelude, Perpetua is not launching with its theme just yet.

This is not, as you may fear,

the first Friends at the Table season without a theme.

That would be really weird if nine seasons in we were like, no, the music isn't doing it for us.

Jack, take a break.

Jack, sit down.

Yeah, sit down, please.

But we didn't want to open the prelude with the theme, but that will be available as we go at notquitereal.bandcam.com.

Keith kind of intimated it gently after berating some people, but I do sort of want to say explicitly, if you are a listener of Media Club Plus who doesn't listen to friends at the table and you have thought, you have felt even just the inkling, the germ in your heart of, I want to hear these people make their own story after having spent so long talking about somebody else's story, this would be a great time for you to jump in.

We would be so excited to hear people who listen to Media Club Plus and who haven't heard Friends at the Table jump on board with Friends at the Table for Perpetua Prelude 1.

You've got to do the hard sell, then the soft sell, then the real sell.

That's the way you get people.

You got to call them, hey, listen, moron.

Why don't you take a listen?

Also, here's why you should take a listen.

That's the only way to get anybody to do anything these days.

Also with me is Sylvie Bullet.

Hey,

Keith said soft cell and now I have tainted love stuck in my head.

The originators of the soft cell.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh gosh, I got thrown off thinking about synthpop.

Hey, here's another thing that we haven't brought up on the show as I go into plug our wonderful Patreon, friends of the table.cash, where you can get all sorts of bonuses for this show as well as Friends of the Table.

Even if you don't listen to Friends of the Table, there's the Clapcast on there for just a dollar.

And that's just us and the other folks from friends of the table basically uh fucking around in noon bits there's some uh episodes that are uh from this uh little project here recordings of us before uh we do a little media club and uh you can hear us talking about uh well like it wouldn't be up yet but like about like some city with weird lighting stuff going on i

was it Denmark?

Was it Danish?

Was it a Danish town?

A really cool Danish town.

It was a really cool Danish town.

Yes.

So if you want to learn about a really cool Danish town, go there.

But don't go there through the Apple app.

They did some changes to Patreon that I was reminded about today.

Oh, yeah.

Where if you subscribe through the Apple app, they're going to charge you

an extra 30%, I think.

Go through your browser if you want to support us and save yourself some grief.

Norwegian town.

Norwegian town.

Sorry, the original town that I was talking about was Danish.

The second town in a region.

Possibly, you can.

I'm on.

Look up Sylvie Bullet Online if you want to follow me.

I forgot to mention that, but

the friend, the Patreon's the important thing.

It is.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey,

your name starts with and.

Yeah.

And Andrew Lee Swan.

Well, okay.

I had a bit.

Just cut it off, Keith.

Okay, sorry.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, just reminding everyone: go visit our sponsors, Casper, and use promo code SADKILOWA to get $20 off your new mattress.

That's not real.

Is what I would say if we didn't have the support of everybody at patreon.com.

So, yes, go check out our Patreon.

It's what we would say if we didn't have a different sponsorship by Purple.

Go to purple.com, enter in the code SADKILOWA.

What's Purple?

It's a different mattress.

It's Casper again.

It's another internet mattress.

No, because they don't have the

gel stuff, the gel cubes.

Oh.

I have never ordered a mattress off the internet, and I don't plan on doing it anytime soon.

I've been sleeping on a mattress ordered off the internet for 10 years.

Good for you.

It's great.

Good for you.

I won't tell you which one.

It's a third secret one.

It's a third secret one, yeah.

We're getting all our jokes out of the way because it's really hard to make fun of the episodes we watch.

We are just watching two episodes today.

And a mirror too.

They are.

I would like to use the word mirror.

These are.

Do you have a recap?

I do.

Yes.

At the beginning?

It's never before seen heights of Tagashi's trick working through the bulk of the encounter between the Chimera Ant King and Chairman Netero.

But first, a little check-in on Goon Freaks, the boy who used to be the hero of this story.

Knuckle shows up in a way that shifts everyone's understanding about what's going on.

It's very psychological first half to the episode.

A lot of internal feeling and not a lot of like actual action.

And because it's a really good show, it still feels like weighty and interesting.

Most importantly, it puts Yupi more under Poof's suspicions and puts Pito and Komagi at risk when Poof breaks the deal that they struck with Goan.

And like a normal guy, Goan uses Poof's breach to punish Pito and alter the deal, reducing the time limit that they have to heal Komagi by 10 minutes.

After this, it's all king all the time.

Netero uses his

100-type Guanian Bodhisattva attack to break a hole in the earth, revealing a giant empty chamber.

And the fairly drawn-out combat by Hunter Hunter Standards gives the man a chance to reflect and meditate a bit about the general state of things.

It becomes clear shortly into the fight that it's just a matter of time before Netero is worn down, slips up, and is beaten, but his inevitable defeat cannot discourage Netero and is in fact crucially linked to his own actual plan.

Okay.

Listen.

We gotta.

I think that while we should save the exact circumstances of what happens for when we reach it in the episode, I would like to begin by at least acknowledging how this block of episodes ends so that we can talk about how we work towards it.

I think as fun as it would be to leave listeners in suspense, it's probably a good idea for our sort of criticism to come out with it

it is very likely it is very very likely that chairman notero has killed the chimera and king

well and there's another death that is even more likely uh it is certainly likely it is 100 likely that chairman notero has killed himself

um he got all my dms telling him to

this episode this block of episodes the fight ends

conclusively, one way or another.

As we leave this block of two episodes, we haven't exactly seen the body of Meroem, but we have seen the explosion.

Yes.

And it was a doozy.

As in all things, it ends either one way or the other.

It does.

All right.

Is there anything about the end, Jack, that you think we should get out of the way at the beginning?

Or should we move into?

No, I just, I really wanted to avoid making an episode where we have to keep biting our tongues in terms of like, ooh, but you'll never guess what happens or whatever.

And I think it would lead to weaker

conversations about like how the pacing works, how the structure of this thing works, if we had to keep sort of like coyly turning to the audience and saying, but wouldn't you like to know?

Another thing to mention, I think, at the start is that this episode has pulled out all the stops in terms of like animation, scene setting,

composition.

There is, there's like minutes, multiple minutes with increasingly interesting and complicated scene composition that is like

not even trying to be tied to linear time.

It is like, it's not abstract from the action, but it's abstract from

a a sort of from it's montage.

It's not set up like a montage, but it's montage in like the sort of traditional sense of like it is

a non-human experiential time happening in a series of images.

And part of the reason for this, I think, is that after teasing us with it for episode after episode after episode, what we actually get in

most of 125 and all of 126 is the fight between Maroam and Chemon.

It's been what, 15 episodes since they left on the dragon?

Yeah, and I think in general, we have seen Tagashi and the anime team play a sort of generally pretty joyful or generally pretty productive game of like, you want to see a fight, don't you?

No, you're actually going to see something else.

Or when the fight actually happens, it's going to happen differently.

We've talked way back in the show about the way they tear apart the tournament arc.

We've talked a lot about how they will like set up confrontations and then sometimes deny them,

things like that.

In line with how the way Keith is talking about the production design of this and kind of like pulling out all the stops, this is the fight between the two most powerful men in the show.

And the show knows it and it is giving it to us.

I also want to bring up something

that I think I'm the only, I can't remember anyone else's experience with Yu Yu Haka Show.

I think I'm the only one that's seen all of Yu Yu Haka Show.

I have not.

You got me.

Okay, so

this is like really calling back things that Tagashi has been interested in forever,

which is, you know, the dark heart at the center of humanity.

Oh, interesting.

There isn't a part of Yu Yu Haka Show that doesn't touch on this a little bit, but we're specifically seeing seeing echoes of and reuses of the chapter black arc from Yu Yu Haka Show.

Chapter Black is a videotape.

I'm going to spoil some Yuhaka Show.

That's okay.

Chapter Black is a videotape that contains, it is made by demons.

It compiles, by the way, Demon World is

a basic fact of Yuyuhaka Show life.

I'm aware of that.

It was compiled by demons as a sort of fuck you to humanity.

It shows throughout history the worst acts,

the worst human atrocities in human history.

It is just like a videotape.

It is like a snuff film like at a historic scale.

It is a magic videotape that contains all of humanity's worst crimes against itself.

And

it becomes the MacGuffin of one of the seasons where the guy who has the main, who used to have the main character's job, but was driven mad by the moral grayness of it all,

wants this tape and wants to use it

as his sort of cause for destroying humanity or allowing humanity to be destroyed by demons, being like, we don't deserve

to be a species anymore.

And

to me, it is extremely obvious that Sensui, this character who has sort of, he started off as an extremely idealistic, charming, capable spirit detective, and his encounter with the reality of the world broke his, you know, pure heart.

It is explicit about how he had a pure heart and the way that he's

protected himself from the cruelty of the world is by separating the pureness of his personality from the realities of the horrible things that he's doing in a lot of ways that maybe you'd go, like, wow, those sure were the 90s, huh?

Uh, uh, but uh,

um,

it's very gone.

This is like

Sensui is a character that is like, imagine Goan 30 years in the future.

Imagine the Goan, the way that he's drawn now,

thrown 30 years into the future with a plan to destroy humanity.

That is sort of what we're dealing with.

And then, like, you know,

just again, like,

the way that the second episode ends with the sort of speech that Merwem gives, it's very much running, sorry, that Netero gives, it's sort of running back a lot of themes from Yuyuhaka show.

So I just think it's interesting that it's something that Tagashi's been dealing with for years and years at the point that he's drawing this.

I want to briefly shout out a film.

What was that?

It's called The Black Tape Keith.

Chapter Black.

It's called.

Chapter Black.

I would like to briefly shout out a film made for TV by everyone's favorite John Carpenter in 2005.

The filmmaker John Carpenter is my favorite John Carpenter.

Is that the one you're talking about?

He's my favorite.

He's that one, yeah.

This film is called Cigarette Burns.

It is really, really fun.

I mean, it's wildly grim.

It's a very, very dark John Carpenter film.

John Carpenter made something grim?

It's grim for John Carpenter.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

It is a TV film.

I really recommend it if you kind of have the stomach for it.

It is about an art dealer looking for a

film, like a film reel that

I'm going to lightly spoil it.

It's not the full, it's not the full spoilers.

That contains the filmed murder of an angel.

And that act is so evil that it causes anybody to, anybody who watches the film or like comes into possession of it to go like completely mad.

Um, which is wonderful.

Uh, such a great junk up into premise.

Um,

and that's what uh chapter black reminded me of, Keith.

This idea of tape made by demons.

Yeah, tape made by demons.

And it, it, it does drive the human who watches it mad.

Yep.

Um, all right.

Instead, uh, let's jump back to the room, uh, to Komagi's room where the stalemate continues.

Now, we are going to add one additional layer to this stalemate with the arrival of knuckle yeah uh just to sort of like uh

um spell out the nesting doll here we have komagi dr blithe pepito gone poof and now knuckle i love the visual consistency that this room has had of characters who are only ever allowed to be in a line they you it always has one character behind another character behind another character every time someone new comes in, they come in through the same door and just line themselves up.

It's very cool visually, and

it also

is a great way of like separating Goan from his allies who are only ever behind him, facing his back.

Yeah, it's really cool.

Yeah, separating everybody from everybody and then playing that tension of like who is looking at who's back, who is behind so-and-so.

I think it's

there was something, there was an interview with,

oh my god, who made the original it miniseries?

Is it Mick Garris?

I think it is Mick Garrison.

I think it is Mick Garris.

So the original it miniseries is like a 4-3 television aspect ratio.

It's like a square or near a square.

Tommy Lee Wallace.

Tommy Lee Wallace.

Tommy Lee Wallace.

Tommy Lee Wallace has this great interview where he's like, it is a film with this immense cast of children and I had to spend a lot of time thinking about how to like block scenes to fit this huge cast into the 4-3 frame.

And so, you know, like when you are thinking of blocking scenes in like very distinctive or small rooms or large casts in a small frame or whatever, you're trying to

bring the relationships between the people alive through the blocking and make the scene feel like it has depth, make sure that you've got room for like the camera to move, make sure you've got different room for different setups, etc.

And the consistency, like Keith says, the consistency with which they have chosen to shoot this scene as it is one door and a line of people is really, really neat.

And it also feels wildly claustrophobic because the camera barely ever leaves those setups, right?

Even though the room is really tight shots, too, though.

Yes, say against Olvie?

There's a lot of really tight shots too that add to the claustrophobia.

Like a lot of just like close-ups of faces, particularly Pito and Goan.

But Poof got some too.

I think Knuckle is the only one I can think of off the top of my head that gets a lot of wide shots, which I think is interesting just because he's the one who hasn't been in this situation for the past couple episodes.

I don't know how intentional it is, but it's a fun little thing.

Animators really love Knuckle's wide stance and use that to communicate a lot about his character.

I mean, if you think about the first time we saw Knuckle, he was going, like, Param, Param, come fight me.

You know, he's a character who

is very expressive in a wide shot, I think.

And they like that.

Knuckle has the presence of mind to ask to take the fight outside.

And Poof decides, classic Poof game here, I'm going to psych him out.

Yep.

Let's see if I can psych him out.

So he says, I'm just a shell, and my true core is on the way to the king.

Pito has like a reaction of shock here.

And I wanted to talk a bit about what's going on.

Right.

Does Pito know that Poof is a shell?

You would think they would, right?

They would have anticipated this.

I think so.

I think the shock is that they would tell

Goan, knowing

how serious the situation is.

The trick is that, of course, Poof doesn't care.

Right.

It would be actually great for him if Komugi dies in some sort of freak accident.

Freak unavoidable accident as a cause of the invasion.

Yeah, because we...

Talked in the last episode about Poof as like distributed personhood.

And now as we cut back, we get to see the real like sharp edge of that sword in Poof's favor because he is out there, like genuinely leaving in, if I remember right, what looks like full poof form with Yupi.

You know, he's not the little cloud of segments.

He is like reformed into the guy.

And as he leaves,

he's reconstituted.

As he leaves, he has that line about how, like, you know what?

I don't think I need Nefabita anymore at all.

And that is a realization that is happening everywhere for every poof at the same time.

And so back in the room here where he is saying, you know,

he doesn't give two shits about whether or not Gone lashes up.

Yeah.

Crucially, I believe that the poof segments have sort of instantly transmissible information to each other, or at least to the core.

Yeah, that's what I mean, right?

It's like

he is like live updating.

So this who is standing in the room saying, I'm just a segment, is the same poof who is thinking, I don't need Nefapita anymore.

Right, because of the palm stuff.

Yeah.

And

they're also all thinking, I might not need Yubi anymore.

Yubi's seeming untrustworthy suddenly.

And they're also thinking, rescue the king, have to, have to, have to, have to, save him, save him, save my boy, rescue the king.

That was very

Spy Kids song.

Oh my God.

I haven't seen Spy Kids in years.

Is Spy Kids good?

Spy Kids is terrible, but it's really fun.

No, Spy Kids fucks.

Spy Kids goes crazy.

Spy Kids is, I mean, it's...

It's a Rodriguez film, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, it's crazy.

Spy Kids is insane.

And they get, like,

worse in the exact right way as they, or at least the second one does.

But yeah, the, the, if anybody who hasn't seen Spy Kids, there's a, there's a, they do like

back masking.

Yes, it's floop is a madman helped to save us.

They do backmasking to reveal that the

fun characters from the kids show are actually, for some reason, horrible, mutated

creatures that are begging to be rescued.

Why that's easier than just hiring low-paid actors, I don't know.

That,

well, because

those are like evil spies.

And also, this evil mastermind guy or the children's show host played by Alan Cumming.

Alan Cummings.

Right-hand man.

Nominally by Alan Cumming.

Yeah, right-hand man.

Tony Shaloo is his right-hand man.

Amazing work from Tony Shaloun.

It does.

That movie rules.

Also, it has.

Ah, fuck.

I'm blanking on his name all of a sudden.

Well, but Danny Trejo?

Yes, Danny Trejo in character as who he says is Machete, like actually that guy.

He says, I have made these guys in the same character.

They're both called Machete.

He's like, yeah, these are the same character.

I don't know why he was legally allowed to do that.

I don't know.

Machete, of course, is Danny Trejo's like Grindhouse superstar.

Yeah.

Also made by Robert Rodriguez, I believe.

Oh, is that true?

Oh, I forgot that it was the same director.

That's why.

Anyway, yeah, great, great movie.

I highly recommend Spy Kids.

It's really funny and good.

Meanwhile,

and I say meanwhile, not that we're going to shift locations.

I mean, meanwhile, that we're going to shift talking about Spy Kids to talking about Humphrey's.

Yeah, right.

You just, you said, I think the words you said literally were Floop is a Badman, help us save us.

So we had the documentary.

So Heath and I were activated.

Yeah.

Knuckle outright sort of like confirms to Goan that Poof isn't lying about being a segment.

There's some real like

trying to defend against and again protect Ghoun's emotions from the like psyching out happening here because Goan hasn't seen

the version of Poof that is

segmented.

Poof, meanwhile, has his own anxiety, which is, hang on a second, I met Yupi.

And if I've met Yupi and this little shit, Knuckle is still here, here,

that means Yupi probably spared his life.

Yeah.

And he sort of thinks to himself at this point, like, well, I'm going to worry about this later, but I don't feel good about this.

Well, part of his plan is to get Knuckle outside and talking about what happened, presumably to use that information against Yupi.

Yes.

Yeah.

Well, first to kill Knuckle and then use that information against Yupi.

I've written down here that this is a cavalcade of of various anxieties.

It's not like we just have the sort of stalemate or the standoff that I was talking about.

It's also like everybody within this standoff is like anxious one level out, except for Goan, who is just you know right there in the moment at the click of it.

And one thing that I think is interesting is that while everyone is like highly concerned for Goan,

um,

and like Goan's state of mind,

Ghon seems incredibly

aware of exactly what's happening.

Like he's not confused.

He's not overcome with emotion.

Or he is overcome with emotion, but he's not

acting rashly, which is worse.

If he was doing this acting rashly, it would be different.

But he's laser-focused.

Laser focused, you know,

ice-cold.

Poof says to Knuckle that he can't leave without Goan's permission.

It's at this point that I flagged up in my notes that Goan has not spoken for episodes now.

Do we have how many episodes it's been since Goan has spoken?

No, but it's like 10.

He's just been sitting there.

Yeah.

You know, he has been...

And Poof says that he can't use his scales, his hypnotizing scales, when he has a segment.

And what he seeks is, quote, a discussion and nothing more.

And then I think it's the narrator who says Poof needed to quote appear to tell the truth.

And it's at this moment that Ghoun speaks.

This is scary, Ghoun speaking.

Ghoun has the kind of steeliness that we have kind of seen in him, the intensity during his last speaking appearances.

But it really is a shock that this is the moment he chooses to speak, and his voice in the silence is surprising.

Ghoun's performer is doing an amazing job kind of selling this, you know,

when this this character talks,

it needs to feel world-endingly consequential.

Um, and he says to Poof, you're lying.

Earlier, you tried to sneak up and kill me.

You even admitted it.

Knuckle, don't let him fool you.

Um, and he asks Poof to prove that he is a segment.

And Poof has a real sort of like mini-poof meltdown here, or like a sort of steely meltdown where he's like, oh my god, this kid is trouble.

Yeah,

he makes a good face.

Let me see if I can find my screenshot for it.

Both of the present Royal Guards see Ghon as an actual threat in a way that no Royal Guard has thought about any human to this point.

Yeah.

Especially Pito.

We'll talk about what Pito thinks in a little bit, but I thought it was really notable.

Really good Pito stuff in these episodes.

I love Pito.

And so he says...

Poof says, I patiently await your decision.

And it's not terribly clear that the kind of shot choices and who he is turning to suggest that he is talking about Goan's decision.

Will you let me go?

But he could just as easily be talking about Knuckles' decision.

Do you want to like

draw this out?

You know, like,

if you push for this fight and you make Goan,

or rather, we're not going to be able to do this without Goan letting me go.

And you have to be comfortable with that.

But the thing is that Goan doesn't let him go and he goes, yes, it's really interesting.

Which seems like all he did was remind Goan, hey, you said I couldn't do this.

Yep, he's stirring the pot, he's absolutely stirring the pot.

Uh, the

like select the um sequence of images here is great.

So, he says, I patiently await your decision, and then he drops his hands to his side, and at that moment, Peter realizes what he is about to do.

Uh, and they say, I think they explicitly say, stop.

And then his head swells up and he explodes into thousands of these like horrible cackling segments who fly through a hole in the roof screaming, I'll wait at the front gate for 10 minutes.

I wish I had one of those like electric bug zappers that look like a tennis racket.

I would have gone crazy in there.

You know, we talk about

the sort of shattered poof personality,

but they all have such similar, they all have the same personality.

And the second, he's so calculating and,

you know, he's such a male manipulator that,

but when he turns into the to the little guys, they're all just like cackling madly all the time.

Like, it's almost like what he, what he's lacking is the mental fortitude to contain his true intentions when he turns into little bugs.

Like, yes, yeah, there's something about like the real poof is the laughing madman.

We have known this from the off, from like Poof's brilliant operatic meltdowns, I think, are just an expression of this.

All the little bugs are like bebopping around inside him at that moment, going, Whoa, hey, hey, we can really let loose.

Um, it's just they didn't want to reveal that he could be 10,000 bugs at that point.

I think about whenever Poof pulls out his violin and spins around saying things like, I must die.

Once I've solved this problem, I will kill myself.

I'm let down the king.

Fool poof.

Pito immediately starts begging with Goan.

Their dialogue is

really scary.

They say, I'm still right here.

I'm the only one you need, right?

Just absolute desperation

out of Pito in this moment.

And I'm going to be honest, I thought they fucked it.

I thought this is it.

Goan goat is just gonna lash out immediately at Komagi and at Peto.

Um, so what's kind of worse what happens to me succeeded.

It's so bad.

Go ahead, Sylvie.

Does he say that Peto has 10 minutes left?

Yeah, you have 10 fewer minutes to heal her.

10 minutes less, not 10 minutes less.

Okay, I thought so.

Yeah, it is like

still with that same murderous intent in his eyes.

Um,

like

there's an

what did the

narrator said that it's like unclear if this was in response to what

like Poof's challenge to Knuckle because he says, I'll fight you, I'll meet you outside in the next 10 minutes.

Um,

or if it's just because those were the last, like, that was the last like interval of time that Gone heard.

But

he's just like full on, like,

yeah, no.

Peter's anxiety is about, is like, does Goan actually know way more than he's letting on?

Like, has he figured out everybody's plan?

Does he, did he give me 10 fewer minutes because he knew that, like, I already was at what I thought was the bare minimum time that I needed, and this is like, he's basically going to allow me to not quite finish.

And then, uh,

and who knows?

I think, probably not.

I think it's, I think that probably they're like, they're.

It feels instinctual to to me.

Yeah, it just feels like 10 minutes is a normal chunk of time to me.

I also think the other thing that's happening here, it's not just, for me, it's not just that.

It's and I don't think that Pito cares too much about this because I don't think Pito cares too much about the quality of Gohan's soul like we do.

But

Goan is punishing someone else for

another person's actions.

Right.

This is the

there's something so vindictive about this, about like, well, he disobeyed me, and now you are going to be the one.

Especially with Pito trembling like and like begging, while right after it happens, it like really drives that point home.

In the last set of episodes, we were talking about like who is the show setting up as the bad guy between Netaro and Merowem?

And like, is the, whose side are we supposed to be on when we're watching it?

And what I said was that like, it's kind of ambiguous or it's like reluctantly reluctantly with the king like it's showing you that the king is is being an asshole and that merouam is like trying to be diplomatic uh

but it still i think understands the threat that merouem

uh uh represents this is a not

ambiguous at all gone is being evil here yes yeah

Yeah, and they've staged this really well where like

Poof is also being evil here.

But in the Komegi, Pito, Goan sort of like triangle, I know where my allegiances lie, and they lie with Pito and Komegi.

Yep,

yeah, it's it is, it couldn't be less ambiguous.

Like, this is not the show, thinks that it's good that Pito is allowed to heal Komegi, and that Komegi shouldn't die as a consequence of this invasion.

And Goan has, for

not

for increasingly irrational reasons, decided that, like, this is bad.

Yes.

Yeah.

Um,

I don't want to belabor the point, but this is Krolo desperately trying to save his

compatriots in the Phantom Troop.

Goan has been, Goan has gotten himself into this moment of

offering cruel and unpleasant stakes to try and get get revenge on, you know, somebody he cares about or whatever.

And, you know, he is, Goan is absolutely confident in his actions at this moment.

He is like laser focused on what he is doing.

Meanwhile, we have that 12-year-old boy who looks up at Crollo in the street and says, basically, how can you care about and love your friends and still do evil things?

And now we find Goan

maybe learning why, but he won't learn his lesson because Goan Freaks doesn't learn anything.

Well, that's actually not true.

Goan Freaks learns the worst lessons in every possible situation.

That is the actual problem.

Surrounded by people who are happy to teach those lessons, too.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, usually adults.

And at least there's at least like a gesture towards the tension of, because, yeah, this whole Goan scene has just been over the episodes a cavalcade of people who ostensibly care about Goan and see him on the edge of like the knife's edge and like don't say anything.

But at least this time, Knuckle gives reasoning for not saying anything because he's worried that if he causes Goan to like falter at all, that Goan's gonna die.

Yeah, and it's just the very least out of place of care.

It's tragic, and it's great actually because, like,

Knuckle just came from a situation where he failed in his mission because he did have

compassion.

Yeah.

And

I understand being like,

well, we can't have someone else do that.

Yeah, I can't have anybody else learn the lesson I learned about who really counts as a human being or anything like that.

Um, we get a little bit of a flashback here to learn that Pito, as afraid as they were, has actually played the situation a little more cleverly prior to this point than it had become clear.

The whole, do you remember that whole like time negotiation where Gohan was like, How long is it going to take?

And Pito said four hours, and Goan said, You can have one, and Pito sort of said, Well, fine.

Uh, we learn that Pito wildly, deliberately overestimated how long this would take in order to be able to heal Komegi more effectively.

This is some real presence of mind.

It's effective bartering.

It is really effective bartering.

It does mean that when Goan starts cutting down the one hour and we actually start moving out of

Pito's sort of like comfort range, things start getting a little dicier.

We have learned that...

Dr.

Blythe has improved.

And as if to demonstrate how Dr.

Blythe has improved, we do get a brief shot of the king with his arm missing.

And it's like, Pito has been on residency in the palace with Dr.

Blythe and has

done some of the things that he has.

And, you know, and Palm, and, you know, like, it's...

Yeah.

It's another instance of Tagashi being extremely frugal with his pieces, like, not leaving stuff on the floor when he can bring stuff back.

He does.

Yep.

He says, Gonakilua had seen everything that transpired uh transpired to this point but since pito had no way of knowing it was only natural to assume that gone had seen through poof's scheme and already knew his plans it was what pito feared the most i have to kill him no matter the cost um

is this the part with the fangs i thought that i had written that down yeah the part with the fangs is just before that right yes i must risk my life or else his fangs may reach the king's throat then what do we see in that moment?

A tiger.

It's so good.

Like a jump scare.

It's like a white tiger flashes onto the screen, snarling.

Beautiful, like sketchily animated tiger.

Isn't that what

Morrill compared him in Kilowattu?

Didn't he say they were tigers?

Oh, you're right.

Yeah, I thought so.

I was like...

And ironic that it's the cat.

Who's afraid of the tiger?

I mean, looking back through.

I'm looking back through my notes here for the uses of tiger.

And are you quite sure this isn't a callback to the camp tigers who have mastered five?

Oh,

um,

the other thing I like about that line about Goan being able to reach the king's throat is that we have also, as you all were talking about earlier, we have seen Goan also threaten Komagi, which is a second way he could reach the king's throat.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The

this little bit ends with Pito being like, I can't, I have to kill Gone.

I can't kill him with Komagi here, so I have to figure out how to get rid of her.

But if I'm gone, who will take Komagi to the king?

So

I have to.

She needs to be healed first.

She needs to be healed, and then needs to be

rescued from this.

And then if I have to kill Goan to the freaks, and then I have to kill Don Freaks.

That is their plan.

That's the three-step plan.

But the question remains,

if I'm gone, who will take Komagi to the king?

Like, where do you give?

Because they specifically say, I can't give Komagi to Yupi or

they don't like her.

Which is true.

And I think potentially only half right.

I think that Komagi.

Oh my god.

I think that Yupi would be a better person than Poof because

I'm sure.

I've been wanting to since day one.

A bit about

Pito's character here.

Pito has spent this whole standoff being afraid of Goan because of the risk that Goan poses to Komegi

and partly afraid for themselves because so much of their nen effort is being poured into Dr.

Blythe.

But Pito has been afraid.

And Pito is still afraid, but it is a really fun character moment to see them explicitly for the first time say, I've got to fucking kill this guy.

Yeah.

And I'm going to.

I don't think that that changes where my alliance lies in this scene or where the viewers' alliance is intended to lie.

But I think it troubles it in a really enjoyable way that we are now rooting for the character who is saying in no uncertain terms, I gotta fucking kill Ghan.

I think about times in the show where people have essentially promised or have sort of sworn internally that they're going to kill Ghan.

I think back to Ilumi way back in the hunter exam, saying, Well, I'll just kill him.

And at that moment, it was fucking terrifying.

You know,

it was horrible.

And I don't necessarily feel horror when Pito says, I need to kill Goan freaks.

Instead, the thing I feel is like

exhaustion and sadness, right?

I'm like, oh, God, here we are, right?

How is this going to go?

How is this going to go?

I have no idea.

By the end, with Meroem seemingly dead, Natero definitely dead, the standoff in the room,

UP and Poof rushing towards the king where they're going to find him, presumably dead.

I am really not sure what is going to happen next.

And we'll talk more about that as we get to the end.

But how is this going to go is a big question that I have with the project right now.

It's what you want a TV show to ask, fundamentally.

Yeah.

Yeah, what is going to happen next is one of the really good reasons why they invented stories yeah um

before everyone knew what was going to happen next that it was you were going to like die of exposure or a mammoth was gonna fall on you or you know

that that was a leading cause of death for many years mammoth fell on me it happened to my uncle

slash died of exposure um

okay knuckle goes to say something uh and the thing that he says you pee was and then he trails off the the thing that i think he was going to and he stops himself from saying it because he doesn't want goan to like shift focus for one second uh because he's extremely worried about gone freaks i think the thing he was going to say was fighting knock uh fighting gopie was almost impossible and i think that

yes fighting yupie was almost impossible and i think that this fight with poof will kill me Do you know that's what he was going to say?

I thought he was going to be like, fighting Yupi was different than I thought.

He was actually kind of a nice guy.

Oh, yeah, I could also see that.

It's so, it's weird, right?

Because that would play against...

So, Keith's theory, fighting Yupi was different and he's kind of a nice guy, would cause problems for contemporary evil Goan, who would be like, no,

the Chimera ads are all evil.

My theory,

Fighting Yupie was harder than I thought and Poof will probably kill me, would cause problems for old, kind-hearted Goan, who would step up to uh to uh throw away his own life to save a friend, right?

Sure, yeah.

I think that that one thing that ties Knuckle to Goan is that they've bonded over their um capacity for empathy for their enemy, something that has eroded since uh they've bonded over this.

Yes, um,

but I

think that that is like

something that they connect on, and why my impression is that

especially seeing this scene and seeing Goan in this scene, that what Knuckle might want to say is you should potentially hear them out

and not be jumping to evil conclusions.

Yeah.

I think you have a note about this, Dre.

Oh, that was, I accidentally jumped the gun and brought that up earlier.

But yeah, it's just, it is, it is the tragedy that Goan has basically been honed to a fine knife edge.

And now everybody can see that there's tragedy awaiting Goan.

Like, I can't remember exactly what Kilua said, but like, the last time that Kilo left Goan here, he didn't leave being like, ah, Goan's going to be fine.

This will all be great.

It was basically like, man, there is something I should tell him.

But if I do, it'll ruin our friendship forever.

And I don't know what kind of person he's going to be when I come back.

Right.

And so it's just.

Yeah, everybody has set up the pins to fall and they all see that they're going to fall and they're kind of worried about it.

Yeah.

But nobody will say anything.

Nobody will stop them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

Meanwhile.

Yeah.

Knuckles.

Knuckle leaves, presumably, to go meet

Poof at the gate.

But yeah, we jump back and we get a little recap of what happened when we last were with Nedero and the king.

We jump back

about a minute.

This is for television pacing reasons, right?

Is there another thing going on here that is worthwhile sort of like shifting the time in this way?

I think that because the scene

right after the cut...

Actually,

here's what I know.

The chapters cut differently than the anime does.

And so in the chapters, you have a very legible

scene from the last episode leading into the scene change, the set change that happens here, which I think could be kind of confusing if we got like 10 seconds of the old set and then the rest of the episode in the new set.

So, yeah, television-facing reasons, basically.

Yeah.

But they were facing off.

They were netting, they are netting up, they were ordering out

Netaro leaps into the the air.

Netero's flying.

Netero's floating.

Yep.

He sort of brings his aura out and his hands together in that golden glow that we've seen a lot.

And then it's surrounded by like a halo and a lotus.

Yes.

A lot of flower imagery.

A lot of flower imagery.

Yeah.

There's a sort of...

It's not just a halo and a lotus.

He is like superimposed over like a galaxy of stars.

Yeah, it's very

colorful and twinkly and cosmic.

It looks great.

There's like a halo burning over his head, like a white halo.

And

does he start fighting immediately?

He starts fighting pretty much immediately, but he does deliver a little speech first.

In between, I'm going play three clips of audio all together.

These come at the beginning

and the middle, and then a second cooldown of

99th hand, an attack from Guanyin Bodhisattva that, like, pummels the king.

Yeah.

It's

the way we saw the Guanyin work before, but it's just happening, you know,

over and over and over and over.

Yeah.

I have.

When did did I start waiting for my opponent to make the first move?

Now, whenever you're ready,

come.

This is a trainee expert.

Yeah, like back in the dojo.

When did I stop hesitating and start graciously accepting the hands of my vanquished opponents

as they bowed their heads in defeat defeat

as if that was what I wanted.

That's not the height of perfection that I sought for so long.

He's now like burst a hole.

I have always dreamt of giving my heart and soul to battle an unstoppable adversary.

Guan Yin is like falling through the earth into this horrible cavern thing chamber.

I could not begin to tell you what this place is.

We know that this field was used for weapons testing.

I don't know why there's a massive endless chamber underneath the temple.

It's like

there's all these columns.

It's weird.

It's very weird.

It's really cool.

It's scary

too.

Yeah,

it's spooky.

And that's not just because of the giant golden figure smashing it up, but that does add to it.

How do we feel about Netero's seeking perfection in this way?

Oh, do you want to know what I wrote?

He's just like Hisuka.

He's just like Hisuka.

That is also what I wrote.

When we were talking about Hisuka and his desire to have his fight with Krolo, and we talked a lot about like his desire to kill or defeat Krolo in

like a battle.

I specifically made sure to mention every once in a while that

it also feels like maybe he wants Krolo to kill him.

This is the episode I was thinking of.

Yeah.

Where it's, you know, Netaro and Merowem fighting, and Netero being like, I am happy to literally, I'm happy to die like this.

And also, you know,

there is a kind of

style of combat that in my mastery, I have been denying myself.

You know, I have become the master who is so good that he waits for his opponent to make the first move, strikes them down with a single blow.

You know, the thing that defined Notero as a combat unit in this show, in the Chimera and Arc, was notably, you know, we don't know where he is.

We don't know what he's doing.

He is like a restrained force of violence that is getting ready for his like one big blow.

Yeah.

And we don't even really see him do that.

The dragon dive is not his maneuver.

It's his plan.

But, you know,

Notero is someone who is waiting for his opponent to make the first move, and then he is going to do a single like prayer punch, and that is going to end the fight.

There's a kind of like catharsis and power that he's robbing himself of.

Yeah, he's saying, I'm sick of being gracious and honorable.

I want a real fight.

Yep.

Yep.

And he gets one.

There is a bit of the viewer in here as well.

The viewer who is saying, I want to see Chairman Notero fight.

Yeah.

I want to see him really fight.

The punch is fun, and the punch looks really cool.

The thing I want is a fight.

And the fight begins.

Out comes the Guan Yin, this immense sort of like titan, golden, horrible, crying titan, and launches a flurry of blows towards the king, who first blocks it, it then is smashed into the ground, and then we emerge.

Oh my god.

My texts were on and they were loud.

We emerge.

We emerge in this underground room.

We have a very

line.

Yes.

Oh, sorry.

I thought you were moving forward.

Which is a lovely line.

I think that that is a great line.

And then he spoils it and he says,

yours, yours, as a matter of fact.

Although, my defense for this line is that Chairman Atero is a corny old man.

You know?

The line is also slightly more graceful in the other sub.

It's like, you know, not way more graceful, but I don't have

it written, but I remember noting it.

Sure, as a little more graceful than this, this is a tomb.

Yeah.

Um.

We get an amazing shot.

Okay, yes.

Thank you, Jack.

I was also about to talk about this.

We might be talking about the same shot.

I'm not sure.

I think it will.

It is an amazing shot of

the Guanyin's hands emerging through the ceiling down into the tomb.

At first, we don't quite know what we're looking at.

We're looking at just this sort of like grey stone, and then it rumbles, and then almost like...

I don't know, like eels or something poking out through the rock.

The like fingertips, the golden fingertips of the Guanyin's hands hands come through.

Was that the shot you were thinking of?

No, I was right past this, but this is a great shot, and I do have a lot of screen.

It was interesting.

I have in my notes how, like, it's the first time that we've seen the object of Guan Yin as physical, apart from when the punch connects.

And it's kind of surprising to see sand pouring off of its back

instead of through it as a sort of like representation scare hand, instead of an actual, it's a monster.

I mean, it's truly, it is a kaiju.

Yes, absolutely.

Did we say kaiju maybe last week?

Did we say that?

I think we did.

I think we compared it to Godzilla before.

Yeah, I, it's also worth saying this is super duper expensive to animate.

We talked about this at the beginning of the episode in terms of the like pulling out all the stops here.

They are putting money on the screen.

Yeah.

The shot that I was talking of is talking about is Netero lands and we see him, we do a basically a full 360 kind of panning across his body as he like holds his arms out in meditation

instead of continuing to fight.

It lasts for like 17 seconds.

It's crazy.

But it's a great shot of him sort of like landing and just sort of like

taking in the moment.

There's like a wrestling iconography happening here and that you know there often is in shoun fights i'm

which way does it come from is wrestling wrestling is probably inspired by shounen i mean i think there's contemporary wrestling bit of both right like i have definitely been

uh like

wrestling is a like has a has its own thing going on in japan it's not like just the same as as it is here

wrestling also does predate the shonen job it does but i think a lot lot about like contemporary wrestlers who would have grown up watching Shonen.

Oh, there's a lot of that.

There's a guy who I saw yesterday, and he did, not on TV, I didn't see him in prison.

He does a move called The Spirit Gun.

Keith.

Wow.

Yeah.

Like how many shots per day does he get?

He just does it the ones it's his finisher.

Okay.

He's a bad guy, too.

A way that they are framing, in the way that, you know, during a wrestling match,

the heel will take a moment to spread his arms and like take on the booze and jeers from the audience before moving into something else.

You know, here we have 17 seconds of Chairman Deterrer reveling in

the power of the Guan Yin.

I, oh, whoa, whoa.

Yep, sorry.

I did it again.

I died.

I accidentally changed the recording level by misclicking on my

Audacity.

Oh my god.

And I then.

I'm going to let the viewer know how much you changed the recording level by

almost I almost doubled it from 54 to 100.

Okay, yeah, that's what it sounded like.

Yeah.

So

I then went to tell you that that happened and then

while fixing it, did it again?

It's okay.

I'm alive.

I'm sorry about your head and ears.

It's my heart, really, that really

got got.

I felt the feel.

Speaking of your heart getting got.

Hey, it's pretty concerning how the king is starting to experience spirit time.

We see a rock fall past his face and it falls.

Hey, there's a rock floating.

Oh,

I know what's happening.

For the viewer who has forgotten, this is something that the show has kind of literalized over the last big fights, which is that as you approach your death, time slows.

Literally.

Oh, and also you start to feel another person's

thoughts and feelings.

Yes.

Yeah, you can communicate without words.

It's the thing that

Zeno had his behind the music segment about.

God,

there's a scene where there's a rock passing in front of

Merrowem's eye where the rock, I don't know, it's going like, what, two millimeters a second or something?

It's so slow and so good.

And then when the narrator calls out that that's what's happening like a minute later, it's great.

We have this shot of the rock falling very slowly past his face, except it's a very high frame rate, so it's falling very

smoothly.

And then the hand of the Guan Yin appears in the right-hand side of the frame and just, you know, smacks the king out of the left in beautiful slow motion.

You know, hundreds of frames of animation.

Yeah, this stuff looks so good.

Getting this slow-mo looking good and feeling good is so much work.

And what's wild is that we know the king can withstand blows from the Guanyin.

He describes it as like no more than a child.

And in fact, as the...

Well, this is in the next episode, I suppose.

But the king is starting to talk about this as like a fight of endurance.

I can withstand the blows.

I just need to wait for him to screw up.

But the violence of the Guan Yin in Slow-Mo, even though we know that it's not doing a ton of damage to the king, is immense.

There's an amazing, amazing quote and scene from the very end of this episode, which we are now reaching.

After, I think, a couple more hits from

essentially meaningless hits from Guan Yin.

He says, Netero brings his hands together in thanks and says, like his prayer, like we've seen him do, I'm grateful, grateful for everything that's led me to this point, and to you, talking to Meruem.

And then he brings his hand up over his heart.

Yeah.

And he does a little heart thing.

And it ends, the episode ends on like an animated heart appearing in the like heart hands of Netaro.

Viewer, at the time, I thought that this was

unreasonably

like like it did not fit with the context of what was going on.

It was a little showy.

It's like, oh, he's making the heart.

In retrospect, it makes me feel queasy.

Yep.

And I will be quiet about that, viewer.

You'll see.

Him making a heart with his hands.

And then one episode later, you're like, oh, fucking Christ.

It's great.

A prayer is something you do with your heart.

Yeah, I think what really sells this for me is there's a point where he has Merowim framed in his hands like they do in Dragon Ball when Tien is using his tri-attack,

his Tri-Beam cannon.

It's the exact shot of like focusing an enemy in a triangle of your hands.

And then instead of an attack, he brings it to his heart in thanks.

Another thing we know that he does, he gives thanks for his.

Well, but he gives a sort of weird, violent thanks.

Sure.

Yeah.

Well, he is giving.

It is a genuine prayer.

It is.

It's part of it, that it has to be a real prayer.

What if prayer could be evil?

Many such cases.

I mean, there's a line.

What if a prayer could be evil?

There's a line towards the end of the last episode

that

is literally that.

So we'll talk about that.

What if a prayer could be evil?

I'll just have to remember.

Puts his hands together to make the heart, and we see

Meroem through them.

We see Meroem burning with purple Ren, and his eyes are red.

I think this is great.

I don't know whether or not the ants' eyes going red is like artistic license or if that is actually happening.

It's great.

The ants' eyes go red sometimes, and it's always terrifying.

Keith, I have a music question.

Sure.

Are they playing Kirie Elaison during this fight?

I'll tell you exactly what they are playing.

It's a new song called The Last Mission.

Could you give us a little bit of that, specifically some bits with some lyrics?

Because it's like choral singing.

Hey, I'm fucking singing the Kyrie Elaison.

Wow.

Kyrie Eleison is a liturgical prayer in Christianity.

It most closely translates to Lord, have mercy.

It is a key part of the Catholic Mass.

It is like one of the

most commonly set to music or set to like choral arrangement prayers.

And it is this like plea for mercy from God.

Who's pleaing here?

Uh

uh this is a good question.

Uh we are.

Yes.

I I think probably Merrowam is pleading.

I think because

I kind of like that you can't.

Oh no.

My heart's giving out.

We'll do.

Yeah, that's what the podcast is for.

We'll do we'll make our pitches.

I'd like that it's not it's not clear.

Like, I think this scene wouldn't work if it was clearly for one or the other, because you can make a case for I think one thing is that it's obfuscated behind you needing to pick that out because it's not in the

manga at all, it doesn't exist in there because there's no soundtrack for it.

And so, this is like purely an editorializing choice.

This is an artistic choice by the soundtrack

to

layer meaning onto the pre-existing text.

I think

that

it is also worth considering the broad definitions and uses of mercy in Christian theology.

The like a plea for God to show mercy to someone is not just, and in fact, it's not terribly often the mercy of a vengeful God.

You you know like like you might beg for mercy from a combatant or something yeah god's mercy is regularly this sort of like scarifying freeing

um like purifying force uh the the mercy of god is something that comes down upon you and you know uh frees you from your sinfulness or frees you from um

It's like a salvation thing, right?

In a lot of ways, like relating to the soul specifically.

Yes, it is.

It is moving with grace, or moving alongside concepts of grace in that way.

I mean, it is just as often

when you hear someone say, have mercy, you are thinking about, you know, begging for mercy from a position of weakness, you know, from like a combatant who could launch the killing blow.

And I think that Natero,

the singing the Elesan in this moment could just as easily be Natero in his, like, I am a scarifying force that is that is removing the king.

I am the mercy of God coming down in this moment.

I think it's important that that is what Guan Yin Bodhisattva is,

is a being,

is a divine agent of mercy.

Yep.

Yep.

I think that's the thing.

I think

there's a double meaning.

I think it's that.

I think it's literally like

Netero as an agent of Guan Yin or Guan Yin as an agent of Netero or an icon of itself

being used as a tool of Netaro to sort of exact

a justice on Merowim.

Flipped, though, is

I am Netaro, and on behalf of humanity, I am about to commit a great evil.

Mercy for me, for the darkness of the human soul.

Yes, Notero ends these episodes explicitly saying that he thinks he's going to go to hell.

You know?

Yes.

If there is one.

If there is one.

I think it's a funny thing for the guy.

I mean, you know, different faiths, but it's like, I've been conceptualizing him as praying all the time.

And it's like, oh, yeah, hell doesn't exist in a lot of religions.

No.

I love to be reminded of that, actually.

Yeah.

That the Christians at some other faiths were like, you know what?

What?

My parents gave me anxiety for nothing.

Yeah.

Nothing at all.

Not even.

Not another word.

Oh, sorry.

Not another word for hell.

What?

Demon World.

Demon World is not hell.

I'll see you in Demon World.

I'm home for infinite losers.

Oh my God, podcast supercut.

Of all the times I've had to remind you, fucks, that Demon World is not.

Yeah, podcast supercut is not.

Jack slapped

in demon world is hell.

Yeah.

Demon World is hell and I want to go to hell.

Episode 26 begins.

Do we leave the tomb at any point during this episode?

The closing shot takes us out.

Yeah, there's also like a montage of

technology talk, I guess.

Yeah, there's some like flashback too.

I think it's...

We just come back back in on action, right?

We're in the underground chamber.

Merowem is coming at Netero, you know, again and again and again, and Guan Yin's arms are sort of batting him away like a fly.

In this massive space, crashing into columns, into walls.

It's that dust everywhere, very super fast cuts.

The narrator comes in with time compressed.

The king was shocked to find Netero was moving at an alarming rate, and he was barely able to follow his after image.

He was consumed by one singular emotion: unreserved admiration for his enemy.

We get a beautiful shot here of like an illustrated panel.

And I think, Sylvie, you've shared this.

This is

almost straight from the manga.

There's a lot of this that is just lifted straight from Tagashi's manga.

This episode is frame after frame of awesome shit.

Yeah.

One of the reasons why I wanted to post the undeserved admiration thing is because we only see it for like a second.

Yeah, it's crazy how much stuff is like barely shown.

It's crazy.

What do we see?

There is Zeno and the dragon

behind

Merrowim, who's sort of upside down, floating in the air.

There's a sign that says ant extermination in the foreground.

And then most of the image is taken up by Bodhizava Guanyin

and then with Netaro

sort of in the same pose as the current attack happening.

Yeah.

And also lots of flowers all over the world.

It's a field of giant roses.

Yeah.

Probably means nothing.

Yeah.

They're pretty.

Can I just can I raise this?

Then we I feel like this is the most are these roses they're not roses oh they're not roses

they're not those are very much not roses they're it just it's it's a very um

uh you know this isn't a photorealistic piece no i just kind of assume that they're roses rose and zero and there was a moment when this thing came up that i was like oh god did they did they draw the wrong flower or or

Japanese roses different than what I think roses are like American robins are different than British robins

No, these just aren't roses.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Look up American Robin.

I mean, you know what an American Robin looks like.

Look up British Robin.

Do it now.

I'm doing it now.

Okay, hold on.

Does he just say like oi Batman a lot?

Oh, it's Christopher Robin from the Hundred Acre Woods.

Oh, my little circus lads.

When I Google British Robin, I'm getting European Robin.

Is that the same one?

It's like a a little round guy.

No, they voted, so he's not part of that anymore.

Yeah, he's a little round guy.

Yeah, he's like, they're more round, but not like Wade.

These aren't like so different.

They are so different.

They are so different.

Yeah, one of them is much more

sparrow-like.

One is a beautiful...

Oh, they're also much smaller.

That might also be worth.

Sure, yeah.

Did you post two pictures of the British Robin, or is this two different birds?

I posted two pictures of the British Robin.

Now I'm posting a picture of them next to each other.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Those are different birds.

Yeah, they're different.

Yeah, sure.

But I would not be scandalized.

But this wouldn't scandalize me.

What would?

Let's see.

If, if, if your, if your robin had no red at all, I would be like, what the fuck?

Yeah,

that would be

pretty weird.

Our robins are more red.

Well, they're more orange.

Can I share something super evil that I found out while trying to figure out what flowers are in this scene?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You remember how we talked about that really cool image of Netaro

with the Lotus?

And he's...

Yeah, yeah.

Just take a gander at this in our chat.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

That is.

That is maybe the most evil thing that's ever been posted in this Discord.

It's a Funko Pop of Netaro.

Yeah, it's a Funko Pop of Netaro praying over the Lotus.

Yeah.

I love anime fandom.

I love the way that people

consume anime.

Yeah.

Ironically, this is one of the more better and interesting looking Funko Pops I've ever seen.

Ironically, this is one of the better smelling turds I've sniffed.

Well, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so

I...

I've been looking at the pages, trying to figure out the flower thing while we had our little Robin the version.

I know that there's some sunflowers that show up on the page of,

at least I think they're sunflowers.

They look like sunflowers to me.

Of the, like,

the...

the fight that lasted less than a minute with a thousand blows, which we'll talk about in a little bit.

But as far as I can tell, there are no roses until there is one notable rose.

I think they're peonies.

I think you might be right.

I don't know if that's just a again, sometimes there are things that are lost in translation where I don't necessarily know the cultural importance of specific types of flowers.

Uh, it could be red lotuses,

sure,

that would be consistent with the lotus imagery we've had with him before.

Yep, um,

but yeah, we see this illustration for like

Sylvie said, like two seconds.

It's beautiful.

Yeah.

It's also like

rendered in a really detailed way.

You know, usually the characters are like

flat lit with sort of like stark shadows painted onto their faces.

But this is like gradient color work on everything.

The bridge, the dragon.

It's gorgeous.

This, I'm sure, is someone's desktop background right now.

Oh, yeah.

Right, let me see.

At this point, the king is consumed by the emotion of unreserved admiration for his enemy.

And he's also starting to piece together how the attack works.

We've talked a lot about how quickly the king learns, just like that's sort of how he is.

Not only is he piecing together how the attack works,

he starts to piece together how Notero came to it.

He says, I won't waste precious time finding out what drove him to this.

He must have yielded to an emotion akin to insanity.

Like that one?

Like practicing the same thing over and over again.

And we see Notero in the field.

The king's spot on.

But it's great how when we first saw Notero's like awful

growth into personhood,

we, the viewer, were saying, this is crazy and this is extremely sinister.

But the show was presenting it pretty straight, and Isaac Notero was presenting it as like a just

and

righteous gaming of

a kind of sinister power.

Yeah, the king says.

The imprisonment is how he presents it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The king spells it out explicitly.

He must have yielded to an emotion akin to insanity.

I think both of these things are true, and that is why Isaac Notero is so frightening.

Yeah.

And he speaks out to Notero.

He says,

he sort of recognizes his efforts that has gone into this.

And he says, even with training, you can still hit your limit.

Even with training, one can still hit their limit.

You are a rare example of someone who has transcended that.

And this is meant

genuinely and complimentarily.

And it's delivered by the voice actor, like, sincerely.

How does Notero feel about it?

How dare you speak to me like that, you little bitch?

I'll have you know.

I don't remember the full, the full Navy Salescape possible.

Insects like you should never talk down to humans, and he just hits him with the bodisafa again.

It's wild.

This man is

very, very proud.

And I say that derogatorily.

It is if you took like snippets of dialogue from this fight and just put them with no context and didn't attribute to anyone and asked, and asked people, who do you think is the shonen villain?

And who's the shonen hero here?

You'd have to not show that one of them looks exactly like Frieza.

Oh, yeah.

But

yes, you're exactly right.

The narrator spells out what the king's strategy is.

He is just going to keep attacking.

He considers the Guanyin, as terrifying as it is to the viewer, to be...

basically fine.

It's just going to keep going and it's just going to sort of swat at him.

It's annoying and it's quite difficult to move through.

Like the challenge it is providing is like a defensive one rather than actually causing him a lot of trouble.

He says, These are no more than puppet hands.

If I attack from an angle that he can't block, he'll have no choice but to reveal a new move.

Each individual, remember this, has a specific rhythm.

We're back here again.

Except now he is speaking a little more.

It's really nice.

Originally, the king said this.

Humans have a rhythm and games have a rhythm.

Once I find the rhythm and I disrupt it, I beat them.

Now he is saying much the same thing, but he is coloring it with context.

That's really a diverse thing.

And I think

it teaches us a lot about the journey that the king has been on.

He says, each individual has a specific rhythm,

a specific bias.

That bias naturally shapes one's identity.

He's also talking about like everyone is making these subconscious choices all the time.

And even in like a really broad palette of options, you are going to be drawn gently subconsciously to these choices.

And his job in this moment is to unravel that.

In practice, that's not terribly difficult than what he said on day one, fighting the chess man who hanged himself.

But he is coloring it with a degree of like understanding of personhood.

Yeah, for sure.

And this speaks a lot about the arc that the king goes on, which is that he ends in a fairly similar place to the place he started.

He has just opened a really complicated box of like, what does it mean to be a person and how do people interreact?

It sounds like a guy who's

instead of

being the strongest, smartest guy to ever live by far and fuck humans, their cows, he's someone who lost a game to

a human a thousand times in a row and understands the value of losing.

Yes.

He just says, I'll simply lose a thousand times and then I can win.

Because humans are still casting.

Because humans are the most part.

Yeah.

He says, I must choose a single correct needle among thousands.

We have an amazing 3D shot here.

We've seen some 3D shots in the show, and I've tried to call them out when they happen, where they have, you know, like built a model of a hallway.

We saw the palace in 3D last time.

This is like totally 3D with no

pretense at pretending to be 2D.

This is like we are orbiting around a field full of needles hunting for a single one.

It's a great shot.

Yeah, and more cosmic stuff.

Have we talked about how he's like seeing thousands of Googie tables in his mind?

Oh, he is seeing masses of Googie tables.

There are...

The thing with Netter, with Meriwim, and this has always been true, but, like, there are whiffs of like Sherlock meme.

Oh, like, it has.

He has a bit of a mind palace.

Or, yeah, or, like,

you know, annoying Redditor to the way that he speaks and thinks, even

now,

it's been softened a bit, but there is, like,

but

he's wildly smuggled.

He's wildly smug,

And he's like,

he doesn't have good taste because he's not been a person for very long.

So he doesn't know how annoying it is to talk like how he talks.

And he doesn't care.

It feels so good.

It is good.

It's great.

And this is a play on the way that

Frieza and Sal talk, right?

This kind of like...

He's Mariartying.

He is Mariartying there's a bit of

Vegeta in here, but Vegeta is kind of a joke.

Sorry Vegeta Vegeta, he's too proud to say any of the stuff that Meruem says at this stage.

Yes,

yes, it takes like

hundreds of episodes of Dragon Ball Z and an evil curse to get Vegeta to pay a compliment to Goku

in one of the all-time best scenes of Dragon Ball Z.

He'll say things like,

This Saiyan's strength is more than I could have possibly imagined.

They both have

strength.

No, but he will admit to himself that Goku is strong.

Yeah.

But he'll say something like, this Saiyan worm

at the same time.

He'll call him

lower class.

Low class track.

How could a low-class Saiyan like this possibly stand up to the mighty principle of Saiyans?

I love Vegeta so much.

He's great.

I need to post that Dragon Ball Dimas scene in here.

The one I sent you, Sylvie.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which is, what is Dimas again?

It's like a new thing that doing, right?

Yes.

It's Age of Ransom.

It's what?

Baby Looney Tunes.

Kind of.

Yeah.

I think it is supposed to, it takes place between the end of Z and the beginning of Super, I think.

If I remember correctly, like it is part of the timeline in a way that like GT isn't considered anymore.

In the non-canonical Dragon Ball GT series, one of the early Dragon Ball enemies wishes that Goku was a kid again because he was easier to deal with.

And he did this while he had the Dragon Balls, and it made Goku into a kid.

And Dragon Ball Daima is like, what if the whole cast was kids for some reason?

Do they still know how to write Kegoku?

Well, Toriyama's dead.

Kind of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who can say if, like, the guy who really knew is not here anymore.

And Toriyama also didn't write GT.

I think this clip will give you a good idea of what the tone is like in Daima.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

All right.

Back to the battle.

The king is, you know, talking about how he has to choose this needle, and he says, but I will be successful and we have this wonderful rainbow light on the king's face.

We see this occasionally like Rainbow Nen

has appeared with Komegi.

It has appeared with the king.

It's also appeared with Meliorone who is on a different sort of level of importance.

But I think the thing that Meliorone can do, you know, can like render himself totally invisible.

There's something about like Rainbow Nen being like

It's about the state of the world.

You know, it is like consequential, Nen.

Uh, when he is in,

oh my god, what is Maliron's power call?

Godspeed initiative.

No,

uh, perfect, God's perfect accomplice.

God's accomplice.

Perfect plan, God's accomplice.

Well, there's two.

Perfect plan, God's accomplice is just making your friends invisible.

I can't remember what his main thing is called.

I mean, the thing that I'm trying to say is he disappears from existence when he is doing that.

And, you know, and here we see Meroem, you know, laughing and cackling.

The the king thinks, is he laughing?

Sorry, the king, Terra thinks, is he laughing?

He's not the only one enjoying himself.

Um, and then he has a great little line.

He, he, he, he sort of thinks,

the king will tear me apart limb from limb.

This is a battle of endurance.

That's what you're thinking, isn't it, King of the Ants?

Uh, he says, bathed in a telltale

uh

purple glow, this is the exact color of a malevolent nen that we've seen a million times.

Yeah, he says, oh, God.

He says, especially because usually Notero's Nen in this fight is gold, and Meroem's Nen is purple and white.

As the fight continues,

Notero's Nen gets darker and darker and darker.

He says, checkmate me if you can, but I won't make it easy.

I'll show you the zero hand.

This is great because

any fool will know in a shounen fight like this, there is a special move, you know, waiting towards the end of the fight.

Um, and I was waiting for Natera's equivalent of the spirit bomb, uh, and I thought I was about to see it with the zero hands, and Yoshihiro Tagashi

licked the nib of his pen and put it back down on the paper.

Um, more of uh, Kamehameha when we really got to see it.

By the way, just to check, just to check in on the state of the battle, so far,

Netaro is unharmed, has not been hit, and Meruem has been hit thousands of times, but quote the thousands of hits the king had endured were beginning to take their toll and he was experiencing a dull ache

he's yep however crucial however

before the crucial however okay uh i want to briefly talk about how merrow uh natero has started calling merouem king of the ants with a capital k and a capital a as a taunt to tell me your name right uh because merouem keeps saying you know, like, basically, I've got you on the ropes.

This is just a matter of time.

Tell me my name.

I won't ask again.

And Natero is taunting him by calling him King of the Ants as though it is his name, knowing that the king is not satisfied with that answer.

Then he knocks off Natero's leg.

Yep.

And he makes it crucial, however.

Spectacularly violently.

It's brilliant.

He just punches it off in this shower of blood.

he's lost his leg i think just above his knee uh and netaro being netaro he stands there he's sort of like balanced on one foot um and the king the king says stop the bleeding and tell me what my name is really really good stop the bleeding before you die yeah and then yeah netaro what's netaro do so netaro refuses to like stop his sort of battle stance and this is where Meruem is like if you don't stop the bleeding you're going to die.

And then Netero laughs at him and then clenches his leg so tight that it stops the bleeding.

You could see his muscle cinching the open wound closed, almost like sucking it in on itself.

It's fucked.

It's so gross.

It's so pretty and fasty.

I classify this as some light body horror.

Yeah, this is light body horror.

Scarier that it's not men.

That's true.

I it's interesting.

We can talk about this a little later.

I think I interpret it as being a nin thing

because of the way that this fight resolves.

But I don't want to get too far out of it.

Yeah.

I always read it as a pure muscle thing.

Because we don't get any aura or anything, right?

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

You know, but it could also be, you know, Netaro is so tuned in with his nin that you don't always see his aura, even if he's doing nin shit, maybe.

Yeah, uh, that could be.

I guess that's the that's the fun part, right?

That's what makes Netaro a monster, is that like he does something absolutely gnarly and gross and terrifying like this.

And you're like, wait, is that just, does his body just work that way without nin?

He has never skipped leg a day.

No, every day is leg a day.

He says, you really think I'll die?

It's great.

Sometimes you just have to, you know.

Yeah.

Just like the characters, this is Beyblades bouncing off each other at this point.

It's a lot of fun.

Speaking of Beyblades.

Oh, go ahead.

Oh, just Netaro.

Sorry, Merrowim takes time to think about how

he's thankful for Komogi for teaching him how to anticipate an enemy's actions, which is the exact

thing

that allows him to not be like slowly worn down and lose in this fight instead of the reverse where he's slowly wearing Netaro down.

Just like another very good piece of how this all sort of like locks together.

There's so many like,

you know,

little things that must have happened to like bring us to the position that everyone is in.

It's very methodical, like a Gungi board.

Speaking of methodical, then he says, Your left arm will be my next target.

Where have we heard this before?

What are you thinking of?

Reed Island?

Genthru.

Genthru.

Yep.

Oh,

Genthuck.

That's great.

Because I was going to bring him up later.

Yeah, we should also bring up Genthru later, but I think that this is Genthru saying to Ghon,

you get to choose what I take next.

I don't know that Togashi is drawing a parallel between

Meruem and Genthru and and Netero and Gun, so much as he is

being very specific about this kind of framing.

A combatant who is so confident about

their

choice of actions and the specificity and kind of like

coldness of their violence and also the sort of systematic way that someone that one person is putting pressure on another person.

I think that this like

next I'll take your arm is sort of on some level,

like right down in the heart of how Hunter Hunter works or like how Tagashi wants to talk about combat and learning and putting pressure on your opponents.

And it is, there is like a, there is a game element to it.

There's also like a,

to prove to you that I have beaten you, I'm going to tell you, I'm going to call my shot.

Yep.

Does this happen in Shounen a lot?

I'm trying to think of like, I I don't think I've seen this happen in Dragon Ball.

This happens in a few things.

This is like a very...

I don't know if it's classified as Shounen necessarily.

We were splitting hairs, though, when we got down to it.

Fist of the North Star has

a lot of this in my recollection.

A lot of You're Already Dead is like the catchphrase of the main character in that.

I feel like I've seen other stuff too that has this sort of thing.

Again, usually done by the villain, so it's like it's cohesive with Merrowim's sort of like take on the traditional shouden villain.

We've talked about the Frieza and Sal

image or visual parallels.

I wrote Tagashi's trick, quote, from start to finish, the fight that ensued did not even last one minute.

It ruled.

It's so good.

It is so fucking sick.

So good.

Natera has a wonderful line here.

He says, and I actually had to go back and check this line again because I wasn't sure that I was reading it right.

He says, this is it.

The last time in my life.

Which is such a wonderful, weird, like tortured little line.

He's not saying, this is my last chance.

From Natera.

Okay.

Yeah, he's not saying this is my last chance.

He's not saying this is my last opportunity.

He's not saying this is the last time I will fight.

He says, this is the last time

in my life, which is really cool.

Yeah,

I'm.

The reading is kind of ambiguous.

It's hard for me to know if he's saying, this time is the last time I will have life.

Or if he's calling forward to the zero hand, which we've had referenced but not seen yet.

This is the last time I'll use zero hand.

I thought it was like, this is the last thing I will do with my life.

This is my final act.

So he loses his arm

shortly after this, as Merim said.

Merrim sits down to be like, okay, let's have that talk now.

I'm ready.

Which leg and arm did he lose?

The

Hunter exam leg and arm.

Sure did.

Yeah, yeah.

You want to speak about this?

Do you remember during the Hunter exam,

there was a fun little thing that happened on the Blimp

where our dear friends, Ghana Kilua,

play

a game with Chairman Nettero.

And he was only able to, he only used one leg and one hand.

And in this fun fight between

this fun game, they're playing.

They're playing and having fun they both talk about how much fun they're having they're playing and having fun with each other um

you he loses that leg and that arm uh

it's great yeah and it's a regression too because it's a fight that starts off using everything and then he's forced to only use uh one leg and one arm where in the hunter exam it's the opposite he's only using one leg and one arm until he's forced to use more they make him use

use more.

Takashi did not know he was going to do that when he wrote the blimp fight, but he did know about the blimp fight when he wrote this.

He sure did.

So deliberate.

Now,

when he uses Zero Hand.

Oh, wait, just before Zero Hand,

I want to specifically say,

we see them fighting over a field of

peonies or lotuses in space.

The narrator says, the result was an exchange of more than a thousand punches causing sparks that showered them like fountains.

And then the key moment came to pass.

A bias so slight it couldn't even be called a habit.

The king discovered he could find the faint glint in the needle's eye.

I really love the I mean the writing is just gorgeous.

I really love the

causing sparks that sh the exchange of more than a thousand punches causing sparks that showered them like fountains.

And then you see them fighting in space.

And I I think that you know, we are like deep on the like iconographic.

This is a battle between gods.

You know, this is being described like a battle at the end of the world.

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to jump forward so far.

My, I just wanted to say that after he does use zero hand, he doesn't seem, he's

he doesn't seem like he knew that he was going to lose.

We, I, you know, I'm curious.

Well,

which is just to just to finish off talking about the like for the last time in my life thing, yeah.

Because

my sense is just like, I do not anticipate a threat like Merowem to ever happen to me again.

I am putting my everything into

this last zero hand for the last time.

I need to put a pin in this conversation until we can actually talk about the end of this fight because I have tons of stuff to say about it.

Okay.

Um,

uh, I also love that Merowem keeps sitting like Gonda is in the uh

movie room.

He sure does do that when he's like,

You've lost an arm and a leg, like you can't pray anymore.

Just tell me my name.

Exact same posture.

At which point we get one of the all-time banger lines.

Natera laughs and says, the king of the ants.

I don't need arms to pray.

Far from it.

Prayer is an action of the heart.

I'd like to briefly send

a malevolent shout-out to my dear friend Austin Walker, who I think if you go back and listen, said

you need hands to pray, knowing full well what he was saying.

Austin's trick.

I think that that's my favorite thing about doing Media Club Plus is

we're full of those.

That's like the best thing that we do is.

taunting Jack with

things from...

There was just one in the last episode.

Has it come to pass?

It has come to pass, yes.

Sylvie noted it in the chat when I called

Netaro a sapient weapon of mass destruction.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I love it.

There's just a lot of us going OT about shit we say on this show.

Yeah, at one point I described something as like a nuclear bomb.

Oh, you did it a couple times.

Yeah.

I had thought that you were talking about UP.

So I was like, got that one sorted.

Yeah.

That was one that I was like,

I think I remember being like, be careful, Sylvie.

It's so funny to me, and I've talked about this before on the show.

There are times when you say things or you react to something that I have said and it slips under the radar like a fish swimming beneath a boat and it passes completely unnoticed by me.

And then there are times when I can tell it's happened and I can't do anything about it.

Right.

Because you feel something shift and I go, oh, hang on.

This is the trick with spoilers.

This is the thing I've always said about spoilers is like

calling attention that something has been spoiled is the real spoiler.

Yeah.

Because when you're just talking about stuff, it's impossible to know like when and where things happen, how important they are, the exact way they unfold.

And it's not until someone says like, hey, that's a spoiler.

Don't spoil that, that it calls attention to it and like locks it into the mind of someone who may or may not have been spoiled.

Just let it lay sometimes.

You don't have to say, you don't have to tell someone that someone else has ruined something because they may not have noticed.

You don't need to, when someone talks about dogs, be like, oh, one of those kills, Kilo was older.

You can just be like, oh, yeah, no, that's interesting.

I wonder what type of dog is Killowa's favorite.

The 100-type Guanyin Bodhisattva

type Guanyin Bodhisattva was a Buddha that appeared behind an enemy, gently enveloping the target with an indiscriminate love.

Previously, Kilua had sensed its murderous intent from a great distance away.

It had left such a strong impact that Kilua had changed direction.

The entirety of Nedero's aura was transformed into a light, much like a dazzling star, and it fired with a merciless roar.

Talk about evil prayers.

The way that the zero hand looks and the way that firing the zero hand

is Notero's Hail Mary is terrifying.

Oh, wait.

Very briefly, I want to read the line again.

Just read it here, and you can write that down on your notepad viewer.

Notero says, Prayer is an action of the heart formed properly from within.

It becomes a wish, and then the wish bears fruit.

Keep that in mind.

Here's what happens.

The Guanyin's mouth opens, and inside its mouth is

the universe, like the dark void of space.

And then out of it comes like

white rainbow light.

And out of that.

That sounds like a plane.

It sounds like a jet plane taking off.

Does anybody else think that?

Yes, it does.

No, yeah, it does.

Or a nuclear shockwave.

The rumble of a nuclear shockwave.

Although, actually, I have a note here that I hadn't realized was

important.

I took it without realizing it was important.

It was one of my unimportant notes.

And we briefly see as the light is pouring out of the Zero Hand's mouth or the Guanyin's mouth,

like a version of Notero that is like desiccated or rotten from the power of the light or the power of the exertion.

And in this moment, I thought that this was gestural.

I thought that we were, you know, compared to the light of the Guanyin, Notero was sort of like,

this thing makes Notero look like this.

That's not true.

As he fires this, Natero is being like physically like ruined by it.

Yeah.

white rainbow light.

The way this is drawn is such a great illustration.

Often, we talk about

the quality of the animation or the quality of the character design.

I specifically want to shout out the way the color work in this

shot of the like white light, because it is both incredibly bright.

It's this incredibly high-brightness white that also has kind of like moving within it, this pale, indistinct, flickering flame of color.

It's gorgeous.

The pillars in the tomb shatter and then as it subsides into silence we hear like a fizzing or a clicking or an electrical rumble that does actually really evoke the sort of like the rush of

what a nuclear blast does to microphones, where they they they simply cannot cope.

So you hear not just a roar of flame or a roar of of um energy, but like the microphones themselves, you know, falling apart right at the edge of their

sound.

It's the audio equivalent of when you see like spots of light with like high radiation, you know.

Yeah.

Lava is on the floor.

The rock has melted.

And Natero is

like an old man.

He looks his age.

Yeah.

He looks 120.

Yeah.

He is missing his arm.

He is missing his leg.

He also looks, um,

and this is grim.

He looks like someone who has been hit by a bomb.

He looks mummified.

Or been, you know,

burned by a nuclear bomb.

He is just a small, empty, ruined figure.

Gasping and winding.

And his eyes are...

Totally empty.

When we talk about empty eyes, we often mean that there is no light in them, you know, or

that there's no reflection or anything.

His eyes are black.

There's like a pinwheel, like a pinwheel of light in them, I think, in some shots.

But I think that's supposed to be reflection off them more than anything.

He looks terrifying.

This is the wages of the violence.

He said,

I have to act quickly before my heart is swayed.

You know, in the knowledge that what he had to do was

not just

an evil act,

but like a categorically evil act.

Yeah.

For the last

is just some stuff I wanted to talk.

Do we have more about like the

impact of this, or can I talk go back to what we were saying about Netaro

his comment about this is the last time I'll do that.

Yeah, please.

This to me, so the reason why I'm I was kind of like confused about whether or not it was Nen or not using his to sort of seal his wounds is because after this he those wounds start bleeding again he looks older we've talked about how nen makes people look younger the way I always interpreted zero hand is that he is using like all of his fucking nen at once yeah it's like the it is the the

he has spent everything that he can on this one

this one technique well and it is completely like

drained him.

Because they talk about with Wing and stuff, how Nen is something that sort of just leaks out of people as they as life goes, and then Nen Masters is like, they're able to control it.

I was thinking about that a lot with him,

again, looking like he's 120 years old after using this.

The fact that he talks about it in a way where it sounds like he's never done it before, where it's like, this is the ultimate secret technique.

Yeah, thank you, Keith.

Like, this was the release of everything that we've seen of Netaro his entire journey with training and nin, and

it isn't enough.

And I think that part's really cool.

Crucially, your aura is a little bit more.

You know, you saying that, Sylvie made me go pull up the nin wheel because I remember and when we were learning all the rules of nin, one of the most basic rules is that like you are what you are and you can kind of develop moves or powers that are based on other nin specialties.

But the further opposite on the nin wheel it is, the harder it is for you.

Yeah.

Um, and I'm looking at the nin wheel right now, and they're not the farthest, but the second farthest things away on the nin wheel from enhancement, which is what Netero is.

He's an enhancer.

Yeah.

Are conjuration.

creating objects from aura and manipulation controlling animate and inanimate things oh my gosh makes a little bit

guadian is a conjuration nen power.

It's got to be, right?

I mean,

I would assume as much.

In no way could what he's doing be described as enhancing.

No.

Yeah.

I tell you what could be described as enhancing, actually.

Every single time we've seen Isaac Notero do something like fighting prior to this.

The

ball game.

That's the game.

The ball game.

That's enhancing.

I also think that Notero is someone who has transcended the the Nen wheel until it comes down to the heart of it.

You know, when he has to do something this big, unfortunately, you are on the nen wheel.

To your point, Dre, about like it is on the opposite.

This is the worst.

You know, yeah, and I

think that

like

even operating not at

like in his like peak

nen type it's important like

nettero is insanely good at nen he is yeah probably the most powerful nen user we've seen

of a human of a human i guess yeah yeah um there maybe there's there's a there's a way to see his dedication to the prayer thing as

um

like

a way of accessing Nen that normally he wouldn't have access as much access to, or maybe he just has such a bottomless, like a well of potential that it doesn't matter.

He was just able to dump all of this extra potential into mastering this thing that he was really passionate about.

Like Meruim says, you know,

gave into an emotion akin to insanity.

Maybe he's just the version of Castro that worked it, that worked out.

That's such a funny comparison.

Oh, my God.

Because Castro had the exact same problem.

But I mean, Hunter Hunter would say that's possible.

Totally.

Totally.

You can train.

You can.

You totally can.

And Nen type is also mutable over the course of your life, I think, is another thing.

I don't know.

Fundamentally.

I think that the important thing about this is that Aura is your life energy.

Yeah.

Nen is

the controlling of your life energy, and he has saved up and spent

his life's energy for one

attack here.

And it wastes him.

The king walks out of the smoke.

I've got essentially unharmed.

You've got

like he's got a few cuts on him.

Oh, sorry.

It's okay.

Yeah, they show, like, he's sort of kind of, he's tattered a bit, kind of all over, in a way.

The damage is there only to suggest the damage that isn't.

Yeah.

If this was a costume in like Nen Impact or whatever it's called, it would just be called, it would be Merrowim brackets battle damage.

Like

it's there, but it's not enough to

kill him by any means.

They announced Merrowim for Nen Impact.

I believe he was like early announced for that, but I might be wrong.

I know that all the

I'm pretty sure, though.

I know that the Royal Guards are in that.

I heard the Broad God's DLC, though, right?

Tito is at least

full DLC, the first DLC.

Merrillin's in the roster, yeah.

Yeah, this is a base roster.

A little bit longer of a clip, but we deserve it.

Yeah, we do.

I freely admit it was a brilliant attack.

Zero wasn't enough.

Sad.

I was born to be the king of the ants,

the crowning glory of life.

I represent the instinctive hope long nurtured by my species.

A species that continues to evolve for my sake.

I stand before you, the culmination of generations of their unwavering service.

You are but one lowly human, not a king.

I am the king that bears the fate of his kind.

And that was the difference in this battle.

The ecology of the chimera ant is focused on the endpoint of all evolution.

That endpoint is me.

This is a feat that the human race with its individuality can never hope to match.

However, humans will no longer serve to propagate our species.

We learned that human individuality is so strong, it disrupts the ants' command structure.

In your honor,

I'll provide your kind with a preserve for a permanent settlement.

We'll consider both quality and quantity as we are selecting humans for sustenance.

Your lone battle was not in vain.

You shall be rewarded.

Your battle was not in vain.

We'll put you in the zoo.

It's unbelievable at this point after

really,

really

treating Netaro like a bad guy here.

A reminder of the stakes.

It's good.

I think it's smart to do that.

It's so much better than the king saying, you know,

humans are actually good.

It is.

Which wouldn't work with what comes next either.

Because fundamentally,

what is being asked is for humans to, or

Netaro to agree to put humans into

farms.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

You've won.

But some of them got to go to wildlife preserves.

We'll be free range.

Yeah, we're still going to eat you.

Well, only some of them.

Yes.

They're just the bad guys.

The really impressive ones will keep around as people.

and anyone who's not as impressive will be treated very well in there

on the range.

I love the way that King's philosophy gets some more facets, but fundamentally remains mostly the same.

It's great.

But

how could it be different if he was still with Komegi playing Gungi instead of here having to do this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Where is the where

else could the emotion that he hasn't been showing go after what happened to Komegi?

His reaction to what happened to Komegi has been fully absent from the show.

He has not reacted.

But we know

that what he's actually feeling is what Pita is feeling, but like worse.

Yeah.

That's got to go somewhere, and it goes into my plans for the human farm.

Also, he was going to do this anyway.

He was going, yes, he's literally got, he's got the beginning of the human farm on his front lawn.

And we know that even when he's not having to make a case to his opponent, the king is already starting to think things like, well, maybe I should keep some humans alive.

And, you know, not kill.

So I don't even

put too much credit to his, we'll consider quality and quantity as we're selecting humans for sustenance.

He's just going to do what he was always going to do.

I do believe him when he says, you know, your lone battle was in vain.

You shall be rewarded.

And he's also, you know, I believe him when he says, you're a good opponent.

But

this is Hisaker again.

Right.

You know?

God, it's so cool that, like,

the awful germ of the idea.

that we started to see with Hisaker has sort of been like scaled up.

Yeah.

It's kind of why this arc is so good.

There's so much of that.

Not just in this case.

There is just so much of like this idea was like small and sort of a through line, and now we're taking it as far as we can.

Like it is like,

I don't know.

I just really like that in a writing way, you know?

There's a jump scare here.

Either way.

Yeah.

The show doesn't really do jump scares like this.

We've talked, you know, I'll use the word jump scare.

What I really mean is like an almost subliminal flash of an image, usually with a sound cue, but they're not really intended to make you jump.

Like, for example, Keith turning his volume up exactly 100%.

Keith activating his net ability.

But this is a jump scare, as there's a pause between him saying, answer my question, you know, tell me my name.

I will not ask it again.

What happens, Keith?

An extreme close-up of a

sketched-out skull.

Like a red

skull.

Yeah, it's a white skull with black eyes and like a glowing red coming up from underneath.

And then it cuts to Meroem, who's laughing.

I will briefly pause here.

Hey, Netaro.

Sorry, Netaro.

You might think that when we say they show a spooky skull on the screen, that doesn't sound terribly frightening.

Somehow, it actually is.

It actually is.

It's real spooky.

And Netero's laughing, and then it shows the skull again, just as briefly, but we see more of it.

It is like your classic scary skeleton skull.

Yep, but it does hit your soul.

Netero says,

I am not alone.

Do not underestimate humans, Merohem.

It's Meroem.

That's the name your mother gave you.

Yeah.

The king.

Just tells him.

Yep.

Just tells him.

The king could not savor his name as it fell from the old man's lips.

An old man who, by all rights, should be trembling before him, and yet he did not.

Now,

when someone says to the essentially in the alien invasion story,

I am not alone.

Do not underestimate humans.

The thing that they almost always follow it with is:

humans have a tenacity and a resolve, and they will beat you.

Or humans might be weak on their own, but they're strong together.

The enduring power of the human spirit,

humans have something that you don't, and that's what makes us human.

Instead, Netaro opens his mouth really wide.

Meruem, king of the ants,

you really don't have any idea, do you?

You know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart.

Mars.

Just then, the king felt true fear for the first time.

These were not the words of a beaten and broken old man awaiting the icy grip of death.

But one glance at the resolve written across his face made it clear he meant every single word.

sorry jack if i cut you off slightly early there no no it's uh

it's it's worth it uh humans are evil and notero is banking on this not only is he banking on it he's incorporated it i guess that's sort of the same thing like um prayer is something you do with your heart yeah in this moment The king feels fear for the first time as Notero raises his hand, like a pointing finger, and punches out his own heart.

Hey.

Do we remember what is on Netero's special shirt that he wears when he's serious about fighting?

Isn't it a heart?

Isn't it the word heart?

It's the word heart.

Oh my god.

It's actually this shot of him punching out his own heart where he is nude that evokes to me most clearly the like

a body following a bombing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think this is a really, really great shot.

It's really haunting.

I was briefly muted for longer than I meant to be.

And I was talking during that time a while ago.

So I can't remember if it was right before that or during me being muted where I mentioned that he looks like a living mummy.

Oh, you did.

We didn't hear that.

Yeah, we didn't.

He does.

This is the prayer action interrupted.

The hand, the palm is not in front of his face.

He has just like plunged his fingers into his chest.

And then in a flashback, we learn that there is a bomb inside him that will detonate when his heartbeat,

when his heart stops beating.

He says, I'll see you in hell if there is one.

And the king says, I see.

From the very beginning, checkmate was yours.

And then

from outside, there is an immense explosion.

The sound design here is so good.

There's no background music or anything like that.

Right after the king says that line that Jack just said,

it it's pure silence for like a split second and then the rumble of the bomb um and the bomb begins to blossom into what looks like a mushroom cloud and then the narrator steps in and he says the bomb was both cheap and compact but despite this it also proved surprisingly lethal With the right technology, it would be possible to mass produce these cheaply, making them a favorite of dictatorships.

This, along with the shape of the cloud, earned it the name Miniature Rose, or The Poor Man's Rose.

And then the episode ends with no further comments.

It's such a banger way to end an episode.

It is

unbelievable.

It is, it's so fucking incredible.

I would like kudos to everybody involved.

You crushed it.

You nailed it.

You should say that this is the show at its absolute peak.

If that were true.

Yeah, if that were true.

here's the thing

this is a deus ex machiner so brutal and so

violent that i was almost insulted by it uh natero revealing all this time i've had a bomb in me that is going to end the fight you know if it if it really comes down to it the thing that stops me from feeling upset about that and instead feeling kind of like bitterly, coldly satisfied with it, is this is the

like right at the end of Notero's whole deal.

This, like, humans are ultimately malicious.

The thing inside my heart was a bomb that was going to kill you.

Um,

this is Isaac Matero in his most like pragmatic but also like deeply fucked ideology.

Right.

Um, you think we're stopping you because you're evil?

We're stopping you because we're evil.

Yeah.

Yes.

The army of the food chain.

The humans want to stay on top of it.

And also, we have.

This is our planet.

Yeah.

You know?

And something about the brutality of the Deus Ex Mac in that.

I don't mean brutality in the sense of it's a bomb, but I mean brutality in the sense that like it lands like a hammer blow.

There would be a way you could write this, right?

Where it's like, we know Notero has a bomb in him.

And the stakes of the scene are, is Notero going to have to sacrifice his own life?

You know is Notero go you could even go one step further right you could say that to use the bomb in Notero's heart would

be a victory for the ants or would be a victory be a victory for malice would be a victory for violence and then the tension in the scene becomes is he going to use the bomb we don't get that we don't know about the bomb until the king does and that is right at the end of the fight and so there is a portion of me that's like, that's not sporting.

You know?

But it's not sporting.

This is Netero and the Hunter Committee.

The laugh on his face right before he does it, it's haunted.

It's a truly haunting image.

It's more haunting, I think, even than the mummified corpse of still-living Netaro.

Yeah.

It's just cruel.

It's cruel to the viewer who was expecting.

I mean,

I don't know.

I don't know what I thought was going to happen.

In retrospect,

I

don't know whether or not we could have gotten to the end of the Chimera and arc with the Chimera and King on the board.

You know, the Chimera Ant King is not someone who says, actually, I think humans are all right.

Going.

You have brought me around to your way of thinking.

You mean the reality of the king in and of himself is that he must be dead at the end.

In a shonen story, right?

The other way you do this is that the king wins, you know?

Sure.

But Hunter Hunter is not going to end that way.

It is not going to end with the victory of the king over Notero, and the show, Hunter Hunter, ends with the king ascending.

That is not what happens.

So what do we do with the king?

And you could have Notero...

Notero has to be the one that fights him.

Because

that is how it goes.

That is how we have set this up.

And you could have the fight go through and Natero win

outright, which wouldn't work.

You could have the fight go through and have Notero win, but at the cost of his own life, which is fine.

But Isaac Notero is not really the type to make a heroic sacrifice.

I tell you what, he is the type to do.

He's the type to make a frightening, violent, ultimately nihilistic sacrifice.

And that's what we get in the end.

And I think there's a fine line between those two things, a heroic sacrifice and a frightening, violent, nihilistic sacrifice.

I don't feel like what he did was heroic here.

The bomb going off.

Yeah, I think if there's a fine line, he is like miles away from it.

The narrator coming in to leave us with the thought the bomb was cheap and compact, and with the right technology, it would be possible to mass-produce, making them a favorite of dictatorships.

That is the image that the narrator leaves us with, you know?

Yeah, that's the image that Netero leaves us with, too.

Like, that is is his final act, right?

It's important to

take

what we've just

learned about

the reintroduction of the stakes as far as humanity is concerned.

This is a

farms or no farms situation.

That the bomb is evil and cruel

and

overkill and nasty and sad and malicious, and that the games that Netero played leading up to it were

seemingly pointless and

like an expression of purely of his desire to like

be in

a life-ending, life-affirming bout.

I think that like, it doesn't change the reality of the ants.

I don't think it does.

Part of me wonders, and again, you know,

this is me building castles in the sky in terms of what Shonen can do.

Part of me is like,

maybe the king needs to win.

You know?

Sure.

I think it's time to introduce the overarching metaphor that has in an instant collapsed into reality on top of

the Chimera Ant season, which is

for

obviously World War II and the atomic bombs that were set off in Japan.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

In no uncertain terms, I think that the U.S.

is a monstrous place that dropped unnecessarily two atomic bombs on a country that it did not need to drop atomic bombs on.

This is a historic debate.

There's plenty of people who disagree with that.

I think all those people are wrong.

Yeah.

And I think that they're even willfully wrong.

I think what's very interesting about the Chimera Ant arc

is how immediately obvious it becomes that this has been about

America's invasion of Japan and the subsequent bombing of Japan

and

how

cautiously it is adopting a sort of seeing both sides attitude, which is,

I would say, extremely rare

for the high volume of media that comes from Japan that does discuss

in metaphor

the atomic bombs.

Yes.

Yeah.

And it is clear that it is being.

This is not a reading that we're putting on this.

We're not making a reading here of like, oh, I think it's probably talking through that stuff.

There is.

By the end of this episode, especially by the

You Know Nothing of the Bottomless Malice Within the Human Heart, with the King, you know, this is.

I'm sort of combining two points here.

I'm agreeing with you, Keith, in that I think that the show is taking a really odd sort of like walking through the middle line, with the king taking his moment of victory to explain that things are going going to be very bad for people from here on out.

But then, leaving as your last word, Natero saying, you know nothing of the bottomless malice within the human heart.

Then the bomb going off.

Then

the narrator, the voice of, broadly, the narrator sometimes gets it wrong, and it's really funny when he does.

The narrator is, you know,

the omniscient voice of the show.

saying,

it would be possible to mass produce these cheaply, making them a favorite of dictatorships.

You know,

the show is

firmly aware of how

the thing inside Isaac Notero's heart, powered on some level by the malice in there,

is like ontologically evil, right?

Yes, totally.

And

I don't know where this metaphor goes.

Because following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was an immediate surrender.

And

I don't think that that is what the Royal Guards are going to do.

I also.

Oh, it's...

Crucially, there will be plenty of time to talk about Poor Man's Rose in the next several episodes.

Yeah.

Right, because this is the other thing that you are going to do or is afforded to you if you say, I'm going to tell a story about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not just like nuclear bombs in general, is that you then

tell a story about what happens afterwards, right?

About the immediate, this was the right thing to do, or this was like an atrocity, or how the hell do we, you know, even begin to repair this.

And then as you telescope out further from that, like, what does it mean when...

now everybody has fucking nuclear weapons but we don't use them you know we we just point them at each other and say uh wouldn't it be terrible if what happened to those cities happened to you um and then nuclear weapons get uh stronger and more and more powerful uh or grimly they get more and more precise um you know the story of the bomb dropping is centered on the moment that the bomb

or the bombs go off and all the American hemming and and whoring of, like, well, what should we do?

Is this, you know, is this justified?

But then the majority of that is sitting afterwards, is sitting in the aftermath of those actions.

And where this episode breaks,

that is just beginning.

You know,

the bomb has gone off.

And if Tagashi has been setting up pieces to tell a story about the bombings

and about totalitarianism, right?

Yeah.

Where is the rest of the story?

You know, what's going to happen next?

What I want to say about that is only that

when this in an instant revealed itself to be a metaphor for the bombings in Japan,

that what it actually happens, it's that it stretches back actually

basically to the beginning of the Chimera and Arc.

It's been about that the whole time.

It just has been totally

hidden beneath

this, the jabbing of the fingers into his own heart.

Until that moment, it's unclear because it's abstract.

All that stuff is all there.

You can go and see

the Chimera Ants as an violent and expansionist Japan.

This is a self, seems like a self-criticism to me of the early days of

Japan's involvement in World War II.

I mean,

like, they literally are re like, there's, there's a lot of, like, the places where the Chimera ants go really do resemble places that have been historically colonized by Japan.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah.

The whole time.

It's been there the whole time.

Well, it's been there the whole time.

So the question is, like, where's the guy from here?

Is actually, how has the entire thing already been a metaphor for Japan's World War II involvement?

And, you know, it is telling that the detonation,

the action of detonation is a stabbing of your own heart, right?

It's, you know, you think about the way that Hart had talked about fiction as a sort of synecdoche for like humanity.

Right.

And, Jack, who does this make the hunters?

This makes the hunters America?

Right.

The pre-empire.

And America.

The evil empire who goes to stop the forming of a new evil empire.

I have to harden my heart to all this stuff.

What is it?

And then the

man, I gotta fucking watch Hunter Hunter again.

And

just to keep building on that, too is an evil empire that mostly doesn't give a shit until suddenly the violence is on their doorstep and the lion man is killing their newscasters.

Yeah, they're also very interested in policing the world,

you know, right?

Yep, and they have an ideology, like a

core ideology that is like broadly, regularly indistinct.

See what is a hunter, but ultimately keeps coming back to like go somewhere take a thing destroy a thing or if we look at karapica this sort of like liberal subject uh we are here to protect the world you know yeah

and again it also always comes down to um sort of like domination and power right like hunters are always

using their nen or their strength to in some way enact like their agendas and that is where their hierarchy comes from is through the

implementation of that.

And

I think the thing that makes the Chimera Ant arc so phenomenally interesting

is the way that it moves in and out of demonizing and empathizing both with the hunters and with the ants.

Something that I think is cast in a whole new light by this is the slow changing of the king's heart, is the

machinations of the various royal guards and what they're doing and how they're feeling about how the king is and isn't changing.

Man, and in this way, is beginning to move in a piece with like

a particular register

of post-World War War II

and post-World War I, I suppose, like war dramas, right?

Where like the mode that a war drama often operates in is like we are going to watch

soldiers and people in command on all sides of the war, and we're going to kind of like try and pick apart

how allegiances move, how the viewers' allegiances move.

You know, like a war movie is regularly moving between these kinds of perspectives.

It's so funny because I came into this recording being like, we're going to talk about the nuclear bomb.

Yeah.

And then

as soon as you said to me,

oh, Jack,

you're looking at this from the wrong Zoom lens perspective.

I'm like, ah, fuck.

I did not come into this episode prepared.

Tagashi stream.

Yeah.

It's great.

And it's, and it's, it's, it's,

it's some of the best deployment of a metaphor that I've ever seen.

It's really well done.

It's really good.

And even if you flash back to me talking about like a brutal Deus Ex Machina, you know?

Someone stepping in and saying we can end a war immediately and all it's going to cost is thousands and thousands and thousands of civilian lives.

And also your soul.

Yeah.

That is also your mortal soul.

I think it is telling.

So I'm going to put a pin in the thing I was about to say.

This is busy and complicated storytelling.

And Tagashi is painting with a series of very complicated brushes.

And so

it is both not my place to talk about how a Japanese creator wants to tell a story about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

And also, it is not my place to say, is he doing this well or not?

I don't know.

I feel like over the course of Media Club Plus,

we have been pretty clear about how our project is less, hey, is Hunter Hunter good?

We've answered that part.

Yeah.

It is.

Yes.

I am not interested in being like, is Tagashi telling like a well-told story about the nuclear bomb?

I think he is telling a well-told story because I think he is working on a very he is trying to tell a lot of stories at the same time.

He is, yeah.

And I think the way he is moving through the metaphor is fascinating.

Yeah.

What I want to say specifically when I say that this is one of the best deployments of a metaphor that I've ever seen, I want specifically the maneuver of waiting until the climax to

flip the switch that turns the light on, and all of a sudden the room is filled with the signs.

Oh, a law, look, all that stuff that we passed on the way, just out of sight, was a thing, it was a sign that said this is about World War II.

Yes, it's not rare for something to be a metaphor for World War II, especially in countries that were involved in World War II.

What is rare is how

diligent

he was about holding it back until the moment.

And then

instantly collapsing the two realities together, recontextualizing 40 episodes of TV.

Absolutely.

I'm not taking issue with you saying it is a well-deployed metaphor.

I think it is a fantastically deployed metaphor.

I am speaking to the listener who might be thinking, I want to know whether or not they think it's a good version of telling a story about a nuclear bomb.

Sure.

That is not what we are here to do.

Yeah.

I just wanted to clarify because of how common of a metaphor it is,

when I say that it's good, what specifically I think is good about it.

It's not just that it happens to be better than World War II.

Yeah, definitely.

God, it's wild.

And people, as soon as this happened, people

talked about it like this, right?

I would hope so.

I have determined that it is not that common.

You know, I think.

It wouldn't surprise you that every couple years, there's a post saying, I think

that Hunter, Hunter, Chimera, Antarctic is about World War II.

And then it's full of comments of people saying,

oh, you might be right.

Oh, oh, oh.

But like, not having considered it.

It's because of the.

I mean, firstly, it's because they weren't watching it.

Also, it's because of the way that it happens, the moment that it clicks into place.

Also, there is so much going on in the Chimera and Ark

that.

Just as, for example, there was so much going on in World War II.

I just think you see a mushroom cloud, you start asking a couple questions mentally.

Well, it's not a mushroom cloud, it's a flower cloud.

It's completely different.

It's wild.

Has Takashi talked about this?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I haven't been on top of looking for interviews and stuff like that.

The

looking at the manga release, literally the only author note is like...

Sorry for the wait.

I've been working hard on this.

Hold on.

That sounds like a good.

I finally got this volume out.

Thank you for waiting.

I promise to work hard in many ways and that's it that's the only author note uh i love

please relax tagashi i i know people are so mean about

rolling too it disgusts me

it really disgusts me yeah mean about what

like him taking hiatus chapters oh what the fuck i know it's people are really mean about it and like yeah like nasty and unforgiving and cruel uh tagashi understands the malice in their heart though yep yeah

so do I.

And you will not see Havan.

You can't unfire the bomb.

No.

Once it goes off, you are now in a world where the bomb has gone off.

The narrator,

the future tense, he says this would be a powerful tool for dictators.

You know,

the action of striking at his own heart has

opened this box.

In the long term.

In the short term,

Poof and Yupi are on their way.

Komegi is being healed, as Pito is planning to kill Goan as soon as they can heal Komagi and figure out what to do with her.

But the bomb has gone off.

So,

we also haven't seen the body.

I don't think that that is

important.

Okay.

I think that.

I think that

show me the body is for something like someone getting shot off screen you know not the mushroom cloud rising over the thing although it is a very different story if oh this reminds me of something i wanted to say uh

the the bomb is not deployed on civilians the bomb is deployed on the king in a nuclear test site they even got themselves hey why were they underground there you go why did they go down there i mean they they went down there to say

this way we avoid casualties, right?

We can let loose.

No, they actually said we can let loose, which is a very Natero sort of like framing of that.

But I do think that that is an important distinction, right?

And it seems like Tagashi doesn't think that that changes the malice of the action.

You know, Tagashi believes that the bomb is a wound on your heart and a wound on the collective heart of humanity.

And specifically, in a sort of very material sense, is opening the door to other future atrocity as this cheaply made, you know,

you know, Tarashi doesn't necessarily think that the fact that it was used on the king rather than on civilians makes it any less evil, but it is interesting that it was used on not just a high-ranking figure, but the high-ranking figure.

The king says, I am the peak of chimera ant evolution.

I am sort of like the chimera ant.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Well, and that implies that he is the peak of everything.

Yes.

Peteminate in the food chain and stuff.

Et cetera, et etc.

etc.

Great job by the way to whoever named that track.

It's become a very important tag for this podcast.

Yeah, it's been really easy for when I just want to reference those themes to say the name of the song and then everyone goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, good observation.

Because those words aren't in the manga as far as I know.

This is purely naming.

Name socks so hot.

I've, I've, I need to tell you something.

I need to tell you the name of a song.

Oh, is this the song that you were like, this is such a monumental spoiler and we can't tell you this?

Yes.

That song is called The Old Man is Crucified.

Jesus.

This one.

This was playing at the crucifixion.

Jesus was forgiving the penitent thief or whatever, and you could hear this in the background.

Yeah, so I think that

was in

that

was in episode 120

sorry, 113 or something?

116.

And your guess was that we would hear the name of the song in 122, not far off, 126.

Hey, not far off.

Yeah.

I think it is.

It would

be very interesting if the king survives this.

Less because I'm thinking, like, wow, how cool and powerful would the king have to be to survive this?

And more as we spin out the metaphor and as we like

pull a lot, like tease out where is the story going from here?

What would it mean if the king survived?

You know,

I don't think he has.

I think that this is the end of the king.

Can you say what you think it would mean if the king were to survive?

It'd be really interesting.

You know, you could play the metaphor more directly and move towards something that resembled the surrender, which was, I think, just about a week later.

But I don't know that that's what the king would do.

I also, yeah,

I don't see a feasible path forward.

Because the king's surrender would feel really odd, especially since part of the threat of the American bombs was there are more.

And with Notero's death, that is it.

You know, Notero, well, no, there will be more.

The narrator has told us this.

But in the immediate, you know?

What is nice about Tagashi

is

he seems to be an author who is aware of these questions as they crop up and seeks to answer them.

Sometimes he seeks to answer them.

Sometimes he pretends that he isn't seeking to answer them.

And then he does.

Then he does, yeah.

And what I love is that a lot of times they are questions about like character and motivation and internal thought and less about

like

stuff happening

like in the world that people have to react to.

Characters act.

and change the world

and characters react to those states

instead of things.

Sylvie's been watching Lost.

Like, Lost.

Like, how Lost.

Don't get me started.

Oh, you mean in Lost, where just like it's like a Guitar Hero board where plot events are kind of coming towards you, and then the characters just sort of see them happen.

I can't stand watching Riverdale, but I do see it as sort of like a masterfully sort of satiric

exploitation of the way that TV is written, where like anything can happen, anybody can do anything.

Like, stuff in the world just flips a switch and changes everything all the time in kind of meaningless, empty ways.

And

that's something that's it is kind of the representative of what I hate about dramatic television.

I hate drama TV, but I don't like Batman, I don't like Breaking Bad, I don't like any of these fucking shows.

I don't like Game of Riverdale.

Say again,

They are different from Riverdale.

It's

happening.

She is satirizing that kind of television.

And

I think Tagashi,

like my favorite TV shows, Tagashi and the Hunter-Hunter anime, are.

working with core character questions and building worlds that emerge from answers to those core character questions and less working with like, I could just make anything happen anywhere to change how plots go.

Yes.

Yes.

Although,

although

I do think that a hallmark of Tagashi's writing is, in a sort of very like Kurt Vonnegut way,

it's like the author saying, I get to decide what the characters do.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they're very consistent.

They are.

I do think that something that is a real hallmark for Hunter Hunter and a real positive for it in my mind is Tagashi's readiness to start getting you on side with characters.

Now, he gets you on side with them through reasonable ways.

You know, you can figure out why they are feeling that way.

But

he likes to make them avatars into people.

Yes, though I can imagine there is a kind of viewer,

and this isn't me, but I understand how you get there, Who says Peter was the one who killed Kite, and they are a baddie.

So, what are we doing?

In most anime fans, yeah.

And I would say go watch Lost, then

I would actually say, Go watch Hunter Hunter, you know,

see what happens.

Um,

I should say, I haven't watched past season three of Lost, so maybe you're good.

Okay,

there's like one really good episode, and then it's like, okay.

Yeah, which season has the polar bear?

That's like season one.

Okay.

All I know about lost are the polar bear, the smoke monster, and oh Jay, you should watch Lost.

I'm putting my weird that is that will not be it.

That's a media club minus show.

Yeah, making that

it may have already been called out as a media club minus.

Yeah, and I honestly, I have fun with it, but I do think it is fundamentally pretty bad TV.

Yeah,

let me just check some uh dates right quick.

So, Survivor premiered premiered in 2000.

Lost premiered in 2004.

So, Lost is a post-Survivor thing.

And then, Saw

released 2004.

Okay.

So, I do think that there's a sort of like a triangle of American culture that you can draw.

And because Survivor is a very, very, very long-running show, Survivor eventually just sort of melds sore, and lost together.

But I do think that it's great that they all sort of like were fired out of the cannon of American culture at the same time.

Love Survivor, though.

Oh, Keith, I learned recently via Allie that you are a big Survivor person.

And this is very funny because I have been getting really into Survivor over the past year, and we have never talked about it.

What season are you on?

We've been jumping around.

We just watched the season, the first season with Rupert.

That has the single greatest moment of television history in it.

In the first episode.

Wow.

Is it the stealing everything from the Rupert Team Team Team Tech?

The stealing everything from the other team because they're pirates, so they might as well steal.

It's phenomenal TV.

It's sort of like the thing.

I hate reality TV.

Survivor is kind of the only.

It's

by far the

TV show, the reality TV show that I like the most.

Although I watched a little bit of a few other things,

it sort of like proves reality TV as a genre to me.

That one moment sort of like self-justifies the genre.

That no one's ever been able to live up to it is their own fault.

I do think it's an evil, badly made television show.

However.

Yeah, sure.

Welcome to the television shows.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I have to stop talking about survivor.

I'm just going to say one sentence and then we can get back to Hunter Hunter.

Keith, we watched the season with Yule, and he's one of the the best survivor players.

Yule and Aussie.

Oh, I don't know who that is.

Oh, look him up and watch the season.

Okay, it's great.

I had, I want to be clear, I don't want to overstate my survivor fandom.

I haven't seen survivor since like 2008.

I've only watched old survivor.

I will not watch survivor at a higher resolution than 480p.

Oh,

so noble, honestly.

Um,

I'm, I, my, my, my survivor knowledge boils down to Boston Rob and Johnny Fairplay and Rupert.

I fucking hate Johnny Fairplay.

Oh, you love to hate Johnny Fairplay.

I'm going to kill Johnny Fairplay.

Bro, let's get together.

Let's kill Johnny Fairplay.

He was on Green Island Minecraft.

He's a survivor player who is deliberately trying to play evil, but he's also evil.

Yes, he's trying to play evil and is evil.

He's like, you know how the fun thing about a heel, Sylvie, is that, you know you love to hate them, but heels are like often skilled players who are like interesting and have something in their heart.

Johnny Fairplay is a largely skilled player who is evil.

There's a lot of...

Well, you just had to say, compare it to a wrestling heel, and I understood completely.

There's a lot of those guys who I just hate.

I need everyone to know he is a wrestling heel.

He's a professional wrestler.

Oh,

yes.

Like a not a great wrestler, but like, yes, he is a wrestling heel.

He is, however, and I want to be as clear as possible for the viewer, actually evil.

He is actually, yes, he is actually evil.

He's a bad guy.

I'm looking at his...

I'm looking at my professional evil.

I could just tell you that from looking at his hair-beard combination that he seems to be wearing throughout the years.

I don't know.

He endorsed Jimmy Rave in Dragon Gate USA in 2011, and I do.

That's not a bad idea.

That's not that bad.

I've heard him say things directly into into a camera that are so misogynistic.

I did not think someone would say that on television.

I'm just looking at this guy's Wikipedia page, and there's some things I'm really enjoying.

One-time current Boca Raton Cruiser Boca Raton Championship Wrestling Cruiserweight Champion.

He was recently arrested for stealing jewelry, also.

I was going to say, on December 18th, 2020, Dalton and his mother, Patsy Hall, were arrested on larceny charges.

We love a mother-son larceny team.

Anyway, that's Jonny Fairplay, a man who was introduced by Keith and I agreeing that we were going to go and kill him.

Yeah, listen, I'll join in.

I just need to know that you two hate him, and I'm down.

Yeah.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you, my dear friends.

All right.

Let's see.

So, all this is to say,

I

do not know what is going to happen next.

I came into this episode with a kind of

some sort of wormy dissatisfaction about Natero ending the fight like that.

But a deep respect for what it said about Natero and about what it said about

violence and evil.

And then when you said, Jack, it's not just an image of the nuclear bomb, and it's not just talking about the nuclear bomb in this episode.

You need to take the big camera.

Yeah.

I like this a lot more.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's so good.

And I want to say, you know, this is somewhere where we're kind of failed again by the restrictions of the podcast.

If you had gone on your own in your life and watched, you know, over the course of a week, seven episodes of the show, starting with 125 and ending with 132,

like your, your, the wave of dissatisfaction, I think, would,

like, it would not even have registered, I think.

Like, maybe doing it that way, we wouldn't have been able to immediately talk through the overarching metaphor.

Yeah.

But, like,

there's stuff that happens that I think might

sink, might

re-dissatisfy you.

But it sort of resolves itself.

Like, it knows what it's doing.

And it like moves into like, oh, it was all for this.

Like, oh, wow.

Like, that's crazy.

Yeah.

It's good.

Crucially, the episodes that Austin and Allie are on are the following episode and the one after that, not this one.

I think that that means something.

Yes.

I think, man, I'm so glad that you didn't.

I don't know that it's like there's a good version of this show where you don't tell me what we're building towards and a bad version of the show where you do tell me.

I don't think that that's the case.

But I am so glad that you didn't

prime me for this.

I mean, you primed me in the way that we're talking about Chimera ants, but, you know, you didn't go into this thing now, Jack, is this reminding you of anything?

Is there any

sociopolitical...

And you know, we were talking about like large-scale sociopolitical stuff and we were talking about authoritarianism and things like that.

And rumbling away in my head was you know we're thinking about

there is a resonance here

but the thing about making this show when you don't know what is going to happen is that people are showing you 500 flashcards simultaneously yeah and you're like oh oh my oh right okay so now we're talking about you pee okay um so i know that

surprise me that uh

I got the I think I described it in a previous episode of like, I can feel the vague shape of something out in the dark.

Yeah.

There was something there, and it was the world's most invisible metaphor.

Yes.

Wow.

Like Meliorone.

It had taken a breath and then let it go, and all of a sudden it was there.

We could see it.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

All the immaculate planning undone by like a sudden violent action, etc.

You know?

Yeah.

What are we watching next time?

That's a great question.

Next time, we're watching four episodes.

It's been two times since we watched four.

Oh my God.

Let's go.

But we're watching.

Oh my God.

You okay?

Yeah, I'm just thinking about the pace we're on now.

We're watching episodes 127, 128, 129, and 130.

Let me just triple check that that's actually what we're doing.

I can read a review while you triple check that if you'd like.

Nope, I got it.

That is what we're doing.

No,

127, 128, 129, 130.

Called Hostility and Determination, Unparalleled Joy and Unconditional.

Oh, it's too long.

Unconditional love.

Unparalleled joy and unconditional love.

Formidable enemy and clear objective.

And magic to destroy.

Hmm.

Hmm.

I love it when Hunter Hunter talks about magic.

Every so often it forgets that it has a word for that.

Yep.

I'm going to read a review now.

Hit it.

This is titled, I Hate Apps, Five-Star Review.

A user named the App Hater has logged on.

I hate an app so much, but since you called for November birthdays, I am here.

Media Club Plus is the only podcast good enough to make me download an app to review it.

Thank you, Media Club Plus, for making me care about anime, but no thank you for making me come here to say this.

You're welcome, you're not welcome.

That's fair.

I am also an app hater.

Fuck apps.

Fuck apps.

Worst dimension.

Worst dimension.

Yeah.

We're at a month, aren't we?

Last time December?

That's true.

We just did December in the one that just went up.

Sylvie, I have a great news for you.

What?

They do them again.

What the fuck?

Now, hold on a minute.

I would like to have

a month of clemency.

This is the clemency month.

This is if

your month has been called, which by my calculations should be 100% of listeners, and you didn't

leave a review, and I know that there's some of you out there,

this is your month to come in.

Say that you missed your month, apologize for missing your month, and leave five stars.

When we will grant you benediction.

You will, yes.

This is, we will, we will sing Jack.

What's that choral song called again?

Curie Ele Son.

Yeah, we'll sing that for you and grant you mercy from

a divine power

of your choice.

Yeah.

If your name is Jason,

did you know that your name is contained within the months of the year?

If you write them all out, you will see a secret message to you.

And the message will be Jason.

Did you know that your name is also the same same name as the dead kid from Heavy Rain?

Did you know that your name is the same as that famous horror villain?

That fellow in the lake.

His name's Frederick.

I can't think of another Jason to mention.

Do you need a pop star with strange pronunciation?

Jason Derulo?

Yeah.

Jason.

I will forever hate Jason Derulo for the year I worked at GameStop, and they just constantly played that Jason Derulo song on the GameStop TV.

Solo?

No.

The one where he says, like, man, it's so sad that I cheated on my girlfriend, but I can't believe she broke up with me.

I don't know that one.

I know Solo because it was in the Star Wars Connect game.

Oh.

And it was about Han Solo when they did it in that one.

Yeah, I'm Han Solo.

I'm Han Solo.

Yeah, but that in the Solo movie.

And also,

I know that he's in Cats.

I think that's it for us.

I think we're done.

That's it for us.

Thank you, everybody.

Thank you for listening.

Hey, everybody.

Why don't you remember about what we said at the beginning about Perpetua?

And you can go listen to Perpetua, the new Friends of the Table season.

Take a chance on Friends of the Table if you don't listen.

And if you do listen, congratulations.

That's you made the right call.

Yeah.

You're smart.

Everybody here should consider going to friendsofthetable.cash where the screenshots, et cetera, are uploaded every time an episode goes out, uh, because this one is going to have a lot.

Because I couldn't stop because it was the two best visual episodes that we've had in Hunter Hunter ever, for sure, without question.

Um, but consider signing up there to fund

us doing this and spending a lot of time doing it.

And did you know that we are still under thirty thousand dollars a month, which is the technically the start that starting point when we started doing this, we needed to cross that.

So if you want to bring us up above our minimum doing Media Club Plus level, that would be great.

That'd be really nice.

If you bring us up to $30,000, we'll stop making Hunter Hunter Media Club Plus.

Wait, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Then if you lower it again, we'll start making it again.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

If you get us over $30,000, I'll start writing the rest of Hunter Hunter.

Sylvie, I don't think it's going to be as good.

She'll put more girls in.

She'll put way more girls in it.

Yeah.

It's weird that.

Why is Krolo a girl now?

That's so weird.

So weird.

Why are, hey, why is Leorio a girl now?

That's so weird.

Every weird.

Why is Shadow the Hedgehog here?

But yeah.

Why is Shadow the Hedgehog teaching Killua all the swear words?

Krapaka always goes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Have a good time, everybody.

Bye.

See you soon.

See ya.

Godzilla would be there, too.

What an episode.

Damn.