...And Make It Painful - Hunter x Hunter ep. 122-124: Media Club Plus S01E39

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 Yoshihiro Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can follow me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

You can check out the run button Patreon at contentburger.biz.

And we've been doing a bunch of streams at friends at the table, twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

And those are going over on the youtube youtube.com slash friends of the table

and uh with me as always is jack to keith hi jack hi keith i'm jack uh you can get all the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com and you're telling me about a very exciting plug

for two days after this comes out Two days after this comes out, Friends of the Table's next main season, Perpetua, is going to begin.

It is inspired by it's an actual play series with no, you know, you don't need to have listened to anything before.

It's a brand new world, brand new story, inspired by 90s and early 2000s Dreamcast JRPGs.

Thursday the Hunter Hunter, I think.

There's a lot of Hunter Hunter and Thursday the 13th.

Yeah, a lot of Hunter Hunter, Thursday the 13th, JRPGs.

Those are the notes.

Don't need to watch anything.

Listen to anything else before.

Nope.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

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

If you are in the Greater Toronto area on March 19th, please come to,

I think it's pronounced Basement254.

If you want to hear my band Gut Machine, play with 666 Pastel, Burst Synapse, and Thought Crime.

More details at thenewFriendsDIY.com.

It should be a very fun night.

What about those in the lesser Toronto area?

I mean, yeah, you can come if you're in like Hamilton or whatever.

Okay, good.

If you, you should make 2025 the year of going and seeing local music.

Going and seeing live music is almost always good, but also going and seeing live music in your town by people who are from your town is the fucking best gift you can give yourself.

It's very fun.

Cannot recommend it enough, and it's not just because I'm playing.

Andrew Lee Schwan.

Hey,

I don't think I have anything to plug.

I was trying to make a joke about that McDonald's in the Pentagon TikTok because it's like MCP and we're MCP, but I got nothing.

Oh, McDonald's in the Pentagon TikTok.

There is a McDonald's in the Pentagon?

Is that MCP?

There is a McDonald's in the Pentagon.

It's oh, McP, like McDonald's Pentagon.

Yeah.

Okay.

McP.

I would say, I would call it MDP, if I'm being honest.

No, you're right.

That's why I decided to.

I would call it Mickey D's P.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

McDonald's.

Do you guys have any.

Did people around you have any stupid regional names for McDonald's?

Because I remember in my hometown, a lot of people used to call it McDicks, which makes no sense to me.

Oh,

no.

I did not have a McDonald's in the town where I grew up.

Did I?

No, I was so blessed.

Didn't have a McDonald's.

I also didn't have a McDonald's in my town because my town is weird.

And we passed a rule about no.

Sorry, this is a good rule, but it's because my town is bad, not because they're good.

So they get

a good thing, but for the wrong reasons.

It's for like house prices, expensive house prices.

There's no fast food allowed in my town.

So we had to go one town over to go to McDonald's, which we called Mickey D's, which I think is very normal.

Yeah, it's very common.

But under BDS, do not shop at McDonald's.

I have been to McDonald's in a very long time.

I used to go pretty regularly.

I genuinely like McDonald's food.

Sorry.

Here is what I will say about the McDonald's burger.

Yeah.

It is a burger.

by what is both the loosest possible definition and also it is the most burger that there has ever been.

This is just like small and flat.

This is my fast food theory.

And this is what I like about McDonald's.

There's fast food.

Place you should not show up.

Once again,

this applies to other kinds of fast food also.

Where like Domino's is

the opposite of this, where it's like, okay, the thing about a McDonald's burger is that it doesn't taste anything like a burger.

It tastes completely unique to that place.

It is its own whole thing that happens to be called a burger.

And so you can like it or dislike it based on that.

Yes.

Not on whether you like burgers.

If you like burgers, you can't like assume that you'll also like a McDonald's burger.

It's not a shitty burger.

It's just not a burger.

It's just called a burger.

Yeah.

Domino's is the same thing.

That's not pizza.

That's not what pizza is.

It's not what pizza tastes like.

You can't go, oh, you like pizza.

You should try dominoes.

It's not a shitty version of a pizza.

It's its own whole thing.

It's a totally new idea that also happens to be called pizza.

And you can like

a shitty version of pizza.

It is, it is shitty.

Well, this is this thing.

I fucking hate dominoes.

I wouldn't eat there with a gun to myself.

Also on the BDS.

I actually didn't know that, but I wouldn't go anyway because I hate them.

And their food, and they tricked everyone and they said our pizza's good now.

And all they did was add some stuff to the crust to make it garlickier, which is fine, but they didn't change the bad pizza.

And what are you guys even talking about?

That Domino's is good now.

Oh my god, death to dominoes.

Yeah,

also, what does their name have to do with dominoes or pizza?

I suppose because a domino is like a thing with dots on it, and pizza is sort of like a circle with dots on it.

Do you guys want to talk about

the noid hostage situation?

I do know about the noid hostage situation.

Oh, I do know.

The noid hostage situation is very sad.

It is very sad.

It's why they had to not talk about the noid for a very long time, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is.

They made made a mascot that was too compelling.

Yeah.

That's the dream.

One day someone should commission me to come up with a mascot for a fast food chain, and they should pay me...

Ooh, I'd do it for $65,000.

Oh, you should aim higher.

You should say 10 times that.

You should at least get six figures.

Yeah.

I don't have a lot of money.

And order $65,000.

Hey, don't I know it, but

I think that you could aim a little higher.

I I think if you 10 times to that, they wouldn't even bat an eye.

It's the same number to them.

It's crazy, isn't it?

How there is a certain kind of company that thinks about well, most companies think about money in a completely different way.

Yeah, it's like Crusader Kings, like our Crusader King streams, you know, it forces you to think like a monarch, which is obviously totally disconnected from humanity.

Speaking of

a monarch, yeah, speaking of disconnected from humanity,

or very connected to humanity in some cases.

Maybe more connected to humanity than the show.

We'll talk about this.

Yeah.

Welcome to Media Club Plus, a show about getting very angry at dominoes.

Yeah, it's the afternoon, so I'm thinking about lots of different things and not just Hunter-Hunter.

I bet Nettero likes dominoes, that piece of shit.

You think so?

I don't think so.

No, I don't think so, but

I just wanted to call him a piece of shit.

I think he likes salads and chicken breast.

This is

worryingly close to the lunch that David Lynch ate for every day.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And David Lynch is a good-hearted person rather than

Isaac Nasero.

Look, I love David Lynch.

Rest in peace.

But I feel like there's not a lot of people who have a good shot of embodying

Notero.

Isaac Nasero.

David Lynch, I think, has a shot.

Like, put him in those shoes, and you might get an accurate Notaro.

Would you like to know your name, King?

Beat me in a fight, and I'll tell you.

My subordinates, who are most likely dead, told me it.

Learn your name or die.

All right.

What are we doing today, Keith?

You want to do a recap?

Well, we talked about the King Notaro.

They ended their nine-episode-long road trip by crash-landing into an abandoned military test site.

Yeah.

Echoes of Dragon Ball Z with the landscape here.

And given what happened to Komegi, the king is probably ready to tear Netero's head off, right?

No, with only a couple minutes of exception, episode 122 is exclusively about the king trying to have a calm chat and Netero trying to goad him into a fight.

But you probably don't want to hear about that.

You probably don't want any more kink stuff.

You probably want to watch that and then end and then not go back to the king at all and instead hear about disgusting, squirmy brain centipedes and gyro.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

Do you remember gyro?

The king,

the original king?

That's what we get.

So that's good news for you, Sylvie.

And good news for sad killua collectors out there.

We're on a historic sad killua run featuring the dramatic re-entrance of Palm Siberia.

Yeah.

In her third outfit.

Yeah, her third outfit.

Pa how many forms is Frieza?

Pa has looked like three totally distinct people now.

It's true.

Yeah, it's great.

She actually has four outfits.

She appears in two different outfits in this episode.

This is great because

this is some lovely planning.

Some of these forms is Frieza.

Wow.

That's four.

Siberia, Frieza.

Oh, Frieza's Siberia.

Which one is Frieza?

No,

I love that so fucking much.

Yeah, yeah.

Frieza's the white and purple one, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Who's the cell?

Is the other one?

Right, Cell is the other one, yeah.

Also, there's five Friezas.

Is there?

Yeah.

Yeah, there's.

Are you counting the gold one?

Yes.

I don't.

Oh, six if you count the gold one.

Five if you count Super Frieza, which is his failed six of the mode.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

This is some really good hunter-hunter planning here, Keith.

Putting these three episodes together is fantastic.

Hands up, not me.

I didn't do this.

Hey, that's not true.

These may have come together originally, but these all got jumbled up because we were supposed to watch them.

Oh, no, this has turned out so well because what we get is watching Tagashi and the animation team play three

duologues, basically.

You know, like this is three conversations between two people.

Yeah.

And each conversation feels really different and has different stakes.

First, we see the king and Natero, then we see,

God, what happens in episode two?

Before we move on,

we see Congo.

Uh, but the bravery of giving us 20 minutes of the king in Netero after holding back for nine episodes and then ripping it away again is classic Hunter Hunter to me.

It's so good.

It's really good.

It's great.

Episode three is Killio and Palm.

And there's something so

that we've spoken about how

Hunter-Hunter pacing, specifically Chimera Ant pacing, kind of moves with its own bizarre rhythm.

You know, it is moving to the beat of its own drum rather than sort of any preconceived ideas about how pacing on something like this should work.

And there is something really ambitious and entertaining about just placing these three duologues back to back to back.

It's great.

It's so good.

I wish that I could take credit for putting these three episodes together.

But

do it.

And so I will.

I'm going to edit it.

I'll bleep it out for all the bleeps.

I I got a lot of messages.

People loved the bleeps.

So I'm going to go ahead and do that.

I've heard stuff that seems to suggest that they don't.

But I think what's happening here as well is that in the last episode, I wasn't too hot on the last chunk of episodes because I felt that the,

I think I described it in the episode as like the foot has come off the gas.

I have good news.

I did put these three together on my edge.

I did.

Yes.

We just happened to end up like we're now back on pace.

We have moved past where I was like, let's do these in two chunks of

four.

So this was me.

I did do this, and I'm taking credit.

It's as though in the last episodes, the pendulum sort of reached the top of its upswing and was like slowing down as it reaches the top.

And now gravity is pulling it back in the other direction.

And over the course of these three episodes, it feels like the pace starts to weirdly like pick up again.

as we go, especially because as we begin with 122, the

opening shot of the episode is Notero and the King on the dragon.

So, as someone who has not seen this before, I'm thinking to myself, here we go.

I have seen enough of Yoshihiro Tagashi's stupid games to suspect that we were not going to move into a straightforward fight.

So, I wasn't terribly surprised by the

events that transpired.

I was surprised by kind of the way in which they transpired, which is

great.

I think the place to start is, and we gestured to this earlier: this very clear evocation of the Dragon Ball,

let's fly away so we don't hurt anybody thing that's going on.

We actually got our version of this previously with the hypnotizing scales, meaning that no one would panic and everyone would kind of stay still as the palace was attacked.

But now it's coming through even more explicitly in, you know, we're here in this nuclear test, this devastated site.

Yeah.

I think that something that's great about

this landscape that goes totally unsaid in other shows, specifically Dragon Ball Z, where, as far as I know,

this archetype is from the like, let's go to a desolate wasteland to have this fight so that we're not, you know, supermanning through buildings all the time.

At very least, the most like prevalent early example of it, right?

Yeah, and I think the most iconic too, of like,

you know, Vegeta and Goku, or Goku and, you know, fill-in-the-blank villain in the middle of nowhere, flying through big rocks uh but it's it's very much like this is the appropriate home for

netaro and the king a place where the only other thing that could possibly happen here is testing you know weapons of mass destruction uh-huh these these are these are uh

uh sapient weapons of mass destruction basically

uh yeah

and they deserve to be here

which is as i understand it, not really the line that Dragon Ball takes.

Dragon Ball is sort of like we're going to a deserted canyon.

Right.

And Dragon Ball is heroic to go somewhere where no one can get hurt.

And it is, you know, it's not that it's

Netero is openly less concerned about civilian casualties than like civilian casualties happen in Dragon Ball Z at the level of like careless villains

shooting

blasts through

at cities or blowing up the whole earth and getting wished back.

But it doesn't, they don't get

on the word here.

They don't get like

when something is like

killed by

accident in course of collateral damage.

Yes.

Like heroes aren't doing collateral damage in Dragon Ball Z ever, ever.

Never happens.

Deader is like collateral damage will happen, and I'm basically not concerned about it because it's way more important to stop the king.

But going to the nuclear test site is like, or whatever it is,

the experiment.

I'd like to say that.

That's what it feels like.

It feels like the place that Oppenheimer takes place.

That's in Nevada, right?

Yeah, it's in Nevada, yeah.

Yeah.

The place that Oppenheimer takes place.

I've had a busy few days, you know?

I'm doing my best out here.

Actually, I haven't seen Oppenheimer.

It was based on some real events, I think.

What?

Quick check-in here.

We've kind of done this several times during the Chimera and Ark.

Who do we want to win this fight?

I mean,

as the camera?

Well, with the king in this scene, right?

In the scene, the camera, I don't know.

It goes back and forth.

I think that it's, I think that we're in a highly neutral zone here.

I think that

it feels very lose-lose.

I think that the camera is with Netaro, but it's reluctantly with Netaro.

It's interesting, right?

It kind of,

I would say it flip-flops because there are things it does with...

When Netero is activating his Nen, for example, that feel really sinister.

And especially if you just change the color of his Nen from like this golden to like the sort of more villainous purple that Merowim usually has, right?

Like, because when he's activating his Nen sometimes, it literally sucks the color out of everything but him.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

and it's an incredible effect, it's really well done, yeah.

Um, and that that feels evil to me, right?

It does, it does.

I think that this is a great um time to um

uh re-invoke um the uh alignment chart, alignment chart.

Do we know all those

netero is the the perfect lawful good

character?

This is an alignment kazemi has has

tiny subversions.

Ah, yes.

I have figured out the DD alignment of the various DD alignments.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

I remember.

As we know, lawful good is true neutral.

Lawful neutral is neutral good.

Chaotic good is neutral good.

Chaotic good is lawful neutral.

Lawful evil is true neutral.

Neutral evil is chaotic neutral.

Lawful good is lawful evil.

Chaotic evil is neutral evil.

And chaotic neutral is chaotic evil.

This is like really good.

Like the reason, like, okay, so Netero, I'm glad that you, Sylvie, that you brought up Netero's Nen's color as it's like this, this gold.

It's the same gold that Gonznen is.

And

like, we've seen that you can be capable of destruction

just because you have like good colored nen, good coded hero-coded Nen, doesn't mean you can't do something bad with the Nen, but it does say something about Netaro's state of mind.

Like, he is not malicious, he is the hero of this, even if he thinks he's doing something horrible.

Uh, like

the this is, you know, go to go all the way back to the hunter exam, like this is the

sort of critique of pureness of heart.

This is like, where can your pure heart get you?

It can get you to a place where,

you know,

an observer can be pretty easily swayed that actually the hero is the villain.

Yeah.

I mean, the villain is the one who says the purpose of power is to protect the weak.

Yeah.

And this is, and that's so good.

This is, we have, this is a psychotic speech from the king.

It's, I love it.

I love it because it's like, he's like, he's got a kernel of something.

And this is not

so lovely to see

how it's like,

oh, sorry, go on.

It's not uncommon for like the villain of a story to have like a kernel of reality in their critique of, you know, the state of things.

Like that is maybe the most common thing in the entire world.

But they really sort of twist the knife with the king, like, because you know,

and I think that Tagashi knows that the king is on a trajectory.

He has not reached his end state of understanding of the world.

He is at a mid, and Netero basically says this.

He's on the fence.

He's on the fence.

He has a remote theory.

Yeah.

Someone please introduce Merrim to the glory of Maoism, and we can fix all of this.

He says, sorry,

was it you or Jack that was about to do this quote from the king?

Oh,

Dre, you said the very beginning of it, or the the very end of it, the uh, to help the winny thing.

Um, yeah, uh, I think I have it written down.

I'm trying to, okay, that's a little bit later.

The first thing that happens,

sorry, go ahead, Jack.

I'm all over.

The first thing that happens is that

the king opens by saying, basically, why do we have to fight?

Nero makes a hilarious face.

He goes, huh?

He's like ten-hour and confused by this.

Nero wants to battle in the marketplace of ideas.

He does.

He literally says that.

He literally

says he wants to have a free open discussion.

I love this.

This being the opening salvo from the king is great because it shows just how for all of their planning

Notero has kind of gone off-piece in a major way.

The plan is falling apart.

He was like, listen, here's the deal.

I have to kill the king.

This is going to be much easier for me.

If the king and I have a fight, the king will obviously want to fight me.

Look at what we've done.

Right.

And look at

they've done, and look at what they've done.

Right.

Um, the king is absolutely certain, no doubt in his mind, that he is going to kill Natera.

He is like, if we fight, you're gonna die, and I don't understand why you are

gonna cut your life short.

He says, There's no need to hasten your inevitable death.

And then he sort of begins this bizarre monologue.

This monologue is very close to, do you remember that time a few episodes ago where the king was like, oh my god, I like people are real and I have the power over their life and death and I've killed like children and this must mean that I'm the most powerful good person, like like powerful person on the planet.

I can just kill as many people as many people.

My ability to kill humans proves that I should be able to do that.

And he sort of he he he um which is mid of panic attack by the way he's in the middle

He starts to develop this this idea a little further.

You know, he says, I was born for one purpose, and this is to rule the world.

And he says, you know, I've sort of changed my mind about humans.

At first, I thought that humans were no more than mindless cattle or whatever.

But now, there are a few humans that are worth keeping alive.

That girl, for example, talking about Komegi and Netaro.

This is another real

whatever does not exist without my knowledge exists without my consent, Blood Meridian type situation, where like the kings, the, the, the, the value that the king is placing on personhood is I get to decide who is worth surviving.

Um,

but then he, he, even in the next scene, he's already, we'll get to that, but but just he's already developing that even further than that.

So he's gone in three scenes, basically, he's gone from, or four scenes, Komagi dead, no, Komagi alive, maybe other people are like Komagi, to maybe people who are like Komegi by default are fine.

Yeah, it's, you know, when you're making pastry or you're making a bread dough or something, and the dough is not remotely sticking together and it's not looking anything like dough, and you just keep stirring, and then suddenly something clicks, and it's just like, oh my God, this has transformed into something else.

Yeah.

This is what is happening over this marketplace of ideas.

What makes it a bit of a shaggy dough?

He's mid-shaggy dough.

He is mid-shaggy dough, and hopefully it's going to, you know,

come together.

He says he'll offer to consider sparing Natero's life if Natero sits down.

This is an interesting.

There's a difference in translation here that I wanted to note.

In my subs, he's much more definite about this.

Instead of saying,

if you back down this instant, I'll consider sparing your life.

He says, if you back down now, I am willing to spare your life.

That is

a

big, it is a big difference to me, yeah.

And Natero says, well, what about the others?

And the king sort of says, hmm.

and so Natera says, No, no, absolutely not.

Yeah, and he Natero is very much in a mood at this point of like, I just have to fucking kill him as quickly as possible.

My heart will be swayed, doesn't he?

He gives it

later on, which is a great,

like a great explainer for his motivation of like, yeah, because it's like,

he could tell from the moment they landed, uh-oh, this isn't as cut and dry.

I have to do the bad thing fast before the guilt sets in.

Like it has for everyone else I came here with.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Who he thinks are all dead, by the way.

He's like, yeah.

This after the episode where Knuckle is like, I can't go after Yupi because he

showed me respect as a

shooting blaster.

Yeah.

And then here we have the elder saying, harden your heart, make the blow.

It's really well done, I think.

I think people get weird about the pacing of the Chimera Ant Arc, but I can I see why all that stuff is in like procession together and why it jumps around to between these scenes, you know?

It's a masterpiece.

It's a masterpiece.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Every time I see someone be like, I dropped during the Chimera Antarc, I want to just like, I don't get it.

I want to slap it.

I don't get it.

I want to, like, what are you doing?

Wake up.

I get it.

Grow up.

I get it.

I just, I'm.

I don't get it.

I, I understand.

I just don't respect it.

Okay.

That's a better way to put it.

I, I, I, opposite of respect it.

I think you're pathetic.

Everybody wants the Gonan Kilua show.

Yeah.

Some people also want the Kropiga show,

which is fine.

And some people

let their desire for that.

Put them off of the show when it's not giving them that.

Yeah, I'm anime fans.

Yeah, yeah.

But when, but the which would be fine in another show that isn't like doing something with that desire.

This show is doing something with that desire, yes.

It's not

it's just it's not just sloppily avoiding including the main characters, it's doing something with your desire to see specific characters in specific ways, and it's like your desire to for that is what caused this

the it does help that the or rather it makes it more understandable that the gonan killer show is great.

Right.

For sure.

But it needs to be great in order to pull this off, where

it's

condemning of the desire for it.

Yes.

Yeah, this is, this is, we've sort of had conversations about this with Hisaker as well, as sort of like a weird, queasy stand-in for the viewer at several moments.

Who?

Another character who's very nice to say that.

Another character who, oh my god, there's a moment later.

Oh, my God.

I hope that I remember.

Okay.

Can I spoil a tiny thing?

Run it past the does he know chat.

Okay.

Please bring it to the council.

Bring it to the council.

Okay.

While you're doing that, can I talk about another thing that I really like about this scene?

Definitely.

When they flash, I guess it's not, it's like a flashback that we've already seen before of the phone call Netaro has with the sort of like UN G7

equivalent

and I think it hits really well after Merrim's

speech.

I think that's fine.

I think that's okay.

I personally think that's fine Yeah, I think that's fine.

Okay.

I think it hits really well after

Merrowam's speech about

people like the I can't remember the exact wording on it, but it's like the weak are like he's talking about the

whole quote.

We can quote that after that.

Okay, cool.

We'll get back to that then after you say this because that would make it a little bit more difficult.

We have a short keto scene too, and then we can come back to this

for that.

Okay, so the thing about with Hisuka, right, and you know, the show sort of condemning the viewer for wanting the Gonan Kilua show because it is the desire for the Gonan Kilua show that creates the circumstances for the Chimera Ant arc and what's happening to Gonan Kilua right now.

Later on, Hisuka shows back up after the Chimera Ant stuff is over, and he's asked about, like, oh, what's going on remember that all that ant stuff that was crazy and he's like my i don't know anything about that i don't know what that was like hisuka also wants to go on a kilowa show and also was bored by the chimera ant arc was like this isn't what i'm here for i'm here for the two boys this is great some of my most uh some of the the criticism along this line that i like the most is by um Michael Lutz and Cameron Kunselman talking about Homestuck and in their podcast, Homestuck Made This World.

And as that podcast continues, Cameron and Michael have this really good, really clear eye on what it means when a piece of work kind of like takes aim at its viewership and how that can succeed or fail or all the sort of the weird conversations or weird narrative maneuvers that can come out of that.

But I think that's so funny.

He's just been like, oh, that is not what I'm interested in.

He basically is like, yeah, I don't watch the news.

Oh my God.

It's really funny.

It's really great.

I never opened the Hunter newsletter.

We flash back to Poof.

When we last left them, Poof was sort of silently begging Pito to get him up to speed while also not necessarily revealing everything to Goan.

And this is great.

There's a move here that I love.

We see Pito telling the story.

We see their mouth move, but what they say is inaudible to us.

Presumably because in this moment, oh no, we're not even Goan.

Because I was going to say, presumably, because we're in this moment and Goan is not even listening, but the narrator

makes it clear that Pito has chosen to include information Gone doesn't know to, quote, ensure his focus remains on the explanation.

Right.

But we don't actually get any of that.

We get...

I love it.

I wrote that Poof asks for an explanation of the events and instead...

of hearing the explanation, we get an explanation of the explanation by the narrator, which is very funny, very funny.

We get a couple times, don't we?

Yeah, we don't.

Do we get that with Koofinyupi in the next episode?

Yeah, we do.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is a thing a narrator can do.

This is like one of the,

I don't want to say functions of a narrator, but like when you bring a narrator into a story, it lets you do this maneuver that you wouldn't necessarily otherwise be able to do, right?

Like take the focus off what is actually being said

and instead focus on sort of what it stands in for or what it represents in this moment.

If there are things that get under my skin about the Chimera and Arc, which there are,

there are moments where

the narrator is stretched too thin.

And I think this is one of those places where, like,

why am I seeing Pito talk?

Like, it didn't help, it didn't slow things down.

I'm sorry, it didn't speed things up really to have the narrator come in.

The narrator narrated about what Pito was saying for like 90 seconds.

Um,

yeah, let's see.

Um,

my

first thought would be that it takes us out of one perspective and puts us into another.

But the show is generally very ready to get us into the poof or pito perspective.

We're being deliberately denied Goan's perspective, right?

Um, but I don't see how the narrator being involved there really has anything to do with that.

And it's not like we haven't spent a lot of time, it's not like I'm unfamiliar with like learning things from the narrator, So it's not like new that the narrator is just.

So it's not like unique in it in that it's doing it now.

It's just like kind of a kind of a sloppy implementation of the narrator giving me information.

It would have been nice to hear from Peto.

Here is one

reading, and I think that this is probably a generous reading, but that there might be something there.

A lot of the most recent episodes of the Chimera Ant have featured characters desperately wanting to to be able to explain something to somebody else and being unable to, you know, sort of like having to hold back or choosing to hold back.

You know, we keep getting this, if only I'd said, or if only he said, or if only he knew, etc.

And there is a way that the show could be trying to keep up that remove, keep up that repeated theme of like

explanation is inaccessible by having the moment that a character explains something to another character be inaudible to us.

Yeah, I'll buy that.

I think it's a good thing.

It just gets annoying, this narrator.

Oh my God, chill out a little bit.

Just a little.

He's my friend.

It's like,

there's so much that it becomes really interesting.

And then every once in a while, it tips onto the other side of like, this is now too much narrator.

It's too much of a good thing, right?

Yeah.

It just talked about how it's really interesting formal choice, but sometimes, you know, it doesn't always work.

Yeah, every once in a while, like the spreads a little bit too thin, and I'm like, okay, let's go back to characters, please, for a while.

I think one of the reasons why I get a little, like, my hackles get up about when people criticize this stuff is because I know that in terms of the manga relying more on just exposition, like expositionary text, it's related to Tagashi's health issues.

And so I'm like, yeah,

it does kind of suck sometimes to just be reading a wall of text, but also, like, I'm at least glad that this story is continuing.

Just give me a wall of text in Pito's voice.

That's all I need.

Yeah, fair enough.

Yeah, I just don't, I don't mind the writing.

It's just a little bit too present of the narrator in specifically this circumstance of like, this way, it didn't save you any time.

Like, this could have been done in a montage or it could have been done in a summary, but in Pito's voice, I don't know.

Something about this specific moment every time I'm like, this is now verging on absurd.

This could have been a montage.

This could have been an email of anime.

Poof

was threatening to massacre everybody in this room if

Pito's explanation wasn't sufficient, but it was sufficient.

And Pooh sort of pretends to be like, okay, let's all just wait here then, and sends six sevenths of his body out through the back of this husk that is now standing there.

Or Poof explains, I only need

one seventh of my body to make it look like I'm still here.

It's really funny that it's seventh to me.

It's like, it couldn't be an even number.

It's got to make it the most annoying fraction possible.

There are a few details here that I really like.

The first is that Pito is unable to explain certain details.

Like, they can't really express the look on the king's face as he held Komahi.

You know, there's like

we're deep in the territory of like, Pito has an understanding here that Poof simply does not.

And Dre figured something really cool out about that, but I think it's probably, we probably want to talk about that in 25, right?

24.

24.

24.

25 today.

Yeah.

We did not watch 25 today.

I'll say this.

That is the case for having the narrator here is explaining that Pito didn't have the words for the Komugi stuff.

Like, that is the thing that Pito couldn't have said.

that the narrator could have said.

So

I'll give it credit for that.

It reminds me of, we had a brief conversation, I think, about Pito and the idea of like, is Pito learning emotions or is Pito just like valuing what the king starts to value now?

And this to me kind of like gestures back to that conversation again, because in my mind, it's like Pito doesn't know the word to describe like tender care that the king showed because that's an emotion.

They're learning that, right?

Like they show, Pito shows it when they are like protecting Komagi, but they don't, they don't know what that means yet.

Right.

Yeah.

Or like the words to explain, like, why did I feel so intensely from seeing that?

Uh, which I, even a person, even a human person born in the real world might not be able to describe this.

Yeah.

Uh, the other thing that I'm saying is that

grandpa, like, doesn't even try either.

Yeah.

So

the other detail that I love is that Keith described one of these little poof terrors, the little poof bugs flying out of his back.

It's not just that it's sort of like it doesn't really...

That comes out of a little hole or something.

It's like a little tiny hole opens up and this little guy flies out, which is great.

The idea of Poof now as like Poof's personhood is

so like exploded almost.

You know, now we know that Poof can do this thing.

The line between Poof as a sort of like cloud of intent and activity and surveillance and uh poof's body is is becoming blurrier and blurrier and i think that's really charming poof is sort of like the oh flutter is becoming the oh flutter by this point yeah not just in terms of the like uh overarching control but also that sense of like you have like a distributed self yeah um although flutter's uh dragonflies are not

him whereas it does seem like poof's segments are that is true

Yeah, yeah, this has become the surveillance arm of the state like in

every way like that's his living

and also the um

the devil on his shoulder

Yes, I was also gonna say like the overworked parent which is the metaphor with poof that we keep coming back to as well right yeah the gunky game of like you're just playing and you should be working and also if I take my eye off the ball everything's going to go to shit.

Yeah.

And so I need to turn myself into these like hundred smaller weaker versions of me to you know, load the dishwasher and make sure that the after-school activities are set up and also make sure that the crowd of people who I'm going to sacrifice to the king are prepared, etc.

It's funny.

He doesn't at once seem both like the overworked parent and like a neglected child.

Like the things that he wants more than anything is to like be alone with the king.

Like, this is my king dad.

Please pay attention to me and just me and not the girl and not the other aunts.

There's also like an obsessive partner vibe to it, too.

Just every kind of toxic relationship you could think of.

Very much so.

Like, there's a line about like in the final episode we watched this week that made me really think that

we can get to when we got there.

The vocal performance on Poof is fantastic.

We've talked about it over and over, you know,

as we've seen kind of like Poof go through all these various different guises.

But the person playing him is doing just a fantastic job.

job um we get a great my favorite uh poof line of all time is when he is uh like castigating himself for some mistake he's made and he says fool poof uh we get a fun version of we get a fun version of fool poof in this episode when after pito explains it uh an evil version of poof appears on the screen and he says fine play pito yeah yeah

which is really good

the the animation gets really fun with little poof by the way uh worth mentioning they the he's so expressive in a way that like they definitely get there sometimes with the full-sized version of poof but like

they they are willing to be way more cartoonish with yeah the little poofs are

don't have as much of a stake in pretending to be stoic and unemotional um

they're just like insane because they are a like a literal shattered personhood right yeah when when poof wants to appear as capital p poof he pulls himself together into this thing.

We don't have like

sad little poof and happy little poof and angry little poof.

They're all just kind of like manic and weird.

There's a line from a little tiny segment later that is one of the funniest lines of the show as he delivers an order to somebody.

It's great.

Yeah.

Back to...

The battle of words that one person is desperately trying to turn into a battle of men.

Yeah.

This is the quote that we had that I said that I'd deliver.

Thank you.

Yeah, hit it.

You fight for the human race?

If so, then know my actions are in fact for their benefit.

For example, in human society, lands are divided by borders, much like territorial marking.

On the right side of the border, children may starve to death, while on the left, scum who do nothing have everything they need.

Absolute madness.

And I shall crush that madness and create a fair world where the very concept of inequality will be forgotten.

There's a long contemplative pause.

I concede that I will initially use power and terror to accomplish my objective, but I will only do so to the extent necessary to maintain order.

I have learned what power is meant to be used for, to protect the weak who deserve to live.

Power is not meant to be used to torment the defeated.

I could not fight.

I will not fight with you now.

I have left the palace so we could have a free, open discussion.

Let him cook.

Ah, now this old chestnut.

Yeah.

This is a.

Oh, go ahead.

No, it's not you, Hedre.

The specific worrying about not tormenting the defeated, for some reason, really made me think about Netaro, like, when we got that flashback of Netaro walking into the dojo and just like kicking that guy's ass.

Like, I don't think, I don't think you could necessarily argue that Netaro intended to torment those people, but he sure as fuck did.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He didn't kick anyone's ass.

He just, he just, they terrified.

Yeah, he just,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

yeah um they did

a nice meal

as as kith described last time you know when we first see the king in this scene he's making a big claim which is all right some people are important and the others are all useless cattle and then he has this break uh and we come back to him and what's really funny is he delivers kind of like two ideas two developing ideas back to back this time the first is the classic um

i

uh the world is cruel and i'm gonna remake it in fairness.

This is very different to what he was saying 10 minutes ago.

We are watching the dough start to come together in the pan, uh, and then without a break, he also, so there's this classic thing, right?

Which is like, the world is cruel, I'll make the world better.

Of course, I'm going to have to break a few eggs to make this omelette.

This, you know, you see this all the time.

This is

a lot of my lovely baked omelette.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's see.

But then, without a break, he moves straight on to,

I know what true power is for to protect the weak who deserve to live.

Which, again, in itself is very subtly different from what he was saying just five seconds ago.

You are, he's figuring this out live, and it is causing Notaro.

no end of trouble.

It was so important to me when we were playing the games and we were making fun of the king for

like

sort of first for a seemingly kind of facile understanding of like game theory and

gamesmanship when he was defeating the chess champions, etc.

And I, whenever, whenever it came up, I kept having to say, like,

we have to remember, he really is a genius.

He's not just a blowhard who thinks he's better than everybody.

He really is

like the best in the world at these things.

Because, and it is, it is like, on some level, it it is like

a human's inability to write a character that is smarter than a human can be that is the fault for that, for the, for the words.

But if we take the, but the character really is doing those things.

Uh, there's actually a line, one of the worst lines in the whole show, I think, come up later from the king.

Um, uh,

but uh,

like

he kind of is like working through

at a rapid pace a bunch of different ideology trying to figure out like, well, these things don't really make sense.

And so, but I'm the king, so I'm probably right about this stuff.

But I'm, but as I continue to evolve, it's becoming, I'm becoming more and more right about things.

And the K or Netaro notices this right away.

He's wavering, wavering between ant and human, and he hasn't realized that those two sides are totally incompatible and neither one is dominant yet.

But regardless of which side he falls on, the outcome will not change.

I'm going to need to make this fast before my heart is swayed.

And that's a great

observation of that

his speech didn't make any sense.

It didn't make any sense.

On the right side, there's starving children.

On the left side, there's scum who do nothing, absolute madness.

You know, blah, blah, blah.

Power is not meant to be used to torment the defeated.

I will not fight you.

I have left the palace so we can have a free open discussion.

Like,

you can't do these two

things.

Which two things?

You can't use

terror.

You can't use terror

to

maintain

order

without using power to torment the defeated.

Yes, yes.

But I mean, I think this is where I'm getting at of just like we are watching nascent philosophy.

Yes, totally coming to power.

I totally agree.

Yeah.

Where I think it gets really compelling for me is that thing that you quoted Notero saying, right?

Of like, he's hovering between ant and human and these things are incompatible.

That's also ideology.

Right.

And because which one's the ant and which one's a human?

A society where you don't torment the weak and you take care of people and power isn't used to torment, that's ants.

That's not people.

People do use power to torment the defeated.

I don't think Notero knows this.

No, no, I think Notero misinterprets which one of those is ants and which one is of those is humans it is it is it is his

willingness to take care of the weak and to not torment the defeated that is the ant

yeah it's so good it's so good because because also you know what we have here uh two things the first is just um

this isn't crit so much as just saying what the story is but sometimes you've got to say it into the microphone

He says they're fundamentally incompatible, which is what the Chimera and Arc has been saying the opposite of this entire time.

You know, the Chimera and Arc is not about

how these things are utterly compatible.

The line between the two is so blurry as to be almost absent.

Sure.

I think it's very complicated.

Yeah, I think I disagree in a certain way, Jack, because like

this is a thought that I've had a lot in trying to like talk to people about like my thoughts on like billionaires and shit.

But it boils down to like, imagine being able to like fix things for millions of people and you just don't.

Oh, my mic fell over.

No, I got it.

Sorry.

Yes.

Yes.

And I, yeah, I didn't think you were being silent, Jack, because you were like, I don't know about that one.

But like, I like, to Keith's point, like, I think that's the ant.

Like, that's like, because the only reason you would come to a conclusion otherwise is because you're a human and you have been conditioned to think about wealth and work and all of these things, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Another aspect of this is that we have seen ant society break down

in a way that does suggest that the show does treat ants and human like

when they haven't sort of like, when you haven't fallen on either side of those, it does treat it as like a tenuous balance where you do need to sort of pick a side.

And the interesting thing comes from like, what are the good parts of being a human?

The bad parts are obviously the willing to torment the weak, etc.,

which the king is criticizing.

But what are the good parts?

And

it is sort of like there's a bad combination and a good combination of the two things.

Ants aren't good or bad.

Ants are ants.

Humans can be good or bad because of, you know,

the brain, the human brain.

Yeah, I think this makes sense.

I think what I'm talking about when I say that they're like blurry is I suppose what I'm trying to get at is that the show is very clear that like

there is something at the heart of ants and people that is the same.

Yes.

There is some sort of like animating personhood that beyond just saying my enemies are people,

which the show is, you know, saying all the time, and it's, you know, that is what it is.

That's fairly standard in storytelling.

I think this idea of like

these impulses that are pushing people or pushing ants in certain directions is more similar than different.

Yes.

And it's the weird wrapping around them.

that is the differentiation.

And I think that we can trace this all the way back to the very, very beginning of the Chimera ant arc, where you have the scientists in in kite's crew who are looking at the ants and being like we can draw conclusions based on biolog biology and what we know scientifically about ant behavior and i i think that it suggests a sort of super being who looks down on humans and can go well we can predict their behavior based on human biology and what they and i think that they're i think that that is something that the

i don't think the show like necessarily implies that but it invites it and i I think that it would agree that that is the case, that there is something biological about biological creatures who follow

an instinctual pattern in their behavior, and so can be reduced to patterns

and behaviors that are like

indicative, and that the

human ability to

self-consciously

assess themselves complicates but does not alter that,

which then now we see with in episode 124 with Palm.

Oh, yes.

Keith, you all you should also know you just basically like outlined the underlying theoretical principles behind my field of work.

Wow, I'm about to hear that.

The chimera and is broad indeed.

All right, let's see.

There's something we've talked about how the king is the king.

I meant Notero, but you know.

Notero is

trying to be quick before his quote-unquote heart is swayed.

But it's also clear that Notero is watching the king sort of like discover this ideology like alive in front of him.

And he's like, I need to kill him quickly because he might eventually get to a good

and I have been hired, and this is what we see in the flashback, to exterminate him.

So it's not just the, I need to kill quickly before he, before I, um, before my heart gets swayed, but also before he sort of like develops his ideology, which might be fine, you know?

Yeah, those guys he was talking about who live comfortably

told me to come kill him.

So I gotta take care of that.

I love this after, after

he gives his like, the narrator gives the like,

sorry, no, after Netero is giving his, like, he's wavering speech to himself, he says out loud, look, king, we've all got problems, you know?

So funny.

It is one of the funniest lines in this show.

It's great because he's like, he is, he is desperately

pulling at the lever for the ejector seat and is not being shot out of the aircraft, right?

He's like, come on, get me out of here.

We've all got problems.

Fight me.

And so he launches his first attack.

He just begins.

This is the first true revelation of Isaac Notero as Nan ability.

It's fucking terrifying.

It's awesome.

Can I say that it's fucking awesome?

It's so cool.

It's awesome, but it's terrifying.

By the way, you look at Guan Yin's arms.

They look just like the segmented ant arms that we've seen a hundred times.

Oh, I didn't think about that.

Did anybody look at Guan Yin's eyes?

Oh, crying.

It's It's crying.

Yes.

We talked about how Guan Yin was the body zapper of compassion, right?

Have we not talked about this before?

Didn't we talk about this when Austin was on, or did we just talk about this with Austin without Jack?

We talked about it with Austin.

I don't know.

We might have brought it up.

We talked about the Guan Yin.

Okay, I wasn't sure if they had shown Guan Yin's face yet.

Oh, no.

Don't think we talked about the crying yet.

They haven't shown its face at all.

So, all right, here's what happens.

Isaac Matero goes through his extremely fast, like, prey maneuver that we've talked about in the past.

And then behind him...

Oh, so first, you know, gold light starts to blossom behind him, like the sun.

And we see shock on the king's face as he sees this Nen ability activate.

And then behind Notero appears a sort of like immense, you know, it's 400 feet tall.

It's immense.

It's massive.

Yeah.

It is a golden

angel-like thing.

It has like hundreds of praying hands.

It's like if his power was the statue of liberty.

Yes, Yes, and it is golden.

It is like shining down.

It just...

What happens?

How does it first attack?

First hand.

It crushes the king with a chop.

Yeah, it sure does try to swat him like a bug.

Yeah.

It sure does.

There's some new music here,

which is fantastic.

It's just this.

It's like a chanting, rhythmical chanting.

This is actually old music.

Is it prologue or unasked advice?

It's one of those two.

The unasked advice of the claniate effect.

But yeah, the chanting is very cool.

I like it a lot.

And so this is a kaiju.

You know, the scale and the horror of this thing reminds me a lot of the way kaiju are depicted and also of the way that like um

uh there's something almost uh

i think about the like great horror in in Akira, and then later, obviously it's post-Hunter Hunter.

Actually, I don't know if it is Post-Hunter Hunter in the original design.

The way the Titans from Attack on Titan are just monstrous, not only in

character, but in scale, in the way the camera treats them, or the way the panel treats them.

This thing is, you know, dwarfing everything else here.

It's like a battleship.

And it flattens the king.

Well, or it begins to.

This hand is

Like a nuclear bomb.

He is pushed into a small crater created by the blast.

It really does look like when

things, the explosion goes off in Akira, now that you mention that.

I have a lot of people.

Oh, Keith.

Akira is wonderful.

Yeah, I've heard.

It's pretty well known.

It's been one of those things I've been meaning to watch for like 15 years.

Hmm.

The city in Akira is really cool.

And the way that it is a film about a city and events that take place in the city.

You could almost.

Who's doing it?

They're doing.

I think they're doing a TV show adaptation by Sunrise was doing of the manga.

But I might be wrong.

I heard that was happening, but I haven't heard anything since it was announced.

Huh, maybe it was annoying.

Yeah, it was announced in like it's like in the planning stages in 2016, so who could say?

Is Akira long?

It's a, I want to say six

big volumes.

It was, it ran for eight years.

Oh, I let the movie watch.

Oh, the movie.

Two hours and four minutes.

Yeah.

Oh, we could watch Akira.

Yeah.

Yes, we should.

Akira is lovely.

I mean, it's all Akira, but you know, I should read Akira.

I should read it's really good.

It's really good.

Okay.

Poof's tiny segment.

Watches UP leave and goes on to be.

Poof's tiny segment.

Poof's tiny segment.

I love that.

That sounds like a bit of a favorite Matt Rod.

Sorry.

I was going to say it sounds like a bit in like a weird, like Adult Swim talk show.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What if they did Space Ghost, but for Hunter-Hunter?

They should have done it.

They did.

Come on.

They did.

It's when Lael was on TV and then he eats the.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And we had um

it was uh Zeno's interview, too.

It was Zeno's interview.

Um,

uh, Poof is happy to see Yupi.

Uh, uh, says, you've changed a lot since I saw you last.

Uh, he updates Yupi on kind of what has been going on, and I think it's fair to say, Yupi is kind of sick of this.

He's he's had a no good, very bad day that has also involved him inventing selfhood.

Um,

and he uh

he kind of like gently mocks

No,

he is gently mocked by Poof, who says, you sound so grown up.

Again, this sort of like patronizing, you know, condescension.

Yeah, I hate this fucker.

He's so good.

He's so good.

He is the same, but I hate him.

Which, by the way, it's bad because for Poof, any change in anything is suspicious and probably

wrong.

If you're up for it, Dre, I would love to bring in Dre's theory at this point.

Oh, yeah, Dre gave us a theory earlier that I think.

As we're talking about Yupi and the way Yupi has sort of

become a person.

I'm just going to read the thing.

I copy-pasted instead of trying to remember.

In hindsight, there's one very simple reason Poof hasn't changed, but Pito the King and Yupi have.

They had to learn about Nin via hunters and specifically through combat.

So Pito is our first one.

she fights kite but then has to use kite or god damn it thank you sorry no i appreciate it uh there's like weird errata lore around pito's gender that has just like broken it in my brain for some reason there's like one official hunter hunter source that has called pito she and for some reason that knowledge like overrides yeah there's a lot there's actually a lot of that um yeah i just know that it's

a thing people have have mentioned about the show that i'm trying to no for sure.

And it's true because I think the majority, I shouldn't say that.

There is a decent number of people who want to view Pito as female because that's the only way it makes them feel comfortable that they want to have sex with Pito.

Yeah.

You're not wrong.

Yeah, I just don't want to put a number on that, you know?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Anyway, yeah, so Pito is first.

They fought Kite.

And then they captured and basically used Kite and our sad doomed bow guy to learn about ninja right like pacwell yeah like that's how the ants first learn about nin uh same with yupi yupi didn't learn how to use his nin until he fought all those hunters and got bushed basically uh and then of course uh merrowim and komogi you know komogi isn't a hunter but what's a what's the word they use like in universe

i was gonna say i think it is nin genius yeah okay yeah so komogi is clearly explicitly a Nin Genius.

And to add to that, what they were doing was abstracted combat.

Yeah.

They were doing combat, but it was just in a game instead of in real life.

Yeah, everyone else is in Dragon Ball.

They were in Hikaru no-go.

Yeah.

Which is a

shonen series about playing Go.

Okay.

Oh, I bet that's good.

Is it good?

Yeah.

I only read a little bit of it, but it was all right.

They're playing Chihayafuru.

That's what they're in.

that is.

It's a cute romance anime that's about a very specific card game in Japan.

Oh, cool.

I've only watched the first season and a half.

But it's cute.

It's fun.

But yes, to your point, Komagi and the king were in combat via Goongi.

Poof has not fought a hunter.

He's been around hunters,

but him and Moral were both just basically looking at each other because they were trying to figure out their their nin before they did anything.

Yeah.

Or in Poof's case, Poof had a plan and was just, it worked out great for Poof that Moral wanted to figure things out.

Um, and then Poof didn't fight Goan.

So his idea about, like, well, this guy, this guy's just a guy, right?

I'm a fucking ant.

So of course my nin's going to be better.

Um,

but he never got that tested because Goan just sat there.

Um, and then we get the line at the end of the episode, um, where Netaro kind of like like repeats to himself, like, oh, exchange words, because that's like what the king has said.

Um,

and he's like, No, we can't talk, we gotta fight, bro.

Like, that's how this works.

Have you have you been in a shonen?

Have you watched the show before?

Have you seen Dragon Ball Z?

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, Goku doesn't convince people to be good by talking to them, he beats the crap out of them first, and they learn the error of their ways.

And, and to be, and no one's even tried either of those with Poof.

No.

Poof has never been challenged in any way by anyone.

Poof lives.

He's been approached by the king.

He's been reprimanded by the king.

But being reprimanded by the king is part of your job as a royal guard.

So that's not really challenging.

If anything, it lives up to his expectations.

Yeah, that reinforces everything about his worldview.

I'm really glad you brought up

Poof and Morals confrontation, where Poof is basically just in a...

Poof's whole deal is literally wanting to build a cocoon for the king and himself in like

all of this right like we get a line later about building a kingdom for

says for the king and i does not bring up you p or pito

just says for the king and like poof wants to come be completely static in pretty much every way that he can be um which has led to this sort of completely stagnant uh state of character development in a lot of ways, right?

Like,

actually, I wouldn't say character development because Poof's character has developed, but it has developed in the opposite way of Pito and Yupi's, right?

Where it has just become more and more

obsessive over maintaining the status quo that it thinks should be there.

Yeah,

to the point of like the characters changing,

Poof says, you know, I hope Pito's change will benefit the king, but I can't be sure.

It's It's clear that he is really only sort of just saying this to output it to Yupi.

I don't think he, I don't think he has any hope that it will benefit the king at this point.

I think he is, he is getting ready to cut Pito loose following that conversation.

Yeah, he could even also be like, be careful about your own changes, Yupi.

Yes.

Because changes are not good.

There's definitely a moment of that, right?

Where Yupi is like, oh, I'm being tested.

The test actually comes in one second.

It's so cool.

Poof turns to him and says, what do you think we should do now?

In my notes,

I wrote down,

this feels like the car skidding for a second.

You know, it's like, it's like, or like the moment when you lose gravity and everything hovers up for a second as the ants

first are like, oh my god, there's room for possibility, there's room for doing something new, and then realize, no, this is actually just a test.

UP correctly identifies this as a test and sprouts huge feathery wings jumping into the sky, saying, We must go to the king, and that's all there is to it.

And it's at this moment that the narrator steps in to say that Yupi is now starting to be

like infected by the fear that is currently gripping Poof.

I thought this was really interesting.

This sort of like a definitive statement from the narrator being like, hey, Yupi, despite having invented personhood, is actually starting to get worried about the king.

Yeah, it's interesting.

I wonder where that will lead.

This idea of like one person's paranoia spreading to another person's paranoia is not

particularly unusual.

You know, it happens in all kinds of fiction, but I want to shout out a horror film that I like quite a lot, directed by

Amy Simetz.

The film is called She Dies Tomorrow, and it's about a woman who sort of just develops this paranoid fear that she is going to die tomorrow, except everybody she meets also starts to develop that fear for themselves be it the person at the party she goes to or the pizza delivery driver or the guy in the uber um and i really love this sort of like growing sense of like an idea so dangerous and paranoid um starting to like worm its way into your head and give you that fear that's um 2020 she dies tomorrow by amy siments

um really good queasy horror film uh bad vibes all around only watch if you like bad vibes Okay.

Which I do.

Yep.

I want to check that out.

I don't like bad vibes.

Good vibes, Odi.

The smoke clears after the Guanyin's attack.

The king is still standing.

Blood is coming out of his mouth.

The king's blood, like many Chimera ants' blood, is purple, right?

Yes.

Yeah,

I believe so.

And Natero thinks to himself, I'm sure that was a direct hit.

He's a tough one.

It's at this point that we get a really beautiful wide shot, like Ariel Tasem Singh-ass wide shot of

the two standing facing each other and the Guan Yin only slightly visible behind Notero.

It's like side on from a distance at a wide shot.

You can see the two men on either side of the frame, and then on the right-hand side behind Notero, just like five or six golden arms appearing.

The king says, are you satisfied?

Sits back down again

to try and draw Notero into the conversation.

He thinks to himself, I will will not repeat myself.

He's got this real sort of like imperious vibe going on from the king, even in this moment of I want to have a conversation.

He's like, I am honoring you by not killing you immediately, you know?

You should be listening to me.

I'm giving you the opportunity to sit down and talk.

Instead, Notero launches another attack.

This time, two hands

clap together to catch the king between them like a fly.

And then the hands are pushed apart, and the red eyes of the king

A tear between them.

And he says, are you really so eager to die?

This scares Natero.

Yeah.

Jumps back twice his normal distance.

Yes.

So good.

The narrator says, from the king's perspective, the wrath that was unleashed was no stronger than that of a child throwing a tantrum, but the king's full power was violent enough to make Netaro jump back more than twice his usual distance.

Netero couldn't help but feel insulted by this turn of events and by the fact that his determination, strong as it was, could be so easily brushed off.

Netaro's doing full back dashes to the edge of the screen.

He is.

We've been told that the king's power, the king's physical combat ability is troublesome.

Now in

the omniscient voice of the narrator, it is being made, you know, extremely clear.

Notero just launched a full power attack at him, and the narrator confirms that this was no stronger than a child throwing a tantrum.

He says, Atari's in trouble.

Wake up.

Can't you see that words are all that you and I will exchange here?

And then there's full scumbag mode.

Yeah,

he does a Doctor House.

Yeah,

speak on that.

He says,

exchange.

Exchange words.

Oh, yeah, I know a word.

Hey, King, would you like to know your name?

I thought you were going to say he needed mouse bites to live.

Is this a thing that Dr.

House is?

That's just a post about House that I remember.

No,

the patient does not,

patients suffering from mouse bites need more mouse bites to live.

I've not seen House, but I respect Hugh Laurie, and I...

like that he did his his audition without letting them know he was British.

That's funny to me.

That is funny.

I like when people do that.

Iduzelba did that for The Wire, I believe.

Did he?

His American accent.

His American accent.

Hugh Laurie's American accent is perfect, basically.

I didn't know because I had seen him in

Stuart Little before as a kid before seeing him as Dr.

House.

I didn't know for like eight years that he was British.

And Dr.

House, terrible show.

Love it.

Perfect.

Love it.

Terrible.

Do you think there's a

I have never been good at accents to the point where, I mean, like the kind of fluency that that sort of a performance has with an accent where Americans are saying his accent is essentially perfect.

How do you even get there?

I don't know.

He was even good at it.

He had

basically a perfect American accent in Abit of Fry and Laurie, which is like 15 years earlier.

So maybe he could just, he could just always

control American media.

I saw a documentary about Abit of Fry and Laurie where they talk about how

Hugh Laurie really always wanted to be an American action star.

Oh, wow.

That's very funny.

This is very funny.

And so I guess maybe it just came from like being a young actor being like, I want to be in an action movie.

I have to sound American.

You still could.

They love giving old guys those movies now.

They do.

They do.

Stephen Fry is a condescending prick, but unfortunately, a bit of Fry and Laurie is very funny.

It is one of the three great sketch comedy shows of the world.

And they are also

clearly, so so deeply in homosexual love with each other.

Yeah.

Both as characters and as pricks.

That it gives the whole thing a beautiful freesaw.

And yeah, and being a condescending prick is something that it seems like was developed in Stephen Fry over time.

He's gotten worse.

He's gotten much worse.

I would go further than condescending prick, honestly.

He's a good voice, though.

If what you want is to sound kind of condescending.

All right.

Too bad he's a bigot.

Yeah.

Too bad he's a bigot.

Too bad me pointing at large swathes of British people.

Too bad he's a bigot.

Um

if he can force Natero he, the king, if the king can force Notero into a defeat, he will tell him his name.

At which point, this tickles the king.

He says, force a defeat without killing you?

Huh.

So I'll be playing without a rook or a bishop.

This game's a line

there.

That's the worst line that this show has.

It's a bad line conceptually, and it's a bad line, like, um, practically, because he's presumably supposed to be referencing Gungi tiles.

And while Gungi does have kings and bishops, the thing that is most interesting about Gungi for an English-speaking audience is that it has a bunch of weird other pieces that we've talked about in the past.

So, why he goes straight to like specifically chess vocabulary here, I don't know.

In all the previous scenes with Komagi, they've been talking about like charioteers and elephants and things.

I'll be playing without a cannon and an elephant now, is what he should have said.

Exactly.

It would still have been a bad line, but it would have been a better line.

I don't miss, I don't dislike this line, honestly.

I think it makes him look like a loser.

I think it makes him look like a child, which is what he is.

So, I looked it up just to be like, is there a reason why it was written like this?

Like, why pick rook and bishop?

Like, what about this says rook and bishop?

Like,

you could have said any pieces.

Like, what i like playing without a queen like it would have been so much cleaner of a line yeah because if he said that he'd think of his own queen he would think of his own queen i think that might have been white they didn't say that what do you find uh

i saw that it's potentially specifically talking about shogi not about chess which would have been which would be more culturally relevant yeah uh and that because like playing uh like handicap games where you specifically don't have certain pieces is maybe a more common thing.

That's the only thing that I could think of that makes that line make any sense.

They sort of boxed themselves into a localization corner because a lot of English-speaking games that involve those kinds of removed pieces, you know, the king wouldn't be talking about like a golf handicap or something, right?

That's what they're trying to aim for, right?

Although, you know, the king would fucking love golf, he'd be like, What is this?

He loves golf, yeah.

You mean I'd have to drastically reduce my power to

a challenge?

Yeah, putting would really light his brain up.

He swings the golf club.

The ball goes through a skyscraper four and a half miles away.

Anyway, I don't know if steering him.

I'm like putt and humanity is redeemed.

We're basically turning him into the guy from One Punch Man

is what that sounds like now.

No, let's not do that.

I don't want to do that to him.

Yeah, fair enough.

Anyway, I don't know if you live in a shogi world that hearing playing without your rook and your bishop

is more legible.

To me, it comes across as extremely bizarre thing to say.

Then we see the king power up a move.

This is scary because we see his hands moving in exactly the same way we've been shown Natera's hands moving, which every character had previously talked about as like the most powerful Nen on the planet.

That like

splintering effect as his hand comes down.

Now we see the king do it, and there is an awful burst of purple aura.

The king's nen is getting all fired up as he says, fine, I'll checkmate you shortly.

And in case we weren't, you know, convinced, uh, the narrator pops in to say the real battle between Notero and the king has begun.

Episode over.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, cool.

And we're going to continue with the next episode, right?

Absolutely not, but

worms.

Yeah, ready for worms.

Ready for worms.

It's a real, I feel a real comfort in my friend's

correct understanding of what excites versus what upsets me in media, that nobody thought to warn me about this.

They were like, Jack will love this shit.

There was a part of me that was like,

are centipedes close enough to snakes that I need to get out of here?

Fucking horrible.

There is some wild body horror going on.

There is.

Yeah.

It's really disgusting.

It's really bad.

We're going to be talking about some horrible bug body horror for the next 40 minutes.

It was so funny last time we recorded that that I said centipeded memory and you were like, what could they mean by centipede?

And it's like, literally, just it's got centipedes in it.

Just go centipedes.

All right.

Pretty straightforward.

We begin as we like to do every three or four episodes with a little aerial establishing update of the palace.

It's in maybe the worst shape.

I thought you were going to say we begin like we do every three or four episodes with Ikalgo crying.

Yeah.

He is also, he is continuing to sob.

This is lovely.

The stalemate that Ikalgo is in of, like, I have to kill and I can't, and it's causing me to completely come apart, being now literally presented as a bookend to

the final battle between the king and Natero, with Natero desperately wanting to kill, but being unable to,

is fantastic.

He doesn't notice Ikalgo.

Because of the sobbing.

Literally, because he is crying too hard on the monitor in front of him, Bizf, Hina, and Shidore leaving in a van.

They drive past the ruined truck that Bluster shots a Flutter's dead body, yeah.

Beside it, this is some really good, like, we're deep in the third act territory of, like, everybody is just getting the fuck out of there.

And where in a previous episode, they'd have driven past a ruined truck and Flutter's body and all stopped, and it would have been a whole deal.

They're just like, nope, we're going.

Goodbye.

I haven't got time to deal with that.

Hina established as don't have time to deal with that character.

Hina's delivery is always so funny.

She's great.

She does not speak in this episode.

The three of them are riding off into a miserable sunset.

I think, well, no, Bizef's going to be miserable because he's evil and a human.

I think

Shidori's going to be miserable because she is being set upon by Hina all the time.

Hina's going to be fine.

Yeah.

Good for her.

Ikago looks up to see that the door has opened.

This is great.

He was crying too hard, you didn't notice.

And then he is immediately interrupted by Welfin, who

fires up his

missile man power.

Missile Mile.

Missile Mile.

A new Eminem movie.

By Eminem.

I was going to say Richard Bachman, but it is also Eminem.

In case you've forgotten, here is how Missile Mile works.

I said it again.

Welfin asks a question and fires these little missiles.

If the person does not

answer truthfully, the missiles will blow up and kill them.

Yeah, it's a one-hit KO.

But secretly, there's another function to Missile Mile, which is that no one knows about.

That no one knows about.

So the first thing that happens is, as I want to go into this, this is something that Tagashi loves to do.

Develops into something Tagashi loves to do, which is take a classic sort of like scene setup of genre fiction and like pull it apart in a really interesting way.

The clearest example of this was the sort of meticulous

fine-toothed comb exploration of a hostage situation and how a hostage situation could work at the end of the Phantom Troop arc.

What begins here is a one-on-one interrogation or torture sequence that goes completely off the rails in a really entertaining way.

But I think that's worth flagging at this moment because Welfin is beginning this scene saying explicitly, I've got him where I need him.

My power will extract information from him.

And Ikago thinks to himself, his power is going to extract information from me whether I want to or not.

So he transforms his arm into a rifle and he says, kill me then.

That's what I want.

I won't betray my friends.

Ikago begins this scene scene ready to die.

It's great.

Another incredible episode for Ikalgo.

Yes.

This is

number one dance in my heart.

For Ikalgo.

I mean, this is such a good episode.

And the thing that you were saying at the beginning, Jack, about

the three duologues is

that it really only works if they can sell Ikalgo and Welfin very quickly over the course of a series of episodes.

This is Tagashi's power.

This is Tagashi's power.

He's able to do that, and he does do that.

And so, like, okay, maybe someone's on the fence about Welfin.

I bet I can't imagine not enjoying his total unraveling a few episodes ago.

He's so fun.

And Ikalgo, like, is an instant smash hit as far as I'm concerned when he shows up.

Yeah.

But it is, it all just sort of like hinges on that because you have to take this episode instead of more king stuff.

You have to.

There's no other way to do it because it comes next he has to in writing this scene uh uh

ikalgo is already going at 80 miles an hour as far as the audience is concerned oh yeah welfin is going at about 50 and he needs to put his foot on the gas he needs to make welfin go in some new way and he does welfin is great in this episode yeah ikalgo turns around and fires the round shoots welfin in the leg in the leg

missile man goes off and welfin is like oh my god how did he know my one weakness the weakness is if you don't answer the question

he don't ask the question oh did he not he had an at right he didn't ask the question yet he had just command well because that's the thing it the the way that his power works is if you don't if you if you don't comply with a command or answer a question truthfully, it will kill you.

He did make a command, didn't he?

He was like, don't turn around or something.

Or like, don't make any move.

I guess maybe it wasn't like an official missile man command.

But the.

In any case, he's fucked up, like, procedurally.

Yes.

Right.

By akago.

Bikago maneuvered.

By a cargo gambling his life.

He turns for death.

Yes.

Wishes for death, turns around, shoots Welfin, and then the bombs are like, I think that Welfin describes them as null and void, which is funny because that's not true.

Instead of killing you, they're not null and void, they implant

four centipedes into the injection site.

Centipedes which grow with

your perceived

resistance to

your defiance.

They are black centipedes created by Nen.

They are literal worms in his brain representing his defiance.

You know, Kalgo is a character who has been defined by his

willingness or his hesitancy to move against the ants or to move against his former comrades or whatever.

And now, as is the way that Nen is so often used, we have this thing, you know, literalizing it out in the world.

Every time, so they are like squirming around under the skin.

This is some real top-tier body horror.

It's just lovely.

It's truly, it's the grossest thing that's happened to the show for sure.

Yeah, Tagashi has always been really good with head trauma, and by good with head trauma, I mean he keeps putting it on the screen.

He keeps doing it.

Yeah.

yeah

consistent with head trauma these things also make this awful noise like someone scrunching a rubber glove around in their hands

really bad and they are also like constantly growing every time Ikalgo um

uh you know

is defiant which he is doing constantly with the the implication being eventually they're going to and i hate having to say this but past this point i'm going to stop dwelling on the bugs but they really are the focus of this scene eventually they are going to grow so big that they will burst out of his head and be really painful and kill him that's what welfin says when when they burst out then he'll die um this is also lovely because and i think this is pure coincidence at this point i really don't think that the show planned to do this um we are now in the territory of what someone who didn't know what chimera ants are might have thought chimera ants were which was like a sort of parasitic bug that you know gets inside your body but they're not actually chimera ants they're just the nen power of a chimera ant which is a wolf.

I swear you actually, like, uh suggested something like this.

Cylons where they were brainstorming.

Cylons, yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is

something a chimera ant could do, you know?

Yeah.

I mean,

Ikago can literally do that.

Yep, Icalgo can do that, and also Palm later on.

We'll talk about this as it goes.

Anyway,

I was not thinking big enough.

I could not have figured out Chimera ants.

Weirdly, I could have figured out Chimera Ants on a certain level because I was just like what if he did the phantom troop again but there were 500 of them well it's because it's a bad question no it's a knowingly like i we were knowingly asking you an impossible question to answer because it's like asking you what is a chimera ant is like asking you what is a human and yes and and like expecting a sort of a list like a uh like a sort of plot synopsis of what a human is you can't do that you can't give a plot synopsis of people um because it's too broad.

At this point, Ikalgo shoots him again.

He says, I won't kill you.

I just need to make sure you stay put.

This now just becomes well.

The next kind of like step of this scene is Ikalgo testing Ikalgo's resolve and

his willingness to withstand pain.

We know Captain Ikalgo, so we know that as long as he's not having to shoot a sleeping man, he can do this all day.

Right.

He's got drool coming out of his face.

At some point, the centipede's legs burst through the top of his head.

They're like wriggling around.

There's dozens of horrible little, you know, sharp legs scraggling around.

It looks like he's wearing a crown of thorns.

Oh, it's awful.

He says, Icalgo died for Ursa.

He says, it's so easy.

Pulling the trigger is a breeze when the only price is my life.

Goes crazy.

It goes so hard.

Keep shooting.

It's at this point that Welford gives up.

Yeah, Welfin gives up.

The interrogation has gone about as wrong as it could go for him uh and it's once again one of these situations hinging on a character willing to put themselves through immense physical pain in order to like come out on top and the other torture sequence oh sure yeah which is fun because this is this is uh

sort of like the mirror image of gone for kilowa Also, yes, also, Goan torture sequences are fundamentally pointless, and this actually has a function right

uh

he so this is another also another instance of like the ants not really understanding nen or their own uh nen powers because as

welfin surrenders um

the

the centipedes start to shrink and calm down and even sort of wriggle in pain instead of in trying to be painful and it's sort of you sort of get the sense that accidentally the centipedes work both ways.

That it is

that

Welfin's surrender weakens the bugs as well as Ikago's surrender would weaken the bugs?

It's great.

They don't understand their own Nen powers.

They don't.

At all.

And in fact, we get this.

This is, I thought that this was really

corny writing, but I liked it a lot.

It's so different head head a little.

Welford basically says, nan abilities are really something, huh?

My personality is reflected in my ability.

Yes, this is

saying the shonen out loud.

Yeah.

I reread

Hearts in Atlantis twice in the last couple of months.

Stephen King book about playing hearts.

Yeah, sort of, but yes.

Only one of the five parts is about playing hearts, and all the other times the hearts are a metaphor.

But it's so good.

It was my favorite Stephen King book when I was a kid, and it probably still is.

But there's a part at the end where a character shows up and just says, like, cards on the table, here's what this book is about for about a page.

And it's really funny because it's unnecessary, but then you get the sense of, like,

I really don't want people to read this whole book and not get it.

So I'm just going to lay it all out here.

If you didn't get it by now,

this is what this is about.

Sometimes you just got to say that.

Sometimes you just gotta say it.

And, you know, is it kind of corny for two sentences when you say, nen abilities are a reflection of your personality,

but at least it serves the function of helping someone who maybe didn't get it.

Is Hearts in Atlantis the one the Hearts story in Hearts in Atlantis, if I remember right, has like one of its central plot parts be a hearts game that is so compelling that it causes an entire like graduating class of university minus a few people to lose their minds?

To absolutely lose their minds, yes.

They sort of become frenzied in

the idea of playing hearts as a sort of escape from the pressures of needing to graduate or they'd be sent to Vietnam.

Oh, to Vietnam.

So it's sort of this coping mechanism that is so unhealthy that it actually causes the exact event that they were playing hearts to escape from.

Sometimes he's good.

That book is phenomenal.

Oh my god, it's so good.

Um, did I tell you that uh

um um my sister read The Shining for the first time, she'd never read any Stephen King before um last winter and she's also never read The Shining Shining's great, uh, and she texted me in like December being like, Is Stephen King good?

Stephen King is good,

yeah, it's he has the power that that that uh some great um uh artists have, which is an inability to tell good things from bad things things in a way that, like,

that like plummets the floor of like how bad they can be, but it lifts it as the floor plummets, the ceiling rises.

Like, there's almost like there's no filter.

So, because of that, some really bad stuff gets through, but some really great stuff gets through.

And it's like, wow, I can't believe hit after hit, page after page of Hearts of Atlantis.

It's like, wow, this guy can fucking write.

It's so good.

Something that's really weird about Stephen King, and again, not to make up worse, just King Things, a really great podcast you should listen to, is that he will often be the worst writer you've ever read and the best writer you've ever read in the same four or five sentences.

Yeah.

Sometimes he just writes a sentence that is just awful.

You're like, what?

Desperation was like that for me.

I read Desperation, which I had never read.

And

it was like a total, you know, C minus,

I would say C minus because there's parts of it that were amazing.

And then the rest of it is like dog shit.

And it's like, how did he do this?

How did he put all this good stuff and bad stuff all right next to each other?

You can't tell the difference.

Because you can't tell the difference.

Yeah, it's crazy.

All right.

Welfin, Ikalgo, who is now in complete control of the situation.

So Welfin briefly says, I saw this coming, but I had no idea I was this weak.

I didn't think it'd be so scary to fight with someone, fight someone with so little care for their own life.

You know, Ikalgo's willingness to go all the way here is what is putting him on top.

Ikago demands that he removes the bugs.

Welfin claims that he doesn't know how and really genuinely just does not know how.

It never occurred to me.

He basically admits it never occurred to me to remove the centipedes.

So I don't, they can't be removed.

This is a good example of them not knowing their own men powers because eventually when the two of them sort of reach a calm stalemate later in this scene, the centipedes just disappear.

This is there because they're going back to demon world.

Yeah,

they topped her back to Demon World because Welfin had completely surrendered.

I love that Takashi's imagination for nen abilities is seemingly limitless.

But occasionally, you know, he's got to pick the kid up from daycare or whatever, and he just goes back to the old well of, I saw a weird nen animal that fucks you up.

This is the same as Krillo's indoor fish.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And also the blood fleas.

And also the fish darts.

Oh, the fish darts.

The fish darts.

I think that it's an insult to call those all the same thing.

Yeah,

they have their own special style.

Yeah, I would say that definitely the two most similar.

I would say that the Nen darts and the fleas are kind of similar.

And then the indoor fish and the centipedes are kind of similar.

Welfin decides to stall in a really funny way.

He pretends to faint.

And then Ikalgo goes to shoot him again.

And

he opens up one eye to check that Ikalgo has bought his faint.

Yeah.

And Ikalgo goes to shoot him again.

He flinches a little bit before he fully wakes up.

Can we talk about how well animated Welfin is in this episode?

Yeah.

Both him and Ikalgo are really well animated.

And the worms are like really well animated.

Yeah.

Welfin is so expressive, and it really is what makes all of this work, especially

him trying to play dead and immediately fucking it up.

It's very funny that he does a dog thing.

Yeah.

It's so funny that he does a dog thing.

He's a puppy.

Yeah.

He's such a beautiful piece of character design in that the animators have figured out the ways in which he can be expressive.

Very often in the early sort of encounters with Welfin, he's very angular, you know, very, very sharp nose, very sharp face.

He has those silhouettes of like crouching or sniffing or whatever.

But now as he's in this like increasing panic with Ikalgo and as the animators need

to make the character go more and more his silhouette becomes like shaggier and fuzzier he has this sort of like rough of fur around his neck and beard almost um there's like a fluidity to his motion that is really great um they clearly were like we need to sell welfin in a major way i just shared the two opposite welfins here from this same episode the like sort of bare-skinned angular sharp welfin and then the sort of scruffy faced welfin

Yeah, who would have thought that Welfin would be

a real A-tier Chimera actor?

Togashi.

I think he just spins a wheel when he sits down to write.

He's got a big wheel with all his characters up.

He's like, which guy am I going to make you love today?

But it does all sort of fit together like a puzzle.

There is a very puzzle-like element to all of this stuff.

It's because it's a fucking game.

It's a fucking game.

Right, but

if you just spin a wheel, you'll get the wrong piece.

It won't fit right.

He's very good at spinning the wheel.

Yeah.

He's just been perfect when I spin the wheel.

When I spin the wheel, it always lands on the right character.

Oh.

Additional.

That one's available now.

Ikalgo says,

do you have any memories from when you were human?

Because Ikalgo, so Welfin sort of like spins out his like, I never really planned to.

I attacked Odi to kill.

I didn't give a single thought of what happened afterwards.

This is when he says, nan abilities are really something.

And Ikago says, I once knew someone just like him.

Do you have any memories of when you were human?

And at first, Welfin lies.

And it's clear that sort of like talking about his memories is a source of pain for him, not just because he doesn't want to...

There is immediately something in there, right?

You can like sense that he is being reticent, not just because he's an ant who doesn't want to talk about his past.

And it's when he finally opens up that we kind of get a sense of why.

Welfin wasn't,

he says, I was sure I was an NGL soldier.

He was one of those people wearing white.

Do you remember way back when

the people with the machine guns?

When Kiloa picked up the machine gun and created one of the hardest frames of anime ever known?

Yes.

And then he has this great line.

The ants are starting to get really confused.

And the story is starting to get, I think, deliberately really confused about like how chimera ants are made and what a chimera ant is.

Now, obviously, what is a chimera ant is something that the arc has been about, but in a much more specific sense, he says,

I still remember it like I was yesterday.

I'm sure I was one of these NGL soldiers.

And then he says, I was fed to the queen and reborn as something new.

This is, we've sort of known that, you know, ants have personalities that are similar to, and, you know, they have memories of, there was that great bit where a cult was like, oh, yeah, lots of ants remember their past or whatever.

But this idea of like the process of being, becoming a chimera ant being talked about more like a transformation or a rebirth rather than a sort of like cobbling together from one entity into another.

You know, when we first meet the chimera ants, it's like you get thing A and you get thing B and you smash them together and you get thing C that has the characteristics of A and B.

And then you're like, well, so those characteristics might include memory.

You know,

there might be more quote-unquote personhood being carried over.

And now we're at the point where the ants are even talking about it.

Like, I was one thing, and then I got reborn as like another version of me.

And this is really important as we start to move into the next episode.

We'll talk about it more.

But the next episode is going to deal with the ants attempting to transform palm to essentially like produce, you know, like work through this process in the most explicit sense, we can transform a human into something else.

I just thought that the like the use of language here was really interesting and really specific.

Welfare goes on to tell the story of his memories and about knowing Gyro,

which he sort of forgot.

It seems like he forgot that he knew this.

That he had sort of like reburied some of these memories.

He says, even now, I can still remember the thing I most wanted to forget: the sight of my father strangling me and the woman behind him just watching.

He says he was saved by his brother, who he was not related to by blood.

And then he says, He looked just like Gyro.

And he says that almost like that part specifically, as if he had forgotten that his brother looked like Gyro.

And I don't know if it's meant to imply specifically that his brother was Gyro,

or if that his gyro just shared an uncanny resemblance to his brother?

I feel like

I always read it as gyro, and the way that he talks about this to me felt like these are repressed memories coming back.

That's why he talks about it in the way he does.

But he does specifically say that he wishes that he could have forgotten this memory.

Exactly, right?

Yeah.

He says,

when I had to laugh to keep from crying, he, Gyro, was there.

We were both empty.

That's why we had nothing to hide.

Sometimes I wonder what he's doing.

There's a lot of really good, vague resonance happening in this scene.

There's a line I love where he says,

Apparently, my brother looked just like Gyro does.

Apparently, that's my, that's my

note there.

And Nikago reacts to the name Gyro, and Welfin says, you know him as the king.

And I have to imagine that what Welfin is trying to say is, you would remember Gyro as the king of the NGL.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

but which is the same thing.

Which they show.

Yes, yeah, which we know is true.

And I think he's saying, you know, back when you were a human, you know,

the king's name, he was the king.

But I love this, the, the, the, the way he says, uh, he uses tense in a really interesting way.

He says, uh, I think you know him as the king, uh, which is like

way in the realm of, like, is Gyro the king, the Meroem?

Um, you know, did is that where Gyro went?

Uh, or is Gyro Ikalgo?

You know?

Oh, my God.

So we have this moment of like Ikalgo begins this scene by saying, he reminds me of someone I once knew.

That could just as easily be like a, you know, just like a reference to one thing or another.

And then we have Ikalgo reacting to the name Gyro.

And over and over again, we go through these kind of like cycle of three shots of Welfin's face, Welfin's memories, Ikalgo's face.

This is just how you would shoot this scene, but I love that there is that like assonance happening.

Yeah.

So there is an interesting thing with the adaptation happening here.

Sylvie's going to find the page she just said in the chat, but I'll explain briefly that

if you were reading the manga instead of watching the anime, you'd already know what has been happening with Gyro

because

Gyro was a bigger part of the story in the manga when the NGL stuff was happening.

Why did he get cut?

I'll tell you why.

It's actually actually a great reason for once.

Oh, oh, good.

Yeah, none of this kite bullshit.

It's because nothing about gyro happens in the rest of the anime.

And so they cut it out to not make people think that they were going to get resolution on some gyro stuff, which they won't.

Oh, so Takashi put that on the board because he was wondering whether or not he would do something with it.

And it turned out that he didn't.

At least didn't win the anime.

Yes.

I don't know what's up with Gyro in the manga, but I know that as far as the anime is concerned, Gyro is not in it.

Sylvie, do you have the page or should I send it to you?

Yeah, I have the page here.

I believe this is the page.

This happens while Gone and Kilowa are in Doley City, which we know as Vienna.

I was like, what the fuck place is that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I've posted in here.

It's these.

There's just a couple.

I couldn't find more than just this one page.

it's in uh chapter 203 i believe i just don't have time to like dig through my my copies of the manga

um

i'm just gonna read this from the i'll just read the whole thing this is the right to speaking right yeah the top panel uh starts with gyro wanted to disseminate evil throughout the world the drug he developed d2 or d squared was only the beginning and there was more he wanted to do and we get a panel of this sort of he's in like a puffer jacket i guess you'd describe it with a hood pulled up you can't see his face in any of these

his vicious tenacity did not allow him to forget his human memories it was if he was were reborn into a new body while remaining himself he left the queen's domain because his pride still considered himself a king gyro wasn't in a hurry this is the one line we get from gyro is uh him saying i'll have to start over or maybe thinking it

he knew preparations were necessary for major undertakings his experience in construction made him rational and productive gyro left town and disappeared without encountering Gon.

Whether this proved to be fortunate for either party will not be known until they ultimately meet.

He's the

oh my god.

Tagashi's the fucking king.

Yeah, this is so cool.

And so there's a really common

anime theory of, hey, what if the king is gyro?

That people who are the manga have to go, no, no, the king can't be gyro because gyro had already been to

Italy.

Hang on.

There's thinking about canonicity that you can do here, right?

Which is like, the king could be gyro because the king in the anime, gyro has not gone anywhere in the anime.

He has not left.

I guess, yeah.

Yeah,

there is stuff that implies that they have kept the truth of the manga while cutting the content of the manga.

Oh,

okay.

Another very common thing you hear about gyro is people being like, you'll see like a hundred different like Reddit threads or whatever being like, is gyro going to be the main villain of Hunter Hunter?

Oh, what?

That's not how Tagashi works.

He's not going to be able to do that.

I don't think that's how any of this works.

Yeah, like, are you reading the same thing I am?

Because I don't know.

They are, but they're also reading a hundred other pieces of garbage that

makes them feel like that.

They think that solo leveling anime is good.

So, like, you know.

Oh, is that not good?

That's good to know.

No, it's garbage, dude.

Yeah, of course.

It's a power fantasy battle anime.

Of course, it's garbage.

You just hear people say that that something is great, and then you're like, that probably, that doesn't sound great, but who knows?

We talked about Attack on Titan earlier.

Yeah, yeah.

Did we?

But yes.

We mentioned the Titans earlier.

I like the way they zoom around in that show.

And I like the way that the Titans have those awful teeth.

The rest of it is

some of the worst shit ever.

Yep.

You should play

a fucking

Tales of...

What's that fucking game called?

The Cell Shaded Tales of like World War II game.

No.

Oh, no.

Oh, fucking.

It's the turn-based strategy game.

Should I carry a chronicles?

Is that what it turned out?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right.

My favorite thing about this panel, actually, is I think that the

A, the baby brains Tagashi Appreciator looks at this and looks at that big wide blank panel of Jairo disappearing.

That is good, but what is better is his lovingly drawn sneaker filling up a whole panel.

Tagashi is drawn beautiful.

Check out those sketches.

There's something so Yoshihira Tagashi about like everything on this page is so vague and shaded and like unsettling.

And then we get this hyper close-up on like a beautifully drawn realist sketcher.

It's such a good sneaker logo, too, because it looks like something and it makes my brain go, oh, that's that's a real thing.

I've seen that before.

And I don't think it is.

It just looks so much like a real sneaker logo.

Yeah.

It's not a bad logo, actually.

All right.

Okay.

So,

this is the point at which Welfin sort of just likes.

He gives up.

He says, I don't care about, you know, ants or money or politics.

I just want to see Gyro.

I just want to see Gyro again.

I'm fooding out.

The centipedes disappear.

This is like...

This is such a wonderful moment of

Welford's particular brand of nervous breakdowns that we've seen over the last X many episodes, where, like, what has happened is

Welfin is like.

I'm trying to think, Welfin is like a...

You spin a coin and it just goes ping-ponging around the table anxiously for 30 seconds, and then eventually gets to a point where it just like rocks slowly on the table and stops.

And this kind of like final acceptance of his own personhood.

He says, I didn't know that telling the truth felt so good.

And the narrator chimes in to say, Welfin spent his life unable unable to trust himself or others.

This was the first time he had ever opened up to someone.

So go ahead.

I love this.

It really is like, you know, the show does a lot with sort of suggesting, like,

is being an aunt like a thing you are, or is it a side you're on?

Like when Welfin is like, should I even be a chimera ant anymore?

As if he could stop being a chimera ant

simply by unaligning himself with them.

And in this episode, he goes, Yeah, I should stop being a Chimera ant.

Yeah.

I just want to be a bad thing, my bro.

Yeah.

I would die for Welfin.

Me pointing at any Chimera ant that gets even longer than 40 seconds, excluding Poof.

Poof is the exception that proves the rule.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the SpongeBob saying, I want an ice cream truckle follow me and live.

This show is excluding poof.

Then we get this great shot.

Occasionally, the show does 3D animation.

It usually does 3D animation when it is doing like large establishing sequences or a particularly complex camera move.

It does it in this moment to be really menacing as the camera drifts through a 3D model of the palace

and towards a very ornate door.

and in the inside, we see the cocoon hatch.

A black, scaly arm emerges from the cocoon, and Palm Siberia steps out, transformed.

We'll talk about what Palm looks like as we move into 124.

But

I really liked the way this cliffhanger worked, actually.

I think you could shoot this cliffhanger and end it on the cocoon is hatching.

That is not the thing they want to leave you with.

The thing they want to leave you with is this is Palm and she has been changed.

Yeah,

before we get into 124, could we take just five minutes?

Sure.

Yeah, sounds great.

Sounds great.

All right, two duologues down.

One was an extremely violent, but ultimately non-combat discussion.

The other was a body horror interrogation that went wrong.

Time to move into the third one.

Killer was Aldik loses his mind.

Killer Zaldic, more sad killer was.

Let's have a quick check-in.

How long has it been since the Assault on the Palace began?

What is it like?

Write this down.

Seven minutes.

30 minutes.

30 minutes?

Oh, wow.

That's

the biggest half of the jump.

That is a big jump, I know.

30 whole minutes?

Because it had been like six minutes up until the last set of episodes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, this is what I mean about like the pendulum sort of reached a resting state and the show moved briefly in real time and now everything has slowed down again.

What I was talking about, you know, 10 minutes ago or whatever, about

the sort of language around like how ants are made, slowly changing and becoming fuzzier and blurrier is only

doubled down on as this episode begins because the narrator refocuses us on the civilians who are 4 million civilians.

4 million?

That can't be right.

No.

It was definitely in the millions.

It was up there, yeah.

Does Yashi Heritage actually know how how many people 4 million people is?

Because there's more people than are in that crowd.

There are like 76 trillion little poof particles, so maybe he just isn't a numbers guy.

Let him cook.

Maybe he isn't a numbers guy.

I was in a football stadium with 130,000 people

for the first time.

Wow, that's a lot of people.

That's a lot.

That's a lot.

It was extraordinary.

I'm not a

big stock of people.

I'm not a football girlie, but it turns out that what I am is a huge amount of people like singing and chanting and like waving.

That stuff's fucking great.

The population of Ann Arbor, the city where I live, where the largest football stadium in America is, is the college football stadium.

No, football stadium.

College football, though?

It is college football.

Yes.

Yes, the population of Ann Arbor is 119,000 people, and there were 130,000 people in the stadium.

I've got to be honest, that makes my skin crawl.

I would, if I was the king, I would, I would outlaw football straight up.

Yeah, me too.

I hate football, and honestly, I don't even like when people like football.

I hate it so much.

I'm shaking your hand right now,

thank you.

Keith and Sylvia, the meme of people clasping each other's hats.

I don't know what happened.

It felt like there's this weird thing that happened when,

do you remember when, oh, do you remember when it used to be hard hard to be a nerd?

Uh, you know, that kind of person who they like, uh, they use that to be evil now?

That's, yeah.

Um, there was this time when, like,

uh,

the idea of like nerd culture becoming mass culture, like the things that mass culture could have adopted from nerd culture could have been the good parts of it, um, like hating sports.

Um, and it's instead, like always, all change to society is negative change.

And so it only took the evil parts and it discarded.

Like, I remember, you know, it used to be embarrassing to act in certain ways.

And it used to be, like, cool to not like sports.

And we're like way past that now.

Like, cool people like sports now.

We, you know, I think that

when I say we, I just mean people who agree with me on this.

We lost.

Sports are, yeah.

Sports are mass culture again.

I hate it.

It sucks.

Especially college football.

Oh, my God.

It makes me fry when I hear that.

There's like a dozen American college football stadiums that hold over 100,000 people.

That's psychotic.

Teachers are football.

That might be the most evil sport.

Teachers are making $4 a month.

What are we doing?

College football coaches should get together and jump off a cliff.

Yeah.

Do the honorable thing.

They should recreate.

We should do a

recreate the Lemmings documentary that Disney did, but instead of the Lemmings, it should be like college administrators and sports coaches.

I'm shaking both your hands now.

And the owners, owners go first.

But there's no college football owners, which is why I didn't start with them.

Oh, they're kind of.

Well, college presidents, I guess.

I don't know.

I don't know how that works.

Yeah.

Keith, I'm shaking one of your hands because I do think college football is uninteresting, but I am not shaking your other hand because I do think sports is really good.

I like baseball.

I don't think sports are inherently evil.

I do think that most organized sports leagues are.

I think that sports are inherently evil, and that the degree to which that they're not evil is like a mistake.

Like, sometimes there's a not-evil sport, and it's just like an accident that happened.

I do think sports are inherently evil.

Like, when the basketball go under hoop.

The basketball's good.

I like the sounds.

This is some great.

um uh friends at the table output that we're doing here in that like it's as though we're walking across a muddy field and occasionally well so firstly we're making a podcast about hunter hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

And then we've gotten off-piece.

Sure.

It's as though we're walking across a muddy field with some sort of like fairly well-founded distaste for sports and the culture and business thereof.

And then occasionally our foot goes plunging straight into just like deep nihilism.

I'm more nihilistic than your average person, I would say.

Are you the person who said every time culture changes, it changes for the worst?

It's true.

I don't know that I'm actually disputing you i don't know

every time mass culture has an opportunity to shift it chooses the nightmare version of the shift there was a period where

it was

socially unacceptable

to use racial slurs on mainstream tv yeah

And we are journeying back into the place where certain kinds of people consider that acceptable.

Although some people

there's a certain word that begins with R that's back in the mainstream of

the mainstream.

Which was spearheaded by a coalition of the far right

and

like quote-unquote leftist prospects of the quote-unquote far left.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I suppose this is an argument in both directions.

It's the argument that culture changed to the point of saying, this is unacceptable to use.

This is a taboo that we will not cross.

And then, unfortunately, what has ended up happening?

But we've gone journeying back in that direction.

The true tragedy is that the period of times where you couldn't say slurs on TV, it really only lasted like 20 years.

Yes,

and at the same time,

the systems of oppression were still thundering away under there, often by the same people who claimed that they were now good because they weren't saying slurs.

Oh, my God.

Oh my god.

You ever want to just move to to the woods?

I'm like,

it's not good in the woods.

It's not good in the woods either.

They're bulldozing them.

What's good in the woods?

That's right.

Hey, if we can get to the point of the money.

Hi, Ontario.

We had a pretty rough election here.

Electoralism will not save us.

Yeah.

Also, and I hate to say this, this is me looking down the camera and saying it, not saying it to you, Sylvie.

The impulse of move to the woods is also not what is going to save us.

No, absolutely not.

It's a very selfish impulse.

I'm well aware.

We have nailed ourselves into this coffin and we are going to have to figure out how to get out of it.

You know?

Oh, my God.

Hey, you may just have to get buried.

Hey, remember what I said the

Merowim should read some Mao and more people should in general.

Yeah.

There's...

I would say that, though, talking about...

I think this is a very...

It's a very episode 102 discussion, but we're here in episode 104, where Kilua is holding a live wire to charge himself back up.

Yes, yes.

And

as we see the crowd, the narrator says

they are ready for this.

Remember when we were talking about 4 million people and then that got us onto?

Yeah.

Yes.

Hang on, hang on.

Bear with us here.

Listeners.

I nearly called them chat.

I don't.

Oh, dear.

They are not the chat.

I'd be making a much worse show if there was a chat going at the same time.

Yeah.

The narrator talks about the sorting process that would turn these people into soldier ants.

And then he says, a creature somewhat like the ones they would soon become begins to stir.

And it's at this moment that we get to see our first like full-on look at Palm.

She looks similar to her sort of previous incarnations.

Perhaps the easiest way into this is she is somewhere between

my beautiful dearheart horrible nightmare palm and the beautiful disguise slash date palm she has long black hair she has a large purple gem on her forehead um her face is rendered more like a human's versus like the grudge yeah she's like a slightly angular face she has a bloody wound in the middle of her chest no uh it's not a wound i mean it comes from a wound she's wearing like a slip um and we can see the wound yeah under that um

and she kind of just like stalks off into the palace as Killior finishes charging himself up at the main.

She has her characteristic sort of slightly curly, you know, like slick black hair, but it's not wild and wiry.

It's sort of like down and tame.

As Killior is moving through the palace, he senses a dark nen that he recognizes.

Sometimes you just got to go back to the well to get a classic old-fashioned drink.

I'm sensing some weird nen.

Yeah.

All that old stuff still works.

All the old Hunter-Hunter stuff still works.

Just because

we're in the weird zone, it doesn't mean the fundamentals aren't.

And he can tell that the person that is watching him has kind of like recognized that he is there.

So first he does...

I love this shot.

He gently rolls his yo-yo out into the corridor and looks in the metal reflection of it to see the like, to see Palm walking down the hallway like a specter.

She's got like bare feet and you can hear the sounds of her feet on the stone.

It's scary.

This is really fun because so much of the joke of Palm originally was she is a character from a horror movie that has been put in a like a sitcom but is still reading the

script from the horror movie.

Palm was never really scary.

I mean she was like She was signifying scary, but she wasn't actually being scary.

She was really funny.

She was acting scary, but it was playing as comedy.

Yes, and now here in this silent palace, like

the hens have come home to roost, and we have Palm Siberia is actually scary, approaching like a ghost down the coast.

Despite being more tame, way more restrained.

Yep.

Is actually scary now.

Yes, I have spoken on this podcast before about my reservations with Palm, and I don't think

I don't feel like any of it.

I don't think it's a situation where it's like, oh, Jack, if only you knew what Tagashi was doing, then you'll trust him or whatever.

I think all that stuff is still...

You'll regret your words and deeds.

You'll regret your words and deeds.

All that stuff is still there.

I think it's worth saying that I have always really, um, I think Palm is a really fun character.

I think sometimes she is misused or sometimes they're doing less interesting stuff with her, but I generally always have a great time when Palm is in the show and I'm glad that she's back.

The narrator says, her appearance hadn't totally changed, but she was clearly not the same person.

And this kind of transformation of a human is something we know the ants can do, but we don't see or talk about very often.

The two big ones are kite, although that was more of like a frankensteining, I think, than like a transformation.

I think Peter stitched kite back together and said, go.

And then this is much closer to what Zazan did with the

awful thralls, the transformed thralls in

what's that place called?

Meteor City.

Although this is, again, the thing that like the king and the royal guards are just operating on a different level than

even the squadron leaders, where like Zazan was able to create these kind of like transformed humans, but they were like putative and weird and sort of like

miscreated.

Whereas for all intents and purposes, Palm is now like an ant lieutenant or something.

I don't know if we mentioned it, the ants are calling her number one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's their experiment.

their soldier experiment.

Speaking though, of going back to familiar wells,

what's the first thing that Kiloa thinks about when he sees Palm and how Palm has changed?

Goan went like this.

Goan's not going to like this one bit.

If Goan sees what happens to Palm, he's not going to be able to handle it.

There's no room left in his heart, not for something as awful as this.

Even without the needle, not only is Kiloa like...

So like obsessively concerned with Goan and Goon's feelings, but he like is even he mediates his own reactions to things through how Goan would perceive.

Killer doesn't have his own feelings.

He has Gohan's feelings.

Yep.

Yeah, we're deep in the codependency here.

You know,

this is the heart of

the love story in the middle of the show.

It's great.

All this stuff is just always working so well for me.

You know, when you open up Task Manager on your PC because it's running slowly, and you find that there's some program that you don't know what it is that is running so much RAM or whatever, slowing your whole computer down?

Yeah.

If you did that for Killu, it would just be Goan Freaks.

Just Goan Freaks.

Go on.

Go, yeah, Goan Freaks is.

What is this protocol going freaks?

Why is it using up 99% of my CPU?

Yeah, what the hell?

The 1% is electricity.

His language here is very specific.

I mean, Keith spoke about the there's no room left in his heart, not for something like this.

He also says Goan could totally lose it.

So Killua's goal is to find out how much Palm is left.

She still seems to have her tracking ability, which Killua is.

I love it when characters in the show try and figure out what other people's nanpower is.

Killua is very good at this game, this sort of like, can I put together the information from like four pieces that I have?

He sort of gets it.

He doesn't know about the mermaid.

He lets it go after.

Oh, sorry.

You mean he's trying to figure out the clairvoyance ability.

Yeah.

I understand.

I thought that you were referencing, like, he's trying to figure out if she's good or bad right now.

I mean, he is also trying to do that.

He's trying to find out what he's doing.

They're kind of intertwined because he knows why Palm

would be able to tell it was him or tell that he was there because of her ability from when she sort of referenced it when Biskey showed up.

And we get a Biskey flashback.

And

because she recognizes him and she's like, you're Kilua, right?

And he's like, yeah.

And she's like, I want to see Goan.

And he's still not sure.

Like, is this a good thing?

Is this a bad thing?

Like, what's going on here?

I can't remember.

What is it that she does that puts him at ease enough to start telling?

So first she says she's worried that Goan will hate him.

Sorry, will hate her when she sees what she has become.

Yeah.

And Killua's mediating his own feelings through Goan here.

This kicks in immediately, and he has to say,

Goan doesn't judge people by their appearances.

This is such a funny thing to say.

Goan is such a ridiculous character that throwing in he doesn't judge people by his appearances is great to me in this moment.

Goan doesn't really judge people by his appearances.

He judges them instead by what he perceives to be the quality of their heart.

Right, yeah.

He's also, I do like that Kilua is immediately like, what makes you think he liked you in the first place?

Right, which is very

natural, Kilua.

Yeah, the misogyny, you mean?

Yeah, the misogyny and the...

And the also, like, trying to

injure someone who he's annoyed by.

Yeah.

And also trying to separate someone from Gum.

Yep.

Yeah.

He, he, like...

Sort of reflexively, I mean literally here.

I'm not describing events in the show.

He, like, reflexively jabs out with a little knife, both when he is annoyed and when he feels like someone's going to step in the way.

His, like, his, his reflexive move, what is it that one of his godspeed powers is like he can act without thinking about it, whirls?

Is this sort of like

spiteful little jab,

which is great.

And it's so natural that it almost like takes him out of this moment of trying to figure out what's going on here.

Like it feels like they're back in Vienna.

Yes, yeah, it's just a second.

And Palm plays right into that.

Palm's whole deal is like this sort of like shuddering fury of not being able to say what she wants to say and occasionally saying it remember when she said to bisky if if you don't figure this out i'm gonna kill everyone and biskey sort of like tugs up her collar like yeesh okay

um well she says she won't admit her thing with no but she will she's fine saying anything else Yes,

yes, the sort of like shuddering restraint is in the acting.

She is restraining herself from remember when she just like pulls out her knife and just like vibrates?

Yeah, yeah.

She says, you always act like such a spiteful little brat, don't you?

I have nothing to gain from your pity.

And then

she says, Where is Goan?

And at first, Killiua starts to answer her.

He says, You know, she's with Peter.

And then he pauses like mid-sentence.

And I love these moments of like Killiwa something occurring to Killua just seconds before it occurs to the viewer is great.

Because he has noticed something.

How come she can see Killiwa, but not Goan?

Because if her power is the same, she should also be able to see Goan.

And he sort of puts together this little, you know, like classic Hunter-Hunter, like explaining the PowerPoint business of like, maybe her power isn't working.

Maybe she crept down the hallway, saw me with her own eyes, then retreated, and then pretended to be coming down the hallway.

And he readies his yo-yo as he sort of says, you know, I think his exact line is, you're an enemy, aren't you?

Which is,

you know, sometimes again, you just got to save the thing.

Yeah.

Uh,

which and it ends up being the sort of resolution to

the fight.

It's good that he said that because

it was, it ends up being the trigger for this whole thing.

This type turned name here as Pam.

Pamela, Siberia.

Pam's hair goes flying out suddenly, binding itself around her.

She says, it seems I've made a mistake.

There are better ways to use my abilities.

Instead of bottling up my rage, it would have been better to yield to it completely.

To which I say she's been bottling her rage?

This is Black Widow, Demon Goddess.

Yeah.

This is one of the coolest new costumes that we've seen in a long time.

Very Bayonetta.

It's very Bayonetta, although it's sort of Bayonetta, except what if instead of being like a sexy catsuit lady, she was...

Man, how do I describe what she looks like?

Killer's mom.

There's bits of Killer His Mom in here.

There's sort of like something like an Edward Gorey painting.

There's a sort of like

gothic grotesque happening here.

What were you going to say, Dre?

I mean, it makes me think of Milia Rage from Guilty Gear.

Oh, yeah.

Using her

hair.

Milia doesn't go so far as to use hair as clothes, but

yeah, she has this great, like, broad hat that she wears.

The hat is another.

Oh, the Carmen San Diego drip.

It is kind of the Carmen San Diego drip.

And her face is sort of like sealed and resolved.

There are, you know,

this pirate called Black Widow, and there are a few lovely frames where she is posed to evoke a spider, not just in like her spindliness.

Keith, could you find this frame and put it in the Patreon?

There's one shot where she is like, the sort of like forced perspective makes her look exactly like a spider,

which is great.

She breaks Killiwa's yo-yo immediately.

There is either a new music cue here or some reused music.

These

shuddering, discordant

runs up the scale.

Do you know what's being used here, Keith?

Yeah, I believe that this is an older

song called Scariness, maybe?

Oh, it is, though.

It is scary.

Or maybe it's concentration.

It's one of those two.

It's great.

And as the narrator comes in to let us know that Killer is in real trouble, he sort of elucidates why.

Palm is an enhancer.

Remember the nen wheel?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Never forget it.

Never forget it.

I thought that the nen wheel would be more

in the show.

Instead, it's like the game engine.

It is powering everything underneath of this.

Everybody has a placement on the nen wheel.

We just don't often really talk about it.

Well, it's funny, you know, this is sort of what we were talking about when the nen wheel showed up and you were kind of disappointed by it.

And we were like, don't worry, the nen wheel is sort of like almost not relevant except for that explains everything that's happening.

Yes, it would be, yes.

It's the plate under the food.

Right.

It is the fly.

Like, if we told you about bread and then we show, okay, so we start with this and you're like, that?

White powder?

That's, oh, that doesn't look like food at all it was like no no you have to cook it into uh more baking metaphors for sylvie uh yeah thank you thank you thank you

like the eggs like the eggs yeah

um

i had a breakfast sandwich this morning

they're so good

they're so good what was on it's a good day when you can go out and get a breakfast sandwich Egg bacon, egg sausage and cheese and a bunch of like mayonnaise and mustard and various other seasonings, sesame seeds on the top.

It's great.

I'm big into sausage over bacon for my breakfast sandwiches.

I'm particular about bacon generally.

I like bacon a lot.

Sure, yeah.

It's 2014, maybe?

Maybe a little earlier.

We're now doing a podcast about bacon.

When was the height of bacon existing?

Oh, sorry.

The height of bacon was 2008.

Yeah.

Because I don't think meal time existed.

Oh,

that was earlier even than that.

The height of bacon was 2008.

It hasn't been even a little bit funny funny since

if ever, 2005.

If ever.

Bacon is very good, though, as a food.

Right, sure.

I was in college in 2010, and I had in a small town in Vermont, and

my

classmates were joking about bacon.

And I was like, what is this?

Four years ago?

So.

Once again, to bite from the excellent range touch network, something that Cameron and and Michael say a lot is, if you were not there, you do not understand what it was like.

And I have to say, younger listeners, the internet is

a different place.

I mean, the internet is constantly being a different place.

It is solidified with sort of like the platform era of the internet.

The internet's kind of been a similar thing for a long time now, but it was different.

The difference is that there's a hundred things that are as annoying as the bacon thing was, and so nothing can get the proper negative attention that's the difference it's just a hundred times worse

and you can read about it and because it's the internet a lot of it is still there but let me tell you it was bad um you would i thought what you're gonna tell people is you could read about how the bacon thing was like astro turfed by the bacon industry

that is actually true yes that is actually true wow i mean that makes sense i remember like christmas gifts like joke Christmas gifts were just bacon scented bacon themed everything for

three years.

That is a bacon industry plant.

Industry plants are back though.

Industry plants.

Never went away.

Never.

There's just 100 times more.

Also say that

there were some bits of the internet back then that were great that don't really exist anymore.

There's like a way the platform era of the internet has really done things to the way people are, the way people exist on the internet, the way they think of the internet as a resource or as a...

It's so tough as well because I say words like community in the full knowledge that words like community have been co-opted by a platform era internet to talk about something different, you know?

Right.

By emails from Target saying we miss you.

We need to bring back some decode forums.

We need to bring back some cases.

Speaking of being the king, that's another thing that I would do.

You're not allowed as a business to tell people that you miss them.

That's impossible.

A business can't miss me.

A business can't miss me.

A business can't.

Don't go shop somewhere where they say that they miss you.

They can't miss you.

They don't know you.

That is impossible.

They don't.

Missing is for the thing you do for your friends when you haven't seen them in a long time.

Yeah.

You idiots.

You idiots.

Me pointing a target.

Okay.

Right.

Kilua is fighting Palm.

She is fighting extremely quickly.

Her affair, as an enhancer thing,

handles all the defense for her completely.

Yoshihiro Tagashi has gone back around and has invented armor from First Principles.

Yeah.

It took him a long time and a lot of thinking about Nen, but he's finally got back to what if Nen could just physically protect you and then you couldn't fight.

It's basically...

Sorry, for people who don't know the real world but do know the Nen world, it's a suit of Ko.

It's a ko-suit.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Because I was really confused.

It's a ko-suit, so it it stops Nen instead of stopping swords.

So she can put all of her power into her attacks.

It's a great concept.

Super low concept Nen, Jack, as you say.

The lowest.

It's...

This is, I mean, Takashi's drawn really good.

Costume design here.

Takashi's costume design is almost always brilliant.

The power of this fight, I think, is in the animation.

They need to sell this thing, and the animation team make this fight look great.

Palm fights.

We have never seen Palm fight.

No, we've seen seen Palm attempt murder, but never a fight.

Yeah, she has those comedy scenes where she chases them with knives and they play Leori's funny music.

Yeah.

But like in combat, she looks great.

She's fighting like a...

There's this big sound cue as she comes slamming down.

She almost fights like a staple gun, you know, just like repetitive and noisy and heavy.

Killua needs to end this fight quickly because he recognizes Goan is, quote, barely holding himself together.

He has an absolute absolute banger, Zaldic Assassin line.

He says, there might still be a shred of Palm's heart in there, beat.

And if there is, beat, it's not going to help.

This is very similar to Netero's feeling about the king.

He needs to do this fast before it sways his heart.

Yep.

But Killure is more...

This is good writing.

This is good.

Tie your higher stakes and lower stakes plot lines together, either literally or thematically.

What Killura is doing is conceptually lower stakes.

Fighting the king is for the fate of the world, but Kiliur is fighting for the fate of Goan freaks, you know.

Which is narratively higher stakes because we care about Goan more than we care about the world.

Yes.

So he stalls Palm by telling her, just telling her the truth.

Oh, this is such a lovely scene.

Killure

has no intention of letting Goan and Palm meet, or really of changing Palm's mind.

He is stalling Palm.

But the way he chooses to stall Palm is he just starts speaking the truth.

And I don't know if he would do this if he had known what it would do to him and his body, but it's great.

Yeah.

He says,

Goan is in trouble.

Someone he, quote, deeply respects was ruthlessly altered.

And then he just makes the case outright.

He says, you know, Goan is in a really bad way.

He can tell, I can tell, and he can tell that you have been altered.

And, you know, if he sees you, Goan is totally going to snap.

And then he just, he just keeps going.

It's like he can't stop himself.

He's getting increasingly like choked up about this.

We're getting closer and we're starting to collect sad killers in a major way.

He says, when you see him, make sure you call him by his name first.

And then he pauses and he actually has to say it.

He says, say, Goan.

That's it.

That's my condition.

Let him know you're okay.

And then it's like he can't stop himself.

It just like keeps bubbling out of him.

He speaks about how worried Goan was about Palm before the mission.

And then

as he realizes that, you know, he has essentially gotten himself into a hole now, his original plan to just like stall her

has come awry in the depth of his own feeling.

He says, please give him some peace of mind.

Only you can do that, Palm.

No one else can reach him.

It's all up to you now.

You know, he is saying, I have failed.

You know,

Goan is lost to me.

Goan's comfort is lost to me.

He cries out, I can't help him anymore.

And he begins like this full, embodied, cathartic meltdown, which I don't think we have ever seen Killiwa do before.

No, he's cried a lot, but not like this.

This is tragic.

This is like truly tragic.

It's heartbreaking.

It's like the only thing that he cares about in the world is Goan,

and he feels like he can't do anything to help.

He's trying to be like Netaro and to harden his heart and the, but he's such a

he's so subject to his own emotional state that he like

does the exact opposite.

He lets like way too much of his heart out that he meant to.

Such beautiful writing.

And it also sort of like peels back the layer that they, that the show is constantly putting on top of Gone and Kiluwa, that they are kids.

He's a kid.

He is sad.

He doesn't know how to control himself or his emotions.

He is like, not that an adult would be beyond something like this, but that's like, you really feel

that

his conception of his options is limited by the fact that he can't see that sometimes people act like Gone is acting right now.

Like, sometimes people lash out at their friends.

Sometimes people can't control their anger.

They let things out when they shouldn't.

They let things out at people that they shouldn't.

And in the same way that Goan can't, or Killua can't see

that what Goan is going through is like a state and not like a permanence.

Goan can't see how he should be treating Killua and how important Killua is to.

Yeah.

This whole thing and his whole life.

It's very sad.

You've spoken that you said earlier that Kiliwa cries a lot, and that's true, but the crying Kiliua does is very different to this.

Kiliua previously sort of cries.

He is silently while he is crying.

Yeah, he weeps silently in the back, great little crook in his mouth.

Sometimes we see him actively crying.

There was that great scene where he said, you know, Gona is my friend, you know, this sort of thing.

This is some two things that I love to see on film are people dancing and people crying.

I I think that you can get a really good sense of like how a piece of fiction is interested in depicting its characters, not just in terms of like their from like a characterological perspective or a thematic perspective, but in terms of like physically putting them in front of the camera.

I think crying and dancing are really good ways into looking at individual characters.

This is some all-time great animated crying.

He sort of like falls to his knees.

He doesn't quite crawl into like a fetal position.

It's just like he falls forward onto himself.

And he's not really sobbing, it's just these sort of like individual choking wails, um, over and over again.

It's like something is just coming screaming out of him, um, but at the same time, it is very clear that what he is doing is crying.

This isn't some sort of like primal scream of anger or giving up, you know, this is someone just like caught in their own misery in this moment.

Um, this is lovely from a shonen perspective as well, where, all right, it's worth saying, this works.

Um, yeah, Palm is not only uh swayed by this but palm is like brought back to her personhood and i think that this is such a lovely take on the old shonen trick of like if i could just get through to someone's emotions if i could appeal to their emotions then they would you know return to their true self or whatever um where you know what how that has been twisted here is that killua um just tries to slow her down but accidentally overplays his hand you know over reveals his his emotions, demonstrates himself as an emotional being.

And it is that purity, it's that openness and like truth in character that brings Palm out.

It's like he accidentally turns the gun on himself and it works out great.

What happens is that, and I think there's maybe this slight undercurrent to their fight where it is kind of unclear because of who Palm is, how much of an enemy she is.

Yeah,

they could have played that a little harder.

I think that when you put it like that, Keith, that would have given the fight a really good

because when I saw her, you know, launch her attack, I was like, oh, she's been taken by the ants, you know, which ended up being true.

It ended up being true.

But there is this current of like, is she doing this?

Like, she's saying that she wants to kill him, but she was already saying that when they were allies.

So

is this real or is this fake?

But at the end, here

we see Poof seeing Killowa's outburst here as the funniest line from Poof in ages.

Oh, say it.

Uh, so baby Poof appears riding on Palm's hat, you know, revealing that he has been MPP.

Uh, and he has the beautiful line.

He says, uh, let me see.

Uh, he's defenseless, exclamation point.

So, comma, new strategy, comma, kill him now, number one.

Um, so yeah, Poof has been there giving commands, I guess.

Uh, we did see that he sent a baby poof in into the cocoon room a couple episodes ago.

And he's, I think Palm just says, shut up, and punches.

He has one more line before he gets punched to pieces, which is, quote, beat that kid to death and make it painful.

Yeah.

So Poof is unmoved, by the way.

You don't say.

Yeah.

Poof is unmoved, remains unmoved.

It's so funny because Poof is unmoved in the face of absolute perfect devotion, which he would think would be

he would respect the devotion at least.

Palm,

after

destroying Poof and taking off her Black Widow Demon Goddess uniform, she says, thank you, Kilua.

I owe it all to you.

It's like there was a wall inside my head.

My emotions were separate from my body, and there was nothing I could do.

It was like that ever since I woke up.

Then you removed that wall.

Don't ever think you're powerless.

If it means helping Goan, I'm willing to do anything in my power, but please don't forget out of all the people Goan needs in his life, he needs you the most.

It's so sweet.

It is very sweet, and it's true and he needed to hear it uh which is good and someone needs to tell it to gone too there is a lot going on here that i think is great yeah first is that we flashback briefly to palm's capture yeah um

she

figures out what no figured out which is that if you are captured by the ants they will basically torture information out of you so she stabs herself in the chest uh She is, however, rescued, and I say rescued, we see her being dragged along the floor by Peto and Poof, who

are interested in her aura.

Right.

Instead of killing herself, she accidentally first revealed her own aura to protect herself from Pito's aura.

And this is what got them interested.

Two royal guards, who are...

Once again, villains.

Villains.

They are extractive.

They went, hmm, we'll have that.

And they've been running experiments.

We know the ants have been running experiments, sort of, but they like literalize it or make it text in this moment.

The ants have noticed that

humans who, or ants who remember their pasts, again, we're back in this realm of like, how is an ant made?

How is that line getting blurred?

Ants who remember their past show more fortitude than others, although memories of the past have a tendency to hinder as well as improve people's growth.

And so they sort of figure out that memories leading to emotional reactions can hinder growth.

So the royal guards destroy the connection between Palm's memories and her emotions.

That's what she's talking about with,

you know, you removed the wall, Killua.

The narrator talks about this as though it's just fact, but we learn, you know, via Killua's actions that this can be undone through these sorts of like,

I don't know exactly how, but like, it is not a permanent process.

It's not a permanent severing.

And just an emotional trigger.

Yeah.

The success of the experiment, this production, would lead,

would signal the end of the human race.

It does appear that this experiment has not worked, as Kellyua, you know, breaks through number one.

Second thing that I think is really lovely here is that

this knits together with Palm's long plotline really well.

Palm is someone whose body and her emotions were linked together almost fatally from the start.

Palm is someone whose emotions caused her body.

I think I described it in the past as like she has like become fried in the sun of her own devotion, you know, her devotion to Nov.

And, you know, we see Nov get fried by his own horror and terror and devotion to his friends.

And so now we have something so horrifying to Palm being the separation from that thing that had on the one hand brought her so much pain in the past, but also was like central to her personhood.

You know, Palm Siberia was this person who was sort of like,

you know, constantly physically reforming herself in this sort of like drained, devoted way.

And so when she tells Poof to shut up and say, you know, my name is Palm Siberia, obliterating him, she says, I will never become a tool for ants, not even if it kills me.

All this stuff about Palm and her body and her emotions,

you know, kind of snaps back into focus.

Weird how we see one of Yoshi Hero Tagashi's only major female characters being someone whose body and emotions are constantly and like explicitly within the text tied together.

Everybody's bodies and emotions are tied together, but it's notable that here we have Palm, you know, one of the

only female hunter given lots of screen time.

Biskey.

Biskey, yeah.

One of them.

Bisky has her own thing going on with her body.

Biskey has her own thing going on with her body.

Now,

do lots of hunters have things going on with their bodies?

Yes.

Does this take away from what I'm saying?

No.

Well,

I think that I would have to think harder on this, but I would say that

the way that Palm has stuff going on with her body is like

poorly conceived

from a misogyny standpoint.

Biscuits is, I think, better written and better conceived.

Like, Biskey is embodying an anxiety that feels like real and feels like

doing something for yourself like self-motivated self-actualized where palms is sort of the reverse

palm is on a leash that is being like yanked around yeah yeah

it doesn't help that a lot of palms stuff was so tied into like her obsession with no early on too and then going and then going it's always obsession with a male character yeah which i think hurts it even more yeah So I think you could, I think you could tie the two characters together by being like,

there's two female characters.

Neither of them get to exist outside of this

anxiety and

hang-ups about their form and their attachments.

But Biskey's, I think, works in a way that is

positive or at least interesting and real.

Yeah, I want to see more Bisky.

I'm always happy to see Biskey.

I'm always happy to see Palm, honestly.

I think that, like, Palm getting a W out of this was really...

I don't know if she's going to survive.

I don't know who is going to survive.

you know i would i would put um

uh uh

like the reticule over almost anybody i would see the sniper dot over almost anybody at this point but i really thought that palm was lost to the ants yeah

and i think that this was a really nice moment of playing with that expectation of like i had thought that the twist that Tagashi was going to pull was, you cannot talk someone back from this.

You know, this is like the first test of can we get kite back?

And the answer is no.

But the twist was, we're going to get the Shonen My Emotions Bring You Back to Me scene, except in a really, really wonderful way.

It's great when Hunter Hunter, which is, I think, known for this, it's able to do the thing that you would expect, and that ends up being surprising.

And that it's still good.

It doesn't feel like it gave into

a trope, but more like it overcame the shackles of a trope in order to deliver good news for a change and

that it works and that it's good.

The

performance of the actor playing Killua is never not amazing.

She is crushing it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the

collection of sad killuas that we get in this.

It's a historic run.

It's a historic run.

Thank you so much, Tagashi.

Great fantastic work.

There are some like new

sad Kiliwas in here.

Yeah.

Kilua's sad in ways we have not seen him before.

He has this.

Broken and despondent sad Kilua.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He looks like a frightened child, which Kiliwa rarely does.

There's a frame where his mouth is drawn in a whole new way.

His mouth has never done this before.

My beautiful baby boy.

This is the shot I was thinking about.

My Shayla.

He's like pouting.

You can tell his bottom lip is quivering.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Killer was fucking great.

Killer was great.

You know, we talk a lot about how he really nailed it when he came up with the Phantom Troop, but he did also really nail it when he came up with Killer Zelda.

Yeah, that is, I think,

Killer Zelda and Gun Freaks are the

enduring triumph of this show.

They are both so well realized.

And

if there's anything that

I'm hoping that Media Club Plus Season 1 can do, it's to move from

their boyfriends and into this, whatever this is for,

yeah, one is boyfriend and the other is,

we're not so sure what.

Well, it's great because you're kind of cheating yourself out of it's very tempting and it's very

like fashionable to look at a piece of media in which there are two boys who are friends

and say they're boyfriends.

Look, I get it.

But you are cheating yourself out of the true joy, which is what the fuck is happening here?

What the fuck is happening?

Something fucked up is happening here.

Speaking of something being fucked up here,

I think that the, you know, Killua's first meltdown here when he kind of like sobs is great.

And then, you're right, Keith,

Palm's like reaffirmation that Go needs Killiua,

him hearing it from somebody is clearly transformative to him.

It's half of what he's been waiting for.

Yeah, the other one is

to hear it from Goan.

Right.

Yeah.

And it's amazing because this is the thing that the viewer has been screaming the entire time.

Yeah.

You know, this is the thing the viewer says about Goan and Killiua's relationship.

You know, since we started to see it take the turn,

I feel like a really it was taking this turn long before it, but the I will obliterate your hands while you hold the dodgeball was a really good moment of this, sort of like starting to take focus.

But the viewer has been screaming that this whole time and Killiua just has not heard it.

This is the first time someone has really said it to him.

And you can tell it really hits him.

The animation team does such a good job of they do this a lot during 116.

Was it 116?

The bottle episode?

Yeah.

Of like Killua receiving information and it like hitting him in his soul.

They are really good at conveying that.

He's got a why.

He is the

soul of the broadside of a barn.

It's really easy to hit him in the soul.

Oh my God.

I was reading the really great

Hunter-Hunter Lasers and Feelings hack, which we are going to play at some point.

And in that, they described Kilua Zaldic as cold-hearted, and I immediately took issue with that.

Yeah.

he is the warmest heart on the planet.

Unfortunately, it's continuous.

He presents Killiozeld as cold-hearted

for a for a

bad at presenting as cold-hearted.

He is, yeah, you know, Killiozaldic

for 15 minutes, and already Melierode is like, wow, my God, there's something real sad inside this kid.

In season one,

or I guess in the Hunter exam,

like he oscillates rapidly between cold-hearted and being 12.

Can you see

the true Kiliwa?

This is a bigger question that I mean seriously.

Can you see the true Kilua in season one, or had Yoshihiro Tagashi not figured it out yet?

Is this one of those things where it was latent in the character waiting to emerge?

Or do you think that the Kilua he writes at the beginning, there's just not enough of that character there to make it go yet?

I think it's close.

If it's not there, it's already close.

I don't know.

I feel like I lean towards this as something that has been like

doing pottery.

It's like the more you spin the, like, you make it.

He's been spinning the

whatever they call it with the

wheel on it.

The wheel.

Sure.

I didn't know if there was another term

for like

years

to get before the Chimera Antarc, but I think that by the time we're in Greed Island and maybe even like, actually, I think by the time we're in the Phantom Troop arc, even, it's starting to take form.

Yeah, but I don't know if it was there from the beginning.

I like Tagashi's set.

I'm pretty sure.

Like, he's been open about it.

I don't have a plan from the beginning.

I'll say that the thing is that Kilua had to overcome the part of him that was jealous of how people felt about about Goan

in order to admit how he felt about Goan.

And it's revealed how he actually feels about Goan in his fight with Illumi during the Hunter exam.

Illumi says it to him then.

That is true.

I think the beauty of the killua thing

is that you are drawn into it with the

first story that Tagashi tells you is of this like abused child who discovers his own personhood and his own capacity for love through the through the attention of somebody who is who is like a ball of love, you know?

Like we talked about this on Media Club Plus, right?

Of like the first

Kilua entering the realm as the protagonist is like a story about watching the world open up for a person who believed that the world was closed.

And that in and of itself is really great character writing.

And I would believe that Tagashi had planned that, that he would tell this story about this assassin boy whose like

awful upbringing is kind of, if not exorcised, but like worked through and processed through the care of this like firecracker individual who,

you know,

opens him up to the world.

Then it gets really good, right?

Which is that Tagashi didn't stop there.

Then he says, all right, what does it mean when person B has just been opened up to the realm of like,

I'm my own person, I can have friends, I can exist in the world outside of the strictures that my family put on me, and I am like overwhelmingly deeply in love and in debt to this person who showed me the world and kind of like opened it up for me.

But Ghon is still out there, still doing that stuff.

And it just becomes like more and more

like burning.

The warmth that froze the ice is now starting to boil the water, you know?

And I feel like that second punch of the Killiwa Zeldic plotline maybe wasn't there in the beginning.

And it was only when he stumbled on it, when he sort of got to that end state of like, Goan has opened Killiwa up.

The box is now open.

Oh my God.

I think found Killiwa 2.

I think maybe the key to this is that it's not about a change in Killiua, but it's about a change in Goan.

That the changes that we see in Killua are like a well-conceived reaction to the changes in Goan.

And that it's Goan's character that had to go through a dramatic change versus Kilo, who went through

a

gradual, legible change, you know, from episode one to episode 125 that like makes sense and is slow and mostly consistent, versus Goan, who like,

you know,

you take a sip of milk one day and it's fine, and you take a sip the next day and it's off, and it's like

it's where do you think that moment was the death of Kite?

No, because Goan is already like beeping around in that philosophy in the Phantom Troop Arc, right?

I was, I, it, I think it might be in Greed Island somewhere,

maybe dodgeball,

it might be dodgeball, It might be dodgeball.

Actually, we're throwing the ball.

And then all that weird stuff with Genthru.

Yeah, it's kind of putative when he says to Crowlo,

what's your fucking deal, man?

How come you could be good, but also evil?

I simply do not accept this.

And Crowlo says, well, this seems complicated and leaves.

Yeah.

Total failure, and that's all there is to it.

Slow and steady wins the race.

Seems soldiers have no need of memories or senseless emotions, which means I am no longer in need of Pito's power.

Can you guess who says this?

If it's soldiers I require, I can create them on my own.

In fact, that would make it much easier to build a new kingdom fit for the king and myself.

Oh, this is so good.

I love how quickly he throws away the scheme.

He says, total failure, that's all there is to it.

And then he says, slow and steady wins the race.

And then he says, Okay, so soldiers don't need emotions.

And then he has Poof's big realization.

I don't need

two fucking jerk-offs.

I've been looking for

an excuse to get rid of these two fucking jerk-offs.

Yeah.

And now I can.

I love this too.

Soldiers have no need of memories or senseless emotions from the most emotional character in the show.

Yeah, but soldiers don't need it.

Poof is different.

Well,

he calls them senseless emotions, which

it seems to me that he considers emotionality senseless.

Because

he's confusing

emotions with sentimentality.

He doesn't see my emotions are real.

They're like actually, because I can feel them and they're changing how I'm thinking.

So that all exists.

Their emotions.

It's Gohan's problem.

I know.

It is about my friends.

Because I'm true and real.

they care about their friends, but that's not real care.

How can they care about their friends and do something wrong?

Meanwhile, I'm threatening to kill an injured girl.

There's two ant things here that I love.

The first is that fairly recently, so this is poof coming to the realization: you know, soldiers have no need of memories or senses, emotions.

Fairly recently, we had the royal guard, we had Hina complaining about how the peons can't speak.

And, you know, there's this sort of like issue with certain ants who are on like a certain level of being and certain other ants.

So now already Poof is rediscovering this in and of himself.

And then if we go even further back, do you remember those great conversations where Colt and Peggy were like, oh, shit, these ants have got emotions.

And this might be problematic for morale and for control.

Yeah.

Poof is figuring this out too late.

And in the wrong, he's coming down on the wrong side of it.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Colt and Peggy got to the point of like, oh, hang on a second.

The first thing Colt said was, maybe I can use Ant's emotions to, like, they can go out and hunt for food better, accidentally inventing the squadron leader system, which is cool.

We can organize our individuality.

I think they actually, I think, I think squadrons already existed.

What he did was pit them against each other in productive competition instead of just letting them senselessly kill.

Which, in and of itself, produced the Chimera Ant arc, right?

Like, that is the juice that makes the Chimera Ant arc go in a lot of ways, which is

distinctive squadron leaders bouncing off each other to try and be the best.

It also created a more powerful king by mistake.

Instead of making them just slaughter people for fun, he was encouraging them to competitively bring in the most food for the queen, which in turn

created the king.

The other fun ant thing that's happening here as Poof rejects Pito's ability is that the horror and nightmare of Pito's awful transformative ability is now being seen as a possible weakness in the ants, sort of like narratively aligning itself closer to Gonan Killua's project.

This is part of like a way that they can process Pito as like a healing transformative entity.

Pito is out here with Dr.

Blythe fixing Komegi.

You know, Peto was out there doing awful experiments on these ants, but ultimately their power was one of like transformation and like retention of the human on some level.

You know, we can keep the human in there.

We can keep their memories in there.

Now we have Poof saying, absolutely not.

Let's jettison Nefa Pito and their project completely.

Right.

and move in opposition to that.

The last image here is a vision of the kingdom he intends to build for himself and his beautiful husband.

Looks like the poop tower.

It looks like

what if the poop tower was made of like masonry?

The thing it's got, yeah, it's got gold foil on it.

Really reminded me of is the library of Babel in a painting by

fuck who did this?

Is this one of them Bruegels?

It is.

Is this one of them their Bruegels?

This is Peter Bruegel the Elder.

Peter Bruegel the Elder's painting Tower of Babel from 1563.

This is very similar in the kind of like construction and the colour palette of the

tower that he envisages here.

Hunter-Hunter has always been in conversation with like classical art, I think, about the Francis Bacon stuff.

And also, I think that the Chimera and Ark is definitely on some level in conversation with like Bruegel and Bosch as two sort of...

Bosch was also Flemish?

I think so.

Painters of this sort of like expansive

bizarre grotesquery, you know, large scenes, hundreds and hundreds of characters, people off doing their own things,

you know, monsters with

like a oboe coming out their bum, stuff like that.

Damn, imagine if one of the ants had an oboe coming out of its bum.

They should have, shouldn't they?

Damn.

And that's all that happens in these episodes.

What are we watching next time, Keith?

Next time, we're watching Amir 2.

Oh, we're watching.

Do not call them

Amir 2.

Right, this is Sylvie.

You're really excited about 126, right?

This is the one that you've been talking about.

Yeah.

So we're watching episodes 125 and 126.

These are big ones.

There's no way around.

These are both ones I'm very excited about.

What are they called?

These are called

Great Power and Ultimate Power.

Episode 1.

That's episode.

That's yeah, 125.

And 126 is called Zero and Rose.

Zero.

Zero and Rose.

Zero and Rose.

What a pair of episodes that's going to be.

I cannot believe.

It's finally time.

It's finally time.

There's simply no

there's no way around it.

These are some of the biggest episodes in the series,

for sure.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

Yeah.

Although last time you promised me centipedes and I got centipedes.

And you got centipedes.

Yeah.

I'll say this for anyone listening.

You might, you know, if you've watched Hunter Hunter already, or if you've watched ahead of the podcast, but don't remember episode by episode, 126 is wildly important.

But it is 127 that largely deals with the consequences of that, which we'll get to in the following episodes.

So we're going to have a,

who knows which one of those two is going to end up being the one where we talk the most about it,

but those are both big episodes: 126, 127.

The dog is coming.

The dog is coming.

From 126 to the end of the Chimera Antarctic, it is wild.

It's non-stop.

Non-stop.

It is like,

I really cannot emphasize enough how

to get in touch, by the way, with both Austin and Allie.

Allie, I think, is going to be on the episode after next, and then Austin's going to be on the episode after that.

Oh, okay.

How many more episodes of the Chimera?

No, don't tell me, don't tell me, don't tell me.

Okay.

Well, you know how many episodes of the whole series there are?

I do, yes.

Roughly.

There's like, I believe there's something somewhere in the region of 145.

Yeah, that's basically there's 14.

four because there we're not we didn't watch two recap episodes so there's 146 total how much happens in 20 episodes?

I was about to say, how much happens in 20 episodes.

Chimera Adark is not a good barometer for that.

By the way, we have less than 10 episodes of the season.

This show.

Of this show.

Wow.

We have like

seven episodes, seven or eight episodes left.

And then we're going to watch one piece.

Go fuck yourself.

Bye.

Oh, wait, no, we have something to do.

I have reviews I got to read.

Yeah, we got something to do.

If you want to have your review read on on the show, it's got to be one, five stars.

Two, it's got to at least, you know,

not always has to be funny, but it has to give us something to talk about.

Yeah.

I've got a couple here today.

The first one is from Hercules the Cat, five stars titled, Meeto Taking Jing to Court Does Not Absolve Him.

Rock and Pod, Love the Analysis, and Your Collective Love for Tragedies and Misfits.

And this is the...

This part I'm, I don't necessarily agree with, but I do think it's a fun, a fun take.

Jing can effectively see the future, given that he laid all these traps for his kid a decade in advance.

He obviously wanted his cousin to raise his kid.

It's the only reason he would have shown up at Whale Island.

He did then spend a couple more years finishing a training ground every authority POV believes was specifically targeted at helping his kid.

But maybe that's the cost of how he does business.

And that's the end of the review.

I don't think you can see the future.

However, I will agree that, yeah, he did plan a lot of that stuff.

He did, yes.

We will talk more about Jing

when it's relevant but but i i would love to revisit some of the ideas there um we haven't i agree seen jing's nen ability have we no nope

we have uh we have a uh a sort of guess that he's really into infusing things with nen seeing as how he did a lot of that uh with the the game and well everything in the game and the game itself and the the cassette recorder all that stuff that sort of feels like some jing sort of

you don't know what Jing's Nen ability is.

Yeah, we don't know.

Yeah, we don't know.

That's so funny that he is this, he's this like guiding light for gone freaks, and this the show is obsessed with nen, and we just have no idea what his nen ability is.

Yeah, Jing's uh ability is that he is writing hunter-hunter.

Uh,

yeah,

yeah, I think listen, we

go ahead.

Oh, Tagashi is Jing, um, that's what Greed Island's about, yeah, Duon and Hisuka, right?

The triad of weird

impulses on a set of characters.

I'd agree more with the first two than the Hisuka, personally.

However, I don't think you're necessarily wrong.

I just think...

We, the audience, are the Hisuka.

Everybody fight.

Don't call me that.

Don't call it.

Don't say that about me.

That's your theory.

That was actually, that was Austin's theory.

Oh, Austin's theory.

I have just used it to talk about other things.

I think I'm saying that it's wrong.

I'm just saying that I want to give Austin credit for it.

I have one more review.

I have one more review for us from Garrulous Monolith.

Behold my net ability.

I alone will post when it reaches five stars.

Auspicious podcast review, APR.

October birthday, belatedly reporting in.

This show is an indispensable companion to the joyous experience of watching Hunter Hunter and assuredly whatever media property they choose to tackle afterwards.

The hosts are consistently thoughtful, engaging, and very funny.

Thank you.

I've never come away from an episode feeling like they haven't given their full consideration to the range of details and production touches that I think make Hunter Hunter such a delight to watch as an anime.

Very sweet review.

Yeah.

Now, what month are we on for birthdays?

December.

December.

Oh, my God.

It's the end.

Oh, my God.

Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way.

Jingle bells, jing.

Oh, my God.

That's his ability, is making it Christmas.

He's Santa Claus.

His net ability is being able to stop time to deliver presents to all the good girls and boys of the world.

I went looking for my sleigh bells.

I don't have them in my office right now.

Sorry.

You can use the nails.

You could use the string of nails.

What string of nails?

You have your sleigh bells.

Did you have a string of nails for the realised theme?

The big whiff cracked.

No, that's a those.

Oh, shit.

I do have those bells.

The bells that make the worst sound in the world.

Are they not nails?

I thought I remember you said you bells.

They're just a bunch of nails at the hardware.

They're hardware, and they're designed to be

ornamental bells, not sound bells.

They make the worst sound on the planet, unprocessed.

Keith, you have to promise that you are going to, like, I don't know, put an EQ on these that's pleasant.

Sure.

Can I get, can I do two?

Can I do a wet and a dry?

Yeah, just so long as there'll be a lot of high stuff, and I don't want to um hurt people's ears okay high

ready yep

yeah that wasn't very nice you know what that sounds like that sounds like the noise that like the bell trap makes when the zombies break into the face for the first time

they also got them from the uh ace hardware yeah yeah probably

um yeah i remember that you got them from ace hardware and i remember you calling them bells but i thought that you were being that you were just saying that you used them as bells, and that they were just bits of mats.

I was just rattling bone bells in my project file.

Oh, rattle me bones.

Rattle me bones.

Rattle me bones.

I walk on two legs in sunrise.

Two legs in sunrise.

Okay.

Four legs in sunset, and I sleep not a wink upon the ocean.

What am I?

Rattle me bones.

Rattle me bones.

Rattle me bones.

Okay, bye.

One of you fuckers pick a name.

What?

Oh, I thought you said your name already.

No.

Okay.

What?

Carol?

Carol.

Oh, Carol's good.

Yeah.

I thought you were making a Christmas joke.

Carol, because it's Christmas.

Yeah, I got it.

I'm sorry, Carol.

You probably get that a lot.

That sucks.

We shouldn't have done that.

Well, too bad.

We already did.

Bye.

Bye.

You want to clap?

Nah.

That was a good one.

That was really fun.

That was a great episode.

I loved our

diversions.