Media Couscous - Hunter x Hunter ep. 119-121: Media Club Plus S01E38

And button.

Yeah.

Whoa!

One, two, three, four.

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

As always, we're 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 find me online at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

You can watch Friends of the Table do stuff on Twitch, and then those get put up on YouTube.

A lot of good stuff there recently.

And check out friendsofthetable.cash for our new Patreon season Realis, which

is also, I think we're having some of those episodes up for free on the main feed.

If you go subscribe in your podcast feed to Friends of the Table, you can check it out.

And

soon should be starting our new main feed season,

Perpetua.

A lot of exciting stuff happening on Friends of the Table.

With me, as always, is Jack the Keith.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

You can find all of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

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

And Rulie Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Blue Sky, SwanDre3000.bsky.social.

Do you like my NPR spin that I put on the intro?

It was throwing me off.

It was

so far the reviews are Bafflement and hostility.

How about you, Dre, the tiebreaker?

I don't know.

I just got bullied by all three of you all before we recorded.

Hey.

Hey.

You asked me.

I don't even know.

That is true.

Yeah.

Do you think you'd be good at NPR, Keith?

Good at it.

You have a prankster spirit, which I don't know thrives that.

Yeah, I've basically never listened to anything on there.

It seems like bullshit to me.

Um, but I'm great on a microphone.

Don't don't let the lack of anyone ever inviting me onto a podcast that isn't one of my own fool you.

I am good at this.

In any case, before we begin, I have a segment.

Yahoo!

If you go over to Discord, I'm going to turn my camera on.

Oh,

it's a very exciting segment.

That pay notes a real segment.

Yeah.

Hello.

Oh, let's go.

Now we're three for four.

Here in my hand, I have an unopened Hunter-Hunter Union Arena pack.

Not sponsored.

No.

I went to the shop and

I said, what's the card game that has Hunter-Hunter packs?

And she paused and she said, oh, Union Arena.

Yeah.

Very exciting.

Hell yeah.

It's harder packs to open than managers.

They're annoying, right?

Yeah, I don't know what's going on here.

Okay.

Okay.

Sounds like

thick.

Like thick plastic

oh great

yeah kiliwa with greed island kiliwa kiliwazaldic

everyone's favorite

it's basho

i think i have that exact basho card he's in the he's in the mansion

oh it's miluki looking looking sinister you're on the way to having a full zeldic set though i am on the way to having a full zeldic set

Who is this?

Who is that?

It's a Nen move.

It's called Scarily Fast Chop.

Oh, that's what Cromo does to what's going on.

Yeah.

Okay, Scarily Fast Chop.

Hanzo Emerald.

It looks like he's about to do a scarily fast chop.

Yeah.

Hanzo.

Or he's about to do a very quiet clap.

Oh, what the fuck is this?

That's the Green Island

Island card.

Yeah.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

That's a great one to have.

That is a great one.

Big ski, let's go.

Big ski

big ski.social.

During your turn, this character gains 1,000 BP.

Is that

probably?

That sounds good.

Thousands is a big number.

Underworld resident.

This is Silva talking to a Mafiosa.

I think

him fighting Crolo.

The flashback that they have during that fight.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yes, yes, yes, yes, is the Ben's knife pictured.

Oh, I hope.

No, no,

no visible Ben's knife.

Oh, it's Wing.

No, it's Mr.

Wing.

Remember, Wing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I look back fondly.

The bummers crew.

Yeah, it's the horrible boys.

This card is called release, as they, I guess, free you from

what they're doing.

They free you from life.

Yeah, I think that's their detonation word.

Yeah, release is the detonation word.

And then finally, we have a foil.

Oh, let's go.

That's a very good kilo of

Godspeed kiloa?

I don't think so.

I think his hair is just swoopy.

Yeah, I'm just jealous.

Oh, it is.

There's electricity and shit happening all around him.

Let's go.

That's very appropriate for today.

Yeah, I know.

We start with that.

Foil, kill you a Zelda.

All right.

That's the end of my segment.

Beautiful segment.

Yeah.

Thank you.

For those listening, Jack did take,

I'm going to say four seconds to just stare at the shiny card.

It's a nice card.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

We got more episodes.

Hey, Shocker, we're still in the palace, still fighting, still resolving.

Are you kidding me?

Are we resolving?

Do we feel like we're resolving yet?

I would say some things get resolved and then immediately new new things begin unresolved.

Yeah.

I will say that

this is the first time I felt in a while that the foot has come off the gas pedal a little.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a couple byproduct.

Go ahead.

There's a couple like things that happen that are big.

But yeah, we're finally like keeping pace instead of.

Like we're crew.

This is crucial.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it is kind of just a byproduct of last last time having so much like in our viewing.

Yes, arguably the most important episode in the series is 116.

Wow.

Last time we left off with Killua beginning to unveil Godspeed, or at least what Godspeed is like in combat,

we pick back up on that.

And his hair gets even spikier than a Super Saiyan's hair.

It's like sharp.

It's like Super Saiyan, but maybe it's sharp.

He's bouncing all over the place, smacking Yupi around with what Yubi describes as one-tenth of his own strength, which is actually really good.

Yeah, that's a lot.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

We spent a lot of time panicking with Okago underneath the palace trying to chess game his way around Bloster, who has escaped the elevator in a very funny way.

And then the next two episodes are mostly concerned with Yubi after Poof escapes from Smokey Jail, which is deactivated by Moral,

when he discovers that the cocoon was empty, mostly empty anyway, he sends out his chibi clones to take stock of everything that's happening in the mansion.

It's sort of like a fun little built-in narrative recap of what's going on.

And while he gets tied up with Gon and Pito in the guard in the guest tower, everyone else is dealing with Yupi trying to bide time for APR to go off.

After fighting to total exhaustion, Moral tries to give his life to put Yupi into IRS, but something extremely surprising happens, even if that surprising thing happens in every shounen that's ever existed.

I'm excited to talk about this, especially given the way that you sort of lead into that as like a shounen expression of what happens.

There was stuff in these episodes that I liked, but I do think in general, I was not as hot on these as I have been in the past.

Now, part of in previous episodes, part of this is that the previous episodes are just so fantastic.

But, you know,

even turning down the gas just a little feels quite dramatic to me.

I also thought that,

what did Keith call it in his notes?

The blunder episodes?

The middle blunders.

The middle blunders are so electrifying to watch.

It's so electrifying to see, you know, the.

Oh, I want to clarify.

These episodes are part of the middle blunders because I count everything up until Knuckle deactivating

APR as a blunder.

Okay, that's fair.

But I understand you're what, like, it's a different kind of world.

Yes.

Yeah.

And I think that the pace suffers a little bit there.

We'll probably kind of like dig into the moments that that really starts

sort of expressing itself for me.

But I think there's good stuff in these episodes.

The first is the reveal of Godspeed, which, as far as we can tell, is a pretty low-concept manpower as they go.

Yeah,

it takes a huge brain to come up with using electricity to reroute your brain's reflexes as a secondary part of the main power of like go super faster.

But yeah, it is different than

what a chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Is that what Knuckles is called?

Like, it's like a different level of

complexity.

Yeah, Godspeed has two functions that are expressed on screen in this beautiful Ukeo-e, sort of like woodcut drawing of these two yokai kind of like acting out the powers.

I love it so much when Hunter Hunter shifts up its art style.

I feel like the one we see most commonly is when it starts rendering characters in watercolor.

That happens a lot.

But we also saw this sort of like awful

and chibi.

We also saw like a lot of um, that, like, Francis Bacon type thing going on with melody and the devil's song.

Um, but here we get like a woodcut, and it looks so cool.

Uh, the first power is called Speed of Lightning.

Does it have a cooler name in someone else's translation?

Mine's just speed of lightning, yeah.

Yeah, I think mine both are the same.

Um, speed of lightning, uh, just lets him move unbelievably quickly, right?

Yeah, that's kind of

what it says on the tip.

It stuns UP.

Like, Yupi cannot react to this speed.

That's how fast it is.

The second, as Keith intimated, is much cooler.

This one is called Whirlwind,

and it allows Killiwa to act without thinking, a pre-programmed response to malevolent intent.

This is of a piece with like Assassin's Zelda Assassin training.

I love it that whenever the show sort of hints that Even though Killiwa might have escaped the immediate clutches of his abusive family and the needle inside his head, There is a kind of thinking about

the practice of violence or the practice of killing that is still deeply ingrained in there as a Zelda assassin, and that he develops one of his core powers being like, respond automatically to your opponent in a pre-programmed fashion without thinking.

It's really great.

I really love Yupi's response here, and it's a great foreshadowing for what happens later when he says,

this aura stuff is really intense.

This is getting interesting.

Before my explosion, I would have never enjoyed an uphill battle.

And then the narrator chimes in helpfully: this change in attitude would lead Yupi to a surprising choice.

However, this would not happen until later when he does that.

Over the course of these episodes, Yupi experiences one of the most productive Chimera ant meltdowns that we've seen so far.

Yeah, a melt-up, maybe.

It might be a melt-up if you're going to go on a little journey.

Yeah.

Destruction and creation.

And then Kilua's power very suddenly runs out.

This is great.

This is a nice little moment of echoing the electricity thing.

Once he's got no more juice in the tank, that's it.

He also has to scamper back up the hill.

It's very funny.

Yeah, he runs off.

And it's as

Yup arrives at the top of the hill, you know, they're fighting this massive crater we talked about last time, And he notices that Kilua has gone, that he finally puts together what is happening.

He's like,

oh, they have an invisibility guy.

This is one of those pieces of knowledge that is both correct, but it's not terribly helpful to him right now, right?

Yeah.

Well, so this is kind of confusing to me.

I think that there's two different translations happening here.

In one of them, I can't even remember which one was doing it and which one

was the other way.

one of the translations that I was looking at has Yupi under

contemplating invisibility the whole time and another one has him being like do they have someone that can teleport yes which I also remember both true but it's it's really the invisibility that is bugging him

bugging him because he's an ant

the two things that chimera ants uh think about all the time are is someone teleporting and does someone have a bomb this is is just like over and over the the same chimera ant kind of thinking

deep anxiety to being an ant like do maybe besides hina is there an ant that like doesn't have a gnawing anxiety all the time she too she too sure yeah she too

used it a little bit more honestly that might have given them

you peep you know

prior to this the the assault on the palace really starts giving the core ants anxiety

I think that's reasonable.

Yeah, speaking of an ant who, prior to this point, was not currently experiencing anxiety, and at least as this scene begins, is not really experiencing anxiety.

Bloster is still stuck in the elevator.

And so begins.

I love this episode.

An extended

sort of

puzzle farce with the feel of like a sliding tile puzzle as Ikalgo and Bloster try and outmaneuver each other downstairs.

It feels like a sliding tile puzzle because there are literally sliding tiles in it.

Yes.

These just slide vertically instead of horizontally.

By the way, Jack, before you say this, I just have to say, Bloster is so funny to look at, do anything.

Anytime Bloster is doing anything, it's just funny by default.

I love Bloster.

His stupid little face looking at stuff is all I need to be like

laughing at.

His little yellow eyes that are like weirdly expressive for how simple they are.

I love how expressive they are.

When he's like really happy about something and they sort of like crinkle up a little bit.

It's good.

It's great.

I don't know much about Tagashi's process.

So it's hard to tell.

Do you think that he knew what he needed this character to do?

So drew Bluster from the off to be like expressive and silly.

Like part of the root of the comedy in these scenes is the way Bluster looks.

You know, he's great.

Or do you think that he just sort of ended up with an ant on the table in front of him and was like, Bluster, it is.

Send him in.

I don't know.

I don't know.

There's no reason this needs to be Bluster.

So for example, Welfin needs to be Welfin because his nen powers and like

character underpinnings have him as this sort of like stalking tracker.

Bluster is just a lobster who's gotten stuck in a lift.

Well, he does having guns is important

for Bloster.

Very, very important.

This scene begins with a little PowerPoint of Blaster being stuck in the elevator.

There's this lovely little overhead map of the facility that looks like

a top-down game.

You can see little icons representing Ikalgo and Bloster as they go around.

There's lots of business about the location of a monitor room, because if Ikalgo can make it there, he can open and close these blast doors to like maneuver Ikalgo through the facility, which is what he spends the next 15 minutes doing.

I wrote that during this episode, Ikalgo is playing Hitman, but he's playing it like Jerma.

He's just sort of keep fucking up his plan constantly and then being like, oh no!

Yeah, my note was that Ikago in this scene is me like playing a deck building game where I'm like, all right, yeah, I've got him cornered.

Oh, fuck.

I forgot about this rule.

Oh, man.

It's great.

His plan right now is pretty straightforward.

He sort of talks through some options, but then he's like, I just have to wait for Bluster to enter the code in wrong enough or for the timer to go down.

Then he will get drugged by the sleeping gas from the elevator, and then I will kill him and take his body.

There's a wrinkle to this that arrives like a hammer blow.

Ikago has never actually killed anyone before.

Uh-huh.

And there's another, there's another wrinkle that arrives like a gunshot,

which is Bluster simply shoots his way out of the elevator.

It's funny because

this was something that I thought maybe

would get clocked when we were talking about this last time, Jack.

Where it, you know, it's like, why doesn't he just shoot down the door?

And then immediately he does.

He does shoot down the door.

And I love Ikago being like, I was naive.

I didn't think he'd shoot down the door.

It's really fun.

It's one thing.

It is his one school.

This is a door

designed to trap humans, nenless humans.

Yeah, definitely not.

Chimera ants.

The sort of setup down here in the basement is so simple that it allows for this great kind of like

outmaneuvering play to be happening.

Ikago never having killed anyone before is such a good twist.

It is so abrupt that it comes across, frankly, like a contrivance.

But I really love the sort of like cold dawning in this moment of like, not only is he going to have to kill and that's going to become a plot line, but like, did we never think to

check?

I like

had trouble believing it because

he was a sniper.

We saw his flea diet.

Like, we heard his songs about his fleas

that make people bleed a ton.

Here's my question, though.

Because when Ikago, or I'm kind of jumping ahead a little bit here, but when Ikalgo, we see Ikago's gun.

He loads like a flesh bullet into it.

It's not a flea.

So were the fleas just the nin power of the dude's body he was in?

I would assume.

It's hard to say, yeah.

Because if he could make a bullet out of his flesh,

He could make a flea bullet out of his flesh, right?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't think we ever get an answer to that.

It's also the gun he has is radically different from like the sniper gun.

He doesn't have the big exact.

It doesn't have the right, which was Ikago's head.

Oh, that's right.

I forgot about that.

Yeah.

There's some like top-level stuff happening here that I think is really charming.

We have

this I've Never Killed Before has a really good resonance with his sort of like ongoing love story with Killua, the child assassin who has killed a ton.

And it also makes the fact that we've never had the I've Never Killed Before

stuff for a very long time with Goan.

That just Goan has never worried about that, has he?

I'm trying to remember.

Has Goan ever had a now's the time to kill?

Yeah, remember his fight with the Armadillo ant.

He was like, I don't want to kill anybody.

But then how does that scene end, Keith?

Right.

He crushes the Armadillo because the Armadillo is mean.

Yeah.

And not only does he crush the Armadillo, he like, it's like violently done, right?

He like turns him to goof.

Yeah.

But up to that point, he was a character who had declined to kill people before, like the bombers.

Yes, that is true.

Whereas Ikalko is a chimera ant sniper,

lover/slash best friend of assassin killer was all dik, who in this very moment is revealing,

I can't do it.

Yeah.

And I think it's complicated not just that

he's never killed killed before, but that this is a particularly heinous avenue for killing.

Like, Bloster is an unconscious former ally that is like,

it might not have come up if they were in a fight to the death.

It's a really good setup.

The like, you're actually going to have to kill him while he's unconscious.

Yeah.

Really nicely done.

Ikalgo lowers blast doors to trap Bloster down here.

Another game about restricting people's movement, keeping people trapped in a weird area or situation

with a congo.

The Congo literally at like a console pressing buttons.

Yeah, yeah.

Over and over again.

Even as the Googie board has been taken off the table,

we're still literally, we're still finding other games.

Is a congo just playing night trap right now?

Is that what's happening or like

five nights at Freddy's?

Yeah.

Yeah, I guess that's the more modern reference channel.

Yeah, but it's the inferior game.

It is the inferior game.

At this moment, this is the next thing that happens here really charmed me, which is that suddenly the elevator starts releasing sleeping gas.

Because of course it does.

You know, it's on a timer.

The fact that he's blown the doors off the hinges with his awful lobster guns doesn't mean that it's not going to start sending sleeping gas.

That's true, but we also, just to cover all our bases we do get a shot of a kalgo in like the monitor room sliding a switch to on like full blast yeah there is like a and don't shut the sleeping gas off button that he presses i thought that the the slider that he was doing was a uh like a bulkhead slider that those sliders exist and and come slightly later oh i see okay look at the ikalgo working with sliders uh the natural uh tool for a squid to use yeah Buttons?

No.

Imagine.

Oh, no.

Oh,

Bluster launches his way out through the sort of like descending bulkhead doors using his guns.

And he now knows that there is someone in the

monitor room.

Vernik Hanger commandeers a tank and uses it to block the elevator off because he's worried that Bloster is going to climb up through the top of the elevator.

Yeah.

He doesn't have to reveal this.

He says that there's a way for Bloster to escape, but doesn't say what that way is,

which means that we get a chance for Bloster to come in with another PowerPoint

to think up exactly what Ikago could be doing back there.

It's just very funny that this is such like a

it's become such a part of the show that at any moment you can count on a character to start thinking in diagrams yes

um and like little papercraft versions of characters

you know we can go through the beat by beat of this but it's not tremendously interesting they maneuver around each other he can't go in a tank it's just lovely that's that's great to see he sets fire to his own tank and escapes under the cover of smoke to kind of like bait um uh bloster into thinking that there are two people down here

Something I wrote about that that was just nice was like,

at least in the English dub, Ikago is talking about, yeah, I can use my octopus body.

And I was like, oh,

Icalgo's okay with being an octopus.

Oh,

oh, look at that.

Yeah,

he talks about how he only needs a little bit of space to squeeze through, which comes back

a couple times in this episode.

Sliding around.

He's also

breathing through a tube to avoid breathing the same gas in.

Moral style.

I wrote down this is moral style.

The

like student extermination team people, the student hunters,

like consciously or not, starting to take on the mannerisms of their seniors is really great.

I like that a lot.

And then he melts down completely on trying to kill

Bluster.

Eventually sort of like sobbing, weeping, screaming, bugging, crying.

Yeah,

literally exaggerating.

Yes.

He's literally buging and crying.

He might have been shitting, we didn't see, but like, I believe he was shitting.

Oh, okay, but he would if he did, but they could.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're the only animal that doesn't.

Um

is that

truth?

Okay.

Okay.

He's sobbing, and he says, he says ultimately, you know, I can't do it because I'm a coward.

We're just sort of working through the beats of Ikalgo's

arc here.

You know, this is happening fairly straightforwardly, I think.

But it being played out as this sort of exciting little

exciting child puzzle is enjoyable.

Meanwhile, a good decompression episode, in a way, is kind of how I felt about this one.

Where it was just like, okay, we get a little break from the super high-tension stuff to like some slightly lower tension stuff.

Yeah, Ikalgo's panicking, but he's kind of funny, so it's kind of funny to watch him panicking.

And Bloster is hilarious, just doing anything.

Yeah, he's also like,

I don't know.

The first time I watched this, I never thought that Bloster was gonna get Icalgo.

I don't know, Jack, if you felt like he would at any point, yeah, remotely.

And Ikalgo is such a joy to watch animated, too.

He is like, they Tagashi and the adaptation team both like really take advantage of his design to make him super expressive and like do fun, cute little flourishes with the way he moves around.

Yeah, good squash and stretch.

You know, both

both voice actors are doing a great job like making him seem like a weirdo

because they

know that they can kind of make this stealth mission business extremely evocative and extremely tense both through nove's kind of like electric um

entrance to the palace that first time around, where that scene just was terrifying.

And then pretty consistently with Melieron's Melierone's breath ability, the way they play those sort of like these little mini stealth puzzles

is really great every time.

So it's interesting to me that they are

not making this as intense and frightening as it could be.

I don't know.

It feels like it's more about Ikalgo's realization that he can't kill this guy than about some sort of...

The tension in the scene isn't, will Bluster kill Ikalgo?

It's

does Ikalgo have the stuff to kill Bluster?

It's more, yeah, it's more about his confidence, both his confidence to like execute a plan to prove that he's a worthy friend, and also, like, in a practical way, and then in an emotional way, of like, can I actually finish the job and pull the trigger and do the thing?

And I think that this kind of reduction of stakes is part of what contributes to these episodes feeling a little, I don't know, flabbier to me.

I don't know, we'll see because we're about to to move into some more scenes that have very high stakes.

That also, the pacing felt a little off.

Meanwhile, in Morel's fight,

he isn't sure whether or not he should attack the cocoon.

Because he's like, this has got to be a trap, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He like overthinks to

some truly impressive degrees here.

Overthinks in circles, I guess.

Or does he think exactly the right way about it?

Well, the narrator will tell you.

Yeah, the narrator will tell you.

And Poof will tell you something different, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a great, I love, there's a couple instances in these episodes of a character saying something and then the narrator coming in and being like, that character only thinks that because they're a character and they don't know all the stuff.

I know all the stuff.

Me, the narrator.

I know all the stuff.

So I'm here to tell you the truth.

Yeah, lots of, um, um, lots of thinking, lots of talking through in these episodes.

Um, and we sort of end 119 on his like

anxious uh pause.

Um, this is uh nice because, and I talked about this in the last episode as well, uh, we have this mirror of the fight with Chitu, right?

Where uh Chietu is anxious and is like bebopping around stupidly, and Morel is, you know, sitting and relaxing and waiting.

And here we have the cocoon and Morel being caught in this moment of like, do I act?

What do I do?

I love that he had two

fights where we watched him use patience to let the fight win itself.

And in this one, it is that instinct that is working against him.

Yeah, there's another line that echoes the fight with Leol here where

he can't tell whether or not he knows there's a trap.

somewhere here, but he can't tell whether the trap has been activated yet.

And this is a big thing out of the fight with Leol, right?

Where as Leol is dying, Morel says, there was nothing you could do.

Basically, you know, I'd won the fight even when you thought we weren't getting started yet.

Is the trap that I'm here, or is the trap like waiting for me to attack this?

Like, what is, what's the danger?

Do I change my plan or not?

And in the next episode, he makes a decision.

He does change his plan.

He breaks the cocoon, sees that there's nothing in the cocoon, realizes I'm an idiot.

He escaped while I was here making a decision on what to do.

Removes Smokey Jail, sees Poof standing outside of Smokey Jail.

And then Poof is like, very poof.

This is a very, I love this because it's a very poof thing to do.

He says, I thought it would take you 15 minutes of deciding.

And it actually, I don't know, let's

best guess, maybe it's been four minutes instead of 15 minutes.

And so Moral takes this as a compliment but poof was actually saying no it would have been better for you to wait longer and doesn't explain it yet it kind of doesn't make any sense moral even calls it a contradiction it comes up later and it gets fully explained is there anything uh interesting before we cut to bzeph here that i'm missing about this scene do we want to go over poof's whole deal now

There's some stuff.

Let's see.

This is loose to me.

This feels loose to me.

It feels like we've sort of we were like right down at the quick of this situation in the last three episodes and here we've got a lot of like bandy around

you know talking things over um as 120 begins i suppose it's worth saying that knuckle finds that shoot has disappeared and there is a huge trail of blood

um

Booth flies up into the sky and explodes into, quote, super fine particles.

I do have one thing about shoot disappearing, which is like, how did you lose him?

It's like if Hobbes walked out on Caliph.

It was fully stationary.

Oh,

shoot.

These like burning balls of light start to appear around the little tiny particles that Poof has turned into.

And then, to my wild delight, horrible giggling starts all over.

And then, like 500 awful, weird, giggling, chibi babies dressed like poof appear and all start thanking Morel.

They can't nasty fucking puffs.

They are crazy.

They're like little psychos.

They're supposed to be like

super calm and rational all the time.

The difference is that poof is like extremely intense and kind of scary.

The chibi

poof clones are like the joker.

They're very.

Yeah, they all have like yonder a face and stuff like that.

It's intense.

They're all very, they're very spooky.

They um

they remind me a lot actually of Sailor Moon villains.

Um, there is a, there are, there's a villains in Sailor Moon Super S in the movie that is a sort of these weird.

I think it stands for, I don't actually know what it stands for.

Saturn?

No, it doesn't stand for Sailor or Saturn.

These are called Bon Bon babies, and they're these awful little floating babies

that are very much like little poof clones here.

Wow.

And they all thank Morel.

They're all saying, Ericato, as they're bobbing around in the sky.

Morel is unfaced because he's a professional, and he immediately summons Deep Purple.

Deep Purple immediately starts attacking all these little segments, but they're pretty evenly matched because the little evil segments can't do much to Deep Purple because Deep Purple clones aren't like real in the same way.

But similarly, Deep Purple can't do a lot to the horrid little bomb bomb babies.

Same reason.

Yeah.

And they can reform once they've been attacked.

Like,

the attacked don't do anything because they just make more clones.

Or they reform.

I guess it's not entirely clear.

While he is distracted, poof, true poof, real poof, or proof, troubl.

Yeah, true.

Uh, snatches the pipe from Morel's hands, flies away, and drops it in a river.

Yeah, no one's tried this before.

No one's tried that before.

Moral gets so punked out this episode.

That's really how it feels.

It is just like, oh, yeah, you let him out of the cocoon, but he wanted you to do that, and you got rid of Smokey Jail, which he wanted you to do.

And then he hit you in the back real hard and tuck your pipe, right?

Which means you can't use deep purple

and dropped in the river.

The idea is that Moral needs to figure out what Poof's objectives are so that he can go find Poof and stop him.

But Poof knows that that's what Moral's going to do, so he just hangs back, lets Moral go off, and then as soon as he starts running away, he just grabs this thing from behind.

It's very, it is a very tricked moment.

He gets extremely tricked.

It's at this moment, as Poof flies away carrying the pipe, that Yupie shows up.

And alongside Yupie is also the first thing Yupie says when he arrives is, are you the one that can teleport?

He's still stuck on this.

Knuckle also shows up.

Knuckle is mad that he has lost.

Shoot.

This is a big concern to him.

And as the fight sort of now begins in earnest between Morel,

Knuckle, and Yupie, you know, Poof has now left.

Morel's opening salvo is to transform his remaining deep purple clones, of which he has, I think, about 80, but he can't make any more.

He turns them all into Knuckle.

Which is too many knuckles.

It's a great image, though.

I think that the deep purple, any of the smoke stuff actually looks really good, but it is really good to see, like, you know, a bunch of knuckles attacking.

Yupie in this moment.

Now, Hina decides to make her escape.

Hina, in case you've forgotten, because she doesn't appear very briefly, is the ant who we described regularly as Leol's girlfriend.

Right.

She's a human woman.

Yeah, basically.

She's human woman.

She has a small amount of fur and

a weird hat and otherwise.

It's a hat that emotes when she does.

Yes.

Oh, that's what it is.

Yeah.

She is a 9X.

Oh, yeah.

That hat's her, the real Hina.

Oh,

yeah, yeah.

Wow.

That's great.

That's some real

Pokemon isn't the sword thing.

But the human body is the one that gets pregnant with Nen.

Yeah, that just means the Nen's there.

Like, I mean,

it's still attached to it.

I'm just saying, are you saying that the Nin is stored in the tummy?

I guess I am.

I guess I am.

Let me escape.

Here's a list of how what were what silly poses can we get this character to do before she disappears?

Yeah, they're all pretty good.

I find her plan here to be really charming.

It's, I can't contact any of the others, so I'm going to fall back on a classic ant maneuver, leave and become a queen of my own.

Right.

She's just Shidori, who she promises to make her second in command.

Yeah.

We've been using that name, but I don't know that we've ever been given it in the show.

We have been given it.

She says it once.

Yeah, when she says it in the introduction.

She's like, Shidori, I'm so glad you couldn't do it.

Yeah,

she's I wish you could talk because it's annoying that you can't.

Yes,

um,

on her way out, she runs into BZF, who is trapped under rubble.

He is dying, and Hina brightly says, You don't look so good.

When he tries to like get her to free him, she just says, This looks dangerous.

Let's just go and turns around.

Yeah.

He makes

her life.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Her exact line is: My boss is missing.

I have no direct line to the king, and the palace is destroyed.

Yeah, he tries to make a plea for his life.

She's like, Why would I help you?

This looks dangerous.

I'm out of here.

Best possible reason to ever help someone, Keith.

Treasure.

Huge amounts of treasure.

And then she easily, zero effort, picks up a gigantic amount of rubble off of his body and frees him instantly, costing her nothing, not even time.

Actually, it's way less time than telling him, I don't have time to save you.

Took.

Yes.

And she gets to start in about a second.

She leaves singing about finding the treasure.

And as she's leaving, Bzaf, who is just such a shithead, gives this great line as he leaves.

He says, this country is absolutely done for.

And then he looks around him and he says, an air raid without my consultation is all the proof I need.

He's referring to the Zeldex to

the dragon dive, but you know, this was not.

I can't quite tell what's going on here.

Is there some reference to like

he would have considered using an airstrike on his own people?

Yeah, I'm not sure.

Maybe

he assumes that if someone was going to try to take down Diego, they would have tried to get him on

their side first,

or something like they did with the general.

Yeah, I think, I do think that that's probably what's going on here.

Um, I think that the more important line there is the this country's done for.

You know, he's essentially writing off the whole project.

Uh, he's extracted as much value from it as he can.

That's it.

Uh,

I wrote, this is, this is what I wrote about this.

Uh,

the rubble scene: Bees of is trapped and is saved by Hina and Shidori after some comedy stuff.

And that is is that is all that i wrote about that it really is what happens

uh most importantly it puts them on the path to the basement it does yeah yeah it does

do you believe that there's treasure down there

yeah

yeah probably I mean, countries have treasure, and he's a shithead.

He's already keeping other stuff in the basement.

The thing is, I feel like that's how he would just talk about the women he keeps down there.

Yeah, but it doesn't seem like that's what he's talking about.

Yeah,

bricks of gold.

I assume he has like a stash that is like his bug out bag amount of money for when he needs to leave this country.

Or like bug in bags.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because the bugs are in the castle.

This is where Poof again uses Beelzebub, Lord of Flies, to split himself and take stock of who is in the palace.

What's that?

Good name for that ability.

Yeah, yeah, Beelzebub.

Hard little creeps.

Yeah, they are.

I think that it's the narrator that says this: the smaller they are, the greater in number they can be.

However, no matter the size of his clones, the core command center, which is a funny way to talk about the main body, the core command center must remain at least the size of a bee.

And then, uh,

uh, Poof chimes in, oh, Smokeman, if you hadn't removed the barrier, my main body would never have been able to escape, and my combat capacity would have been reduced by half.

But now I'm free.

I'm invincible.

You've already lost.

The plan I executed earlier was an act of pure desperation born out of necessity.

Had you comprehended the truth, had you realized my main body remained inside the barrier, you would have understood my ability and would have searched for me.

And in that case, I would have had no way to fight you.

Yeah, this is the extent of the plan that we have have here, right?

Yeah.

It's like he was actually always inside Smokey Jail still.

He just sort of had to make Morel think that he wasn't.

This is kind of weak.

I don't know.

It's fine.

Yeah.

My favorite moment here.

Oh, actually, sorry, I just want to jump right back to BZF because there's a note here that I forgot.

He suspects that people outside the NGL are calling ants biological weapons to, quote, justify the assault.

And if they capture him, they will, quote force him to confess and use it as cover while they throw me in prison for my life i don't think any of this is particularly new stuff but it is bizaf who has demonstrated in the past that he was really the only person like plugged into the geopolitics here um being like uh uh they'll force him to confess and use me as cover i'll be their convenient scapegoat i haven't actually done anything wrong you know um

i think that's good stuff from this person who even in this very last sort of moment of of escape, is like desperately trying to hold on to.

Uh, I was in the right, it's the ants who are really the

issue here.

Um, the really interesting thing to me about Poof's narration there, and I think it's a fun plan because it it hits Moral exactly where we've seen him at his best, which is like coming up with interesting plans.

And he gets sort of kind of double outsmarted by Poof.

And the reveal at what the plan, what Poof's plan was,

does make him seem right that if Moral had stuck to his resolve, it would have worked out for the better.

But the narrator chimes in and goes, no, no, no.

Actually,

fool poof.

Moral destroyed the barrier at the precise time to back up Knuckle.

Quote, the timing with which he released Smokey Jail was in hindsight, quite a miraculous feat.

And it was certainly more than a simple product of coincidence.

It would be safe to say that Morrel's vast wealth of experience played a role in saving him.

This is kind of a point that they've been really trying to hit

during this invasion, which is that

their experience is the thing that is keeping them alive, even as they're failing

fairly quickly.

Like they should have been dead within two minutes, but instead, like

it's the, it's their, the, the, their wealth of experience is like

letting them live kind of over and over again in these encounters where they should be dead um

and that's i think important broadly for

um

hunter hunter as a show and then also like

you know there's characters here that don't have a lot of experience yeah i mean it's it's Poof, who is like, we get a montage of him checking in on all like the different chess pieces and and coming to the wrong conclusion about two-thirds of them.

Yeah, I love this.

So, as Poof flies away, well, so Morrel starts counting down as his smoke creatures are destroyed

by

Yupi, who is just wailing on the various fake knuckles.

And then Poof watches as

Gone watches Pito healing Kamaki.

Then he watches Welfin stalking behind Hina and BZF.

These are all like Dre said, these sort of like little reports.

And then he sees an awful sort of like egg sack thing featuring the human that was featuring containing

the human that was, quote, captured a few days ago.

It should hatch soon.

This is Palm is what I'm understanding this to be.

Whether or not, you know, we're clearly meant to wonder whether or not this is Palm.

I do not like the phrase, it should hatch soon.

I don't feel good about what's going on here.

And

doing work on people

and like transforming people has always been awful.

The two big ones that I can think of are obviously Peter and Kite.

And then also, do you remember Zazan's like

transformed thralls?

Yeah.

Yes, I do.

The ones

that the Phantom Troop had to

fight them.

What were the kind words spoken by the interim leader of the the Phantom Troop?

Let me see if I can find them.

I don't do mercy killings.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, be citizens.

Aren't you citizens of immediate?

He has them basically fight him to the death, right?

So they're like

certain death.

You fight to the death, or would you just live as a dog?

A dog person?

Probably just live as a dog person.

I imagine he was like kind of a busted dog person.

Oh, well, I mean, if I'm busted, then yeah, it was like an ugly dog person.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

You're also a resident of Meteor City, right?

So you've spent your whole life being like,

God exists, and he's 13 weirdos that like fight for me.

I'm living as a dog person in a different way already.

I suppose.

Yeah, but I could be the first dog person to be in the Phantom Troop.

I don't know that that's true, Dre.

Yeah, I guess you're right.

Yeah.

Wait, are you saying because you don't think I could make it or because we don't know if there's already been a dog man?

Oh, because we don't know if there's already been a dog man.

Maybe there was a while ago, like some ways back, when it was just all dogman and Krolo.

Crolo's dog fashion troop.

And then all the dogs died.

Probably it was a dog.

Yeah, you're making it sound better.

Oh, yeah.

Gotta get humans now.

All the dogs are dead.

The punchline to Poof's little sort of like CCTV tour is when he looks at APR buzzing around around Yupi as he has been for the previous episodes, and he says,

Not sure what that pointy-headed fat thing is.

Not sure if it's a friend or a foe.

Well,

then he says, It could be Yupi's true power.

Yes, yes.

I love that the Royal Guards, you know, and we saw this before stuff started getting really sinister and when their own sort of like internal pressure started pulling them towards and away from each other.

But the Royal Guards operate a real live and let-live spirit spirit in peacetime, as far as each other are concerned.

Where Poof here really is just sort of like, I guess that's what Yupi does, maybe.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll see.

And because of God's accomplice

and the slightly larger size of the clones now, Meliorone and Kilua are able to evade detection by them.

So Poof doesn't know anything about them.

And because of Calgo's underground, he never found Ikalgo.

So there's three unknowns still for Poof.

Speaking of unknowns, Poof then says, oh my God, wait, the king, where's the king?

I'm forgetting about how I love the king.

God.

He hates this.

I'm trying to see.

Let's see.

He reforms into his regular sort of spirit at this moment and says, this is worrisome.

Does he like, oh no, he doesn't fly off.

He's got some additional business to attend to.

There's a really nice knuckle moment here.

Yupie is trying very hard to find the real knuckle.

And he's waiting for a punch from a real knuckle.

And then he's going to, I think this is a great Yupie move, sort of like launch these spines out of his back.

Not the tryptophobia spines that we saw a few episodes ago.

These are just sort of like...

shards of rebar almost that he is hoping will impale knuckle.

He's waiting for the punch that comes and eventually the punch comes and he turns and slams the spikes out and the smoke thing disappears.

And it's at that moment that he realizes there never was a real knuckle the real knuckle is long gone this to me is just a pretty straightforward like play on a shonen thing right of like the classic shounen you're surrounded by a bunch of clones what you have to do is find the real clone that all falls apart when you know

big naruto moment honestly it also plays on like

the desire for a television character to reveal their plan.

But then in this case, the reveal of the plan was part of the plan, which was nice because Morrel's the one that shows up and says, There, what do you get it now?

There never was a real knuckle, and then he's like, There never was a real knuckle, and then, of course, the real knuckle punches him in the back or something, yeah, and a little more, um, a little more interest is accrued or whatever.

They're really this is really they're trying to do death by a thousand cuts with UP, yeah.

So I suppose it's actually way too much more than a thousand cuts.

Um,

there's a sweet little moment here as we learn that Morel and Knuckle made a plan years ago.

This is just nice more context of like student and master.

Oh, was this years ago?

I thought this was like earlier before the invasion.

No, the impression that I got was that when he was like a young man, when like Knuckle was a young man.

If Knuckle clones appear, basically Morel says, I'll essentially only stoop to summoning.

your stupid guys if I think you need time to cool off.

This should be your sign that, like, I'm essentially covering for you.

And also a way to communicate to you really quickly.

You are losing it.

You know, you need to sit back.

And Knuckle does do this.

He gets some distance and he kind of cools down a bit.

I had something to say about this, but I can't remember what it was.

Oh, it was about how

Knuckle calls this a condition, like a nen condition, which is funny.

I just just like them sort of borrowing nen ideas into like social concepts.

Like, it wasn't a promise, it was a condition.

Yeah, whether or not that word is being used in the sort of like binding sense that nen conditions are, I think it's still

interesting that they're using it in the same way that in the past we've talked about how it's always notable when the ants choose to or choose not to use nen language.

Yeah, I think it seems fun in general how nen conditions have evolved from being something that were like very explicitly pointed out every time

and then like

to now where everything's sort of implied and now it's to the point where it's just it's borrowed, a borrowed term for not necessarily nen contracts

anymore.

Definitely.

Yeah, the

interest about individual conditions has like weakened.

just because it's become like a part of nen life to the viewer, which I like.

This whole deal makes you be mad.

He explodes again.

Yeah, he sure does.

Who sees this and is like, oh, you're really going to resort to something like that over there?

Jesus Christ.

Now that we've had Knuckle kind of like cooling down a little, we get the little resolution to that mystery as we see Shoot opening his eyes in what first appears to be a hospital being worked on by surgeons, but based on the man who opens the door and steps out into the void beyond it is revealed to be nove's apartment nove's you know teleportation

do you think

those doctors in there in one of the rooms no they're the hunter doctors i think they're the same oh go ahead i think they're the same kind of hunter doctors as that poor woman who had to come and operate on the queen

yeah i was literally about to say yeah i think yeah

i think they live there i think they live in one of the i think they're tenants

i mean you know what's rent like if it's rent controlled fuck yeah

send me in.

You got to call your landlord every time you want to leave.

I'm not, I'm, I don't want to live there.

Oh, is that true?

I know he's, he's the only one with, yeah, he's the only one with the master

pay that he can give people.

You got to text your landlord so you can find out where you're coming out every time, I guess.

That's the different thing.

Hey, man, I got to do groceries.

Am I going to end up in a fucking war-torn palace again?

Yeah, I'm good.

You're the doctor.

You can afford something better.

I think the real problem is that he keeps forgetting which grocery store you like.

So like you go to, you're trying to go to, like, the normal grocery store, but he spits you out in front of Trader Joe's.

And it's like, I can't, I don't even like this stuff.

I can't even get my normal things here.

Everyone's too

underformal.

And they're wearing Hawaiian shirts.

Then they're ringing bells.

Why do they ring the bell in Trader Joe's?

I think that they give you free stuff.

I don't know.

I've never really

been in a couple times to a Trader Joe's.

I didn't like it.

Why do they...

I go to Trader Joe's occasionally.

I like their pearl couscous.

Is that the bigger ones or the little ones?

Those are the bigger ones.

We've spoken about this.

I will not tolerate a small.

I will not tolerate a small couscous.

I'm only on this earth for a short period of time, but there's no price difference.

I

remember hearing my boyfriend have headphones on laughing at something, and I asked him, and

he was like, oh, Jack and Keith are just talking about couscous.

And it was really funny the way Jack reacted.

I'm talking about couscous once again.

Yeah.

Media club coose.

Yeah.

Or

there you go.

Oh, media cooskous.

Couscous.

Yeah.

There you go.

Media couscous is my favorite queen song.

Is there a queen song?

What's the reference?

I was just thinking Radio Gaga.

Yeah.

All we hear is media couscous.

After all this time, the tower falls, the central tower that has been really trying its best, you know, it's really been going for it this whole time.

Smoky Jail was described as the only thing that was keeping it up for a while, and now Smokey Jail is gone.

Its time has come.

It tumbles.

Pretty impressive of Smokey Jail.

Yeah, absolutely.

Hold a whole tower up just by being there.

Very useful.

Hina and Bizf head into the tunnel, followed by an angry Welfin.

Welfin is mad because, as far as he's concerned,

BZF is his meal ticket.

Right.

Not Hina's.

Yeah.

He thinks Hina has like stolen his idea

to bilk.

Bizef out of money.

That's my mark.

God damn it.

Yeah.

As episode 20.

He's not wrong.

Yeah,

that is the plan.

It is also just funny how Welfin continues to just assume everything wrong every time.

Well, sometimes, sometimes he kind of gets it right.

Right.

Right.

Yeah.

Nina is trying to escape with BZF and take his money.

I guess.

Which would render his plan to become the king behind the scenes moot.

But I do hear what you're saying.

His plan has already been rendered moot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is his, that's his problem.

He has not widened his scope.

Lest we forget,

Welfin was responsible for the brilliant plan.

Um, what if everyone switched sides?

Maybe I should switch sides.

That's the funniest thing that's happened in the show.

I love Welfin so much.

Does it mean to kill me at any time?

Should I even be a chimera ant?

I just, I love the idea of like, the idea to have a character who is constantly analyzing and frozen by that analysis in a arc where everyone is acting on impulse is so much fun.

Yeah.

It's great.

Yeah.

That's that is really good.

And I think that Welfin in those moments benefits so strongly from the kind of like,

we've talked about this several times, the speed with which Tagashi and the team are able to like spin up interest in a character.

You know, they could sort of like point at a random chimera ant we haven't seen before and be like, okay, in 60 to 100 lines of dialogue, I'm going to get you on board with this person in like a really interesting way.

I'm sort of waiting for that to happen with

Hina's Pion.

What's her name?

Shidore.

Shidore.

Yeah.

I'm waiting for the moment when Takashi says, all right, Shidore.

Do you think that she's primed to be like an important character?

No, I don't know.

Important because I don't think.

It's relevant to the screen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, this is something Takashi loves to do, right?

It's like have a character in the background.

We see this with Bloster and Wilson, actually.

And she too.

Characters in the background who sort of like come bubbling up and get a little more focus on them.

Alternatively, they just get killed.

Poof, fresh off his sudden remembering that the king is gone.

This is a bit like when you've received bad news before you go to bed and then you somehow manage to go to sleep and then you wake up and then the bad news hits you like a bolt and you sit up suddenly and you're like, oh fuck.

Yeah.

The king.

The king.

My one thing.

The one thing.

He approaches the room where Pito and Gon are.

And as Pito using their voice, you know, speaking aloud, it's important to mention this because the Chimera ants can speak telepathically.

Pito speaking aloud warns Poof to stay back.

Now, this is important

because

my memory is that they establish early on something that's actually very important for these episodes.

The royal guards cannot do that.

They can't speak telepathically with each other

i was wondering this is did the telepathy sort of die with the queen

no no there's different levels of ants and different levels of ants have different abilities tele with telepathy the original soldier ants could only speak telepathically communicate telepathically same with the queen

Then the sort of squadron leaders could speak and use telepathy.

and they chose to speak more often, but they could use telepathy to give orders and to communicate with the queen.

The

royal guards don't have telepathy.

Why is that?

Because of this,

because of this.

I think, I mean, yeah, my more infiction answer would be like something about needing autonomy to take care of the king.

Or something like just the virtue of having

become too

little like ants.

They've become so far from what they originally were biologically.

They've got too many other kinds of things in there.

I mean, they also, like, they don't need to hear the queen because they don't give a shit about her.

Oh, yeah.

They only answer to the king, so why do they need to know what the queen thinks?

Yes, and the queen is sort of represented as like, not quite like a gestalt consciousness, but there's something about the way the queen is responsible for for like birthing all these ants that they do sort of have this like hive-mindy sort of gestalt feel to them.

And like you say, Dre, by the time the royal guards arrive, they are not royal guards to the queen, you know, right?

They are royal guards in preparation of the king.

Yes, the king,

they must have some kind of reaction to the king because the king seemed seemingly able to just summon them at will by like shouting.

That might just be because they're hanging over his shoulder the whole time.

I'm not sure.

121 begins, and Poof is immediately mad that Pito spoke out, alerting Goan to his presence.

Goan's retort to this is, shut up.

This isn't about you.

And Peter's retort is, he already knew you were here, and if he had heard you, he would have killed the girl.

And to this, Poof is like, what?

This, this thing?

He says, he's only sitting there because he wants to help that girl, right?

You almost make it sound as if he intends to harm her.

It's great.

Like, Poof misreading the situation and the particular kind of like nuance of his misreading, feeding straight into the ways that Goan previously misread the situation is really good.

He doesn't know what's happening.

He has no interest in really finding out what's happening.

And

confirming his biases about what humans are like and what their objectives here might be.

He suspects maybe that Goan even knows

Komugi.

And just like, and it is surprising.

Like, Gone shouldn't be here, like, menacing

Pito

while they try to

heal Komugi.

Like, that doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

And we spent a whole, we spent 90 minutes talking about that.

Yeah.

Kiliwa is charging himself up from the mains.

I love it.

Not only he going beyond the, it's because you always be on that damn phone.

It's because you always be that phone.

He's out of battery.

He's got to charge up.

He's got to charge up.

We've talked a lot about the way that Kilua has changed, and I think the way in which Killiua Zeldic changes is,

you know, the heart of the show for me in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

But little moments like this, you know, crouching down to charge yourself up from a power socket

really sort of harkens back to like old Kiliua vibes.

This to me is sort of like assassin killiua or like flippant kid assassin killua.

Yeah, but it's like I read it very much as like Kilua like reclaiming that part of his life and his identity.

Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, definitely.

All right, and electric boy deal with it.

Once he's charged up, he's going to go and meet Goan.

And he sort of talks to Mel kind of lightly about about this.

And then he says, once he gets like this, gone,

he's not going to budge for anything.

I might go down with him.

And then a pause.

Then he says, I'm kidding.

This is a really big translation difference here.

I don't know.

I don't know what happened here.

But in

the in the subs for this, what Killowis says is he might trade his life for Pito's.

Oh, that's interesting.

Mine says I'll go down in flames with him.

Wow, okay.

Which I think is also more aligned in flames, but different than what you've more aligned in meaning with

Jack's and more aligned in tone with mine.

Go down in flames is also more like explicitly romantic.

We've talked in the past about the like language of like romance stories being applied to Killua specifically.

And I think the idea of like a relationship going up in flames or going down in flames.

Implicitly more self-destructive, too, which like I think is really worth noting there.

Heliard has a really good moment here of like he's thinking in his head, like, look, I can't say what I want to say about this, but I'm pretty sure that their relationship is like weird.

Are these kids okay?

Yeah.

He's basically like, whatever, not my place.

I'm, you know, I'll just listen to him.

Keith, I'm curious what your translation says for the next line I have after the I'm kidding, which is Killowa saying, I have the most powerful spell called kite, which is like like him saying, I can just mention kite and that will help me.

In mind, he calls it his magic word.

He calls it the magic word, kite.

I like the magic word a little better, I think.

Killer is being really flippant here, but as you leave, Meliaron thinks, you know, if you're prepared to be so flippant, why did you look so sad back there when I saw you in the room?

This is

not even the first time Melieron noticed how sad Killiwa looks.

I hate to say

collecting sad Kiluas kiluas is one of the best bits of the show.

Yeah.

No, I understand completely.

Wait, where's my sad kilua from this one?

He wasn't terribly sad at these.

I definitely got one, but

I don't see it right away in my screenshot list here.

Well, there's a really funny killer with a the when he says the magic word, he's got a very, very silly face.

He's sort of got like a, this is like an angry kitty cat killier.

Uh, we haven't had a kitty cat killer in a while because the switch is so high, it was refreshing.

Uh, wind blows in Kumigi's room or rather in the room.

Yeah, that is Kumigi's room, right?

Yeah, yeah, she was shot in her bedroom.

Oof.

Uh, wind blows in Kumigi's room, and Poof thinks to himself, ah, I'm down wind.

And then he's like, very obviously, well,

I'm sorry, I guess you've got it from here, Pito.

And he leaves, but Goan stops him, recognizing that he's going to try and use his

hypnotizing scales, presumably to like blow them into Goan's, and maybe even Pito's face to like bring an end to this stalemate.

Both Goan and Pito are like begging Poof to stay and, you know, like remain locked in place.

And Poof says, you want me to stay and do nothing at all just for the sake of the girl?

And Peter says, It's for the king.

And Poof thinks to himself, Wow, something, something's

going on.

What's wrong with them?

This is not the same, Peter.

Something changed.

Something has happened since I was imprisoned.

This is great because this is like the perfect anxiety of Poof, the like

parent who takes their eye off the ball for one second and then it all goes to shit.

There's a kind of video that is, i believe almost always fake uh but it is uh

uh

people who are like i let my cat back in from outside and then you see your of your cat in the window and you're like wait then who are you uh there is like this sort of like has something compromised pito energy to this of like is this my cat

Yes, but also to like further that like parent taking their eye off the ball thing as well, it's also like the moment Poof has to act for their own self-preservation, right?

The like the cocoon thing, the moment they act to take care of themselves for one second, Pito goes to hell.

Yeah.

And the king disappears.

He stays, but he sort of tries to express as like clearly as possible, he sort of like wills towards Pito, even though he can't do the telepathy.

He says, you know, you have to fill me in and you have to make what has happened subtle.

You know,

communicate the circumstances to me, but in a way that gives us an advantage.

Right, because he believes that if they talk too much about the king or the king's location, that like Goan will try to stop them.

And Poof's promise is, I will just then kill everybody here.

I don't care that much about Komugi, even if it's for the king.

Yes,

I think he describes it as a bloodbath.

Yeah, Yeah.

I really like the bat.

I mean, this might just be a good time to talk about the guards in general.

They've had some really good development over the past few episodes.

Yup got some in this next episode where his sort of like stuff crystallizes.

Yeah.

I love this sort of turn where Pito is clearly the one who cares about the king the most.

That's great.

And like,

no, as much as Poof will claim to be invested invested in the king, Hoof is more invested in the project of the king.

And I don't know.

I feel like we might have mentioned it last time, but this puts it in such stark relief and makes it so obvious.

Yeah, this is sort of the thing that we've been.

We did talk about it a bit in the last episode, but

we spent several episodes sort of cluing this, like,

that this was going to come to a head and it's a very good head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that, um, I think it's, it's, it's notable that the king is gone.

You know, we've said this over and over again.

He's not just gone from the palace, he has dropped out of the narrative.

And in much the same way as Natero and

Zeno's plan was kept vague from us at the beginning and then sort of like dreadfully revealed.

Now we know the sort of depth of

their like off-piece planning.

You can't help but wonder, like, what is going on?

Where is the king?

You know, how is the fight progressing?

Almost no characters know the truth of what happened.

Pito knows, but they're stuck with Goan.

Goan knows, but they're not doing anything other than sitting.

Kilua knows, and seemingly has like not had a chance to tell everyone.

Big pigs on his plate.

Theoretically, Kilua could have like told Yupi, and Yubi could start, or not Yupi, uh, uh, Meleoron, and Melioron could start disseminating that.

But, like, yeah, they have like, they have pretty big fish to fry, so it hasn't come up.

And crucially, the only person who knows that it's fine if the Chimera Ant guards know where the king is is Nove, who will show back up in a little bit and we'll talk about that.

But, like,

they might know where the guards are.

Sorry, they might know where the king is, but they don't know that it's like, oh, like, king is really far, like, really, really far.

Meanwhile, UP is, like I said, sort of like beginning to figure out personhood.

He's getting pretty close to controlling the explosion or like figuring out how to control the explosion.

And his line is the narrator's line is, prior to this, Yupi had been unable to comprehend the existence of reciprocal emotions.

There's some really good lines relating to Yupi.

There's a one about compartmentalization that I thought was really funny.

Yeah, and then the narrator is

really hammering home.

Like, Yupi is capital F figuring it out.

Yeah.

You know?

Becoming a guy.

He is becoming a guy.

And as sort of part of the process of becoming a guy, he transforms into

like a true chimera.

This is the most sort of striking beast transformation for Yupi yet.

He becomes like a sort of centaur type thing with like shaggy black hair.

He has a helmet like someone from Dragon Ball.

Who is it?

Who has

the Patriots mascot logo thing?

Oh, I was just thinking

about a long-distance biker.

Or

speedwalking hell for Malcolm in the Middle.

His right hand.

We joked about Tony Hale voicing Ikago.

Brian Cranston as UP would be pretty good.

Oh, it'd be great.

Like, like all growly and, you know, kind of like putting it.

Yeah, he would genuinely do great at.

I mean, like, listen, his Power Ranger's work proves it to me.

His right hand is like a sort of like a scythe blade, and his left hand is...

How would you describe this?

This is more complicated.

His left.

This one's tricky.

His left shoulder.

Start trying to trick you.

His left shoulder is like a mass of those sort of like

gaping-mouthed, tumorous heads that he sort of becomes when he explodes.

And then as it moves down his arm, it becomes a sort sort of like wizened, shriveled, bearded head.

That's that's his upper arm.

Yeah, it has like a very noticeable mustache with a big mustache and then

out of the

thing's mouth comes what looks like a table egg.

How do you feel about this?

Yeah,

I it looks like a

I could not proboscus.

There's a little bit of a proboscis vibe.

There's a, I kind of reminded me of Ikalgo's

pentacle gun which did we mention the little cool transformation where we saw that sort of just like oh yeah we did

look

at the person did yeah flesh looks good

um

but the the more the gut the sniper itself um

yeah i don't know i i don't know if that

um

if the the head on his his like left arm is supposed to be evoking something that we just don't have the like cultural background to understand

yeah yeah yeah Like, if someone knows, like, let us know, I'd be curious.

I was gonna say, practically, he implies that it's where he's storing his rage.

Oh, it's like his hat, it's like Hina's Hina's hat.

Uh, that's the real Yupie face.

Oh, I was gonna say it's like her pregnant, it's this pregnant rage hat.

Oh, he's pregnant, he's pregnant with rage arm.

Yupie was pregnant, good for him.

It's great, every time Yupi turns into something else, it's a delight.

Um,

I saw a YouTube.

Oh, God.

Just that he's talking so much about how he's like, oh, just one more and I'll master my explosion.

And you're expecting him to like

do an explosion, but instead he turns into the fucking horse thing.

And you're like, wait, this was what you were.

Like, it felt like, oh, I can like direct the energy instead of just exploding.

Here we go.

And then he transforms into a horse thing.

I really like the transformation sequence, I think it looks really good, especially when he's like, um,

he's like silhouetted almost and like has this sort of like magma-y vibe.

Yeah, he's got

this one here where he's like got the sort of um

the black eyes, and his skin is like cracking with like, yeah, like magma.

Yeah, that's I think that's literally the shot I'm thinking of, Keith.

It's great, yeah, it's really good.

I like QP a lot, um,

And he's tearing the shit out of the

smoke clones who are just, you know, falling one by one by one by one.

I think we see a few times the number on APR, which I tried to write down each time.

It goes from like 591, like 500, like, sorry, 50,000, 0, like 50091.

And then later we see it at

209242 after the transformation.

It really is

increasing.

It is increasing

exponentially.

Yeah, it is working, and which I want to mention now before we get to something later.

Yeah.

We've talked about this a bit in the past about how, you know, in Dragon Ball,

for example, you know, you could always find a bigger gun.

You know, there will be a way to withstand APR.

There's a move called Gallic Gun.

So I said you can always find a Gallic gun.

Whereas it is made very clear, you know, that APR will defeat UP.

It's just a matter of time.

There's no, you can't be strong enough that APR doesn't do its job.

Yeah, and because of the way that exponential like mathematic curse underneath it all.

Yeah.

Because of the way that exponential math works, it'll happen quite quickly.

The only issue here is that UP is so fundamentally capable that even five minutes off.

Morale is falling apart.

He is like,

this is really bad stuff.

He is like breathing heavily.

He's almost unable to stand.

I've never fought Yupi, but there was a moment a couple of days ago where I was writing some Realis music and my ombudsha for playing the oboe just came apart.

And the thing that it actually made me think of the most, Keith, was when in some episodes ago, you were talking about that kind of training you do where you run on a treadmill until you fall down.

Oh, yeah, VO2 Max.

Yeah.

And this was me for trying to maintain an oboe embouchure where I just, I just could not do it anymore.

And this is morale weak on the edge of the on the edge of the crater.

For for people who aren't into woodwinds,

the embouchure, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, Jack, because I also don't know about woodwinds.

This isn't a part of your oboe that's fallen apart.

This is your physical.

Oh, yeah, this is like a physical failing.

This is the thing that you do with your mouth that was no longer...

You used the words fall apart.

So I wanted to make make it clear you're talking about a physical failing of your body yes my body just going i can't do this anymore the umbrella is the way you sort of like shape your mouth and the tension in your face to create an environment around the reed to make it sort of like sound an instrument when you whistle that's an when you whistle you're making an umbrella yes exactly um and often with reed instruments the tension is the thing that really gets you you know you're you're making like a series of muscular choices with your face to make an instrument go and if you're inexperienced with the instrument like i am with the oboe after like a long period of playing there comes a point where much like vo2 max you just fall down on the treadmill it does not work anymore

choice a muscular choice

Yeah, it is kind of a muscular choice.

I think playing an instrument is a series of

embodied choices that you're making.

You have to make them very quickly and precisely.

UP stalks towards the fallen morale.

APR kind of like bobbing beside him.

APR over Yupi's shoulder here

is kind of sinister looking.

You know, we know that APR is working against Yupi, but they've been paired together for so long that seeing the two of them approaching Morale gives APR a kind of sinister light, I think.

I'm sorry if I missed this.

Did we mention what Poof says when he sees APR?

Oh, yeah, we did.

The pointy-headed power thing.

Well, that he says it's Yupi's power.

Yeah, we did say that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's like, maybe that's Yupi's true power.

It's very funny.

The thing that I love is that,

and I'll tell you now, this episode ends with Yupi having no clue what APR ever was.

He never learns what it does.

He just knows.

that they've been protecting it and that the number has going up.

He doesn't know what it means.

He doesn't know what it does.

He doesn't have a PowerPoint where he tries to figure it out or guess.

It's just the annoying thing that he knows is bad.

He, this would kill me.

The not knowing and the anxiety.

Like, did those fuckers do something to me?

The other day, I was driving, and my car made a sound I hadn't heard before.

Everything was fine, but I thought about it for the next nine hours.

Yeah, yeah,

um, I'm gonna play this audio of uh, you be

in

confronting Torah form, confronting uh, the absolutely

um floor, literally on the floor,

Moro.

I've got something I want to say to you.

Yupi, having learned to compartmentalize his rage, was finally able to clear his head.

You look like a half-dead fly.

Even so,

you guys are amazing.

He had shown astonishing growth during combat, far beyond Morrell and the others.

But when he spoke, it was not to taunt or gloat over his opponent.

Instead, his words were of pure admiration.

Given Morrell's initial impression of Yupi, this must have been the very last thing he expected to hear in this situation.

But Yupi's feelings were heartfelt and sincere, a fact that Morrell had no choice but to accept

i'm not really sure how to say this but because you are so incredible

i should kill you now it's only proper

it's great really good uh

this is just lovely straightforward shonen stuff i think we've talked throughout this project about Tagashi and the team's skill at not just subverting or playing with or maneuvering around shounen but sometimes just reproducing it yeah playing into it at the exact right moments.

You know, Tigashi's trick is that the bad guy isn't quite so bad.

He says, well, I'll put you out of your misery now, so don't move.

And Morel accepts it in this moment.

He's like, well, this is it.

This is a worthy adversary.

You know, what a way to go.

And he raises the sword and we come to commercials.

This is like a lovely, we haven't really talked about necessarily the way that the episodes are structured for commercials.

Um, I think that this is uh like a really nice moment in the middle of the episode.

Oh, we talked about it a bit during the early part of the show, right?

Where they used to do the little commercial bumpers long,

yeah, yeah.

Remember the Hunterpedia?

That was that's gone too.

That's gone too.

That's gone freaks.

We need to keep pointing at the screen.

Um,

I wonder if there's gonna be a gone too at any point.

Gone two, Got gone one?

Got gone two.

I could not make any guesses as to what Gone Freaks is doing right now in the manga.

I mean, I know he might not be in it.

You know,

we know that Tagashi will regularly, like, it's like a meme about Tagashi, right?

That he stops writing about Gonan Killinga.

I know that

the stuff that I haven't seen has essentially no Gonan, is what I understand.

He's probably doing something.

I don't know.

I hope he's happy.

I hope he learns some stuff about himself.

Come on, Gonan.

Come on, you idiot.

The sword comes down, and

the body is gone.

And Yupi thinks for a second, was this a fake?

Was this a smoke Morel?

And then he looks up at his sword and sees that there is blood on the tip.

And of course, we know that this means that Morel has been saved at the very last moment by Maliarone.

MVP of the invasion so far, honestly.

Clearly, he is like, yeah, best supporting.

Do they do Oscars for invasions?

Best supporting invader.

He's doing great.

It's then that Knuckle reappears.

No one is happy about this.

None of the goodies.

Morel is furious insofar as he can sort of like gasp.

And Melierone is like, what the hell were you thinking?

You know, bringing yourself back onto the battlefield.

We nearly had like a perfect retreat.

Foreshadowed by his behavior after

shoot was clobbered, he has chosen to sort of risk it all to save his friend instead of like let the saving the world plan

work.

People are saying that he needs to save his friend because while you p cannot see melirone and morel he can see the trail of blood that they are leaving so it is only a matter of time right right

um

but again that is that is stepping in is counter to the apr plan which is key

yes

um

He stepped in in part because he heard Yupi's words of admiration and he asks Yupi to show them mercy.

The narrator describes it as he decided to be diplomatic instead of violent.

We've known that this was in the heart of Knuckles' character all along, right?

Knuckle is the one who takes care of the dogs.

One of the first conversations we had with Knuckle was him saying, Maybe we shouldn't kill all the Chimera ants.

In his heart, he's a big softy.

And Yupi says, No,

no, absolutely not.

But

get rid of this thing.

And he points at APR.

He says, and I'll consider your terms.

No one likes this either.

Morel.

Clever Yupi is very scary.

What is sorry?

Clever Yupi.

You pee clever about things.

It's intimidating.

You're like,

where are we going here?

Morel, the narrator says, Morel's desperate cry, you know, obviously, do not do this.

did not reach his companion.

They've gotten so much mileage out of God's accomplice muting people um we've talked about this sort of every time it happens so we don't need to belabor the point but over and over the show is so good at like

you're invisible in more ways than one yeah another sort of micro arc that's been going on is that meleorn has been on the sidelines for a lot of these fights and has resisted going in to save people because it's detrimental to the plan to reveal that there's invisibility happening.

And when he finally does go in, it was at the perfect moment to save Moral, but also he was unable to do it in a way that didn't compromise him.

Yeah.

It's telling that from the start, Melieron's power was presented to Goan and the viewer before, you know, even before the idea of the extermination team had really kicked in, of like, I know how to kill the king.

We just have to use this power correctly.

And they kind of like built the assault on the palace out of that core idea.

So I think Melieron has a not incorrect estimation of how valuable his power is.

What I don't think he realized before he went in is that the nature of his power is constantly going to be putting him in these awful, like do or die, intervene or not intervene situations.

And he makes a decision here.

If he was a more advanced end user, he'd be able to conjure some sort of oxygen-delivering device that lets him receive oxygen into his blood without bleeding.

Or you think if he just like because his clothes turn invisible, so what if he just wore like an oxygen tank on his back?

But I think that that would count as breathing still.

Oh, you're right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right.

Which is why it's got to like be like intravenous or something.

Yeah.

I don't like thinking about that.

No, that's yeah.

Hey, you got to do what you got to do.

That's true.

He makes a choice, and this is kind of mercenary choice, but I understand him making it.

He steps back, revealing morale.

You know, he essentially forces

Knuckle to back down.

It doesn't work because, in this exact moment, well, he also steps back not just to reveal Morale, but so that Knuckle could fight alongside Maliaron if need be.

He's sort of like making himself available to fight Yupi.

Right, and you also said it was also so that

Moral could tell him,

don't do that, don't

give him APR back or take back APR.

Okay.

But he takes back APR.

APR disappears in the way we've seen APR disappear.

Have we ever seen APR do this before?

It tears like a balloon.

I think it's different.

Because it usually turns into the cat.

Into the cat.

Yeah.

I was trying to remember if we'd ever seen it be withdrawn.

But yeah, it bursts like a balloon.

It's really good.

Not like a sort of sudden explosion.

You see the rip and it sort of like blows away.

It's awful.

Melieron breathes out.

He says, it's over.

There's no way we can beat Yupi anymore.

And Knuckle, screaming, you know, really realizing that they've lost, turns to Yupi and says, fight me, kill me.

And what does Yupi do?

He leaps over him very dramatically.

And he goes, no way.

He says, nah, screw all that.

We knew

if we were paying attention, we would have known this is what he was going to do.

On like multiple occasions, he has gone back to his original pathing to protect the king, right?

Over and over.

And this is like a lovely little coda to the UP is learning about selfhood and learning how to control, you know, control himself.

He says, Knuckles says, Where are you going?

And UP says, To the king, of course.

You want to come along with me?

You die, you dummy.

The thing that I like about this time, you know, he's left shoot

before.

He was going to kill Morrow out of respect, not out of a desire to kill him.

Yeah.

But this is the first time where the narrator chimes in to be like,

if he really was doing his job, he would kill them.

And he knows that.

And then it jumps back to Yubi being like, why did I do that?

What's going on?

What are my...

I'm having feelings.

What's happening?

What is feelings?

I don't even know.

Whatever.

Shut up.

It's weird that he's not really like that.

I don't feel like he's being like that.

He's most of just like, I've developed feelings.

I am acting like Poof now.

Which is hilarious because he has developed emotional intelligence, a feat that Poof could never do.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's great.

He hasn't interacted with Poof since gaining these new brain powers.

So he's like, he sees like, oh, I'm being like emotional, but he doesn't see that it's a different kind of emotion um

uh which is funny but in me in my version he does seem annoyed at himself oh having developed yeah i think the narrator even says like like he felt rage but it was a different kind of rage and it was like it's rage at himself for having confusing feelings

it is confusing sometimes you know

um

what you gonna do uh i love uh

up i think that up has now sort of like affected uh this is such a good demonstration of like the shonen transformation through combat except the transformation is happening entirely within the self to the detriment of the people around them and not even like i've developed a new power that i'm going to use to win the fight so much as like my power and this comes back to the way i've talked in the past about nen being an expression of like uh emotions of like internal feeling of like a way of externalizing that he's like my power has given me a way into thinking about myself.

And then over the staging of a Shounen fight, we see that like process of learning go through and Yupi comes out of it fully formed in the same way that we might have, for example, like Tian Shin Han

sort of like transmuted over to Goku's side over the course of a fight.

Yeah.

You know, you say it's internal and there is a lot of internal stuff going on.

And it's not like Dragon Ball Z, where Master Roshi has to give Tian a speech about like, come on, man, you're not really a bad guy.

Why are you being so bad?

But Yubi does spend this whole time, like, watching this group of people, you know, cover for each other and care about each other and protect each other and risk their lives to jump in

between their ally and Yubi over and over again.

And like, that does something.

That's something.

That's a version of

this

that I think is very important.

But it's almost less patronizing, right?

There's something a little patronizing about the Shonen camera being like: villains exist to be transmuted alchemically by the heroes.

The heroes have got it figured out, and over the process of interacting with the villains, the villain is kind of like worked through.

It's sort of like pummeled like a piece of taffy until they're soft enough to be reformed into a new shape.

Yeah,

I think it depends on the particular show and the particular scene.

Like, a lot of times,

I think, you know, Naruto is really the

biggest, I don't want to say offender, because I think a lot of times it's good.

The biggest doer of this trope happens over and over again.

And the way that it happens there is like,

and it's similar to how it happens here, which is like, you present the good guys and the bad guys as having made different choices from similar places.

And the good guys end up not being evil, and the bad guys end up sort of resentful and

full of rage because of their resentment.

And then it's sort of a process of like, oh, I'm seeing a positive example.

Sylvie, is this tracking with Naruto for you?

Is this making sense?

I guess.

You guess.

I mean, I

have maybe passed myself off as more of a Naruto expert than I am.

The thing about Naruto is all of the villains go like, you don't understand.

Everybody fucking hated me.

Everybody made fun of me all the time.

They were evil to me.

And so this is me getting back at what I'm owed by society.

And then Naruto going like, we literally have the exact same situation.

Everything you just said.

is true about me as well.

And instead of killing innocent people over it,

I just wanted to prove everybody wrong and that I could be good and helpful and I'm not about to.

You couldn't have done that to Rock Lee Gara.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I understand.

So, and I think that there's a sort of more subtle, more unsaid version of that happening here that is also different from Master Roshi's just sort of like sort of vague gesturing at the end of the day.

Good boy.

Yeah.

Does Naruto, Naruto is really, really wildly inspired by Hunter Hunter, right?

I

is.

Yes.

More

than a year, but yes.

Would you say it's more Yu Yu Hakusho, though, and kind of in its inspiration?

I feel like Sasuke has a lot.

And again, my Yu Yu Hakusho knowledge is very limited.

I feel like I've just seen people describe Sasuke as a run-up, like He meets Kiloa.

It is, he's very He A meets Kiloa, yeah.

Yeah.

Does that have good villains?

Because I feel like

Togashi's writing of villains is just top tier.

It's not on this level.

There's a few that are good.

There's a few that are outrageously good.

And then a bunch that aren't.

Like, we've talked about Gara a lot.

Gara is the best.

Gara is great.

Gara is my favorite character in Art.

Gara's deal in one sentence as a villain.

Gara has the exact same evil spell that was cast on Naruto on him,

but instead of growing up as an orphan, he grew up like under the thumb of the state in a way that where they were using him as

an extension of their state power.

And uh, king coated a little bit, actually, because he's like a prince, he is like a prince, yeah, he's very princely, and uh, uh,

this sort of manifests as like

um

his resentment and hate of the world for being cruel to him, aligning with his country's willingness to use that resentment as a geopolitical uh force against other nations.

Interesting.

It is.

It's very.

Genuinely, yeah, it is probably

a high point for the show for me as pretty much all of his arc.

And it's pretty early.

So.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Before the time scape.

It's before the timescape.

It's before Naruto Shippetin.

So

you could watch it.

Before Naruto Shark jump.

UP says, try me anytime.

We'll fight as equals then.

This is obviously just a really lovely

reference to the first fights that we saw Knuckle in, where Knuckle would like handily defeat Goan and then say, you know, like, come back and try again.

Well, that's actually not quite how it went.

Remember, Goan hit him so hard with the punch that he went flying, and then Goan decided that wasn't good enough.

Yeah.

But there's an echo.

There's an echo happening.

Yeah, for sure.

There's a great line

from Yubi.

He says,

sorry, it's from the narrator.

He says, Yubi had learned how profound Nen really was and had awakened his previously meager sense of self.

Shout out to the narrator.

Yeah,

I'm really glad for non-viewers that the clip that I played happened to include like

a perfect example of narrator using Legend of the Martial Artist.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As his theme comes rising up in the

Knuckle is pretty convinced that he has lost this fight.

Well, actually, just before that, Yupi sort of like sums up his ideology as he as he as he leaves.

He says, Now that I have this rage, I have to use it.

There's still some work you could do there, Yupi, to figure that out.

Now that I have this rage, I have to use it.

But who or what should I use this on?

And the narrator says, Was this materity?

The problem is that the rage, I believe, is a physical object in this case.

He thinks rage is a sole natural resource.

Yes.

Knuckle is convinced that he has lost this fight absolutely completely.

This is like done.

At one point, Melieron says,

well,

he said, fight him anytime.

Go and fight him now.

And Knuckle's saying, no.

He says, we're friends.

He says, I can't see him something to exterminate now.

He wasn't a bad guy.

So why would we keep doing this?

I can't think of a reason.

And then a shattered, exhausted voice says, the king, as Nov reappears.

We'd seen the start of Nove's like physical breakdown.

It's wild.

His hair had gone white when we saw him last, but he was otherwise still sort of like fairly put together.

And now

he is like skin and bones.

His clothes are too big for him.

He's gone.

What colour is his hair?

He's almost gone.

He has gone almost completely bald.

The part that isn't bald bald is the worst part you could imagine.

Yeah.

He only has the very front of his bangs.

He has one line of bangs.

I saw a guy on the Toronto subway with this haircut before.

This is the worst haircut this side of Charlie Brown.

It's not great.

I'll be honest.

Don't say that about my friend Charlie Brown.

He has a famously, he has a bad haircut.

I think it's gestural.

I don't think that's just gestural.

Yeah.

No, I I agree.

It is gestural, but it's gestural of a poof.

It's not, you know, I've seen him drawn.

We're not talking about him right now.

We're talking about Nove.

Nove is like shaking.

He's like wringing his hands in front of him.

And he says, the king is gone and the royal guards won't make it to the king in time.

Consider them fired.

And then he pauses and chuckles and says, and you too.

This is the show just making text to what we have been saying this whole time, which is like, the elders here fucked this mission up completely.

And that was their plan.

Um, he asks where Palm is, and they say, you know, we haven't found it yet.

And there's this sort of like, you can tell he's only barely keeping it together.

He doesn't have a meltdown.

I was sort of expecting him to like scream or lose it.

No, but he just sort of like very weak, like draws a ragged breath.

Um,

he's unhappy.

Um, and then he says, as he's descending, he says, You guys are strong.

He takes, he's taking Morrel with him, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Very brave of him to be, you know, continually trying back up here.

It's obviously killing him, like in a real way to be here.

Yes.

Whatever juice

a real hunter is supposed to have, he did not have it, it turns out.

He was never tested in this way.

You're not built for this, right?

He had all the skills, but he didn't have the personality or something, whatever it is that keeps you from like physically falling apart at the purple at kill at Hizuka's purple hallway.

Um,

he's looking more and more like Palm.

You know, we've talked in the past about how Palm's devotion to

Nove sort of caused her to become like shriveled and like blasted and like weakened.

But she still has this sort of like dreadful, powerful animus.

The same thing is now happening to Nove,

but it's his fear and its horror.

And rather than powering him up, it's sapping him of his energy and capability.

He asks what they're going to do, what Knuckle and Maliron are going to do.

And they say, we're staying.

We've still got a lot of work to do.

UP's not the only royal guard, you know?

So they are.

They are.

I'm not exactly sure what they think they're doing by continuing the mission.

Are they just like, we're sticking to the plan, we have to eliminate the royal guards?

I think that it's that and Palm.

I think it's those are the two things.

And that their allies kill out there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it would be a bit weird if Knuckle had literally just had the, I saw a royal guard gain personhood in front of my eyes and I don't actually want to kill him and then move on to like right next to Royal God.

But yeah, I think you're right.

I think they're saying like we have to at least get our allies out of this fight because there are other royal guards out there.

Who would have thought Yupi would be the first one to jump ship?

Well, he's not really jumping ship.

He's going to go and find the king.

He's actually getting back on the ship.

He jumped knuckle is what he jumped.

He did.

And that brings us to the end of 121.

I thought these episodes were fine.

There was good stuff in there, but as I hope I've sort of like articulated, I had some sort of like pacing and tone frustrations with it, which is a shame because some of the content that was content.

I think I mean that in the literal sense.

The actual content

episode.

Yes.

It was good, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah, I felt like these.

Oh, go ahead.

No, you go ahead.

I was going to say, I felt like these episodes were just a big like table setting.

It is just, okay,

let's finish out the stories that are about to finish and then also show you like where we're going next.

I mean, that's very explicit in like the poof, like going around the whole castle and being like, and here this is happening, and here this is happening.

But it really does just feel like that it's like

they're showing us what the table is set for, like kind of the next round of stuff.

Yeah, scheduling problems have made it really easy to just keep going in chunks of three.

And this is not how I ever envisioned these episodes being shown in a clump like this.

Um, because it is sort of

uh, uh, you know, Jack, you're very sensitive to

the

changes in speed of a show, which we talked about a lot earlier, where it was like, every time I watch the first episode, and I'm like, oh, nothing's really happening here.

And then all of a sudden, in the next two episodes, all this stuff is happening.

And in my head, I'm like, yeah, television.

Yeah, I've heard of it.

But this really is sort of more of that than usual that ideally ideally would have been split between two halves, like ending the last set on 119,

starting the next set of four or five on 120.

But we just haven't really been able to like get into a groove where it makes sense to be

doing

four or five episodes at a time.

We used to do fours more often, but it's just been like easier to do sets of three.

I think that these episodes show better not together.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I mean, I think to speak to my defense, I think part of the issue that I have with this,

part of what produces this kind of sensitivity is, and we've talked about this on the show before, the like default unit of television for me is one episode.

Yeah.

And so it means that when I'm watching them in these blocks of three, I'm sort of having these like little discrete chunks of pacing, if that makes sense, where I'm like,

like a little sandwich.

whereas usually the way I watch it is I watch one episode and then I let go to

watch another episode of bread and then you have ham a little later,

and then you have another size of bread a little later.

Yeah, and then I say to myself, Well, why isn't this?

No, I do actually, I do actually believe, I do unfortunately believe that the best way to watch television is with breaks between the episodes.

If only for me, I don't know.

No, I'm the same way.

I like, I like to watch episodes between two and three at a time, yeah.

Sure, yeah,

every week I'm watching Severance, and it ends, and I'm so mad that I can't watch two severances in a row.

See, actually, here's the thing: what I will tend to do is wait for a show to finish and then watch them all in a whack one day after each other.

I'll do it that way around.

I understand the value of weekly TV, um, and I think that people like David Lynch have done really good stuff with like the what weekly TV pacing gives you.

Um,

but But my favorite way to do it is one episode a day until I finish a season.

You know, you could watch one a day of media.

Now, Keith,

now this is smart, but you are neglecting to take into account my inability to manage my own time.

Fair.

Fair.

What are we watching?

Is that the crux?

Have I just found the crux?

I think you might have just found the crux.

You might have just found the crux here, Keith.

I started watching Squid Game, and then I fell off it not because I wasn't having a good time.

That's good game two, then I fell off it not because I wasn't having a good time, but because I was like, oh fuck, I've got all this other stuff to do.

I have a great news for you.

You should wait until the next season of Squid Game

until you watch more of this.

This is what I've learned.

I think that's what I'm going to do.

And especially it's summer, so it's not.

They've chosen to do half of a season of Squid Game and call it Season 2.

It's actually Season 2A.

Do you think that is a season?

Dan to Dan?

Did

Dante Dan also do that?

Dan Dan also released just half a season.

Yeah, I was, I think I recommended that to you a while ago, and you should wait until the second season's out.

Yeah, it's on my list, so that's great to know that there's an update to that.

Jack,

ends in a terrible place.

Jack, go ahead.

Why do you think that they split Square Game?

Was it a financial reason, or do you think that it was like a marketing reason?

Netflix has done this before.

They did it with Arrested Development Season 5.

I think it's because they realized that

their

binge model was like

really good for people who want to watch their shows, but not really good for like making money.

So they've tried to come up with different ways around that.

And anytime they think something's going to be a big hit, I think it's something that they discuss, which is what if we release seasons two and three six months apart,

which is what's happening with Squid Game.

There's a season three coming out in the summer.

And this has been in the works for a while.

I mean, I remember when they announced the premiere date for season two, they announced it alongside and three will follow later in 2025, which made me wonder: oh, they're probably doing this fucking thing, aren't they?

Um, in any case, this is not a podcast about Skid Game, this is a podcast about Squid's game, Ikalga.

Um, yeah,

what are we watching next time?

Next episodes, we are watching um

222, 223,

and 224.

No, 122.

124.

Yeah, 122, 123, and 124.

And those are called

pose and name,

centipede and memory, and breakdown and awakening.

We are going to get back into

the good shit, I think, soon.

We are not quite...

Keith, you said that 116 was the thing you've been looking forward to for like forever with this show.

Right.

126 is the one I'm looking forward to.

So, yes, that is another one of the things that I've been looking forward to for months.

Almost there.

Yeah.

We could have been a centipede ant.

We must have done.

One of the like amazing Gonzo one-second Chimera ants that gets obliterated by someone.

He had that weird one in there.

He was wrapped around a tree.

No, he was a snake.

I just remembered, I just remembered him being sort of centipede-like, but no, he was a snake.

Who were the pervert with the human dogs?

No, that was a mosquito.

And

what was the other one?

No, there was a

20-armed thing.

Yeah,

there was a third one.

There was a chimera.

He was like a reptile horse.

Yeah, he was the one that was holding the chimera ants so much.

Yeah.

Yeah, these are great.

Sorry, wait, did I?

Yeah, okay.

After this, I just want to say, you know, Sylvie, the thing that you're looking forward to, that's going to be a two.

That's going to be 125 and 126 as a two.

That makes perfect sense.

I'm very excited.

Those are maybe my two favorite episodes on the show.

Exciting.

Yeah, it's our first episode.

And it's going to be a four-hour episode.

That's going to be the longest episode per minute of television watch, maybe in the history of recap podcast.

I'm calling this shot 100%.

Yeah.

uh

the other day i saw on youtube a video that was a it was a three-hour compilation of jeopardy uh rounds and it turns out that this was really odd because you know a jeopardy round is like one full clearing of the jeopardy board and a game of jeopardy takes place over two rounds What three hours of this does, however, is it does one board and then changes to another one.

And that also means that there are three new contestants.

But because of the way that like Jeopardy is cut, you know, you're regularly up on the board.

Every time I looked back up at this, three new people had showed up and were answering questions.

And this is what watching the Chimera Ant arc feels like: where it's like you look down and then you look back up, and now three new weirdies have showed up to like cause problems.

Glance back at it again, now it's someone wearing a weird hat.

Um, I've had so much time with the chimera ant.

So much time, so much, so much good time.

Yeah, um, Sylvie, review us.

Yes, yes, yes.

Okay.

I'm going to.

I have one here.

This is from a friend of mine, but it's also a good review.

So this is titled, I'm a September Girly from User Cave Gift.

If Mark Wahlberg was around

in Hunter-Hunter world, he wouldn't be able to shut up about how he would have handled the Chimera Antarct differently.

Which is true.

And then I also

have.

Where'd it go?

I had another one.

I swore I had another one and now I've lost it.

I have a

review call out.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, shit.

Was it for the person that said we made their favorite show better but gave us four stars?

Yeah.

Ben, you've given us the wrong score.

They covered my favorite show and made it better, and they won't stop.

It's simply the best podcast you could imagine about the best show you could hope to watch.

Enjoy yourself.

Four stars.

Ben, you hit the wrong button.

Yeah, you described that was a five-star review.

You left a four-star review by mistake, clearly.

You can fix this.

You can fix this.

I actually don't know if you can fix it, Ben.

I don't know if they allow you to edit your review.

You can now see the little four-star meter.

You used to not be able to see it.

You can actually see it now

in the ratings.

You can see a little blip next to the four.

Oh, no.

That's you, Ben.

You did that.

And you've ruined us.

Oh.

No, I'm joking.

Ben, you have time to fix it.

It's not a permanent mistake.

But do fix it.

Please do fix it, Ben.

Like, we're joking about the things we're saying about you.

We're not trying to cast aspersions on your character.

We are just saying you hit the wrong button.

Yeah.

I found it.

Okay.

This is titled Two Johns Are Fine from Gone's Mom.

September birthday here to do my duty

to the only state I currently recognize.

When Jack, Sylvie, Dre, and Keith started this podcast, I watched all of HXH so that I could properly appreciate it.

As it turns out, this was a better decision than either of my marriages.

Hunter Hunter is probably my favorite anime, and MCP makes it even better with fascinating discussion, notes on the music, and thoughts about the character designs.

I also like the comparisons to the manga.

The jury is in.

Two Johns are great.

Evidence.

They might be giants.

Who are the two Johns?

Those are the two.

I don't know why it

brought it up.

Is this like the name John?

Is this like a Philly John?

No, it's like the name John because that's why the They Might Be Giants joke comes in because those guys are both named John.

Which I knew, of course.

I love They Might Be Giants, and I know the two Johns.

And

it's my favorite part of Coraline is when one of the Johns sings a song about Coraline.

Yeah.

And,

but I don't remember talking about two Johns.

I don't either.

It must have come up.

I think that's...

Or it's a non-sequitur.

It's one of the reasons why it really spoke to me because I was really confused by it.

And then also the two divorces thing.

Yeah.

Well, I guess maybe

congratulations on your divorces from the way you talked about them.

Sorry about having to have two divorces.

Yeah, there you go.

Let's split the difference.

Congratulations on one of your divorces and sorry for the other one.

Yeah.

I like that.

Yeah, play it safe.

I think we are now summoning October birthday people.

No, we just did that.

We're now summoning November, October people.

November October.

November October.

Sorry, November birthday people.

November birthday people.

No, I like November, October.

November, November, October.

I'm a November, October cusp.

Shut up.

If you were born in the month of November and your name

is

John.

John, hey,

that's a good one.

If you are a member of They Might Be Giants, please review it.

That's a little too specific.

That's a little too specific.

I would love love it if one of them was listening.

Or heavy honor.

Yeah.

I don't know what's going to happen next.

I do not know what is going to be happening.

Can I tell you?

It's completely different.

It's great.

Get ready for something completely different, Jack.

Okay.

Okay.

That keeps happening, though.

Yeah.

It's completely different.

You might not even know the extent to which it's different, although I bet you could guess.

Now?

Shay, if you'd like.

uh, let's see.

No, I

do not know.

I pick up, it's like I turned to look at one of the spinning plates and was like, I don't think it's that.

Uh,

the king.

I was thinking about the fight.

Okay, I was like, We're gonna cut hard away to whatever the hell is going on at the fight, but that didn't necessarily fit with the episode names that I've been given.

So,

yeah, uh, centipede and memory,

centipede and memory pose and name.

I have no idea.

This is this is this stuff's great.

I love, I really do love the assault, but I'm excited to see some something that isn't paper flights in QP.

Yubi has been like the main feature of these has been yeah, and it's been great, but you know,

all right,

bye, bye, noodles.

Good night.