Gon Is the Imposing Presence - Hunter x Hunter ep. 113-115: Media Club Plus S01E36

Hit it!

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

As always, we are brought to you by friends at the table.

This season, you're watching at 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshika Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on Twitter and Blue Sky at Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com/slash run button.

Run button's having its biggest moment in years.

All the videos are great.

Go watch some Run Button.

If you've never gone and watched Run Button before, there is no better time.

You can also.

no, that's it.

With me as always, is Jack to Keith.

Hello, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

I'm writing the Realis theme right now, as I have been for months.

I described it to Austin earlier as I feel like I'm pushing open the door of the Zaldic mansion and it's taking me fucking forever.

You just got to make sure you keep those weighted clothes on.

Yeah, but and the goddamn weight is close.

You'll be stronger than ever.

I feel like I will be.

Also, tired.

Yeah,

stronger and tired than ever.

Sylvie Bullet?

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me on most places at Sylvie Bullet.

And you can check out all the bonus content we've made for this show at friendofetable.cash.

There's Dragon Ball Z.

There's JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

There is a smorgasbord of anime that we've watched in relation to Hunter Hunter.

And Andrew's one.

We just keep saying...

Oh, sorry.

Oh, go ahead, Jack.

Oh, we just keep saying that the final Dragon Ball pot will be up, and it truly will be up.

Keith just has had a busy few weeks.

Life happens, yeah.

Life happens.

Uh, Andrew Lee Swan.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Yeah.

Uh, you can find me on Blue Sky, uh, Swan Durry3000.beast guy.social.

Yeah.

Okay.

You can go to for mine, you can just go to Keith J.

Carberry.

Contentburger.biz in your web browser.

You can just find it by entering that into the internet.

Wow.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

You can also find me on Instagram at Andrea Lee Swan.

I think the most recent thing I posted was some fucked up brownies that I made.

I fucked up in a good way.

What was in them?

Nothing special.

They were very dark chocolate fudgy brownies.

I love that.

That's like my favorite kind by far.

Yeah.

Sometimes you bite into a brownie and you're like, this is just like cakey or chocolatey cake.

Oh, I hate it.

I hate it.

I hate it.

I'm looking at you with Pillsbury.

Yeah.

Got them.

Get them Betty Crocker, I think.

Got her ass.

I think those are very cakey.

Most mixed brownies are too cakey for me.

Yeah.

Some of them have like fudgy versions.

Like Betty Crocker has a fudgy version, but the normal one, anyway, homemade's the best.

I'm sure every delay.

The best brownies I've ever had in my life are made by my friend Linda.

Congratulations, Linda.

Shout out to your brownies.

My lovely boyfriend makes very good brownies.

What about you, Dre?

The best brownies I've ever had, probably the ones they made the other brownies.

Nice.

Hey, that's the best case scenario.

Yeah.

You always want like to cook something and go, this is the best version of that that I've ever had, or at least that I've ever made.

Yeah.

I always, when I make something, I always sit down to eat and I, and I take a bite and then I look at Isaac and I say, here are the six things that I would have done differently.

And then he says, shut up, this is great.

Yeah, I'm the shut up, this is great partner.

Are you an apologizer when you put food down as well, Keith?

I feel like putting it down and saying, I'm sorry, this didn't hurt, or I'm sorry it's x or whatever sometimes i know myself doing it i'm extremely clinical about it i i understand that it's still good pragmatist yeah

um i would never go this is no well

if i if i was really disappointed i might but almost never am i like actually

like i wish that i i'm sorry to you that this isn't better but i can still taste that it needed you know a little bit more pepper or something yeah sure

um

We have some good episodes to talk about today, but I also have a segment that I wanted to do last time.

Oh, great.

Me too.

Beginning with a segment.

Oh, I think I know what the segment is.

I'll forget again.

So we've talked a little bit about,

we've mentioned a few times that we are planning on watching the Hunter-Hunter original movie

Phantom Rouge.

Non-canon.

Non-canon, except for a little bit that apparently is.

Some backstory stuff is apparently canon keith am i wrong am i right you are the one who informed me yeah there's a there is a chunk of the movie that is based on the i think two-part episode zero that is tropica stuff

now i thought it would be fun because i watched this ahead of time to make sure that it doesn't like backdoor reference stuff coming from the chimera ant arc uh because it's set before that it's set before um greed island i believe and it does do that it does backdoor reference stuff it does

Yeah, but like Greed Island stuff.

Oh, yes, that is true.

But not Chimerian stuff.

We're in the clear for the Chimerian stuff.

And while I was watching this, I took some screen caps.

If anyone knows, the original,

the beginning of the show started, if you really want to think about it this way, as a stream where

Keith Austin and

I, yeah.

Yeah, Dre, you weren't able to make it.

Yeah.

We showed Jack separate screenshots of Hunter Hunter and asked them to tell us what they thought was going on.

So I would like to do because I'm the only person who's seen this one.

I have three different screenshots and I'm going to let you decide on a level.

There's

I how

I don't want to we don't need to do all three, but I need to know how inscrutable you want them to be because I've got two.

I've got our cast

I've got inscrutable and I've got slightly scrutable.

Okay, so scrutable is off the table.

Can we do the hardest two?

Sure.

Okay, great.

I'll start with I'm so excited.

All right.

Wait, am I?

Okay, yeah.

Okay.

I think that I know what this is because I think that I know a little bit about this.

Okay, well, then I go last.

Yeah, you go last.

Are we just guessing what we think this is?

What do you think this is in relation to Hunter-Hunter?

This has got to be some guy's little nin power sidekick thing.

So, what are we looking at, Dre?

It looks like a close-up, like, zoom in on the face of some kind of like marionette clown puppet thing.

By the way, I will put this first in the screenshot thing so you can go for free and sign up as a free member of friendsofthetable.cash and you hold on, we'll get these so you can look at this.

I'm googling something really quick.

Not this.

I thought you were saying, hold on, don't tell them about friendsofthetable.cash.

Yes, don't.

Don't do it.

This is a sort of smiling

puppet face or like large round mask of a clown, big red nose, big wide smile.

It's got the frilly neck thing that I can't remember that it's a frilly neck thing.

Beautiful teal-colored eyes, beautiful shiny eyes.

Already the rendering style is very slightly different to Hunter Hunter.

You can see the highest res shots

in the movie, by the way.

That's why it's set out to me.

It's a rough.

It's called a rough.

The neck.

Oh, it is called a rough.

The frilly neck thing.

Yeah.

I don't know how you meant that type of shot was.

I was like, the clown has a star over its eye.

So my immediate thought is: like, is this a Hiseker thing?

But Hiseka tends not to use a lot of clown imagery in his

nen abilities.

Hiseka is also not necessarily this kind of a conjurer.

Um, and also not blonde either.

But that was, I also had that same thought, Jack.

Yeah, I think Hiseka thinks of himself as a magician rather than a clown, right?

Right,

he's a magician with clown affects.

He's like a jester, yeah, a jester magician, he gestures at the jester,

Yeah.

Exactly.

He's a Zanni through and through.

Here, I think.

We didn't have those in our real estate game.

It's my reality.

He's Xanax.

Yeah, he's Xanax.

He's a little bar of Xan.

Okay, alright.

This is either a Nen conjuration or it is like a weird prop.

Because as often as Tagashi likes to have weird Nen guys getting conjured, he will also...

I think about the first time we met Miss Neon and her room was just like full of toys.

And then we have um

uh Kilua's brother's awful goon cave.

What's that guy's name?

I never remember his name either.

Yeah, Milaluki, Miluki.

Yeah.

Um, what's your read on this, Keith?

Okay, so I believe that in Phantom Rouge, there is

another child that hangs out with Gonan Kilua.

That what?

That, yes, that

Kilua is wildly, outrageously jealous of, because Gon likes him.

And

this is like his

little doll that he carries around.

Interesting.

It's really fun if that is going to be what's going to happen because I feel like Killiua's weird, incoherent jealousy towards anybody interacting with Gon has been something we've talked about several times during the show.

But I think the first time it really came up was when

zushi appears for the first time and killer is like he has other friends he has other friends sorry no zushi's in the other hunter hunter movie zushi is in there's another one yeah

oh wow okay

by the way

not great but like the it was at least a fun watch for me to be like oh this is silly

to watch yeah

i think i think it would be it's weird how because of of the way this adaptation works, we haven't really gotten a chance to talk about the filler episode of anime, but it feels like it could have been a filler arc for Hunter Hunter.

Oh, fun.

Yeah.

Is it the same voice cost?

I believe so.

I'm pretty sure.

Interesting.

What's the second screenshot you have for us, Sylvie?

Okay.

The second one.

You guys wanted the hard ones, right?

Yeah, I can't wait.

Yeah.

Oh.

I think that we might have talked about this character.

Did we?

This looks like Maluki to me.

It does look like Maluki.

That was my thought, too.

Here is we have like a beautiful blingy font

saying heaven's angels in sort of iridescent purple.

Yeah, and then a sort of who is

it's very Lisa Frank.

It is very Lisa Frank against a sort of beautiful backdrop and then we have a sort of like

I don't know like gay Maluki

going on gay Maluki yeah yeah yeah

um I thought it was Nicholas personally when I first saw

Nicholas too I was like oh Nicholas

wearing eyeshadow

lipstick yeah as sort of a dress shirt but also like suspenders posing kind of coquettishly

neckwear that looks sort of like an ascot, but terminates into like a long bow.

It's very strange.

It's like a delayed bow tie.

Yeah, so the bow tie happens way down.

It's a bow tie with a fuse.

It's a bow tie.

It works its way up to the top and it explodes.

That's his nen ability.

I mean, so what we're seeing here is nen, right?

Of some description.

This is like the weird title cards that appear increasingly over the show when nen powers get activated.

This is what I so you're saying that this character has a nen power called heaven's angels?

Yes.

That's totally plausible, but it could just also be like sometimes they do like those like little watercolor poses of characters and it could be a character that is like in a gang of little gay kids called Heaven's Angels.

Like the bombers from the Legend of Zelda games.

Yeah, yeah, like Hell's Angels, but Heaven's Angels.

Oh, my God.

I mean, I think you're onto something.

I think that's why it's...

I think it is the Hell's Angels pun, right, Keith?

That's my thinking, yeah.

I want to say this one, I have no idea.

The last one I had an idea, this one I had no idea.

I think this is an advertisement for a store.

Oh.

What did they sell?

I don't know.

Makeup.

Those fucking bow tie things.

You're right.

Yeah, those bow tie things.

Dra, this is a good instinct because the first portion of Hunter Hunter is really regularly about money and about like what you do with money, how you get money, what money means to different people.

Then it becomes about ants.

But it could be a shop, right?

Who is this character?

My first read was, this is Maluki, but I don't think it is Maluki.

I think this is another person.

This just gives me Mac Daniels from Gundam vibes for some reason.

Mac Daniels is a really funny name for a character from Gundam.

It's not a character, that's the name of their fake McDonald's.

Oh, my God.

There should be a character called Mac Daniels.

Gundam say

I think like Omaro and Char get a burger at the Mac Daniels.

The font is similar.

Look at the end of McDaniel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's beautiful.

I want to go to McDaniels.

I think this also gives me sort of like cabaret vibes, like the host from Cabaret.

You think this kid might be a fascist?

but very possibly very possibly that very possibly look at the shiny hair you know uh-huh

um

it's

to say yeah

i can't say anything yeah i'll give any i'll give things away do you think we're gonna have a good time with this film i think it'll be fun i think it'll be fun to talk i think we will have some things to talk about and like i think that it is made by people who really love those characters um and i do think that the first like

half hour to 40 minutes has some genuinely good stuff.

It's that stuff that Keith was talking about that's partially based on the chapters of the.

Yeah.

That stuff I think will be genuinely.

Takashi actually wrote.

Yeah.

That stuff I think we'll actually be able to sink our teeth into a little bit.

Yeah.

But otherwise, I think it'll mostly just be like kind of silly.

It'll also be a lot of fun to talk about.

You can't convince me it won't be a good time to watch Kilua be outrageously and probably

confused at why he's so jealous of a random person.

Like I said, they really get the character.

There's also a joke that happens with that kid that I can't reveal.

There's a rug pull that is bizarre.

Yeah, I know exactly what happens.

And the capper on the joke is hilarious.

I also think that as a collective, we have some pretty...

We can talk about canonicity in ways that I'm excited to talk about with all of you in terms of, you know, what is canon?

How does it work?

What does it mean when something is non-canon?

How does that change the lens through which we talk about the show, etc.?

It's going to be a lot of fun.

And if you want to listen to it, you can go to friendsatthetable.cash and support us on Patreon.

The friends at the table Patreon is one of the best deals in the world.

Yeah.

You know, we have so much stuff up there.

We've been doing this for so long that, like, the backlog is nuts.

And we've always been great at it as well.

So even the really old stuff is, you know, tip-top.

Yeah, all this stuff is good.

Those are my...

The only better deal that you can get is a huge, vast amount of pierogies at Costco.

How vast.

Buy some pierogies and then listen to our show.

Please.

What are we talking about today?

Also, really quick, this is another screenshot that isn't for you to scrutinize.

However, it does confirm trains for you, Jack.

Oh, my God, they're on a train.

I didn't want to say it on Blue Sky.

I wanted to say it on the air.

Well, it's our two friends right there.

Yeah, Gunn's hair looks kind of weird.

There's occasionally some weird off-model stuff.

Wait.

Ah, fun.

I know there's no way shoot's in this movie, but that looks like shoot in the foreground.

Oh, no, I've accidentally applied a third screenshot.

It does look like shoot on the foreground.

It could be shoot, although it would be really, it looks like Killiwa has seen him, so it would be really weird if

there was nothing Chimera ant related.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, I think I can just put this one to bed real quick.

That is not shoot.

No, shoot, McMahon.

It is just a man disguised as shoot.

We're supposed to talk about Shoot McMahon.

Yeah.

I would love to talk about it.

Oh, hold on.

Freak news.

Oh,

Keith, a big trap door opened up, and he's fell down.

Well, that's because when I sent the third screenshot, my nen ability activated.

Here's, I will make a quick game recommendation.

This is something I have mentioned on my socials that I've enjoyed.

And it just clicked to me today that it does kind of have Nen condition simulator built into it, is Paranorma Sight, the Seven Mysteries of Hanjo.

Oh my god, you can't.

I'm sorry.

I'm not afraid to play this game.

Yeah.

There are conditions that people have to fulfill, and it's cool because you have to puzzle them out.

That's so neat.

It's a horror visual novel that

people talk about really fondly.

I apparently enjoy it.

I enjoyed it.

It opens really strongly.

It opens super strong.

I think it rushes a bit at the end, personally.

However, I do think it is still worthwhile.

A great handheld game if you can get it on either Switch or if you've got a Steam Duck.

Is it scary?

It can be.

I didn't think it was like

personal.

I don't know.

It deals with upsetting subject matter, but I'm a horror freak, so I don't know how to gauge that, you know?

Yeah.

Like

there's parts where they talk about very heinous crimes, but it's not necessarily depicted on screen all the time.

But I just like to shout out a good visual novel because it's a cool medium.

Hello.

Hello.

Keith's back.

I can stop filibustering.

I have a couple things here quickly to talk about.

The first

physical things?

It sounded like you got physical things to talk about.

Yeah.

Allie sent me a package of stuff that I think she got in Japan.

Oh, my God.

I'm going to send a picture of the first one here.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

What have you got here, Keith?

It's a little tea towel that has

Gon Kilua, Karapica, and Leorio on it, like the little chibi versions of them

skipping around.

It has the hunter language on it, so I don't know what it says.

I think it says hunter, hunter, and then it says gone kilua karapica.

Oh, yeah, that makes it out there.

It says it also says the back, the little tag, it says exhibition, Tagashi Yoshihiro, and then puzzle.

So I don't know what the puzzle is.

There's some puzzle.

And then, let's Sorry, this one's kind of hard to take a picture of.

It's Nen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It is Nen and Orb.

Well, Nen can be caught on camera.

We just have to.

We do know this.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

In a way, it was Nen.

It is.

Yeah.

Holy shit.

How long is this?

Shout out to Allie.

Two and a half, two, two to two and a half feet.

What is this?

This is the Nen wheel.

This is, yes, it is the nen wheel.

And then, speaking of what I could, this is like, I think, a letter-to-letter decoder for the Hunter-Hunter language down at the bottom is what I think that is.

From

Hunter to Japanese.

And

yeah, the Nen wheel with all the different N types on it.

Also, an inexplicable soda.

Oh, she gave me an inexplicable soda, too.

What's your inexplicable soda like?

Two strange colas.

I can't remember the name of it, of the cola.

I'm sure she's not popping you.

I did feel strange for a couple of

times.

Team Disappears mid-episode.

It was very Christmassy.

It was like

there was like, it was like vanilla cinnamon cola

or like maybe like allspice.

There was some sort of kind of like warm, like warming spices.

Oh, the spices.

Yeah, all spices?

Yes, all spices.

It had every spice.

It was nasty.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

And then it also had a little, it had more of those arena.

Oh, what is it called?

Those cards that you got?

Oh,

the

arena.

That was from Allie's friend Harris, who has also said a couple really nice things about the show.

So thank you to both of them.

Oh, thank you.

I have

what's that?

Did you get any good cards?

I got a really good

Gone and Kilua.

Nice.

On one card or just separate?

No, separate, separate.

Okay.

I have, before we move on from this segment, and I promise you, we're going to make Media Club plus.

Well, this is Media Club Plus.

This is Media Club Plus.

Me pointing at the back seats where people are like rustling and shaking their heads.

Settle down.

This is Media Club Plus.

Austin gave me a Christmas present, and part of the Christmas present is an envelope that has written on it, do not open until you have finished Hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

And the cast knows what it is, but I don't.

So, you know,

excited for you to open that someday.

Yeah, let's hear from you in the summer or something.

Okay.

That's the little whistle cue.

Yeah, that's the whistle cue.

Okay, so we watched three episodes today.

What were they?

113, 114, 115?

I believe so, yes.

Last episode, we left off with the destruction of that central staircase as a preventative measure by Yupi, and the king

leaves the guest tower with Zeno and Netaro.

In this episode, we're largely dealing with the simultaneous actions of each part of the extermination team.

Shoot takes his chance to initiate the fight with Yupi to help Moral escape.

Gonikilua and Ikalgo as Flutter head off in their own directions after Kilua takes a quick detour to help Ikalgo out and has some

confused internal turmoil over that.

Moral initiates his fight with Poof using Smokey Jail.

Ikalgo immediately raises a bunch of suspicion from everyone.

Netero and Zeno have a sort of brief encounter with Goan and Kiliwa before heading off.

And we end with Goan entering the guest chambers and seeing Pito with Dr.

Blythe operating on Komugi.

We're going to spend like an hour on just that brief interaction between Netaro, Zeno, and

and gone.

I can feel it.

I do think in general, and I'll be curious to see if the three of you feel differently.

I think these are pretty simple episodes from a Media Club Plus perspective.

I don't foresee too much trouble or getting caught in a massive bog or something with these episodes.

I think these are really like capital P plot episodes.

Stuff is happening.

The wheels are turning.

People are like bumping off each other in really interesting ways.

But compared to the high-stakes,

almost like watching the ship sail swing around and the ship moving in another direction that we saw last time around in terms of Komegi and the king and the assault on the castle kind of going wrong in ways no one was anticipating.

Here, everyone is sort of moving along their tracks in really,

if not predictable, but not particularly complicated ways.

These are great episodes, though.

This stuff is just humming along at this point.

It's such a joy to watch.

There was a world,

you know, months and months and over a year ago when I first wrote the outline, and where we were more worried about spending too long doing Hunter Hunter, uh, which was like one of the initial concerns before we started was like, is this gonna take forever?

And so, my initial pitch at like spending fewer than two years

doing the show was

had

episodes, it was either 110 or 111 through 115

all as one.

And then

116 to 121 all as another.

And I think when we watch the episodes, it just doesn't, it doesn't work for our schedules.

It doesn't work for the pace that we go at when we talk about the episodes.

But I think that when we watch the episodes, like it'll make sense doing them as a chunk.

Yeah.

Because while it's a ton of action and a ton of stuff to chew through, there's actually like less of what we end up talking about in these episodes.

There's just, but there is like so much.

There is like one notable exception, I think.

We'll get to later.

Yeah,

there is some stuff

which I'm really excited to talk about.

But I think these are also just good action episodes.

You know, after the sort of the techno thriller, Hunter Hunter is now moving straight into like an action thriller vibe, and it works so well.

Once we get past episode 121, ask me what I used to call these episodes.

Well, because

I have little things describing what the episodes are.

Oh, I think I even know what you

do.

So, like in the Hunter exam, I have them grouped like

10 to 12, Prisoner Challenge, 14 to 16, Assassin's Game Part 1, 17, 18, Assassin's Game Part 2, Phantom Troop, 42, 43, Karapika plot, 44, 45, 46, 47, Uvugin Capture, and then conditions.

Like, I have little titles for each thing to know roughly what's happening in them.

And at episode 121, I will tell you what I called these because

I just have been looking at it this whole time and like kind of dreading this section.

Interesting.

I was going to say that my first note for these episodes is like, we talk a lot about how Tagashi does

new and interesting or like subversive things with the Shounen battle anime as a concept.

Yeah.

But these episodes are just him like...

It shows that when he just wants to play it straight, he is also still a master at that.

I think the stuff with Shoot and Knuckle is my prime example of this.

Although there is one thing that's happening in these that is extremely abnormal.

Yeah?

Which is that there's a constant running narrator in the battle describing the internal thoughts of everybody.

Sorry, that's normal to me.

That's our friend.

It does start to feel normal.

Yeah.

Right.

The narrator is really on one in these episodes.

And we'll probably dip into talking about that in individual moments where it comes up.

But,

you know,

as a listener who might not be watching the show,

a lot of what we're going to be talking about is filtered through this sort of like constant lens of the narrator popping in to describe how a character is feeling about a thing or how a nen power works or you know

fleshing out some detail here or there

and that might not be apparent in the way that we are talking about it but the narrator is by now like a near constant presence

um

all right we begin with the wrecked palace the palace is now completely fucked up we spent so much of the the run-up to the assault in the palace and Nove's amazing infiltration of the palace, that we're pretty familiar with these sets by now.

We talked about this in the last episode with Austin, the way that coming back to that central staircase and, you know, like over and over communicating to the viewer how the palace relates to itself, the sort of the core

individual sets,

develops this familiarity that lets them play with the stakes more clearly.

Here,

we see it serving a second purpose, right?

Which is that now we get to see the palace in ruins.

And we are going, oh, right, that's that bit, except now this thing has fallen down, or you know, there are like aerial views, and you can see that even the grass outside the palace is just pockmarked by hundreds of the dragon dive

arrows.

It's great.

Another interesting thing is that we've sort of switched away from the traditional use of hegemony of the food chain for this period of the hunter exam, not the hunter exam, the chimeric.

The hunter exam is still not over.

It's still not over.

Someone's at Moral's actually about to say that.

You find

it true to be true

exams.

Hegemony of the Food Chain, we used to hear the really intense,

like that part of it.

But they switched for a lot of this section of the Chimera Antarct to playing the beginning part of it, which sounds like this.

And the narrator will come in and describe how sad everything is

while this plays.

And it's really good.

Another really efficient use of the soundtrack, which I don't know if you have noticed, but we've had barely any new tracks in like 20 episodes.

Yeah.

Now, why is this?

And why are we going to get like eight new tracks all in one episode in episode 116?

Oh my God.

I have to.

The Chimera and Arc is so dense, and part of me wonders whether or not

my gut is that there are two things happening here.

The first is that Hirano, as a composer, is focusing really hard on the next things that he's having to compose for.

You know, like scheduling means that he can't be keeping up a pace of new music

in the same way that he has been previously.

The other thing is that perhaps they don't want to overwhelm viewers with new information.

Part of why this bit of the Chimera and Arc works so well is that we have these really established characters, we have these really established sets, and all we're waiting for is the shoe to drop and them to sort of like fall out in an interesting new arrangement.

And in a situation like that, it's sort of a gift if you have, like Hirano does, this broad palette of pre-written scores to draw on because you can be like,

well, I don't need to introduce new music.

Everything I have written here can get shaded or can get colored or get reintroduced in a different way.

Fundamentally, new songs are harder to tell someone how to feel than songs where you've already used the song to tell them how to feel.

Yes, absolutely.

We do hear, I think, a new arrangement in one of these episodes.

I think we hear...

What's the narrator's theme called?

Pidemonia the Futane?

Is that the one?

No, no.

Legend of the Martial Artist.

Legend of the Martial Artist.

Oh, yeah.

We hear like a new arrangement of that, which I believe is just the flute part playing as Flutter Ikago is infiltrating the palace.

That's maybe true.

Usually, when there's a new arrangement, it will note it in this list that I have.

It's possible that they just didn't hit that one.

It'll say something like

unnamed or

unused

version of Legend of the Martial Artist.

There are also definitely times.

Oh, sorry.

It could be...

The last new thing was in episode 111.

It was called Memories, and it was just like a plinky piano thing.

There's also times where it'll just use a certain portion of a song that you don't necessarily hear.

Oh, yeah.

That's true.

Like here in hegemony of the food chain, where we never really hear that until like the early hundreds.

It plays hegemony of the food chain totally differently.

And then now it will play a different part of that over and over and over.

It's very useful.

And of course, they were obviously thinking about this as they were making Hunter Hunter for making Media Club Plus, because it means that we can focus on stuff other than the music for a while.

Hey, people like the music stuff.

People like the music stuff.

It's consistently one of our biggest compliments.

They really enjoy that.

I'm so glad.

It's so much fun whenever we talk about the music stuff.

But at the same time, I am sort of grateful that we can be this deep in the Chimera and Ark and not having to think about too much new music stuff.

Although episode 116 is rumbling over the horizon.

Would you like to hear the titles of those songs just as a taste?

Yeah, sure.

Prologue, Invaders, Vow of Vengeance.

What's going on here?

I won't.

Actually, I won't read this one.

And I won't read that one either.

Oh my god.

Can you send this to the group chat, please?

Yes, yeah.

You'll see the ones, I'll send it as a screen cap.

The ones.

Oh, no.

What did I do?

I'm using a different keyboard and I fucked up.

The initial assault

on Yupi after the.

Oh.

They saw what it said.

Sorry.

Could it be

the first one slapped me in the face?

And then the second one?

The second one is great.

But like,

the phrasing on the first one is really funny to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really funny.

It's really funny.

The first one is funny, and the second one is like,

yeah.

It's a statement of fact.

Yeah, the second one is like.

Yeah.

But we'll talk through the

stuff.

Through the ruined palace, we kind of come to see the effect of the first assault on Yupi or the consequences of Yupi's attack, which is that Goan and Killior have successfully gotten past Yupi and up into the higher portion of the palace, as has

Morel.

I believe that Knuckle and Melioron are standing at the top of where the stairs used to be.

I couldn't quite figure out their placement in the early portion of this.

Yeah, they're like standing at like,

I think that they went up when the stairs fell.

It's said that they were on the second floor, and then eventually they come back down.

Okay.

Shoot is already engaged in a fight with the massive Lovecraftian Yupi at this point.

And in a piece of foreshadowing that we will keep coming back to over and over in these episodes, he is already wounded.

His leg has been wounded, and he is using his fists.

If you remember, Shoot's Nen Power is the sort of, well, one of Shoot's Nen Powers are these sort of like floating, conjured fists that he flings at people.

He is like riding the fists,

almost like early art of witches standing on broomsticks or something rather than sitting on them.

He's used, Moral does a distraction to get away, but loses his pipe.

Shoot, who's already wounded, like, does another distraction to help Moral get his pipe back and then get away because he has poof to fight.

And then the narrator says, Shoot, his right leg crushed, unconsciously used his remaining leg to stand on one of his own fists.

Despite the fact that he had never attempted this before, Shoot realized this would be his signature move.

And although he had no clear reason to do so, he covered his right eye.

Yeah.

He simply enjoyed how the feeling of being cornered filled him him with strength that had until now eluded him.

Sustained by adversity itself, Shoot took flight.

Over the course of these episodes, Shoot McMahon is going to get the shit absolutely kicked out of him.

Yeah.

To the point where

by the end, the narrator is explicitly saying Shoot is going to lose.

It is only a matter of time.

And the control of the tone here is really something special.

Where

we, as the viewer, I can't speak for you, but I, as the viewer,

really did buy this sort of like triumph and joy in the adversity and like perseverance in him being backed into a corner and realizing where his strength lay.

And also, at the same time, how deeply sad and wasteful this all was.

And I think that like nailing down that balance, getting the viewer to feel not just, oh, it's sad that Shoot is probably not going to make it out of this.

And, you know, watching Shoot's health fail more more and more but also

he's really doing it you know he is in this moment he has recognized his strength he has found his courage um I thought was really good writing I really liked shoot's stuff in these episodes really good I mean I Takashi loves to do the we saw it a few times I mean Bisky basically says it at one point the like pressure creates diamonds sort of thing where like characters will realize the truth about themselves or like something major about themselves when put in these life or death, like super super heavy situations.

I mean, that was kind of going way back.

That was what Bisky was saying is like, quote unquote, wrong with Kiloa, right?

Is that like Kiloa, because you're afraid to fight, you will never know how strong you could actually become.

And here we see they don't actually hit this point too much in these episodes.

They did it a little bit in the previous episodes, but Shoot and Killiua are often paired for this exact reason.

And I think that's a really good articulation of that, Dre, right?

Of like, this is where Bisky saw was failing.

Killiwa learns to overcome it.

Killiua speaks to that in Shoot.

Shoot learns to overcome it.

I really like the narrator's line.

He doesn't know why he's doing this.

Just to really hammer home, you know,

until he is the man in the arena, he cannot conceive of any of this stuff, and then he can.

Morel has a kind of sweet line here after,

oh, Morel gets cut in half, but his,

it's a smoke version of Morel.

Don't worry.

This keeps happening.

Every time it happens, I'm like, oh, God.

Oh, oh, oh, it's just a smoke version.

Which is great.

But he does lose his pipe briefly, and then one of Shoot's fists carries the pipe back to him.

I love it.

And Morel, as he leaves, he says,

when we get out of here, let's drown ourselves in really good liquor and get hoisted.

I want to give you guys a big hug, and that's the only way I can think of that you'll let me.

Dudes rock I love dudes rock

so much there's some real dudes rock vibes in these CD Hudson yeah moral is extremely dudes rock moral like honestly these three are all like they become so well like we've already kind of sung the praises of like introducing characters late in the game and

sticking the landing but they are so all so strong both in terms of like individual vibes you kind of understand what they've all got going on and then also as a unit you're like oh yeah the you do feel like moral trained these two you do feel that paternal relationship there and then the sort of like best friends thing going on with with the uh the two students there's i really enjoy it that tagashi can like keep a character on ice until it's like ready for them to or like maybe like a multi-stage rocket where like we we felt like we already understood shoot's deal and then like the second thruster kicks in and you're like oh there's like a whole new like avenue for shoot.

You know, and Moral has this is like Moral's third kind of big thing that like re-characterizes him a bit.

Yeah.

This is part of the value of Tagashi's,

you know, one of Tagashi's plotting techniques of just like introducing massive gangs of weirdies all at a whack and then sort of forgetting about them or seeming to forget about them, which is that it does let him introduce a lot of possible

levers that he can suddenly start pulling at any individual moment.

I think the senior hunters are interesting in that there aren't actually a lot of them.

You know, it really is a small crew that has just been slowly developed and developed

over the Chimera and Arc.

They remind me a bit of the

suitors in

Francis Ford Coppola's Bramstoker's Dracula from 1992,

which are a bunch of bros who are all trying to woo one woman.

And initially, initially all start from like a position of mistrust and jealousy but it turns out that one thing better than mistrust and jealousy is a desire to find and kill dracula yeah over the course of the movie that they form this like incredible like loving brotherhood are you dracula killing bros

And there's something going on there with the exterminated, the senior members of the extermination team as well.

Please be careful mentioning Dracula, though, because I will start doing those for Artu voice.

I don't even know what it sounds like.

Yeah, don't threaten me with a good time, Sylvie.

Would you like

to play a Hunter-Hunter game?

Is that Willem DeFun?

Annoy I did Jet Jigsaw.

No, Willem Defoe.

No, no, it's like a Bloodborne character.

Yeah.

Willem Defoe none.

I don't know who plays those.

I just know Willem Defoe's in Skasgaard plays.

Defoe plays sort of Van Helsing, and he just sounds like Willem Defoe.

He's great.

I do.

Why would you make him sound like any different?

He sounds great.

He does sound really good.

All right, let's see.

We cut to Ikalgo, who is now on a fucking stealth mission.

And you were not kidding, Keith, when you said Ikalgo accidentally attracts the attention, the suspicious attention of every single person.

Yeah.

It starts pretty well.

We're introduced to Ikalgo's power, Forbidden Games, Living Dead Dolls.

Right.

Officially introduced.

Yeah.

It's confirmed that he's using, that he's puppeteering corpses,

which we had sort of known.

They previously talked about it as like when Captain Ikalgo takes a host, you know?

And I'm sure that he can possess a living person.

I just imagine it kills them.

But here we have, you know, dead Flutter.

It's really funny how lovable and sweet Ikalgo is, and his power is forbidden games, living, dead, dolls, and he's puppeteering what we will soon learn to be rotting corpses around.

This is part of the value of Nen.

If you write a character strong enough, you can give him any fucking Nen power and it'll work.

Goan and Kilua pass him heading to the basement.

This is lovely.

This is some real

Steven Soderbergh heist movie or Steven Soderbergh crime thriller thing, where something that Soderbergh loves to do is set up these sort of like intricate clockwork plots, put a bunch of characters or a team into a location doing individual tasks, and then as they are doing their individual tasks, the camera will sort of catch their paths intersecting.

However, in this moment, the path intersecting leads to something really interesting happening.

You're right.

This is where

Kilua, right as he's going to turn and go with Goan, notices that

Ikalgo's about to run into two ants

and just like instinctively goes to help by running up to them and exploding their heads instantly with his yo-yos.

It's a great shot.

Looks great.

It looks animation

is incredible.

There's this like really heavy, like inked outline to everything while he's getting his yo-yos out and such.

Yes.

It's like

it's one of the things that sometimes happens where it's visually interesting in like three, four different ways, all within the span of a couple seconds, where it's like, yeah, that super heavy inked outline, and then he really stylized like yo-yo POV back at Kilua, and then

the

yo-yo's going into their heads like

a hot knife through butter, and then their heads exploding into nothing.

This is more Tagashi head gore.

This is a Hallmark.

I don't really know why.

More like a lifetime.

Fuck out of here.

And we're ending this podcast right now.

I watched a Hallmark movie the other day.

I might have talked about this that was like, what if Hallmark Hallmark makes Indiana Jones?

Did I tell you about this?

No.

Was it the Christmas one?

It was the Christmas one.

Do they do anything else?

For the secrets of the Yule Lats.

They do do other stuff, Keith.

They do homecoming stuff.

They do fall stuff.

I watched a Hallmark movie called Pumpkin Everything.

It was fucking terrible.

Anyway, this

does bravely ask the question, what happens if Hallmark tries to make an Indiana Jones movie?

It doesn't work on any conceivable level.

Like, the way Hallmark thinks about plots and the way Hallmark thinks about like it's really it is kind of worth watching.

The way they think about like moving through space and moving through a story is like fundamentally incompatible with what is required to tell an Indiana Jones story.

It's really interesting.

Yeah.

Indiana Jones doesn't really even know how to make those movies anymore.

Not anymore.

No.

They did know how to make it for a while though.

This moment, Killiwa turning in slow motion, and he's not quite sure what he does, why he does it.

He's

like, What am I doing?

Why am I doing this?

Yeah, the narrator pops in to say he had always been the one reminding others of the importance of staying on task.

Although his mind was in a panic, his body continued to act rationally.

This is sort of the first tolling bell of a classic localized Killiwa Zeldic meltdown that begins over the next couple of episodes.

Yeah, but I think this is like the first.

I mean, we've been seeing Killiwa going through a grinder already

in the build-up to this of like like his anxiety about what if it goes wrong, his great moment of like, I knew it when he pops out and they see UP and they don't sense Pete,

they don't sense Peter's N.

Yeah.

But over these few episodes, he's going to sort of start spiraling in a way that I'm really interested to talk about.

Remember how convincing he used to put on that he didn't care about stuff and that it was all going to work out?

It's like a completely different guy.

I mean, I can see how he gets there, right?

But like the idea of Kilua Zeldik as like a cocky, disaffected person is now so funny to me when he is instead the person who is like violently caring at all times right i mean he every other shot of kilua he's on the verge of tears like crying tears

he's great yeah i was gonna i was gonna post about this on blue scare the other day but then i realized why would i do that when i can talk with my friends about it yeah with our uh mountaineers and it's blue sky so you might get random people spoiling the show for you because that's how blue scare works

crucial I was thinking about how the first time the three of you said to me, Killu Zaldik is the protagonist of Hunter Hunter.

I sort of was like,

What a funny joke, right?

I can sort of see a lens in which you might think that.

But now it just seems so wildly obvious.

Right.

Just like a statement of fact.

It seems like an exaggeration, like in New York is the third character.

Should you get fucked up?

York too is the third character.

Please.

Right, yes, exactly.

But it is just literally true that Kilu is the protagonist.

It's like not, it wasn't like a joke or an exaggeration.

What's great is that he has like become the protagonist.

I mean, he kind of always was, you know, in retrospect, you can see that he always was.

But the Kilua arc that we have been seeing him go on, you know, it's been sort of rumbling along quietly for now.

But I feel like the big sort of climactic moment that we saw last was him ripping the needle from his head.

Oh, and I suppose him and the Kalgo falling in love with each other.

Speaking of falling in love with the Kalgo, you know, this is

My initial read on this moment of turning and going to help

is like dovetails with Killiwa's anxiety, right?

Where like he, he,

not just his anxiety broadly, I mean his anxiety in

Nove's apartment before they leave, right?

Where he is, he is like,

he invents game theory, he plots it all out.

He says, you know, we need to be, we need to be really precise and we need to be really particular about what we understand will happen.

We need to stay stay on the plan, but we need to conceptualize other aspects of the plan.

I don't feel like anybody is taking my anxiety seriously, but I'm just sort of like putting it out there.

We talked in the last episode about Kilua, like taking a position of authority in situations like this.

And I love this, this like almost immediate as the mission begins, this moment with Ikalgo when he realizes the like the limitations of all that anxiety and all that planning.

When he he's like, well, I have to act, you know, I have to go off piece.

and then also how tragic it is that planning Killua is the right Kilua.

This was the wrong thing to do.

Flutter is not known to be a bad guy, like this

there, like maybe Ikalga would have gotten into trouble on his own because he's about to call Lael Hagia to two people who know that Flutter would never do that, but that might not have happened had Killua not intervened.

At the very worst, as well, Ikalgo is a capable fighter.

Right.

Yeah.

These two ants would not have said shit, I think, to Flutter.

They were, I think that they were, they're soldier ants.

They were like one level below

Flutter.

And then definitely what wouldn't have happened is Welfin, who sees, doesn't exactly see, sees everything except Flutter and Killua passing each other in the hall, sees all the other pieces to it, and is revealed to be the second most neurotic person on

the whole show.

Welfin comes out of these episodes so well.

Tagashi puts his foot on the gas pedal in terms of like, I have to make Welfin go now,

like go as a character, and he works so well.

Yeah.

Welfin, one of my favorite things about this moment, Welfin, seeing Killiwa's mistake and seeing Flutter come walking carefully down the corridor, is that he doesn't immediately start, he doesn't figure it out.

The overwhelming thing about Welford is that he's a suspicious character.

And instead, what happens is that he just goes,

What the fuck was that?

And then his mind starts spiraling.

There's a breakdown in the third episode that we're going to talk about that is one of the best breakdowns.

The like

wild leaps in logic made in such a short amount of time.

Like, astonishing, astonishing writing.

Killiwa passes Ikalgo, and Ikalgo says to himself, you owe me one.

Because I'm doing while all this is happening, by the way.

Oh, Gon is running.

Gone goes.

Gon is sort of running, not really thinking about his friends, just going straight for the mission.

Yeah.

He is, right?

That's what Gonzalez is.

He totally is.

Sylvie is judging.

I am.

You're judging Kilua Zaldic.

No, what I'm doing is pointing out that Kilua and Gon have switched places.

Right.

Yeah.

They have completely switched functions in the story.

Gone is the one who is the cold, mission-focused one, and Killua is the one who worries about his friends while they are.

But there's one problem:

Goan is missing Kilua's cool, mission-focused charm.

Well, yeah, absolutely.

Goan is just scary, Goan is just terrifying, right?

Like, he's a Terminator.

Yeah, um, or like we were saying in his eyes a few episodes back, he's like Illumi.

Yes, and Kilua's power is like

sharp and bloody and piercing.

You know, Killua's signature move is that thing where he makes his hands sharp needles.

We saw him do that.

Yeah, we did.

Achillua attack is like precise.

It takes one second and it usually leaves like this fountain of blood.

Goan, meanwhile, is a sledgehammer.

You know, Goan's signature attack is like just this ball of obliterating light.

Or worse, just a punch delivered to you by a fist.

Yeah, that becomes a ball of obliterating light.

It's a sledgehammer.

Yeah.

This is great.

I mean, this is this is

such a nice like interpolation of the Ikalgo,

the like love for Kilua, love for Ikalgo, love for Goan plot.

It's not really a love triangle because I don't think that like jealousy or sort of like the like a power imbalance of love is at play here.

Right.

But I do think that it's a little bit.

It's a love line with a start, a middle, and an end.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's just adding some really fun color to this.

Uh,

something interesting, though, is that, you know, if Kilua is feeling

that he is the Goan in his relationship to Ikalgo, like the camera is showing, then him acting like Goan here

to Ikalgo's Kilua makes like perfect sense.

Where he's like, the reason we're doing this is I'm fulfilling the story requirements of needing to appear like Goan.

Yes, yes.

then Cheeto and Bluster emerge.

You cheetoed him again.

I completely, I knew in the back of my head that Chitu was gonna show up again, but when Cheetu fucking showed up, I was like, oh, what the fuck is this guy doing here?

Yeah, I love Chi-Too.

Yeah, um,

Chitsu and Bluster show up, and immediately, it's great, you know, Kellua's awful sudden attack on the two soldier ants kind of like wrong-footed me as a viewer in terms of what was about to follow.

Because I was like, oh, Flutter's going to have to get into a fight.

And then I was like, oh, no, wait, oh, no.

Because Flutter now has to play Agent 47, dressed up as the drummer, going, I love to drum.

Oh, I'm going to love to see Flutter drumming.

Yo, Flutter, do a blast beat.

And he can't.

I mean,

the scene sort of begins as he's, they're sort of like, Lord Flutter.

And they're like, hi.

Meanwhile, Shirepoof is beating himself up that he wasn't there to defend the king.

Do you know the deal by now, gentle listener, when Shire Poof beats himself up?

This is that, but with a sort of like even more like fatalistic, doomy approach to it.

He says,

and the last time he did this, he said he resolved to commit suicide.

Yes, he did.

He says,

He's talking to himself, like a version of himself is talking to himself.

And he says, how do you even qualify as a royal guard?

The narrator points out his fatal flaw at this point.

He had an absolute ideal to live up to with no room for amendment.

Yeah.

He just cares too much.

Yeah, he simply does

too much.

He considers himself now a former royal guard.

This is so good.

And it only makes him more dangerous as well, right?

Because he's the person on his last day in the office trying to, you know, really stir the pot before he leaves.

He's like, Why couldn't I find the king?

And then he sort of realizes in a sort of awful, like sickly

admission to himself that he knew where the king was.

He just didn't want him to, quote, be with that woman, right?

And truth, he doesn't want to admit to that.

How did that look on screen?

When he refused to use spiritual message on the king, at first he says, it's because that would be an insult to the king.

And it's like, no, it's actually because I don't want to know.

Yeah, how is that represented on screen, Sylvie?

Well, it's basically this.

Remember Remember how Bad Move Little Ant was rendered?

It's basically the same.

It is big block tech, like kanji.

And like the screen just sort of vertically scrolls down it while he says, I don't want to see him with that woman.

Oh, yeah.

That is so good.

It's like the Star Wars crawl of Shire Poof admitting that he...

It's really weird, right?

Because I think Shire Poof doesn't really love the king romantically, despite his sort of like Bishonen romantic presentation.

The thing he loves is the idea of the king as the sort of like spearhead of ant ideology, right?

He's like so wildly in love with capital T, capital K, the king.

I think you saying that, I think it's time to like put a name on the thing that we've been, that I've been, that we've all been referencing about

the royal guards the whole time is

like

this kind of clash between

Poof's idea of the king and then the reality of the king, which like we can see in these episodes that Peter just sort of like accepts, like accepting orders from the king as the king is versus Poof's psychotic insistence that the king be this other thing

and then calling that loyalty.

Yeah, and it is, it's once again just sort of like a misapprehension of

what you're born for, of what you're supposed to be.

You know, we see this over and over.

This is Killius plotline as well, if not a misapprehension, right?

Like a misunderstanding or a misalignment between who you are and what you are supposed to be.

Share some of my favorite screen caps of Poof's meltdown here.

Yeah.

Because, you know, if the king isn't capital T, capital K the king, then poof isn't poof.

Yep.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're right.

Useless poof, you utter fool.

I've said that to myself a couple times.

He also says,

Where is it?

You are now a mere bug.

You are you.

You are less than trash.

He keeps calling himself like fool poof.

Yeah.

And he's like singing and dancing like an idiot.

All tears streaming down his face.

He's so funny.

It's unbelievable.

This is not the first time that we've said this, but if you're not watching any of this show, go and watch Shadow Poof's Meltdown in the last, uh, you know, uh, 25% of this episode.

The problem is, all three royal guards are my favorite royal guard.

They are so well rendered.

I, I, I could easily put put Yupi last, but the other two.

I think Yupi is fucking great, though.

Yeah, and this is not an insult to Yupi.

It's just how can you compete with Poof and Pito?

Yes, that's true.

I think Pito is probably my favorite just because they are just an awful, just an absolute nightmare.

um

let's see uh this is this is great this is like um the the absolute like nihilistic depth of poof's um selfishness and the selfishness like deep in his ideology but at the same time he is just desperately trying to like in the in the way that um cotton candy spins itself around the stick, you know, more and more.

He is desperately trying to wrap it in this sort of like sweet, loyal devotion to the king.

He just ends by chanting for the king over and over again.

And the narrator says that the chanting does it justice.

Yeah, he's sort of like yelping and singing.

It's really good.

The narrator says, A mad fanaticism greatly hampered Poof's normal thought process, which you could have written on the bottom of the screen the first time Shire Poof showed up, and I'd have been like, sounds about right.

Yeah.

Great.

Great character.

Honestly, all-time character, Poof.

Love Poof.

Midway through his meltdown, he turns around to see Morel standing behind him.

And then something great happens.

He flies up like a moth and bounces off the wall.

He like bounces off Morel's smoky jail, which is this, you know,

thick smoke.

And he, he, he, he turns and he says, Let me out, please.

We get this great shot of Poof reflected in Morel's glasses.

I love this sort of like,

you know, like pathetic, weak little moment of physicality.

You know, Poof is so often extremely physically strong and frightening, but just melting down emotionally at all times.

And I love that his first reaction on seeing Morel is just to like flutter against the edges of the room like a moth.

I also like that it's, you know, even though Poof is totally losing it, it is, it is just like another

example of the Royal Guards like not being what was expected.

Like, they're monsters for sure, but I don't think the like head down, let me out, please, tears running down his face is what anyone thought was going to happen when they started a fight with Royal Guard.

Although, to his credit,

he

gets control of himself in this moment, sort of, insofar as Jayapoof can.

He turns around and opens his wings to cast Spiritual Message.

Spiritual message, love spring of moth scales.

He is doing an aura reading in the pseudoscience way, not the hunter-hunter way.

The way that spiritual message works, and the visual on this is great, is he sees these sort of like tiny points of light representing a nen aura around someone, and he uses this to determine their emotional state.

He checks the vibe.

This is we sort of learn how this works in the next episode, but we can talk a bit about it now.

Something I love is that there's a similarity with

what's his name?

Knuckle here, where he's not only checking the vibe, he's like Morrel is displaying vigilance, confidence, and some other thing in a ratio.

2-3 to 5.

Resolute.

Yeah, he's 2-vigilant,

3-resolute, and 5-confident as a ratio.

He's able to see the stat sheet.

I really like this, and I love how he desperately doesn't want to do this on the king because he knows what he'll see.

You know, it's so sad.

A hundred to one Komugi.

Yo, it's all gunky in here.

Oh, Gunky.

Take off their boots.

Shut up.

More

like

Soderbergh sort of counterpoint here as Goan looks up to see Morel's smoky jail.

Killure is lagging behind him for some reason.

Again, you're right, Sylvie.

This is the exact opposite.

Killure is always the one charging ahead and turning around to see Goan either looking beautifully at a butterfly, gently touching a tree, getting into a fight with like four separate guys.

Then Ghoan turns to see the king calmly leaving.

on another rooftop.

This is like following on exactly from that last shot of the king as he walks between Zeno and Netero.

Notero and Zeno are walking behind the king, and Notero just like gently points a thumb over his shoulder towards Gone to be like, Peter's in that room.

The

This is so the shot of Netero looking over and seeing Gone in the far distance, Goan being drawn so small on the like uh parallel bridge on the other tower and then there's like a medium shot or like a full shot of Goan, like fully cast in shadow, and then the like

kind of casual, almost joking point back, like she's that way, and then Goan's or like dark black aura coming out off of him.

Awful.

Unbelievable.

It's so good.

It rules.

It's like the remember the King's aura when a certain green player got hurt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's actually, it's weird.

Like, the king's aura in that moment was dark.

I think it was like black and gray, but it was kind of like diffuse and whirling and swirling.

Goan's is just like black fire.

It's just, you know, burning.

Yeah.

I love the shot of Goan from the massive distance and then the

full shot of him totally cast in shadow.

It's like one of the best things in these episodes for me.

It's great.

Now, on the face of this, this is pretty straightforward dramatic irony, but it's worth saying to, you know, talk about at this point, as the viewer, I do not want Goan to kill Peter.

Right.

Yeah, no one does.

I think no one, very few people do.

There's people that do,

but but but Peter's the bad guy's the good guy,

and that's what they say, and that's who doesn't like the Chimera Hand Arc.

Outside of the sort of like general dramatic irony, right?

Of like we, the viewer, have more information about the situation than our hero does.

And our hero is on a violent path that he doesn't fully understand that we the viewer do.

You know, this is, this is really standard.

This is like a good, standard, tense piece of dramatic irony.

Can I ask you something real quick, Jack?

Yeah.

Even if...

If in this moment we could download all the information we have in our brain to Goan's brain, do you think it would make a difference?

No, one bit.

Yeah, I don't think so either.

No, one bit.

But I think Takashi goes one step further, right, beyond the sort of general dramatic irony here, which is that Goan is a frightening laser-guided missile.

It's not just that we don't want Goan to kill Pito.

Goan is

Goan is the villain in these sequences, right?

We're like watching a violent train heading towards its destination, and we're going, oh, God.

I have one thing to add, because I'm not 100% sure.

In the last episodes, we saw Xano's blast, you know, coming in, or we didn't see it, but we saw the result of it.

You know, the king sort of handling Komegi very gently,

Pito and Zeno and Netero sort of being overwhelmed by this, Pito crying, them giving the ants the sort of space to deal with that,

and

that being a sort of transformative moment.

And when I was watching that, I was thinking, like, what would have happened to Poof if Poof was there?

Like, would Poof change his mind about how this is working, or would he remain totally mad about it?

And I have to also wonder the same thing about Goan.

If Goan was there for a moment that was like painted as transformative, would he be transformed by it?

I don't know.

But that's a really, that is a really interesting question.

I mean, ultimately, he wasn't.

You know, this is

right,

that's what makes it a tragedy.

Yes, they have placed these pieces in this configuration, right?

That the two characters who could perhaps be most

actionably transformed or most consequentially transformed are not actually there.

His will to fight has been set ablaze.

Sylvie, as Natera pointed, you said, horrible man.

I would love to talk more about like the weird sort of like

passing the buck that is happening here from the senior hunters, but I think that the time to talk about that is actually during an encounter.

Senior in a different meaning of the word.

Yes, it was Zeno.

Grandpea.

Oh, God.

The two grandpa's do sort of have a Mario, evil Mario and Luigi vibe in some business episodes.

They really do.

They don't let Zeno do it, do anything, but

to me, they are totally trying to communicate to you that Zeno is the remorseful one.

of these two.

Oh, hi.

Zeno is the one who doesn't like what's happening.

Zeno is the one that feels bad about the girl.

Zeno is the one who almost says to Kilua, you have to change what's going on here, and doesn't.

It's wild.

He's the patriarch of the Zelda family.

He is all like,

it's weird.

I've always been on kind of like, I fuck with Zeno.

Yeah, that's what I've been saying.

Maybe you do have to hand it to Zeno.

I don't know.

Tell you who you don't have to.

He's got a code.

Yeah, his code is one kill per day.

you know why?

Maybe it's a good kill.

You know, maybe it's a good kill.

We know one kill

for the Zelda family.

Luigi Zeldic?

Oh, Luigi Zelda.

Luigi Zeldic?

Man, I want to rewatch myself.

I want to definitely just the Mario and Luigi joke, not referring to anything else.

I want to re-watch Hunter Hunter so bad.

I got to go commission something real quick.

Hold on.

How does this stuff play once you've seen it?

It It plays so good.

I'm telling you, it plays really good.

I bet going back to Early Hunter Hunter is always just so rewarding because you are watching

nascent.

Yeah, like seeing the

like Goan in the early thing might as well be like a stuffed animal.

When you're watching it the first time, you're like, he's perfect.

He's a ray of light.

You're watching it like Kayla was watching it.

You're like, this guy's amazing.

Everybody he meets loves him.

It's awesome.

And then

getting to have that recontextualized by this you're like there's a darkness in him

what's what's

sort of can i give a sort of self-absorbed analogy for what it's like jack yeah please totally uh it's like in woodworking where like after you've put something together if you've done it right people can't see like three quarters of the work you did like they can't see all the weird little different joints and things like that but then when you go back and watch hunter hunter the second time you're like oh

oh yeah yeah yeah yeah what was really funny was like the first time through and you know it's on tape you can go back and hear me say it right from the beginning i was like there's something off with this gone freaks fellow but the thing that i was saying was he is like wildly naive and he is he is like very um

He wears his heart on his sleeve so dramatically that it's going to like cause him trouble.

It's going to be dangerous for Goan freaks.

And then the longer I watched it, the more I started saying things like, it's going to be dangerous for people around Ghan, this kind of like, this kind of naivety, this kind of like,

this sort of like fierce, directionless love.

And now I've gotten to a point where that naivety has sort of been eclipsed by this like single-minded cannonball fury and like

like blunt personhood to the point where I am no longer worried for

Gung's naivety.

I mean, I suppose I am in the sense of like a characterological long view or whatever, but

yes, you're right.

He's like a weird stuff doll at the beginning who you're like, wow, that poor boy, I hope he doesn't let himself get taken advantage of in some meaningful way.

And then you watch him become more and more like Jing and more and more like the worst violent impulses around him.

Well, fucking great.

And then there's this undercurrent and you we can't you have to like also hold that like why is he like this?

It's because of Jing.

It is the whole of Jing that like creates this darkness.

But

you know from what we've seen of Jing

like

the it sort of makes sense the sort of like detached kind of I'll be going now kind of attitude of like if you're not letting yourself get attached in this way, then you can't develop this sort of voracious darkness.

Yes.

And in general,

as someone experiencing media or as a media critic or as someone who just likes stories and working with stories, the best gift you can ever give yourself is sort of figuring out how to think about villains or think about negative characters in a way that goes beyond, well, those guys are bad.

You know, chuck them out of the story or whatever.

But I feel like Tagashi has given us an especial gift in the way that he writes

villains, in that I don't even watch Hunter-Hunter going, well, now clearly it's a story about how Goan has capital G, capital B gone bad, you know?

This is not a story about the villain Goan freaks or whatever.

Tagashi is just out here putting a bunch of characters on screen, many of whom have like conflicting,

regularly violent, regularly

like constricted personalities that cause them to, you know, hurt or help each other in equal measure.

And it produces this great outcome where it's like, yeah, I love gun freaks.

What a nightmare.

Yeah.

Um, he's great.

Uh, all right, let's see.

I know we said that these weren't going to be particularly difficult episodes to talk about, but it does turn out that

even when this stuff is humming along, well, firstly, it's us, and also, these characters have been put together really well.

Hey, we got through an episode in a half hour.

That's actually not bad.

Oh, good for us.

We just took an hour to get started.

Yeah, I did have a whole segment.

Yeah.

We had a really good opening this time around.

There's the kind of podcast listener who's like, why aren't they getting to it?

And sometimes I am that podcast listener.

But sometimes, you know, it's the whole.

Yeah, not me.

This is the show.

You want to hear them talk about whatever all the time?

Yeah, pretty much.

Pretty much.

The kind of show that I listen to, anyway.

That's true.

And the kind of show that I do.

All right, let's see.

I think I prefer cats right now at this point in my life.

Sure.

All right, we're going to have to do that.

Everyone has begun their battle.

Yeah.

Except Goan.

Kellyua.

And that's important.

That's important because we need to give Melioran somewhere to go later in this episode.

Yes.

With Goan and sees what he saw.

Is it.

It was.

It was.

Jack, did you find this confusing?

Which bit?

I don't have it down verbatim, but

Netero told me which tower they're in, let's go.

And then Kilua spends a lot of time thinking about

what let's go means, and then refusing to ask, and then that makes him sad.

Yeah, before we talk about that, I want to talk briefly about this incredible moment with the king.

The king

says something really weird.

Without looking back at Natero and Zeno, he says, take me.

And I can't tell whether or not he is surrendering

or submitting sexually or

I can't tell whether he's surrendering or he's saying, transport me to where we are going to fight.

And I really love that ambiguity in that moment.

The king is, you know,

we've been outside of the king's head for these last few episodes after having spent so long inside the king's head watching him melt down that i really love that we don't super know uh what is going on here um

out of respect zeno launches his his tremendous dragon attack out of respect or something else according to the narrator or something else again the narrator is like hedging a lot here it's lovely he says um

He made sure not to infuse his nen with any mischief.

He knows that the king knows that this won't hurt him.

And instead, what it does is that the dragon lifts the king up in his claw.

Natero, sinister, sitting on the back of this dragon riding it away as goat and killiwa stare up at it just absolutely dumbfounded uh the narrator the dragon pick up the king that isn't what i remember happening i remember the king wrapping his tail around the dragon claw and then just kind of like getting lifted up oh that's true i saw the king in the dragon's claws i thought he had picked him up but maybe not maybe you're right uh maybe the king was like willingly boards the dragon that's gosh that's what i feel like i saw but now i'm now questioning too.

Hmm, let's see.

Let's see if I can find it.

Do either of you have a sensation on this sort of like moment of ambiguity here with the king as to whether or not he's surrendering or whether or not he's moving to the fight?

Or do you read it?

He's moving to the fight for me.

The ambiguity in this for me is whether or not Zeno is afraid.

And I personally think that it is out of fear that he doesn't use a shred of mischief in his

fear that the king will retaliate.

The narrator takes time to note that Zeno is impressed that the king would know that the Nen was not harmful.

Because of, you know, reminder, the king is a few months old at this point.

Yeah.

One thing about the king, though, it's that he is extremely good at seeing and understanding nen.

Yeah.

So

he does pick, he does wrap his claw around the dragon.

Okay.

Sorry, wraps it, no, wraps his tail around the dragon's claw and sort of gets carried away.

At this point, have they established or hinted at that the king knows that it was Zenno's

nin who that struck Komogi?

I think that the king knew, yeah, right away.

Okay.

So I also wonder if that could possibly be a part of, you know, Zenno very intentionally being careful with his Nin.

Yeah, we took.

I just think the king's a genius,

and I think that he's just, they've just, they've done a lot of of legwork to show he can put two and two together.

He can put much bigger numbers together, even.

And I think that he had,

I think he had all the pieces to work out what we've worked out.

Yeah.

My note here, unfortunately, just reads.

So I wrote down, it carries the king away in his core and a terra riding the back of it.

Goan and kill you, a stare, and then a line break.

And then I write, but still the kids want to get revenge on Peter.

This is unfortunately the problem.

Yes, then we have this really confusing line.

Goan says, let's go, and he leaps towards the palace.

And then Killiwa melts down.

He says, let's go.

Which is it?

Yeah.

And he can't ask, quote, the question.

If I ask him that, there's no stopping it.

There's no turning back.

And the narrator says, if he could only ask, then everything would be out in the open.

But Killiwa is worried that he will lose something he holds close to his heart.

What the hell is going on here?

Right.

So I'm going to give you a couple of things.

So the first thing is that the my subtitles, instead of saying, which is it, say, in which sense do you mean?

I mean, let's go.

All right.

Oh, that's just such a fucking mistranslation, like a mislocalization.

Yes.

Yes.

And then the other thing is that it gets, and I know that it's a, it's a, it's very confusing for people because I searched for the answer because I was like, this is so confusing.

Do people even get what's going on here?

And there's a lot of people explaining this scene scene in a way that doesn't make any sense.

I'll say, before I continue, Killiwa spells out exactly what he means later, even though I don't think it's a spoiler to talk about.

But if you want, I will lay off.

I mean, let's lay off, in part, because I think, what's the translation that you heard?

What does he say?

In which sense did you mean?

In which sense did you mean?

All right, I can sort of broadly put together what works,

how I think that that is going to work, and I'll see whether or not Killiwa is really meaning that later.

I think this is great.

It actually makes me sadder that we got that translation.

Sometimes I like the sort of like the ambiguity or the nuance in the two translations.

I think this was just a failure of localization or translation in this moment.

What I will tell you is what people seem to misunderstand about this.

And I checked the manga to make sure that they were definitely 100% wrong.

And I think that's possible that the people that were localizing it just also misunderstood Um, because in the manga, it is very clear that

Kilua knows which tower the king is in because

Goan says

Pito is in the left tower.

And then what the misunderstanding is that people say, which is it?

They're talking about which tower Goan didn't tell him which tower, but that's not true.

He did tell him which tower.

He did tell him that.

That is just 100% correct.

And it wouldn't make any sense for him to be melting down about, like, I can't ask him which tower.

It doesn't make any sense.

Like, that doesn't really.

This is lovely, though,

taking the correct translation in that it sort of like makes much more central and roots in the character so much more specifically the big anxiety that is going on here, right?

Killua sensing that something is up.

Killiwa wondering whether or not this whole thing is like a

doomed violent crusades.

And I think that it kind of like snaps back into focus around our protagonists, something that a lot of the other characters are kind of working through.

And it makes Zeno and Natero's

like dereliction of duty all the sadder,

which is great.

I love that Killua is worried he will lose something close to his heart.

If he could only ask, then everything would be out in the open.

Once again, we talked about this in the past.

Goan and Killua's relationship is being being rendered out through the language of romance literature and romance films.

Things left unsaid, losing something close to your heart, everything would be out in the open.

You know, this is the language of the third act of a romantic comedy.

My heart hurts right now.

Keith, you posted sad killua, and I'm genuinely tearing up.

I was about to say, if you're out there collecting sad kiluas, this is one of the saddest killuas you can get.

This is an S-tier sad kiloa.

It's great.

It's great.

Oh, go ahead.

No, go on.

I was just going to say, we're going to come back to this, Keith.

Is that what you were saying?

Yes, Killiwa Director Episode explains what he meant by

the episode.

Yeah.

It is like, I want to be clear.

I think it's at the very end of the arc.

At the very end of your nightmare, remember that.

It's not a big deal, which is why I'm saying, like, the stuff that it's concerned with, we already have put on our plate and we've been eating for a dozen years.

I mean, I think we're basically there, and it'll be fun to come back to it as and when.

Um, meanwhile, Ikalgo is trying to bluff his way through a conversation with Bluster and Welfin.

Now, I've already talked a bit in this episode about how I think Welfin, these are really good Welfin episodes.

I would also like to shout out my man Bluster, possibly one of the funniest ants just to put on the screen.

Yes, he is a big, stupid water bug.

He has a silly voice, and you don't even know what his power.

Oh, you do know what his power is now.

I do know what his power is.

We'll see it in a bit.

It's fucking funny.

He's so funny looking.

And he's so sort of like...

His character design is just perpetually...

The visuals.

He's just perpetually confused.

And he is often confused in his actual, you know, acting, but he's also just like trying to do stuff and going around and doing stuff.

This just means that he's like, he's like a...

Oh, man.

He's got one of the funniest frames in these episodes.

I will share it now.

It is not, it hasn't technically come up yet, but this one of my

let's see.

It's like, this is so funny.

Oh, this is during like Welfin's internal monologue.

Yes, it is.

Yeah.

He's peeking through.

One of my, I want to see if I can find it.

Yes.

One of my all-time favorite films is the 1940 Howard Hawkes film, His Girl Friday, which is

a kind of comedy that they only ever made one of, and no one was skilled enough to make it again.

I know,

there's a handful of these.

This is an undivorced movie, right?

Oh, oh, it is, it is an undivorced movie, uh, but the way that it works and the way that it moves, um,

no one has tried people have tried since, and no one has ever succeeded.

It is one of those things.

Uh, do you remember a couple of episodes ago, Keith, you were saying that very often people finish watching Hunter Hunter and they ask online, I've just finished Hunter Hunter, what is there that's like this?

Right, and they'll realize I'm very sorry to tell you there is nothing.

His Girl Friday is one of these.

It is a scribble comedy.

It sort of invented a scribble comedy.

It's about journalists.

And towards the end of it, a character called Joe Pettibone, played by the actor Billy Gilbert, shows up.

And he has one scene in this movie.

And he plays a man who is sent to deliver a message.

This is a picture of Billy Gilbert.

I'm just going to share it.

here.

Bluster has always given me big Billy Gilbert at the end of his Girl Friday vibes, in that he is barely ever on screen, and whenever he is on screen, he is fucking swinging for the fences.

He's great.

Ikiago is not very good at this.

I wrote down in my notes here, Ikiago.

That is not his name.

But he's trying his best, and luckily he's hit the two stupidest Chimera ants.

Chi-2 brags about a new ability that he is eager to try.

This is so funny to me.

He got his first ability roasted so aggressively that he has got off to try a new one.

And the conversation goes pretty well until Flutter, Ikalgo, makes one major error.

Calling

dead names Leol.

He dead names Leol.

There are consequences, people.

You may get caught in a big lie.

So don't do it.

So don't do it.

This is

amazing.

The punchline to all of this ants changing their names on and off screen thing being

it acting as like a shibboleth in this situation is great.

Both Bluster and Welfin

say,

did he say Sahagia?

I don't think G2 has noticed.

No.

No.

And then Flutter heads down into the elevator.

Bloster kind of stands there like, what?

I'm sorry.

The vibe from Bluster and welfin in this is like when you alert like six guards at once in Hitman, but you don't fill their complete alert bar.

So instead, you get that like hissing, like

sound in like a perfect ring around 47, and you hear like five guards go, like, what the fuck was that?

Quick!

What was that?

What was that?

Must have been the wind.

And then 47 like ducks into a corridor or whatever, um, and temporarily gets out of sight.

This is when Poof uses spiritual message on Morel.

And then he launches his first assault.

His wings turn black and explode into what first looks like a swirl of awful black hair, but turns out that it is a cocoon

swaddling him up.

He takes some slight to something Morel says, but he says, Don't worry, I won't remember when I'm reborn.

This is great, this sort of like fatalistic, self-destructive impulse kicking in here

also as a way into the fight with Morel.

This is backwards.

This is not how a butterfly works.

They go.

Well, hey.

We just assumed it was a butterfly.

He is a chimera ant.

That's true.

That's true.

He might just be like the Pokemon that looks like an ice cream.

He's not actually an ice cream.

It's an ice cream and then it becomes like a panzer tank.

I have to look through my plex to find the other re-wedding comedies that I have in there that I also haven't seen.

The Philadelphia story and my favorite wife, both also from 1940.

So whatever was going on in 1940, the three big re-wedding comedies are in there.

Is the Philadelphia story a Capra movie?

I'd never be able to pick a favorite wife.

No, it is George Cucker.

Oh, George Cukor.

Yeah, he's a rival.

Okay, there you go.

George Cukor.

I don't know

him at all.

He's a right.

He did Gaslight.

He did do Gaslight.

He was also originally.

He was,

I believe, yes, he was a queer director in the 40s in Hollywood, which meant that Hollywood kind of hated him, but also he was very, very, very, very good.

So they kept

giving him movies and also making his life really hard.

He was originally set to direct Gone with the Wind, but he was replaced on Gone with the Wind by Victor Fleming.

And I am so curious to see what Kyuko's Gone with the Wind.

He's a really good player.

He's an Adam Rip, which is a really good 99.

Wouldn't it be wild?

Wild to be a film director born in 1899?

I know.

It's extraordinary.

There's a really good book.

called Hollywood and Oral History, which is like

an entire history of Hollywood told by the people who worked in it right up until the sort of like 90s from the start.

There are these great early stories of people arriving in, you know, proto-Hollywood and it just being like farmland because it hadn't been built up yet.

And they would go into these barns, and down in the basement of the barn, someone had set up like a projection room or like an early film studio in the bottom of a barn.

It's wild.

Crazy.

Yeah.

That's the barn that fell on.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

What are you talking about?

Johnny Knoxville?

No.

Okay.

Buster Keaton.

Buster Keaton.

That's the one that fell on Buster Keaton.

That would have been a great joke, but I forgot the name of Buster Keaton.

Rip.

Rip the Buster Keaton.

Yeah.

One of the old times.

The bar got him, I think.

The bud did get him.

I like this, though.

It's

again, over and over with the ants, we keep coming back to like something has gone wrong with nature.

The king's birth is early and violent.

The ants themselves are sort of like a perversion or a corruption of nature.

The show is constantly interrogating that, but here we have a butterfly crawling back into its cocoon midway through a fight.

Shoot and Yupi continue to fight.

Yeah, and it's good.

Yeah, it's really good.

It's really wild.

By the way, we learn like five or seven minutes into this fight that it's been approximately 15 seconds.

It's so funny.

We're in the full time bin.

What did they call it?

The spirit?

Listening with the spirit.

That's when you, well, that's when you can hear someone's thoughts.

I don't remember if they gave us a word for just the time slowdown.

Well, I feel like they said that's like you can hear their thoughts and it like makes time slow down.

And so it's like you can have a conversation in the span of like.

five seconds.

Yeah, yeah.

They did say, I just can't remember if they gave it like a specific name besides listening with the spirit, which is when you can learn something that you shouldn't know from someone else during that sort of time slowdown.

Shoot is fighting with a wild, bloody abandon.

His clothes are torn.

He's got blood all over him.

But he's still fighting with this like spectacular energy.

At one point, he launches himself towards Yupi to cast Hotel Rafleisia.

That's his nen power that he used to steal Killua's eye.

He manages to steal one of Yupi's eyes.

This feels great.

Like, it's like something I really like about how they've built the

Royal Guard is that even if it's like something that in a normal fight would be super minuscule and not make, and like, honestly, it kind of feels like it doesn't make a huge impact at first.

It still feels massive that

he was able to get in there and get the eye.

Sorry for interrupting.

I just like, I got hyped.

No, no, it's such a, it's such a good moment.

And there's this great sort of like sad,

it's a really sweet tragedy, this kind of like this fight with that shooter's in, this fight with UP, this sort of like doomed fight.

He has a great line about how like anything he can do, however small, is both useful to the fight and is also like a triumph.

It's great.

I look back and my notes only call it a temporal discrepancy, which is what Zeno calls it during his

behind-the-scenes scene.

My note here says, poor Yupi is having a very confusing day.

Yeah.

Yup was just like, shit, I have to guard the staircase because I guess Peter is doing something.

Well, fuck.

Yeah.

That's everybody shows up.

He's also winning a fight that he feels like he's losing for some reason.

Yeah, they do some really good stuff.

After Yupi's like...

horrible Jungi Ito Lovecraftian Transformation in the last episode, they've like really toned that down where he is still this multi-eyed monster, but he's sort of animated like one of the aliens in Lilo and Stitch where he's kind of like kind of goofy with it.

You know, like he's pulling funny expressions with his eyes.

He looks great.

Oh my god.

Yeah, earlier.

And Poof as Pleakly and Jumba would be

early.

I shared because he breaks out of that like eyeball head mode because he gets really mad that he can't see who's attacking him.

And I shared it earlier, we scrolled up, and I said that his eyes make him look like fuck an Invader Zim character.

Yeah, he totally looks like an Invader Zim character with his eyes like all scrunched and angry.

He's also, he is genuinely confused.

He doesn't really know what is happening or why.

Yeah.

Is this a great line here where he's like, I just have to keep him fighting, shoot, I just have to keep him fighting me so that the others can get closer to the king.

Yeah.

And the narrator says, at that moment, Yupi and Shoot's goals, coincidentally, were the same.

Because, of course,

Yupi wants to keep fighting Shoot to keep him away from the king.

Did we say the line from the narrator at the very beginning of this scene where he said Shoot's reckless attacks without fear for his life ironically helped him survive for longer?

No,

it's true.

I'll tell you who doesn't like this is Knuckle.

Oh, he's having a bad time.

Yeah, he's having a really bad time.

To him, a huge amount of time has passed and then we learn exactly how much time has passed with APR triggers after 10 seconds.

It's so good.

Tagashi, it's it's a mini Tagashi trick because like the fight with Gone and Knuckle APR feels like it's activating constantly.

It's and so like you we are conditioned to feel like it's a very fast ability, which it is in reality.

But the way that they're presenting it here, it makes the audience really really feel the time dilation, and I love that.

Yeah, it's also like, um, it's such a small amount of interest, you know.

UP's nen is so immense, his aura is so immense, yeah, that it's something like you know,

APR is still, remember, APR grows the more interest it accrues.

It's still tiny, it's just bobbing around.

This absolutely feels like any moment that I have been doing something that I am deeply bored by, and I look up at the clock to find that, you know, 21 seconds have passed or something.

Knuckle is sobbing.

He is calling on Shoot to endure the fight because he can't reveal himself.

He's begging, please hang in there.

And he goes to charge in.

He nearly loses his cool, but Mel taps, I call him Mel in my notes because it's quicker to type.

Melieron taps him on the shoulder,

stopping him because he needs to take a breath.

So Knuckle has to sort of,

you know, take a moment and take cover and hide and let them out.

Knuckle briefly thinks that maybe this tap was just to stop him from charging in recklessly, but it's like, oh, nope, he really needs to take a breath.

I gotta go.

Yeah, Maliorone is

doing great.

Because the time violation,

you know,

it doesn't affect how long you can hold your breath.

So it's been minutes for us and for Maliron's breath.

Yes.

But everyone feels like it's only been 10 seconds.

Didn't he say that he could only hold his breath for 20 seconds?

No, it's supposed to be like two minutes and 30 seconds.

It's a long time.

I misremembered.

Yeah.

That's why he's insane that he already needed to take a breath.

He's stressed.

He's stressed.

He's stressed.

He's quitting smoking.

He is quitting smoking.

That's hard to do.

That's hard.

I love that

it is the invisible,

unable-to-speak person who is the one absolutely losing it on the sidelines.

I think it's such a great,

you know, it's like a hallmark of Shonen fights to have someone out there, you know, standing on the edge.

You see this with Goku all the time.

Goku's in a fight, and everyone is either saying, like, Goku is about to die, everyone give him the great strength of love, or they're saying Goku's about to kick this man's head like through a wall or something.

But, you know, they're visible on the side and they're cheering or they're sobbing or whatever.

And I really love that in this case, they are completely undetectable to anybody but themselves you know um just a quick sort of dramatic irony check-in everyone is very concerned about who's near the king and where the king is and getting to the king or keeping people away from the king uh king's gone the extermination team so literally Does not need to be here.

Like, the thing they needed to be here for has happened.

Yeah, I have a note about this later on and I can't find it, it but it does essentially boil down to i wish that those old men would have communicated this to them one um

yeah they're they're their like comms is appalling yeah and you know why their comms is appalling keith it's because everybody who is actually doing the work here or is like following the plan was in one room planning together and then the two idiots who literally begin by carpet bombing the place were off doing their own thing why didn't they you know remember that really scary scene scene with Nasaro where he like anticipates a phone call?

He like anticipates a conversation in a text or something?

Why didn't you help them?

I know.

Well, there's this weird thing of like, okay, the extermination team needs to be there to make sure that what the Netero wants to do can happen.

The weird thing is, like, if we think about it, like, if we were in a tabletop scene, it would be like, you know, one of those games where the person who's assisting has to roll and the person who's rolling has to roll.

And it's like the main person person doing the action rolls a 10, but the person assisting rolls like a two.

That is what it feels like.

And so they're mired in these consequences on this thing that they didn't even need to be here for.

This is also Notero, Isaac Notero, through and through, right?

This is the Notero's deep and fundamental belief in the hegemony of the food chain, something that we have seen as early as the Hunter exam.

Yeah, remember his remember his final round of the Hunter exam?

Right, it was it was it was literally hegemony of the food chain, yeah, yep

um this guy's the pits

he lets malarone breathe and immediately uh they become visible but they are you know hidden they're physically hidden from view but apr immediately becomes visible and yubi goes what's that what is that

this thing his first thought

This is like a running gag with the Chimera ants is that they are very afraid that something might be a bomb.

Just, you know, right, it's probably a bomb.

um

he withdraws all his arms um do you think yupie needs to be afraid of a bomb quick question no no you don't think that

depends on the bomb

a nuclear bomb maybe i don't know sure

i don't know um

he like so first he just like swings his arms at it most of this episode yup is whipping his arms around like crazy like a wavy tube man um

obviously he can't hurt apr

Then he decides to attack Shoot.

At which point, the narrator says, there was only one reason UP was able to defeat Shoot, a difference in talent.

And he blasts these awful, like, quill needles, like, sort of like tryptophobia needles out of his back.

His fucking like pore.

Like, yeah, he shoots.

He sin bullets out of his head.

Oh.

He absolutely did.

And I'm sorry for saying as much.

No, you're right, though.

Fuck.

Grody.

Yeah, it was grody.

It was a scary attack.

Shoot punges himself with one of his fists to propel himself backwards.

It's so sick.

It's so good.

Yeah, that was great.

I was reacting like I was watching a good wrestling match for this, where it's like, I know that this guy's not going to beat this other guy, but goddamn,

everything he's doing to keep in it is great.

And here's our real sad shoot moment.

You know, first he imagines a red butterfly, and then as he is sort of like flying, he sees

grass growing around his fists as they fly.

The sort of the like green of the Hotel Rafflisia fire

is sort of like the green leaves here.

Um, and he sort of like wobbles on the

fist that he is balancing on and like tumbles and slumps to the ground.

These two

manga panels are that of this moment are really, really good.

He says, I can still fight.

More than that, I can still fly.

Wonderful.

The narrator says, Slowly but surely, he was reaching his limit.

And it's at this moment that with a yell and you know, stamping down in a wide stance, Knuckle reveals himself

yelling, Bring it on, as he begins the fight with Yupi.

It's good.

This page is incredible, Keith.

I know, right?

The

bruising on Shoot's body, the framing of it all.

Hey, guess what?

Yoshihiro Tagashi, like a really good artist.

He's a really good artist.

Who would have thunk MF can draw?

Yeah.

I love how

well

and how meaningfully he can, like, wildly scale up and down the detail on any given character at any given time.

Yeah, it's wonderful.

And I feel like that is, from my understanding, the number one skill of a mangaka or a graphic novelist or something, right?

It's like,

where do I need to spend the brush strokes?

One of the few

comic book series I've read was an old Star Wars comic.

And there would be every once in a while, you'd get like a really, really wide shot of a landscape with like Luke Skywalker brushed in as a tiny, little, tiny little guy.

And those are some of my favorite.

It was great.

So I support this.

You know what they should do more of?

They should do more matte paintings.

Yeah, I'm always saying this.

I went to see Nosurati the other day, and there was some stuff in that movie that I was like, I should have been a map painting.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, they should do that.

I agree with that.

It's not very cost-effective.

It's not, but it does, unfortunately, look better.

Is it not?

It feels like it would be.

I probably is.

I don't know.

I just wanted to say something in the voice.

They just don't want to pay artists anymore.

Instead, they pay other artists to make bad computer map paintings.

Yeah.

It fucking sucks.

It fucking sucks.

Yeah,

I don't want to think too much about the entertainment industry.

Here we have confirmation as episode 115 begins that as the possessor, Ikalgo can use the people he's possessed'N powers.

I had sort of suspected this.

I couldn't tell whether or not the sniper, the weird, remember the weird sniper that Ikalgo was for a while?

Yeah.

That had like the air sack?

Right.

I was wondering whether or not that was a

you can never tell with Yoshi Horatigashi.

Well, because Ikalgo's head was the air sack.

So that feels...

Yeah, and his like arm was the...

That always felt to me like that's something that Ikalgo can do.

It's like, it's like a

It's like a property of Ikalgo.

But here we see him summoning Flutter's dragonflies.

It's great to see Flutter up and about.

I think Flutter is a wonderful character design.

I think he moves really well.

I didn't notice that Flutter's hair looked like a big moth from the back.

Oh, I don't know.

I really enjoy.

I think they actually mention that Ikago can do this when they talk about the dead doll corpse move.

I can't remember what it's called.

But they like offhand say that he could use this thing.

Being of good heart, which he is, Ikalgo has decided to rescue Palm despite never having met her.

He says, Palm is a friend of my friends.

I want to save her because I decided I would.

This is some real.

I'd like to die for this

squid.

This beautiful, beautiful squid.

What's the thing that Kubara says, Keith?

It's like, man's gotta have a creed.

Yeah, gotta have a code, I think.

Yeah, gotta have a code.

By the way, this is that moment in the, in the,

in the manga.

Unbelievable, I think.

Yo.

Oh my god.

He's so fucking good

to read and catch up with to where we are with the manga.

Because like every time I'm like, oh, I want to do that.

I promise you, this page does not look like how you think the page is going to look.

It is a vertical full page showing like a very

like realistically drawn rendering of Palm's face in very thin spidery lines and then Flutter and then Ikago's big round eyes and his huge eyebrows at the bottom.

And he's saying it's not about mission or duty.

I want to save her.

And the whole page is covered in this like almost like spirograph

super aggressive crosshatching.

It like

yeah, it almost looks like screen tone but it's all it it it also looks like just like scratched metal or something and like massive craters of ink blotching yes

which i love when he does he's done that a few times and i i do love that what does it say to me this says that this is a man who doesn't know who he's thinking of he's having it is such a vague idea like he doesn't know who she is really yeah yeah um yeah there's literally holes in it, and it's covered in all this bizarre extraneous fuzziness.

But also, it's this thing that he's sort of picking up from Killiwa, this sort of, and now the extermination team and Morrel and seeing Meliaron go through the same thing of like,

you can set that life behind you.

You can take a code.

You know, you can say, these are things I stand for.

These are, you know, these are sort of like ideals that I want to pursue.

Yeah.

In the

in the episode, it is sort of just like him thinking of the sort of like attractive version of palm, which I wrote down picture of attractive palm instead of insane palm.

Too bad.

Too bad.

It would have been very funny to say, she's a friend of my friends.

I want to save her.

And then have a ton of ring.

Now it's time for

rules about elevators.

Rules about elevators.

This is the most complicated elevator that anyone has ever made.

Okay.

It's fine.

I'm going to explain the kill.

Unless someone really wants to explain the elevator.

I have all the rules written down so that we all know.

I wrote a huge amount of rules for how the elevator works.

I wonder if there's going to be a bunch of elevator business.

He can't stop himself.

Even in the middle of his most ambitious, most high-stakes, most emotive arc, this is still the man who learned about art forgery, wanting to really go for it.

That's why he's the goat.

So

like

that's the secret sauce.

Inside the elevator is a scale that weighs anything that's inside.

You also have a code.

The code is personalized to each person.

When the code is distributed, you also have to give them a weight.

So there's a computer that knows who the weight of each person with a code.

When they get in the elevator, which can only hold one person at a time, they have to enter their own code and then a check runs to see if they weigh about what the computer thinks they're supposed to weigh.

If it doesn't work, then you get a strike against you.

If you make three mistakes, then the doors lock, the alarm is triggered, and sleeping gas fills the chamber.

And once the guards get you, both the violator and the code's original owner will be killed.

These are the rules of the elevator.

Now,

this is a contrivance.

What?

This is Tagashi knowing that he wants to do something later and not...

Or baiting us into thinking that he's going to do something later and not knowing how to do it.

So constructing...

This is like when you follow through the steps of a Sudoku and you're like, well, fine, that has to be a one.

That has to be a seven.

The elevator has to have a weight plate in the bottom of it so we can, you know.

I don't mind.

This is the mode that this guy operates in.

It's really funny.

It's really funny to see this kind of narrative flag put down and because of the way that Tagashi works, genuinely not knowing whether or not he's setting up some awful consequence or whether he's just making a menacing elevator.

I also don't know why.

If Nen is allowed to have conditions, so can an elevator.

This is just an elevator with conditions.

It's true.

I don't want to ring the Cinema Sins bell here, in part because the answer to why didn't they do this is that the story wouldn't have been as fun.

That is so often the answer to all these stupid cinema sins bells.

Ikalco is demonstrating here that infiltrating the palace in disguise is a viable option.

This is something that they had not discussed prior to the beginning of the plan.

I don't know why the plan is not more centrally focused around this, about like getting

specific like masquerading infiltrators into the palace, hunting down nen people who can do this.

Obviously, the answer is it's way more fun to do it the way that we are doing it, but But, you know, I have two qualms.

Sure.

The first qualm me up, Keith.

So, the first qualm

is

that

even though Flutter is not a disguise, it's an actual ant that actually works with these people.

He still is immediately putting two people on notice.

That's true.

It kind of doesn't work straight away.

The second thing is that the same thing is true of Meliora.

Also works with these people, also puts Welfin immediately on notice.

Welfin doesn't even see him, just smells him and is like

melts down more than anyone has ever melted down.

I'm so excited to talk about this.

Uh-oh, Steve.

So I don't know.

I think that what the show is doing is showing you, hey, even though we had ants on our side, just disguising people wasn't an option, especially because there was only like 15 people in the whole palace.

There is also like an overrunning theme among the ants is their like comical and ultimately self-defeating paranoia.

They do get checked when they pre in an earlier episode, they say that ants, all of the ants get checked when they come into the castle.

That was in like two episodes ago.

Yeah, one of the things about having very, very few people in the palace means that there are A, fewer people to, you know, have to worry about, but B, the like amplitude of the worry about those people intensifies dramatically.

Yeah.

Where you're like, well, it could only be one of X people, so we're going to be very careful about that.

This is where I wrote down, Bluster is so good to see on screen.

It's It's true.

I love that guy.

Yeah.

At this point, Welfin briefly smells a foul smell.

He says, what?

Why does Flutter smell so bad?

We know the answer.

He is dead and he is rotting.

He's been dead.

Just to recall what happened.

Flutter used the elevator to go downstairs, and then Blaster immediately followed.

And then Welfin went into the elevator to also follow.

All right, I remembered why I specifically wrote down Bluster is so good to see on screen.

Bluster has this really funny beat here where, like, Bluster's like, huh, huh.

He said, Lord, Hagia.

Flutter goes into the elevator, the elevator goes all the way down.

The elevator comes all the way up, and Bluster is still standing outside, going, huh, huh, lowering his big, stupid, lobster head, or whatever.

Then, silently,

like a horse who has been temporarily baffled, he just walks into the elevator and it's like, Guess I'm going down there.

Gotta see what that's about.

Um,

Welfin is starting to put things together, but he's kind of putting them together wrong.

I love that.

Okay, so I think Bloster also heard him say, Lord Hagia.

And so, Bloster must also be trying to figure out what's wrong, but also, I'm a chimera ant, which means I'm lethally paranoid and constantly afraid that someone is stabbing me in the back.

The reason for this is I'm constantly stabbing someone in the back.

All the ants do this.

The ants are like,

it is the worst crime to be disloyal.

And anybody might be about to be disloyal to me and the people I work for.

Also, I am the most disloyal person on the planet who is constantly scheming.

It's great.

It's like

the only exception to this is the King of the Royal Guards.

Yes, they are exceptions.

You described this in the past, Keith, as

like

eunuchs, like a culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like King Dynasty eunuchs.

Yeah.

Oh no.

Yeah, where they were like.

They were like all constantly scheming against each other.

This is also what happens when you get an intrigue court in Crusader Kings, where you are like constantly badmouthing how bad it is to spy and lie while also spying and lying as hard as you can.

Yeah, I do find it interesting that like the ants who stay within the ant structure get like consumed by this, basically.

So good.

And then the other fate for ants is you you rebel you you straight up turn turn turncoat on them and like you are on the hunter's side now sorry i need to correct myself ming dynasty eunuchs did they not have eunuchs in the king dynasty they did but the ming dynasty ones were the real famous ones they were the real busters yeah

those were some all-star eunuchs and it's it's funny because it's the same thing because they're allowed around the important people because they're seen as harmless and they use their status as harmless to sort of worm their way into like power and importance but everyone knows they're doing it past a certain point yeah so it just produces this like

this like nightmare yeah yeah hey have you guys ever heard of fascism before

this trait of the ants is one of my favorite like themes that has developed through the chimera and arc uh so then he thinks well hang on maybe maybe the reason that Blaster hasn't raised the alarm is that he's in on it.

And he imagines himself going down in the elevator and getting killed by Blaster's nen power, which is his claws opening and shooting him with the bazillion machine guns.

Does it remind you of anyone, by the way?

Oh, it's pistol shrimp.

It also reminds me of Franklin.

It's Frank's frankly.

What's going on here?

Why didn't Takashi come up with a new nen power?

Because it's really funny.

It's really funny.

Yeah,

this might be because I watched this episode with the dub, but in the...

Does anybody else remember how they keep referring to blaster here yeah they call him they call him bro right i thought they were calling him blow in the dub they call him blow

is this a pun on the pronunciation of of bro and blow and blaster in japanese although does he have a different name in japanese yes it's uh bravoda or something oh so the pun would still work right it is it does have an r yeah hold on i'll tell you exactly

it's a pun on blow that way bravado instead of uh blaster Blaster, I think.

Okay.

It just struck me as very weird that he's like super suspicious of this guy, but also referring to him by a friendly nickname.

Yeah, it's a triple pun, Jack, of

Lobster, Blue, and Blaster.

Oh, and also like Bluster, right?

Because he's like constantly

constantly...

Have we talked about this before?

I'm having crazy deja.

We have to talk about it.

We have this before.

This talks about how good the

pun is three or four

months ago.

Yeah.

Bravuta.

That's his

ask your doctor if Bravuta is right for you.

I feel like this is like coming back to the central staircase in Media Club Plus.

We're just gonna keep going over these conversations again and again.

It's sort of avant-garde podcasting.

I love the staircase.

Putting it on.

I love the staircase.

I love the staircase.

Welfin is now really starting to lose it because he's like, well, shit.

If Flutter is

turned traitor, and if Blaster has turned traitor, then hang on, BZF might have also been killed in this attack.

And if BZF has been killed, all my plans are for nothing.

This is some really great, like, failing to see the forest for the trees thing where he, like, misidentifies the situation and is like, well, shit, BZF is the real money ticket, you know?

I have to find BZF.

And it's like, we are way beyond that, my friend.

Sorry, and BZF is his ticket to becoming what again?

The power behind the throne.

The king behind the scenes.

The king behind the scenes.

He has a line later where he's like, I don't want to be the real king because the king has too much to worry about.

I feel like this is a massive misunderstanding of the role of the king behind the scenes.

Right, is the person who actually has to worry about things.

Yeah, and we know this is true.

Bezeph, every time we see him, he's like, well, other than running an awful sort of like sex slavery dungeon, he's also like, I have to answer all these phone calls.

Zeno intercepts Goan and Killiua.

Killiwa has this very

tragic.

It's great.

Killiua has this very understated, like, grandpa moment of like the Zaldics meeting on the field.

This is the first time he's seen him since he left the mansion all that time ago, right?

They didn't meet during York New City.

Killiwa as a Zaldic has always been someone on the outside.

Well, over the course of the show.

Famously, like, historically, Kiliwa was like a central Zaldic, right?

He was like the pride, the golden child.

Yeah.

He was in line to take over the family.

Yeah, but in the show, he has been set apart from the Zaldics.

And there is something, like, on the face of it, or sort of like on a very basic level, very touching about seeing him meeting his grandfather in this moment.

Zeno notices that Kiliwa has changed.

Yeah, looks into his eyes and goes, he's changed.

Do you think he sees that the needle is gone?

Probably.

Probably.

My belief is that the Zoldex knew about the needle.

Yeah.

And not just Illumi.

There's something really sad here in this scene, and a lot of it is, you know, we are, I think we are, because

to steal from the great range touch, because the method works.

You know, we are able to read this scene with so much more

care, or rather, we are able to give this scene care that we might not be able to give it if we were just watching it straight through.

This speaks to me so much about the Zelda family arc in this moment, him looking at his grandson and saying he has changed, and it not being terribly clear in the moment whether or not he is recognizing Killiua as having reached a maturity that he always hoped he would, you know, as the star assassin, or whether he is seeing that Killior is beginning to step away from that, whether there is a sort of a pride or a sadness here.

There's a lot in this glance between Zano and Killiua, I think.

And

the

show describes him as disappearing into the darkness,

but not before saying,

What does he say?

You make the call inside.

I know nothing besides the mission.

My job here is done.

This is awful.

This is some real

children

are left to pay the debts of their

possessed as shit.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

I missed a line.

He held back everything else he wanted to say, and Zeno disappeared into the darkness.

That's the most important line even.

He helps

everything else he wanted.

This is the whole thing for me about how Zeno is the compassionate one here over Netaro.

This is the first half is Netaro's sort of like thumb pointing back towards Pito to Gone and then Zeno holding back everything else he wanted to say and leaving.

And it's just like, no, tell him.

What's really tragic is that he and Kilio are on the same page in this moment.

We know Killiua is also feeling this thing and he just needs someone to verbalize it, you know

And he can't out of loyalty to Gome

and it could have been his mentor, you know, you know insofar as the Zaldic family are his men this could have been a moment where he got to see the patriarch of his family express like mercy and care And the patriarch is about to say it, but doesn't.

And so Killiua never sees his grandfather in that mode.

It's fucked.

Yeah, it sucks.

It is a violent tragedy that Netaro and Zeno.

You're right.

Zeno is the more compassionate one in the situation, but Zeno was the one that carpet bombed the palace.

You know,

these two elders are able to sweep in and say, Set ye all on the path to violence and bloodshed.

And then when the time comes, they leave the palace.

They don't communicate to everybody that the fight is essentially over.

They just say, you know, you make the call.

Sucks.

I could watch APR smiling its dumb little smile as it gets walloped about by whoever is trying to get rid of it all day.

24-hour stream, people try and get rid of APR.

It's so important to about Nen.

It's so important to About Nen that

it doesn't matter if you're Yupi, you still can't destroy it.

It's not

destroyable.

It's a rule.

Yeah.

We talk a lot about

Realis.

There's a lot of Hunter-Hunter sort of accidentally in there, but like a statement that is true.

Even Yupi cannot move past this true statement.

It's not like in Dragon Ball Z, you can make a definitive statement, and

someone with a bigger beam can come along and blast through it.

That is not true in Hunter Hunter.

Yep.

And the fact that APR is just so joyful this whole time, it waddles its little arms around as it smiles, as it is walloped into the corner of the room by Yupi and comes bouncing back.

It's great.

Knuckle is leading Yupie on a chase.

He can't pass out.

Oh, sorry.

I skipped a sentence.

Knuckle is leading Yupie on a chase.

Shoot, lying on the ground, is close to passing out.

And he is trying to stop himself from passing out because he knows that if he does, Hotel Raffligia will free and Yupie will get his one eye back.

Again, this is just this tragedy of this very small but very meaningful

wound on Yupi that is being held up.

Melierone encounters Shoot in this moment.

Meliorone is invisible.

He's holding his breath.

He's crying.

He's power walking.

He is power walking.

I love his facial expressions.

Yeah,

I'm talking.

Yeah.

Melioron is one of my, like,

I always forget.

That dude is right there with Icalgo at the top of the Chimera ant pile for me.

Do we remember what he says about his strut?

No.

Oh, yeah.

He's walking.

It's like he's, this is the walk that is like perfectly optimized to move as fast as possible while using as little breath as possible.

Yes, that's exactly right.

To conserve as much oxygen.

I'm not going to start walking like this in my daily life.

Yeah.

When does he say this?

While he's doing it, he says, I'm not walking too fast.

I'm not walking too slow.

Like, it's the perfect speed to conserve as much oxygen as possible.

He's so good.

He's so good.

It's so funny.

And it is like

kiriyashi, like, like, oh, like, indulgent.

It is.

He is John Lennon walking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's doing the John Lennon funny walk.

Oh, no, that's not John Lennon's funny walk.

That's how he always.

Okay.

Malero, do not stop to talk to that fan.

Just get in your car.

We know the Beatles are the best band of all time because they are literally more evolved because they're closest to crabs of any human.

I really like this.

This John Lennon picture is especially funny to me, and I always love it when it shows up because of the expression on Yoko's face and the expression on the man to Lennon's right.

Is that Yoko and this man are like sharing a glance that is just like cracking up about Lennon doing his normal walk.

And I love that you have this deeply stupid man in this deeply stupid hat doing this walk and two people behind him who care about him glancing at each other like, what the fuck?

I think I went to high school with that guy.

What

shoot are doing that while Melanie Ron Walks?

No, not John Lennon, John Melman.

Is that John Melman?

Yeah, that's John Melman.

I think I went to high school with him.

I mean, I know I went to high school with John Melman.

I just think that that might be John Melman.

The guy you went to high school with.

It can't be because it would be bad for the plot for a guy called John Lennon and a guy called John Melman to be walking next to each other.

That sort of stuff just doesn't.

You can't have two Johns.

No, you can't have two Johns.

He's a J-O-N, though.

Does that help?

Maybe.

It might do.

I'm not sure.

We'll have to ask the jury.

That's the listeners, right?

Yes.

Melirone is sobbing, saying, I can't tell Shoot to give it his all because he already is.

All these moments of like characters wanting to say something but being unable to.

This is great high melodrama writing, you know.

Oh my god.

You know what?

That's where Kilua gets it from.

It's inherited.

What?

Zeno also can't talk about what he's thinking about.

Same as Kilua.

I mean, listen.

That's how it works, Keith.

I know that

we're not talking about them two now, but when you said all these care, I was like, oh, yeah.

Zenno is another

Zoldex.

He can't talk about his feelings.

Zoldex are

the moon to the other person's sun.

That's how they are.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, it's so good.

It's so good.

Yeah.

Invisible, he runs straight into the path of Welfin.

This is lovely.

This is the exact situation that you want a character who is invisible in, but visible when he takes a breath to be in.

Now we're staging the great, he's running out of breath.

Meliran says, this sucks.

Out of all the squadron leaders, he is the biggest skeptic.

And at this moment,

he starts running out of breath.

So he like hides around a corner.

And he becomes visible for one second and then becomes invisible again as he takes the breath.

And that one second is all all it takes for Welfin to first sense something something's going on and secondly lose his entire mind who would like to talk about Welfin's power no I hate it

oh listener listener listener listener Welfin is a humanoid chimera and wolf he is deeply suspicious he's skeptical he has a catch a song yeah remember he watches straying and earlier when they were at the elevator we got to see his cheeks just like fall out.

He gets on all fours and the camera goes right up his ass.

He's a wolf with an ass.

He is smelling.

He's sniffing.

We keep getting class-ups of his eyes.

He's very watchful.

Get a small piece of paper.

Write down on the piece of paper what you think his power is

and put it on Blue Sky or something.

Send it to friends at the table.

I want to hear your guess.

Write a review.

Write a five-star review.

While you're thinking, listener, of what

his power might be, I want to say, similar to

Rama, another character who had

his

super muscular abs out, wore a thong, and had his ass out all the time.

It is like, and write in if you don't feel this way, distinctly non-sexual.

This is, yeah, this is ass.

Never have you seen so much ass in a way that was like so.

It's not that much ass.

We're making it sound like he's got cake.

No, you're right.

It's not that he has so much ass.

It's that so much ass is

a percentage.

Okay.

I just wanted to be clear.

Like, it is if, like,

you know, it's like 90% of it and 10% of like the thong.

I'll give you a clue, listener.

His power is not related to his ass.

No.

Well,

hold on a minute.

No, to both of you.

Okay, and your time is up.

Sylvie, could you please describe Welfin's power?

Oh, you mean Missile Man?

The little

freak that arises from his back?

And if you,

what's the specifics?

That's how they explain it.

I want to make sure I'm not actually

weird, little smiling missiles.

I've got the whole quote, I think.

I also want to say, my subs always have like an extra name for everything.

In this one, it's Eggman, Missile Man.

That makes no sense.

That makes no sense.

By the time Welfin noticed a presence, Melioran was already long gone.

Had Melioran stayed in the same place, Welfin's attack would have certainly reached its target.

So this is what his attack is.

My subs, really quick before you do it, mine was egg on your face, Missile Man, which I think makes a little more sense.

Sure, yeah.

So, yeah, it's this horrible, like, it's almost like an angler fish with a human head.

It's got four arms that are like the wings of a plane, and each one is holding a fish missile.

It's like a cartoon fish painted onto a missile.

The way that it works is that Welfin can load

the

bullets, load the, they call them bullets, uh, chooses a target.

The bullet is loaded with a question or an order.

If the target lies or defies the order, the attack commences.

Had Meliron stayed in the same place, Welfin's attack would have certainly reached its target, whether Welfin could sense them or not.

But because the criteria were not met, it misfired.

Once activated, a missile man will pursue its target until it hits its mark.

No one can sustain the impact and survive.

However, Welfin understood his ability wasn't invincible and even was suspicious of his own ability.

It's great.

There's a great shot of these stupid Eggman, missile man,

missiles like bobbing around uselessly when they can't find Malirone.

They just sort of

like fish.

Yeah, it's worth saying that when he fires Missile Man, he like bends down and it appears on his back.

Keith, do you know what a Zamborak is?

No.

Zambarak is a 17th-century Persian

military unit that was a small cannon mounted on the back of a camel.

And that is the vibe that I have here of like Welfin, this wolf bending down with these four missiles mounted on his back.

He can also smell unscented deodorant.

This is such a funny leap to me what he says about this.

It's so funny.

And it's also, it's like bizarre to me that they go to the unscented deodorant because they've already foreshadowed like the cigarette smoke smell.

Right.

Yes, that is weird.

Well, specifically, they've said, I'm not smoking because they would be able to smell it.

Sure.

But I guess it's like, I don't know, when's the last time he smoked?

Like, how many days?

It takes a long time for that smell to go away.

He was already shaking by the time they started going.

So it had been long enough to be shaking, I guess.

It's great.

Here is the leap of logic that he makes.

Oh my God, if they're wearing unscented deodorant, they must know about me.

Which means that it has to be a traitor, and it has to be a traitor that knows about my nose.

He is paralyzed by this.

He is like, oh my God, Chimera ants are turning against us.

It could be fucking anybody.

And the cherry on top, he's right.

He is right.

And he gets to a point where he even says, should I even be on the Chimera ants side anymore?

He says, in order this is what he says in order

why don't they want to fight me is it because they can kill me whenever they want what should i do now should i even be on the chimera ant side anymore

my note here says can you make someone so suspicious that they switch sides entirely of their own volition

I love that's my favorite leap here, though.

Why don't they want to fight me?

Is it because they can kill me whenever they want?

It's so good.

It's some real top tier catastrophizing.

Why isn't my friend answering my texts?

Is it because they could kill me whenever they want?

And meanwhile, the friend is just like making a cup of coffee or something.

The phone is on the other side of the room.

Yes, I wrote then here, this is a fragile man.

This is a fragile man.

This stuff with

Tagashi and the anime team are so good at writing people having meltdowns because we've now seen like four separate meltdowns just in this little run of episodes between Killiwa,

Poof, Welfin, and then I think Maliarone also.

And

they each have a different ring to them.

Yeah.

It's great.

At this point, Goan and Killiua arrive in Pito's room to see Dr.

Blythe working on Komagi.

There is an audio glitch in this scene, in the soundtrack.

I've never heard this before in Hunter Hunter.

They're playing

what's it called?

Arrival of the Martial Artist?

Yes, Legend of the Martial Artist.

Legend of the Martial Artist.

And

they misalign a loop.

Like a measure comes in slightly misaligned.

I'll send you the timestamp for it, Keith.

It's wild.

I'd never heard this on the show before.

The show is generally really, really good about

the way it is looping around its stems or whatever.

I don't know what happened here.

I don't know why it didn't get fixed or caught.

It's really odd.

A note gets cut off in a really weird way.

I would love to listen to

the version I have to see if it also has that.

Yeah, because I wonder if they fixed it in a different cut.

Yeah, I don't know.

Or if it was maybe a Netflix issue.

Well, I guess that wouldn't make sense.

If it wasn't no, it wasn't like a buffering thing.

It was like, it was clear that something had gone wrong in the project file.

Um, Pito turns to look at them, their N inactive.

There is something so sad and sinister about this.

Pito, a character who is so defined by their N, their ability to sense anything around them, and in that sensing, put people on edge, you know, um, terrify them, cause them to flee, cause them to lose their minds.

There's something so like plain and unstated and sad about Pito having to turn their head to see Gon and Kellya.

Yeah.

That I love.

And we have Goan's face in shadow, the shadow slowly leaving his face as he looks up.

And as we wonder, you know, what is Goan going to think as he sees this, the shadow leaving his face, his face darkens again with a frown as he makes eye contact with Pito.

And as the episode ends, we hold on his face for, you know, a while.

It's like a six-second shot of Goan's face.

It's great.

It's, yeah, it's bad.

It's moon rising here.

I love this in the manga, which I was checking just because I had it open because of misunderstanding.

I wanted to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding the Kiloa thing from a couple episodes ago.

But you've got a panel with the tiny

Dr.

Blythe in the bottom.

And then the bigger version of it as they get closer.

It's so good.

Look at this panel.

I know.

I just love it.

It's really good.

after all the panels that we have shown and talked about today a tagashi in like his most

maximalist his most busy his most high detail um

a contrast to you know when we've talked in the past about some of the scenes with kite and pito he's so sparse and spare in his line um in his high contrast and now here in this really shocking moment of looking up and seeing dr blithe yeah again this is like

there's barely any panel work going on you know dr blythe and pito dr Blythe huge, Pito and Kamigi small in the top two-thirds.

Pito starting to turn in a big black block.

Pito's face turning, but their eye is not visible.

The eye is so often the locus of like Pito's horror and terror.

When we see Pito,

I don't know, you can cut.

Is that Pito's eye kind of just underneath their hair?

It's underneath their hair, yeah.

It's in shadow or covered by hair.

It's a little hard to tell.

But so often we see Pito's eye as this sort of like shriveling, terrifying entity, and here they're just turning their face.

And then the final panel, Goan, just fury on his face.

Yeah.

Goan is the

imposing presence here.

It does the linger on the eyes thing a little bit.

Yeah.

Like not to the same extent where Pito's are like stretched and sort of like morphed in that way.

The perspective always does.

But like, I couldn't help but think of it when they do the shot of Gone's eyes like while panning up his face.

that

he's the monster now.

He has become the monster now, monster and true.

Two monsters, monster and monster.

Tagash is one, two, two monsters.

There they are.

Tagashi's love for like full black high contrast paneling really, I mean, I have to imagine this is part of the reason that he dressed Pito like he did.

Seeing it for the first time, not for the first time, but sort of seeing it really here clearly, especially against Goan.

He's able to like block out Pito's blazer in like full black against their white hair in a way that looks really good.

Even in contrast to someone like Dr.

Blythe, who is wearing white with the black crosses on, or Goan, who, what is Goan's, he's wearing like a white singlet in these scenes?

He's got shorts and a tank top.

Yeah.

That incredible panel of Goan and Killio walking, Keith, that you just shared earlier, Goan with his shoulders kind of slumped and Killio with his arms like alert walking behind him.

It's great.

With Pito as a smudge, Blythe as a big shadow, and Komagi looking like a flea.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Blythe is looking just like a flea.

Yeah.

So good.

That's something you wouldn't notice with a full Blythe because it just looks like a thing, like a doll, big evil doll thing.

But does look like a flea, which is consistent with pito's jump yeah you know

all right good show great show good show

i've been thinking a lot about how you

talked in the past about how the chimera and arc is almost its own show you know um and i think i understand that from like a both a scale perspective it's gigantic and also the stuff that it is talking about is

so

self-contained on some level.

And my first sort of instinct, my gut instinct, is like, well, no, it only really works because of the hours of characterization and, you know, stuff built on that.

And I don't want to discount that.

I really do think that that

is central to the way that we are thinking about and enjoying the Chimera and Arc.

But I suppose I wanted to bring it up more specifically in this moment where it's like, do you think it would work standing on its own?

Do you have any sense of how that would play?

Do you think that the kind of like central character relationships would sing as well?

Weirdly, I think that it plays right, I think that it plays like

an HBO show,

like on its own, like less as of an anime and more of like

Game of Thrones.

What do you mean by that?

It just the way

because if you were disconnecting it from

the most shonen parts of the show,

what you're left with is pieces like

scientists, teams of explorers, castle intrigue,

and drama, betrayals,

anti-hero

genre.

Yeah, I think that when you disconnect it from what the rest of what Hunter Hunter is bringing, the way that it changes genre

stops being important because it's only the genre that it starts as, which is like that weird kind of anxious, almost horror mode that it's in.

Maybe we should just get Art to watch the Chimera Antark.

Just to see what he says.

Just to see what he says.

I think Art would like the Chimera Antark.

I think almost everyone would like all of Hunter Hunter.

It's true.

It is true.

Is your wife still watching with you, Dre?

Yes, she is behind.

I forget what happened, but we basically had life happened and we got separated.

You have to keep watching it.

Yeah, so she's like 10 episodes behind me, but we're trying to get caught up so we can.

continue continue watching.

Is she enjoying Chimera and

I think

she's off and on on it.

I think the parts that are just like super, super, duper combat-focused are not as much her thing.

Yeah.

So, like, initial Chimera Ant, she was kind of falling off, but then when Gona Kilo come back and Biscuit shows back up, she started getting back into it.

All that stuff in Vienna was so good.

Yeah, really good.

I love Italy.

What are you watching next time, Keith?

Well, we're going to watch another three.

Like I mentioned earlier, this was meant to be a big six.

And now we're moving into what was going to be another six.

Episodes 116, 117,

and 118.

And I'll get you the titles for those.

I can read a review while you do that.

I got to read it.

Oh, yeah.

Revenge and recovery, insult and payback,

and a false rage.

Hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Normal.

Sylvie.

Yeah.

Do you have a review for us?

I do.

Here is a five-star review titled Peak Podcast Exclamation Point.

Hi, I'm an Alex, and I love this podcast so much.

By the way, the name bit with us saying that, and so people introduce themselves as I'm Anne, and then their their name.

I love it.

Hi, I'm an Alex and I love this podcast so much.

I've recommended it to many friends and reference it often whether they like it or not.

Thank you.

They do.

I usually listen on Spotify.

But I came on here to assert dominance to the biggest fan named Alex and then a cute little like happy face.

Anyway, this podcast provides a nuanced, detailed, and entertaining analysis of Hunter Hunter all at once.

And it's really refreshing to have so many perspectives on a piece of work I love so much.

This podcast truly enables my obsession with analyzing and re-watching Hunter Hunter over and over again, so thanks for making me crazier, I guess.

You're welcome.

When I listen to it, I find myself getting vicariously excited for everyone to get to my favorite parts, and everyone never disappoints.

I both get to feel like I'm watching Hunter Hunter for the first time, again, and also like I'm with a group of bros who understand that Hunter Hunter is for the gays, which is a wonderful feeling.

Sylvie, just want to say that your chart of the troop is incredibly correct, and I salute you.

Thank you.

Also, the editing of this

is a delight, and I really appreciate the work that goes into it.

And I love when someone pops in as a guest for an episode.

It's all just so fun.

Okay, I'll stop typing now.

You didn't have to, but thank you for the five-star review.

Thank you, Alex.

And then I had another.

Yeah, I had a short one here because I'm trying to read two an episode at least.

You know, we've got a lot of very lovely reviews, and I they mean quite a bit to me.

My name is July, but I was born in June.

If you don't read this, you're cowards.

Beat you.

I did.

I'm not a coward motherfucker.

Great, you're a drunk freak's energy of you, silly.

My bloodlust is emanating from me.

Great Hunter-Hunter podcast.

Superior breakdowns of complicated subject material and camaraderie between friends.

Signed Julio.

Or Julio.

I think I'm going to assume Julio.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you.

And don't ever, don't ever come for me like that again.

I'm no coward.

I would invite actually anybody who hasn't left a review to come for us right now.

Yeah, make a challenge and I will rise to it.

Yeah.

We're at 527 reviews.

Boy, I would love to see 600 reviews.

So if you're there going, surely they don't need my review.

We do.

We do.

We need 73 more reviews to get to 600.

You know how few people

will leave a review at this point?

It's very few.

My name condition activates at 600 reviews.

And if you have a personality like Sylvie's, if you don't leave a review, you are a coward.

Yeah, there you go.

Balls in your court.

If you were born in the month of September,

oh, the merry month of September.

Season amidst some mellow fruitfulness, bro.

Is that September?

What is a September name?

For some reason, Sage feels September to me.

It does, yeah.

A very non-binary month.

More

non-binary people are born in September than any other, any other month.

Sure,

no, I don't know.

I have no idea.

I just

know non-binary people named Sage.

That's more of a thing.

Yeah, that is true.

Yeah,

birthdate math is wild.

The extremely high probabilities of what seem to be coincidences around birthdays just because everybody has a birthday and there are only so many of them is great.

It's not a name, but I do have a review criteria.

Okay.

If you're non-binary, leave a review.

If you're non-binary, leave a review.

Leave us a five-star review.

Let's see.

Is there any other business that we have to attend to?

I don't have any business at all.

We just say one more time, friends of the table.cash, if you want any of our bonus stuff.

Yeah.

Oh,

do we mention the YouTube?

Because both the

Virtue's Last Reward playthrough has started back up again in the new year.

Yeah.

And also, Jack and I started playing through Anthology of the Killer, which is also a very fun time.

So good.

Definitely recommend if you guys just enjoy listening to us be excited about stuff to check out either of those.

Yeah.

I definitely feel like you're all playthroughs of 999 and Virtue's Last Reward have big media club plus energy.

I agree.

There's a huge crossover possibility there.

If you like this, then you would like that.

And I'll make the same pitch for Run Button.

I know that because I'm on that show.

I'm on Run Button.

And hey, you think Keith does a good job of editing this show?

Yeah, it's edits all of Run Button.

I do.

I do edit for, I think actually, except for like a couple of Halo videos.

I think I've edited every run button video in the last couple years.

Wow.

Kyle used to do all the editing.

Also, you should probably listen to Friends of the Table.

Just give it a shot.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

There are a lot of people who have

found us through this.

Every once in a while.

We play tabletop games, too.

Yeah, I hear from someone who's like, I've never heard of Friends of the Table, but I started listening to this, and then I started listening to Friends of the Table.

And I'm like, how did you hear about this without having heard of Friends of the Table?

Hey, listen, people have been.

I like, shout out to everyone who has been mentioning us to their friends, to

people who are into Hunter Hunter.

True.

Someone left a comment on the Padres subreddit.

Okay, gotcha.

Like the

facebook team.

You said that's fucking rule.

You said Padres.

And in my, because you're talking about podcasts, I heard P-O-D-R-A-Y-S pod.

Someone on the Pod Race subreddit with like Saboma with the new RTX podcasting podcasting software.

Yeah.

Why would the Podrace subreddit?

Someone just mentioned it in a comment.

I was just checking to be like, because I, you know, I like Podrace before that the people on the Hunter Hunter subreddit have said some nice things.

Oh, that's a good idea.

I was just great.

I was just checking out to see if,

you know,

I did a little name searching.

I'll admit it.

I name search the show now and then

just to make sure people are enjoying it.

Yeah.

And hey, people are enjoying it and also recommending it to their fans.

Friends, I guess, internet friends.

Friends are fans.

If you have friends on the internet when their baseball team loses,

you don't need to disrecommend it when your team loses, but maybe it'll make someone stay better.

Whenever your team gets mathematically eliminated from any sort of playoff,

shout out to all my fellow Vikings fans who are about to start listening to Media Club Plus.

Friends at the Table is a very good actual play podcast.

We play tabletop games and we talk through them and we have a pretty broad and I hope pretty generous definition of

play and of the influences that we are drawing from.

We are drawing from weird old television that we saw.

We are drawing from the fun things to do at the baseball park that aren't played baseball.

We're drawing from Hunter Hunter.

We're drawing from Hunter Hunter.

We are drawing from a coffee stable book about architecture that we've read one-third of.

There are three really good places to jump on.

You can listen to Partisan, which is a story about a group of perhaps the

least well-matched people trying to start a revolution in the depth of an awful galactic empire.

If you like Andor, I think Partisan would be a really great place to start.

There is also Sang Fial,

which is a...

It's like a dark fantasy season set in a weird west

wasteland.

It was once a beautiful place that got cursed.

A strange curse kind of passed across it.

If you like the work of Mike Mignola or Hellboy or Guillermo del Toro,

it would be really great.

You could also wait just a few weeks,

maybe a little longer than just a few weeks, and listen to our new season that's going to be starting soon.

It's called Perpetua.

It's the ninth season of Friends at the Table.

It is inspired by

Dreamcast RPGs of the late 90s and early 2000s.

It is,

we've not actually said a lot about what that show is about, but it is a brand new setting set in a sort of JRPG-inspired fantasy world.

We've recorded a bunch of it.

It's cool as hell.

Yeah.

Another one is Bluff City, the now free, previously

paid season that we did.

It's an anthology season where

each episode takes place

with different characters in a different time in a place called Bluff City that is sort sort of like the real world's um Atlantic City.

You can hear that for free by going to tinyurl.com/slash free bluff.

I checked that link is still active.

I love Bluff City.

How many times

in my life I'm thinking about Bluff City.

I'm like a fan of Bluff City in the way that people who aren't on Friends of the Table are a fan of Friends of the Table.

This is what's fun about Bluff City because I think I also feel that way about Bluff City.

We don't make it very often, and when we do, it's always such a joy.

All that being said, I hope you have a lovely evening, or morning, or afternoon.

That covers whenever you're listening to this, have a wonderful time.

Yeah,

and don't ever imply that I'm a coward.

Ever.

I swear to God, I'll snap on one.

If we don't end this podcast, Sylvia's a coward.

Ended right up.