VH1's Behind The Spirit - Hunter x Hunter ep. 110-112: Media Club Plus S01E35

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, we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshihir Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on x.com and blue sky at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

There's so much stuff going on at Run Button.

You should really check it out.

We started our remake, let's play, of our 13-year-old

Let's Play 20 Years of Sonic.

Let's play.

At the time of recording, there's three episodes of that out.

By the time this is up, there'll probably be like six.

We've also, we're also deep into our, not deep, we're medium into our Silent Hill 2 remake, Let's Play.

We've also recorded some Silent Hill 2 and 1 stuff to go along with that.

I think we're going to play all of Silent Hill 2 original again to go alongside that.

So you should watch.

All of that.

It's all good.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeith.

Hi, Keith.

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

I'm a little under the weather today.

They gave me a COVID shot.

I'm sorry about your shot, but congratulations on

being boosted.

Isn't that nice?

Yeah, that is nice.

I'll feel better about it in a day and a half.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can check me out on Blue Sky pretty much.

That's the one.

You know, Sylvie Bullet on there.

Also, check out friendsofthetable.cash for bonus episodes.

Coming soon, we're going to watch a very silly Hunter-Hunter movie.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Blue Sky, Swan Drinker3000.

You can find me on Instagram at Andrew Lee Swan.

And our fifthest returning guest of all time, Austin Walker.

Your fifthest?

Yeah, this is your fifth time back.

Yeah, that's

the first time you're on.

This is your fifthest.

Oh, my God.

I see.

Yeah, of course.

I thought it was a ranking.

No, no.

It's a a ranking of how many times he's been on.

Yeah, it's a plus five sentence.

I get it.

Yeah.

Hi, everybody.

It's Austin.

I'm here.

I had to be here.

A week ago was like, what episodes are next?

And you said the episodes that were next.

And I was like, can I come on?

And then there was a sort of response from everyone who'd seen these episodes already to be like, wait, what's in these episodes?

Oh, we're already here?

Yeah, man.

This happened so much faster.

It happened so much faster.

Half of this episode I thought happened in the next set, and half of it I thought happened in like 10 episodes.

I mean, I will tell you, I came on for one reason, and I then remembered what the other reason was.

Oh,

I'm curious to know, which you should note when those reasons arise.

I will.

Okay.

I will.

I mean, let me pretty clear.

By the way, if you've been watching

twitch.tv slash friends of the table and youtube.com slash friends of the table, you should know that that backup, the back, there is no more backlog of videos.

The YouTube is now to date with the Twitch.

So if you're a Twitch hater,

which you should be, then

just in terms of the user experience of watching VODs,

that is true.

Check out the YouTube.

It's much nicer to watch the VODs on YouTube.

I also fix all of the audio for everything.

But

what can you do?

So both of those companies suck.

Oh, sure.

You should hate both of them as corporate entities, but in terms of what your experience is.

If anything, you should hate Google much more.

Yeah.

But if you're going to watch a VOD, it's hard.

You know what?

Twitch is owned by Amazon.

Twitch is Dips' website.

I literally, I forgot Twitch is owned by Amazon.

I forget all the time.

Yeah, that is a close.

YouTube is so Google.

There is no room to breed.

Yeah, there's no

fucking world.

It's bad.

What a set of episodes.

Austin, you already mentioned that you saw these episodes and was like, oh, I got to be on these.

So that's how good they are.

And how much stuff happens.

This is a weird set.

We're like in an I feel like this is a new mode of Hunter Hunter that you've entered into.

Like one of the notes I made was it feels like this is the beginning of a new season.

Yes.

Like when Shidori shows up and for whatever reason, the tone of that opening scene in episode 110 feels like a new season is beginning.

Yeah.

And our attention is like just being drawn differently to a different place.

It's weird.

And everything that's happening is like, like they're delivering everything differently.

Like the story is being told in a whole new way, like almost

like there's been, there's been a gradual change, but then there was like, uh, it's like if you look at a map of the ocean and it's like, it gets like steadily deeper and deeper and deeper, and then you drop off a shelf and it's like all of a sudden it's two miles deep here.

And ostensibly, it would seem like this was happening in the middle of a moment.

You know, you would tend to make this sort of a change to a season at what feels like a natural breaking point.

You know, you'd say, for example, let's finish the assault on the king's castle and then we can start futzing with the tone.

But not only is Hunter Hunter, you know, uninterested in waiting for that, you know, the tone changes when Tagashi and the team want it to change, not when the story says it's going to, as we've learned over and over again.

Also,

the actual content of these episodes is really striking if what you're expecting going into them is the assault on the castle, which we see, you know.

But in between that, we get

Welfin playing detective.

Oh my god, yeah.

We get a backstory of of everyone's favorite violent madman, Chairman Natera.

And we find out how old he is.

Yeah.

We find out how old he is.

And how grateful he is.

And how grateful he is.

And how much he prays.

He praises the privilege.

He praises a lot.

He does.

We get a lot of new

Nen abilities and the gleeful return of some old Nen abilities.

We get

Nefa Pito briefly becoming the protagonist.

Yeah.

Which is funny.

Well,

but I think the place that I do want to start is this opening.

Wait, I just need one more piece of context that I bet no one has looked up because it's just not the way we tend to engage with these things.

Yeah.

The show did not take a break in a real way between any of these episodes or before this episode.

But the world did.

This is

110 airs originally on Christmas Day, December 25th.

Wow.

2019.

They do take one week off, and then 1-11 is January 8th, 2014.

Oh, my God.

So there is

a year kicks off with the Netero backstory episode.

Wow.

That's wonderful.

The dragon.

Happy 11th anniversary to that episode.

Yeah.

Yes.

Wow.

To the day.

Yes.

Dang.

So I do think that that's kind of contextually really fun.

If you put yourself in the mind of people watching this show at the time, obviously it's adapting a manga that you could go out and read.

But if you haven't done that, you're like, what's going to happen next?

What an amazing way to come to here.

We do kind of do this to our audience every two weeks, right?

Now that I think about it, we're forcing the people who really want to stick to watching along with us into taking these breaks.

And I'm sorry.

Good luck.

And I've seen a lot of people like

trying so hard to stick to it.

And then I've seen people break from it entirely.

I got a comment on the Run Button YouTube today.

Someone saying that they've, since we started this show, they've watched Hunter Hunter two and a half times.

This last moment for me was, I think I got to these episodes and was like, oh, I have to watch the rest of this the first time through.

Like, I have to get to the end of this arc by tomorrow or else I can't do anything else.

Like, I have to, everything else has to go to the sidelines.

I can't think about anything else.

I have a question there, Austin.

Is that, how much of that was like the classic sort of capital P plot, I want to know what happens next,

like plot-wise?

And how much of it was, I can feel this show show taking on a shape, and I want to see what shape it is.

Both, it's both of those things.

I mean, it's like I had big thoughts about where it was going.

I could kind of feel like all of timeout, actually.

First of all, I had a thing I wanted to say right away when I came on the show, which is, y'all have been fucking killing it.

Your show is so good.

Like, I can't wait for every episode.

There's a moment in the last episode where I was just like, I they've gotten so sharp, uh, honing themselves over the last

10,000 punches every now in the wilderness.

Yeah, we speed with the window.

So we're doing our 10,000 punches.

You're doing very great punches.

The sun is not setting anymore.

You're getting to the 10,000 punch sooner.

Yeah.

It's really

weird because we were ending every episode with an hour of prayer.

It's the friends of our table waiting.

I've been doing that since the beginning.

It's just now you guys are joining in with me.

I see, I see.

So that's, so one.

Two, Jack, to your question, like, it isn't so much, ooh, what's going to happen next, though I do think that this is, if I have a single thing to say in this entire podcast that I could shut up forever, it really is, these are the sorts of episodes that make me like Hunter Hunter more than most other shounen anime.

It might be my favorite shounen because the breadth of what it can do is so much wider than even some really well-made shows.

I think Dungeons, or Dungeon Slayer,

Demon Slayer, no, Demon Slayer is a pretty, I think Dungeon Meshi is actually really broad in this way, too.

And I don't, I guess it's a Shounen show, but

Demon Slayer is a like straight up and down classic shounen with some cool battle scenes and all that but it's like fundamentally it's going to come down to a guy with a sword technique every fucking time yep

and the breadth of what characters can do and what the show and what the story is concerned with is so much wider um and uh zooms in on stuff that's so much more interesting than simply what is the result of a fight but it never gives up what is the result of a fight like and so jack to your question of like is it the plot like yeah i left these and went oh my god where is the king going?

What happens next in that?

But I also was like,

is the narrator going to continue being the characteristics the most in every episode?

Because you've been pointing out for weeks now, episode after episode, the narrator's character is slowly changing, is getting more involved, is

just outright saying the names of powers and explaining how they work, is editorializing a little bit.

And here we are full-on storyteller mode throughout these episodes.

And so, yeah, there there is a sort of like, is the shape going to keep changing?

We get a mini documentary in the middle of the second episode where a character talks to the camera.

I know.

We have a,

yeah, it's like an office-style

professional.

It's like, yeah, it's wild.

He's on Big Brother.

Yes.

Something that Hunter Hunter has done increasingly, in addition to the narrator getting, you know,

more and more singular, is recently it has started beginning these episodes with almost sketches, you know, 40 second long scenes that initially seem completely disconnected to what was going on, but serve to just add this weird little wrinkle to what's happening.

And here we begin, you know, after seeing huge crowds visible in the dark, standing in the dark outside the palace, and learning that due to ongoing negotiation and plotting inside Nov's chamber, everybody is going to enter the palace at the staircase portal, which is scary.

They are literally putting all their eggs in one basket.

We move into another one of these little sketches.

We see Hina, who is also known as Hirin.

Is that right, Keith?

Yeah, Hina's original name is Hirin, and at some point off-camera changes her name.

She is taking a bath, and she is complaining about how her nen exorcist power

causes her stomach to grow larger depending on how powerful the exorcism is.

But then she is talking to her aide, a sort of classical ant woman.

She is an ant with mandibles.

She's wearing, I think, like a maroon dress or a maroon apron.

And she's talking to her aide, and she describes her as a rare peon that understands speech.

There's two things that I really like here.

First, she is complaining and she wants a bigger reward from Leol for the exorcism.

All the ants are constantly prepping to stab each other in the back.

They have been this entire arc when they're not helping the hunters.

It's just this constant whirlwind of ants trying to outmaneuver each other, which is great.

And then she is, there's this differential between the kind of ant that she is and the kind of ants that, quote, understand speech.

We'd known that there were sort of like worker ants going around, but I didn't quite realize that the difference was that large, that there are ants who do not understand what is being said to them.

Actually, so they mentioned this with the

Chimera ant queen can also only communicate with their like telepathy.

So there's a there's actually a scene from like 30 episodes no not 30 well maybe 30 episodes ago where there are some ants who are complaining that they have to that they can't talk to the queen they have to like use and that's the last time it came up was like episode like 90 or like 88 or something um

it's funny how how long the tooth is on some of that information so the implication is that she can sort of like communicate with speech but not understand spoken

right yeah yeah most of them most of the peons uh or like the older generation of ants are telepathy only but uh this ant can can't speak but can hear the speech and like react and respond

interesting yeah

it's time for some detective work yeah you know this takes a second

i do want to i'm going to do my recap just because i wrote a special recap for today

uh speaking about the narrator

as the team of hunters prepares their infiltration of the Chimera Ant King's hideout, two things are on their minds.

First, they must do anything they can to separate the king from his royal guard.

And second, why does it already feel like something has gone wrong?

Unbeknownst to them, the royal guard was having the exact same concern, for the exact opposite reason.

The king was pushing them away and everything in their being rejected this new state of affairs.

Both sides of this battle, a battle which is soon to commence, will have to reckon with the fact that there's no predicting your enemy's movements when there's two monsters on the board.

Hello, man.

That's my sneak is my hunter narrator guy.

I love it.

Just two?

There's just two on the board?

Just two.

I think there's just two.

Definitely just two.

Definitely just two.

That's all they've told us.

That's all they told us about.

There's two.

We don't know which are the two.

Oh, yes.

I mean, I know which are the two.

We know.

They have directly called two people a monster.

I know.

I'm just saying.

There's also one that

develops a hundred eyes on the top of his body.

That's not even the guy I was thinking of.

I know.

That guy's not a monster.

Somebody else's eyes are not a monster.

You're right.

Somebody else's eyes become, what's the exact phrase?

Cold as ice?

Cold as ice.

I think in the Dove version, they said they're like a cold abyss.

A quiet, icy abyss.

Yeah, there we go.

Kilo alone noticed that a shadow had fallen over Goan's eyes, turning them into a quiet, icy abyss.

Yeah, it's worth saying that we will spend time in this episode with such protagonists as

Yupi,

Peto,

Welfin, Welfin, a certain assassin whose name we will not reveal until later.

We don't spend any time with the protagonist Gone Freaks.

No.

No.

At least not interiority-wise.

No,

we have a special action.

We spend the acts, but we're never in his head.

Yeah, we spend about 30 seconds with Kilua thinking about Goan.

Killua's favorite pasta.

Yeah, I was going to say.

Kilua thinking about Goan?

Do you want to say this is an hour of television minus commercial, like without commercials, you know?

This is three episodes of TV.

How many minutes do we think of real-time pass in here?

Oh, my God.

15?

Like, in universe minutes?

There's a point of 15.

None.

Because it's like everything in episode one is

real-time-ish, is like, you know, be they're talking, they're bouncing.

Maybe they're not real-time-ish because maybe the conversation in Nove's apartment is happening, apart, whatever, like, you know what I mean.

Because Fred's is an apartment building at one point.

Yeah.

But the room is happening at the same time as like Welfin's investigation or whatever.

But then, like, episodes two and three,

111 and 112, it's like 60 seconds.

Yeah.

It's like,

it's not a lot.

It's, and I say this because at some point I'll have a video to share with the group, I guess.

Some of you are familiar with it already.

Some of you are not because there's spoilers in it.

But it's not a lot of time.

It's not a lot of time.

It happens.

Yeah.

And there's a way that, you know, sometimes this sort of thing gets staged, you know, where a lot of stuff is being packed into a very small amount of time, where it does feel very

compressed, but these episodes actually feel wildly expansive in finishing them.

It's like it's far.

Also, sorry, there's another another answer, which is these episodes comprise something like 60 years.

Not because of 60 years or however old.

I've no idea.

I don't know the exact age.

I missed whatever the exact age is.

And what I love, though, about the thing, Jack, that you're talking about, like different shows have staged this sort of like, it's, it's, you know, a 30-minute episode, but only 60 seconds happens.

Classic Frieza Goku fight stuff.

There's like an in-universe way.

He finds a way to explain this.

He explains why time is going slow for everybody.

And we get it, but as already referenced, deliver it in documentary style.

Oh, it's wonderful.

Let me just shuffle through the roller decks of various quests and side quests that Yoshihiro Tagashi and the team have got going right now.

We'll pull out the first one on the top.

That's right.

Welfin and director Bizaf.

Okay, that's where we're going to start.

Bezaf is furious that Palm has escaped, and Welfin is furious about something else.

The sound of Bizaf's cell phone irritates him tremendously.

It's so good.

Yeah, you got big ears.

He's got big ears.

It's also this thing of like ants and humans are extremely similar in a lot of ways and extremely different in others.

Someone talking on the phone is often a cause of irritation for people, but the thing that's irritating Welfin is actually the sound of the signal rather than the sound of the guy talking.

Welfin sees an opportunity here to climb the ladder.

offering to track palm for Bizep.

And what does he want to be?

He wants to become something very specific.

Yeah, what's this ladder?

What's at the top of this ladder, Jack?

He wants to become the king behind the scenes.

He recognizes that,

let me find the line that we're going to hear in just one second,

that Merioem is, quote, a nameless king in a borrowed castle.

His subjects no more than mindless puppets.

That's a Meroem line.

But Welfin sort of has recognized that and thinks that Bezeph is really the guy in control.

This is so funny.

We spend ages watching the ants trying to take out the king so they can be the king or set up the king elsewhere.

And finally, we have one wolf who goes, Oh, that guy.

I should get that guy instead.

I have a question.

Does anybody remember?

Does Leol ever use the words king behind the scenes?

I don't think he knows prominently he wants to be in the scenes, all the scenes.

Because

my memory is that the words king behind the scenes get said 5,000 times.

Welfare was with Bluster as one of Leol's second-in-commands, right?

Yeah, he was like, yeah, it's him and Bloster were like, after Flutter disappears, I got to get a new crew.

And now Leol is gone.

This is so funny that we, the show, are working down the list of ants as well.

You know, we were with Leol and now we're with Welfin.

He doesn't find Palm.

What does he find instead of Palm?

Shoo.

Shoo.

He finds Shoo.

The Chekhov's gun of no shoes has finally been taken off of the mantelplace.

It's great.

It's really good.

At the time when he lost his shoe, I thought to myself, you know, the terror was very, the terror for me, Jack, was very sort of sharp, where I was like, well, what if someone finds that shoe immediately while Nova's in the palace?

And now, it is, we are so far away from that in time, and the sort of the Jenga Tower has been built so labyrinthinely around it that I'm sort of like, well, this is clearly bad news, but I'm not quite sure how bad news it is yet.

Because Welford really is like

sleuthing it out.

Like, this is really like doing, you know, detective were smelling footprints, following trails.

There's some kind of, I don't know, maybe to me, if it seems clumsy because I just had a worse grasp on the exact order of events that was happening here.

But he makes some leaps that I finally worked out.

how he gets to where he gets, but I genuinely can't remember what the fuck is up with the bomb thing that we'll get to in a second.

But I do look confused about that.

I do really like

him

sniffing,

like thinking in his head, communicating with UB.

So basically,

he finds the shoe.

He follows the trail of footprints.

Oh, do we have something else?

Do we actually have the Comey Gy stuff here first?

We touched it briefly.

We could lump this together because I don't think we gained much.

Let's lump it because there's really not much wealth in

after this, right?

In these episodes?

Yeah, not really at all.

That's pretty much it.

He gets to the bottom of the staircase.

He's like, the trail ends here.

And he's like kind of running through all the things that possibly could have happened.

Once again, we're at the bottom of the staircase with a character frame standing next to the staircase.

They keep coming back to this.

We've already drawn it.

We've already drawn the staircase.

Just put them there.

I mean, I will say, like, truly, one of the reasons these episodes work is I have a pretty good idea of what the basic layout of

this palace is.

Maybe not the deep hallways, right?

But, like, I know there's a staircase.

I know there's the room on the second floor.

They're very clear about there being a second floor in these episodes.

Yeah.

Um, that the king has special feelings about the Titoes, the flagpole, the flags on top of.

Exactly.

And there's the, and there's also a little forward tower that that they later go to.

Like, there's like some pretty clear layout coming off of the episode where they went through all the PowerPoint presentations, including a sort of map of the vicinity.

And that's really important if what your goal is is to tell a story about people breaking into a place.

I've seen so many shows and movies where that's like the point of the show or the movie, but I can't draw you a very simple conceptual map of the place.

And so you're not leveraging things like choke points to create tension in the narrative.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So good job.

They do a great job of like making it work, even if what what you have is like

courtyard inside stairs, king upstairs.

That's all you need.

Even just telling you about it.

Yeah, it's super clear.

But Welfin is like, they fly out?

What is going on?

So good.

And then Yupi shows up, and he has the idea to ask Yupi, again, you know, this like...

information that we know, we've known forever.

It's actually a contrivance that

Welvin didn't know, but they already established that he wasn't there and he asked yup like hey is there any reason that pito might have shut off their n at any point and you p is like uh yeah when the king ripped off his arm you idiot don't you remember that it was a big deal

it's so good there's some good up these episodes

yeah there are some lovely up lines here um

When he says that the king ripped oh, he says, oh, you didn't hear?

The king tore his own arm off.

And you get this sort of flashback to the like weird, hazy camaraderie of the early days in the ant citadel when the ants were just like, Yeah, the queen's doing this, or like complaining about cults' workplace ethic, you know, stuff like that.

Yubi is really the royal ant of the people,

he truly is.

Like, neither is not a person, but Pito is too if Pito is too scary, and everyone's afraid of Pito.

Poof is a maniac and is like, so is like a snooty weirdo.

UP really feels like too down to earth to care about like

a distinction between a royal guard and an ant other than I could kill you.

Don't fuck with my shit.

Don't bother me.

Don't bother the king.

My favorite UP line here that I wrote down, and I initially paraphrased this, and then I went back and made sure that I wrote it down completely because the detail in the line is what makes it funny.

He says,

to Welfin, I should probably warn you, if any of you go to the second floor, the king will definitely kill you.

And there's something really lovely about the specificity, the sort of like casual specificity of like, oh, I should probably warn you.

And if any of you go to the second floor, the king will definitely kill you.

This seems like a good place to jump back to our dear friend, the king, to see why he is in such a foul mood.

Well, first, Komegi is resting at the Gungi board in her room, and she's wondering why the king didn't tell her his name.

And she looks up, and we get a sort of like P.O.V.

Komegi's imagination, and she briefly sees the king as this sort of like shadowed human figure in a robe.

It's really, really good.

Because she has no idea what he looks like.

Yeah, and no idea that he doesn't know his name because that's weird.

That would be weird.

That's a bizarre assumption to make.

That's a kilo-based assumption.

You may remember he decided his name was King.

So he has a name now.

He hasn't given himself a name.

It's just King.

There was no other name to consider.

Don't worry about it.

If it's good enough for Tekken.

I mean, let's imagine if Komugi was a Tekken player.

The subtitles for him now are King.

Oh, really?

Really?

Oh.

Yeah.

That's funny because I had just assumed that he abandoned that name because

he kind of flips out and like...

like changes course on the Komugi thing.

And then

this scene, he says, who am I?

A nameless king in a borrowed castle.

Yeah, well, and that subtitle

on Netflix's thing at least says, in brackets, king.

Well, who am I?

And it had been calling him Meruham.

I believe so.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm maybe I'll have to go back and double check it.

But it's calling him king at the very least now.

That's interesting.

Here's a great follow-up line to this nameless king in a borrowed castle.

So he is firmly, fully in the middle of a capital I identity crisis.

What first started out as a sort of abstract identity crisis?

You know, what does it mean to be alive?

Why am I playing gunky?

Why am I protecting this girl?

Why am I protecting this girl?

Has rapidly grown into like a full-scale proper, who am I?

You know, what is my deal?

He looks out at the moment.

And he makes the classic face that we all make when we're asking ourselves, who am I?

What is my deal?

A big, open-mouth, absolutely insane scream.

He says, a nameless king in a borrowed castle, my subjects no more than mindless puppets.

Beat.

If this is the mandate the heavens have granted me, I fear nothing except the tedium that it will bring.

What's going on here?

Cope.

It is cope, isn't it?

V

feels like to me, at least.

My subtitle.

Stop being edgy when his girlfriend's not around.

That's the only way he can have emotional intelligence.

So true.

My subtitle, slightly less edgy.

I did get that line too.

Mine said,

If this is the fate the heavens have granted me, I have no doubt I shall slowly be bored to death.

Oh, damn.

That's

better line.

That's a very different shade of the line, right?

Yeah, it is.

It is very different.

Actually, there's a few.

I think there's just three things that I noted in here that were like drastically,

not drastically, but like notably different than their

than the dub and the other sub.

UP is shadowing him.

The king says, stop it.

UP continues to shadow him.

The king hits him so hard in the face that he goes flying backwards.

One of my favorite Pito lines from this, which is like, they just go like, now we've all been beat by the king.

The king, then, then we start hitting a new interesting wrinkle.

And this, once this starts happening, this starts happening kind of pretty rapidly, which is that the king is

really starting to become actively frustrated with the security efforts of the royal guards.

Because after striking Yupi, the king then tells Yupi to tell Poof that Poof's Poof's N is irritating him.

And the ants kind of, sorry, to tell Pito that Pito's N is irritating him.

The ants kind of anticipated this, but they can't really remove the security.

Pito says, sorry, no can do.

And

Poof says, well, then you have to tell the king because I do not want to get hit again.

So that's

a good.

You know what?

You're making a good decision, UP.

Yeah.

Pito initially presents

one plan, which is that they're going to block the aura around the king,

like an umbrella protecting you from the rain.

And the king is like...

This is a real I'm not touching you solution.

Yeah.

For real.

Yes.

Yes.

I think the king is right to not like this.

He's like, if this is annoying, what you're just going to follow me around?

You're going to track my every move or you're going to basically imprison me somewhere.

This is lovely and, you know, like thematically resonant of a lot of stuff that this arc is playing on.

The idea of like a king or a powerful figure in the absolute lap of luxury that has essentially become a prison.

I'm thinking a lot about the like

oracles in Greek myth.

You know, are people imbued with such tremendous power and are required to be so protected that they are essentially imprisoned.

Meanwhile, the second layer of this is that like what Pito is doing with their N is extremely important.

Like, yes, for the other side of this, like,

the consequences of how this shake out shape

like immediately what is about to happen.

It's great, and this is just stories, so it sounds so facile to say on the face of it, but the ants really don't know what's about to happen.

I mean, nobody knows what's about to happen.

That's the best thing about, so I just re I watched like the last 20 episodes or whatever in the last couple of days to catch up.

And the thing I kept coming back to is like imperfect information remains one of the key things.

And it's not importantly, it's never that sort of like two ships passing in the night.

If only, you know, the love interest A and love interest B didn't know they were going to be in the same place at the same time.

So they missed each other.

Like it's not that sort of deeply frustrating thing.

Instead, it's both, it's all invested parties are interested in something that they're working towards actively, but they don't have perfect information.

And they're all doing their best to reason out the truth of the situation or what the best way is that they can, with the limited information they have, make the best play possible.

And the sort of friction that comes from that is really productive, both in terms of the plot going in fun places and also in terms of like characterization and who these people are.

Sparry Frozen Synapse versus XCOM.

Say more.

Well, Frozen Synapse is a tactics game where both teams make their moves simultaneously.

uh in with out of view of each other and then you hit the play button and then those moves happen and you get to see if you made the right move by like where your guy ended up versus the other team.

And so you get this thing where like there's simultaneous planning and then simultaneous carrying out of those plans.

And importantly,

you can mock what you think the enemy will do.

You can say, well, if they go over here and set up here, can I then sneak my guys behind this car without them getting shot?

Oh, yeah, that could work.

That could work.

But you don't know they're going to go.

You don't know that that's where they're going to go.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Versus something like XCOM, where when the enemy makes their move, as long as they're in your sight sight line,

you can see what they're doing.

You can also see like the results of their movements in the world, even if you can't see them specifically.

And then you get to react to them, and then they react back to you after where like this tit for tat sort of thing.

And that is not, I mean, obviously, sometimes it's like that, but it's, I think it's rare to have a show that is doing a frozen synapse thing.

There's a formal thing happening here that I really like as well, which is that one way you would kind of stage this hidden information or this imperfect information plot, usually, is that you would

cut between

events to really hammer home dramatic irony.

And that works really well in a story where you have a set of protagonists and a set of antagonists or a set of secondary characters.

And you can cut between them.

You can see our protagonists putting a plan in place.

And then to really ramp up the dramatic tension, you can intercut it with, you know showing how things aren't quite how they believe them to be but what Tagashi's drifting camera lets you do you know what what Takashi and the team's resolute almost bloody-minded insistence that everybody can and should be a protagonist is that it means that Everybody feels like they are working as the like lead unit.

You can't intercut to raise dramatic irony.

Dramatic irony doesn't really work here other than in a few moments.

Because instead, what you're doing is you're just saying, well, here's one team of protagonists planning thing A.

Here's another team of protagonists planning thing B.

Only one person here knows how that's going to go, and that's the narrator.

And so he's going to pop in and explain how it all works.

There's the show that does this the best, of course, is The Wire.

It's Hunter, X Hunter.

It's Hunter Hunter and The Wire.

Is this the move that The Wire does as well?

Yeah, yeah.

The Wire is famous for being like the

sort of cop procedural show that spends just as much time with the the people who are, you know, the people who are in the drug

cartel, or they're not even a cartel, really.

Like the business.

What are they actually called?

The Barksdale crew, I guess.

Yeah, the Barksdale crew.

And then we refer to them.

Yeah, and then like the union.

And then like, you know, each season kind of has a different kind of focus, focal point, but you spend just as much time on those characters.

The thing that I think this also would make two things that would make this fall apart.

One, if it was one piece of information that each side didn't know, if it was like, ah, they don't know the MacGuffin is coming or something, you know?

I like that just sort of like a soup of humans.

Exactly.

And then two, the show does keep things that neither side knows.

Right.

Exactly.

Like, who's Netero's friend going to be, which we'll get to?

And what's that arrival going to look like?

Does he have his normal plan?

Does he have a normal plan?

We're all wondering if Netaro's going to have a normal plan.

You forget this because the detailing and what the plan is is so clear in the previous in 109, where there's like all of the different PowerPoint presentations and maps and stuff.

You're like, okay, yeah, I get it.

I get it.

They're going to do this.

And then, and then, you know,

what's his name?

McCalgo is going to go down to save Palm.

And then they're going to go the stairs.

And like, oh, yeah, but there's also a whole other actor here.

Even the last time we see Netarow,

there's no hint that something extremely bizarre and unexpected is going to happen because we see him just like meditating on a nearby mountain.

Yep.

Solo.

Solo.

Even outside of like large-scale, spectacularly violent plot moves from the chairman of the Hunter organization, there are like little wrinkles here that the

extermination team knows, but has been kept hidden, or more specifically, hasn't really been reminded to the audience.

There are a couple of tiny little details in the plan that we see them execute that that made me just like punch the air.

It was great.

We'll get to them later.

But for now, here is what they've decided to do.

Pito's N is only going to be used up to the first floor of the palace.

No N on the second floor.

The king says, you will not come unless summoned, so disturb me at your peril.

Pizo feeds this back to the royal guards who sort of go,

okay.

what this means is there's two things that this means first we have a perfect inversion of pito's air uh pito's n crawling down the stairs and poof's n crawling down the stairs now the bottom floor is full of n and the top floor is empty and secondly yup has been stationed on the stairs this is where you p meets wealthy in the scene that actually follows this um This is great because if you're thinking about all this stuff in relation to the hunter team, it's sort sort of like the perfect mix of, like, well, is this good or bad?

Like, is it good that there's no Ener on the King, or is it bad that you be on the stairs now?

This is to Austin's point about it not being one singular piece of information, you know, messing with the viability of the plan so much as all these little

It's great, it feels like a tabletop game, you know, the sort of the like expressivity or the react the reactivity of the plan.

It could it could shift in terms terms of like capability or effect in any direction at any moment, depending on how things go.

And now we have UP sitting on the stairs.

Such elegant work to come back again to this almost like ritual redrawing of this staircase with different characters on it.

Then we have a Welfin scene.

Welfin is really starting to figure the mystery out as to like what was going on here.

Oh, a tiny detail about the shoe that I love is that the palace is so massive and is so empty that it took them one week to find the shoe.

I think that's just like a really good, creepy detail.

The palace is just so empty at this point.

Also, the other thing is

Welfin keeps like playing with the shoe.

Keeps like tossing it and catching it, like flipping it on his finger and twirling it.

It's really funny.

Yes.

The vibe that I get from Welfin here, both in terms of his like

conscientious detective work, the way he's kind of playful and the way he's occasionally animated just like being a wolf like bending down to sniff or like crawling around is he's like grommet from wallace and grommet when grommet has to figure out a path

they're the wrong pants welfin and and of course just just like tagashi to have like another character pop up who it's totally unclear whether we just get one little bit of this guy he maybe he'll show up again to conclude this or what or if this is like new guy welfare who we care about now welfin new guy he's drawn so well big 2003 mean character new guy welfare

oh my

god

if you weren't there be grateful

he um he keeps uh the camera keeps zooming in really close on his face uh it looks really funny um he makes he makes funny expressions does welfin that's why he's powering and growling character

he keeps getting cast in purple and red light it's very cool he's starting to figure out the mystery, but he wants to make sure that he can prove it.

He's doing this like Colombo style, where it needs to be ironclad.

He's doing 4D chess about like, how do I do this and get credit?

I have to get credit.

I can't waste their time, but I also can't give them information that they're going to find out it was a lie.

So it's got to be more that they can use without me getting anything for it.

That's the big thing.

Yeah.

I have immediately even UP says, oh, yeah,

I think Peto and Poof's ends probably the same.

And Welfin's like, privately to himself and his own interiority, he's like, no, I don't think that's true.

I think what happened is that he's not.

It says a lot about Yupi that he has no idea.

Yeah, totally.

So he tries something kind of weird.

I don't know what this is about.

He goes down to director Bizeph and he says...

There was an intruder in the palace.

The intruder can teleport.

He possibly teleported Palm out.

All this I can understand.

He's like linking together BZF's plot with his plot.

But then he says, they were planning on blowing up the palace, and we need to find the bomb.

My note here is, not sure what Welfin's move is here.

Let him cook.

Yeah, let him cook.

So I did a lot of thinking to try to figure out exactly what here didn't make sense to me.

I have this with five question marks and five stars next to it.

But I'm pretty sure Welfin

because he pulls the teleportation thing out of nowhere, right?

He does, but this is actually the second time that the ants have worried that someone can teleport.

Yes, um,

early on, one of their big concerns with the king was that someone was going to grab him and teleport out of there, which is not what Nove's power is, but it's also not what they're trying to do, right?

Yes, because no one they don't know anyone who can grab the king like that, basically.

Like, no, that's that is not within that

a great plan.

Nove couldn't even approach the king, let alone grab him.

Yeah.

But I went back and double-checked.

Welfin was there when Layol was using Flutter's power to see Nove teleport.

Oh, interesting.

So he

knows that there is a teleporting guy.

Flutter also knew that there was a teleporting guy back before he got clobbered.

And I don't remember what he did to that information that I didn't check because I thought it's enough that

Welfed was there when Leol saw that using Flutter's power.

Now, the bomb thing, totally beyond me.

I don't know why he thinks it's a good idea to say, to tell BZF,

hey,

I'm going to go look for this bomb.

I have a theory here.

I mean, first of all, it should be clear for people who are not watching along.

He says, they're going to try to do a bomb.

And then we get a little interior.

Yeah, right.

Like, that's not going to happen.

He knows that this is a lie.

We know this is a lie.

It seems like he's taking BZF off the board.

Yeah.

And being like, and listen, we can't let anybody know about this, buddy.

Like, you and me, like, he's ingratiating himself in a way, not ingratiating himself, but he's like aligning himself with BZF

and saying, like, look, it probably won't happen until the sorting happens because that's when there'll be the most people.

That's when the king will be out in the open the most.

I'm going to solve this.

And so, you know, you and me, like, you go back in the safe place where you go you don't go talk to anybody else don't tell anybody else about the thing I'm hunting down for you etc etc and I think that it's just about like

of getting him you know

lining up situations

it well and also just like I want to make sure I have access to this guy because at some point I'm gonna do my thing yeah and so hey buddy there's a bomb coming you better go

you that that scene ends with him going um uh all right the coward finally calmed calmed down.

And so I think he's like, BZF is a sort of loose thread,

a loose cannon, a risk.

Let me get him back into a room where he can just be quiet and wait and not risk whatever my maneuver is going to be.

Now, what that maneuver is, is not clear.

Right.

And also, yeah, and also stay off the damn phone.

Exactly.

Stop walking around here.

This guy has a 5G on.

This conversation between Welfin and BZF marks the first real time that I can think of that an ant plotting against a superior has actually had direct successful access with the superior.

I feel like all the ants are constantly plotting this shit, but they never get to a place where they can actually pull the trigger on their boss.

This is good work from Welfin.

Yeah, the most we don't understand.

I think that's the first time so far before was Leol, and Leol was like miles away from the king.

Yeah, yeah.

Also, that was never going to work.

That was never going to work.

I want to give him that his power is good enough to get something done.

He could get, if he was, if he managed to steal a good enough power, he could have done something.

I think Leol, we should always give credit to Leol for being a cool dad or uncle.

Yeah.

And that's, that's the most important thing.

I think he mentioned good taste to music.

His good taste to music.

That's right.

His biggest problem was that he assumed that he could get one of the royal guards or the king to say, nice job, I owe you one.

And that's never gonna, that was never gonna happen.

No, no.

Maybe UP, but maybe not.

Yeah, not even UP.

Not even UP.

Do you think that is just like another exam, like, just an example of how every Chimera ant except for the king and the three royal guards, like, that we see that are named, right?

Have like humanity in them.

And it seems to be that the royal guard and the king like are, they don't have that.

Like that was not a part of their like creation, it seems like.

Well, we, of course, learn, of course, that UP literally doesn't have any humanity in him.

They do say he's the only one.

Yeah, UP is a magical beast.

Oh, okay.

Magical beast plus Chimera ant instead of Chimera Ant plus human.

The thing that I've seen is that

unlike the normal ants who have like a human soul in them from their human selves, that the chimera ant, the royal guards are like an amalgamation of many souls.

And so

they don't have personality in the same way from their past life because they're like many past lives, which is why they're so strong.

And then Yupi doesn't have any humanity at all because he's just like a bunch of magical beasts altogether.

I guess there was a crop of magical beasts that they found.

Gotcha.

It probably is a huge amount of those tigers with the horn.

Oh, no.

The campfire tigers.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a title sequence for the first frame of the show show where the narrator says, magical beast so that a Chimera ant has

ended up.

Rebecca.

Sorry.

I do just want to push back a little bit on the idea that Poof and Peto don't have humanity in them.

I get it.

I think that they are cruel in a way that most other Chimera ants aren't.

I think they are single-minded, especially Poof.

But I do think that so much of what's happening here is those are human qualities.

Even those sorts of extremes are human qualities yeah and i think by the end of these three episodes we literally see pito get hit with a sort of moment of i mean we we see pito cry right yeah which i think is meant to hit us with a sort of like oh my god they've something's changed in them in the same way that something changed in the king maybe not in the same degree or direction, but this is like something shifted in their positionality regarding emotion in a huge way.

The thing that they don't seem to have is like one-to-one memories of a human life.

Correct.

Yeah.

I think that is exactly right from what we can tell.

Yeah.

None of them are like, oh, right.

I used, that was my stepdad or my adopted dad or whatever.

Or like, I used to be a farmer or I used to be in whatever, you know?

And then, and then that does lead to knock-on effects of like not being able to connect.

in that way,

the way that the other ants have, which is why you need to have a moment for Pito to come to that versus the other ants who like kind of have like his bubbling up over the course of like the first like few weeks of their lives.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.

And, you know, in some ways, it's like even the person most removed from, even the person who is been being played the most stoically and single-mindedly, which had been the king, eventually, you know,

what's the

line in military strategy is like no, no,

no strategy survives contact with the enemy.

It's sort of like

no living sentient being or sapient being survives remaining inhuman when it comes in contact with a long enough time with a human.

And it's just that Meruim has the

happened to be in the position to have that happen to him before it happened to these others because of his unique interest in Goongi.

So he'll kill anybody who tries to get him away from it.

Right.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

No point in humanity survives contact with Goongi.

That's right.

That's true.

Or with Koogi.

Unless you're shy of poof because all your humanity is like from dance moms or whatever.

God, that is the energy.

Yeah.

I do love that

read this sort of like, what aspects of humanity do the ants take on?

And the answer is like all of them diffuse, you know, poured out through these various different scenes.

But I really do love that the sort of like

underlying background noise of a lot of the mid-tier ants is just the very human desire to like claw your way to the top of the pile.

Get a little credit.

The two overriding things that we see in terms of like ant humanity, by which I mean deeply human traits that the ants express all the time, is like fierce loyalty and love for those who mean things to you, and also simultaneously a desire to stab people in the back and stand on top of the hill.

You know, it makes perfect sense because who were they?

They were farmers from the NGL and gangsters from the NGL.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yoshihiro Tagashi turns over the next playing card on what am I going to write about next?

Ah, good.

It's the extermination team.

He was hoping these guys would come up.

Everyone's arriving in no.

Extermination team.

I keep forgetting what the narrator was talking about.

I had forgotten that

the narrator called them that until it's so deliberate.

I mean, by the end of this episode, the extermination team is put in a really weird place.

And of course, that's the moment that the narrator starts with the game.

I was trying to remember it for the extermination team.

I was trying to remember it for the intro, and I couldn't.

So I just wrote them, like, I just said Team of Hunters or whatever.

Melieron is going to work with Knuckle.

That's great.

I love that they developed a complete friendship off-screen.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

And there are these fun little wrinkles in this scene, some more fun than others.

An opening one that I think is really fun is that Melieron really wants a cigarette, but is worried about the scent of smoke.

Again, just like deeply relatable human sort of gestures.

He's like kicking his heels.

He's anxious.

And Knuckles says, just smoke one.

Cannot imagine a worse time to choose to quit cigarettes.

Just have one before

you're about to go try to assassinate this incredibly, unfathomably powerful being who also killed your dad.

Yeah.

Quitting cigarettes is hard enough.

It's super hard.

I'll like have like a recording where I'm like, I don't know if I was on my A game, I could really go for a cigarette.

This guy's trying to kill like the strongest creature to ever exist.

Now, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Other side, lung capacity, lung capacity.

True.

Well, this is why I love this little moment because I can't tell whether or not this is just a neat little

human moment with Maliarone, a little shading on the character, or if this is setting up some central problem that's going to emerge.

That's Hunter Hunter.

Malear.

Oh, sorry, Connor.

He doesn't come up in the next two episodes, but Welfin doesn't come up in the next two episodes.

Nope.

Either.

The pacing that's happening here is

so, so clever.

You know, Jack, a couple of episodes ago, maybe it was the last episode of the show, you were like, how could there be 30 more episodes in this R?

Well,

and the answer is partly...

It's partly, you know, episodes 1, 11, and 112 happen in three minutes or whatever.

But also, it's Tagashi is setting up a bunch of different domino, you know,

things.

What are those called?

What are the domino rallies?

Dominoes.

Domino, you know, dominoes.

Domino

rallies, yes.

That are moving at different speeds, right?

And so, or different lengths and are like, okay, like the big, the payoff for this, if there is one, might be six episodes away.

It might be 15 episodes away.

Right.

It might come in the manga.

It might come in the right, which means you might have space to bounce back and forth in a way that you wouldn't if, you know, you y'all have watched some Dragon Ball Z on here.

This is not how Dragon Ball Z works.

I was going to say, this is like virtuoso plotting.

Pacing.

We had talked about how Dragon Z.

In the bonus, Patreon bonus episodes, which you can get to by supporting us on Patreon at friendsathe.cash, we have a bunch of really cool bonus episodes where we talk about Dragon Ball Z and Judger's Bizarre Adventure.

We're going to five.

$5.

Just $5.

And in one of those episodes, I described the experience of watching Dragon Ball Z as like watching an extremely long, singular fuse like wind its way around a house.

And just as you think it's about to like get into the garden to light the firework, it goes like back up through the fire escape and inside again or whatever.

And Keith said, Dragon Ball Z is a show about the fuse.

And you know, you see that over and over again, especially the like shown in Pacing.

You know, we will be in one fight for 10 episodes.

And the fight will be sort of the same at the beginning, at the end as it is at the beginning, except people will just be bigger.

If anything, 10 is an understatement, a dramatic understatement.

I think the fight with Boo is like 35, 45.

Like it's insane.

Like it's a fight with a guy.

It's preposterous.

Yeah, it's preposterous.

This is a show with 15 fuses.

This is like watching Rally Racing or like the Le Monde 24 hours.

You know what I mean?

It's Mario Mario.

Check it over here.

Yeah.

Like all of a sudden a blue shell bombs the first place plot and it becomes the last place plot for 20 episodes.

Or if you're going to the fuse and bomb like metaphor, a bomb goes off, right?

Like, oh, they're not all the same like length fuses.

Some of these fuses were only 30 seconds long and we're paying it off now.

And then

we're going to be talking about it.

Yes, exactly.

Yes.

Yeah.

When Netaro shows up, that becomes the most important thing that's happening immediately.

And, you know, it should go without saying, but this is so hard to do.

When you have this many characters and you have this many plates, the thing that keeps you up at night and also up during the day in a sort of like awful head spinning daze as a writer is like,

why is this happening and when?

Because I can explain to you my plot in the broad scale.

I can explain to you my characters in the narrow scale.

You know, I can tell you how people are going to react to things.

But you enter as a writer, this like awful game of like, oh my God.

So if that's happening then, this can't be happening there.

You're just sliding post-it notes around.

He is making this look so easy.

It's astonishing.

And can I say in the background, yeah, I thought that we weren't going to talk about it because it didn't slot into the very beginning, but I think this is a perfect time, thinking of how difficult that is to do and how much work it would be to do as an author.

What else is Tagashi doing?

Tagashi has decided to roll tens of thousands of dice to play a little game

with the audience of the hunter-hunter manga where you can get a chance to become a hunter.

This is like an extra material that this puts into the manga.

Like 10 pages across volume 25

where people can write in with a character name and with stats that they've chosen.

And those stats...

There's three stats per player.

You can stat them out however you want from a pool of stats.

I just want to read this.

This is,

I'll share the picture of it as well.

He says, an apology and an explanation.

I am sincerely sorry that the results of the third Hunter exam have been unbelievably delayed.

I really wanted to go through each and every application and roll the dice myself.

And now, here are the results.

We had a grand total of 4,336 entries.

Thank you for your participation.

I would like to describe the exam process and post results in the comments in this volume.

It has been so long that I wouldn't be surprised if many of you have forgotten what name you used.

Please put up with my

selfish ways.

Let's get started.

And then it's Tagashi as the little dog he draws.

And on top of the dog, it says, I'm sorry.

And he's bowing.

I love this way.

Please give yourself a break, Tagashi.

Yeah, man.

There's literally too much to go through all of these, but there are six different games.

And I would love to talk, just say what these are.

Oh, my God.

He is the best.

Can we read these as a like individually?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

God, he's doing this while he's writing this fucking arc.

This is so funny to to me.

Round one, beach flags.

Four people per match, with one person advancing to the next round.

The scores were tallied by agility and die roll.

Regular D6.

If there's a tie, it's broken by their timing stats.

If there's another tie, I keep rolling until there's a winner.

And then the dog says, Thanks for all the messages.

The pool of applicants was reduced to 1,084.

It took about 15 hours to roll the die roll.

Go on, friends at the table.

What do we do when we don't do guests?

The highest score was Lime with 16 points.

There were five people tied for second place with 15 points.

Pino, Kamakura, Captain Fujita, Hantasan, and Dorodora Ponpon.

People with agility of 1 or 0 all failed.

According to the luck of the draw on their opponents, there were cases of people losing even with a score of 15 or winning with a score of 5.

My roll-in was punctuated with occasional outbursts of, whoa, what are the chances?

There was a super intense battle where I had to roll the dice four times to finally settle the match.

I can picture him having designs for all these characters in his mind, too, just like popping in while he's doing this.

I'm like, oh, that's great.

Does someone want to read the other one?

I want to read all of these over the next.

This is a Patreon bonus.

If we want to read all of these.

We should read all of these for a Patreon bonus.

Should we, in the bonus, should we say the names of the winners or for now, or should we read because the names are for the winners?

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

I have an idea.

Okay.

Patreon bonus.

We all make characters.

We all make characters.

And then we all style.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then we send them to Yoshihiro Tagashi.

Yes.

Yes.

We'll send our real OCCs.

And we put them on a t-shirt.

We put our Hunter OCs on a t-shirt.

Okay.

Now, now

this is real podcasting.

I'm just going to.

I don't want anybody to read anything that's on this page, but I'm going to show the image of what the final match is, the final event, which I'm saying is called Triple Muscle.

And just look at what it says here.

Just

oh my god.

Oh, there's some good names here, though.

Yeah, there are.

Okay.

Super Ninja Wolf.

Okay.

We have to do this as a bonus.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have to start thinking about my hunter-hunter OC immediately.

Mine's Super Ninja Wolf.

No, that's Super Ninja Wolf.

Steal.

uh i'm doing

okay well that's allowed yeah in the same way that the uh king is getting increasingly irritated by the royal guards uh worrying and that in turn really irritates the royal guard kilua zaldic is really annoying everybody inside nov's apartment with his planning um except he is moral

except moral who moral and killua are kind of have become kindred spirits although moral will never output it he just sort of thinks like that guy's got it's got his his head unscrewed right it's funny that you say that that he's annoying everybody because he is but he's annoying everybody the way that like

a a manager who is really like you did you did you do your counts today did you conference come here yeah like but there's like an authority that killa has in this room it's his old line of work

say that again over and over it's his old line of work he is professional yes yeah we see this over and over again you know kiliwa in moments of crisis not only being capable but but um taking on this role of authority, even among people who outrank him, and people respecting that.

Part of that is that people know who the Zelda assassins are.

You know, a huge portion of the very early part of the show was focused on people flipping out when they hear the name Zaldic.

So I have to imagine that even among these extremely high-ranked hunters, people are like, Killua Zaldic is the son of Silver Zeldic.

You know, he knows what he's doing.

I wonder what the Zelda's are up to right now.

Oh, that's an

Ikalgo is so sure that the royal guards will be near the king, and he speaks with a seemingly earned chimera ant authority.

He's like, I'm a chimera ant.

The royal guards will be guarding the king.

And this is a real moment where the show just hammers the dramatic irony home.

And it's like, of course they're not.

We are watching them fracture right now.

Morel briefly pauses to consider that the king might be, quote, making babies inside the palace.

Oh,

God.

That's funny to me.

Well, it's really weird.

He says, you know, that one of the

Chimera Ant King's duties was to reproduce.

I love that he still thinks we're in the realm of Meriwem's duty rather than having gone completely off-pieced.

There's also the line, we don't know what he does inside the palace.

We know what he does and he plays.

You know, he sits down and plays Gungi and that is all he does.

People be gaming.

I have like a couple things I thought about this.

The first is that it's like they, even though they they have met multiple Chimera ants who they have like befriended, like Meleoron and Ikalgo are here.

They know that Chimera ants aren't just wired like animals anymore, but they can't get out of that mindset for the king or the guards at all.

And I think that's really interesting.

And the second one is it's really funny that they're like, oh my God, what if the king's fucking?

It's like, no, he's playing board games.

He's just up in his bedroom playing board games.

Don't worry.

And specifically, they're worried, what if the king is fucking palm?

Yes.

This is awful.

Yeah.

They have this sort of like gross reaction to the thought of Palm being assaulted by the king.

But then they know that Palm has presumably been assaulted by Director Bizeph.

You know, they sent her into the palace on a very specific mission.

You know, we've talked in past episodes about the way that kind of plotline of like dispatching a female secret agent into a position of either like violent peril or sexually violent peril is like a hallmark of this sort, or you know, a hallmark for better or for worse, usually for worse, of this sort of like spy thriller storytelling.

That's happened to Palm multiple times now, too.

It has happened to Palm multiple times, but here there's a particular kind of revulsion or a particular kind of like squeakiness that the crew feels when it's the king involved, when it's a Chimera Ant involved, when, you know, putting Palm into the

area of director Bizeph was previously thought of as just like, well, this is sort of the role of a female hunter in this mission.

It was a really odd moment.

We often directly get a visual, this sort of like hyper-stylized, like being held by the damn demon king's aura.

You know, it's a sort of like Art Nouveau, semi-erotic drawing of like the purple aura enveloping a naked palm.

Lots of like hands grabbing or two, like more than like

more than two, more than like a normal amount.

And not a youpie amount.

Not a yupie amount.

Like the air has hands.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I will say that as like odd and weird as this little moment was, I thought that the punchline to it worked pretty well, which was Killer thinking Goan probably doesn't get it.

And we cut over to Goan, just like looking blankly.

Goan's like unworldliness is over and over again a really good beat that they keep coming back to, I think.

But we also know Gohan has been on a million dates.

Yeah.

Yeah, but he doesn't know what a date is.

That is also true.

I mean, he did accidentally stage a really great date, you know.

Yeah,

actually, he really does know what a date is.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Well, the point of this is Killiwa being like,

there are things we have not thought of.

Yeah.

Yeah, and then he has a brainwave, and it happens too late.

Killiwa is starting to consider a third party as the reason that he is anxious.

He comes up with this plan and I said to myself, yes, correct, Kiliwa.

And then it's too late.

You know, we're moving on.

We're going from a great parallel with Kite, Kite's sort of like formless anxiety heading towards

where he's like, something's wrong.

There's something I'm not thinking of.

What is it?

And

I could be wrong, but Kite never settles on something.

It is.

He is killed before.

He's killed before he figures out what he didn't know.

Oh, no, he figures it out.

It's Peter.

Yes.

I love that this exists, and it'll show up again in the next episode.

I believe, quote unquote, just because.

People have feelings that are not just N.

There is such a thing as gut instinct or

expertise that can feel like instinct that is not reducible to Nen, right?

Kilo is not using his Nen ability lightning foresight or something like that.

You know what I mean?

He's using, I've done this so many times and I can just tell something's off,

which is a really good thing.

Oh, right.

Sorry.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of course, of course, of course.

You're right.

It is very similar to Machi, though.

Yes.

Yeah.

And she's always right.

She's always right.

There's a other little argument in here that

I think is really important

is

the discussion of whether the king hurt himself or not.

Because Killa was talking about it like it's a fact.

Right.

And Moral's like, you can't know that for sure.

And then we get the really incredible line of like,

in what situation would you hurt yourself?

And Gone says, when you can't forgive yourself.

And I'm going to post a really good image from the manga here because it's even better than the manga.

I'm excited.

Oh, that's amazing.

That's so good.

Can you describe what's happening there so it's um kind of just like plain back back black backgrounds on this we get like a close-up of moral's face saying okay let's think in what situation would you hurt yourself then next panel is a close-up of gone

with in his hair and this is something that's been done in the chimera ant arc a few times not so much in the show but in the manga Gon will frequently be deep in thought about what's happened to kite, and you'll either see Pito or in this case, it's the zombified kite's face like in his hair.

It's on his mind.

Like a mask or something?

Yeah, like a Photoshop mask or something.

It is literally on his mind.

And here we see the eyes of the zombified kite when he starts saying, when you can't forgive yourself.

Oh, that's good.

This is another difference.

My

subtitles said,

and the manga says, when you can't forgive yourself.

My subtitle says, when I couldn't forgive myself.

Ooh, gone.

But then the dub said, when you can't forgive yourself, forgive yourself.

My heart.

This is so good, though.

As a side note, I am generally pretty uninterested in whether or not a character being on model is like a sign of quality or a sign of effort or anything.

That's like a

way of thinking about adaptation that doesn't really appeal to me.

But the adaptation team has done an amazing job with these characters, whole affect.

You know, you look at these manga panels and especially that Morel in the left, the way they've been able to like capture the stances and poses

of these characters, the close-up of Morel's face as well, the process by which they got these static black and white images into, you know,

the moving colored characters in the show is really impressive.

I love the little bit here, too, where Morrow kind of builds off of the thing Ghan says and it's like, yeah, that makes sense.

That means he's not just an unemotional despot, but a proud statesman.

And continues to expand on that.

And then Kilua is like, yeah, that's eternally.

Moral summed everything up nicely, but he's wrong.

He's really good because it's like, he still has the feeling.

It didn't settle the feeling in Killua that there's something missing.

It's not just, oh, the, you know, the king disappointed himself and so he hurt himself.

You know, it's, there's some, there's some X factor we have not figured out yet.

And it's going to throw a, uh, you know, a curveball at us.

He says it has the potential to completely screw up our plan.

Before we move on and end this episode, I do want to double back to the

thing about thinking of the ants biologically as a scientist instead of as people, which is like, despite being friends now with ants and like treating those ants like people, but still kind of like

biologizing the other ants.

There is this aspect to it where like this kind of came up when the ants were splitting, and you had all this politicking going on about like the in-ants of the out-ants, who's going to stay with the queen, who's going to go on.

Uh, and what ends up happening, despite them having this humanity, is they do end up largely following the like the what the scion said that they would go out and try to start their own kingdoms.

And

those ants were painted as like the renegade ants, and the loyal ants were painted as like

the sticking, you know, to like too much to being ants.

When actually those roles should be flipped according to like what they had said about the ants, there is kind of something to what Morrill said.

Like, the king isn't out there fucking, but he is like forming a weird connection that he's like wanting privacy, wanting to be alone, wanting to be with Komigi.

There is something there to that still, where like, despite, I think that one of the things that the Chimera Ant arc has to say is, like, despite

all of the humanity bouncing around in your head, there is biology happening to people.

Whether that's true or false, I don't know, but that kind of keeps coming up in this season.

Yeah, I mean, that's part of the like Crichton-esque, like

a bio-thriller that they're playing as well.

You see that over and over again in Jurassic Park and in Day of the Triffids and in The Kraken Wakes and, you know stuff like that

We've spent ages getting ready for this fight episodes and episodes and episodes and now finally we are counting down from 10 seconds as Morel screams get ready to rumble.

They go through the door

We have the silent the silent like quieted it's a beautiful control here.

Yeah,

111 starts almost completely in silence.

We get this beautiful I it probably rotoscoped, high-detail shot of Morel's pocket watch

spinning in the air.

It reminds me a lot of the way that Dave Gibbons will draw the watch in Watchmen

and the cup being thrown of just this like really

precise analytical view of an object in space.

You know, in this moment, the watch chain and the watch move really realistically, really beautifully.

And then we get the reflection of his face in the watch, like telling everyone, let's get ready to rumble.

Everybody is walking towards the door, including Flutter.

Can we talk about this?

I was so confused for a second.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, me too.

Yeah.

I was like, wait, did Flutter change that?

Wait,

I think I know what's happening here.

I think they are letting Flutter go.

Oh, no.

They show you in the previous episode.

You just have to watch real close.

Oh, what's happening?

Do you want me to tell you?

I mean, will it, will it be, is it plot relevant for later?

I mean,

it's Tagashi.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, then I'll wait and see.

But it's not, but it's, I don't think it's a secret.

It's not a secret.

No, it's not a secret.

In the previous episode, when everybody is getting ready to go through the door at the very end, everyone starts doing their sort of like stretches or like, you know,

Meleoron Roan does like a big exhale yawn.

You know,

Knuckle takes off the like the top layer of his outfit, etc.

Ikalgo walks to the corpse of

Flutter.

I had wondered where Ikalgo was.

Yeah.

Oh, that's brilliant.

That's really good.

I was like, where's Ikalgo going?

The audience should always be asking, where is Ikalgo?

The audience should always be.

Here's what I'd figured.

He's a small fellow at this point.

I thought he might have been under the camera.

So we're ready for the assault now, right?

Yeah, everything's going to go as planned.

Every member of the extermination team has all the information they need to know about what's about to happen.

The narrator

two minutes ago.

And I thought to myself,

oh, no.

This is the point in which my notes just go into all caps basically for the rest of all my notes.

Also,

this is the moment in all of Steven Soderbergh's excellent Oceans movies where

the plan is explained to you in such detail by Danny Ocean in the Oceans films that you think you understand all of it.

But what Soderberg does in order to make the fun twist at the end of a heist movie is hide one whole wing of the plan from you.

This is what is happening here.

And what is revealed is one of the few like

absolutely sit up straight in my chair hunter-hunter moments, which is in the sky, we see this massive multi-winged dragon that two men leap from like paratroopers and start falling towards east gorteau and my heart my heart sank because i was like this is chairman notaro isn't this

uh

there's this great moment where pito and poof both see it and they have the exact opposite face on

yes uh they both look up at the sky and go, Dragon!

Pito is thrilled and

looks like he's a heart attack.

I didn't notice the heart in Pito's mouth.

Oh, yeah.

So funny.

There's some really great Pito expression work in these episodes.

Oh, yeah.

Pito was the first to notice it.

The only reason Pito decided to look up in the sky at that moment was

just because

in quotes pito's hunch was vague and then they say something's coming but seconds later faint suspicions became certainty the enemy however the enemy was still far above they were so far up in fact that even pito's extraordinary senses were unable to detect them at all now battle ready this certainty was a result of feral instincts left over from pito's animal origin they're a cat To your point, Keith, about the biology continuing to bubble up.

Yeah.

Right.

You know, this is my cat, Virginia,

she'll sometimes get afraid of her own leg or something, and she'll just be walking and we'll just go, whoa, and you'll have to like scamper up.

I've seen Virginia go from having her end throughout the entire house to being directed across the street like this.

And then Pito does a really cool, like, this is one of the coolest images in this episode full of extremely extremely cool images.

They like,

like, like moving like a massive water cannon or directing a spotlight, they move their N directly up into the sky.

Except it's animated so well, it like has weight to it.

So you see them have to like pour it upwards into the sky because this

pillar I really love the way that they treat Pito's N like, I mean, water is kind of the way to put it.

We have a shot later where it moves like that, but they, like, so much of the setup, like, in episodes prior to this, has been about how overwhelming the, like, malicious N is from the guards, and, like, making it feel like something with this weight is just, like, really well-made.

Like, this is just really well-made TV.

I think Cards on the Table, this might be the best episode of the show we've watched in a long time.

Maybe ever.

That's a great episode.

We keep saying that, though.

I know we keep saying that and i'm sure i'll say it again but like i this one is like it gives me goosebumps yeah this is a good timer

uh i love the like up until the this set of episodes n is basically a thing that extends in a circle from your body and then we get a hint in 110 that okay maybe you can like block off a certain area and do like a weird like dome of uh n or like a bowl of n instead of a circle and then now it's like, I don't know if this is a pitot thing or what.

But they can just blast it.

They can just blast their N in any direction.

They're just blasting.

They did.

The water metaphor is really great because it's almost as if they're tightening the nozzle on a hose.

Yeah.

Where at first it's really wide and spread out and soft, and then it becomes this tight spray up into the air that's focused on this, these shapes moving through the sky.

And, you know, it's not just that there is a big floating dragon.

It's also like there's heat lightning or something else There's like gold flashes.

We keep coming back to this dragon, but we actually really only see the dragon for one shot.

And then we see these gold dragons.

Well, we see these gold flashes in the sky.

And then an immense golden nen dragon pours down from the sky.

We've seen this nen dragon before.

It was smaller.

It was less scary.

It was fighting Crolo Lusilpha in York New City.

Zeno Zaldic has arrived on the scene.

By the way, we get this like huge block like at the same same time.

Yeah, I was literally about to post a screenshot of that.

Yeah.

It's my favorite, these title cards.

Which is great because

the next time we see those, it's like disagreeing with what a character had said.

Or

it's disagreeing with the narrator.

The narrator poses a rhetorical question and then the title card says no.

Yeah, the block text that Keith is talking about here is just a massive title card saying at the same moment.

I've written that down and then next to it I wrote, we are living.

Yeah, this this is it.

This is the stuff.

So the golden dragon comes down, and then back in the apartment, Nove is still counting down from 10.

At this point, I ask myself, hey, how much of Chairman Notero's plan does the extermination team know?

And it will become clear that the answer is none.

None.

This is a problem.

Killewa notices that Goan has gone quiet and still.

This is the moment where like, the light goes out of his eyes as he prepares himself both for the, I have to imagine, like, general rigors of combat, but also the, like, exacting revenge against Pito and the threat that's coming.

I think it looks so good, too, with the, like, sketchy lines laid over him and his eyes darkening.

And it's, like, a really quick couple seconds, but like

leading up to the line, Killiwa alone noticed that a shadow fell over Goan's eyes.

Like, boom.

Speaking of who knows whose plan, they don't know Netero's plan.

Netero doesn't know their plan, and it seems like fundamentally doesn't care.

Has accounted for what

the Extermination team has to do by including a whole new person on the team whose job is to do the same thing that the Extermination team has been doing.

Yeah.

Meaning that,

was it necessary to have them even here at all?

Who knows?

That could go with either this second-to-do person or the whole extermination team.

One of these two groups could just be gone.

Netaro and Zeno are falling down through the sort of like inside column of Zeno's massive Nandragon.

Oh, did we say Zeno already?

I thought that we hadn't said that.

We do.

We did say Zeno.

They touch Pito's N.

So much, like you were talking about, Sylvie, so much has been made of Pito's N.

And this moment of like first contact between Netaro and the N is so cool.

We see Pito turn their N off.

They grin with these sort of like sharp teeth.

And as they prepare to leap into attack, the dragon explodes into a shower of arrows.

But Hunter Elizabeth Zeno has an evil flying nimbus.

You can only ride the dragon dive if you're evil of heart.

Looking at Netaro and scratching my chin.

The dragon dive turns into this like 500,

maybe 1,000 falling, glowing arrows.

It's an airstrike.

And when they hit the palace,

Netaro's plan, let me just turn over the piece of paper.

It's written down, carpet bomb the palace that my own team is in.

It's wild.

This episode also just made me think of like a

fake blowback about the Chimera conflict.

yeah, where they're just like where Chairman Netero called his old friend Zeno Zelda, and then it's like a clip of like Tony Soprano saying something.

We get the blowback episode, though.

We do

that, they get through the interview with them.

You have to subscribe to the bonus feed to get the Zeno Zelda interview.

It comes after the ECZ.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

By the way, let's not forget there's also a crowd of what, millions of

zombified humans

in the courtyard of this this is

and i i want to be clear discriminate or indiscriminate this

oh this is wildly indiscriminate

yeah yeah and we learn how indiscriminate it is about to be for the extermination team in a second but like this is his plan

Sure.

This is so consistent with what we have learned about Chemon Natero.

Chairman Natero has always had a sort of scattershoot approach to humanity in general.

And now he is doing a literal scatter shoot.

It makes sense why you would bring in Zenna as well, right?

To like bring in the grandmaster of a villainous assassin organization.

One murder a day.

I am not.

I want to be clear.

You do not have to hand it to him.

However, later on, we will get

two particular things kind of

directly, I think, pretty directly acknowledged or

established.

One is this is, for Netaro, the way to keep casualties at a minimum.

A different character, I want to say one of the royal guards says that in narration.

And then, two, it becomes clear that Netaro and

Zeno both thought this was worth it or necessary given the threat, and that they have immediately, now upon meeting the king later, will be like, ooh, we, we both, you know, Zeno will eventually say, you know, this isn't what you told me I was signing up for.

Right.

And the narrator says Zeno's rebuke was just, and Netero couldn't help but feel the same way.

Again, I'm not defending him, but I do think this is another limited information thing, which is itself, I think, a good angle to attack Netero on.

My guy did not try to gather any information.

If you're going to hand it to one Zaldic that isn't Kilo,

it would be Zeno.

I think it's Zeno.

Probably.

He's the least ostensibly evil.

I'm a good.

Of the ones we know, Kaluto is kind of cool.

Yeah, Kaluto.

Kaluto is kind of cool.

I sort of wasn't.

I wasn't really counting Kaluto because he's so young.

I wouldn't bring Kaluto to this fight.

Yeah.

Illumi would.

The narrator is, you know.

But

I wouldn't bring Kilo to this fight.

No.

I know.

The narrator is now really involved.

You know, as Austin read here, the narrator is not only chiming in with his sort of usual explanations of Nen powers, he's saying things like, this was Pito's first mistake.

In turning off their N, they had lost them.

It's

this is incredible.

And this kind of continues through the episode, and so I sort of want to take a moment to talk about it now.

This is like flying dead in the face of the tired old writing advice show don't tell,

where you could do these episodes without the narrator the narrator is you know you'd need to recut things you might need to introduce some more dialogue the narrator is not structurally essential to the clarity of these episodes however watching fight scenes play out watching the kind of scale of this thing happen and then having the narrator um

speaking over it almost like a like a piece of prose that he's reading that he's telling us

you'll remember that i said someone tell tagashi about the novel?

Yes, there it is.

Actually, even character dialogue is breaking through the way it would in a prose paragraph, where the narrator will set up like it's what I just, the thing I read before, right?

Of like Pito's hunch was vague, and then Pito says something's coming, you know, and like it's not,

it's surrounded on both sides by narration.

It's not the narrator is not doing establishing shots.

The narrator is the lead actor in the scene and is describing what they are seeing effectively.

It's like a GM and their characters.

Yeah.

And this is so stagey.

It is like stilted in a really interesting way.

It turns out that when you have writers and animators working at, you know, such a level of skill and practice, this kind of like tell and show

mechanic does feel like off.

It feels weird.

It feels, you know, stagey is the word I keep coming back to, but it works so well.

Something it really actually reminds me a lot of is

the playwright Arthur Miller began

Here's a play called The Crucible, which is about the the witch trials in England in England and New England New England

And The Crucible begins in prose that is not read on stage It's not performed by actors the the prose that the crucible begins with lives in the script to be read by the actors and the directors except it's not stage direction.

You know, it is outright prose about the world.

And after he sort of finishes his first, you know, 2,000 words of prose and you move into the stage play format,

it continues as a stage play until certain characters are introduced, at which point he jumps back into prose for another couple thousand words.

And reading through the play, it produces this really weird effect that I was really reminded of in hearing the narrator come in.

As the fight, there's going to be a fight on the staircase.

I don't think that's a spoiler.

As the fight on the staircase begins and the narrator is just talking, just talking and talking.

It's incredible.

This might be geographic, but the crucible is required reading here for school.

Yeah, it's like a real, like, by sixth grade, I'd read The Crucible.

Okay, I wasn't sure if that was just me in New England that had the Crucible, but Jersey too.

We're all in a pretty tight.

I guess Dre, did you have to read The Crucible?

Yeah, I did.

Okay.

All right.

So at least east of the Mississippi.

The Crucible readers.

I read.

Are you east of the Mississippi, Mississippi, Dre?

Do I not know where?

Yeah, no, yeah.

Okay, phew.

We'd have to get art.

Oh, no, art went to school in New York.

I read Death of a Salesman in school, and then later I read The Crucible.

I have a friend who's an English teacher in Jersey, I believe, who

was recently teaching The Crucible.

It's still lovely.

It's good.

Yeah, it's good.

There's some stuff in the Crucible.

It's fucking sad, man.

Yeah, that really is.

Yeah.

There's something else happening here visually that goes along with this narration shift.

It's really emphasized in a particular shot, but I also think it's emphasized simply in the structuring of it.

We've already kind of touched on it, which is it does feel like a blowback episode in some ways.

It does feel sometimes documentarian.

The camera, as Pito looks up at the

golden, what is it, the dragon drop like arrows falling?

The dragon dive, yeah.

The dragon dive, right?

One, their eyes turn to this rad, bright red with all the spirals in it.

It looks cool.

It looks so cool.

And then they jump up to kind of charge into where they have sensed the figure in the sky.

And when the camera gets to the figure in the sky, standing on nothing, Netaro, the camera is like a shaky cam.

It's like shuddering back and forth.

And it's like, there's a moment where it struggles to stay in focus.

It feels like someone floating there, like with a camera, trying to get a good shot of Netaro, who is standing in the air like when Superman is evil in a story.

It is 100% the way you draw that, you know?

Yeah, it's great.

There's

the other detail on Pete.

Oh, sorry, you got Keith.

Just something that I want to note about this narrator is how present the narrator is in the manga.

I went and looked at a lot of the stuff from here, and the narrator is all over.

Like, it makes a ton of sense to me to choose to adapt this one-to-one because

you would lose so much to to lose the narrator uh and without like i think i think the thing that you would gain is that you could make these in a lot fewer episodes if it was what you wanted to do for some reason the affect would be so different it would be so different uh and then the other thing is um

how

well they've carried over the framing from what we'll talk about in a second i have i have two manga shots queued up to share for when we get to or I think about to get to.

As Pito leaps, they destroy the top of their flagpole.

Pito sitting on the flagpole is like a

recurring image over and over again through the back part of this chimera and arc and has sort of been representative of the horror of their N, like looking over the palace.

Yeah, there's been some mirror of like Poof kind of slowly losing his mind and then always cutting back to Pito, just sort of like diligently applying their N, like sitting on the, sort of thinking about like, wouldn't it be fun to go fight moral?

I mean, that's what's kind of funny, right?

Is do you remember like, I think it's 109

when Poof is like, well, I have to put myself as the person who's going to care the most about the king's safety

because

Yupi, I forget what his, I forget what his reason for Yupi not doing it, but his reason for

not being Pito is like, they're too flighty.

They're going to chase the first toy they see.

Yeah.

Right.

Which is what happens.

Yeah, literally.

They didn't stay where they were.

If they'd stayed where they were, a lot of things would have gone differently.

Yeah.

And that's also very cat-like as well.

The cat experience of like, I am going to stay here in the same place for 11 hours and then I'm going to launch myself as hard as possible at the cardboard box.

Awesome.

I thought you were going to go the other way with it and say, like, Poof was wrong because Peto, like, was so diligently sitting up there for

every single moment up until the fight starts it's specifically if pito sees something to chase down they will drop their end yeah and not be a safe

not be they'll leave the the some angle uncovered that's true that's what happens to chase moral which they didn't

well they didn't sense moral no they were fighting they were like thinking about moral and like no sorry i mean in this moment in this moment

they don't know that the the extermination team is coming in because they looked up and they put all of their attention upwards.

Yeah, sorry, what I meant was when they were doing the cat and mouse thing in the city.

But that's how it is with a cat.

You know, you go, well, the cat didn't chase the mouse last time, so it's going to be fine this time.

And the next thing you know, you know, it happens the next time.

Jerry's got to be fine.

Tom chases Jerry.

Yeah, he's fine.

And then we both went to Tom and Jerry.

I'm just picturing Zeno making the Paul Dano does he no face when

God, earlier today, Virginia slept on the chair for hours and hours and hours and then got up and got immediately to the important goal of eating the plastic plant directly behind her chair.

So yeah, Notero says, bad move, little ant.

The power dynamic here is immediately clear.

I am, all the big talk about Notero's strength

is being played out in the framing.

We are Pito in this moment looking up in horror and awe at Notero

on this manga page.

Yeah, it's so good the way Tagashi draws Netarov.

So good.

He makes him so horrific.

Yeah.

He draws him like

a classical theater mask almost.

And it makes it clear that this is a man who is like in his mid-hundreds.

Yes, instead of just like an old guy.

Hey, early hundreds.

Come on.

Something like that, yeah.

And then we cut to a literal documentary.

This is with

the static plays for a second.

Oh, sorry.

We skipped bad move, little ant.

Oh, we did.

Oh, I thought we said that.

Okay, okay, yeah.

We said it, but like, we didn't really talk about it till we got a little bit more.

There's a great title card that appears with these sort of like almost,

you know, when white light is split into its multiple colors and you get to see, you know, the various shades, those draw together to form the text bad move in the middle of the screen.

So what happens is Peto jumps up and uses a new technique, Puppet Masters Serenity, Terpsicora, who is a Greek god of dance.

Terpsicora is, yeah.

Yeah, don't know what that's about.

I don't know why Pito's moves are named the way they are.

When Pito uses this net ability in order to fight at full strength, it takes less than a tenth of a second after activation to launch the attack.

But in that moment, Pito swore Netaro said.

I anticipated several offensive

and defensive patterns, but that was a bad move, little ant.

And then we watch TV.

Well, and then the color thing happens and the words bad move show up on our screen.

Yeah.

There's so much narration that they have to introduce like a second text-only narrator.

The moment I realized that this like TV static thing wasn't a harbinger of some weird nan power, but was instead the show cutting into like documentary format, was so cool.

This is a piece to camera by zeno zaldic sort of explaining about chairman notero

um first he says

yeah he is he really is to be

yeah

vicious hunter one

first he says his nen is very quiet i really like this description given what we just saw from natero carpet bombing an entire palace and you know i mean that was zeno's power but he is coming in loud in this moment um he also says, he's been old forever, even when I was just a baby, says Zeno Zaldic.

He fought Zeno's grandpa and survived.

And he describes Cheminataro and him first as we're kind of like Yin and Yang.

And then he pauses and he says, no, that's absurd.

He's so much stronger than me.

Yeah.

So one of the things, there's an implied second character here.

that is asking questions to Zeno, to which Zeno is responding.

Yeah.

I love it.

It's so strange.

It's so interesting that they chose to be a little bit more.

And we've interrupted his nice dinner.

Oh, yeah.

He's having an amazing dinner.

Yeah, look at how he's sitting in this manga panel with his head in his hands and his wine, his insane glass of wine.

I will say, Jeff, you said this is not Nen Power.

I'm not teasing something.

I'm not sure it isn't.

I'm not sure that in the manga, eventually we don't learn that the narrator is a character who can interview anybody.

You know what I mean?

Like, I truly don't write.

Yeah, fair.

Interviewers lament me.

Exactly.

My power.

Interviewers lament.

There's also, this could also be something that Pito is experiencing, like, in a literal sense, because the first thing that Zeno wants to tell you is that, hey, this slowing down thing of time that you think.

So Pito is feeling time slowing to an absolute crawl.

That's real.

I'm Zeno.

I'm telling you that that's real.

That can totally happen.

Time slows down when you're about to die.

You can even hear what another person is thinking and describes like being it's proven because you can know something that you couldn't have known otherwise.

It turns out to be true.

Man,

this is called listening with the spirit.

Oh, not in the dub.

No.

That's called spirit echo is what they call it, I think.

Spirit echo.

Yeah,

I'm going to stick with listening with the spirit, I think, is nice.

That's way cooler.

It's cooler.

Not a collectible in in bloodborne this temporal discrepancy often occurs when two powerful warriors clash i'd love to get a another manga explaining uh the frieze of fight on namek uh-huh this is sort of like fictionalizing this is yeah

that's what i was saying before is there's a canon answer for why there's 30 episodes of this yes because it's we have everybody is doing this and they are for the rest of this episode and the next episode the the when they're going towards the staircase and everyone's like, oh, Gone's doing this.

And da-da-da-da-da.

They're experiencing spirit echoes.

They're experiencing listening through the spirit.

This is weirdly.

To me, this is like a very Terry Pratchett or maybe Douglas Adams way of writing something.

It's like, describes, like, oh, yeah, the place is just filled with magic.

So stuff is weird all the time.

Like,

there is something, I've said it, I've talked in the show before about how one of my favorite jokes in What We Do in the Shadows is

Matt Berry's character, a vampire, confidently asserting that ghosts aren't real.

Oh, yeah.

And I do sometimes feel, I love it when Hunter-Hunter just says shit.

You know, like they show me Nen, and I'm like, okay, fine, I can sort of believe that.

But then they say things like, time slows down when you're about to die, and you could actually feel each other's thoughts.

And I'm sort of like, really?

And learn private details about somebody.

Oh, that's surely that's not real.

So this is

maybe some sort of hacked in post

interview with Net with Zeno.

Maybe it is a fourth wall breaking.

I wrote in my thing, it's like

a serious hunterpedia in the middle of an episode.

Yes, it is.

I also wrote that down.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a hunterpedia, which we haven't had in a long time.

They should have done it in that style.

They should have, yeah.

GB Zeno.

But the other thing, yeah, it really could be like this is Pito is experiencing this thing, and the part of it that they're experiencing is Zeno's knowledge of how true it is.

It's wonderful.

And then he says, it's very fun to me that your thing calls it

listening.

Was it listening with spirit?

Listening with spirit.

I'll come back to that in just a second.

Jack, go ahead.

He says, the secret to his power.

You better look out for 100-type Guan Yin Bodhisattva.

Now, what is Guan Yin Bodhisattva?

Guan Yin Bodhisattva

is an extremely famous Buddhist

pseudo-deity.

Yeah.

Do you know what it is short for?

Guan Yin?

Yeah.

I don't know.

Guan Shi Yin, which means the one who perceives the sounds of the world.

Oh,

yeah.

Yes.

I have heard that.

Huh.

And is, like you said, a very

super prominent, maybe one of the most prominent

leaps.

Out of Buddhism and into other religions, even.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah.

Wow.

That's so interesting.

A daily passion and healing and like specifically

doing good, like doing healing action in the world.

Yeah.

Now we see 100,

what is it exactly?

100 onion bodhisattva.

Is it healing?

It's punching.

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

Just before we we get too far past it, I did have something about the way that Senno is talking about his relationship with Metaro, which is it's the, um, him and I are, uh, we're like yin and yang, he and I, and then to the presumably after the who the person he's talking to is like, oh, so you've, you guys are like equals.

He's like, no, we're fool, we aren't equals.

He's always gotten the best of me.

One, this could be Kilowa talking about Gone.

Oh, yeah.

And two, I think it's really interesting how the Zoldecs tend to be.

I wrote it as: do you guys always end up being the moon to someone's son?

Because that is

really how it feels

in this show.

You know who else it is?

It's Vegeta.

It is.

Oh, dude,

this is Vegeta talking about Goku.

You thought Hunter Hunter was a conversation with Dragon Ball Z before.

I very much thought, like, I'm so glad we showed Jack, Vegeta, and Goku before getting to this stuff because it's explicitly even the fight where they leave, right?

Yeah, it's all here.

But reversed, it's flipped.

It's Frieza asking for somewhere safe to fight.

Yep.

Uh-huh.

It's so good.

So

he blasts Peter with a gigantic beam of golden nen.

Splatten like a bug.

Yep.

Where does this beam seem to come from?

A point below him.

How does he do it?

Does he do like a kame?

What's he do?

He, well, so time is happening very, very, very slowly.

In fact, the narrator says, Pito stopped the sensation of time moving completely, but we understand that what Notero is doing is moving extremely quickly.

He sort of

like shadows of his hands move in the air around him as he raises a hand and then brings it in like a gesture of prayer in front of him and then pushes a hand forward to like classical martial arts to like launch a punch.

And then from below him, this massive like wing of golden men blasts out and there's this effect of something opening up you can see yeah there's about to be a flashback you can see the fields of the flashback opening up like literally from the past you can see the color of the fields like in this warp from where the energy comes from That's wild.

I had features.

That's so incredible.

Yeah, I also want to make another connection to Buddhism,

which is the when he's doing the hand motions, he's lifting them out, bringing them together into like a prayer motion.

He's doing all these sort of motions, you're seeing the sort of like shadow of the previous motion,

which ends up echoing the sort of like version of both Buddhist and Hindu deities who have lots of arms, right?

Like he's very clearly, he is echoing very powerful, very loved deities.

And then the thing he's doing is blasting people with huge energy waves.

That's Shonen.

That's Shonen.

I mean, there's an undeniable link.

There's a foundational link between martial arts and

Buddhism.

100%.

Yes.

Well, so this is incredible.

At this point, snow falls on a field, and a man is standing covered in snow and ice in the middle of it.

This is just, man.

It is so easy to talk yourself out of making moves like this in a story, of saying let's find a better place for this or you know maybe if we put it in earlier or maybe if we demarcate it differently these kinds of big moves are so easy to say well maybe this isn't the right place for it or whatever or even over and over maybe it should be its own episode Maybe it should be its own episode, you say to yourself.

Maybe we leave last episode on,

you know, we zoom in on Netaro and we'll have the narrator say, you know, but Netaro's story, da-da-da-da-da.

And then the next volume will start and the next episode will start, and we'll come in on the snow.

But no, instead, it is, you know, 12 and a half minutes or whatever into this episode, which the viewer has no idea you're going here.

And we come straight out of the highest stakes we have seen on the show.

Yes.

Come back from commercial, you know, and it's snowing.

It's, it's, hey, it's Tagashi's trick.

It's wonderful.

Tagashi's trick works in time and space.

Your space and time.

Let me wait to say.

Sorry, what was that, Sylvie?

I was just saying, Tagashi is just like on another level with

this.

The narrator says, Notero, 46 years old, winter.

Great opening line.

Notero, at 46, has reached the pinnacle of his mental and physical capability.

And the sensation that he feels is gratitude.

The narrator is really just in full telling us a short story mode at this point.

He is, quote,

indefinite, sorry, infinitely indebted to martial arts for making him the man he'd become, and he wanted to show his gratitude.

How does he choose to show his gratitude?

He resolves to punch 10,000 punches in gratitude per day.

To pray while punching 10,000 times.

A prayer before every punch, I believe, right?

He says he gives him a punch before every punch, centers himself, and then punches.

And then the prayers come after the punches.

I think it's in between.

I also think it's in between.

And this is lovely because this is just...

I said momentum, you can see him bring his hands together, can't you?

Yeah.

In between each punch.

Yeah.

He does the...

It's basically doing the function.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hands into prayer, then down to like horse dance, like by his side, and then out as a punch, retracts the other arm back to the waist, right?

It's a really simple punch that executed really well.

Then the narrator says something wild.

The narrator says, first,

he focused his key.

Yes, I love that.

I love that.

Hey, what's key?

Yeah, hey.

This immediately gave me a fear.

And the fear was this.

Did Chairman Notaro invent Nen?

There's a chance he named it.

There's a chance that he like, it was like a style of, and we see over the course of this episode, he eventually takes on a dojo.

Part of me is like, the narrator is saying he focused his key because

they don't have language for it yet.

This is a really good, this is a really good thought.

We've had it.

We know the

sorry, I'll send this to the other chat, actually, before I, in case I actually say it out loud.

Sounds good.

I was thinking about it, and we've seen a lot of like

old nen, but it's never been this old.

You know, this is maybe we said 64 or something years ago, you know.

People we've seen using nen all seem to have been prior to that point, and also I think people were using nen, maybe, albeit sort of inarticulately.

Um, I am

this moment when the narrator suddenly started using like classical martial arts language to describe what Chemon Natera was doing, when this is a show that loves to use nen language, um, was so cool to me.

At first, this sequence of focusing,

prayering, oh my god, praying and punching took five to six seconds to complete, says the narrator.

But he repeats this progress day after day, and we get a lovely little pastoral montage as winter becomes spring, becomes summer, becomes fall, becomes winter again.

Animals are shown watching his progress.

What's one thing we know about good hunters?

Oh, yeah.

Loved by animals.

Then he noticed a change after two years.

I love that he's standing in a little patch of dirt, you know, like a pitcher's mound or something, because he's just watered away over all this time.

He completed the punches before the sun set.

And then the narrator says, At 50 years old, that is to say, four years after he resolves to do this, he experienced a complete metamorphosis and he completes the 10,000 punches in less than an hour.

And the punchline to this is, this gave him more time to pray.

Well, and it's it's it's not a punchline that's delivered in a punchline voice.

It's delivered in like a dreadful, ominous tone.

Yeah.

At least in the dub.

I mean, there's a sense that what is going on here is absolutely insane.

I think it's not just that.

I think that it's like sacrilegious.

I think it's like

it's spoken with the voice of, and that gave him more time to load a gun.

Like,

you know what this reminds me of?

Yeah, go ahead.

A gunslinger in a Western.

Yes.

There is like a style of Western storytelling, like the Western the genre, not Western the place,

where the gunslingers are over and over painted as these kind of mythical figures capable of near supernatural acts with a gun, acts of focus, of accuracy, of courage.

And very often, these

This specialty is through like very, very intense training.

Of course, where do we get a lot of Western fight choreography from?

We get it from martial arts movies.

So these things are like connected in a way that I understand.

But it seems like what the way Notero, now he had more time to pray, you might as well be talking about, you know, some gunslinger who can draw fast.

You know, he was practicing his draw so fast, now he can light a cigarette, or now he can, you know, scope out the bandits or whatever.

Yeah, but it has the energy of the gunslinger who finishes a shooting routine or whatever and then kisses a cross, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, wait a second, is this good?

Is this

your unforgiven gunslinger rather than exactly?

Yeah, to me, I think that there's something really explicit happening around.

Um,

I don't think that Togashi is saying something about religion, uh, but is saying something maybe about religiosity, is saying something specific or like sharp

about

humanity's own capacity to

sharpen anything into a weapon.

Yeah.

It reminds me a lot of Karapika's torture to learn the chase.

Yeah.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do we have they established much of like the state of religion in Hunter-Hunter world?

Not really.

Not especially that I didn't think so.

We've seen a lot of crosses.

When the banter trooper around.

Right.

Okay, we have references to Jesus, right?

Yeah, right.

Yeah,

and the devil.

Yeah.

have had religious characters in the background of things as well.

You know, it's clear that religion exists in the world.

We know where we're going here, right?

He is able to launch 10,000 punches in, you know, less than a second.

Except he doesn't quite get there yet.

He arrives in a dojo, his clothes ragged.

At this point, I wrote down, again, the fear settling deep in my soul.

Does the hunter organization exist at this point?

How long ago was this?

He can now punch so fast that the sound comes later.

It's so good.

I punch like this when Hiyori Itai hits its chorus.

What I'm doing every time.

I have a little bit of audio from this.

Please.

Okay.

I was like, can you see the video?

Can you see the actual

scene and then I'll play the...

So he walks into the dojo, he delivers his punch.

Oh, you're going to play this after.

The line that I really love is: when Netero came down from the mountains, it seemed that his fists had left sound behind them in their way.

Which is like it's not just when he punches,

sound comes out, it's that they've left it behind.

Yes, saying that gave him a grunt.

It's so well written, it's so good.

So, yeah, he's come down.

Keith, where does your thing begin?

Will you defend your dojo?

This dojo

is yours.

He's bowing and crying.

But please, please, make me your pupil.

It was the birth of a monster.

Yeah, sure.

If you treat me to a real nice meal.

This turn of events took place over six decades ago.

That's also the first new track in like 11 episodes.

It's called Memories.

The first half of that, it's like...

you know, this very sort of lonely piano-like plink-plonk going on, and then it goes into

latent power, I think.

A classic nen horror music or like nen spirituality music.

It's either latent power or the other one that they use at that time.

This is also where he gets called Bodhisattva Guan Yin or the previous, you know, sensei or whatever here.

At least he says the name.

It's when he punches, yeah.

Yeah.

Like he saw something.

Yes.

Yes.

Hey, a monster was born.

Can anyone remind me really quick of what Wing thought after teaching Gone and Kilowa?

Anyway, anybody can go?

Oh, weird.

He said, you look up that thing by the way.

I've checked this.

I think it is safe to say.

So this was like gestured at very early on, the Shingen Ryu style of martial arts.

Biscuits.

Yeah, what's that again?

Yeah.

That is what Wing taught them, the sort of the four major principles of Renzetsu, Hatsu, and such.

What we consider to be foundational nen before it releases.

Biscuit also was Wing's master.

This is said like offhand line in episode like 35 where Wing mentions that Nethero is a grand master of Shingonryu martial arts.

And Gan and Kilowa are just like, what?

That old man?

And I don't know if it's ever like explicitly said that this is the founding of that.

but it to me that's what it feels like right agree yeah this is where the school of nen study becomes real like he's this is the founding of Xingenryu this is what the hunter like the not the hunter association necessarily but a very like

not common but like a foundational school of nen practitioning and like study comes from and it is also an it is born in a moment of conquest Yeah, of like taking the dojo.

He, this man achieves enlightenment, and the first thing he does, or like, is like that's how it's presented, right?

Yeah, and

the first action is a show of force and conquering someone's dojo.

And I think that is just like Netaro, like

that is the image I always have of him.

I don't know if this is a legend or fact or movies, but I, I, there's definitely like a thing of like going to someone's dojo and fighting the master and then taking over the school that is like yeah a thing that's classic I don't know what that's called

something yeah um but it is very funny to see like

that

deployed as like the almost a surreal thing of like a

fucking maniac who spent four years living in a field punching all day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then it's just like, all right, time to get me a school.

Well, and he does like the Kenny Omega evil grin twice.

He's like, his, we, you know, you, you played the sound clip, but you didn't see the expression Netero makes.

It's unsettling.

When he says, Make me, if you treat me to a real nice meal, when he's called a monster, he's this big grin on that gets, um, we kind of, it goes back to black and white.

The static appears again,

you know, indicating we're at the end of the little mini documentary about Netero here.

Um, two things here.

The first is, I want to talk briefly about um, the design of young Netero or Netero in his 40s or 50s.

Um, Netero now is defined by this sort of like grinning, mask-like face, uh, the bald head, the um gauges in his ears, the big eyebrows.

As a younger man, he wears his hair long, he has a very angular face, uh, like a chiseled face, he wears like a short beard.

Um, This, like, the long hair and the way it moves reminded me a lot of kite.

Although there's a real distinction made between the affect of those two characters.

Big time.

The second thing that I wanted to say, and I think that this is something that is coincidence more than anything else, given the way we know Tagashi didn't plan this far ahead when he started.

Do you remember our very first encounter with Notero?

Jumping from the airship?

He falls from the sky and immediately changes the stakes.

I love that.

That's a good one.

It's really nice.

That's because I got

it.

He is simply that.

He's a guy who falls from the sky.

Can I give you another little early thing?

Yeah.

What was the game he played?

Oh, it was like a food eating.

No, no, no.

The game was like...

I'm going to take the ball.

Take the ball.

What was the condition he gave himself?

He's going to use

one arm, one leg.

You can't pray.

You can't pray with one arm.

You can't bring your hands together.

That's really good.

I didn't even clock that.

There's not that she was going to do that.

You never know.

Crush the airship.

You might, but, but, you know, like, that's, it's so clear.

Because when we come out of the

kind of documentary, he, we really see him go through the motion slow.

He brings his hands together, then he pulls one out.

And it's like he's going through the prayer motion before he throws the punch over and over.

Like, that's how he does this.

God.

I love that you pointed out that he, like, our first shot of him is him descending from something because there is, like, he comes down from the mountain, and then he comes like the drag and dive comes down.

It really does feel like a god coming down from like Mount Olympus or something.

And it is just as terrifying as that would be, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And him taking the dojo and saying, well, I'll do it for a really nice meal and then smiling evilly is an echo of him falling from the airship and checking out Menshi.

You know, it's just like

Goku shit.

I am unbelievably powerful and I'm also a lascivious old man.

It's great.

Yeah, absolutely.

He knows what he's doing, Yashi Heritagashi.

Most of the time.

Yeah, most of the time.

We all err here and there, but yeah.

Pito's eyes go small as they recognize this information.

Like a moment of hesitation on Pito's face.

They are throwing,

being thrown by this punch so far away, and they summon Dr.

Blythe, which they are connected to by their tail, as an anchor to like

stop them from being knocked over a mountain yeah the narrator is like yeah dr.

Blythe can't move so this will stop

when's this episode come out

like oh like this podcast yeah what's this episode this podcast the this coming this coming week yeah I'm just gonna say this this is high-level realis play when you realize that one of your conditions on a sentence is actually something you could use in your favor by like making it be because

he never moves right but they're right what they're doing here is they're they have a condition, which is when I summon Dr.

Blythe,

I can't be more than 20 meters away from it.

Like, I cannot move more than 20 meters away from it, which means that Dr.

Blythe becomes an anchor for them, which is this little tricky, playful, it's so good.

I really look out for Realis maybe later this month.

My plan is leaving an Ash Can release later this month.

Exciting.

This isn't just also another continuation of Tagashi getting even better with doing

sort of like

off-label uses of none powers, I guess, is how I could describe it.

Yes.

Because we talked about it a little with the Leol and

Moral Fight.

And this is like also a really just like fun moment of that of like, oh, yeah, this guy understands what pieces he's given himself to play with and is using them in really interesting and fun ways.

Yeah.

It's great.

A funny thing that I stumbled into

briefly going back to the the Netero thing, the 46, 46 in the wilderness

sets himself a task thing.

I saw someone on Reddit point out that when Togashi was 46, he began what is the currently ongoing arc in the Hunter-Hunter model.

Oh, my fucking God.

Like, set himself the grand challenge because he mastered everything else.

And that's still the arc that's going on today.

It is.

I hope Togashi makes it to 120.

It's hard to do.

What's the name of this arc that he's currently on?

I can't tell you.

We can't tell you you why.

Someone said the name of something, and I caught it from the episode.

Someone did?

Yeah.

Wow.

Maybe.

Wow.

It's fine.

Wow.

The big dog kills Killer.

Yeah, yeah.

That's why I asked you.

The Purina arc.

Because I thought you might be like, oh, the arc's name is just like the Red Tower.

I mean, I think this arc does have a very simple name, but I'm not going to say it.

I think, yeah, we'll just keep moving.

There are, there's a, there's a reality where the,

it's like an insane joke to tell you what the arc's name is because it's like, uh, they'll never guess what it is and what it means.

Uh, and it's funny to have like like sort of like the gorilla thing, like thinking about it all the way up until you get there.

This is not one of those, this is too, there's too much information, I think, in the name.

Oh, interesting.

Well, I think that's, yeah, I think the name would make you jump to a conclusion that is

the wrong conclusion about what the arc is, but would still give you information about something that's coming.

That's a great point.

I'm so excited.

I'm, you know, there's no way I'm not reading Adanto when we're done with this.

Do I not read that in the current arc?

Maybe we're talking about two different names.

Yeah, you might not.

You might not know what it is.

I might have to think about it.

Do you want to know?

I can put it in our chat.

Yeah,

put it in the thing.

Yeah.

I may have just forgotten that it's not the other thing that I think it is.

Yeah.

Okay.

The cherry with the goal.

I know that, and I thought that it was the thing from right before that.

I see.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Midnight in the palace.

Yup yawns on the stairs.

He has no idea that above him, Dragon Dive is about to land, and that Pito has launched themselves into misguided nen combat with

the war Buddha.

And didn't notice like poof that.

Pito's end disappeared.

No.

The portal opens.

Everybody comes out.

Malaron is riding on Knuckles' back.

They had sort of like intimated how this plan was going to work.

They were like, I'll tap you on the shoulder when I need to take a breath or something.

And I was like, I don't know how they're going to do this, but Knuckles just carrying him around.

It's great.

To save breath, because

he wouldn't be able to hold his breath long enough.

Yeah.

Knuckles also topless.

There's an amazing look on Hupie's face.

He turns in slow motion, and he has this great look that I think he actually verbalizes in the next episode, which is, who the hell are these guys?

Um,

Knuckle is semi-transparent.

Five minutes before we move into the next episode, yeah, totally.

I just want to hit this last line.

Uh, Knuckle is semi-transparent to indicate Meliaron's power is working.

That's really nice.

Um, although later,

the power might still be working, and we have no idea.

He is invisible.

Um, and the narrator says, There, where they had hoped they would encounter no one at all, they encountered someone, and then in a very sort of Dr.

Zeus line, and that someone was Yupi.

Um, BRB.

All right.

Five minutes.

Episode 112.

Killua's first thought.

I knew it.

I love it.

It made me laugh so hard.

That is...

Yeah, that's him.

That's Killo Izeldik.

Yep.

Yep.

Yep.

Kennison.

He keeps it quiet, but he does keep...

Killer Izeldic keeps the score.

The one who keeps the score.

Shut up.

All right.

Yupie says, who are these guys?

But he thinks it for one second, and then he simply ceases his thought process.

This is when we learn, and we gestured this earlier.

Yup is a magical beast crossed with a chimera, and boy, are we about to learn what that means.

Is this where we get...

What is the song?

So you know what?

It was

last episode when they first start coming in.

I meant to shout this out.

Legend of the Martial Artist plays when they first break in.

Yeah, and there's a whole narrator thing and then the narrator recedes legend of the martial artist comes in and they're all like running in slow motion it maybe is

so to go back to the thing i said the very beginning of the episode that is why i wanted to be on these episodes was because the the um the palace invasion begins i'd forgotten that we get all of the hetero stuff in this set of marks or in this set of episodes so that was a little bonus for me you just wanted to be around when the when people started shooting Yeah, I wanted to be around when

Legend of the Martial Artist starts playing and everyone's running in slow motion off the thing.

And you start go, you know, when the when 10 goes to zero, when you count down and it all starts, it all kicks off.

I just wanted to be here for the kickoff.

I didn't realize the kickoff also had a dramatic flashback in the middle of it.

Yeah.

Well, I think that this dramatic flashback is an extremely Austin move.

The, you know, like, oh, yeah.

This is something we talk about all the time.

You know, something we talk about all the the time on the show is our willingness and, frankly, gleeful desire to like cut hard away from what we're doing, um, either narratively or mechanically.

You know, yes, on Friends of the Table, we will pick up new systems, we will put them down.

Uh, if we're not feeling that the current thing is letting us express what we want in the right way, we'll shift gears very quickly.

So, I was not surprised when I saw Notero, and I was like, no, that's why Austin wanted to be on.

So, it's very important that you want to be able to do it.

It's built around this idea going back to Ottoman Hiron, which has the end of the season happen before we get to the end, and then we go back to the middle of the season.

It's funny because it feels, it's like a reverse inspiration, because like,

I had no idea.

None of us had seen Hunter Hunter.

Correct.

This is a bit like Le Guin.

You know, we were accidentally making Le Guin fiction, the pale imitations of Le Guin fiction for years before we read Le Guin.

And then we went, oh my God, wow.

And I feel like we've accidentally been making pale imitations of Hunter Hunter for years and then we found it.

Yeah.

What we're really talking about is why we like Hunter Hunter is because this is our taste.

Right.

Yeah.

Sorry, Sylvie, you were saying something.

I just said no accident here.

No accident.

I, man.

We're working on a season coming out soon called Perpetua.

It's going to be our ninth season.

It's inspired by like 90s and early 2000s Dreamcast games.

And this is

specifically.

Yeah, RPGs.

There's probably going to be bits of crazy taxi and stuff in there i'm not sure i hope so um

this is the first full season we've put into production like that i've been on post having seen most of hunter hunter this is

a hunter hunter ass season that we're making

um

all right uh brief note about yupie he has the same ears as malirone Oh,

Yupi has these very distinctive, and Malearn also have these very distinctive ears that at first I had thought were

sort of chameleon ears, because I had only noticed them on Maliro.

But I think they must just be like a weird chimera ant, like one of the palette by which he draws chimera ants.

They're sort of like little rounded holes on the side of his head.

Anyway, his eyes turn red and he grows awful spikes that turn into a wheel of blood red hands.

This is

those ears is what I've just realized.

Oh yeah, yeah, we talked about tackling that before too.

This is a lovely Tagashi, you know, one of Tagashi's domino rallies reaching the end.

I had thought that Yup's ability to make wings was the extent of Yup's power.

That was instead the like watching Leonor Messi perform a small park kickabout with four children.

And now I'm watching him actually really kick into action.

Yeah.

Well, you remember how he made the wings, right?

He just like

wished them into existence.

He like did, he like grew muscles out and shaped them into wings.

A thing I love about this sequence is besides just how fun and grotesque it is,

Yupi says, having extended these new arms out, my body is a shield.

As long as I stand, the king shall be safe.

And we don't get these sorts of statements from Yupi ever.

And so, like, he's just not the one.

You know what I mean?

He's not that good.

Don't have that sort of like,

you know,

unnamed chimera and declaration of skill and intention.

But at least with Poof and Peto, we get a lot of what they're thinking and how they position themselves with the king and with each other.

This is the most we've learned about Yupi.

He's mostly just there chilling.

Right.

And I love that he slipped into this mode.

Because he's a magical beast.

You know, the sort of the revelation that why Yupi has always been sort of other, has always been sort of on the outskirts of the royal guards,

kind of unconfident, not unconfident,

sort of like set apart from them now makes so much sense.

It's really, really great.

Well, yeah, the narrator explains as a magical beast hybrid, he was the only non-human hybrid among the guards.

Perhaps because of this, he cared less about his individual identity than the other two.

This lack of ego became strength, which suggests something different than just he can do this because he's part magical beast.

Right.

It's that he doesn't

have a unified, permanent sort of

like self.

He doesn't have this sort of like mirror self in his head, this sort of like ego ideal that he's grounded by.

It means he can become whatever he wants.

You know, he can change himself in dramatic ways, which suggests actually that Poof and Pito could do this too, if only they didn't cling so hard to who they thought they were.

Right.

Which is really

you kind of get a little bit of that when Pito like throws her legs like four times the size total launch off.

Red also has a 20-meter long tail out of there.

You're right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

The Royal Guards becoming,

in this moment of crisis, becoming more monstrous, becoming more, you know, spectacular.

The narrator is really going for it now.

I've written a narrator sweep in my notes.

Sorry, really quick.

Can we just back to the evolution?

We've had like this happen with our protagonists before where in moments of like extreme heightened stress, they have to evolve in a way.

And this is just a more like obvious and like blatant form of it.

It's not as just like nen abilities are like getting more like a character change or something like that.

But like

Yupi growing multiple arms, you could compare it to Kilowa ripping the needle out of his head.

Well, that's the thing that's so, so wonderfully beautiful about it is like, and like scary, is that like it's both because it's terrifying because he grew three extra or whatever, four extra arms and extra sharp teeth and all of this.

But the heart of it is like, if not for all the shit that we get put through as people, we could all be anything we wanted.

Right.

There's a very like new type ideal here from Gundam that's like, oh, right, because he doesn't have the pressure that's being put on him to be exactly one type of way, he's free to do whatever he wants.

Of course, what he's doing with it is protecting the king.

The king's kingdom is a king.

This is why the Khanera and people are arc, or one of the reasons why the Khanera and Arc is so wonderful, right?

Because

it is constantly splashing around in all these ideas of like personhood and image and

what makes a person and

how

the way you look and the way you act affects kind of like what is available or accessible to you, how those kinds of allegiances can shift and change.

But it's sort of, I mean, it's like it's always churning away wildly, like a machine that is, you know, shaking bits of itself off all the time,

such that it's not quite that it's incoherent.

It's almost like you talked about way at the beginning of this episode, Austin, in terms of like the plan is all these various little bits that are just like bebopping around and knocking into each other, and interesting things are coming off it.

And rather than

what he sacrifices in focus, what Takashi sacrifices in saying, I don't want this to be an extremely clear-cut story about identity and personhood and humanity, instead opens itself out into this like really expressive, weird sandbox of those ideas that are constantly like bouncing around.

It's a really

interesting way to approach this.

We get the opposite in four minutes when he wraps back around to shoot and shoot's anxiety around who he is.

And he makes this very particular claim about who Shoot, what, you know, Shoot does have a stable identity, one that he can't even see for himself,

because, quote, what Shoot failed to realize was that whenever he'd been faced with adversity, that's when he truly came into his own.

And so there's just as strong of a case being made for having a really strong, stable, permanent identity, a permanent ego ideal that you would totally inhabit, even if you don't even know that you inhabit it, right?

The sandbox description you just gave is so good, Jack, because Tagashi is exploring all these ideas in different directions, is illustrating different perspectives on them, has different characters embody different positionalities, but doesn't,

it's rare that Togashi ever comes out or the show and the show's team ever frame something as being definitive and singular.

You know, the only way you could think about it.

Yeah, it produces a sort of like ideological collage.

I think there is real value in like

clarity of storytelling, clarity of purpose.

But I think that sometimes it can be very easy for me at least to fall into a trap of thinking that that's the way that stories have to be, that there is a primacy in clarity, that you need to state your idea as clearly as possible.

Whereas instead, what the Chimera and has kind of Chimera and Arca sort of exploded into is this sort of like gestural collage of all these different ideas that are, you know, like pinballing off each other.

I think that's such an interesting way to tell a story, especially to tell a story about so many big things as this.

And to stable that into like the Shonen genre and

a lot of other media more broadly is like the sort of

ego problem of

overcoming yourself, stepping out of your ego is

almost always like kind of a main character good guy thing.

You know, Goku has no ego.

Like, that's why he's better than Vegeta.

Like, Kiryu has, you know, another character that comes up a lot in this.

Kiryu has no ego.

He's like, uh, maybe that's like a little closer to Hunter Hunter, where, like, Kiryu's

lack of an ego gets him into trouble almost as often as it saves his life and saves the life of people around him.

And then Hunter Hunter is like, okay, let's give like the worst guy also no ego.

Like, he also is strong because he has no ego.

Like, Netero has no ego, but also, is he like a monster?

Yeah, we're going to say that Netero has no ego.

That makes him strong.

And also, he's a monster, but he's the good guy.

Like, there's a wrap back around to regaining ego after spending four years in the wilderness wanting nothing but to punch and pray.

Right.

And yeah, there's just very, like, there's like a willingness to

not just make

a non-traditional character the protagonist for X period length of time, but also like give them

good guy traits, like

you know, hero traits, and then be like, well, they're still a bad guy, or are they still a bad guy, or also maybe the good guy's the bad guy?

Like, it's kind of this, like, it's such an interesting bag of tricks to have all of these kind of ideas.

Like, we don't have to tie any of these specifics to

an archetype.

We can like unleash them from an archetype.

Yeah,

hard to do well, and currently being executed spectacularly.

They're going up the stairs, and something happens that none of them expected.

Well, so first, the team can't see Maliorona Knuckle.

They know this.

They must have known this going into it.

I should have known this, but

what's it called?

Godspeed Initiative?

What's the fucking thing?

Godspeed Godspeed Initiative rules.

Hold on.

Yeah, write that down.

Write that down.

We'll have to write the word Godspeed into Tagashi.

He'd love to know that word.

Well, isn't that already there?

Godspeed is already.

Literally, Killowa's ability.

Killer's ability is called Godspeed, but Godspeed Initiative is something different.

We are not seeing.

Has that happened?

We haven't seen it, but he names it in one of the names in the world.

We haven't seen what it is.

He summons a little bit of electricity between his fingers.

I'm being careful, Keith.

I don't do it again.

I had sort of thought that I briefly thought that the team would be able to see them, but when Maliarone is holding his breath, he cannot be seen.

He cannot see.

That's the whole thing.

Yes, the whole thing.

Not just seen, sensed.

Yes.

Unless the TV show really needs you to make sure that you see the punch going into.

We can see him.

Right, yeah, because I can see him a little bit.

A little bit.

Our combined N is the audience.

Right.

The morphogenic field of R Combined N.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've watched this before, and so we have the future knowledge of having seen it.

We can see that it's a dog or whatever the hell that thing was.

The palace explodes.

Um,

the single best reaction in this moment timeout.

You didn't finish saying the nightmare thing about them not being able to see, right?

Or has that not happened?

Oh, yeah, that has not happened yet.

That has not happened yet because it's contingent on Dragon Dive falling.

Right.

Uh,

everything starts exploding around them.

This is the first confirmation that Notero's carpet bomb plan did not include a carve-out

for

the main team.

Yep.

It's so, I love that we have two characters who know more than everybody else straight away.

The first character is Kilua, who sees these things and go, oh my God, it's my grandpa.

That's Gampa.

That's Grandpa Zenno.

I know about Dragon Dive.

And this is, this is, there's some dispute about this, I believe, even though I didn't know about Nen last time I saw him.

But I know about Dragon Dive.

I know what this is.

This is my grandfather.

But is it that dissimilar from Echo Step or whatever?

Shadowstep, that he knew before knowing Nen?

Theoretically, he wouldn't be able to see the Nen.

He'd just be able to see the exploding roof.

Sure.

So with Shadowstep, there's nothing to not be able to see, I don't think.

Right.

This is my only...

I'm not wrapped up in this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just to make those cinema since I'm not sure.

I just want to put out there as a kind of a funny little thing.

That's all I wanted to do.

And maybe something that I'll

talk about in 20 episodes will wrap back around.

I'll re-reference this moment for some reason.

But

the other character that knows something is Goan.

Goan notices before anybody else that if a bomb hits, one of these bombs hits Melio Rone and Knuckle and kills them instantly, they may not be visible and we may never know where they are or that they've died.

Terrifying

scary.

I know because of residual men.

Well, so they might actually become visible.

We just don't know.

We just don't know.

But Goan realizes that this is an issue.

Kilua realizes that Goan has realized this.

And then Shoot has real, or sorry, Moral has realized that Kilo has realized that Goan has realized this.

So they have to fight UP.

This is

to Austin's quote from earlier in the episode about how no plan survives contact with the enemy.

This is like the clearest and most immediate expression of that, of like, oh my god, our ace in the hole might have just died, and we will never know.

By the way,

this is actually a case of no plan survives contact with your ally, Chairman Netaro.

my grandpa.

Yeah, no plan survives contact with Gampi.

I want to say that the sort of chain reaction

people realizing things, it sounds like a joke.

And it sounds like maybe it sucks even when you say it like that.

It is awesome.

It's so cool.

I've done this a few times of like people spotting other characters figuring something out.

And it's tricky to write, and it works every time.

And then of course they are using

whatever it was called, echo spirit, whatever, listening to the spirit, listening with spirit.

That's how they can make these quick recognitions because two fighters are approaching death, you know, or whatever.

So

yeah, whatever's happening, Goan ended up with the most time.

This is when we have Schute's moment of uncertainty and fear and then a recognition that, you know, Goan, quote,

a young boy whose strength didn't hold a candle to my own was the one to break me out out of my cage.

We talked about this, I think, in the last segment with Yupi, so I don't know that I have anything else here.

As a punch comes out of nowhere and hits Yupi, Knuckle and Maliarone are alive.

This is great.

Crowd goes crazy.

Yeah.

I didn't actually think they would be dead.

I thought that the stakes here actually were is Goan putting himself in more danger by expecting that they might be dead.

It would have been a huge amount of business to set up Godspeed Initiative and then

kill them both.

I love that

Knuckle has time to strike a pose when inflicting

bankruptcy.

Well, that's because he's a JoJo character.

Because he is a Jojo character.

They got me a second time.

Do you remember the first time when APR appeared on Cheeto?

I was like, oh my God, APR, that's amazing.

Because we had that all explained the first time.

The plan had to my credit the plan had been explained in such exhaustive detail that I thought to myself

I know every bit of this plan except the bits I don't and what I had neglected was that Knuckle would use his primary ability so seeing little APR peep out every time APR appears he sort of like pokes his little head out

every time APR shows up it's my favorite little guy in this whole show.

He really does like a little groundhog boop.

Yes.

APR is also

under God's plan, so is also invisible and cannot be detected.

And the narrator, of course, tells us, like, they even practiced to make sure that APR would still be invisible.

It's great.

Yeah.

It's great.

Put it all in there.

Leave it all in.

Give it all to me.

It's perfect plan, not God's plan.

God's plan.

Is that the brake?

Yeah.

No, no.

Is it not about God at all?

God's accomplishments.

It's God's accomplice.

Perfect plan.

God's accomplice.

Perfect plan.

God's accomplice.

That's good.

God's accomplice is such a good name.

It's such a persona-ass name for a thing.

By which I mean a JoJo name for a thing.

Yup transforms into one of those guys from Bloodborne.

Yup needs to get get into a new mode to be able to figure out what is attacking him.

So he turns into this sort of like awful Lovecrafty and multi-eyed horror.

He has so many eyes.

He's in guys on his shoulders, this guy.

He transforms into this, and then the narrator says, perfectly dead, Pen.

So far, everything had proceeded to plan.

Just

plan.

Which is so funny.

Yeah, we watch this guy turn into a Lovecraft monster as bombs fall all around and the narrator's like, good.

good by the way this is the the face of

the face of four characters to whom everything is going according to their plan

morale grimacing shoot grimacing goan looking in shock kill you what kind of stealed

by the way i love when the punch lands and they all go knuckle and melee oron yeah are alive it's cute a note i love there is gone does not like take that opportunity to like follow up with like another hit gone just keeps running and keeps running.

Yeah.

Single-minded focus.

Single-minded.

So good.

And he's like nimble with his plan.

And what a great way, you know, set up this stake of, oh, my God, this thing might have hit somebody that we cared about

now.

Set that up now

and then pay it off in three minutes when that happens.

It's good.

It's so good.

It's so good.

Knuckle is briefly paralyzed by trying to calculate UP's sort of like.

Remember, Knuckle will like quantify Nen in a really wild way.

He's the only character on the show who really does it.

He'll say things like, he has a Nen of 700,000.

Yeah.

He is really Knuckles.

They call him

a veteran of 5,000 battles.

Yeah.

Pito, who is way out in the distance.

Pito is playing a cooperative open world game with their friends, and like a server error has catapulted them

onto the other side of the map, and they can only watch as the power of the game.

It's like when in an open-world game, some physics glitch launches you, like

100

giants,

knock you super far away, but like you had an invincibility potion on, so you don't die, you just get knocked Trevor away.

Yeah, I do love that we're so far in Shounen genre at this point that I wasn't I wasn't remotely concerned about Pito suffering full damage.

I was like, oh, it'll be fine.

Yeah.

The thing I love about this is this pays off something from the very beginning of when the king showed up, which is Pito is the one who can't fly.

Yeah.

Pito has to fall to the ground.

I also like

just

the attitude of this of where like Pito's biggest concern right now is getting to the ground faster.

And like the

worst thing about being being catapulted

10,000 feet in the air or more is how annoyingly long it takes to fall.

Oh, this is so annoying!

So they turn their aura, they blast it back into the castle, and the whole team feels it.

And so does Yupi.

Yup notices that not only has Pito's aura come rushing back, he notices that the team has also hesitated.

There's this great shot of all his eyes going wide as he sees

Poof is dodging between the gunfire, the dragonfire that is falling.

Why was Poof out of the palace?

The king kicked everybody out.

So what's he been doing?

Just flying around?

Yeah, flying around.

Was he still releasing the scales or was that done?

I think that was done.

I think that was done.

Yeah.

We missed that he wanted to use a move on the king and didn't.

Spiritual message he wanted to use.

do we even figure out what the king is thinking yeah he would figure out why the king is so mad and he says oh i could use spiritual message but that would be an insult to the king but actually the real reason is i don't really want to know because i'm afraid of what that it would confirm my suspicions poof is such a great character we don't know what the worst message is at this point

all the time no we don't think so

um

a few episodes ago keith you described that the like the arrows between the royal guards and the king are going to become essential.

And I have to imagine that there's still a ways to go on that.

But having gone from them, you know, coming out of their eggs in the original Citadel to this point, the three royal guards are such well-drawn, sharp characters in terms of how they interact with each other, their own sort of internality, etc.

It's great.

Terrible news.

The tower room.

has been ruined.

The gungi board has been ripped in half.

And you can can see where we're going here.

Pito activates their N to see that the king is alive and is with Komegi,

who is lying unconscious across his lap.

I love how they.

Sorry to jump back a second, but I love how they characterize Pito's ability to use their N as a byproduct of not being able to get there faster.

If they could get there faster, they wouldn't have had the time to think about using N.

And

this ends up like sort of being a boon to figuring out what's going on.

Just sort of like clever little bit of

almost totally unnecessary characterization.

This is all gravy,

but it's good gravy.

Yeah.

That's what I'm saying

when I watch it.

Sorry, say that again, Sylvie.

I go, oh, good gravy while watching it.

The thing I like about this vision that you're the, the, when, when Pito has there and pointed straight out to see, it's all this kind of like black and white, like, like white lines on the black background

with the people being highlighted in a sort of red, um, matching Pito's like bright red eyes.

Uh, and it's almost like seeing like a wireframe, like our architectural sketch of the palace, you know, or like going into detective.

We've gone into Pito's detective vision

when this happens.

Oh my god.

And I partly like this because when we come back and we get another shot of what's happening in there, we get white lines on, or black lines on white instead, which we'll get to when we get there.

With red showing up in an important way, also.

Pito also sees Zeno and Natero using their own N to hunt the king.

And so they do something really creepy.

They made their legs.

Their legs grew three sizes that day.

Tagashi leaning into like grotesque body horror with the ants is always really great.

He's got a really good eye for it.

Tagashi has a really good eye for body horror and sort of like gore, drawing gore in general.

I think Pito in this moment of like desperation,

becoming less and less visually human and, you know, even more indistinct in what kind of an animal they are.

You know, they're leaping like a cat, but they're also looking very insectoid in this moment.

It's good.

Yeah, the jumping wear is very flea-like.

Oh, it is.

Oh, it really is.

And their eyes have that thing that's like big red.

Like, it's fully red.

No more pupils, no more.

It's just the whole thing.

Not a swirl like before.

No.

Fully red and kind of even more bug-like in this moment, you know.

You said flea-like, and I'm just wondering if Pito can play bass.

Probably.

I think probably.

Actually, you know, Pito can't, but

their men puppet, you know, mischief.

Peto strikes me as a former, I think, Dr.

Black.

Oh, right, sure.

Yes, of course.

Please, Pito's base puppet is called Bass Dr.

Arnold.

The narrator is fucking putting in work.

He's being paid by the word, and he's cashing those checks.

As Pito jumps towards the palace, the narrator says, But only a second later, this is a panel.

This is like a box out in a panel.

Yeah.

It's great.

Is this the part you're talking about, Jed?

Oh, do you have the quote?

Are you going to read it?

I don't think I have the quote.

No.

The aura from the king was so unguarded, his current state of mind was quite easy to deduce.

As a result, PETO was painfully aware that the course of events was headed unimaginably and dramatically in the wrong direction.

It's so good.

You could just write lines like that.

It's not easy to do, but you can just write the lines.

Events were heading unimaginably and dramatically in the wrong direction.

The visual of this, too, of the black aura coming out the window.

Yeah.

And then even the like suddenly nude Pito moving through the like black

wild membrane.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's also this like, it looks like something out of a tool video.

You know, it's like black and white with like fleshy or like the way that like if you if you close your eyes and you look at light, you can kind of see the membranes of the backs of your eyelids is happening here a little bit uh but it's all black and white it's really it's really good and the the stopping short of the just the two different the the pito

on their way and then the pito post king nen where like

like you know that that they're not slowing down but it looks like they've halted in midair like their hair flies forward

It's great.

Yeah.

And now we're in black and white, except for the red of blood.

A red drop of blood falls into a pool.

The gungi table in Komagi's room has been torn in half.

Blood is coming out of her mouth.

There is a huge wound on her stomach.

Oh, the wound isn't visible.

There's a large red, you know, stain on her thing.

The king's face is shaded completely black.

You know, there's no details.

Not his head.

Not the whole head.

Not, oh,

the top of his head is blocking out like the hat type shape on his head is blocking out the whole of his head.

Like, you can see him from the back, and you can see his ears and stuff.

Just the face in this kind of like sharp-angled, almost like a pentagon.

It's like completely

when a panel has been blacked out on his face, right?

Yeah.

Also, Komuki is drawn in an interesting way here, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Her hair is like a maid.

Well,

what stood out to me is she looks older and she looks like beautiful.

She looks older.

She's drawn in a beautiful way.

Her hair has come out of one of the kind of braids that it's normally gathered in, like kind of wrapping, and it's fallen long, you know, and out.

Not both of them, just one of them, but it's framed in a way that like she gets to take this very traditional kind of almost religious classic painting.

Yes, how down this,

right?

Yes, exactly that.

Yeah.

Arm out.

Like this is, this is, it is a Renaissance painting.

You're 100% right, Jack.

And she does look older, to Dre's point.

Like she looks gross.

She looks like she's the same height as the king in that shot.

Dream is really cradling her.

Really interesting because the king is short.

The show has been pretty explicit about the fact that Kumigi is a child, and a lot of the business in the last couple of episodes were like, why is she so small?

You know, she's so small and frail from the king.

So I don't think, I think that they are doing something deliberate by drawing her like this.

It has never been explicit that she's a child.

She's been presented that way, but they've never called her like a kid or anything, I don't think.

Huh.

I believe that's just small.

Yeah, she is like...

She's small, frail, and she's like ignorant like a child.

Yeah.

Like she doesn't understand social niceties and things like that.

Which doesn't mean something isn't happening here, to be clear, right?

So yeah, yeah, yeah.

She has crazy bad presented as a child, but here is being presented as a woman.

In fact, I believe the narrator in English says, and the woman, da-da-da-da-da.

Pito also refers to her as the blind woman.

The blind woman, right?

Which is generally the first time that they have referred to her in the way that you would an adult, but I think it's worth mentioning that like...

Yeah, generally we have lines like we get one later where the narrator says a young girl covered in blood rested in the arms of a grotesque creature.

Right, right.

But then the narrator comes back in and says, the central staircase came crashing down.

Lovely.

I, you know, there's only so much you could do by close reading this show, but I love the central staircase came crashing down as opposed to then the central staircase came crashing down.

There's something about the pacing of that line, uh, just introducing it as a statement rather than like presaging it with like a time marker or something.

Um, quick shot of Yupi destroying the staircase and things kind of going nuts.

And now Pito looks up to find himself in a room with the king, Komagi's body, and Zano and Notero standing motionless in the other doorway, going,

what

Jack, you read part of this quote already.

The rest of it here is:

When the king looked away, time suddenly began to start moving again, but all besides the king were still frozen in time.

Even those who broke in to assassinate the king stood in place, breath catching in their throats at the sight before them.

A young girl covered in blood.

She rested in the arms of a grotesque creature who, despite his appearance, held her in a way that could only be described as gentle and kind.

Yep.

Based on what the king says next, which is, Peter, use Dr.

He says, You will heal Komagi.

I'm counting on you.

I'm counting on you.

Such a good line.

Crowd goes crazy.

Loses it.

Yeah.

We can assume that at this point, Komigi is still living.

However, I didn't know that before he said that line.

And so I wrote down: you know, if Komagi is dead, we are again finding ourselves in like an aborted or

early-ended ended arc for the king.

You know, the king is constantly being caught in these weird moments of arrested development, often violent arrested development, first, you know, tearing himself out of his mother's womb, and then a sort of

a story of like love and self-discovery getting violently halted.

It's so interesting that this character who is so powerful, were that the case, you know, that Kermagi had been taken out in this moment,

is defined over and over again by like being halted just before he can reach some kind of

completion of an idea or completion of

working through something.

And I think that's really fun to consider that in relation to the Netero arc that we got, or the Netero backstory we got, where upon completion of

his four years in the wild, returns, and when someone sees him,

sees a Bodhisattva or sees a Buddha, right?

Sees Goyen.

Which, by the way, upon being asked this, upon seeing this, how does Pito respond?

Pito cries.

Yeah.

Their eyes well with tears.

This is extraordinary.

This is a mirror of the moment that Colt's baby was, you know, not Colt's baby, but that that moment.

And it was funny, you were on the episode then too, Austin, huh?

Strange that you keep showing up in these weird, pivotal moments.

Skydropping in from above.

We talked in that episode about there being being like um a sort of a like a like a spiritually transformative moment um in in things like this and i think pito seeing the king cradling komegi and maybe more specifically seeing zeno and natero frozen in place

um not knowing what to do it just brings pito to tears and who is not here like seeing this uh you pie is not here

seeing this poof not here oh sorry poof i meant i meant poof and i said up sorry you puppy also also are here.

You're just not important.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have some audio to play for this if we want to hear.

Please.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hit it.

Through all of this, the two veterans continued to stand in silence, watching their enemies closely as an expression of respect.

What was unfolding was an act of love for another's life.

This kingdom of predators.

An intrusion at this point would mean the complete loss of all of their justification and humanity.

You know, this isn't what you told me I was signing up for.

Zenno's rebuke was just,

and Nethero couldn't help but feel the same way.

One more line.

Not here.

We should do this somewhere else.

This is the king speaking.

Yeah.

And

we have

the king being the one to do that is unbelievable.

It's so good.

It's great because also what we have here is the shonen thing of like we have to fight somewhere where there aren't people.

You know what I I just couldn't.

I can't stop like Frieza saying, Goku, we have to take this fight somewhere else or we'll accidentally kill some Namex.

Yeah.

It's so good.

And then Dr.

Blythe appears to get to work.

It's amazing the way this has all been set up.

Yeah, go ahead.

Finish your thought.

Even if Peto's N

turning off in this moment to heal Komegi isn't plot consequential, which I doubt.

It's been the the

seed has been planted in our mind from that first thing that felt like you know when uh when they turned off their uh N to heal the king that

in that moment that felt like the most consequential high-stakes moment of Pito turning off their N.

But on some level, it was just set up for this for this.

And I

truly believe Pito crying here is even more important from a character logical perspective in terms of our relationship to Pito and what comes forward.

In a plot level, the fact that they have to turn off their end and have to heal Komogi, which is a process that we know takes a long time and all that, is super, super, super important.

But in terms of our relationship, go ahead.

There is also something important that we are forgetting that Pito can't do while she's using Dr.

Blythe.

What's that?

Move.

Move.

Like move more than 20 meters away.

Yeah, anything.

So

the thing that I want to zero in on here is that previously, Pito has been written and drawn as a character who's extremely fun and extremely playful.

And we love them.

I think all of us love when Pito is doing something wacky or fucked up.

But Peto sees what the narrator describes in the authorial voice as being an act of love, and it causes them to cry.

And

then gets requested to help the king do something that's about healing someone instead of killing someone or bringing him food or some new toy to play with.

And I just want to go back again.

What is the move of Netter?

What's Netero's move called?

What the 100 Taiwanion Bodhisattva?

And who is the Bodhisattva in question?

The healer.

The healer.

It's all happening in reverse.

It's all broken.

And at this point for me is the moment where I start going like, oh, I love Peto.

Peto is, Pito has become protagonist coded in a different way.

In the same way, Colt gets protagonist coded this is his trick he can do this so well yeah yes i'm i and step further merowim's also getting that treatment too merowim like 100 you were talking about yes frieza make it as if it's frieza making the challenge it's like oh well or it's what if merowim was goku what is

also how it feels exactly what if merowim is goku from here on i'm like wait i'm rooting for pito to heal komugi i i really hope that they let merowim get away from here instead of trying to fight him here right i really hope like, all of a sudden the audience has been like flipped to being, to their investment.

I can't speak for the entire audience, but it feels like part of what's being aimed at here is the moment where your position around the situation is that your investment is that the actions that the antagonists want are what you want to see happen.

So hot to be able to do it.

It would be so scary.

It would break, you know, at this point, I'm watching this and going, oh my God, I really hope that they can heal Komugi.

I really hope they get what they want right whereas an hour ago the thing that they wanted was to feed the king five million people yeah

and I was not I was not turns out in favor of that for instance you do not have to hand it to them right I think it's I think it's one of the trouble

one of the things that that gives people trouble with the chimera arc is like

you could watch this and then and reject it like you could reject like this like this is not legible as a hero story anymore and it's not yes and but you if what you wanted was chairman netter to come down and kick a bunch of ass as the good guy you might start to be going now wait a second this isn't good anymore and it's one of the like the flaws of the genre that that is so intensely enforced by

the entries into it that like

these are stories about heroes The heroes are complicated emotionally, but not morally.

They're like that.

Like, if it's, if there's ambiguity in the morals here, it is like on the front page and consistent and like part of the deal.

And you don't get into a situation where it's like, oh my God, deals are being rapidly switched up all the time.

What is going on?

Like,

who's the good?

Who's the good guy here?

Who's on?

Right.

Like, I, I understand why this is like difficult,

um,

in

in as far as shown in is difficult.

Well, and this is the thing: is like, here's the moment where we're bumping up into shonen as a genre descriptor and not a what it actually is, which is a market descriptor, right?

Um, which is something is shown in because it's published in a shonen magazine, it's not uh, and because certain things show up in that magazine, you start to it starts to cohere as a set of genre qualities.

Uh, but but if it if it was published in a Seinen magazine, we would think of it as a Seinen.

And these qualities tend, things like protagonist, you know, the focal point of the story shifting,

you know, moral ambiguity,

complexity of ideas around personhood and

politics tend not to show up in Shounen as much or in as developed a way.

And so it's one of those moments where like part of the reason it's such a good shounen, which it is, is the ways in which it's not very much like a lot of other shounen while still playing with a lot of the same signifiers that you've come to love from watching or reading Dragon Ball Z and Naruto and

even Yu Hakasho, right?

Like, it's not like

Togashi wasn't playing in this space previously.

And that's, I think, the great strength is how well it plays as a shounen when it is being a shounen.

Like,

if it was, if it sucked at being a shounen when it was supposed to be being a shounen, it wouldn't be impressive that it can sometimes upend what it seems like it should be.

It would just be like, oh, wow, this didn't get anything right, did it?

I think a really important thing here as well is that we have seen the king over and over again be a character of like violent, vengeful action.

Even just in this set of episodes, he was hitting Poof as hard as possible after Poof, you know, walked slightly too far behind him.

In the early days of the king's arrival, I mean, the first thing we saw him do was kill his mother.

And then we've seen, you know, the king decapitating people with his tail sort of became a hallmark of that character.

And being able to do it so quickly.

And he had that great monologue a few episodes back where he was like, oh, I killed that child.

And that means I'm the best.

Yeah.

I can just do that.

I have power over life and death.

Damn.

I think it's really fun.

I think it's pretty powerful, huh?

It's really telling that.

The king knows that the dragon dive is what has wounded Komegi, you know?

Yeah.

And he knows that these intruders are almost certainly responsible for it.

He can, we know the king can, like, see aura.

We know that Natero keeps his aura pretty quiet, but I doubt Xano does,

at least in this moment.

The king could just lash out with his tail.

And he doesn't even lash out in anger.

You know, he says, we have to take this fight elsewhere.

And then, taking advantage of the moment of distraction, as Dr.

Blythe pops out, and Zeno and Notero go, what the fuck is that?

He just walks past them and leaves.

Oh, it's so good.

Because he could have swung at them in that moment.

No, totally.

Yeah, for sure.

And in the past, he would have done.

You know, these are the people.

It's fascinating, right?

Because it's like, it's not even that he's not swinging at them because he doesn't see them as

dangerous or he doesn't see them as a worthy target of his vengeance.

These are people who have, you know, perhaps mortally wounded the person he cares about the most.

But instead, in this moment, the thing he says calmly is, all right.

We need to take this fight elsewhere.

It's great.

What the hell is going on with the king?

Also leverages the fact that he knows their goal is to separate yeah and he's like i think it'll benefit you as well meaning i know this is what you want you know there's a great line from the narrator shocking that uh where he says uh

despite uh i don't have it written down uh he's just like despite netero having spent enormous sums of money to get zeno here to separate the king from the royal guard he still somehow felt like he had lost the initiative.

He's also like,

the end of that line is also like, of course, Neta is going to take this opportunity.

He's like, you know, well, we can separate him.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

This is really exciting.

I'm not at a point where I'm like.

I mean, I don't know what's going to happen next, but it's not like the episode ended with like an alien coming down.

You know, I think that the, I think that the, which is the kind of thing the show has done before.

Not an alien coming down, but the the show will occasionally, especially in high-intensity moments, throw such a wrench into the works that I'm left going, I have no idea where we're going.

You know, I can make a guess at where we're going right now, which is that the stakes now are whether or not this fight is going to happen with the king, how the situation with Yupi and Poof, who doesn't know that this has happened and isn't here, but is on his way, are going to go, whether or not Pito is going to be able to revive Komegi.

You know, those all seem like the wheels that are turning.

I am so curious to see, you know, where they stop.

Yeah.

There's so many pinballs bouncing around, right?

Like, we haven't even seen a callgo since this all started again, right?

Flutter kind of disappeared off-screen.

Yeah.

And like, we know Goan and Kilua are coming upstairs.

Yeah, but they are coming upstairs to the receiving room, which when we last saw it was empty.

That was the gungi board torn in half.

Yeah, they're in the guest chamber.

It's great.

It has now gone completely wrong, but it's gone completely wrong unilaterally for everybody, which is fascinating.

Good luck, Kumigi.

Good luck, Peto.

Good luck, Pito.

Cursed thing to say.

Good luck, Pito.

Anyone else you'd like to say good luck to?

I mean, good luck, Gonan Killiua.

Good luck, Yupie.

I think Yupi's good.

I want to see Poof.

I like Poof as a character.

Poof is so fun.

Everything

that he does is amazing.

Good luck to Calgo.

Good luck to Calgo.

Good luck to Calgo.

Good luck

Meliaron.

No, I'm not saying good luck.

Good luck, Nove.

Good luck to all the characters.

Good luck, Palm.

Good luck, Palm.

Palm?

Yeah.

Thank you to the king.

Thank you to the king.

Good luck Shidore.

Bad luck, Beason.

Who's Shidore?

Shidori is the peon

who can understand.

Oh,

had we

paraded for

briefly in the background.

Yeah.

First time she's ever been spoken to, though.

I mean, that's right.

Yeah.

Described it in the lowest possible terms.

Funnily, I think the last time we saw her, she was like one of the faceless ants that happened to still be in the palace when Nov was around.

I think that's right.

Oh, yeah.

We just saw a little cutout of her.

Yeah.

Sylvie.

Hey, what do you think?

Sorry, go ahead.

I just want to ask if we had a review.

Just one question.

Yeah.

What do you think

Jing is doing during all this?

He's like drinking soda.

Well, no, the chimera, people know the Chimera and

the whole thing is happening.

Yeah.

He's playing Xbox.

He may be some weird place where he's not watching the news.

He just doesn't seem like a guy that's not with the news.

He's on the back of a giant turtle or whatever.

Yeah.

At one time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What is he doing?

He's he's

he's doing some like Byzantine bullshit of his own invention in another part of the world, right?

He's inventing Greed Island 2.

This time called Merchant AI Systems.

Greed Island 2, it's a whole new development team he's just left behind all of the previous people he had he recruited them specifically so their names would still make the name yeah right

now the other team is still working on right of course yes it's called greed islands and he's brought on Shelduck no

oh no

uh do you have a review for us Sylvie I have a I have a couple short and sweet ones some people wrote some very nice longer ones that I will read on an episode that isn't coming up on the three and a half hour recording mark.

This is our longest episode since October.

Yeah.

I do read all of them, by the way.

It's very, it is very lovely to see all the nice things people say about our show.

I'm going to read a couple, and

I'll admit, both of them are because the usernames are really good, but they're also just short and sweet reviews.

The first one from Brisket Luger,

a five-star review.

Commander Bizeph looks like Mike Pence.

Bottom text.

Wow.

The first one was the title.

Bottom text was the description.

And it is true.

And then the second one.

Five-star review titled Still Don't Know What a Hunter Is.

I wish I could.

And then Body.

I wish I could think about anything as deeply as they do about an anime.

And that's from Crocodile Gungi.

You can tell someone has made an account to do this.

Yeah.

There's another one for that.

Another one, like two rows down.

Goongie on the mind.

Hundreds of hours of HXH analysis.

I'm down for it.

I love people making accounts.

Thank you.

It genuinely is heartwarming to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it's annoying to review something on Apple podcasts.

We appreciate that.

It takes some time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I've seen multiple people be like, I don't have an Apple product and I don't know how to leave a review if I don't have an Apple product.

I think you have an

interview.

Does iTunes not let you do that anymore?

I know that that's.

I thought that iTunes did let you do that, but I can't be sure.

That's how I would do it.

Yeah.

On what?

On just the iTunes app.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Yeah.

I feel like Pocket Cast lets you leave reviews now.

Pocketcasts.

It just does.

Yeah.

But it's just for that review.

Yeah, that's the thing.

Yeah, it's their own walled garden.

Yeah.

Right.

Still,

leave them there, too.

Thank you so much, everybody.

Is your birthday in August?

August, the sweet summer month?

The sweet summer month.

Wow,

yeah.

Bumblebees go gambling around in the flowers, gamboling, not gambling.

They're gambling out.

Damn, everybody's gambling now.

Bumblebees, damn.

Yeah.

Use code bumblebee and get free $200

on your first bet.

Watching sports is impossible now.

It sucks.

It's the worst.

Austin, do you have a name to call to someone people?

Sylvie, Sylvie just did the thing, or somebody else did the thing just now recently, where it was like, if it's your, your name in the month is the same thing, you're like June and June, that already happened, right?

I did that last week.

What's exactly?

Sorry, you can't get Caesar's son to review us.

That's exactly.

That's exactly it.

What's a good Gen Alpha name?

What are the alpha names?

What are the new.

I don't know.

Gen Alpha people probably shouldn't be listening to us, huh?

That's probably too young.

They're 15.

I'm 14 or 15 now.

Don't post at me, but you can listen to my podcast.

Yeah.

What are the biggest Gen Zs?

According, I just did a quick Google from parents.com.

Thank you.

The top five names for, okay, they have it by sex.

How about Olivia?

Yeah, Olivia's on there.

That's number two.

That sounds like a good one.

That feels like a, I feel like we probably have some Olivias out there.

Olivia.

Olivia.

August.

Thanks for all of us.

Your name is August also.

Or Augustus.

Or Augustus.

Or Austin.

You're a proud member of

the gloop line.

Yeah.

Austin is an Augustus.

Augustus comes from.

From the Gloop line?

No, no.

Sorry.

We were talking about Keith and I were doing Willy Wonka Joe's.

Yes.

Augustus Gloop from Willy Wonka versus singing Augustine from Hippo.

Augustus Gloop Righteousness.

That's right.

All right.

Well, I think we're about there.

Yeah, that's it.

Thanks for watching, everybody.

Oh, we want to talk about what we're doing next time, right?

Oh, that's important.

You should know the episodes, yeah.

Yeah.

So I can watch them the second we got off this call.

I'm not gonna.

So we're doing another three.

It's uh

although I'm really tempted to add a fourth one because some shit happens.

There's a cliffhanger at the end of 15.

Do you want to just do it?

Do you want to do four?

No, we'll talk for eight hours.

Okay.

I won't be on this next one.

Okay.

So it'll be a little bit more than a hundred times.

We'll talk for eight hours for eight hours, Austin.

I know.

I don't know how you're going to do this.

I don't understand how

the will you all have.

Because I can just not watch.

I can just hold it, right?

But if I started to watch again right now, I'd be doomed.

I'll tell you how.

I spent two years in the mountains punching and made it.

So I'm way really good at podcasting.

Here's how I do it.

I watch the episodes right before we record.

So I have to stop.

Yeah.

I just watched them four times over a week.

Okay.

I watch these episodes so much, dude.

Yeah, that's not even your first time doing that.

No,

it's been happening more and more frequently.

Yeah.

We're watching 113, An Indebted Insect.

Great name.

Hilarious.

114, Divide and Conquer.

And 115, Duty and Question.

That's D19.

Very noble names.

By the way,

this isn't, this is more of a recommendation for people who have watched the show.

Because Jack, I assume you don't watch the next time on because you don't want to watch that.

I would recommend it to people because there are frequently just very funny Ghana Kilua narration bits where it's like.

In one of the more recent ones, I think for the Indebted Insect The Next Time On, it's a Gone is like chewing on something, and Killo's like, What are you eating?

He's like, Gummy insects.

And Kilo was like, Really, right now?

It's cute,

it's like a really good, like, decompressor after this stuff, you know?

Yeah, that's great, really, really good.

Well, have a good night, everybody.

Yep, thank you for joining again.

Yeah, can't wait to come back for future episodes.

Um, all right, bye.