A Boy and his Squid - Hunter x Hunter ep. 107-109: Media Club Plus S01E34

Hey everybody, it's Keith here.

I just want to let you know that you're going to hear a lie in this episode.

At the end of the episode, I talk about how episode three of the Dragon Ball Z bonuses is already out.

That's a lie.

It was supposed to come out

three weeks ago, but I was sick as a dog three weeks ago, and then it was Christmas, so it's still not out,

but it's almost done, and it'll be out tomorrow.

It'll probably be out tomorrow morning.

So if you're listening to this episode and you're like, gee, I wish there was three more hours of Media Club Plus, you can go to friendsofthetable.cash and listen to the Dragon Ball Z bonus episodes, the third of which will be out tomorrow.

That's going to be the first of the year.

By the way, if you want to hear me be sick as a dog, you can watch the run button stream that I did at 6 a.m.

when I was too sick to be able to fall asleep, where I rank every food.

That was a blast.

You should go listen to that.

Bye.

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 Yoshihiro Tagashi.

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

You can find my Blue Sky by going to keithjcarberry.contentburger.biz.

You can also check out Runbutton, youtube.com slash runbutton.

We're in a golden age of run button.

I think all the stuff that Run Button's been doing has been so good.

If you are out there not watching Run Button, but you are...

Listening to Media Club Plus, listening to Friends of the Table, watching Media Club Plus.

Sorry,

watching Friends of the the Table on Twitch do Twitch streams.

Run Button is just a lot like that.

So if you already like that, you'll like Run Button.

Go check it out.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

And during this month, you can support a project that I am working on on Kickstarter with the great illustrator Connor Fawcett.

It's called The Beasts and Blessings of the Hallowed Hall.

And it is a deck of beastiery cards,

like a physical deck of beastiery cards, with a pamphlet of like folk horror microfiction to go along with each of them.

I'm really excited about it, and I'm really excited to be working with Connor.

Where's the best place people can find like a link to that or whatever?

You can find a link to it by going to my blue sky, it is not quite real, or by going to Connor's Instagram, which is Bad Bucket, B-A-D-B-U-C-K-E-T.

Great.

And

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me on Blue Sky and Instagram at Sylvie Bullet.

You can check out some of the bonus episodes we've done on the Patreon at friends of the table.cash.

We've done a bunch of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

We've done some JoJo.

We've got further plans for some fun stuff.

You should check that out.

You should also check out the YouTube.

There's a lot of fun stuff on there.

I don't know when it's going up, but Jack and I played some Caves of Cud.

It was my first time.

It went great.

That'll be up way before this is up.

God.

Perfect.

Yeah.

I won for anyone wondering.

Are you won?

Caves of Cud.

Yeah, I beat it.

Are we sure how it's pronounced Cud?

It's pronounced CUD, and she beat it by getting her head kicked in by a baboon.

Shut up.

That didn't happen.

We came to an understanding, and then I opted out of life.

Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

I think we should talk about Caves of Cud for this podcast.

Dre, I know you haven't played it yet.

It's one of the best games ever made.

I'm watching Caves of Cud for the entire runtime.

I might know it's really good.

I'm not six in the morning last night.

I might do that tonight.

With me also is Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Blue Sky at Swan Derry 3000.

You can find me on Instagram at Andrew Lee Swan.

What game are you playing instead of playing Case of Cud?

Stalker 2.

Stalker 2.

Oh, that is also a fantastic game.

Yeah,

and Fortnite.

And

that's a different game.

That's also a sort of zone that

does radiation to you, but in a different way.

Yeah.

It's true.

We're just on a roll with these episodes.

These episodes have been crazy.

I love the Chimera Ant Arc.

No one could ever convince me that this isn't the best.

I love York New.

I like Greed Island.

But to the people who...

bounced off of this show here in this arc.

I know that I can't stop saying it.

You're weak.

You're a weak person.

I'm sorry.

You're weak.

You should have kept watching.

Go ahead, John.

This is the end of these three episodes.

And I thought, is this the best Hunter Hunter has beaten?

And the answer is, it might be.

Maybe.

Maybe.

There's so much good stuff in here.

The last, every episode since episode 100 has been like a total banger.

There's just a

weird cadence to these episodes.

The first two are full of big character moments, steady plot progression, really interesting stuff happening with Kilua and the king, respectively, not together.

The last episode is like pow bow bow, intricate plot setup work.

We've talked a lot about how Tagashi is like kind of sets up bowling pins to get knocked down, and that the first episodes that we watch tend to be like that.

This is flipped because we've done a lot of changing to the schedule because of scheduling reasons.

We sort of ended with the kind of episode we normally would stop on.

But this is way more pins than usual.

This is like a Wii Sports bowling challenge amount of pins.

Basically, Killer wakes up, solidifies his new friendship with the octopus

or the squid.

They meet up with the rest of the gang.

Morulf has a big fight with Leol or a medium fight.

Palm goes MIA after infiltrating the main part of the palace.

Everyone's worried about that.

The king has an identity crisis, and everyone talks a lot about the plan to infiltrate the the palace on both sides.

Several times during these episodes, Tagashi and the adaptation team really want to make sure that we understand the plan.

Yes.

And

they sort of begin explaining it very exhaustively in the first two, in 107 and 108, to the point where I was like, all right, I can tell it's very exciting that the plan is going to happen, and I can understand that our enjoyment of it is going to be contingent on, you know, how the expectation is versus how it pans out or whatever.

But I understand the plan.

And then episode 109 is all explanation of the plan, and it is electrifying.

It feels like Danny Ocean pitching a heist.

It entires.

It is an entire episode of talking through the plan.

And it's so cool watching the screenwriters kind of like change their cadence from frank

blunt instrument exposition of the early plan explorations in episode 107 and 108 as we keep going back over, all right, here are the little doors, and here are the, you know, here's how we're going to move in, here's how we think it could go badly.

And then they change their cadence for 109 to like really start tugging at the audience's heartstrings and anxieties of like, all right, this is it.

We are breaking the plan down and it is going to take us 23 minutes.

And fantastic.

Kilo goes like,

you know, I've got, hey, I'm having my anxiety.

Have you heard about my anxiety?

Like, something you, Kilo?

Something's wrong here.

We need to talk about it, we need to game out how things might be wrong for the whole episode.

And, you know,

I've said before the trick to being a writer is that you get to write the whole thing.

And so you know all the stuff that's going to happen and can make any character figure anything out.

But the trick of a good writer is how well you can make that not matter to the viewer or reader and does such a good job of like giving Kilua a big kind of

induction, an inductive reasoning win.

Did that are some wonderful moments?

Conducive.

Yes.

Sure.

It is a conducive win.

There are these, this has happened.

Oh, sorry, go on.

Just, just, you know,

Kilua figure something out that is like just verging on an implausible leap, but they do such a good job of kind of filling it in with enough, like,

like, we're sitting in a room and we're only here to talk about this.

And they figure out a really cool detail that we'll get to.

And I really like it.

Yeah, there's some ants doing that too.

I like that there's a lot of people figuring out 95% of something, but the 5% that they don't figure out could really be the make or break of it all.

I love.

If only Karapika was here, They wouldn't get that last fight.

Can you imagine how go near Chimera ads for his life?

Karapika is watching the news, and he is saying,

No, the only bugs I care about are spiders.

This is just delightful.

It's like watching a Rube Goldberg machine.

I mean, all of the Chimera ads

is like watching someone

Mad Man in a Room setting up a Rube Goldberg machine.

But as we have gotten, as we've drawn closer and closer and closer to the sorting.

Yeah.

We've gone very micro on the DT.

We've gone very, very micro.

And then at the end of this block of episodes, the first marble...

I mean, the marbles have been clicking into place for a while, but I'm avoiding saying domino, by the way.

It's driving me crazy.

No.

Well, I know, well, like, the domino is, uh, the domino is consistent with we'd be talking about a game or whatever, but there is something implausible about a Rube Goldberg bug machine.

There is something like

military and silly about it.

It's like mouse traps.

Yeah, it's like

on this show multiple times.

Who knows what could happen next with a domino?

The goal, I think, is that it all goes according to plan.

Yeah,

I guess you got a point.

By the end of 109,

people are consciously moving in the Rube Gold Bug Machine.

Whereas before, sort of stuff has been happening surreptitiously in various areas.

Now the strike team is on their way.

We all, we all, we've all seen Back to the Future.

We all remember the

opening scenes in Back to the Future.

You have talked with such love.

I saw it years ago, but you've talked with such love about this opening on this show before that it makes me want to go back and watch that.

It is the best Act One of any movie.

Like, it is mathematically, like, unbelievably efficient and perfect.

We know they've made a lot of those movies.

Only three.

Three.

No, I mean movies.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I really mean this.

I mean, it is like distilled blockbuster perfection.

It's sort of like, what if they invented the blockbuster and then, like, five years later, perfected it, and then no one's ever gotten close besides like Spielberg, who was involved in this?

So, uh, where is Spielberg executive produced us?

I can't remember.

Yeah, he was involved because they have the Jaws joke in the sequel, right?

They do, yeah.

Funny joke.

Uh, yeah, uh, doesn't make any sense, but it's still funny.

Um, because there weren't that many Jaws movies, fundamentally.

Anyway,

the detail in this is the Rube Goldberg machine that Doc sets up before being missing for a couple of weeks has just been like running on its own, like his little breakfast routine for himself and the dog.

And it just like going and going and going every morning.

And by the time Marty McFly gets to it, it is like...

The dog bowl is overflowing.

The egg thing is cracking eggs into a pan that is over.

You know, it's like, this this is, are we going to get a perfect Rube Goldberg machine that goes exactly according to plan?

Are we going to get this nightmare Rube Goldberg machine or something in the middle?

We have no clue.

And there's something really dreamlike about the reworking and re-emphasis of detail after detail.

We see the staircase over and over again.

Yeah, we do.

Love the staircase.

And we see the

like the view of the palace from Morel's entrances and exits.

We keep getting told over and over again, we expect the king to be in the throne room.

You know, we expect the royal guards to be doing this.

There really is, you know, beyond just foreshadowing, there is something

almost

like gestural about the way we keep coming back to these individual images, the staircase, looking at the palace, the king in the throne room.

And I love that.

Oh, oh, oh, but then it's Tagashi, and there's always a chance that we go like, and Jack, you'll never believe it, we'll never see that staircase again.

Well, surely the underground church will be coming back.

That seems major.

In the middle of all of this, there are two things that are great.

The first is King, King, I just called you King, Keith.

Keith

was not kidding when he said the king is

suffering an identity crisis.

The king is really going through it by these episodes.

It's quite literal.

He is starting to come apart.

And the other thing is, the strike team doesn't know anything about Kumuki.

They have no

and for as insightful as they are, they could never guess.

They'd never guess in a million years, says Killiwa.

What if the king got really into ooh, Googie?

And of course, if he really liked Goongie, he'd have contacted her.

He'd probably get bewitched by her autistic swag.

And if for some reason he couldn't win, he'd get so frustrated, he'd make some sort of strange deal and then rip off his own arm.

And that's why Pito had to stop using N.

Let's travel back in time to the beginning of episode 2.

Yeah, we're all over the place.

Do you have a summary, Keith?

I already did it.

It was freaking

the whole thing.

Okay, whatever.

For some reason, I was like, oh, yeah, that couldn't be it.

No, no, no.

It was fine.

I just knew that we didn't have a lot of time, so I went fairly quickly.

We pick back up on Moral and Leol in the church, circling each other and

about to start their fight.

And one of the funniest things that's ever happened to Hunter Hunter happens, Leol summons a trident, or I guess a harpoon and a surfboard, and moral screams in surprise.

It's really funny because it takes about three minutes for them to explain why he would do that.

Uh, but that's great,

but uh, but um, he reveals his power tube or in the uh the sub, or no, in the in the English, uh, uh, the dub, tube surfs up.

Yeah, there's, um,

you know, this is joyful to me, me, the idea that we make all this work about going to an underground church, and you're like, oh, cool, they're going to have some sort of like thematically significant power, the sort of the incense of morale smoke or whatever, and then Leo rips up the thing.

But they bring it back.

It makes perfect sense at that point.

It does make perfect sense at the end.

Because it's not about the church, it's about the underground.

I was going to say

it's its verticality that matters, not necessarily its religiousness.

Which is a great, it is a great little twist that it's like, oh, I guess it's random that it's in a church.

And it's like, nope, it still made sense.

My tube ability summons the ocean, Leol says.

God damn, it does.

This is, it's, it's, it is, the orange ocean.

It is an orange ocean.

I don't know why it's orange.

I suppose it's like sewer water from.

I think it's supposed to be lighting.

I think it was, yeah, it was lighting and also that it's like in a church.

So the grounded walls are stone.

So it's just like...

showing the color of the ground.

I liked it, but my

thing was, like, sometimes they do look like they're in like a dimmer light.

They're in a different light than usual.

And then sometimes it just doesn't look like that.

And

it does make it feel like Leol's surfing on a wave of orange crush.

It does.

Visually, though, it being orange

gives this a really good look.

There is some beautiful water animation in this.

As the fight begins, there's so much water.

The space of the church room,

you know, this is a bigger on the inside than it is on the outside type situation.

We are now in a sort of massive underground ocean.

There, Leo is zooming around on his surfboard.

Morel is getting like sucked into underwater currents.

The water is splashing all up and around the walls of this place.

It's great.

Moral reveals why he was gasping in surprise.

He knows his ability.

It belongs to a friend.

His friend.

Rachan.

He gets caught up in what the subtitles call Maelstrom,

Maelstrom Tornave, but the Dove just calls a Vortex.

And this is what Jack was talking about.

He gets sucked down into this whirlpool where he uses his breath, his insane lung capacity as jet propulsion to break out of the whirlpool.

Yeah, he's doing vape trail.

Which is just

perfect shonen insanity to me.

Just like, yeah, yeah, he has smoke power.

His smoke doesn't work.

What else is his smoke good for?

Oh, he can blow real hard.

I'm actually really,

I'm really glad you said that because, like,

there's something that, like, I think really clicks in this arc that happens in Shounen a lot that I think only like the really good authors tend to make fun.

And some it can, it can make the series feel bloated when they start getting weird with the powers and being like, yeah, this guy has a surfboard wave ability.

This guy has a smoke ability,

which are both kind of high concept, but then you won't even guess the way that this all resolves, which is even more weird than the powers.

Way more weird, yeah.

And

I like when a manga author is adventurous with the abilities of their characters.

I think it like typical of Tagashi, there's a logic and a gaminess to it where it's not, oh, I had a second secret ability.

It's like, no, my ability is more adaptive and complex than it seems.

And like,

B follows A, C follows B, and we get to like this really weird place with sort of a logical,

an illogical, logical conclusion.

It's a very weird.

Not to do the whole the typical JoJo fan thing, but it is something that reminds me of a Rocky's writing.

Eventually, when he gets more comfortable with getting weird withstand abilities,

he's able to show them being used in different ways that like seem like they're introducing a new power, but it's actually just a one-off use of it in this weird.

For example,

we saw in our JoJo episodes when he turned that man into a rock.

He doesn't do that again.

He just does that one time.

And it's fun to see Tagashi doing it because he's also a master at it, I think.

Yeah,

Jojo and Hunter Hunter were running concurrently, right?

They were...

Tagashi were continuously.

Jojo was running at the same time, I think, as both Yu Yu Hakasho and Hunter-Hunter because it's a huge turn.

I thought Hunter Hunter didn't start until

Yu Yu Hakasho ended.

That's what I'm saying.

Oh, I'm saying Jojo's run is so long.

Jojo's run is contemporary with both.

It bridges the gap.

Do we think that by the time we get into what we call high concept nen, Tagashi owes a debt to Iraqi?

I mean, we keep saying there's a lot of Jojo in this.

And I think that Takashi and Iraqi's style is very different.

I think that they're pulling from the same places and also informing each other.

I think that is what I'd say.

I think in the last episode, we talked about how they're literally in the same magazine, like for years.

Yes, they're both in.

I think it's Jump.

Yeah, I think it's just shown in Jump.

I don't know when.

I know

JoJo's eventually goes to

Ultra Jump, but that's in the mid-2000s.

But yeah, I think it is more of the situation where it's like they're both two very prolific authors in the same like in the

like Shonen Jump is the Shonen publication.

Like it's it's the right it's not necessarily the size of Disney, but if in my shorthand I can say it's like the Disney of Shonen.

And like

I think you know, it's hard not to see it, see some parallels.

But like in the same way that this happens with

later generations or like later later generations makes it sound like so much far in the future, because Naruto also started with

future waves.

Future waves, thank you.

That is,

yeah, yeah, no, I think I like waves because, like, there is sort of a wave of, um, and maybe it's the emo musician and me, I love classifying things into waves, but um, it definitely does have that sort of like

thing going where, like, if you look at the big three of Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach, I think you can see their influences on each other in different ways.

And I think that, like, Tagashi and Araki probably had

similar situations going on.

But I also don't want to discount the fact that like

dude's married to Naoko Takauchi, and there's definitely a lot of that influence here too, I think.

I want to say that the big three being Naruto, One Piece, and Bleach,

that is like a cultural thing that people say.

That wasn't just Sylvie.

For non-Shonen people, that's just like what people say about those three shows.

It's like whatever, sure.

People can say whatever they like.

Yeah, no, I actually disagree.

They can't say whatever they like, and it's insane to call those three shows the big three as if it means something.

I mean, One Piece is massive.

Oh, totally.

It's a lot of it, but it is massive.

There's nothing, it wasn't One Piece that was the issue here.

Oh, yeah, no, no, it was

bleach.

Yeah, it sure is Bleach.

Bleach is like such a distant third.

This is like

in terms of notoriety.

Sorry to reach back into the past for another stupid thing, but this is the supernatural of super hulak.

Oh, that stabbed me in the heart, Keith.

I was so targeted.

Are you saying that supernatural is the worst show amongst super hulak shows?

It's the least famous.

I like a lot, and also not

isn't even good.

So it's the worst.

That's a good point, actually.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's like, what is the best tasting turd?

I hope that there is like...

I'm going to say, I'm going to use the word dozens.

I hope there was dozens of people listening that have the same reaction as you, Sylvie.

I bet there are.

I bet just hearing the word super hoolock.

I don't think that Keith should say that.

It feels weird.

Keith is so terminally offline.

Although,

I don't know.

It's weird.

It's for me.

As someone that liked Doctor Who at the time,

but didn't like...

Sherlock or Supernatural.

It was something that I was aware of at the periphery.

And I was always confused by the idea that there was an identity built around liking three shows.

That's such a weird thing to me.

Were you on Tumblr at all?

No, zero.

That's why.

I will say all three of those shows aren't on the Media Club minus list.

Yes.

Bad on boom.

Two quick notes about this fight that I really like.

The first is

Leol has completely abandoned all the Lion stuff.

It's amazing.

Yes, he's into music now.

Lion is the past.

He's into music and surfing and zooming around.

It is so...

So much of the joy of the Chimera Ant Arc has been watching the ants kind of like develop identities from first principles.

Leo is such a 90s guy, too.

He is such a 90s guy.

Do you remember all his stuff about how

the lion is the king of the jungle?

And

I'm crouching.

Now the lion is the

savage garden.

Yes, exactly.

The other thing that I want to talk about is: as he uses his vortex power to trap Morel underwater, which doesn't work because in a beautiful shown online, Morel says, when it comes to maximum lung capacity, I'm confident I'm the best in the world.

Straight line.

He uses this and he says, This is one of my original moves, with the implication being that he has like

you know, borrowed Gratchon's power.

Gratchen?

Yeah, Gratch.

Gratchon, yeah.

Gratchon's power

through the rental scheme, but is like innovating on the nen techniques, being like, oh, this is, I've taken this and I'm doing something with it.

Yeah.

Which is very chimera ant, by which I mean is very human.

That's such a

relatable thing to do, right?

To like...

borrow a power or borrow a technique and put your own spin on it or whatever.

But I think a really useful lens for this is that over and over again, Morel is the character who has the most to say about like

capital N, capital P, nen powers as a concept.

You know, the whole sequence with Chitu was

an extended joke about what it means to like misunderstand your own nen power.

He's kind of a nen professor.

He is kind of a nen professor, yeah.

Right back to the first time we met him when he had, he was really grim in his first encounter, looking down at Gonan Killier and basically saying, like, you do not have it.

And I love that in the scene in this scene we have leal saying this is one of my original moves that he's rented and we have more saying you know you've stolen this this is this is from another guy i understand how this works i think that's really neat

interesting

that i just realized so when i first was watching that scene well i guess recently watching that scene one the first thing that popped in my head was is the twist going to be that leo is this hunter right like uh because have we seen

on no,

I checked him.

I didn't think so.

This is their first mention and has not appeared on screen.

He, I think, he pronouns is how he refers to him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, has not appeared on screen.

Um, just mention continued drag.

But so, what I think is actually more interesting is if we remember how Layles power works, that in order to borrow one, he basically has to help somebody out and get them to agree that they owe him.

100%.

So, how did he get a hunter to say yep i owe you one mr lion chimera ant-man this is uh this is i drag this is a great point i have this exactly written down because uh uh what um moral says is since you stole my friend's ability you deserve to die and leo's like hey i didn't do that but since you won't listen to reason i guess we'll just fight but yeah uh since we know how leo's ability works not only was layo being true, but that Grachon has actually said those words like like yes, I owe you one.

I agree to owe you a favor, which means that

I think the implication is that Leol must have saved,

either spared his life or like saved him from another ant and was like, but you owe me, saw his power, it was like, it's more useful that this guy's around.

I want this guy's power.

I think that's right.

And like.

Did they mention?

I swear this came up when Flutter was like incapacitated, that Leoles loses the ability if the user dies.

Yes.

Yes.

yeah.

So, like, also confirmed that Grachon has to be alive out there somewhere,

presumably.

I mean, I not doing Chimera ant stuff anymore if he doesn't have his powers, but like, was part of some other hunter group that are out there fighting Chimera ants.

Yeah, well, because Layles one of the ones that was out, like, in the review, he was out in the world, yeah, doing interviews.

Okay,

I forgot about my

here's my theory, just sort of like, you know, drawn from the loosest possible evidence.

He is,

there are hunters out there on the Chimera Ants side.

You know,

we know that the hunter organization is currently going through some stuff.

Classic Tagashi style.

Remember that that came up and has not been mentioned yet?

So I wonder if there are, in the same way that we have Notaro's crew out there being like, we have to take out the king, there are hunters out there who are sort of doing the inverse of the Phantom troop sequence, where it's like we're helping Chimera ants out in this region or whatever.

We've been hired to work through this or that.

Sure.

That especially makes sense, like jumping ahead to how we well, jumping back and then ahead to how we've seen Nove react, right?

We are led to believe that Nove is a pretty competent, like up there hunter.

So it's also, but if we see someone like Nove reduced to like just like shell shock from like coming across

pitos

in

it follows then that maybe a less seasoned but still licensed hunter would run into a chimera ant and feel hopeless and be like yeah no i'll work for you it that keeps me alive uh especially because we know that the hunters that were sent after the chimera ants were the uh uh

uh the organization dogs the like lesser contract hunters that don't do private work

you know it might be the case that in like

manga issue 412, Yoshihiro Tagashi is going to like just do a spreadsheet of how the Chimera, sorry, of how the hunter organization is set up.

You know, there'll just be a flowchart somewhere and be like, oh, that's how it works.

Oh, sorted.

We no longer need to ring the bell.

But

he says,

re-getting the power, he says,

so...

Morel says, you know, basically you've killed a bunch of humans to get this power.

And Liel says, I was merely protecting myself from the humans that were hunting me.

And then this very salient point is moved over extremely quickly so we can get back to the surfing.

Yeah.

You know, we have the like humans and hunters being like, I'm not actually evil.

You were hunting me and hurting me.

Nope, we must, we must continue to surf.

But coming from Leo, that is very much a like, well, so much for the tolerant left.

Yes, it really is.

Because we have also seen Morel Moral.

I keep wanting to say it like the fucking mushroom.

We have also seen Moral.

Jack keeps saying it.

Jack is poisoning you.

We have seen.

Well, I also just like Morels.

They're delicious.

Yeah, they're delicious.

We have seen, we have seen Moral treat Chimera ants like human beings and value them like human beings.

So,

yeah, it is, it is

something I like in this, this is

all over the show, you know, characters who stake out a moral or ideological position and they argue from it.

And the show, like, sometimes comments on it, sometimes doesn't, sometimes does a little bit of both.

And it's like, these characters are mostly not right or wrong.

There's not a lot of like guy who's always right, which is, yeah, in my opinion, talking about waves of shonen, um, a

nasty wave of horrible shonen that uh still exists.

Uh,

oh, very much, uh, still exists, but it was it was at its strongest,

I would say, around the time of Sword Art Online.

Guy who's perfect and always right, but you watch it and you can tell he sucks.

Yeah, Sword Art is kind of the

poster boy for that.

There's not a lot of that.

Dolly, afraid of it.

There's not a lot of guy who's always right.

And

we had something kind of close to that, Goan, who is like, guy who's always seems really great to be around.

And we've spent the last, you know, 30 episodes complicating that a bit.

So, um, yeah.

Um,

he has another move, giant wave, big wall, or as the dub says, heavy pounder.

Heavy pound.

That was crazy.

Um, right.

Basically, it's the exact same move as Vortex.

He makes a big wall instead of a big tornado, and he

pushes Moral down into the hole.

And Layl, or uh, Moral just stays down there, and uh, Layles, like, having a like a oh my god, he's just down there, he's not coming back up.

He could be down there 10 minutes, 20 minutes.

Wait, maybe he can hold his breath as long as a whale, and then he thinks of a whale.

Yeah,

he's really into marine life right now, huh?

Yeah, he has it.

He just like thinks of a whale, and uh, and then he does a PowerPoint about what if Moral is down there, um, blowing into a smoke hose to confuse him and make bubbles all around him, which is what's happening?

Rules, because there's definitely

a world where this is a worse anime that just shows this from Moral's perspective.

Yeah.

I'm so glad it's from Layles because there's this, I noticed that, like, Tagashi's done this twice now with Moral's ability where it's kind of framed like a magic trick.

You get the big Tada at the end both times with this and Chitu, and it's really fun.

And it's smoke themed, so there, like, literally is half of smoke.

It's smoke.

He is is smoke and mirrors.

He's the mirrors.

The smoke is the smoke.

Yeah.

It's the actual visualization of it as well.

On

there's like three really great.

There's him imagining a whale, and we get to see a whale.

There is him

imagining

or visualizing him using his breath to blow him out of the vortex.

We talked about that.

And then there is this beautiful cross-section of the church where we like see

like a dollhouse side on all the weird little patent passageways and tunnels that they use to get down to this place and we see how it's been flooded it's it's really really fantastic yeah he's imagining that maybe the the the bubbles are a distraction and moral has used like a bag of smoke air slowly deflating to like mask his escape this is where the church being underground becomes important for two reasons the first reason is that all the water has to stay down instead of running out it sort of stays down and it's blocking the escape, all the tunnels with water.

The second half is

the fight's over.

Nothing happens.

Nothing more happens.

Leo falls off of his board and is like, what the fuck is happening?

I'm busy and I feel weird.

Who wants to explain how this happens?

Someone else can explain it.

Can I just say episode is brutal if you have issues with drowning and stuff?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they do not really hold back.

Yeah, now this one was kind of hard for me.

Yeah.

He, um,

he falls off his board and kind of like tumbles through the water, which is now quite still because the uh all the waves have, you know, he's not doing any big wave business anymore.

Um, and as he is floating down, sort of going, what the fuck is happening to me?

This is an amazing shot.

He looks down and he just sees Morel sitting calmly on the very bottom, um, blowing bubbles through his pipe.

Um, and he has flooded the air with CO2.

He has been, you know, essentially just like breathing out and poisoning the air of this underground church.

I don't think you could do this, but it doesn't matter.

Well, it's airtight, it's an underground church, and all the exits are filled with water.

Yeah.

So it's a closed system.

He says, my attacks began even before yours, and as Leol drowns under the water,

Morel just sort of like gets up from the bottom and swims away.

That's a really great ending of the fight.

And there's some there's I think that they really imply

with like the way that the camera lingers on Leol, with the stuff that Morrell has said and done in the past, even as recently as being like, I hate fighting someone who has good taste in music, that like Morrell might save Leol and be like, now go away, like give him the same deal that he gave Colt.

Nope.

Leol drowns.

He just drowns to death.

Yeah.

But

we've talked a lot about Tagashi in games, obviously.

But an even more specific thing that Tagashi keeps doing is he keeps like manufacturing like artificially closed systems to like put people in.

It's happened so Greed Island is a big version of this.

This is like an artificially closed system.

Chitu's thing.

Let's see.

Are there any more?

I swear to God, there's one that I'm missing from.

Do you consider the castle to be one?

The castle sort of is one.

Yeah, the just like all everything that P2's N encompasses is like a closed system.

And then like

the Gungi board is a kind of a closed system.

I swear to God, there's a big one that I had in my head from York New, but I lost it.

But like, there's a lot of this, like, like, let's

create the mafia community.

Let's create a vacuum.

Like, let's do our best to make a vacuum.

Oh, the NGL is an artificially closed system.

Yes, very much so.

So is East Orteau.

Let's make all of these

at wildly varying scales from the Gungi board to a whole country, all these artificially closed systems within which we can create a set of

rules to do our fight in or to live our lives in.

Karapika's hostage situation, too.

His watertight hostage situation is another big one.

This is

really good.

This is really good.

And I'm really glad you brought this up, Keith, because I hadn't really thought of that as

a formal move that he's doing or a structural move.

And I think you run really dangerous.

You're playing a very dangerous game when you start doing silly formal tricks and making that the backbone of your work

because it is only as good as the stuff that you're you're filling these formal spaces with.

You know, if you say, I'm going to do a series of like different scales and different intensities of like bottles and put the characters in these closed loops,

that only goes as far as how good your characters are, you know?

And I think that Tagashi is

convincingly you can close the system.

Yeah, definitely.

Tagashi is like smart enough to imbue his characters with enough

sort of like like angles that he can lock them in these closed little spaces and keep finding new permutations by which they can work.

It's really, really neat.

Yeah, you see so often in like serialized TV or whatever, people being like, oh, now we're going to do a bottle episode.

And occasionally those bottle episodes are fantastic, but very often it's just like, yeah, I know these guys and now they're in a closed system, you know?

Yeah, it's more of that.

But I think this works this works so well.

A nice little detail just before Leol passes.

He says, I told Wolfin and Bluster to stay back so that I could get all the credit.

And this is just a nice little mirror in the same way that the Royal Guards are playing him.

It's just people try to get one over on the people below them all the way down.

Did we mention his incredible Coke line of I let him have the advantage so I could turn the tables?

Oh, yeah.

I know this is very funny to me.

And then Moral's like, my first attack began even before yours.

Like, he had already, he's locked in a church and he's like, oh, I have an idea.

CO2 death.

Moral's doing the you're already dead from Fist of the North Star, but in like super convoluted, like, like roundabout ways instead of just punching really hard.

I really like Morrow.

I think he's such a great character.

He's a great character.

He's arrived so late in the show.

Yeah.

Now that I'm thinking of it, Knuckle has too.

Also, not that late.

Less than two-thirds.

Yeah.

I guess that's true.

I always forget about the scale of, like, the show.

I would die for Knucklebind.

With you.

We'll get into Knucklebind.

We'll do that.

Knuckle has some great stuff these episodes.

Meanwhile, under the palace, Palm has drugged Director Bizeph.

She knows how to escape.

But she needs to see the royal guards so that specifically she needs to see the king so that she can she can track them.

Yeah, this was mentioned when she was with gone and killiwa in vienna correct um that the reason she was able to they when they ran away when kilowa ran away with gone she was gonna be able to track them because she'd seen them before they i think it's mentioned briefly explain what her power is in like three chunks and that is like the second reference to her power i think is that and we still don't

we we know most of how it works at this point which we learned um when they talk about the plan

for her to sneak into the king.

But yeah, we do learn that she can see people that she's seen with the crystal ball.

Okay.

With the horrible mermaid crystal ball.

Yeah, yeah, the mermaid crystal ball.

There's a nice little bit of sort of like

nested blackmail going on here, nested corruption going on here, which is that Bizaf has kept his underground village, his awful exploitation village, a secret from the royal guards, so he can't blow the whistle on Palm doing shenanigans down there for,

you know, without exposing his whole scheme.

I don't think P2 would give two shits about discovering this, you know?

I think that they'd just be like, yeah, they're like, whatever, keep doing the paperwork.

We're busy.

But

this is hopefully preventing Bizaf from waking up and being like, I've been played.

or whatever.

They do seem to imply that he's been drugged, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

She creeps through the palace,

and just like Nove, she can sense the N of the royal guards.

First, she senses Poof's N, as Nov did.

She's at the bottom of the staircase.

You know, it's great.

The framing is exactly the same.

She's like crouching on the same side.

There is something really nice about the rhyme of it being Nov and Palm who are put in this position.

Given that they're this sort of like sickly, untoward pair um i really love them both being here at the bottom of these steps i love it i love how they they stick to the um i think it's still poofs on being like a distillation of pure evil basically when they encounter it yeah yeah it's really it's very effective the no one likes it no one likes it no no no no one likes it no one likes it

Well, there's two things that happen.

The first thing is that we see the same thing that

uh nov saw this sort of like

smoggy thick billowing uh n

and it sort of recedes and she's like oh maybe i can go a little further and then it like

comes back in full force basically and then we see we cut away on her scared face.

Pito's N comes screaming down the stairs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is an N jump scare.

Now Nen has been explained to us so efficiently that we we can see a bad aura approaching and not only know that it's bad news, but know whose it is.

Yes, we can recognize a person from their unique N.

From how bad the vibes are.

Just from how bad the vibes are.

They have evil

Bobo and Kiki ends.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Booba.

Buba.

It's not Bobo.

Is that Bobo?

It could be, though.

That's the last time we see Palm these episodes, right?

It is.

And I would.

What's up, Jack?

The single worst person to be discovered by is Never Peter.

UP would just.

Well, the king would just kill you.

We know that Peto tortures people for information regularly.

Yeah.

We've seen Pito using, like, doing like...

experiments to someone's brain.

Yep.

And over and over again, we have had hunters say,

we keep coming back to this.

Like, hunters are expected to take their own lives rather than be interrogated by the ants.

Especially interrogated by Peter.

So I really don't feel good about this.

Less because I feel bad for Palm, although I do feel bad for Palm.

You know, the hunters know the risk.

And more that I feel bad about the plan.

If Peter has gotten some information.

It doesn't seem like she has.

We see Pito, at work later in this episode, and they are not pulling Palm's brain out.

Yeah, they're not talking about an intruder or anything.

No.

There's some really good Royal Guard businesses in the world.

There's some, oh my God, is there some good Royal Guard business?

Poof is on his bullshit.

I have got some poof buttons to hit.

Wonderful, wonderful.

I can't talk about the way I described him in my notes.

I mean, I'm about to say it, but I'm just not going to do it on the show.

Oh, I could say mine because they're not slurs, probably.

I never said anything.

Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I just said it's a word I'm allowed to say.

It might be possible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

you're allowed to say that.

So we're saying slurs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fluorescent lights as Killua wakes up in the underground hospital.

Icalgo is reading a book about a squid.

You don't understand

about a squid.

And he's looking the same as usual, right, Jack?

He is looking

like a well-dressed little man ready for the winter.

Yes, he is.

Yeah.

He's what is he's got on like a beanie.

He's got on a toque.

Yeah, thank you.

It's like a bubble hat, right?

He's a South Park character is what he looks like.

He is dressed like a South Park character.

Yeah.

I couldn't tell you which one is the one that he looks like because I can't keep them straight.

But he does look like one of the main, one of three of the main four.

Yoshihira Tagashi high-speed character work.

Ikago is a triumph of this because I would like to address briefly the fact that we have barely seen Ikalgo do anything.

Right.

He has his great, but we do love him.

He has this great sniper intro.

Kilua handily beats him.

Kilua nearly dies to fish darts.

Ikago rescues him.

I would go to the ends of the earth for this beautiful squid.

Remember when he sang?

That was so long ago.

I love what he's saying, yeah.

This is all within expected parameters.

Hey, where'd this singing go?

Why isn't he singing anymore?

He's

crying.

His heart is singing.

He's also,

his entire world has been upended.

He's lost

a position of being comfortable and being stuck in a place he doesn't want to be.

And now he's been jostled into a world that he wanted but thought was beyond his grasp.

Yeah, it's God.

God.

Oh, I love this stuff.

I love this stuff so much.

It's so good.

Killu is immediately like, okay, let's go.

We're best friends now.

Yeah.

Of course, you're part of the crew.

I do hate seeing Killua's muscles.

Oh, yeah, that is insane.

Yeah.

No 12-year-old should have an eight-pack.

No.

Fucked.

He is disgustingly ripped.

Like, it's body horror to me in a way.

It's just really upsetting.

And it's also confusing is why it's in the show because it's not like Kilua wasn't lifting 30 tons of stone just to go home back when he was 12 and not ripped.

I think it's supposed to just be like, look how quick he recovered, but he could have done it with his shirt.

But he's been, but he's had his shirt off before, and he's just had the body of a...

of a kid.

So they've changed the way that he's going to be able to get

his shirt off.

Maybe it's all the nin training.

He's on the Marvel actor diet, you know.

Yeah, just a lot of steroids.

There's uh, I have two half-formed thoughts about this.

The first thing is, uh, watching Ikalgo's, uh, it becomes more clear specifically what's going on with Ikalgo in just a couple minutes, uh, but um, it feels like they're reproducing Kilua's infatuation with Gone via

Ikalgo being infatuated with Kilua, and then they make that extremely literal in like gee nuts.

They do the gun shot.

But it's not, it is not just.

They do the gun shot.

But it's not just like

the, you know, you are light kind of thing.

But like, there's a, there's like a bizarre reaction to like Kilua's body happening from a Kalga.

This is like, it feels

non-platonic.

And then the second thing is,

we've talked about this a little bit before, specifically, I think, when Austin was here talking about Hiseka in Greed Island and talking about how you could read Hisuka as like a criticism of the Shounen audience sort of watching

Gonan Kiloa's adventures in the same sort of

lurid way that Hisuka does.

Where's Hiseka been in this arc?

Hiseka is now the audience.

We are now like being forced to look at Akilua and his body in this bizarre.

mad at you for saying that i think you're right but i'm mad at you for implying that any of us could be hisaka this is yeah this is a this is a these are my two thoughts that i had about this because it's so long it is a this is not really this is not just like he has a shirt off he puts a new shirt on this is a like

multiple poses body angles

like from the side from the front from the back like look at kilowa's body for i don't know 20 seconds while ikago goes like oh

it's crazy.

It's crazy.

I think

that is the reading of it that I think plays the clearest for me.

Something else that is interesting here is that, like, Ikalgo is a chimera ant who is thinking about his own body pretty much constantly.

And we don't know

how often chimera ants have spent time with humans.

So I wonder as well to have Ikalgo, who is a character who is like, man, I'm an octopus, I don't want to be an octopus, turning and looking at the like ripped body of a human and being like, what the fuck is this?

You know?

Um,

he telephones Goan to bail him out.

Oh, this is an underground hospital run by another Yoshihira Tagashi racist caricature.

Yeah.

Um, uh, who demands 1.6 million Jenny.

Remember money?

Yeah.

Remember when this show was a lot about money?

It's worth 1.8 million plus 10,000 to use the telephone per minute.

Per minute, yeah.

Per minute.

That's how they get you.

He calls Goan.

Really interesting scene with what's going on in the news these days.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

I had the brief thought of like, hmm, 1.8 million.

That's not that bad.

That's not that bad of a deal.

10,000,

15,000 bucks for saving your life in a hospital.

I don't know.

I think that that's actually not that bad here.

Yeah, if you're listening to this in the future, this is airing near the time of the wildest thing that happens in December 2024 in any.

um,

he calls Goan.

Goan is so happy to hear from him that he screams.

It's this is really sweet.

It's really cute.

It's good to be reminded that Goan likes Kiloa.

Yes.

Yes.

He does care.

We also

like, you know, just sort of

it's a chance to have zoomed past all of the potential padding that another show might have done of like Melioron getting to know Knuckle.

Goan is like, hey, I met a new guy and he's best friends with Knuckle and shoot now and this is great.

Everything's going great.

And it's like, oh, we don't know belaboring this point at all.

It all worked out.

The last time we saw

Melioron, he was crying in the bushes watching Knuckle

petting dogs.

Melioran and Knuckle really are friends now.

And this is great because they're both kind-hearted souls.

Yeah.

Nove briefly comes up.

He is, quote, probably done fighting.

And we get a shot of him.

He is just breaking down, head in his hands, in the portal room.

Now we get into Ikalgo falling in love with Kiliwa.

I think this is great.

Yeah,

sorry, Kilua leaves.

See, like what I did there.

Kilua goes to leave and is like, aren't you coming?

And Ikago has like a breakdown.

He has like a full breakdown.

His eyes get all ripply.

It's a very good effect.

He's like, are you sure you want me to come?

And then Kilu goes what was i the only one who thought we were already friends and then ikago literally screams and cries saying i'm going i'm going with you another like similarity though to gone is like how

he was so effortless like like he treated their friendship like it was a given with killowa yeah um and now killowa is doing that with ikago yep um he gives a speech about uh

friends helping each other uh is natural and expected and they don't need to keep thanking each other so this is the last time that Killer will be thanking him.

And that, if, if, or when Ikago helps him, uh, or sorry, when he helps Ikago, Ikago doesn't have to thank him either.

I don't know what this is about, I don't know where that's coming from.

I don't know what is to be meant by this.

It's this, is this, is this, is this bad?

I can't.

No, it's, I think it's really sweet because he's like, it's nothing special to help your friends, so it's lame to say thank you for something that's expected.

I think it is him trying to like just make it more clear to ikago where they stand now like to not feel like he owes him to feel like oh yeah to make them feel more like peers i know you all say thank you to your friends though because

i'm not kilowazoldic child assassin in a shounen anime yeah like to me i just see that as like a a like The assassin industry is all about like you do what you're paid for and that's why you do things.

And this is Kilua explicitly saying like, no, I do things because I care about you, not because I'm worried about like you owing me one or I owe you one and sure.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

So it's not him.

He's 12.

Right.

Yeah.

Sure, sure, bank.

But, you know, he's 12.

To your point, though, Keith, I would say thank you to my friends, but I would also, if I were able to help a friend in a situation, I would be like, yeah, absolutely.

Let's do it.

You know what I mean?

It's like, I think

I need to explain where I'm coming from.

Here's where I'm coming from.

I'm not saying this, but I'm saying I don't know.

It is.

Is he now used to

not being thanked by Goan for all of the stuff he does for him?

You could interpret it like that.

This is a good point.

I really do think of it as like

him trying to be like in his cool kid way being like, I...

I help you not.

I would help you not because I expect gratitude or anything in return, but because you're my friend.

But do you learn to not expect gratitude because you won't stop helping your friend and he won't stop helping me?

Listen, dude, we can.

I don't know because Kilo Azoldik is the most abused child in the world.

So like,

I just want us to be careful about what's going on with Kilua here.

What is going on?

There is some.

Watch this scene completely out of context.

And between Ikalga's crying and screaming, and Kilua literally being lit up with the Goan Freak's golden light, you know, Goan You Are Like Light.

You would think that this had all the subtlety of a hammer blow.

And on some level it does.

But there is some really delicate writing going on with Killua here,

where

it would be very easy to write this archetype of Killua sort of going, like,

oh, brother, this means nothing to me.

Look, you know, just come on or whatever.

But instead, they balance that, which is sort of what he does say, with like, Killua genuinely cares about Ikago.

And he even makes clear in his dialogue, like, we are friends.

You mean a lot to me.

You know?

Yeah.

Stop complaining.

This is, this is big for him.

Yeah, yeah, I really, I love this.

I love this scene so much.

He then says, and this is amazing.

I love this because it's saying something

crazy about the world, or at least what Kilo thinks about the world.

He says, one more thing, because

this is what he says, because

Ikago says, I'm so happy I could die, is what he says.

This is what Kilo says, give me a break.

He does say, give me a break.

He says, there's one more thing.

The world you're stepping into is far more brutal than the world of the Chimera Ants.

Yeah.

What?

They may seem similar, but there's a huge difference between risking your life and throwing it away.

People staring death in the face every day don't want to hear that someone's ready to die.

Yeah?

It is crazy to hear Kilua say like, like, chimera ant, chmera ant, hunter shit.

That's crazy.

That's way harder.

It's like, because there's emotional stakes now.

yeah is how i read that right where it's like we're fighting for something you care about you're fighting for people you care about as opposed to just doing something you've been programmed to do

yeah that's that's how i read it too so it makes it a lot yeah it makes it like that much there's that much more risk involved because you'll have you could have to deal with losing someone close to you yeah and this is where uh kiloa gets given gon's glowing light yeah which By the way, I was checking this chapter in the manga for a minute.

One, because I wanted to see if the Kilua stuff is as weird in the manga.

It's still there, but it is mostly just like, oh, he's healed so quick is the point of it.

But this shot isn't in the manga.

Really?

Huh?

There's like

a little essential to this scene.

Yeah, there's like, they have a really good panel of Ikago following after.

Kilua, but as far as I can tell, there's not the like close-up of Kilua with the light behind him or anything like that.

Damn.

Yeah, this is the sort of thing that you get to do, I guess, when you make decisions early on about how you're going to slightly reframe the thing to be like more focused around like the Kilua-Gone relationship and how it revolves and evolves.

Yeah.

I think that

this is such a lovely little scene, right?

Because not only do we have

the kind of like

the golden light of Gone

being applied to another character, character, you know, another character feels the same love for someone that Kilua feels for Gone or a similar kind or whatever.

But we also have Killua welcoming another traumatized child of violence out of a life of child violence and into a different kind of child violence.

You know, this is chosen violence.

This is Kilua welcoming Ikalgo in the same way that Goan welcomed him.

Or, you know, welcomed quote.

No, I fully agree.

I really

think it resonates a lot, honestly,

to have gone, Kilua.

I almost did it.

See?

To have Killua in the gone position

in a relationship is like.

You wouldn't be able to picture it before this arc, I don't think.

No.

And

you only get here after coming this far with Killua as a character, right?

Killua has to go through a bunch of kind of like incarnations to get to this point.

Yeah.

I mean, you have to, I think for this, specifically, like this difference of like, there's a difference between risking your life and throwing it away, like you have to see Killua spend multiple seasons, be willing to throw his life away for Goan

before like coming around and realizing, oh no, that's not what Goan wants or needs for me.

Yeah.

I don't know if we have much more to say about this.

There was one line from Killua that I thought was insane.

Hit it.

He's talking about people who can, like, hand, like, people, it's right after

the thing Keith said about like you're entering a world more brutal.

He says, only those who can take perfect care of their body and then drink poison that's barely under the lethal dose at any time without hesitation can survive.

I'm like, Kiloa, I think you are just thinking of your childhood.

He does have a bizarre set of criteria.

It's bro wild.

You gotta be on your grind if you want him to pay with you, bro.

I don't think that Goad would have the exact same list of things.

Top two, stay in shape, drink poison.

I mean, to be fair, you could say that the struggles he has with his relationship with Gone at times are like drinking just a little bit of poison.

They are like drinking just a little bit of poison.

After Killiwa's big speech here, Ikalgo says, Killua or thinks, how do you always say the words I want to hear?

And then he says, just such a beautiful line to end this episode on.

You know, deep in the horror of what the fuck is the king going to do, we're briefly playing like

a softly romantic drama between a squid and a child assassin.

Yeah.

And he says, thanks for the warning, but all I see is paradise.

And that's how the episode ends.

It's so fun.

Yeah.

It's great.

Love at first sight.

I love these two.

I love Ikalgo so much.

He is such a delight.

I'm so happy that he's here.

And you know what?

I'll say it.

There's some, not even my favorite Okago stuff has happened yet.

Yeah.

That's great.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He has such, I love his stupid look.

He had just

so well to losing most of his limbs.

Yes, he really did lose it.

These are feet now.

Yeah.

I'm just

so funny.

Walk around.

And he's like, yeah, and also I'm half the height that I used to be.

And I'm in love.

Yeah.

He's put little shoes on him.

Go ahead.

Now, what is interesting here is that in real life, an octopus can regrow its arm.

Hmm.

Oh, yeah, that's totally true.

Yeah.

Huh.

Well, he's an ant.

And he's a cat.

I don't think Ikalgo is going to make it out of this arc.

I do not think that this beautiful squid is long for this world.

Because there's a lot of Hunter Hunter after the anime, and I would love to see the continued adventures of Captain Ikalgo.

God, it'd be great if if Ikalgo was the new main character.

That'd be so funny.

It would be so good.

We're now onto 108.

Yes,

what do you think the king is doing?

Correct.

We were talking about stuff that was softly romantic.

Now let's get into stuff that is just kind of feels out and outly so.

This is so weird.

All right.

The king is close to winning for the first time.

And Komagi, who already looks sickly most of the time, Komegi usually looks like she is experiencing a head cold.

Um, she looks fucking desiccated at this point.

She is like her lips are dry and cracked, she is exhausted.

Um,

I think Poof says her mind and body are at their limit as the king is getting pretty close to winning for the first time.

But rather than coming into this scene on or in the perspective of the king or Komagi, actually, we're very rarely afforded Kamagi's perspective.

We're usually the king in those scenes.

Um, we are in this scene with Shayapoof, who

is really.

Shia Poof has been working really hard to maintain his composure during very difficult times over the last year.

How's he doing this episode?

And what is the difficult time?

Tell me about what the difficult time is.

The difficult time for Shayapoof is I am the main valet for a man that I idolize who has a key role and instead he's just playing board games with a child and I consider this to be an existential failing.

Now, most of the time, he's sort of like, hmm, yes, sir.

However, during these two episodes, he loses his goddamn mind

screaming and wailing.

It is the most dramatic anyone's ever been.

It's wonderful.

Watching Shyapa.

He has just been sitting, reading.

It is such a good punchline to the like character is desperately like bottling up all their anxiety and then it just comes rushing out.

They're playing Gungi.

She is not looking good.

No, more so than usual.

More so than usual.

She's tired.

Her lips are cracked.

They've been,

the implication I think is they've been playing for like probably more than three days straight, maybe like four or five days

over and over and over again.

To me,

that sounds maddening.

They're both having a blast.

Yeah.

This is where.

Did someone already say this is where Poof says her mind and body right through limit.

It will only be another match to do before the king wins.

But he sends her to bed.

He sends her to go get some rashes.

Oh, yeah, it's important to

like a stake that we should understand really quickly here is that Poof has sort of decided.

He's decided this like off-screen, but he's like, all right, eventually the king is going to beat her.

Then he's going to kill her.

Then we can get back to the business of being Chimera ants.

Taking over the world right yeah i think he explicitly says like taking over the world yes he does during all of these meltdowns and like during the gungi scenes going forward this is the position poof has settled on the king needs to beat komagi once and then kill her yeah

um

instead he uh

He considers Komagi a liability because he is starting to notice more and more the ways that she is causing the king to act out of character.

And by out of character, I mean I don't mean that the king is becoming quote-unquote good.

I mean that the king is not a single-minded, violent force of superiority.

No, he

is the one who says, take a break.

Yeah.

I would take no joy in defeating you while you're in this weakened state.

Go recover your strength.

Yeah.

And then

Poof is like, even while his arm was being treated, the king never stopped playing.

But now he changes his mind.

This woman is a liability.

If this continues, she will certainly cause problems.

He goes to like grab her.

He's like, I should kill her now and just finish this.

But drops his, drops the book instead.

Drops the book.

I have a button to press.

This is

his internal monologue when he's right on the brink of killing Komagi for the crime of

making the king slightly out of character.

Making him feel.

I mustn't be hasty.

The king went back on his word so that he could remain true to his creed.

So he could defeat the Gungi champion at her peak, so he could demonstrate his prowess.

If I kill her now, as I long to, the king would only know defeat in Gungi.

He would never taste sweet victory.

Her death would only cement her status as someone whom the king was never able to best.

I'm such a fool.

I almost let a thoughtless impulse leave a hideous, irreparable scar on the king.

What was I thinking?

He picks up the violin.

This is now diegetic.

Still crying too while doing this.

Yeah, tears streaming down his face.

He's like dancing around

life

once i ensure that the king will rule the world

now the brain from being the brain

yeah i'm

i did not know when that clip was gonna happen

is what like when yuffie walks in at the end and like looks at and is like what the fuck

right after this clip ends up

i'm so sorry for talking over him being like

i gotta kill myself right after we complete our our mission.

He's going to kill himself for his crime.

He keeps jumping to that, I got to say.

Yep.

Yep.

Well, yeah, that's...

He's like every narcissistic parent that I've ever had to talk to people about.

Yes, absolutely.

He is.

Oh, well, I made a mistake.

I guess I should kill myself.

But I think he means it.

He does.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do the narcissistic parents mean it?

Maybe the narcissistic parents mean it.

Sometimes.

Yeah.

Sometimes.

The bit that really gets me is when he

his devotion to the king, his love for the king, causes him to start rationalizing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that like chain of like desperate rationalization of like, well, no, no, sure, no, surely the king didn't do this for this reason or whatever.

Right.

It's just fantastic.

The plan.

I'm not the only person who's rationalizing in these episodes, too, for sure.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

I was also saying that during this entire meltdown, he is beautifully Bishonen.

He is crying his gorgeous, sparkly tears.

He's a thousand feet tall.

He is such a clamp character.

Good lord, it is

insane.

This is wonderful.

This is...

The Royal Guards, as a piece of character design, are great.

I think we've talked about this in the past.

There's a bit later

where we'll talk about it later, but like Poof tries to delegate and realizes that he is the only one of the royal guards who is

sensible.

You know that he was going to, even if they were more chill, though, he would have decided that he was the only one for the job.

He evidently come up with a plan that lets me stick by the king.

Yeah.

Yes.

Purely by chance.

He is the person who understands what Chimera Ann's are supposed to do, and everyone else has gone off-pieced in a major way.

Well,

I would love to speak more on that.

Maybe later in the the these episodes i'll say specific thing that i meant to say here the plan begins yeah seven people will infiltrate the mansion gone freaks kill your zaldic shoot mcman knucklebine the squid ikalgo yes

morrel

and maliron nov is not going to enter because he is done The chairman will try and enter after them.

Their plan, as usual, is to lure the royal guards away.

And we get to briefly see some chibi royal guards getting getting lured away.

Well, they're guarding the

chibi king in the middle.

And at this point, Gohan's musician, by the way.

At this point, Gohan is really worried about Palm.

And the crew sort of pretty quickly says, well, look, since we haven't heard from Palm, she's either dead or she's in hiding.

And the concern is that she's been captured and tortured.

Goan shares the same concern as me.

And Kiliwa says, look, that really is something to be worried about.

But rather than speculating on a worst-case scenario, we should just trust Palm.

One episode from now, Killiwa will spend 20 minutes speculating on worst case scenarios.

Yes.

But I think that they do a good job of being specific about what Kilua wants to avoid here, which is that if they worry too much about Palm and they try to check in on her and they can't get it, or they learn worse, they learn that she's in danger.

Goan will insist that they all abandon the plan and try to save Palm immediately with no plan, and then all die.

Yes, and we get a very funny image that this is true, yeah.

With the pigs, yeah, with the flying pigs behind him, yeah, yeah, he has like a sad cartoon face, and then there's like a bunch of cartoon pigs flying behind him.

I do really like this bit, though, because it's like classic gone to still like there's been a lot of revenge-focused gone in the past, like few episodes of this show, of like of our recording sessions, I mean.

And this is hit back to being the boy who wants to make sure his friends are safe.

But it's also, it's...

We've seen this version of Kiloa before,

but I just think it's so funny that it's like...

Gone will want to save Palm right away, and no one will be able to stop him from making us do that.

So we can't even start down the road.

Yeah.

He's preempting him.

Yeah.

The other detail here that I love that is absolutely

the married couple who know each other's quirks through and through is Killiwa says

he will suggest that we rescue her, but he won't offer a plan.

We're going to have to be the ones who come up with the plan.

And he's doing that multiple times.

We've seen him do that multiple times.

When they were trying to get Greed Island, remember?

It's like, oh, well, it's more like I've got like 70% of a plan.

That means you've got 50% of a plan.

Yeah.

Yes.

I forgot about that.

He ended up having a plan that time, though, right?

Eventually, Kiluwa was like, oh, that actually is a good plan.

Yeah.

Yeah, Goan occasionally has a plan.

It sort of does seem to happen stochastically and by accident.

Yeah.

To his credit, Maliran, who has just joined the crew now as like one of those Chimera ants that is, yep, they're a pal now.

Yep.

Says, I think what Goan is saying, I love that he like tries to interpret Goan's thoughts.

He is new to this business.

I think what Gohan is saying is that we could change the plan.

If we are so worried about Palm being compromised, if Palm gets compromised, the whole plan goes to shit.

Why don't we change the plan?

And they essentially say, no,

we are going to stick to this.

We can map out some alternatives.

And they talk about those a bit, but this is just the show underscoring again and again that one of the biggest stakes in play here

is that the strike team has a very particular plan.

and if any

like facet of that plan is different,

all the dominoes are gonna fall.

I call them dominoes, Sylvia.

Oh, and the marbles are happy.

The marbles will start to roll.

The googie pieces will stack.

The goongie pieces will stack.

Or it'll be like the bit in mousetrap where the rib goblo machine will come down on the empty, you know, whatever instead of on the mouse.

Let's see.

Poof shows up.

Poof is so desperate to try and get the king back on track.

It is so sweet.

He shows up and he's like, I have

easier.

It's not sweet.

It's evil.

He's evil.

He is evil.

He's sweetly trying to get the king to be more evil.

He is sweetly trying to get the king to be more evil.

The thing that I find sweet is how

desperate and how

facile these attempts are.

It is so obvious what he is trying to do, and he can barely restrain himself from giving the game away.

Well, the first thing that happens is that the king is now like openly learning from Komu, asking for advice.

How do you do this?

What's the best way to do this?

And Poof shows up.

It is like, sire, and the king is like, what do you want?

Go away, mom.

I'm playing games with my friends.

This is why I think it's sweet.

And Poof says, sire, I have news for your ears only.

And the king basically says, No,

I'm playing Goongie.

Yes.

Anything you need to say to me, you can say in front of Kamugi.

Whose name I don't know right now.

No, I don't know yet.

In front of the Goongie genius.

In front of my GF, my Goongie friend.

If you make her leave the room, I'll literally kill you.

Yeah.

And maybe rip one of my limbs off in the process.

Goongie friend.

Yeah.

He says, I think we should discuss the post-sorting schedule, which is a really funny way to refer to complete conquering of the world.

He thinks we should depart sooner,

presumably to take over the world.

We, the viewer, and the king and the hunters have really neglected to think about post-sorting.

They are putting all their eggs in one basket.

The hunters' eggs are in the basket of kill the king.

The king's eggs are are in the basket of Gungi.

And Pooh is the only one here saying, listen, we've got business to attend to.

Sorting is not the be-all and end-all of this.

Definitely not Goongie.

And the King says, I really like the King's response here.

The King's response isn't, no, I want to stay and play Goongie.

He says, don't bother me with this.

These are petty decisions.

Yeah.

For you.

It does not matter to me.

It's great.

Yeah, my job is to do whatever I want.

Your job is to make being the king real for me.

Yes.

And so Poof goes out and he calls a, he says, all right, emergency meeting, bring me the tall one and the maniac.

We need to sort this out.

Every crew got the.

He's so depressed about this.

And

is this where

Yupi's like, didn't you fucking say that he was like about to beat her?

And then

Poof is like,

she's getting better too yeah yeah it's just a conversation between him and yupie on

the dies

pito gets there like right after this but yeah okay as the king improves you know he's likely at this point far and away the second best goongie player in the world um

uh but that means that komiki is like

being challenged for the first time in maybe years

and she is also improving and so poof is like very worried about this uh and this is when pito oh peter doesn't show peto does show up later pito's scene is somewhere else.

She's figured out Moral's whole deal.

I was, I did not see this coming.

I had, it's so obvious in retrospect, like so much of Tagashi's plotting, but like, I had not thought Komagi was going to improve.

Right.

Because of the way she's introduced, right?

She's like, she is the Gungi champion.

And champions are there to sharpen the

protagonist.

You know, Master Roshi is, you know, Master Roshi does improve.

And as I understand this in a lot of Dragon Ball is Master Roshi going, wow, there are new depths to power that I didn't understand or whatever.

But he is there to sharpen Goku.

And so I was like, well, Kamugi is here to sharpen the king.

So it's great.

Of course she's improving.

Of course she's improving.

Anyone can be a protagonist.

That is the message of Hunter Hunter.

Did we move past, this might be my notes being out of order, the fact that he is asking Kamugi questions about Gungi.

We did talk about that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We talked about that briefly.

Okay, cool.

Because I like he, him internalizing, one, asking for someone else's opinion and internalizing it is fucking huge to me.

They really need, they need to sell.

If Poof is going to be a fucking maniac breaking down over here, they do need to sell that something is happening with the king.

And they have so,

like, I love all of this stuff.

The king is one of my favorite characters in this show, right there with Komugi.

Like, I live for all this stuff.

Yes.

They're amazing.

They're still putting

the same sort of like bizarre internal questions that he, you know, said to himself while he was sitting on his throne and stewing, he's now saying outright to Komugi.

He is also saying them kind of like mangledly.

There's a moment where Komugi beats him and he starts asking her questions about it.

And she says, you know, you needed to

play more aggressively in this way.

You know, you needed to make a move.

You needed to push forward.

That's the only way you could get me to.

Sometimes you must accept the risk and move forward.

Otherwise, you won't be able to make me hesitate.

It's such a great line.

But then that comes after a different piece of advice where she was like, yeah, I had to, I like drew you in to a trap.

And he was like, oh, I've never thought about not attacking.

Yeah, passivity isn't in his nature or something along those lines.

Sorry, well, he says.

Yeah, the king hits the passivity is foreign to me line after Komegi talks about how he needs to actually push forward.

And I really love the read of that.

It's as though he's responding backwards or he's like responding to b instead of a and i wonder if um

the the passivity is passivity is what does he say novel to me uh he's foreign to me i don't have the exact quote on that one being passive is foreign to me um and i wonder if what he's saying you know i don't know if this is accurate is he was actually staying in that position of passivity because he was relishing it you know he he wanted to sit on the gungie board in that position of like well let me let me see how being passive feels which we know is sort of what the king is doing is like feeling out different emotions through Gungi.

Yeah.

Well, later in that session, he talks about how, like, she's, you know, beating him over and over again, and how she's like

changing her play style is changing and improving.

And he's like, but I don't hate it.

Or it's not suffocating.

In fact, I find it enjoyable.

It only goes to show she's still far above me in skill.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He also says something about like, I find it enjoyable because she's guiding me into that style of play.

Yes.

Yeah.

How much stronger will she get?

Is what he says there.

It's so cool.

All of this would be

interesting, but kind of thin if it were not surrounded by the Royal Guards consistently melting down.

Well, one-third of the Royal Guards consistently melting down.

Yeah.

The threat of the sorting, and the like large-scale

heist special operatives mission that the hunters are also running.

I mean,

you know, I don't want to.

I want to be careful that we're not overselling or underselling the Goongi match, like, on its own.

Because, you know,

it's an interesting two-hander watching Komagi and the King.

But we don't spend a lot of time, like, hearing them talk.

They're often talking about Goongi language that we, the viewer, don't really understand.

I think part of what makes the King and Komagi work so well is the way it is situated within.

the the the like the mass of everything else going alongside it and taking your single most powerful character in the show and essentially like willingly locking him in a board game with a child who is who is herself getting better and better and better is so cool

yeah

yeah i i i think that the stuff with uh those two is so good i'm having a blast watching it

uh

her uh oh uh we briefly get a little bit of killua being like this is where He's setting up the following episode where he's like something feels off.

You know, I i think someone says like the king will definitely be in the third floor uh throne room watching the sorting and then kilo is like will he be he says um maybe the king won't be where they expect him to be watching the uh the sorting from his throne room and uh uh this is like a very quick scene and they cut right back to uh the king playing with uh Komegi and her

nen is fully awake she gets like covered in nen aura she's like something is happening to me.

This the illustration on this aura is this is one of the coolest auras we've seen so far in a show of my favorite auras the drop coming off of her finger onto the what it looks like sylvie yeah it's so it it looks like like bubbles basically like like it has that prismatic quality that like bubble like soap used for blowing bubbles has where there's like a little bit of a rainbow sheen to it it's got this sort of soft edge around her she's got a very a very um booba nen uh as opposed to the kiki of pito's.

Yeah.

Like, there's like little bubbles coming off of her, too, that are just sort of like floating in the air, and that, like, when she presses a piece down, you can see a trail of them left by her index finger.

Um, it's beautiful.

And it does seem like, in classic Komagi style, she has developed Gungi Nen.

Yes,

nen designed for the playing

Gengi.

She says wonderful moves.

We had an end preg a couple episodes ago.

We can lay off.

We got a home run.

We don't need to force any.

She says wonderful moves keep flooding into my head.

We get shots of the moon against this as well.

Hunter Hunter will deploy shots of the moon.

I think this might be a Shonen thing.

This is the moon's arc.

The Chimera.

We have drastically increased our moon shot per episode.

Yes, we got some good moon stuff actually in the canyon as Uvo fought the Mafiosos.

Oh, true.

That was the other moon time.

Yeah.

The king notices she's about to get stronger, and for the first time ever, Komagi asks to take a small break.

Is this break to go and rest to deal with the fact that her nen has awakened?

No, she has just got a lot of good ideas for how to play Gunki and wants to go and write them all down.

Yeah, we also get the reveal that every time she places a piece, she memorizes the placement and context of the placement.

To me, this reads is implying that her nen's been dormant, not dormant, but like active for a while, but this is the first time she could feel it, you know?

Yeah, yeah, totally.

So I love this.

This is

not extremely subtle.

Her nen awakens.

The king is like, oh my god, she's like going to get better and better at Gungi.

And then he goes, oh, hey,

what's your name?

While she's walking away from him, because he's already given her the break that she asked for.

Right.

And it is not lost on me that

he only decides to ask her her name after she's actively awoken to Nen.

For sure.

In terms of who the king thinks is a person.

Correct.

And who even Hunter Hunter as a show thinks is a person.

Yeah, yeah.

Remember back a few episodes ago where I was likening um

uh hunters to uh like nobles in crusader kings where i was like you become real in a way uh that you are not beforehand uh when when you have nano or when you are a hunter um

she introduces herself as komagi um

and she asks the king's name And here is another great moment of realizing something about how the show has been set up.

We've talked about this in the past of like Takashi will do these really

gentle pieces of like capital P plotting that you don't quite realize how significant they are until later.

The king has never learned his own name.

We know the king's name.

Had you forgotten, Jack?

I had completely forgotten that

changes when she says, Oh, by the way, would it um be okay if I even asked your name, sir?

He does call her Komugi-kun, by the way, which could mean nothing.

Um, what uh, what's the use of the kung?

It's more friendly than other honorifics, is my understanding.

It's not like as romantic as like some other ones, but yeah.

The way the king talks to Kermagi in these episodes is amazing.

Yeah, in terms of like a character voice developing.

Yes,

he gets crazy and tense and there's like a canted angle on the camera and

shaking when she asks his name.

And if you hadn't realized, because you learned Meriwem's name forever ago, you know, viewer of Hunter Hunter or listener of Media Club Plus, if you had forgotten that Merwem wasn't there and none of the royal guards were there when his name was revealed, you might think, oh, he's pissed or something bad is going to happen because she asked his name.

Like, oh, he's like getting, you know, he's upset at her something, or I don't know why this is happening.

He goes, what the fuck is my name?

It is like a pit opens up inside of him.

The king is all about like, first, I know everything, and what I don't know doesn't matter.

Then the king is like, I know everything, but I could stand to be better at Gunki.

Yeah.

Natural progression.

Then the king is like, oh, shit.

This is inarguably a critical part of myself that I have no access to.

It is like he looked for his soul and found nothing.

He has no identity outside of being the king, and surely his conversation with the royal guards will help with this, right?

Summon the three.

Uh, they they all they like leap down and they bow.

It's great seeing the royal guards bowing in front of the king because you can kind of just feel in that moment that Poof is like, ah, perfect.

God's got in his heaven, all's right with the world.

This is how it's supposed to be.

I saw a Hulu show, um, uh, a comedian that I really liked.

Lisa Gilroy was in it, so I watched it called Interior Chinatown, which is based on a book that I had not heard about.

Um, it's really good, I liked it.

Um, uh,

and it is like...

I would say if you have a low tolerance for like meta stuff, it is super meta.

And that stuff doesn't always land.

But one of the big things that it's doing is the book was written as a screenplay.

And

they do a lot of...

playing around with characters who get names and characters who are described as their job like in the credits to a movie where someone might be like dan or dan smith or the pizza guy pizza guy too you know what i mean yeah and so characters giving each other their names or like opting to learn someone else's name is like a really kind of structural part to um uh

i was watching it i was thinking of like a castlevania uh or like a metroidvania game where like like like information and access to future plot is like literally locked behind you know, the choice to humanize a character by learning their name.

It was really interesting.

I like the show a lot.

Yeah.

But

this sort of, this is what I was thinking of when I was re-watching this.

It was like the

this like, oh, I've been like humanizing myself playing Gungi, and I've hit this wall called, I don't fucking know my name.

I'm nobody.

I'm the king.

I have a, I'm the, in the credits to my movie, I am an unnamed character.

It's wonderful.

It's so good.

And, sorry, go ahead, Jack.

I'd forgotten.

I hadn't put together.

It's so good.

When you forget, it works so good if you forgot that he didn't know.

Yeah, because I'm like, well, that's Meriam.

Of course it is.

Yeah, that's my friend Meriowam.

This is also, I feel like this is the really, this is the punchline to, in the same way that, you know, early in this project, I kept being like, Hunter Hunter is about games.

And you were like, buddy, you have no idea.

This is the punchline to the show subtitles naming characters for me.

Yes.

Not in the sense that I had something spoiled or that, like, structurally it worked differently, but the fact that all along the creators were playing a game of like, who knows names and when.

Yeah.

Um, is

really great.

Uh, this is a problem for the Royal Guards.

Well, no, not true.

This is a problem for Shypoof.

Right.

Yes.

Uh,

they don't know his name name either.

Well, not just they don't know.

Well, so there are three.

It's worse than that to me.

He says,

all right.

Poof.

What's my name?

And Shire Poof says, with all due respect,

rough.

You are the king.

You have no other name.

You are the one and only king.

He emphasizes that there are others out in the world who call themselves king, but they are imposters.

And then he says, your duty is to remove them, you know, is to essentially like become the ultimate king.

Become the king of kings.

And the king's response to this is great.

This is clearly someone who has been trained by a child to think about board games very cleverly.

He says, hang on, that means that the king is just a title.

You know, a title can be bestowed, and something that a title is not a name.

Alright, this failed Chair Poof.

This is a beautiful clash of beliefs because Poof doesn't believe, I think, that the king is just a title.

Like, I think that Poof is like, no, no, the king is

the king is born.

That you are the king is a fact.

It cannot be bestowed.

Do you think part of this is because he's been playing a board game where the king is a piece?

I was thinking this absolutely.

Do you think that is one of the reasons why he was like, oh, shit, wait a minute.

But it's the most important piece?

Yeah, I know.

I really do think you're right.

Like, he and Komagi are like the archer, the

elephant, the cannoneer, or whatever.

And then he goes outside and he calls them by name.

He says, Yupi, poof,

Peter.

It's like he's just had to realize that that was their name.

He did, like, he wouldn't even consider that those were their names, it was just the thing that he calls them.

All right, uh, Shy Poof has failed.

I'm gonna ask the same question to Yupi.

Yupi says, Pass.

Bruh, I'm too dumb to answer this.

He has the, I'm gonna call this the Socrates defense.

He's like,

I'm not going to pretend to know this.

I'm not the guy.

I'm not that guy.

I'm not the guy to answer this one.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Professor, but I did not do the reading.

Time to bring in the cat.

The cat has the most in-character answer.

These three royal guards are plagued type beautifully every time they appear.

Pito's answer is, well, okay,

maybe

you could select your own name.

This is very exciting because we've talked in the past about how

when ants get to choose their own names versus when ants get to be bestowed a name versus when ants get to be bestowed a name by the queen.

You know, I'm very excited about the possibility of the king getting to choose his name and you know, whether or not that is different from Merrywan.

We're going to spend the rest of the season calling him Paul.

And Poof says, Hmm, good idea.

Name himself Googie.

After my favorite thing.

Poof says, good idea.

You should name.

Yep.

Name yourself after the sorting.

Yeah.

He's the God.

The helicopter parent, controlling parent thing is all I can think of now.

And he really is like...

Go ahead, Dre.

Well, it's just that it is the cognitive dissonance of you are the most powerful and beautiful person I have ever seen, but I also refuse to think of you as a person with agency.

Yeah, right.

This is the thing I was going to say earlier is that to Poof,

the king is

like

it is not like it is a stone pillar.

It is a space for Meraram to occupy.

And

when the king is deviating from the you know the pillar, he's freaking out because he's like, no, no, no, no, no, the king has to be the king.

Well, and if the king stops being the king exactly the way that Poof thinks he should, right, then also poof loses all purpose.

What are royal guards without a king, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, which is, you know,

stupid.

We get more fucking stupid, yeah.

Listen, hey, fuck this butterfly.

Yeah, you're ready to be a therapist.

I'm listening to someone for 15 minutes and going, hmm, that's fucking stupid.

Interesting.

Now you just get to learn a bunch of different ways to say that's that's fucking stupid, but in fancier language.

I see.

Okay, so what happens next here?

Because I have more people freaking out, don't we?

We do.

There's a little, there's a lead into that, though, that I think is it?

Yeah.

Is it the fact I have written down he bothered to learn her name?

Yes, he bothered to learn her name.

I have another button.

I'm sorry for this one.

Tell me if this is too much to play afterwards.

We can all cut it down.

We can yap over it, too, if we need to.

It's so

I can't help it.

It's just so good.

Peto.

Yes.

If Komogi were to endure this sorting, the same kind as what will occur tomorrow, what would happen to her?

She would die, sire.

The selection

to find humans possessing the physical and mental strengths of the necessary.

This stuff from poof that we're gonna hear, it's all in his head.

That's eternal moment, obviously.

That's important to mention.

Sire, please.

After meeting Komogi, I've learned strength can manifest in different ways.

For example, during our trip here...

Please, sire, you must stop this.

I ended a child's life.

Sire,

you mustn't say it.

It's possible that the child...

Please, this isn't becoming of you.

Possessed the raw potential to surpass me in a particular field.

The king must be absolute.

Yet I extinguished it.

Do not repent your actions!

I have no real reason, not a single one.

That's enough, sire.

You mustn't say anymore.

I am

king.

His nen, you know, rippling up around him.

Yeah, in terrifying fashion, honestly.

I took a life for no reason at all.

So that must mean that I have tremendous power.

The end to this, he says,

he says, violence is power, and violence is the ultimate strength in the entire world.

The strongest power in this world is what mine said.

And I'm like, yeah, okay, man.

Whatever you say.

The king is on some judge holding shit at this point.

He says...

But surely this will not crack.

It's wild.

Like, you know, we've talked about the king having an identity crisis, and perhaps you, the listener, were thinking, all right, so the king is kind of going to learn from Komagi that person,

personhood, like innate personhood, is a thing, and that's going to cause him to have, you know, complex and difficult feelings.

That's true, but the complex and difficult feelings immediately take a dog leg and go back in the other direction, which is the king goes, listen, if...

It turns out that people have an innate personhood, and it might be that power and strength can be...

Later on, he says, um

after meeting komigi i've learned that strength can manifest in different ways right uh you know he learns that and then he says but hang on i can just end them i can just i can there can be that power and there can be that capability and that potential in a person and i have the ultimate power to decide whether or not that remains it's a really brilliant yeah it's a great sequence it is genuinely intimidating but it is also funny that he's like i killed a kid and I'm strong as hell for it.

Yeah, it's because I can kill a kid that I'm so strong.

Yeah.

And then Poof, yeah, Poof freaks out more.

He's like, I'm not worthy of being a royal guard.

I jumped to the wrong conclusion.

He has a second meltdown.

It's exactly the same meltdown as the first.

I foolishly believe that his highness regretted his actions and something that, that's something no ruler should ever do.

He's constantly screaming and crying and pissing.

Like, it's so funny.

Oh, by the way, if you're not watching this, he is constantly pissing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, sorry.

It's kind of weird.

He pisses from his eyes.

He just pee pisses from his eyes.

And so the king psyches himself up to go kill Komugi.

This is

clearly.

He's doing it the entire time he's walking there.

He's like, I'm going to fucking kill her.

This is not.

I'm not being emotional.

I'm being logical.

This is just what kings do.

I'm not being weird.

This is normal.

Oh, fuck a bird.

Before that, he has like a pretty relatable thought, first of all, where he's like, Komagi is so so immensely strong, but she's only strong at Gungi.

Yeah, it's just a board game.

All the power in the world means nothing in the face of my power.

Me every time I get beat by a 12-year-old in Fortnite.

It's just Fortnite.

Kamugi should do the gritty.

Right.

In real life, I could kill that kid.

He says, I've had my son.

She's worthless to me.

Let's kill her right now.

Oh, wait.

Just before he leaves.

After Poof melts down, the three royal guards kind of look at each other and they go, he has changed since that kid showed up.

Which is great.

Then he goes off to kill her.

Then he says, fuck, a bird.

He opens the door.

Komagi is being attacked by an eagle.

This is the same eagle.

No, it's probably not the same eagle.

Eagles often look the same.

This is...

Wait,

oh, the eagle from

the mountain.

Right.

We saw it earlier.

He looked at it.

Yeah, he does look at it.

Yeah, yeah.

And I almost...

This didn't occur to me until actually just listening to the audio, but it's like right after he says, like, I'm the king, it starts powering up.

You also hear the eagle like freak out and fly away.

Oh, my God.

So I'm also wondering if it's like,

was his like display of like violence and power and scaring the eagle actually like caused this?

He caused it to fly into the room in fear?

Yeah, because it's like freaking out and like trying to find shelter.

And I don't know.

That makes a lot of sense.

I think that makes a lot of sense.

It does vaporize it when it sees it attacking the room.

eagles don't normally fly into open windows and start attacking children that's not typical yeah well it is a hunter hunter eagle but yeah

um he kills the eagle and then he says it's so sweet he says look here there's blood all over you when i was talking earlier about the way the king speaks to komagi he goes from

I've had my fun.

She's worthless to me.

Let's kill her right now.

To look here, there's blood all over you.

You know, and are you hurt?

He loves her.

I, like, I'm just saying it out loud.

He loves her, like, so much.

What is this creature?

And me, what do I want to do with her?

Probably kiss, would be my guess.

Marilyn.

The internal and external,

like,

the internal monologue

and dialogue with Komengi sort of clashing is, like...

It's so good.

I love it.

What the fuck is happening?

I literally cannot stop myself from having this sort of reflexive, protective protective thing that's going on.

Yeah, but violence is definitely the most powerful thing, strongest powered in the world.

It makes his

whole display from a second ago seem like such a fucking joke, like such intense

projection or projection.

Cope, it's cope.

You guys know the Key and Peel

skit where it's like two guys talking about their wives, and they always look up the staircase before going.

And I said, Bitch,

I do that.

That's him with the kill with the guard.

He's in boys chat with the royal guard, and then when he's back with Komugi, he's like, Oh no, I'd do anything for her.

There's a psychological name for this thing that's happening.

I can't remember the name

of like when you're

trying to quit doing something, like smoking or whatever, and right before it goes away, you do a bunch of it.

Drain what I'm talking about.

about

extinction burst.

Oh, an extinction burst.

It does sound like an an ability.

Yeah, it's like, you know, you're trying to, you're trying to quit a behavior, and so you're like training yourself not to do it.

You're trying to like power through changing yourself or whatever.

And right before you stop doing it forever, you have like a break where you

indulge.

Yeah, this is like, this is this is like such an extinction burst moment for the king where he's like, I'm actually fucking evil and I'll kill a little girl and I actually like doing that.

And then let me look down at the next three lines of dialogue.

Why is there blood all over you?

I'm so startled by her fragility.

And then there's this, firstly, I love the startled by fragility line because most of what he's seen her do is play Goongie.

Right.

So, you know, he hasn't really seen Kumagi in any other context of like, she is a child who can get attacked by an eagle.

She is blind.

You know, when she's at the Goongie board, she is impossibly powerful.

And here she is in this room, you know, getting attacked by an eagle.

And then he asks her why she didn't call for help.

She gives the most komagi answer of all time.

It's true.

She didn't want to bother people.

And then the king says, the coolest king line we've seen so far.

He says, you wouldn't have bothered anyone at all.

You are a guest of the king.

And then in his internal monologue, he says, Why did I say that?

I don't know, man.

Why?

She starts to sob like a Charlie Patrick.

You like catty patties, don't you, Squidward?

She likes to throw her head back.

She's screaming.

She says, no one's ever been this nice to me before.

This is so wildly fucked up.

Kobagi deep in the palace of the chimera ants.

You know,

they met surrounded by dead bodies.

She didn't know.

She didn't know.

literally a monster.

She also didn't know that he's a monster.

Still doesn't.

Still doesn't.

Still doesn't.

Still doesn't.

The king says, What is this creature?

What do I want to do with her?

And the episode ends.

Puberty.

Well, yeah.

It's great.

This shot is fantastic.

It's so, it's, oh, I'm so happy we're here now.

God.

Jack, I missed these episodes.

A couple, I believe it was in episode 32.

We're in episode 34 now.

You said, like,

I hope they don't do some lame thing where

the little girl mate is nice and it makes the king nice.

What do you think about that?

I think that I am feeling.

It is complicated by the fact that the king seconds before was like, I'm going to fucking kill her.

And not only that, violent superiority is the only true superiority.

Had the king over the board been saying things like,

Maybe we should stop the sorting, you know, maybe,

which we might get there, I don't know.

But, like, you know, had the king been learning facts about like the value of people as a whole, it seems like he's learning facts about the value of Komugi the Gigi player.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which, you know, and that is synecdoche for people as a whole.

You know, I know what the show is doing there.

I also think the fact that the king's

flailing discovery of his own personhood is really the name thing was a really spectacular wrinkle uh i think

the big thing is that this is super well executed

right like

yes and there there is there is this thing of like is he changing or is he just like changing about her or is he not changing is he going to is he going to ping pong back again he's clearly erratic

yeah the king is a complete mess uh gongi is i did it again.

No, that's the king's name.

You've now called both of them Goongie.

I love

the title is Googie and Goongie.

It features the characters.

LeBron James is Googie.

Komegi getting better at Goongi is really cool as well.

Yeah, it's great.

I

have

no idea where we are going.

I mean, I can...

It's like I said earlier, I can feel like dark shapes out out in the mist of the shape of the story.

Buckle up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm excited.

How far through the chimera and arc are we?

Two-thirds?

I believe that we passed the halfway point in these episodes.

How can there be more?

It goes until episode like 33 or something?

I don't know for sure when it goes until.

Okay.

i mean the post sorting is a problem also this is uh shaman pacing so we're probably going to be in the sorting for fucking 50 episodes

yeah yeah yeah uh the wiki has it categorized as going till episode 136.

oh so i was close but even underestimated it yeah yeah 136

has that little that tends to have little codas to their arcs right web connecting issue

crazy yeah

now you might think, but I mean,

the Chimera Ant arc began with Kite discovering the Chimera Ants, them getting teleported to Kite.

We have all of that forwards.

Yep.

Help.

Yep.

Next episode, 109, Taking Stock and Taking Action.

I'll tell you, there's only one of those.

Yes, they sort of take action towards the end.

That's very cool.

This episode is wonderful.

This is just a logistics episode and you are probably going to hear us in this next chunk kind of like try and feel out how to talk about it without just recapping logistics because we can do that very quickly.

This episode sings in a way that just a logistics recap shouldn't.

The stakes are so high at this point, and the positions are so clear.

What characters know, they are very confident about, and what characters don't know and we do,

we are very confident about.

It's very exciting.

And then there's stuff that we and the characters don't know.

We don't know what the exact orientation of the palace is going to be when

the balls start rolling.

The teams have now split up.

Gon and Kiliua are going to climb the awful staircase while Ikalgo goes to search for Palm.

This is very funny to me.

Killua was right.

We have started a Palm rescue mission.

We don't need to do that.

That is not part of the plan.

And yet.

Do we say specifically Ikago's plan is solely Palm focused?

Like, they got an extra guy, and they put that extra guy on Palm Duty.

Yeah.

And they were like,

if you find Palm, just get out of there.

Don't wait for anybody.

Don't try and find us.

Just go.

Oh, and then a great line where Killer is like, hey, have you all heard of, have you heard of game theory?

And Ikalo goes like, these are all such unlikely unlikely scenarios, and then Killer's like, unlikely scenarios happen all the time.

This is like,

like, so, yeah, I've remembered what family you're from, Kiloa.

Yeah, you're Zoldicking out crazy because he's like, Yeah, 50% of the time likely things happen, and then, you know, maybe a fraction of a percent of time, every other thing happens.

Uh, and it's like, okay, that's

how much he refers to his old line of work, but

won't say what it was in data analysis.

Yeah, it really does feel like he's like, oh man, I just made a new friend.

I don't need him to know that I was an assassin.

The Chimera ants don't know that the Zaldic family are celebrities.

No.

You know what?

Maybe that's why he was able to make friends with Icargo because he didn't know.

I haven't seen this.

I haven't seen him on TMZ.

I haven't seen the show Silicon Valley, but I imagine that this episode is a lot like what Silicon Valley is about if this was about an app instead of about infiltrating.

If we launch, then this will happen if they were launching an app this is what this would be silicon valley but instead they're infiltrating the palace yes um

yes he you know he highlights how when he was an assassin he could um wait for the right moment but here hesitation is going to mean death he starts planning some alternatives um one of the alternatives is that if it is possible to sense pito's aura remember the aura that uh terrified nov and terrified palm Palm?

They're just going to track it to its densest point where they will find Pito.

There's something so protagonist, anime protagonist, about Goan and Kiliwa going, well, we'll just walk towards the densest point of the awful aura.

There's been a lot of business about how Goan and Kirliwa were able to withstand Pito's aura.

They were able to withstand it, but they fucking hated it.

It terrified them.

But they don't linger on it.

They're comfortable with

being reminded of it and with the prospect of going back into it.

Yeah.

These children have very calloused souls as opposed to Nov's.

Yeah.

Nov had a pure soul that is bruised for the first time.

Yeah.

Although I am really curious to see what their reaction is going to be when they discover the aura again, you know?

Because they haven't felt it yet since Kite's death.

And I wonder what that is going to be like.

Yeah, you're right.

Someone says that they're talking about Pito's aura.

And I think it's Akillo who says the line according to cult and then he says something about the line and I wrote down I miss cult

Well Jack they can't figure out why Pito's N was switched off

you know Komegi

and what is happening to the king really is the one component they are missing unfortunately it is the thing right and and it's also the thing that's impossible for them they will have they like there is no way for them to know no unless they had a very specific Nen power.

Although, that's kind of what they're trying to do by getting Palm.

And it hasn't worked.

Totally.

There's a great line after this about this where Moral is like, look, when the end turned off, you know, I didn't question our good luck.

We just took advantage of the situation, which is totally fair.

But like,

it's nice to double back and be like, wait, why did that happen?

Yeah, and it leads to my favorite.

It's like you talked about at the beginning of this episode, Keith, there's this beautiful piece of reverse engineering here.

Yeah.

So they telephoned Colt.

Oh, my God.

They remembered how to draw him.

They remembered Colt.

They remembered how to draw him.

And they forgot how to draw someone else.

What the fuck?

You can't keep doing this to me.

Colt is.

Huh?

What's wrong?

Yeah, what did you see?

Colt is on the telephone and he says, well, Peto kind of turns their aura off when they are healing someone.

Using Dr.

Blythe.

So for Peto's aura to go off means that someone needed to be healed.

And Kilo says, cool, thanks.

Bye, cult.

And they hang up.

Also, the ant baby is there.

Visible in the back of the scene.

Playing with toys.

It's kind of a toddler now.

It's a toddler.

As I predicted, it has grown really quickly.

It has dark hair.

It is surrounded by

a beautiful mansion somewhere, presumably set up by the Hunter exam.

You can't just show me this.

Several episodes ago, Jack, you saw Komagi for the first time and said, I bet this is the ant that grows up, they grow super fast, and now she's here to do something, something.

And I said, a very weird part of that is correct.

And the part of it was that the hand baby does grow very fast and is now the size of a human toddler.

The hand baby's second appearance.

Little tail swishing around, playing with toys.

Little tail.

It's a baby ant, you know,

facing away from us.

It is, I also talked in a previous episode about how something that ants are missing is like

families in the sort of human sense of the word there are no ant children all ants are children are sort of like born as children this has uh sometimes gone well when ants are able to have a full development cycle and sometimes not gone so well when you produce maroon um but here is an ant baby you know yeah uh or a toddler uh this is

Yoshihiro Tagashi's crazy business.

He will

neglect a character and then will suddenly come rushing back to them.

I mean, you know, I don't know what's happening in the manga right now, but I know that it has become a running gag that Tagashi has been neglecting Gon and Kiliwa.

And then will occasionally just go like swinging back towards them or back to a character that he knows.

So it doesn't surprise me that he does this.

It just, it feels amazing every time it happens.

Who's that little fucker?

What are they doing?

Who can say?

Who can say?

We could, but we won't.

Then they figure out.

They're like, they figure out that the king was injured first.

They're like, Peter wouldn't use her power, wouldn't use their power on anybody else.

Yeah.

Wouldn't use it on one of the royal guards.

It's got to be the king.

Specifically, if someone needed to be healed and the thing that needed to happen was that

they stop protecting the king, that person's dead.

So it couldn't have even been one of the other royal guards.

They would just let that royal guard die rather than take the end down.

So it could only have been the king.

But then who

was the king?

It's probably got to be the king.

The king has probably injured himself.

We have seen this show's like command of information, who knows information when and how has been played over and over again, but it's rarely been done.

So

like you said, Keith, it's a bit of a stretch, but the deployment of it is so elegant of just like A follows B, the team figures it out.

Something I love is that they can't guarantee that they are right.

It's a really great feeling knowing that we know that they are right.

They're making a guess.

But we also get this really cool moment where, like, I remember how insane it was the first time I saw the king tear off his own arm because of a misunderstanding in Gungi, a game that fundamentally doesn't matter to what they're doing.

And so then, you know, nine, ten episodes later, or you know, or seven episodes later, something like that, watching them be like, holy holy fuck, the king must have hurt himself for some reason.

Like, it also, it must be insane to them to have to come to this conclusion.

Like, look, you're going to fucking think I'm insane.

But we're pretty sure that the king hurt himself so badly that Pito needed to save his life.

Something that this reminds me a lot of, we're talking a lot about in the early stages of the Chimera and Arc, we talked about like techno thrillers, and then we moved into like

fucking John Wyndham and Michael Crichton and people like that.

And then we talked about Metal Gear as it was continuing.

This reminds me of

hostage negotiation films or hostage situation films, where something that will happen a lot in hostage situation films and also in disaster films, it happens quite a lot, is you have the outside crew outside the place where an event is taking place, either a hostage situation or a

I'm thinking of like a sort of like a dog day afternoon situation, or in a disaster film, I'm thinking of the Towering Inferno which is about a skyscraper that burns down and a lot of the tension and excitement in those movies is the people on the outside trying to reverse engineer what is happening on the inside from the limited information that they have in order to like help them act and I feel like this thing of like Peter's end turned off that means that they were healing someone that means that they were healing the king that means that the king must have injured himself really does feel like a hostage situation thing you know oh i reckon some people in the lobby have escaped and that caused them to shoot so-and-so or whatever.

This show's willingness to be

a thriller.

This is a thriller.

We're watching a thriller.

Oh, yeah.

Like, it's so outside of like typical Shonen behavior that

it's hard.

It's hard to put it in the shonen box sometimes.

Other times, it's the easiest thing in the world to do.

But it is one of the things that makes the show so compelling is like

how effectively it can totally rewrite your expectations on like what the bounds are in the genre.

Yes.

And no offense, it makes other shows look worse.

It makes other shows look worse that they don't reach this far.

And how

much less far they reach is kind of...

I mean, it's a real shame.

It's doing to Shonen what Twin Peaks does to a police procedural, by which I mean sometimes Twin Peaks is a police procedural, you know?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

And sometimes it's Dale Cooper standing in the forest with a

whiteboard saying, here is a thing that I learned in like a Tibetan ritual school.

We're going to throw it rocks.

Yeah.

It's great.

That was like

true, Dale Cooper wins.

I should re-watch Twin Peaks.

It's been since The Return came out.

I just started watching it with my partner and he has never seen it before.

It's

very simple.

Did you even finish X-Files already?

No, I've watched that on my own oh okay and like we watch it like now and then when we don't have it that's X-Files is easier to put on when he's had a long day at work twin peaks is like a good to sit down and like pay attention to it was like a couple weeks ago you told me that I was right about John Doggett so I oh that's because yeah I was moving and I needed to have something going in the background all the time or the packing the boxes would drive me crazy but you did the worst bit of moving yeah yeah then they make you do it backwards yeah they make you do it backwards Yeah, the last time I moved, I made the decision that I will never not hire someone to move for me again.

I will not be doing someone else.

It is the best.

We packed all our own stuff, but then we hired people to remove remove it from the house.

So that was nice.

Yeah, the last time I moved, I hired someone

after I had moved like 80% of the stuff.

I was like, someone can take the rest of it.

I'm not doing this anymore.

I'm done.

And it was great.

Did I tell you that I

accidentally packed my clarinet into the pod that was going to get carried across country with no temperature control?

Oh, God.

And it was right at the back of the pod, and there was no way we were going to unpack that.

And I spent the entire week of the move being like,

my clarinet is fucked.

I've had this instrument for 25 years.

Oh, no.

Goodbye.

But it turns out that, you know, because it was packed under stuff and it was in a special case, my clarinet works fine.

So there's a happy ending to this story.

But I was just like, fuck.

It probably shouldn't be my violence.

I'm not going to be in with a bunch of other stuff that can help buffer temperature and humidity changes.

That is what

reassuring loved ones told me many times, and they were correct.

I'm post facto saying

I agree with them from back then after having already learned the truth.

Now Hunter Hunter gets really grim.

What happens now is really awful.

After a really long time of really the only like living souls we have seen being the hunters and the ants, the show remembers that people exist and people exist in a large awful mass summoned via loudspeakers first into a square, tanks surrounding them.

More people than we have seen in one place in the show

than ever before, I think.

You know, there's millions of people

here.

Huge, awful crowds.

Five million humans will fill the palace grounds.

Almost immediately, the plan starts working really well.

Peto correctly believes that there are lots of enemies in the city.

This is exactly what they wanted them to believe.

Poof briefly discovers a new worry.

This is a nice moment of Poof getting something right, kind of.

He is worried that someone is going to find the king and then teleport him away.

I think this is a projection.

I think he wants to stay by the king's side.

I don't think that he truly thinks that the king wouldn't be able to fight anybody in that moment.

This presents a problem per UP, which is that the king is already so irritated at all the royal guards, Reed, Shire Poof, babying him during his Goongie games that he won't let anyone guard him.

So they're going to have to guard him secretly.

Can't be Yu P, Yupi's too big, can't be Poof.

They're off doing sorry, can't be Peto, they're off doing something else, obviously isn't it like basically pito will get adhd that's why she they can't yeah she'll be a little kid cat and she'll just wander around get distracted by something fun

and the they briefly the the the the hunters briefly pitch what if the king calls this whole thing off

you know what if they

start suspecting that we are playing games with them and they which they do abandon the whole thing which they do and they abandon the whole thing.

And Maliorone says, no, because to call the whole thing off would say that the king

is making a compromise, and he won't do that.

So they are just going to play this thing to the hilt, which is great.

That's a really nice exploitation of the way the

top floor of the Chimera ants think, and specifically the way Shirepoof thinks, because right now, what the king is thinking is, oh no.

Also, I love Gunki.

Something, something Gungi, something.

I love Goongie, and definitely no one else or anybody else that plays it related to it, just the game.

And then a little bit

that it says Goongi equals, and then a picture of Komu.

Yes.

Yes.

Very much so.

I love this.

This is like,

you know, when you're talking about,

you know, like hegemonic political power, like the United States or something, and every move that you make carries the internal inconsistency of,

you know,

the king is the strongest guy of all time.

Nothing can fuck with him.

Nothing can even touch him.

He's basically invulnerable, but he is constantly vulnerable and he's going to be watched all the time and constantly protected.

Yeah.

We need some sort of security for our homeland.

Yeah.

Greatest, greatest country on earth, but also

constantly under threat from all sides.

Similarly, you know those leftists who have no ideas and are in fact, you know, weak-willed,

thoughtless, useless,

naive idiots, the human sheep of the world, the cattle.

Yeah, and also they're the most dangerous single entity.

Isn't there deadly, deceptive?

They're everywhere looking around every corner.

They can teleport.

They can.

They can teleport.

They can teleport.

Yeah.

Every ideology, you know, containing within it its own, like, self-denial.

Yeah.

Merrilly and picking the name McCarthy.

Nov

stands up and

insists that he joins the mission, albeit in a very limited but useful capacity.

And he looks normal, right?

Yeah, nothing's changed there.

His hair has been bleached white.

I love this.

I am the sucker, I have to say, for in fiction, when someone gets so scared that their hair goes white, it's one of the oldest tricks in the world.

Speaking of Twin Peaks.

Yeah, speaking of Twin Peaks.

It's one of those things that happens often enough that it has become like a facet of storytelling, but happens rarely enough that whenever I see it, I'm like, oh, yeah.

It's great.

He is going to kind of like act as a watchdog.

We see him later, like, observing the entrances that the various people are going to take position in pointedly going to make sure he like stay outside of pito's uh end range like he cannot go and anywhere near their end um yes

he also says the line i won't take risks ever again and that like is so funny it's crazy and they get like this zoom in on his eyes like super like haggard and tired looking.

He's been completely destroyed by three seconds of Pito.

To his credit, he is still in the mission.

He is like a pro-hunter through

where he is like, I'm going to make myself useful here.

He was so.

He was going to go fight the Royal Guards.

And now he's like,

look out.

Him saying, I'll never take risks again is what I said the very first time I ran a stop sign when I was learning to drive.

I said, no more.

No more.

That is my stop sign.

It's important to stop because it's important to stop.

You you don't want to crash and also because the police hate it.

The police hate it.

And also, sometimes it's nice to stop the car when you're driving.

Yeah.

It gives you a little, you know.

The last time I got pulled over, it's because I barely didn't stop in the middle of the night when there was no cars coming.

The cop was like, I don't know, 500 yards down the road.

And I barely didn't stop coming off of

a turn from like an exit ramp onto a main street.

And the only car in sight was 500 yards down the road.

And I turned

and like got pulled over, and it was terrible.

I hated it, it was so awful.

Yeah, you did the sound well, though.

Thank you.

It was a good sound.

I during this project, I have learned to drive, and now I am the queen of driving.

Oh, congrats!

Congratulations.

Yeah, I can go on the freeway for 10 minutes to go to Costco.

Wow.

And I

boom.

All right, let's see.

There are tanks, you know, moving around, moving around the crowds.

Loudspeakers say any person who leaves their line will be shot on site.

This has happened several times in the Chimera and Arc where we have moved out of...

Obviously, the Chimera and Arc is about human power and human atrocity and the way those get deployed.

There are several moments in the Chimera and Arc where the aesthetics and the actions of human atrocity are represented directly.

You know, we saw this in the first purges, and we're seeing this again here with the tanks, you know, like a forced march.

The show is very real about the way the ants utilize

human infrastructure to execute an atrocity.

There is certain ant

spice on top of this.

You know, later on, Poof does something really terrible,

but it is telling that the way the

mechanism by which the ants

execute their

biggest atrocity yet isn't with, you know, high concept nen.

It's with soldiers and tanks, you know, rounding people up.

Nov notices weird iridescent light falling down on the palace.

And it is Poof in the sky flapping his beautiful wings.

Usually the for the last like 10 episodes, they've been like folded behind him.

His character design is fantastic.

He is sending down these sort of like hypnotic scales on his wings, and the amassed crowds that are just standing outside the gate of the palace in this sort of like

curled rank are looking up, hypnotized by it.

And Nov notices that this hypnosis

created first by the scales and then by the like rumbling sound of the tank's engines, the simple orders barked over and over again, are put in place so that when the blood starts to flow, when the sorting begins, the humans will stay locked in place.

This is just great horror writing.

I think this is fantastic.

It's a great image of Nov realizing this, of seeing like bodies and blood spray flying in the air and just a crowd of people standing in the background.

I love this.

It's very sinister.

And then I love,

you know, Nove goes and reports this back and Moral immediately identifies this as good news.

It's like, this is classic Moral.

This is actually great for us.

It would be really, really tough to do what we need to do if people are running and screaming all around us.

Oh, I want to jump back super briefly.

Let me find.

Oh, God.

Where is it?

We had spelled out, Pito spelled out, or maybe Poof in talking about post-sorting spelled out exactly what the sorting is.

We were right.

It was just good to hear an ant say it.

They are like testing for humans who are very strong of body and mind to serve as soldiers in the king's army.

We get that confirmed.

Yeah,

this was the working theory that we had had.

It's great to hear the ants say it.

So we know.

I still think the king mostly just wants to eat them.

I think the king mostly wants to eat them and play Goongie.

Yeah.

Why not both cracking open a cold one while we're playing Goongie?

The cold one, by the way, is a corpse.

A cold one corpse.

Kobagi's like, are you eating a man?

And he's like, yes.

And she's like, can we still play Gungi?

And he's like, yes.

And she's like, yippee.

All right.

What do you think Komagi's been eating this whole time?

That just occurred to me.

Food.

Goongie pieces.

That's how she keeps winning.

They bring

with the

shipment of women.

That's true, sure.

That is true.

But they haven't shown her eating.

No.

Also, we know that now.

she's the Jack Bauer of Gungi.

Does Jack Bauer not eat famously in 24?

I remember because I've never seen 24 really, but I do remember complaints about stuff like, How does he not go to the bathroom his whole day?

How come he's never eating food?

Maybe food isn't one of them, but that's just the thing that I always low fiber.

Yeah, he's low fiber.

It's probably stimulants.

That's why he kills people when he shouldn't.

Oh, he's angry.

He's hangry.

Yeah.

Right.

Did we talk about...

Sorry if this is.

We can come back to this later, actually, when we're talking about the Ansegon.

Okay.

A quick note that I want to talk about about the hypnosis thing.

This is such a lovely move from Tagashi to do a take on the Dragon Ball.

Let's take the fight to an open field.

Something that happens again and again in Dragon Ball is like, we have to go fight in the canyon.

And you'll have characters say, like, this is good because it means there's no civilians around.

Yeah, and the animation, this is good because we already have those drawn.

We have them all.

We already have those cells.

They're ready to go.

And I love that Tagashi's approach to this.

It's like, no, 5 million people are there, but they're like locked in place thanks to a combination of like tank barked command magic nen scale hypnosis.

Yeah.

Well, they can't fly, so they can't just go to a canyon.

No, uh, Go can fly.

Remember when they would say,

they can jump.

They can jump.

Yeah, it's different.

Go can be not a lot of so fast not a lot of flying in hunter hunter flutter flies poof flies yeah you're beef flies you be youpie flies

in very early ant scenes there were some wonderful crowd scenes of the ants flying hey isn't it weird you think it's weird how um the chimera ants as sort of like a broad entity have been completely subsumed into the main cast of the story and the threat of the chimera ants is more for chimera ants

yeah yeah do you you remember me making you guess how many unique ant kingdoms were going to be a problem for the main story of the Chimera Ant Arc?

Really?

Two.

I mean, one, arguably.

The ants are.

Arguably one.

Yeah.

And how many ants are there in that kingdom?

Four.

Four.

Arguably like.

There's some, yeah, they said that there's like some, there's a couple of soldier ants in the castle, too.

They're not really part of it.

They're just kind of neutral entities.

Man, that scene was wild in retrospect.

Morel rocking up to the palace being like, sorry, Nove being like, I'm terrified of the ants, and then Raider being like, 12 ants are in the palace.

And most of them are loser ants no one's ever heard of.

It's about to begin.

The mission is about to begin.

Shoot turns and notices how calm Killiua is.

He describes Killiua as, quote, overflowing with confidence, but why is it that now and then he seems so sad?

Yeah.

Killiua is very anxious.

I think this is a misread from Shoot.

Yeah.

Also a very anxious man.

I think it's because now Kiloa is acting as opposed to being passive in his anxiety, right?

Yeah, I think you're right.

Because before he was just running away and now he's like, I'm freaking out about this, but I am going to go fight these ants with my new power.

Yeah, it's called Godspeed.

We don't know what it is, but it's Godspeed.

Godspeed you, Kiloa Zoldic.

Godspeed you, Kiloa Zoldic.

Raise your tiny fist.

What's the fucking album called?

Raise your skinny yo-yos towards heaven.

like antennas towards heaven

uh we we get a little um

bit of stuff from every uh

member of the crew here this is lovely yeah everyone gets their own cut in i really enjoy it this is great yeah like you said shoot starts off saying like why is killer so sad i'm not so sure that

that shoot is wrong um no he actually shoot is ex is like ontologically right i think killer zeldic is a sad man yeah i think he he he nails the sadness i think it's just the anxiety that he's a little off on.

Moral says that he's tired.

He says, I'm at about 35%, or he says, 40, no wait, 35 out of 100.

It's such a good

man.

Yeah.

He'll focus on drawing the target away from the king or his target.

He's starting to...

He sort of actively suspects that this might not go well for him.

But he's like, I'm going to...

do my job, you know, and it says him well.

Something about being at 35% makes it easier to accept his fate or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Then to Nove, who is apologizing, he says, I can't fight them again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't fight them again.

He's sorry about it.

Melioron is practicing holding his breath.

I love that.

I love that.

In the timer, he's got like a stopwatch.

Yeah, two minutes, four seconds.

And I love that he's also like, it's probably going to be half of that because I'll be stressed.

Which is crazy because.

You're not wrong.

Like,

we have introduced a character who's so much better at holding their breath.

It just happened in these episodes.

Yeah, but unfortunately, but unfortunately, he's not the one with the invisibility power.

Melioron should have been practicing this more because he's had this power for as long as he's had Nen.

He was smoking the wrong stuff.

He should have got some immoral thing.

He really should have quit smoking cigarettes.

Goan was right.

His little line about...

I'll be tense, so it'll be half of that.

Sometimes when I'm watching like Survivor or something, and they have to do a challenge where they like swim underwater and they hold their breath, and I'm sitting on my couch, and I'm holding my breath, too, and I'm like, I can hold my breath for so much longer than that.

And then I'm like,

you are on your couch in Michigan.

You have slept in a bed last night and eaten a full meal.

It's famously, it's also, it's way easier to hold your breath in Michigan.

They don't know why.

Yeah,

I think it's to do with the presence of the Great Lakes.

Yeah, some sort of light.

Some of the shape of the peninsula.

The shape of the peninsula.

Yeah, they call it the mitten or the great breathing state yeah i can hold my breath for 35 minutes uh

yeah ikago's promising to carry out his mission for kilua and he says tomorrow will be my birthday

it's so moving the way ikago's voice uh not his voice acting his like character voice is really strange he he has these really weird little turns of phrase that are at once really earnest and also like kind of loose and poetic um i like the way he talks a lot yeah um yes he's literally like, I'm going to be reborn.

It is bizarre.

He barely knows these people.

Oh, and we skipped over Goan and Kilu.

Goan is like, I'm going to fucking get Pito no matter what.

And then Killu is like, I'm going to support Goan and make sure that he's able to get Pito.

We are

fucking

space.

Yeah, I love this scene.

I want to talk a bit about...

We talk about Takashi's drifting camera and we talk about Tagashi's drifting camera in like a macro level.

And

if anything, like moving a perspective around a room on a micro level is perhaps more common in storytelling, you know, jumping from perspective to perspective of characters in a room.

But they do put a purple filter over it.

Like the show is very clear that they are taking a formal move here in moving the camera from place to place.

Everybody kind of gets one line.

It feels like such a neat little distillation.

And also

because we get, we usually hold so long on a person.

If we if we ever get something like this, it's like watching, you know, two or three people react quickly to a very specific thing.

It was, it almost felt out of character for them to go, you know, let's give everyone three sentences.

It also really helps with the structure of the mission.

You know, we are moving into like a really critical stage.

And so we have a sort of

like a conclusion to like, you know, we're moving moving through a little conclusion of the prep sequence because after this scene with all the heroes ends, we just get these brief shots.

Peto is on top of the tower, watching from their post, Shai Poof is sending down scales, Komagi is sleeping at the Gungi board, and the king is standing alone on the balcony, like looking out over the meat orchard.

And he doesn't say anything, he's not even thinking about nothing.

He says, I am the king, but who am I, really?

I wonder for what reason was was I born?

And then he turns and looks back into the dark.

It's great.

I wonder for what reason was I born?

There was a reason.

Yeah,

ask Poof.

Yeah, he does know.

He does know the reason.

Well, ask Poof, but also ask the queen.

Well,

too late.

Bad news.

Bad news.

And then it's time for people to leave.

There are just these great shots of them entering Nov's sort of like teleportation space and then reappearing in their like designated locations.

As Ghoen leaves, he is already starting to worry about Palm.

And the narrator says, 10 minutes remain until they enter the palace.

The pacing here has been so wonderful.

The slow build up to like, what are Chimera ants?

And then this like sudden...

spectacular rush of like, oh my god, Chimera ants are this.

And then the slow build of like, will the king be born?

And then the sudden, awful rush of the king is born and he's a nightmare and the entire situation has changed.

And then this like

inexorable, awful build up to the sorting, having to figure out what the sorting is, having to figure out where it's going to happen, developing the plan.

And now we're at the moment and the narrator is saying 10 minutes remain until the mission begins.

It's just great.

It's so good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And good to hear from the narrator.

Who's absent in these episodes?

He is absent in these episodes, although his theme has played a few turns.

Yeah, we got the theme

at least once when Shoot was explaining the plan.

Yes.

In episode 108.

Yes.

Speaking of episodes.

Oh, did I miss it?

Or did we not mention Kilua hinting at his new Nin ability?

We did mention Godspeed.

Yeah, we mentioned Godspeed.

Okay, we did mention it.

Okay.

Yeah, we don't know anything about it.

We just know that it's called Godspeed.

Probably involves electricity.

Probably involves electricity.

Anarchist

drone band.

Beloved anarchist drone band.

Speaking of episodes, what are we watching next time, Keith?

Next time, we've got another three.

We're watching episodes.

Surely they're going to wrap this sorting up in.

Oh, man, I don't know.

I do not know.

They might wrap this sorting up in one episode.

You know?

Probably

awfully wrong.

Or it could go until episode 136.

Yes.

110, 111, and 112.

Those are titled Confusion and Expectation.

Charge and Invade.

And

Monster and Monster.

10 monsters.

10 X Monster?

Monster.

No, Monster and X.

10 X Monster.

Yeah.

We also have a couple five-star reviews that that I'm going to read.

I'm really looking forward to those next group of episodes, by the way, because I have a vague idea of where we're going and I'm

very into it.

Oh, Keith, did you also mention that this is like we're officially passed where you have perfect recall of this show?

I did not.

I talked about this in the

chat, but like the last time that I watched Hunter Hunter, right before we started doing Media Club Plus, or, you know, like eight months before we started watching or started Media Club Plus, I was watching Hunter Hunter.

I watched up until about these episodes, and we were talking a lot about potentially doing the show and planning it.

I was like, Well, I'm about to do a show about Hunter Hunter, so I'm going to stop watching Hunter Hunter.

And now I regret that because

I've hit the part where, like,

for example, when

later in the episode in 108,

when they're like, yeah, Komagi's getting better at

playing Gungi.

I had written at the beginning of that episode, like, by the way, Komagi's getting better because she's also playing the king.

And then I remembered, wait, do they say that?

Like, later?

And then later in that episode, they exactly say, like, Komagi's getting better at it.

So I was like, fuck, I don't remember what happens in these anymore.

So good luck to me in the future.

That's exciting.

Yeah.

Okay.

I have two reviews.

Two reviews.

One of them

is

titled WALL-E from July.

Hello, friends.

I'm currently working on getting my Bachelor's of Social Work and hoping to move on to my Master's of Social Work after that, all while working two jobs.

As a result, I have to spend my free time very carefully.

I cannot express the rush of dopamine that I experienced upon opening my Spotify, brackets, boo Spotify, to a brand new episode of Media Club Plus.

They got other apps.

Get a different app.

I will say, there are other apps.

They also ask a question here that I don't.

You guys can think about, and I'll read another review if you have answers for it.

Bonus question.

If you were a nen exorcist, what would happen to you when you removed Curse Nen?

Don't say Nen Preg.

Okay.

Thanks for showing your kind words.

I think

that's a good thing.

Good luck on your social work.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I got a

cool degree to have.

It's hard to get, too.

Do you speak from experience here, Dre?

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

That's

a master's of science in social social work.

That's my degree.

Yep.

Naive.

Dre, did you write this review?

No.

Dre, is your name Wally?

Sometimes.

Oh.

Dre, do you not want us to say Empreg because you're the one who's picked that?

No, I didn't pick that.

No, no, Dre.

Because Dre's Wally.

Right, because Dre's Wally.

Yeah, don't say Nenpreg because Dre's going to say.

That's my joke.

That's my joke.

You can't have it.

The other five-star review I have titled Practicing Good OPSEC by Username Upright Virgin.

My birthday and name may or may not have been called.

I'll never tell.

Love this podcast.

Glad to be watching Hunter Hunter for the first time with the show.

The cast discussion around how the show uses games is so good every time it comes up.

I bet you enjoyed this episode.

Yeah.

Plus two for Nunprag.

Thank you so much, everybody.

The way I would remove Chris Nun is by recording a podcast about it.

Oh, yeah.

And the less

powerful than then, the longer the podcast.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm getting, we've been getting a lot of cursed energy out of me through doing this.

I think I would

produce a sort of the substance style double, like a version of me

that also existed.

No, that I didn't have to kill, but who was just kind of like mean and angry, and that was the bad

version.

You make a waluigi, yes.

I would make waluigi.

You create whack.

Oh, no, no, whack.

That's better than Wadjack.

Wadjack is

better.

Pictures that people post on the internet.

The internet guys.

The internet guys.

They're called Wajack.

Okay.

Oh, those things.

Okay, sure.

I don't think about those or care about them, so I've never.

I know you don't.

Yeah.

Keith is too busy thinking about other things, like, for example, a new way to replace the stereo inside his car.

I do think about that.

I've

done that.

He has done that.

Curse Nin removal idea.

I would have to read an autobiography of the person's life, and that the more Nin power, the longer the book is.

That is actually very fun.

Wow.

That's a really good idea.

Keith, you got one?

Yeah, it manifests as a physical object, and I have to dig a hole big enough to bury it.

Ooh.

By the way, I have to go deeper to

the deeper, the more powerful it is?

Okay.

Yeah.

We made a

one last bit of review business before we go.

We missed a month.

I know.

I was going to bring this up if you didn't notice.

Did someone point it out in a review?

And you know what?

I'm going to say it because it applies to both categories.

If you were born in June or your name is June, leave a five-star review.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah,

this is my birthday month.

I'm born in June.

Okay, leave a five-star review then.

Yeah.

Leave a five-star review in my honor.

This is a podcast that embraces accountability via reviews.

So,

if you need to hold us accountable, leave us a five-star review.

It has to be five-stars.

If it's anything less than that, I will ignore it.

Yeah.

How else will we know it's important to read?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I'm so excited to watch More Hunter Hunter.

Thank you for that.

It's a good show, right?

Yeah, it's the best.

It's the best.

It might be the best anime ever.

People are really liking Dan to Dan.

It is for sure.

I am enjoying Dan to Dan too.

I watched an episode of that that made me cry last night.

But also

Hunter Hunter makes me cry way harder.

I'm glad, Sylvie, to hear, you know, we don't have a one-to-one anime taste, but I am glad to hear like another person

say that that show is good because.

Oh, have you been watching it?

No, no, sorry.

Just because it's been recommended to me and I know people that like it, but I really need like five people that I know to all like an anime before I'm confident that it's probably good.

It's fun.

It definitely

is so real.

It definitely has some like...

They do a lot of jokes about dicks and balls and boobs and such, but it is still at very much.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

Any other business?

I think that's it.

Yeah, I think that that's it.

If you're listening to this, then every possible episode that we could ever put out on the Patreon for Dragon Ball Z is out.

So you can go listen to all three Dragon Ball Z episodes, both of the Dragon Ball episodes, and both of the JoJo Bazaar Adventure episodes

on friendsofetable.cash.

Oh, my God.

Sylvie had an amazing idea for a bonus episode the other day that I am so excited about.

I remember that.

Yes, I do remember this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Should we say it or leave it?

Let's say it.

Let's do it because we talked about it forever ago and decided we couldn't because it wasn't canon.

Or sorry, it wasn't

spoiled stuff, but we're past the spoil point.

We are going to be watching the first of two Hunter-Hunter movies that were produced after the anime that are non-canon movies.

And the first of which is called Phantom Rouge.

It came out in 2013.

Sylvia's going to pre-watch it in case, for example, it says something like,

in case we see the dog, you know the dog I'm talking about.

I'm like,

like, I don't,

they could get real creative and be like, oh, this, because it takes place, for anyone listening, it takes place after Greed Island, but before Chimera Ant.

And I'm like, yeah, but what if there's a dream sequence where Killowa sees the dog that kills him?

You know?

Right.

Yeah.

So I want to make sure.

But nobody else is, none of us have seen it yet.

It has a whopping 44% on Rotten Tomatoes, which, you know.

That's love, if you can believe it.

Some of my favorite films have a footy focus in the film.

Rotten Tomatoes is a worthless website for the most part.

It is.

It is worthless.

Some of the

stuff has 95s on there.

Yeah, because it's a because everyone sort of likes it.

Yeah, because trying to sort every movie review in a binary good or bad is a problem.

Anyway, speaking of problems, it's almost 11 p.m.

for us.

We should probably call this.

Yep, let's go.

Do we need to clap?

Do we need to do anything?

Yeah, let's do clap.

Perfect.

Chaos.

Good job, everyone.

You just said, do it, man.

Yeah.

All right.

That's it.

Okay.

Bye.