Gungi! Gungi! Gungi! - Hunter x Hunter ep. 104-106: Media Club Plus S01E33

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

As always, we are brought to you by Friends at the Table.

This season, we are watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by Yoshihiro Tagashi.

It is cold and wet in my office, and I am drinking tea today.

So if you hear tea kettle noises, live with it.

I'm doing it.

I don't care.

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

You can go to keithjcarberry.contentburger.biz to just go right to my Blue Sky page.

I've been posting a lot there.

The posts are good.

I don't have anything else to say about Blue Sky.

Don't bother me.

If you want to watch Run Button, you go to youtube.com/slash runbutton or runbutton.net, our long-defunct URL that we finally revived, runbutton.net to go to our YouTube page.

Go watch some of the Silent Hill stuff we've done.

I've started playing Star Wars Outlaws again now that the

last big patch from launch is out.

And of course, you should go listen to Friends of the Table,

the roof upon which our shingle sits.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

I'm not drinking tea, but I am cold.

Sylvie Bullet?

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

Primarily Blue Sky these days as well.

I post a lot on there now.

How hot or cold are you?

It's like fine.

My friends are there now, so it's like whatever.

That's kind of it.

Like, I I don't really

temperature-wise, though?

Oh, oh, like, physically, like, in real life.

Sorry, I thought you were.

It's actually kind of warm in my apartment.

Okay, that's nice.

And Andrew Swan.

Hello.

You can find me on Blue Ski, Swan Derry 3000

at the dot.

I always forget what comes after that.

You can find me on Instagram at Andrew Lee Swan.

It's bsky.app.

Oh, yeah.

And

temperature?

Like, right now?

Yeah.

Outside or inside?

Inside.

Physically.

How are you feeling?

Temperature.

Hold on.

Let me look at the thermostat.

Dre, how do you feel?

No, like how do you feel?

I'm so cold, Dre.

Okay, I feel pretty cozy.

Okay.

I can tell you that it's 65 degrees in my office.

It is 68 degrees here.

It is 67 degrees here.

We talked before the show.

There's a big hole in my ceiling right now.

So there's a massive draft.

So it feels colder than it actually is.

I was surprised to see.

Although, I think this shitty thermometer that I have here

for humidity is like plus or minus five degrees.

So I guess it could be as cold as 61.

61 Celsius, if anyone was one.

I was going to say we shouldn't keep the audience in suspense.

What is that in Godzone Fahrenheit?

I don't know.

61.

Hang on.

I think I can do that.

That seems like 60s to me.

That seems 67.

69.8.

69.

69.8.

Wow.

That was close.

That was close.

I don't have my heat on.

The building is just hot.

Yeah, my building is like that too, but

this addition that my office is in doesn't get the passive heat that the rest of the building does.

It's a shame.

One of my favorite things is waking up in the morning in the winter and

the heating hasn't kicked on yet and the house is kind of chilly.

Yeah.

And that's a nice feeling, knowing that it's going to start warming up soon.

But that sort of like that little bit of winter chill in the house.

Yeah, I've developed um an appreciation for a cold house that, as a kid, when my mom wouldn't let us turn the heat on, I hated.

Yes, now I'm just that's just how I live.

It turns out that having authorship over it does actually drastically change how you feel about it.

Yeah, I'm not so because the heat, I don't mind because it's it's so cheap to heat my apartment.

It's the AC in the summer that is like I don't know about the rest of you, but my heating or my electricity bill is staggering.

It's staggering.

It's like $300 a month.

I don't understand because I remember when nothing about the way I lived changed and I was paying like $120 a month.

It literally has more than doubled in the last like seven years.

I don't know what's going on.

I hate it.

But the heating is like, I don't know, 50 bucks even in the coldest month.

Who cares?

But I don't know.

Something about the cold is nice now.

I don't know what happened.

Are you gassy?

gassy?

No, no, my stomach's fine.

Okay.

Well, okay.

All right.

I'm sorry.

Gas to Media Club Plus or Minus.

Is the temperature warm or cold?

Yeah.

Your local temperature podcast.

Have I ever mentioned Media Club Minus, the note in my notes app, to you guys?

No.

Media Club minus me because all my friends dunked on me for gassy.

I started it recently, and it's just just things that I think would make a terrible season.

Oh, yeah.

Could you give us one of them, please?

Glee.

Can I add one?

Yeah.

Entourage.

Oh, that's a good one.

Oh, I've thought of a worse one.

Okay.

Parks and Wreck.

Oh,

yeah.

Honestly.

Honestly.

If we did a Parks and Wreck season, it would...

I think it would kill us.

I would rather watch Parks and Wreck, but I would much rather do a podcast about Entourage.

I think Entourage we'd have things to say.

Right, absolutely.

And it wouldn't be like, ugh, like, just another sad, you know,

depressingly twee bullshit plot line about how even the worst guy you've ever met is secretly kind-hearted.

Whatever.

Who cares?

I hate that show.

Media Club minus

Ted Lasso.

Media Club plus

archival footage of of the 2008 Yoville City Summer Football League.

When we just watch all the episodes

from Yeovil City and see how they did.

Did anybody see Art's tweet about like, what if we did Media Club Plus of like all of baseball?

That's crazy.

Arts on some really high-level stuff.

No, the sport.

Not the documentary.

Okay, because the documentary is really long, too.

Yeah, but what I'm doing is really watching.

Oh, my God.

That's great.

Okay, we have these episodes.

What a set of episodes.

Another few weeks with absolutely zero Gonan Kilua.

Yeah.

These three episodes had none.

The last episode of the last set had like one short gone scene.

So we're with like one full month of television with about two total minutes of

any of the four main characters theoretically of the show.

Also, these episodes are great.

These episodes are fucking incredible.

Yeah.

Hey, did you know that the king really likes Gungi or likes something about it?

I don't really.

It's not totally clear what he's liking about this.

And also, he's not totally sure what he's liking about this.

The king is super focused on board games.

Nove, Moral, and Palm start making moves to infiltrate the palace.

By the way, remember when Palm looked normal recently on her date with Goan?

That's back.

She's looking normal again.

You might even call it foreshadowing.

Oh, and the king loses an arm.

If you haven't seen these episodes, you'll never guess how.

Oh, we're really in it now.

Yeah.

We're really in it, in a, in a clammy, uncomfortable...

I mean, all of these episodes take place during a rainstorm.

So everything is just constantly lit by, you know, grey, overcast clouds, a a lot of rainfall

lots and lots of pointed thunder but the sensation isn't actually of a thunderstorm it's of a thunderstorm about to happen you know um if if all of the chimera ant arc has been a roller coaster continuing to click up and up and occasionally dipping down as the king is born and starts decapitating ants and then starting to click up again we are in this really odd moment where everybody is trying to outposition everybody so that they can get the the pristine like starting strike yeah And it's a really great feeling.

And we start off with a really fun little outsider's view into that sort of positioning with Bloster and Welfin, who are

making fun of Leol, who they're still calling Hagia, for dead naming him.

Dead naming this fucking line.

Wait a second.

Can we talk briefly about dead naming the line?

It's crazy.

Why?

I mean, okay.

A fact about the world is that anybody can change their name at any time and expect to be addressed by the name of their choosing.

Sure.

I am curious about why

Hagia has done this.

Oh, it's because he has a Kalgo syndrome, which is that he is a tiger who wants to be a lion.

So he has said to himself, all right, I want a more lion-like name.

Yes.

And that happened off-screen.

It's really interesting that we kind of, in classic Chimera Ant style, we sort of saw A, B, and C of that thinking, and then D, E, and F happened off-screen, and now we're at G.

And another, I mean, there's another example of this, too, not just Icalgo, who either at some point changed his name from like octopus to Icalgo or like from something else to

Octobo.

Or yeah, Octobo, or just was always called Ikalgo.

And

it was always a thing.

But then the other one is that we haven't technically seen it yet, but Hiran changes her name off-screen to Hina, maybe to be more human.

So interesting.

Yeah.

So interesting.

I can't catch that.

Yeah.

Oh, but because I've been calling her Hina for the whole time because I forgot that her name was ever Hiran.

Remember the great Captain Ikalgo, who is currently taking the bleeding to death Kiliwa Zeldik to an unlicensed Chimera ant doctor.

Don't worry about that.

We don't worry about any of that in these episodes.

Yes.

The last time we saw Kilua, he was on Death's Door.

And these episodes have not a hint of that.

And neither, again, did the last episode of the last set either.

None of that.

It kind of bangs.

It really builds tension, I think.

It's great.

I think it's great.

And it's just like, now we're with Blaster and Welfin, like, for just a couple of minutes.

It's a little prologue.

It's so striking.

You know, first we get to see what is happening with the meat orchard.

Yeah.

More literal than I was expecting.

Yeah, rules.

I was expecting the meat.

I was not expecting the orchard.

Yeah.

They say, I like this blostered wealth and say, sometimes you can't see how strong someone is until you have enough strength yourself.

They're monsters.

I'll do whatever they say.

Talking about how they got their powers from Shaoapoof, who's been giving the ants like custom abilities.

And this is great because it calls back, it is going to, when we get a big scene with Nove in the last episode, it's going to call back to Gonan Kilua in the hallway at Heaven's Arena in a really nice way.

Oh my God.

Yeah, right?

How good is that?

I feel like because we go through this show with a five-toothed comb,

I feel like

I generally notice moments like that when it is happening, but that was a full like scales falling from my eyes.

The anime team has find a head moment.

Yeah, but I love this weird little opening that feels like something out of a

Martin McDonough movie you'll play, the guy who made

In Bruges or Seven Psychopaths or

Seven Psychopaths.

I love In Bruges.

Banshees of Vinish Eren, Life Telling to Finish More, that kind of stuff.

Just this like weird little

like two-hander scene of two side characters talking about their bosses with a completely different tone than we're used to.

The ants describing other ants as those monsters is great.

It's volume.

It's so good.

And then they say...

First, they do that.

It's good to see Chimera ants haven't changed.

One of the first things that they think about when they see the Beat Orchard, which is these

humans sort of kept in stasis, a little bit like the ants in the eggs,

but making these sort of like awful, dusting, rotting trees of bodies in storage.

Yeah, like they really look like fly eggs or something.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Nov calls them bizarre fruit or something.

It's great, but the ants are...

Ants are on their old game.

They look at it and they go, I want to eat that.

What if we just eat the humans?

And then they sort of decide, no, these monsters, that is to say, the royal guards um

you know why ever step against them um something interesting that they they identify quickly is that like surely shirepoof anticipated the ants to start getting a little um

uh

uh revolutionary uh when he gave them the powers right uh which is really interesting because is that something that poof was anticipating you know we've seen in in previous episodes poof's Poof's concern about how the king is doing.

I wonder if on some level Poof is hedging his bets.

We get a little bit from the narrator about this later.

Totally.

The way that

they send out these guys, specifically, the squadron leaders and stuff.

I really...

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, no, they straight up do say they're sent on missions that are deemed less important and that they expect to fail.

Not to jump ahead too much, but I feel like it's relevant now.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

This This is the very end of episode 106.

Yes, it's way towards the end.

It's during Nove's big sequence.

But I really like...

I love the

ghost town or ghost castle, I guess, energy that this scene brings.

I love them talking about the king like he's a moody teenager.

All he does is remain in his room all day playing games.

There's a shot of him in this first episode pretty early on.

Oh, no, it's actually the very end.

It straddles episodes 104 and 105 of him sitting on the throne like mad, and he looks like a shitty child.

It's so good.

Yeah, it's great.

And I mean, this is going to come up as we talk about these episodes because

a huge chunk of this episode is an extremely tense infiltration of the palace by Nove, a character who I had previously been feeling neutral to irritated by.

Yeah, he was overly confident and kind of like condescending and kind of shitty

palm.

Where he comes out of these episodes looking really good.

Good how.

We are positioned with Mr.

Nove for a long time and get to see him doing something extremely difficult at extremely high stakes.

And he continues to do that until his body and brain no longer lets him do it anymore.

Yeah.

Although I sort of see it as like the sort of hubris and condescension that he's he initially shows up with kind of crashing down on him to be

like, oh, yeah.

He is so not all that.

In a way that's, it is totally, it's sympathetic because of how intense the situation is.

But they do a really good job.

God, we're really going backwards today.

They do a really good job of like, of showing,

he throws up Gonan Kilowa in his mind as like a self-comparison that is really unflattering.

Yes, but I appreciate, you know, this is the thing that Hunter Hunter loves to do again, which is suddenly start piling an emotional arc onto a character that we didn't think was going to get one.

Yeah.

I care about Nove now.

He has some humble pie.

He eats some humble pie on screen.

He eats some humble pie, and he eats it with good grace.

Yes.

He is a sign of good grace with his humble pie.

With his humble pie.

Yeah.

Who wants to talk about four-dimensional apartment complex hide-and-seek?

Oh, I love this.

Yeah.

So good.

I have a question.

Yeah.

Where do we think the Nen Dimension is?

Yes, they say the words Nen Dimension, Jack.

I knew you were going to ask me about that.

I knew that I wasn't.

I knew that they were going to.

Do you feel like it's in an alternate world?

does no create the men dimension or does he just have access to it does demon world theory feel like a burden to you now jack yes it it does feel like a burden because i feel like i was

I was preparing one extremely stupid banquet table, you know, let's say cherries,

Sunday, ice cream Sunday,

you know, Devils on Horseback, bacon wrapped around dates.

You know, it was

devil on horseback.

I'm looking that up right now.

Devil on horseback is, I think, bacon wrapped around dates.

Okay, sure.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Why is a date a horse?

Listen, I get my bacon is the devil.

In any case, it was like I was preparing this lavish, remarkable table and sort of going,

isn't it fun that there's this table over here?

And then I turned round, and Yoshihiro Tagashi was like, he had like a soup tureen and like a ladle, and he was just like handing out food to this massive cascade of diners bizarre tables bizarre outfits and i was over here with my like little six course meal like oh this is do you know the show is taunting you specifically coming up with demon world by like pushing around the edges of what you were talking about i feel like the show media club plus is taunting me specifically you know well that's on the back

it says it on the tin that is that is the thesis statement you know i would like to come back to a little more as we get closer to the end of this project of Hunter Hunter Media Club Plus is

y'all knew what I was in for when it was like, let's show someone who's never seen the...

This is a show that I think is especially wild to someone who has no idea what is about to happen.

It is uniquely, you know,

encountering a story for the first time is always exciting experience, but there is something about Hunter Hunter where it's like,

I had no idea the scale and

delight of the roller coaster that I was about to be put onto, but you did.

Yeah.

I don't know if it's Demon World.

I don't think it's Demon World.

I think he makes it.

I don't think it's Demon World.

I think that if Demon World exists...

It doesn't exist.

I can't square Demon World with the Chimera ants.

I just can't.

It's funny because they're just people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They are

becoming more and more literal that they're just people.

Yeah.

They are just people.

They're just people.

So we know that Mr.

Nove can use portals to enter a sort of

other dimension.

This has previously appeared when they used it to kill hundreds upon hundreds of Chimera ants.

Yeah, and also to store Moral's pipe, which he presumably didn't want to carry around all the time.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

It is revealed to us that this ability is called hide-and-seek, and it is a little bit more complicated than it seems, although we've pretty much reverse-engineered it.

It is a set of 21 rooms across four floors that all look the same.

And we get to see that

Nove is using it as like a little home base.

He's got like energy bars and bottled water and presumably like first aid heat.

uses it like the trunk of a minivan.

Yeah, it's really really good.

The only really important thing that we need to learn here is that

regular people can only use the

what's the easiest way to put this

Regular people can use the specifically set entrance and exit

portals.

Nove can make sort of neutral portals anywhere to bring him to any of these other portals whenever he wants, but he has to specifically set for other people to use entrance and exit portals.

This is a contrivance to establish the stealth mission that has to appear, which is that as these block of episodes continues, Nove has to infiltrate the palace to essentially place exit doors to allow the team to play.

He's playing Team Fortress 2.

Oh, he's the engineer.

He's placing teleporter exits in places that are tactically viable.

He wants to place a far one in like the garden, I think, on the diagram, one in the middle, and then one close up, is what they say.

I don't know if they say that in these episodes.

I'm sorry.

I watched these like five times over the past week.

No, it's all set up in my brain.

Yeah,

you said like the next day after we recorded the last set of episodes.

Yeah.

I watched these already.

I said an evil spirit took hold of me and I watched the next group of episodes.

And then you watched them again and again and again?

Yeah, because they were really good.

Yeah, they're really good.

By the way, Nove, I want to, I want, there's a lot of hunter-hunter game that I want to exist.

Nove stealth game seems really fun.

I would do a Nove Stealth game.

Have you...

We had talked in the past about, you know, what would your dream hunter-hunter game be?

And I think that y'all said, oh, there is one that seems pretty obvious, other than it wasn't Greed Island, but we can't talk about it yet.

Do you think that we have run up against any of your dream Hunter-Hunter games yet?

I don't remember saying that.

I

was wondering if we were, we might have been talking about Greed Island.

Oh, yeah, that's possible.

Hmm.

Because

my

lame answer would be that I would love a sort of big open world

game in the style of like somewhere between Breath of the Wild and like the Sandland game that just came out

earlier this year.

Like I would just like to run around in Hunter World with different characters with weird powers.

And like talk to, talk to freaks, like have weird conversations.

Probably be there.

Do weird little quests.

Yeah.

So let's see.

Nov

also

decides to focus on taking out Flutter.

In a mirror to the scene in the last episodes where Morel

briefly and wrongly assumes that Cheetu is the nen exorcist, so decides to focus on taking out the exorcist.

Nov figures out that Flutter is the sort of like telecommunications specialist and wisely decides to take him off the boards.

Pro Hunters are very, very good at this to the point where if it is not interesting to Tagashi, he has them just win fights off-screen.

At some point off screen, Nov takes out Flutter and we see an unconscious Flutter inside the hide-and-seek dimension a little bit later.

I love this.

This is just like another one of those things that in another show would have taken an episode and a half to three episodes to finish.

And it just

there's not even a second spent on it.

He just, we see him think, oh, I should take this guy out.

And then the next time we see him, he's sitting in a room with like a twitching flutter, like

totally beaten and off to the side.

I'm curious about, and you know,

we've probably got enough information here that we could try and figure it out.

But it's worth saying that I don't think it's something that the show is hiding.

I'm not terribly clear how Nove fights.

I think it's probably a combination of like portal evasiveness and then just like fast hand-to-hand hand-to-hand nen combat.

We saw one attack that he has.

What does he do?

He uses scream.

Oh, it's

window to the void.

We are doing these backwards.

We can just talk about this.

We can talk about this attack now.

Then later when we'll come back to it and say he just did scream.

He uses a portal to decapitate an ant.

It's called a window opener scream.

Yes, he sort of just like wraps a portal around the ant's head and

portals the head away.

It looks really good.

Here's what it looks like: if you've ever, if you've ever been with around a kid, or if you've been a kid yourself playing with bubbles, and like they have like the big bubble wands, and you put it in the detergent, and then you like stretch it, and the bubble stays in place while the wand moves, and it creates this like really, really long bubble that sort of just stays there in mid-air for a second.

What if that was like a black hole that deleted your head?

Meanwhile,

in the tag dimension, that that is to say,

the dimension constructed by Idiot Chimera and Cheetu for the purposes of playing his favorite game, tag.

This is such a funny joke.

Because, you know, Chi Tu traps him in this dimension to try and do his stupid tag men game.

And it becomes really clear to everybody but Chitu, that is to say the viewer, the narrator, and Mr.

Morrel, that...

No, his surname is not Morrel.

I'm falling into Nov's game.

What's his first name?

Nov calls him Mr.

Morrel really condescendingly, and then that fucked me up.

He has a great name, Moral.

Macarnazey.

Macarnazy, yeah.

So good.

But as far as we can tell, Nov's is his last name?

Nove is a mononym.

Oh, cool.

Nove has no other listed name.

Oh,

um.

Everybody knows that Cheetu has fucked this up, and it has this great sensation of like an improvised game that isn't quite working, or like a piece of playtest game design that just isn't producing the right effect but everybody but the designer can see it it is so funny yeah uh morrel is trying to sleep and also to try and psych out chitu and chitu is losing his goddamn mind yeah yeah there's there's this thing you know cheetu's like hopping up and down like chase me play tag come on he's like taunting him, getting really close, close enough to actually tempt Moral to like try and get him one brief time.

Uh, and um, Moral just kind of thinks to himself, like, if you wanted me to chase you, you should have set up rules to make me have to chase you.

Like, he's so kind of put off by Chitu's total misuse of this power, misunderstanding of how this was going to go.

Uh, like, it's so funny because, like, yeah, he could have, he made a dimension where he was allowed to set any rule he wanted, and he set a rule that, like, one, gave his opponent eight hours to do anything that they wanted, which he does not have the patience for, and two, didn't actually encourage them

to play the game by the rules.

It's

such a good joke.

It's such a key joke.

And he is ADHD personified.

They have a second.

And ants have yet to invent psychologists.

Yeah.

Well, Peggy could have been, but he got decapitated.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ants might have invented psychologists.

There's a line from Leol later that makes me think they might have done, which is really funny.

Yeah, there's the line that Jiju says here that just made me crack up is at one point he gets close and he just actually says, look how close I am to Morrel.

Yeah, and then Moral says, as soon as he gives up and steps away from me, I win.

I've got him.

Yeah.

There's two things that are going on here.

First, Morrel is a Nen master in the sense of like not just skilled.

You know, we spend a lot of his character introduction being watching him mentoring nen pupils for better and for worse.

And I can't help but read him watching Chutu

screw it up completely with the kind of exhaustion of a teacher, going,

You idiot, you know, you have not thought this through.

You are a pupil in every kind of way.

It also makes all of Karapika's dealings look great.

You know, we've known Karapika as a smart guy, but Karapika invented a nen power like with single-minded lethality and perfected it over a period of months.

In basically the same amount of time that Chichu had to learn about Nen.

Yes.

I don't...

Maybe, yes.

And, you know, Karapika figured out the Nen conditions.

He, like, honed this thing to a razor's edge.

And Chi-Tsu is out here being like, oh, I forgot that I could actually force you to chase me.

Yeah, he was.

Karapaka had honed his ability to a razor's edge, and Chi-Tu has, like, the fake chainsaws that they use in haunted houses that don't actually have a blade in it.

It's just scary to look at, but then you're like, oh, wait, this is nothing.

This isn't anything.

This is actually, this actually doesn't work at all.

Yeah.

It's very relatable.

I feel like, you know,

world building or something, sometimes you come up with an idea that...

Two-thirds of it feels really, really solid.

And then the final third of it, it just is.

Oh, this goes nowhere.

This doesn't actually work.

This falls apart.

The first usage.

Is anyone excited to talk about Gungi?

Oh,

boy.

What's going on with the King?

Kamaki and the King are still

playing.

They are in exactly the same postures as we saw them previously, facing each other across the Gungi board.

Poor Bored Shirepoof is sitting with his legs crossed at like a play place who brought her kid here to get some energy out.

He does

like the King's babysitter.

It is very funny.

It's so funny.

And they're just like, at least he's not getting hurt outside.

It's, it's, the thing that has happened to the king is the king is still very scary, but he has just been getting increasingly like impotent and weird and petulant.

And it's such a great character turn.

You know, he has all this like sound and fury of being born, killing the ants, getting the palace, and then just sort of like runs into a blind alley and gets himself stuck there.

It's such a cool thing to do with the character.

I can't wait to see how you how I can't wait for you to see specifically how this part of it develops with

I am so curious.

Yeah.

Yeah, because no one knows what Yupi is doing.

I mean, the characters presumably do.

We don't.

He has disappeared.

We see him a couple of times just walking around in the background.

Yeah.

Yep.

This is violent.

Yeah, he's violent.

Peter

is doing what Peto usually does, which is nightmarish medical experimentation

and producing the most evil wren that anyone has ever seen, leaving poor Bishonen Shirepoof

as

the babysitter.

Yeah.

They are playing quickly and abstractly.

They are discussing rules that are completely inaccessible to the audience.

In comparison to Dodgeball, where we were taught how Dodgeball worked, almost exhaustively.

Excruciatingly taught how dodgeball works.

Not only are we not taught how Gungi works, the characters are speaking the language of Gungi very, very quickly.

They'll just say like 3-1-4 shinobi and put the tile down.

Sylvia, you mentioned earlier in the challenge.

How did you go into this?

This most recent watch, I was like, okay, I'm going to figure out at the very least what the moves they're saying mean.

And like how Gungi kind of works, because of the information we're given, we are given the the names of units.

We're given

they say, like, at one point, the king says Duke 551.

Um, we did like just as an example move, um, and then like they'll move them on the board.

There's also like a setup phase, like like Warhammer style or something, but I don't know about that.

Um, basically, what I gathered is it's chess with a third dimension, or a type of game like chess with a like a height.

Five, five, one seems to mean a row five, column five, height one.

Height one.

Yeah.

And then, like, there's archers and, like, there's cannons.

And, and, like I said, there's a duke or something.

And, like, they seem to have different things.

They seem to go to different elevations and stuff like that.

Um,

Keith, you mentioned that there's probably fan rules online.

I checked at when we were talking about that.

There are fan rules.

Okay.

I googled Goongi and Goongi was a male Wookiee Jedi Padawan, apparently.

Please Please tell us.

Oh wait, you might have to bleep that.

Hold on.

Was this in Rebels?

Is this a thing that Austin shouldn't know about?

Oh no.

I don't know.

It's like ugly CG, so I can't tell.

Whatever.

I don't care.

I think that Gungi is in the Clone Wars and is one of the members of the crew that go and get their crystals.

That happens right around the turn of the Disney sale, which would have been forever ago but that okay cool so it's it's safe for me to say this busted wookie is not my go detail oh yep there we go bad batch for a few episodes group of five young links

yeah they were deemed to be at the top of their class led by ahsoka tano and yoda they traveled to ilum yes this that is what he's from so this is like halfway through clone wars basically while we while we were talking about something that uh uh sucks instead of hunter hunter um that's a joke that's a joke um i did find out that

there's a game that this is based on and it's those episodes do suck, so fuck those episodes.

Okay, cool.

Janki or

Chengi, I don't know.

I'm probably butchering the pronunciation.

I'm sorry, I just learned about this.

Sometimes called Korean chess is a...

I guess we'll link the fucking Wikipedia page to you guys so you can see.

It's literally, the board is like one-to-one.

Oh, wow.

And, you know, by keeping the game inaccessible, what they're doing here is not...

One of the things that they're doing is not terribly subtle, right?

Which is that, like, whatever consequential play is happening here is at a level of skill and remove from the viewer.

You know, this is between the king and the gunky player, and we are kept apart from it.

We can see the consequences of this in terms of like character interaction.

We could see the consequences of this in terms of

outcomes in personality, but the game is being played at

a remove from us.

It's like

that quote from about

Jengi.

The game is sometimes fast-paced due to the jumping cannons and the long-range elephants.

I can see why

Tagashi was like, oh, this is cool.

Yeah.

Weirdo chess?

Yeah, that's for me.

Listen, a friend of mine's been reading Yu Yu Hakasho and sending me in his author notes, Tagashi will just make little games.

Oh, wow.

I'll put them in the chat later.

He's the very he's writing about.

Yes, and I love it.

Yeah.

Tagashi, I think this is a total, this is a, I'm totally making this up, but I would love, Tagashi is definitely like, I would be one of the failout hunter exam hopefuls from the first round.

He'd be like, he, he could, he's like, I bet I can show up to the basement and then flunk out during the run.

We did see the guy who

is loosely, was loosely, we saw Dune.

Like, yeah, we saw Dune,

just doing the Tagashi pose from that one picture.

I

Dune's technically a hunter, right?

Oh, totally.

I don't know that.

Yeah, for sure.

No, no, no.

What I like about them keeping the rules of Gungi kind of nebulous and fluid in terms of definition is it does let them sort of

like they don't get hung up on it.

Right.

They can just use it purely as

a ground for the character interaction between

you said her name last time, I think, right?

Yeah, Komugi, yeah, because Jack subs say everyone's name.

But it is worth noting that we do not learn her name in these episodes still.

No, she is still referred to as the Goongi player.

At the end of the last episode, I think we get the narrator calling her the Gungi player.

Yes.

Yeah, which is way cooler.

It casts this in a completely different light if we don't know her name.

Yeah, I'm kind of bummed that you learned that early.

Really annoyingly.

Well, because it makes her this sort of like odd, frightening monolith, right?

Really bizarrely,

one of the episodes this time subtitled her as Gungi Player.

So

they need to get their acting gear

together.

Come on.

I don't even mind you.

You know, I would obviously prefer it if you didn't show the name.

Be consistent about it.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

The king is back on his stupid...

shallow little game about all I have to do is disrupt a human's rhythm.

Yeah.

And I can

figure it out.

I should say that this is a weird difference between my sub and the dub is that in the dub, he always say like, I have to disrupt a human's rhythm or humans are susceptible to fear and greed.

In the subtitles that I have, he's always saying like, like

one's rhythm or one's fear and greed instead of specifically talking about humans, which I prefer.

Interesting.

That could be a literal translation translation thing, though.

Yeah.

Like,

this is the thing with very literal translations is sometimes that stuff like that happens.

I do think that rules, but I like him talking about it in terms of humans because it starts happening to him.

You know?

Yeah.

He gets tilted.

He tries to tilt Kamugi and he gets tilted.

I just think that like...

He doesn't particularly have a reason to feel one way or the other about what's different about humans and ants.

So I think it sort of makes sense that he would go, like, yeah, anyone is susceptible to greed and fear, and to not specifically be like human.

Because we actually have seen him treat humans like livestock, uh, but it's not like he has a high opinion of anybody, even his like

Royal Guard.

Uh, I think he has a higher opinion of them, though.

Totally, yeah.

But I think he also thinks that they're susceptible to greed, yeah, and fear.

This really, as he keeps hitting the same beat over and over again, it's so interesting in a show where you have villains like villains,

you have villains like the Phantom Troop, who are just a constant cascade of like different opinion, and they're constantly working over all these different ideas.

It is so interesting to see the king, like a loop, coming back again and again to these same ideas of like violent divine superiority and rhythm, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it starts to feel a little bit like

the lady is protesting too much.

Yeah.

You know?

And also that's really

four days old.

This is the thing.

We get a line later that I sort of want to save a little bit to talk about then.

But like the king is starting to come into shape as a sort of like putative, incomplete thing.

And it is so sharp to characterize him as being so confident about his own superiority, but at the same time, just turning over again and again the same playing card and expecting to find something different on it.

We've had a character think that he was incomplete before.

Which character are you thinking of?

The queen, who is desperate for him to not be born yet.

Yes, yes.

So I think that another character thinking of themselves as an incomplete.

Yeah, it's great.

So back to the I'll disrupt Kamagi's rhythm, the Goongie player's rhythm.

And then we get a great shot under the board.

I love it when sports media does this.

There's a really great shot in challenges of playing under the tennis board, the tennis board, you know.

Yeah.

What's it called?

Court.

Court.

But here we see the king place down a gunie tail from underneath.

And then

he...

He has a clever plan.

He's like, I've invented a new way to play Goongie.

I'm going to call this detached castling.

And he sends the smuggest voice to Kumigi.

It's great.

Yeah.

And

it's after she gasps because she notices it too.

Yeah.

Like, she gasps at the fact that his king is isolated on the board.

It's like all to one side.

And when she notices it, that's when he's like, heh, I'll call this detached castling.

It's great.

And he has this like whole inner monologue about it.

And he's like, I want to hear you gasp for breath.

I want to like see her get terrified.

And then, well, what happens?

Well, it's not just that as well.

He's like specifically like

he's doing the

person who has just heard about the possibility of chess.

About what chess does.

Where not only does he say, he's like, when I do this, there's no longer a next right move to play.

In fact, there are no correct moves.

And Komegi defeats him in one turn.

Yeah.

She calmly plays a piece, and the king casts forward.

We get this great image of the board multiplying behind him as he foresees a loss in every possible turn.

And he resigns.

We get a filter on the screen that we only see, have only seen so far during like tremendous horror or violence after she plays.

Yeah, but like super film brain.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's so famous.

This is what we get.

It's the same filter as when Kite dies.

Yes.

yes.

And what's worth saying, Kumagi's affect, the Kungi player's affect, is so

sort of like

she's not vacant.

She's clearly like very present and she's pleasant and is having a good time.

But she doesn't have any of the sort of like latent horror of a Supreme Baster.

Even in her most skillful playing, which we have never seen her not be playing extremely skillfully, she's just sort of good-natured and is figuring it out.

She's very humble in her play, even in victory.

So for the king to do this five-minute

sophomore chess spiel about how like I'm going to disrupt her rhythm and then her just beat him in one tile and sort of go like, okay, all right.

Yeah.

Wow.

Do we want to talk about what Komigi says about this?

Because the king is like, wait, you hesitated.

Why did you hesitate if you could beat me in one move?

Obviously, you knew that I was like making a fool of myself.

And what does Komagi have to say about why she stopped Firmina?

Your detached castling strategy is actually named Coco Rico.

I came up with that strategy about 10 years ago.

Placing the Duke in the center became a popular combo with it as well.

That's me shortening

the explanation.

Called Central Duke.

I was pretty happy that a fool like me could give...

I skipped it a little bit.

Hold on.

I don't have the whole quote is what I'm realizing just now.

But she explains that it became really popular and that it became sort of a sign of like strength on a Goongie player.

Yeah.

I have the rest of it.

I have a quote if you need the rest of it here.

You send me it, Keith.

I'll keep reading.

Okay.

If you don't mind.

This is from where you left off.

Should I do the voice?

Yeah,

she has a list.

It's great.

She also has, as we've said in the past, she has load-bearing snot.

She is constantly sniffling and coughing.

She is so gross and so cute at the same time.

She is like a pug.

It's genuinely impressive that she is like like a pug.

Like, I would say, like, grosser and cuter than a pug.

Yes, I would agree.

At the time, they both drew a lot of attention.

I'm not going to do the voice.

I was so happy that a fool like I've just I could, but I don't want to.

I was so happy that a fool like me could still give birth to something that was so intelligent.

I even called it my smart little baby.

But soon after, I found out how to kill it.

A year after I came up with Cocorico, an opponent used it against me in the national title tournament, and I figured out this counter move.

So I was able to win the match, but then it disappeared from

my subs had like from textbooks and

official matches.

To think that the dear leader thought of the same strategy I had, I was so honored and touched, my heart trembled.

It felt like seeing my once-dead baby come back to life.

That was how I felt.

So I almost didn't have the heart to snuff it out its life again.

That was why I hesitated.

It's

so good.

It is like it's a combination of really sweet, really smart play, and and also

the stupid Matt Damon monologue from Goodwill Hunting of just like such a total evisceration of a person's entire like.

I suppose you think the Tesh Castling will win.

You just started playing Gungi two days ago.

There are some touches here that I think are so good.

The first is the Then It Disappeared from textbooks line.

Yeah.

Kamugi.

Kamugi is skillful enough and influential enough that she births an idea, it is written about, and then she kills it.

And of course, you know, as we're talking about the game as a broader metaphor for like statecraft or personhood or whatever, this is really fascinating.

Yeah.

I should hop in here just to, I need to defend the king.

Yeah.

Obviously, he comes across as a petulant child, as arrogant and condescending.

He did spontaneously create the same tactic as the world champion Dungie Gungi player.

This is the thing that makes me love their dynamic so much: he is still very good at this.

He is

very good at this.

He is super talented.

He's like, she's the second best Gungi player in the world.

Yes, he is.

I mean, but yeah, like, yeah, but if Komigi did exist, if the king was himself in her place,

he would probably be in the exact position

as like, you know, world champion

time after time after time.

But he's not.

She's here.

And he lost.

Yeah.

What does Poof say about this?

That's the longest the king has ever listened to someone speak.

And then he raises up.

He says he raises up the biggest red flag I've ever seen.

Oh, well, it should have no significance.

Yeah, I wrote

Meruum listens to Kamugi speak for longer than anybody else, which could mean nothing.

It's so funny.

There's a bit where he says,

after Kamugi has her whole speech, the king says, rubbish.

I've lost interest, take a break, which is real, I'm not owned shit.

He is, he's so tilted, he's so tilted, and it's it, this is me being like, oh, the king is like a child, not just in the sense of like a petulant adult, but like

the king's

the king is unable to know how to deal with this.

He's never felt it before.

He's like, yeah, he's never felt it before.

We get this like front row seat to someone like rapidly dis like because the king is a fully, like kind of a fully formed adult when he comes out of the womb in many ways and then not developed at all.

We have someone who feels like an adult who's just discovered what emotions are.

Yeah, and it's like a really cool, it's a really cool character trait.

He says, take a break.

After this, there will be no more breaks.

It is very clear that whatever Komagi is doing unintentionally is doing some kind of work on the king that he feels that things are getting to a head.

you know?

Um, he is like, all right, this is becoming real.

Yeah.

There's this part of me that thinks like

he's mad, he's acting out,

um,

but also he like has to appear as the king to not be

going easy on her for both, I think, for himself, for Poof, for her.

Like, it's like it is anathema to his worldview that he should be, like, giving her a break for whatever reason.

And yet,

he is.

Weird.

Yeah.

Weird.

So it's like being mad, looking mad is like, is like almost like saving face.

Like, I've got to be pouting

just to, like, get his way in a weird way.

Yeah.

There are these wonderful reaction shots from Poof, who is sitting and reading the whole time during that whole previous scene.

You know, almost any consequential moment, you will see Poof looking up in the black crown from the book.

There's a great moment of that later during the wager.

Yeah.

Well,

it is like you are babysitting, but also like, what if two of the children are fighting each other and the parent is like looking up like, well, hang on.

When and how do I need to intervene?

Except Poof knows, and we'll learn later, you can't intervene with the king.

No.

Not in Super Baby, Baby Genius is 2.

Chi Chu has gotten bored.

He is reading comedy manga.

It rules.

It is so fucking funny.

feeling like a buffoon pretending to laugh is he maybe pretending to read the laugh he's kicking his legs fake the laugh he's letting she pretend to read lebron james oh my god he's always on the first the first uh page of everything dre thank you for um referencing one of two things i know about lebron james

wait what's the second one uh he's he played basketball that's true yeah that's all that's it

he's just a guy who plays some basketball.

I should have known.

Best answer.

Oh, his son also plays basketball, and that's weird.

Yeah.

With him.

Yeah.

And he's bad?

Is he bad?

By NBA standards, he's bad.

Yeah.

Okay.

At this point, Morrell.

Has him.

He has...

attached a long rope of Nen.

There's a really funny

PowerPoint shot showing the rope drawing itself all the way around the tag arena, and it's tied him to his foot.

And now all he has to do is wind

the rope is attached to his pipe, and he just has to wind the pipe up like a bobbin.

And he's going to get Cheetu.

It is so funny.

Oh,

yeah,

it is kind of chained bastard.

Yeah,

smoke bastard's really good.

Thank you.

Listen, don't underestimate the power of smoke.

Yeah.

I know, Dre.

I know.

I love the image of him in his fucking smoke gilly suit crawling around this little light hyperbolic time chamber.

Like two frames per second, like rap, rap, rap, rap, rap.

This is now...

I love Chi-Tu so much.

Yeah.

Chitsu's first response to this, fight the rope.

Chitsu is now two for two of attacking the extermination team's net abilities, knowing that it will have no effect, but trying anyway.

Yeah, he's exactly what he needs to do.

Yes, he is a stupid rich cat.

Like, literally.

The capper on this is,

oh, I guess it might be after a brief scene with.

Oh, no, no, no.

Okay.

No, he does it.

He does that.

There's a capper on the show because

he's like, ha ha, I've invented a new power.

He spontaneously, like, spawns, spontaneously spawns, uh,

a like arm, like, knife/slash crossbow bow.

It's like claws.

He's got big claws.

Yeah, he has like wolverine claws and also a crossbow.

And he fires it at no or at uh moral.

And moral's like, this is slower than you are.

Why would you?

And his face just like falls.

He's like, wah.

We got a goofy sound effect, too.

It's perfect.

And he stabs him, he lunges forward and stabs him, stabs Morel through the chest with his crossbow bolt.

But of course, smiling, Morel disappears into smoke.

This is when he had been hiding in his smoke ghillie suit.

There's another layer of stupid cheetu here because he just explained that he can make smoke look like other things, and he didn't like grok that at all.

No.

The shot of him like laying on the grass, kind of propped up on his elbow,

blowing a smoke version of himself is really funny.

But two illegal.

What are you doing?

What?

Blowing a smoke version of himself.

What would you do with a smoke clone?

No comment.

He actually said, Morrell says, you are an idiot.

Yes, it is great.

And he leads up to it where it's like, the reason why you're going to lose is because you're an idiot.

Like, there's a pause before it that's very important to me for people who aren't watching along to know yes by the way they're there this is this must be why morrel and nouve are friends because they both had the idea to have a ghillie suit as part of the main part of their plan if you make sense they play call of duty together they play call of duty but they're both snipers

it makes sense i mean the

The amount of characters that this show throws at you.

We are now at a point where like Morel and Nove as high-skilled dangerous hunters out on their own mission.

I didn't know who the fuck these people were, you know, this time last year.

Couldn't have conceived of them.

Okay.

Chi-2 resigns.

He says...

So Morel sort of briefly says, you want to try this again?

And Chi-Ju says, no way.

I'm done.

And also, once I've been caught, I can't use that ability ever again.

Just like a final.

Morrel's like, shit, I feel bad, man.

Yes.

He says, I almost feel like I should apologize.

Morrel

in these episodes is two for two on

being incapable of not kind of sympathizing with his adversary.

Yes.

Which, again, makes his relationship with Knuckle make a lot of sense.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, Morrel reminds me a lot of...

I think Morrel is an Art Martinez Turbo character.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

I swear I've seen someone say they thought Sovereign Immunity looked like

I also have seen that.

Maybe you told me about it another time, or maybe we just both saw that.

It's not a bad, not a bad read.

It's not a bad read.

Easygoing,

scarily capable guy.

Yeah.

Yes.

All right, let's see.

Moral connects back up with

Nove, who this is where we see that he's taking out Flutter.

Yeah, they're hanging out inside hide and seek.

Yeah, they're just hanging out eating snacks with again a twitching ant in the corner.

How do you clean the blood out of that place?

Do you think it's got like a blood button?

It has like a reset, like a clean out.

It's got like a hose.

Yeah.

Or like an etch a sketch.

Like you could shake the whole thing and whatever's in there disappears.

I love Blinky as an answer, Jack.

Ned Etcher Sketch Power.

Wow.

I feel like it just gets tossed into the void, right?

Yeah, probably

when Nova exits or something.

Yeah.

Flutter being out of action has genuinely slowed down the left tenants.

Welfin and Bloster.

Blobster?

What's Bloster?

Blobster.

Blossister.

Blaster.

What's his name?

He has a different name in the subs, in my subs.

Blossister.

It's worse.

It's

Bravada.

That is worse.

Yeah.

Oh.

Oh, that's a really good double pun, though, right?

Bloster is so much better than Bravado.

Yeah.

But they're both going for Bluster and Bravado.

Yeah.

And lobster.

I think Bloster is good because it's an anagram.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bloster is really funny.

Yeah, the ants are struggling now that Flutter is gone and none of them could admit it to each other.

The Lieutenants don't want to admit it to their boss because they want to, you know, they want their boss to think that they're capable.

And the boss can't admit it to Pito because why would you ever admit that?

Yeah, he says something like, I can't ever lose face in front of Pito.

It's really funny because Pito doesn't give two shits.

No, this is not important at all.

Pito is out here doing...

It's so weird.

Pito is either doing off-screen Frankenstein behavior or is just being so latently evil that their presence terrifies everybody.

Yeah.

Yeah.

While then you cut back and just like being really easygoing.

Like just like kind of sitting around chit-chatting with...

Saying meh a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah, legs crossed like sitting with the legs.

Like a chill co-worker, Turpoof, and a Yupie.

There's such a like staggering gulf between Pito's first appearance, the way that

the omen of God.

Yeah, the way that other people perceive them, which is pretty directly tied to that first appearance, and then the way that they behave just like walking around the palace, which is like, yeah, I'm Pito.

What's up?

This is an extension of the bit that Tagashi does with the Phantom Troop, right?

The difference is that he keeps Pito Pito genuinely frightening, whereas the Phantom Troop shed their frightening reputation pretty quickly and become easygoing, enjoyable people to hang out with until you're occasionally reminded of how they make their money.

Leal has another thing going on here, which is that Leal is planning on betraying everybody that he is in contact with.

He's been explicit about this.

We're going to learn a little more about how he plans on doing that.

But I can also see how he doesn't want to lose face in front of Pito, not just to save his own skin, but like his life is easier if Pito believes that he is capable.

And if Pito, if Pito believes, if Pito agrees to what his eventual thing would be, which is that, hey, Pito, you owe me one.

Yes, because now we learn Leol's power.

We are spinning the big Nen wheel and assigning Nen powers mostly at random.

No, no, this makes perfect sense.

This is exactly what he's been doing.

I think this one one makes sense.

Yeah, so wait until you learn

Leo's exclusive backstory that's only in the side manga jack, and you'll understand.

You'll see.

Okay, he holds a little tiny thing that looks a bit like a Playdate console, like the little yellow console orange.

It looks like the Apple MP3 player, like a cream player.

100% MP3 player.

A River Rio, or whatever those things were called.

IOU dispenser Rental Pod.

This is how Rental Pod works.

It allows him to borrow his target's abilities by putting him in their debt.

There are two conditions.

By putting him.

Putting them.

Oh, putting them.

Right.

Yes.

Sorry.

It works the same way, but it happens the other way around.

The debt to him happens first.

Right.

First, he has to know the ability, or at least know its name.

I love the implication here.

He has to have seen it or know its name.

I would love to see him create some busted ass nan abilities that he has just heard the name of, and he's kind of like misunderstanding how it works.

That's real.

Or would it be perfect?

Does it just be perfect?

Does it exist out there in the demon world, floating around?

Yes.

Yes.

Me grasping onto it starting to make sense again.

Here we go.

Here we go.

The very idea of the power has its own avatar in demon world.

Yeah.

Demon world.

That gets printed out on a piece of paper and then torn up.

yeah the tar so then he has to grant the target a favor the example that they show is saving flutter from a river i don't know if this was the actual one that got him to take flutter's power but it's funny to think that it is

yeah and then he has to say something like you owe me or this isn't free yeah then the target has to respond affirmatively then the data is safe

yeah because

it finally starts to make a little bit of sense why layol thinks that he can become the new king because as we learn later, when he uses someone's power, they don't have access to that power for the full hour.

So

if he's able to take

one hour per debt owed, so he, I guess he could do it a second time, or I don't know how that exactly would work if he has to print out the receipt again.

But if he could take one of the royal guards' powers or even the king, it starts to make sense why he thinks that he even has a chance to do anything.

Yeah, it's really, really good.

But the funny thing is, if I was Peto and Layel did some stupid shit for me that I didn't even care about, and then he said, now you owe me, huh?

I would go, no, I don't.

Yes.

Yeah.

It relies on that.

And I don't, we might see that work.

This power.

Oh, another thing about this is if the target dies, the ability goes.

He's inaccessible.

Yeah.

Because then he knows that Flutter is still alive.

Right.

He makes the he makes uh Bloster and uh

uh Wolfen turn around while he pretends to contact Flutter, uses the power, and then goes, uh,

the bugs are here, we're good.

Oh, yeah, I control the bugs, it's it's fine, don't worry about it.

Flutter's here, he's letting me do this.

You can't talk to him, don't worry about it.

Two pieces of this explanation.

We use iMessage exclusively.

Two pieces of this explanation kind of like struck me as flags to be like, keep an eye on this.

This is going to be consequential.

The first is that if he is using the power, his target can't use it.

And the second is that if the target dies, his power disappears.

As the Chimera and Arc has been developing, we can see that...

Tagashi is really interested in like spiraling coincidence.

You know, tiny circumstance A producing tiny circumstance B that then like the flapping of the butterfly's wings, you know, produces X, Y, and Z.

And over and over, we see in the little sort of

like side stories or sub-loops moments where...

One little facet of a nen power in play in place A causes everything to, you know, shift around in place B.

We're about to see this happen in a major way as Nove begins to infiltrate the palace while something else is going on.

But hearing this nen power and these nen conditions sort of spoken about so explicitly,

the first thing that I thought about was, we're not actually being told about his cool power.

We're actually being told about two very particular conditions that are likely to become important later.

He is planning on getting the king to owe him one.

And then I think he is planning on leaving on saying, fuck these guys.

Goodbye.

I'm going to establish my own ant kingdom elsewhere.

It's king time at the very end of this episode.

The king is sitting on his chair going, man, I don't like this.

What's going on with me?

But also, I kind of do like it.

But also, I kind of do like it.

It's so funny.

All right, this should be an unbearable dignity.

And yet, although I find myself frustrated, I enjoy it all the same.

What I don't understand is why.

Sorry, Jack, what did you say?

Oh, you said dignity.

Oh, I did instead of indignity, an unbearable indignity.

This is an unbearable dignity.

What would that be?

What would be an unbearable dignity?

Oh, it's like doing shit like being the king or something.

Something that is dignified, but also sucks.

Yeah.

Having to be coronated or something.

That's a boring speech.

We've seen a guy recently who hated being coronated.

Who hated being coronated?

Fucking the king of England.

Did he?

Yeah, there was this like, I can't remember if it was a hot mic or someone like lip reading, but he was like in a car and he was like, this is boring.

That's so.

You're a king.

I saw this in a chat.

It was, or not in a chat.

It was like a quote tweet of like someone complaining about how many, you know, dozens of millions of dollars it cost for the king to be coronated.

And then it was a clip of him being like, this is boring.

And then it was like, glad at least he had a good time.

I can sort of feel out the edges of what is going on here with the king, but the exact shape of it and the consequence of it is still

indistinct.

Do you want to talk about the edges?

I think that what is happening is that the king has.

Let's say you don't like eating broccoli, and you react violently to eating broccoli.

But you sort of figure out, but your parents figure out by accident that you really like broccoli puree or you really like broccoli on a pizza or something.

This is like me when I learned that I...

when I then I didn't like shrimp because I tried shrimp cocktail as a kid and then I learned that I liked coconut shrimp, and now as an adult, I like all shrimp.

I actually love shrimp.

I think that the king has accidentally

found himself in a situation.

He has backed into a situation where he can see the expressivity and like dynamism and interplay that happens when two powerful people

like interact with each other rather than immediately assuming superiority and violently killing your opponent.

And what the king is experiencing for the first time is the enjoyment of interacting with another human.

And the way he has done it is through an enforced series of goongie games with a blind child.

So what the king is saying here when he's saying this should be unbearable in dignity even though I'm enjoying it is like hey

it's actually being alive has more to it than the violent

like

uh hunt for power

I think that's the edge of the thing I think there is something much more specific going on here um

there is a uh an outcome here that I'm afraid of uh which is evil Komegi

oh

I've been thinking of this going one way actually I've been hoping that it that actually rather than Komegi softening the king there is a sort of like um

evening out that happens where there is a cost to Komagi's soul.

You know?

Yeah.

But it could go hard in the other direction.

She's suffered enough.

Yeah.

Well, like, there's a the thing that I like that's happening with these two is that you have a character who is wrongly assuming that he is superior in every way to everybody.

And you have a character who is wrongly assuming that she is inferior to everybody in every way.

Other than Gungi.

Other than Goongi.

Yeah.

But like, you know, still talks about like, if I lose, I'll be trash and stuff like that.

And like,

I don't know.

I like these two coming into contact because it feels like a really more interesting version of Unstoppable Force, a movable object or whatever.

Yeah.

I think it's, I was just thinking about,

you know, we keep talking about the king's sort of like feelings of superiority, and I was reframing it in my head in a way that I think helped like play out the large-scale, like, broad-brush stakes of the thing, which is that the king very simply believes that he is the best thing.

Just that he is the best thing.

Yeah.

And he's been enabled to believe that too.

Yes.

Well, sort of,

because now, at least Poof is kind of going, oh, God.

He might be in some trouble.

I cannot wait to be able to talk more explicitly about Poof.

He's great.

He has great stuff.

He gets some really good stuff these episodes.

Because Poof Syntro is playing the violin while Peter performs the most evil things you've ever seen.

Yeah.

Yeah, he is

the personified soundtrack to evil.

But instead, he's out here.

He is sitting waiting for his laundry to be done in the laundromat and looking up in horror as he realizes that he might have left his iPhone in the pocket of the trousers, currently going round and round.

The king on his throne looks very small and very petulant.

At this point, he gives the line that made these three episodes kind of snap together for me and is how, you know, the way into thinking about the king for me at this point.

He says, my skill in self-analysis is not yet refined.

I find it very vexing.

That is so funny.

It's a crucial part of being king.

Yeah.

Hey, but that's, I mean, that's self-analysis.

Confirmation they do not have a psychiatrist.

Psychiatrists.

He is doing self-analysis, but like a lot of people,

his first stumbling steps towards self-analysis are like, oh, God.

The difference is that he is

like the evil ruler of the Chimera Ants.

He's not even the ruler of the Chimera Ants.

He's just

the ruler of that palace.

Yes.

Yeah.

At this point, the Chimera Ants have no ruler.

It's one guy, his three sycophants,

and a bunch of opportunists.

Yeah.

I'm reluctant

to say, like, look, Dre, you're a therapist, but I mean,

yeah, I know,

let's do it.

You know, you spend your professional life thinking through

people thinking hard about themselves and helping people think about themselves.

Do you have a particular perspective here here on watching the king's sort of like

lumpun flailing attempt to begin to talk through self-analysis while also being in the kind of like violent position of power that he's in?

I'm trying to think of a way to answer this because the first thing that came to mind was like way too flippant.

I mean

There are a lot of people who respond to their emotions in this this way that are adults.

They just also aren't like a superpowered anime villain with a tail that could decapitate you.

Which is meaningful.

Which is meaningful, right?

And it just means that they then have these negative reactions to feelings in other ways besides backhanding someone with a tail.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, like,

Jack, you said it perfectly when it's like the first step to self-analysis starts with, oh no.

Like, yeah, there has to be, like,

I don't want to say there has to be, but, but maybe.

There has to be a genuine like moment of like, oh, oh, fuck, when you see it all click together.

I feel like

the pit begin to open up.

Yeah, and it's not even because, like, it's not like, oh, fuck, like, I did something wrong.

It's, it's just like, it's almost like this.

this dread of the knowledge that you are starting to have because it shows you how much knowledge you don't have.

Yes.

And that's very interesting to see a character like the king have who has spent he's you know his whole raison d'etre is i'm the best thing so you know why would i need to why would i even need to examine that and in fact what we might be seeing is that it's not that he was thinking why would i need to examine that it's that he wasn't even reaching for those thoughts in the first you know he wasn't even considering that that could be something that you could think you know i think thinking back to like um you know the the moment where the queen says like no don't be born yet i feel like in that moment you're supposed to read it as like like, no, you're not like strong enough yet in terms of like anime power, right?

Like, your power level isn't good enough yet.

Uh, but I think what's really interesting is that everyone that like sees the king that has an idea is like, oh no, his power level is like, it's off the charts, dude.

Yeah, nobody can touch him.

Uh, and I'm wondering now if this is what we were meant to think of, okay, this is this is why he's not fully developed yet.

He doesn't know why he's alive.

Yeah, like he doesn't know about this glorious mission that the queen had for him, this vision that she had for him.

He's just here.

He is just like, he's not like id personified because he's starting to lean into things that are more like long-term gratifying.

But yeah, he's just impulsive.

Yeah, he's impulsive because he can just get whatever he wants.

And this is like the first time that he can't.

Yeah.

It's great.

It's really great.

Yeah.

You should just.

You should.

It's so good because it's like, well, make the villain play chess with the other person.

And it's like, no, but the villain kills everybody.

No, but I can't do that because my villain kills everybody they meet.

I don't care.

Take that villain.

Make them play chess.

And make the story interesting.

Not just like, oh,

the king's not going to kill this person because the plot or whatever, but it's like, it's meaningful.

It is meaningful and it's earned that the king does not kill this person even as he gets violently furious with her yeah and you know he doesn't know why he's not doing it poof doesn't know why he's not doing it komagi isn't really thinking about it

no because she's thinking about googie hopefully

she also crucially still does not know that he is not no

right

amazing man

that's great uh komigi has had a break and she has taken her break like i imagine she's taken many breaks in the past she has fallen dead asleep at at the gunkie board.

I love her.

It's so

the amount of spit and snot

drooling, you know, leaking from her face.

Disgusting.

It's unbelievable.

The king sees it.

He says, how vile.

She shows signs of, she shows no signs of intelligence or dignity.

How do those beautiful plays, those paragons of logic, flow out of her like so much water from a fountain?

It really is like him discovering, like, wait a minute.

this weird girl kind of has swag.

She's so grody.

It's also Gone Freaks looking at Krollo Lusilpha and saying,

how are you like this?

Why are you like this?

Why do you care so much about your friends and at the same time, you know, launch such

genocidal violence against your opponents?

This is the king looking at Komagi and saying, where's your genocidal violence?

How can you look so gross but play gungi so well?

How can you be so smart and good at Gungi, but not even have the urge to kill?

Or the urge for Kleenex.

The king is introducing a wrinkle to the next.

She can't support Kleenex.

That's true.

You're right.

She doesn't know that not everyone looks gross like her.

She's sort of like the little batch girl, except what if instead of selling batches and dying in the Victorian winter, she just played Goongie non-stop?

Yeah.

For the new match, the king is introducing a little wrinkle.

He's very proud of his wrinkle, and

he can tell that he's going to use fear and greed to wrong foot Komegi.

I have quite a long bit to play of this because it's so important.

Would you like to play some bits?

It is worth saying that this is a really good demonstration of the king thinking that he has a good plan and it

just falling apart immediately in the face of Komegi.

I'm going to set this up.

The king is going to reveal his fairly cruel plan,

and we're going to get a shot.

The first time we've seen a lot of poof glancing up, he is so happy with this cruel plan.

The poof is like finally something I approve of.

Mom's proud.

Yeah, mom's proud.

Let's make a bet.

Did you say bet?

I did.

If you win, I swear that I will give you anything your heart desires.

Anything?

Let me see.

Anything?

However,

if you lose to me,

I'll take your left arm.

Greed and fear disrupt human rhythm.

Greed will cloud the eyes.

And fear.

Fear will cause courage to shrivel and die.

My left arm, hmm,

my left arm,

should I do it?

Why are you hesitating?

Well, not to be rude, but instead of my left arm, do you think that

it'd be okay if I just bet the same thing that I usually bet when I play?

Usually,

and what is that?

I bet my life.

If I were to lose to you, I would much prefer to pay the penalty with my life.

But I really don't want to offend you right after you made me such a very generous offer.

Plot twist, she's a psycho.

Yeah,

she's great.

Um

die for Kobagi.

Because she then she sort of

die for Kobagi.

She breaks down.

The I don't want to offend you after you made such a generous offer is so fucking funny.

I mean, it is clear that she understands the stakes of being brought to play Gungi in front of the, who she believes is the leader of East Gorto.

She understands that already there are violent stakes in play here.

So I can understand her choosing her words carefully.

But at the same time, you know, she sort of spells out, she says, Gungi is the only thing in my life that I'm actually kind of good at.

Professional players hardly make any money at all, so the only way you can make any meaningful reward is to become a world champion.

She spells out that she sort of sees Gungi as a life or death game because she is the breadwinner for her family, for her entire family of 12.

Yeah, she will become a burden if she ever loses a single match.

And then, in perhaps the least subtle work that I have seen this show ever do, she says, In Gungi, we have a saying, when you lose, even the greatest king of all becomes a mere mortal.

Yeah.

That is

lately.

The dub is quite a bit less subtle than the sub.

What does the dub say?

The dub is what you is oh right is what you said the sub is a little more subtle god i don't have the exact thing but i remember noting it at the time mine said a goongie king is a mere mortal once he's lost um

the uh

uh the next thing she says is that uh

if she loses even a single match she would become the greatest burden and garbage is what her parents have always called her she's like if you if you lose you would be garbage and then she says if i lose now i'll become no better than garbage and garbage is all you would get in exchange for beating me and that would be terrible manners.

It's great.

She is so

I love her.

She's a certified freak.

Yeah.

She also

No?

No.

Absolutely not.

Okay.

Wait, what?

She.

Why not?

Don't worry about it.

Did I miss something?

No, we can move on.

She also says, I wrote this down and I underlined it.

I told myself that I'd die if I ever lost a match.

Yep.

This sounds like a nen contract.

It sure does, huh?

And you know, there is way back, way back when,

way back during the sort of Zepile business.

Do you remember what we were told about nen geniuses?

Yes.

Not word for word.

There are people out there who have never learned about nen and have never sort of existed in nen society, but are so good good at what they do

and sort of and vice versa that their nen is exceptionally powerful.

And we're given examples.

They are like Go players, pianists, like concert pianists, sports people and painters.

And world leaders.

And world leaders.

And counterfeiters.

And counterfeiters.

There is.

Komigi is a nen master.

I can't see how, you know.

Yes.

And Jack, I just came up in the last set of episodes.

You didn't quite put it together then, but they absolutely show her surrounded by an aura of Nen when she first opens her eyes and starts picking up pieces.

And the king goes like, oh, the atmosphere in here totally changed.

And they show her, like, surrounded by aura.

I was reading that as like anime aura, except the joke's on me because this show never ever uses anime aura without it being

well.

It does use anime aura.

It's just called Nen 100% of the time.

It's just called Nen.

Yes.

It's great.

She can't decide what she wants if she wins.

And she says, look, I'll decide once I win.

She is absolutely confident that she is going to win.

And the king laughs.

He says, she feels neither fear nor greed.

I realize that I was the one that lacked resolve.

And at this, Poof looks up like, well, hang on.

Wait a second.

He says, I never imagined that if you were to win, you'd ask for my life.

And Poof says, sir,

from across the room.

Like, the same.

by the way the really the really on-the-nose thing that was said in the uh in the uh

the other translation my translation says uh after losing one game a gungi master becomes a normal person

which is closer to what syllabi said yeah yeah yeah

and the king petulant decides okay the whole betting game is off no more betting that was my mistake and then he tears off his left arm

the shot of her face like covered in blood sort of like not understanding what's happening.

Yeah, because she says, what has happened to your arm?

What's going on?

This for me is like such a good underscoring of like she believes she's in the room with the with Diego.

Yeah.

Or she knows it's not Diego because he was like, I killed Diego.

Oh, yeah.

But she hasn't no idea what is happening.

She's covered in this blue ant blood.

It's great.

Poof comes up to be like,

stop.

You need to reattach your arm.

And the king hits him so hard that I thought he had killed him.

This is it for a while, but I have another button to press.

This stuff is important, so I've I couldn't help myself.

I shall go summon Nefir Pito.

I am certain you will still be able to play, sire, even as your arm is being reattached.

That is the biggest concession I can make.

And if you refuse to accept my offer, take my head, so that I may not live with the shame of your death.

Fine then.

Come closer, and I will end you with a single strike.

It's your turn to play, so move.

I won't.

I refuse to play until your arm is better.

I'm very sorry.

I won't say it again.

Now move.

He's like needles at her throat.

If you still wish to kill me, do it.

Him condi.

You little.

Damn, she can beat him on the board and off the board.

And off the board.

It's great.

I feel like the parentheses in Gungi is Kobagi's motto.

Do X breaking a Gungi.

In Gungi.

Yeah, that's great.

I feel like that clip speaks for itself.

It's wonderful.

The impasse where Poof can't get closer and Komegi is refusing to play and the king is like, well, one of you is going to die until Komegi kind of talks him down is fantastic.

Yeah.

It's so good to watch him be cornered by her just by the leverage of, I won't play Gungi with you if you don't get.

your arm sewn back on.

And if you kill me, you can't play Gungi.

Yeah.

She knows that he wants to win.

Yeah.

Or at the very least, she knows that he wants to keep playing.

Right.

Can we talk about why he ripped his arm off?

Yes.

Why do you think he ripped his arm off?

Well, he gave himself the punishment for her losing because he felt that he lost.

Yeah.

But they didn't play.

Well,

he lost so badly, he lost before they even started playing.

I think it's more of like, well, if you retroactively have been betting your life in every single one of these games, let's make it even.

I'll tear my arm off.

That's how I read it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's sort of like, I've, like, I've embarrassed myself by

suggesting that we do a wager when I was actually not prepared for the possibilities.

Yeah.

I, by default, lose, and I'll look like a fucking fucking idiot unless I tear my own arm off.

Plus, I think a sort of like

childish boiling over of it in that moment, right?

It is clear that, like, you know, I think that that reasoning is right.

The outcome that he chooses is a violent, petulant, self-destructive act.

I mean, a lot of children that struggle with anger issues actually do a lot of self-harm as a way to handle those emotions.

So.

Yeah.

The king is saying saying in that moment, all right.

Um, let's see.

We're at Nov and Morrow, who notice immediately that the puppets are gone.

Oh, my God.

Nova is like, my guess is some threat much greater than us has befallen the royal guard or upon the king himself.

Right.

This is what I was talking about earlier.

The first domino has fallen.

And it is Komagi saying,

I put my life on the line, and the king tearing his arm off, and then Pito having to go and play doctor.

By the way, at the very beginning, I said to the listeners who aren't watching the show that you wouldn't be able to guess how the king lost his arm.

Did you guess?

Were you able to get it?

Right into us.

Right in.

IT pulled that podcast.

Yeah.

This is great.

I love the fact that

Nov and Morrell can kind of sense that there is ant maneuvering going on.

They couldn't begin to conceive of what is happening inside the palace.

No.

No.

It is true that a threat much greater than them has threatened the king.

It's just that it is also, it's the king.

It's a weird girl.

It's also a weird girl.

Yeah, it's a weird girl and the king.

Yeah.

God, I hope Kermagi makes it out of this arc.

We shall see.

We shall see.

They have been found by Leal.

who is about to launch an attack, but Nove decides that the time is right.

You know, this is the the best possible moment.

In fact, the only possible moment to sneak into the palace and set up those exit gates that we talked about way back at the beginning of the episode.

Um,

his plan is that they only really need to win one battle so long as it's with the king, right?

Yeah,

they can win any battle or lose any battle as long as the king is the one they win, which is basically true.

They could all die.

If the king dies, then it's uh basically a success.

Yes.

Although, I think you could...

I think

it would...

The list of people that could then save the rest of the world from Peto, etc.,

is pretty short.

Yeah, it's very funny to me that the hunters are still working with the assumption that the king is like following out traditional Chimera ant like strategy.

You remember that like part of the reason that they, I mean, the main reason that they want to kill the king is that they're worried that he's going to go and create like a second branch of Chimera ants that's going to proliferate into a bazillion chimera ants.

No, the king is still a lethal, dangerous, genocidal entity, but he is playing Gungi.

Yeah, it doesn't seem like he's getting ready to spawn a new generation of ants anytime soon.

Although, I guess Fury is hard to say what the

that's part of what the...

The sorting is for, I guess.

Like, I guess.

Yeah, there's definitely that implication.

While the king is playing Gungi, the royal guards are like taking care of what the king is actually supposed to be doing.

Yes, but I think it would be very difficult to get the king to stop playing Gungi.

Do you think it would be an insult to the king, the idea that there would need to be more ants?

No, I think you spin it to him like they are your thralls.

You know they're going to get more food for you.

But even the royal guards already don't trust the other ants,

the original ants enough to

like my favorite thing is how Tagashi has done this sort of like

you know what?

I'll get into it later.

I'm jumping ahead to you.

He's really isolated the king.

Like,

yes, but there's other stuff I want to, but it's, I'm jumping ahead to

when Nov is infiltrating again.

Okay, okay, sure.

And we're basically there.

We get one brief shot, amazing shot of Pito hard at work reattaching the king's arm in a normal way.

Yep.

Yep.

In In a super normal way.

Dr.

Blythe.

How would you describe Dr.

Blythe toy repair?

One of Peter's men puppets?

Like one of the Kirby villains that seems a little intense for a game for this age group.

Oh, that is a good description.

Yeah, that really is.

Dr.

Blythe is like,

what if, like,

it, like, Stephen King's it was a doctor and she had these horrible mechanical arms that terminated in, like,

horrible, nasty little root-like fingers, like a series of fingers.

Like,

yeah, it's not good.

It's grody.

Yeah.

Um.

The only reason.

That they are able to get this close as Morrel begins, sorry, as Nove begins his sort of like, again, it's raining this whole time.

He's beginning this, like, awful splinter cell rainy infiltration of the powers um

is the fact that the king's arm is missing and the fact that the king's arm is missing is as a result of his like petulance and incomplete imperfection um exacerbated by kumagi's play you know this 10-year-old gungi master is uh uh opening the door to the hunter's big play but there's a flip side to it too where they can only get close at all because of the king's arm but on the other side is if she hadn't refused to play unless he got his arm treated, he might have bled to death and just been dead.

So she saved him.

Everyone seemed pretty concerned that he Poof was pretty concerned that he was going to die.

Yeah.

It's true.

Nov is terrified at the...

possibility of Pito's N starting again.

He doesn't know what we know, which is that Pito is out of action for about three hours as she reattaches.

This is just lovely dramatic irony here.

This scene would be a different kind of tense if we didn't know when Pito's N was coming back online.

But for the most part, we can assume that they are hard at work.

It's not just not nervous.

Yeah, instead of...

Worrying with Nove, we get to just sort of like watch Nove be worried.

Because we're not worried because we already heard from Pito's mouth that it's going to take a few hours.

And then we heard from the narrator, by the way, Nove doesn't know this.

There is still, like, I like how tense it is because of when we get the soldier ant walking in, because there's still that implicit.

Like, if someone else sees him, even if Nefer Pito's N is off, Yupi's going to come through the floor or something and like throw him around crazy style.

Like,

yeah.

He gives a couple PowerPoint to explain hide and seek again and to how he's going to place the exits.

And we get kind of like a layout of the palace, which is fun, but ultimately not super important for now.

At one point, you know, the king is at the top of this sort of like circular tower and the blueprint of the king's room with the text in the middle saying king looks exactly like a gunky tile.

That's, you know, not exactly subtle, but it's great.

Yeah.

And then we have an amazing line from the narrator.

The narrator is gradually beginning to come into his own.

I mean, we've we have talked, I've this has been foreshadowed for a long time, and we're starting to see it happening more and more.

Um, but the narrator will now just deliver these beautiful little bangers of lines.

Occasionally, he says, So he begins here by saying, Currently, within the palace, there are only three humans the ants do not intend to eat.

Uh, one is the Gunkie player.

Have you noticed songs been playing while the narrator does his job?

Yeah.

Oh my god.

Underwrite those fucking theme.

This is the fucking narrator's theme.

They turn it into the narrator's theme.

That's so good.

It's so great.

Yeah, it's great.

You'll now hear it happening basically non-stop

for the rest of the show.

That's amazing.

Because I wonder if what they are trying to do...

I think that much like the king accidentally backing himself into having to understand personhood the music supervisors have have got themselves into a trap which is that they are deploying that music for like consequential high-stakes revelations.

It is like it's like a it's like a tone theme except now that they have decided to hand those all off to the narrator what it ends up becoming is a character theme for the person delivering those revelations.

Yep.

Yep.

That's so funny.

Person one, the ants don't want to eat, Kumagi.

Reason they don't want to eat her.

King don't want that.

You can't play Gungi if she's eaten.

King play Gungi.

Second person they have not eaten.

Diego.

King play Googie.

Reason they don't want to eat him?

They need the body.

They need him for the news.

Yeah.

For the news.

Yeah.

He's got to go on CNN.

Third person they don't want to kill, director Bizef.

Yep.

Wait, but Director Bizef.

Never heard of this guy.

Wait, who's direct?

Listeners, like, did I forget?

Director Bizef?

Oh, my God.

That's Jeffrey Epstein's music.

I know.

It's fucking terrible.

It's fucking wild how they're just like, yeah, human trafficking time.

Yeah, we have never met Director Bizaf.

He is a human, and the reason he is alive is that he runs East Goto.

He was the power behind the throne this whole time.

He was sort of like an intermediary for the countries dealing with the other countries.

And I would say that I would say that the Royal Guards have decided that Director Bisef needs to stay around to run operations.

But realistically, it's probably Shayapu

who has said, you need to stay to make this all work.

Right.

We do not want to run the country.

We just want to do our thing.

Keep please fielding phone calls, etc.

And then the show sort of like puts down Director Bisef for a bit.

They mention him in this this first great sequence, and then they sort of briefly forget about him.

Because what the narrator, the narrator's music, our main character, the main character, is really trying to do here is set up another Yoshihiro Tagashi haunted house.

Because this castle is immense.

It is in the middle of a thunderstorm.

And it has three humans and 11 ants in it.

It was Palm Ants a minute ago.

Oh, no, no, no.

This is before that.

Inclusive.

Nov does not know this.

And there is something really

over these last few episodes, Togashi has clearly gotten really interested in the idea of like doubles and fakes.

Not just doubles in the sense of like one character mirroring or rhyming another character, but a fake.

You know, we see this over and over with the

Morel's smoke creatures.

We also get this with Leol's sort of like faked rental powers.

Crowlos, the original faker.

Krolo's the original faker.

Going way back to Zepile, describing how art forgery works.

And then we have this false country.

You know, the big broader metaphor of the world.

Two false countries in a row.

Yeah.

NGL was also a fake country.

NGL was a fake country.

Iscorteau is a fake country.

Now we're in a fake palace.

All the apparatus of like statecraft and like rulership has been stripped back to to its most basic sort of like atavistic, violent

impulses.

Did you get BZF like actually introducing

like I fucking can't do all this shit by myself?

Like I'm running this country with like one computer and one phone.

And then later, BZF is about to introduce a false town, like a fake town.

Yeah, fake town.

And so over and over, this imagery of like

things being hollowed out or like facade shells of other things is great, especially as we're in the middle of this big arc of like what initially sets out as being

chimera ants are sort of like false humans, and then gets further and further into it where we're like, humans and chimera ants are sort of the same thing, and then now into sort of like the structures of power being deployed by these people are very often

shells where everything has been emptied out of them except the violent animus that keeps them moving.

It's not just that.

There's like a real obsession with like the truth of stuff being seen or like the like secrets behind things being seen.

There's to some extent it's a lot of the hunters talking about like Leo, for example, being like, I can't let them see my ability.

Letting someone see your ability makes you super vulnerable.

It's like literal vulnerability.

But then we also have people who are just like their appearance doesn't like, I'm not saying Ikalgo is a one-to-one trans allegory or even a very good one if he was, but the whole like, I'm an octopus who wants to be a squid, but in my heart, I'm a squid thing ties into this thematically, I think.

It's a part.

It is, there's a tapestry of potential slash less potential trans allegories.

Absolutely.

Like, a ton of them.

And I'm not like.

Ikako is a square menu of them.

Yes, absolutely.

I think it's just like, I haven't brought that up in a while.

Yeah.

And I don't want people thinking this is the only one that I'm claiming.

And like, I don't know.

I don't even know if I have have a conclusive statement on it yet, but it is something that Tagashi is really interested in and has continued to play with, like,

continues to play with through the rest of the show.

More fakes.

All the fake Chimera Ant Kings.

Yeah, I'm the king of speed.

I'm the king of whatever.

We've got the king of gluttony.

We've got

the king of Meteor City.

Oh, oh, yes.

Leol trying to be the king of the jungle when actually he's a tiger and also he's trying to be the chimera ant king.

social and with it social and with it he is i think we we we have proved that he is not social or with it that we'd never know because we see the scene with him and moral at the end and i would disagree and then i you know i keep coming back to like i i keep saying it over and over

but it's kind of like the the lock and key for me is i keep saying like hollowed out you know the king the king himself is such a good example of this right where like you can tell that poof and maybe you pee and pito but definitely poof sort of like wants him to be be this kind of a king, but instead it's like all the innards of his carapace have been scooped out, and all that's left is his like anger and superiority and resentment and uncertainty and violence.

The sort of the levers by which

like

kings and rulers work laid bare.

Nov has no idea that this is the best time to infiltrate the ant palace, and he says, the narrator says, and the

uh narrators are always uh ominous so i don't put much stock by this it's the narrator's job to be ominous you know

um

i like this line sorry jack i i don't know if you said this line exactly but uh the soldier ants and the various squad leaders personal favorites have nothing whatsoever to do with guarding the king whatever loyalty once existed between the king and his squadron leaders has vanished entirely self-interest is the only thing keeping them there knowing this pito and the royal guards have given them duties that are of little consequence and are expected to end in failure.

So have you guys heard about the mentality that enables fascism before?

Tell me more.

I don't know if how I it feels intentional to me that Takashi's immediately got like there's a regime in place and then everybody who's part of this is ready to stab the other in the back so they can get a leg up which is like textbook to how people operate within those systems.

It's a textbook

this

way that a frequent way they do.

I wrote this in my section of stuff that may or may not come up in my notes, but like the ants really are like, what if like the hunters were born with nationalism?

Like they are, they like, yes, believe in the ants as a thing.

They want to go, what if we did our, like the Hunter Association, it's kind of loose and squirmy, and we're not really sure what they do, and they're kind of involved in government, and they're kind of not, and they work, they work with governments, but they, you know, they're kind of like Jedi, but they're also kind of like mercenaries.

Yeah.

The ants are a society.

They have a government.

They have a structure.

They want to go like putting everywhere.

They want to, yeah, like there is like a that's not even a joke.

That's how I see them.

The like people,

you know, people are livestock.

We are like the real species.

You know, we are the inheritors of the earth.

Yes, we need to be in a position where we govern over them

and treat them like cattle, literal cattle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

They really,

they're grind set guys.

They're the guys who are like, you need to be making as much.

You need to be as productive as possible.

You need to get up in the morning and start day trading immediately.

But the king keeps playing Gungi.

Yeah, I know.

Because the king, he's got it.

Well,

that's not actually why.

The king is, I think the,

again, it gets back to the stuff of perception versus reality.

Well, and then also, like, as far as, you know, the grind set guy thing goes, it's, like, it's the people at the bottom wrong that actually have to be on the grind.

Once you get to the top, you go, oh, there's actually not really anything to do up here.

People,

you don't actually have to work.

Like.

It's not that part of it isn't real.

Like, you do.

Like.

You just got to watch the people stepping on each other to get to where you're at.

Right.

And then you're up here, and it's like, oh, I just have to appear important and powerful.

And

the king benefits from actually being a supervillain.

But it's like, oh, yeah, you don't really actually have to work up here at the top.

Hey, it's weird, isn't it?

How Gone Freaks is sort of a bit like, what?

It would probably be really frightening to both be and know Goku.

Yeah.

And it's weird how the king is sort of like, wow, it probably would be really frightening and kind of like empty and hollow to be Vegeta slash Frieza slash cell.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, it's like

I thought you were going somewhere else with that.

What were you gonna say?

I thought you were like, hey, these guys are kind of similar sometimes.

Oh, Gone and the King?

Oh, yeah.

But I mean, Yoshihiro Tagashi has never written a villain that he doesn't also put a big arrow next to and go, this is Gone Freaks.

Yeah.

Evil Gone Freaks.

Or Or just Gone Freaks, if I'm being honest.

Yeah.

Yeah, but it's like, you know, you see all of Vegeta's posturing of like floating in the sky with his arms folded saying, I'm the Prince of All Saiyans.

You know, you're a little kakarot, you're like a little worm.

I can't, you know, you can't do anything.

And Takashi dares to ask, what if that was all there was?

You know, what if all we saw of Vegeta in that scene,

that was all he had ever experienced, floating in the, literally floating in the sky for four days with his arms folded saying, I'm the Prince of All Saiyans.

Yeah.

You know, he never had a home planet.

He never had a family.

He never had any sort of like logical path to that ideology other than, I guess I can turn into a huge ape.

And that's what makes me the prince of all Saiyans.

The principle says I can stomp on whatever.

Someone who is working really hard for the worst people in the world and in the worst possible way is director Bzef.

Yes.

He is the collaborating bureaucrat.

You know, he is out there smoking a lot of cigarettes.

He is, like Keith said, he's just constantly receiving faxes.

Humans are still collaborating with the Chimera Ants on sort of like broad level, you know, with East Goteau as a country.

And Bisef is collaborating with the Chimera Ants directly.

And we learn that this is because he is involved in a

scheme of human trafficking or sexual slavery, where the people that are bringing in in food for the king are also bringing in women that he has selected from the sort of like sorted populace.

The disgusting email that he gets about them calls them available bodies.

It's grotesque.

Yeah.

And it leads to a twist that I did not see coming.

And I punched the air because he sees a woman on the list who he, at first I thought he recognized, but it turned out that he was just, you know, particularly struck by.

It's us that it was meant to recognize.

I did.

I was not used to her in this look because we see her name, Sinker Bell.

Fantastic code name.

That is a friends at the table ass pseudonym.

Yeah.

At which point, Marcos, remember him?

He is the general who is currently selling out East Goteau to the hunters in exchange for safety and freedom.

And we're seeing a little bit of how the hunters are benefiting from that.

He says, we've got a hit.

And it turns around and reveals that Cinco Belle is Palm getting ready to infiltrate East Goto on her own.

This was great.

I'm really glad Palm is coming back up.

Palm and I did not leave on the part on the best terms.

No, and I had a question about this.

This is not exactly relevant.

I'm just curious.

We talked a lot in that about how maybe the date episode would have been more

or less annoying if Palm like didn't turn into an attractive woman to go on the date and just like went as her crazy self.

Seeing that it was like a setup to this moment where she's like doing the same thing as part of an infiltration, does that make it any better for you?

Or does it not matter because it's a plot and plots are inherently contrived anyway, so they could have contrived whatever they want?

There's a couple of things here.

The first is it's always really fun to see the hens coming home to roost in terms of Tagashi's plotting.

I don't have particularly strong.

I think I found it

uninteresting and distasteful then, and I kind of stand by it.

I think, you know, plots are contrived and they could have contrived something else.

I think that this

is more interesting and compelling.

But I do also want to be very explicit about the fact that once again, we are situating kind of like our current highest-ranking woman character in a place where she has to go undercover into like a human trafficking thing to take out the guy.

I guess there's other women on the show.

Yeah, Komogi.

Sorry, Komugi, my bad.

Female hunter, at the very least, though.

Yeah.

You know,

we are not

out of the woods in terms of the show's kind of like weird deployments of Palm.

I will say that Palm as a shuddering, nihilistic force of revenge,

paired up with the requirements and strictures of an infiltration mission is very fun to me.

That like opens interesting doors, and I'm curious to see how that works.

I would not have picked...

What's her surname?

She has a great last name.

Siberia.

Palm Siberia.

As like my cool-headed infiltration agent.

But you know, here we are again with like what do women get to do in Shonen?

Cool-headed, more like polar-headed.

More like polar-headed.

Shut up.

Siberia.

That's not even a term.

We had a bad time with Android 18.

Android 18?

Is that Android 18, yeah?

Android 18 in the most recent Dragon Ball bonus episodes, which you can listen to at friendsetthetable.cash.

They're all really great.

And I'm really grateful for taking the time to have that conversation and thinking about the sort of latitude that is afforded to women in Shounen.

I don't think that what's going on here is, you know, half as egregious as what was going on with Tariyama and Android 18.

But at the same time, you know, I look at Mito and I look at

Bisky.

Oh, sorry, I look at Palm.

You know, here we go again.

It's one of those things where it's like, this is not an uncommon, we're back in the techno-thriller stuff.

This is not an uncommon thing.

It's right out of the, yeah, you have to, you see this in like James Bond all the time as well.

The specific sort of like

women are asked by the mission to put themselves in sexual peril

to get close to the outcome or whatever.

And so often these are how the stakes of the scenes work, right?

It's like, how close is it going to get to quote unquote going bad for our female character in this moment?

What type of violence will be enacted on them if it does go bad?

Will it be sexual or physical?

It is like it is such a bad, it is such a disgusting situation that has been concocted for this.

Like the horrible sex village is like, oh, night.

It's fucked.

It's a nightmare.

It's like truly evil.

And

important, like, the other part of this is like, okay, the answer upstairs harvesting 5,000 humans.

That's really bad.

The king is playing Gungi.

Like, what is going on?

The king's playing Gungi.

There's trees full of people.

It's the human downstairs that's like doing the most disgusting, vile thing that's happening in these episodes.

Subtle, but I do actually really like that we have a human collaborator in here and that the human collaborator is as capable of just, you know, the deepest recesses of

and it's important like he's collaborating because like he was already doing this this was like his history is like well i could try to escape like marcos you know or he doesn't know obviously this is this yeah above the story

uh yeah because marcos is the person that delivers the truck but like sure i could escape you know the ants might kill me

But I've already set up my village.

I've already set up my horrible village.

Maybe I should try to cooperate.

They'll keep me around if I help them.

It's terrible.

Should I help the Hunter Association?

They're great at looking the other way, man.

Yeah, sure.

They probably have been already.

God.

At this point, at the beginning of episode 106,

and it really was at this point, I just wrote down, Gonan Killio have completely disappeared.

Who?

Who?

Yeah.

It's so.

Just, okay.

Let me look real quick at my episode list.

Open file location.

I mean, go-to streaming websites.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Opened

crunchyroll.legal.com.

Okay, so we had episode 100.

We had episode,

sorry,

96 and 97.

Zero Gonan Kilua in those.

They were at

Phantom Troop.

Those are the Phantom Troop episodes.

Infiltration and Selection, Combination and Evolution, and Tracking and pursuit those are like half and half right those are like there's a lot of gonan killua in those episodes but this is also like the parts you know there's a uh whole bits that are purely the king doing games it's like the start of the games this is like um uh novan morrel setting up the stuff with marcos you know i would say it's like half and half gonen killua We get a big Kilua episode with no Goan, a big Goan episode with No Killua, and then four episodes in a row with neither of them.

We're at about 35%

Goan and Kilua content in these episodes, in the last 10 episodes.

Maybe less.

We talk a lot on this show.

It's worth saying, the pace of these three episodes is extraordinary.

They are just moving along at this

nasty, insidious little clip.

Glass six?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's true.

We have telescoped telescoped the stakes way in now for Nove's infiltration of the palace.

We are sort of locked behind Nove in a third-person perspective.

Yeah, it is almost like we're like watching a let's play of Nove.

Let's play hitman Nove.

Oh my god.

Oh.

Guys,

I'm making just a couple comedy saves, all right?

I guess you need to see what happens if I

throw this fire extinguisher at this ant, okay?

Okay.

IO interactive hunter-hunter game.

Yeah.

Wouldn't be my first pick, but they're so good at like detailed, bizarre environments.

Mm-hmm.

Um.

Okay.

He's kind of kind of Diana.

Sorry.

Leo, your target is moral.

I love...

This is where we see him using

his power, where we see him using hide and seek to open the portals.

The way he opens them is so cool, where he draws a circle in the ground, and some symbols sort of appear in a circle, and then he taps the middle with his finger, and there's like a water drop sound, and the ground disappears and becomes black.

It is extremely cool.

This is also really

restrained adaptive work.

The adaptation team must have known that that was how he did it since, you you know, since he showed up, since they read the manga.

But they said, no, well, let's wait to show it now.

You know, we can

skip ahead to showing him use the purple circles,

you know, the purple portals previously.

You know, we don't need to see

when it's revealed in

the manga.

I wouldn't be surprised if it was like, yeah, it is that thing of like, we know ahead of time because it gets shown eventually.

So we have to actively restrain ourselves to not show it until it's time.

Yeah.

He sees the meat orchard, and he's very sanguine about it.

He spends a lot of the first portion of this mission understanding well the stakes and being afraid of Peto, but at the same time, just clearly being like a trained, high-ranking hunter.

He's like, okay, this is bad.

This is where he's going to create.

He calls these humans the king's nen weapons to

attack mankind as his pawns.

At this point, I wrote down, why not just use ants?

You have ants.

It's because ants have free will, right?

And the king wants to be the best.

Yeah.

Like, no one ever was.

That's the song from

Pokemon.

Goku would just fist fight Charizard

and win.

Goku was killing Charizards when he was four years old.

Dragon Ball is literally four years old.

That's a a 2004 newgrounds animation is what you just said go killing charizards at four years old that's on newgrounds goku versus charizards typing this in very quickly who are charizards

this is this just makes me tired and angry to look at uh moving on he sets up three uh well he sets up two um

exits the first below the trees that's gonna be a nice surprise surprise for any of the hunters who come through.

The second, kind of up near the front door.

As he's getting closer and closer to the doors, he's like, no one is here.

What is going on?

Yeah.

And he starts creeping through the castle.

This is when a Chimera ant sees him and he decapitates him.

We talked about that earlier.

A bit that we neglected to mention here is that this ant is a sort of weird little bug.

Yeah, this is like the...

This is like, oh, there's an ant that looks like an ant.

What the fuck?

He also has.

Those aren't supposed to be here.

The the cutest reaction.

This ant is non-union.

He does not have any dialogue.

He turns to the camera and goes,

yeah, yes.

Because we know pointing up most Chimera ants.

We already know that this is just a random ant soldier and a various squadron leaders' personal favorites have nothing to do whatsoever with guarding the king.

They're just like, this is like Chichu's friend.

You know what I mean?

It's so sad.

Yeah, because this isn't just a drone regular.

These are low-ranking ants, but they're all...

They have relationships with the people, with the gods.

Yeah, yeah.

That ant was just like a guy who

knew Bloster or something.

If we're playing Crusader Kings, Keith, this ant gets killed, and we're like, oh my God, they killed Engelberg.

Or if we're playing Hitman, if we're playing Hitman, this is like a minus 10,000 points non-target kill.

Yes.

I really love this.

He manages to get rid of the body, but he neglects a smear of blood and he

treads on it with his shoe.

And then as he starts, you know, he is really panicked by this because he was like, this is this great moment where after he takes out the ant, he just sort of like freezes because he's like, is this it?

Have they, you know, was there another one?

And this really rattles him.

So he just like kicks off his shoes and is now just running barefoot.

Yeah, this is like the moment where the anxiety that was building really turns into panic.

Yes, I don't love that there is a pair of dress shoes covered in ant blood just loose in the hall.

I don't feel good about that.

What do you mean?

If the ants find that, they will know that they have been infiltrated.

And if they know that they have been infiltrated, Peto will step up the N and they'll scan the whole place for Nen and they'll find the gates and they'll be able to set an ambush.

We were warned about about that.

We were like, if the ants ever learn where the gates are, they just set an ambush at the gate and kill us all as we come out.

Yep.

Nov makes it to the staircase.

He's like sort of pushing himself to go further and further.

And we see

Poof's end

because Pito's still doing the surgery, sort of like flowing down the stairs like a smoke.

Publy almost, too.

It feels very like there's a different, there's it's similar in its like malicious like vibes to uh Pito, but it's distinct enough that you can tell it's not Pito.

Totally.

It's great.

It's really funny in the wiki at the end, it tells you every character that appears in the episode, and it'll be like

this character mentioned, this character debuted, this character image, if it's just a picture of them.

For this one, it says

Shawapoof, parentheses, Aura.

Hell yeah.

He appears primarily as aura.

It's worth saying there is no soundtrack here, and there hasn't been for the last sort of like four minutes of the infiltration.

Hirano and the music supervisors go for it with soundtrack in this show.

They are ready to let you hear the score.

And here it's just nothing.

It's just

footsteps, rustling clothes.

He says, I can't.

I can't move past this point.

If I do, they'll kill me.

What is that aura?

It's like it's filled with everything sinister in the world.

It's not that I fear death, not anymore.

What I fear most is that the ones lurking up there will go to great lengths to wring out any information I have on the king before killing me, which they would do in the cruelest way possible.

If I'm caught, I won't be able to resist.

That's what this aura is telling me.

This is as far as I can go.

How does he picture that?

He's describing being tortured to death.

Yes, it's Peter with a butcher's knife and a hammer with Nove as a dismembered doll, like with like toys as organs, like pinned to a table or a wall, and then like something.

What is it with the hair?

Is it like electrodes?

Like he's being electrocuted.

I don't even know what that's supposed to be.

I can't.

Oh, that's his brain.

It's

his brain.

Oh, it's being controlled by Dr.

Black.

You looked at this and went like, oh, Peter's going to give him a

Cressy the Clown haircut and dye it pink.

Well, it's so fluffy looking.

I thought it was hair now i can see why you thought so yeah like

i didn't know why they gave him pink hair but it's because it's brain uh

this cat has pronouns and she's gonna give it to you too

fame sorry

um you know we talk about games uh on the show all the time uh pito is the puppeteer and there's sort of like toy toy like stuff with her um it's it's great here in this scene uh in the toy nauve that has been taken apart instead Instead of internal organs, he has a diamond, a heart, a club, and a spade.

Oh, yeah.

You know, I wouldn't be surprised if this wasn't a Tagashi panel.

This is so specific.

Oh, it's also worth saying, this is a detail that I hadn't noticed.

Pito's very distinctive, like,

flame

N is visible around the image as a vignette.

Which is really cool.

They've also got massive clown shoes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How about that?

Trusty the clown reference.

Um

and he flees.

He just leaves.

Yeah.

He

he to his well, no, he puts an exit at the bottom of this huge set of stairs.

Such a great set, these stairs.

It looks like

a single standalone staircase with this like frieze or mural carved onto one side of it.

It has no banisters.

It's massive.

I would not be surprised if we have some sort of huge fight on it later.

Yeah.

His goal was to put that exit one floor up.

So this is why he couldn't go any further.

He wanted to go like 20 feet further.

And even that, he was like, nope, not doing it.

I think he, yeah, he says, like, the ideal situation would be to get up the stairs and plant the entrance.

Yeah.

And this is Keith talking about Hisaka in Heaven's Arena.

Right.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

It's so nice that we haven't had to talk about Hisaka in so long.

I know.

I mean, we're still talking about the sex village.

Yeah.

So, like, his memory lives on.

It's so sad, though, because

we're away from Hiseka, hooray.

But we're away from Karapika.

I would love to.

I would feel really stabilized to know what Karapika thought of this situation

and how to act.

You know?

Hey, my impression is that

from a certain point onward, there's a whole lot of Karapika happening.

Oh, sure.

Okay.

Yes.

Yes.

That is my understanding.

Krapiker and the troop are going to come screaming back into the story in a major way.

Okay.

Morale meets Leol in the rainy city, and he has one of the funniest introduction to an ant lines we've seen.

He says, hey, aren't you that lion guy I saw on TV?

I love it.

I'm just watching TV.

Moral rules.

Yeah.

Moral's great.

For a guy that's a full bad first impression.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He doesn't know.

I think he said that at the time.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Something that seemed bad at first had a different truth laying underneath it.

Well, it's, I don't know, it's weird because it's not like he's that good of a guy, but he's really likable.

Yeah.

He is that good of a guy.

Is he that good of a guy?

He's gotten better as a guy.

The guy who called Gorn and Killowitz

like adult tigers?

Okay, well, but remember when he swore allegiance to that trip?

Greeting on the hunter curve.

We are greeting on the hunter curves.

He's fine on that

fucking curve.

Look, i i i can't i can't allow us to say that wing wasn't that good of a guy but moral is wing moral is worse than wing as a guy the stakes have changed keith yeah you know what mr wing would do in the chimera end hog he would fucking die in six minutes we have no idea i have a pretty good idea Biskey didn't want any smoke with the ants.

And

do you think that's the one that you think that Gonan Kilua could fight Wing right now?

Yes.

Yeah, I do.

Do you think they could fight Biskey?

No, no, I don't.

But

Wing is Biskey's student.

Yeah, I know.

So are they?

Right.

But Wing is older.

So?

Who is Biskey?

Biscuit's must.

He's got his fucking shirt in.

Well, I think they were at the point in Hunter Hunter where they're really laying it on thick about how important real experience is.

That is true.

Do we know who Biskey's muster is?

Yes.

We do.

We do.

We do.

No, we do.

And not you.

Not you.

Not you.

But we.

Oh, that's exciting.

Okay.

He leads Leol

away to fight.

He just kind of goes running away.

This is really funny.

Him just turning and running to set up the arena in a different place.

And he specifically talks about giving Nove as much time as possible to set the exits.

So he wants to keep Leol away from the palace.

Yes.

Now the food has arrived at the

castle along with the women that Bezaf has sort of asked for.

This was notable because

Nov sees the trucks arrive and goes, ah, hopefully Palm is among them.

Now, I didn't know prior to this point whether Palm was going off piste or not.

Either would have been fun, but it was kind of heartening to think, all right, the hunters are moving in lockstep right now, even if Gon and Killiwa are not.

Yeah, they do kind of imply earlier that at the end of the last episode that maybe

Palm was, they say Palm was doing her own infiltration,

but they do reveal, like, yeah, this is part of the plan because Nove does a very big thing about it.

Is that the next thing?

I actually, this is my last button for the day.

No,

him, Nove melting down?

No, that's not for a while.

Right, right.

Um, at this point, uh, the director's kind of like uh awful situation is revealed.

I don't think we need to belabor this point, but he has sort of built a simulacra of a like a town or like a village street in a hangar under there where the women are being imprisoned.

It looks like a fairy tale village to go with the sinker bell-tinker bell thing.

Uh, yes, I think he calls it a pair, his paradise.

Is that yeah?

It's grody.

Gross.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's also really sad.

Like,

there's four women, including Palm, and, like,

when Bizef leaves after he picks one of the women to go with him, like, there's a really sad moment of the other two girls being like, oh my God, thank God we're here.

Like, this is whatever was happening to them before, this is better, which is.

Yeah, we

rough.

They've chosen us to survive.

It's grim.

Morel has made it out of the palace by now.

Oh, and sorry, Palm is

positioning herself in here.

She makes a nice drink for the guy.

I did like this a lot, where

you can see her planning all this stuff, except her internal monologue is the same as it's always been, which is just like shuddering,

violent intent.

Yeah.

All the times.

Now we get directed at someone good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

At a target who is good for the violence yeah an audit person who is a good person it's a good yeah thank you it's okay everybody understood you didn't just do a massive heel turn and say actually i think bizav has got it right i will say i do think i want to be clear it is funny and is morally good when she was threatening biscuit and gun and kill you as well that was also very funny to me it was very funny it was funny yeah

this is she says what matters most is not that i succeed but if i fail and am caught that i end my life quickly you're making this so reasonable

This is

scary.

Do what I think.

If I fail, I must cut it.

I fail.

I must end my life.

This is.

I mean, it's the same thing Nova's saying.

And it's also the same thing that Komegi say.

Yep.

Over and over.

The threat of being tortured to death by

the hunters.

Oh, no.

Oh, by

uh-oh.

By the Pope Power as.

Why doesn't

Why doesn't Nove exit through one of his gates?

Because instead, he crawls out of the entire palace.

He's not wearing any shoes.

His coat and

jacket are all torn.

He's having a terrible time.

And he drags himself out of the palace while sobbing.

Why not just pop out through one of his gates?

I wonder if it's like...

They're not...

Like the gates aren't detectable until they've been activated.

Like by using the gate, he would give his presence away.

Because I also wondered the same thing, and that's kind of the only explanation I can intuit.

I just was like, this is perfect for the melodrama.

This is

high melodrama.

It's so good.

Dude,

dude's barefoot in the mud and the rain on his hands and knees sobbing in a suit.

In a suit?

Yeah.

Looking all fucked up.

Yeah, he's looking like a comedian from 1995.

And he has three

thoughts here, each of which flow into the other.

The first thought is, I was so afraid of that aura.

I couldn't even begin to kind of conceive of it.

Yeah.

Thought two, Goan and Killiua faced up to that aura and are planning on facing up to it again, specifically.

How can they do this?

Is it their love for each other or for their friends or for, you know, like humanity in general?

And then, kind of like coming like a bolt in the blue, thought three is like oh my god i hope palm is okay and this is like genuinely kind of sweet you know i don't think that what's going on with no and palm is the greatest but this moment of nouv realizing in this moment like oh my god at least he's worried i care about her we've put her in this terrible situation You know, I was too cowardly.

I have just put Palm in a situation that I was so afraid of that I fled.

You know what?

No one's worried about going to Killiwa like this.

No, no.

Do you want to hear a little bit of him freaking out?

Oh, absolutely.

I thought it was a great scene.

Really good performance.

Yeah.

Oh, and we also get, by the way,

I mentioned when Kite died that the song that Killua that plays while Killua is delivering his, this is an important part of why I wanted to play this.

Killua is...

monologuing about like why this happened or and being like we weren't even worth a one-armed kite uh this is the same song this is like the second big instance of that song playing, who's the title of which I'm kind of forgetting.

Paul,

don't get in over your head.

I managed to plant the exit.

So even if your mission doesn't succeed, we can still execute the plan.

If you get caught, it's over.

That

vicious aura.

One glance

was all it took to break my spirit.

Gome,

Kiloa.

You've seen it.

You've seen their aura, too.

You were probably even closer.

You may have even touched it.

And yet,

how could you still face them?

How?

How could you bring yourself to fight them?

Is it to save your friends?

Or to protect humanity?

Tell me.

How can you fight

palm?

I think that this is like one of the big scenes of this arc.

I think that people really remember that as like one of the standout performances and bits of...

Bless the soul.

Yeah.

It is funny without the visuals.

Sometimes it does sound like he is laughing.

Yeah.

He's not having a total meltdown.

He is having a complete meltdown, just to be clear.

He's having such a meltdown, and I'm pretty sure that the next time we see him, there's like an immediate comedy beat.

Like,

it's crazy.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I'm pretty sure.

Keep your eye out for Nove because I think we're going to get a comedy beat from him next.

Yes, you hear it.

I also love that he gets it wrong.

That is not Pito's aura.

God and Kilio have not encountered that aura.

Yes, true.

I love his thought that, like, oh, there must only be one that's that bad.

Right.

Yeah.

No.

Do you think

Pito's N

feels the same way if it's if he would have felt the same way from Pito's N?

Or is Poof's maybe worse?

Or is he like, oh my god,

Pito's N when actually it was Poof's N and it's not as bad.

I guess that doesn't matter, but interesting that he may even now be underestimating Pito.

Yes.

Yes.

And then we just have a great setup for a Shonen fight.

You know, we move from this straight back into like fairly standard Hunter-Hunter.

This is actually very JoJo for other reasons as well um as leol squares off against

morel uh firstly more talks about um

the moment that an opponent reveals their ability is really exciting to him he's like oh feels tingly tingly i love it it's addictive

uh they end up in a in an underground chapel and demonstrating that the ads have both learned about irony and go leol says ha sorry you'll have to say your own prayers.

You see, I'm an atheist.

He had time to be an atheist.

That's so funny.

The pacing on these lines makes me laugh so hard.

It's really good.

Oh, all that running, and we ended up in an underground church feels so fucking like punchlined to a joke in a weird way to me.

It's like, I could hear Strong Bad saying it.

By the way, this is a little bit ringing the hunter bell for me.

The stuff with Moral.

He led me here knowing my ability works for me.

If he believes everything is going his way, he won't hesitate to put his abilities on display.

Then he compliments his own deep purple or

what is it?

The

purple haze ability.

No, it is deep.

What is it?

Is it both?

Is it purple haze, deep purple?

Sometimes it's called purple haze.

Yeah, purple, yeah.

Yeah, the moment an opponent showcases their abilities, it's addictive.

That's what hunters are about, baby.

Fighting.

They just like fighting.

They built the whole thing.

It's all about just fighting.

Leo starts to prepare for his rental power.

This is fun.

This is another Crollo power.

It's

a book that you draw from, and we don't quite know what we're going to get as the viewer.

And he puts in headphones and starts talking about a rock band called Black Planet.

It's so funny.

How long is the album?

Well, it's 12 songs.

And the 12 songs on their second album form a story.

So at the end, it's almost like reading a really awesome...

God, could you imagine if you were like eight months old, you were a fully coherent individual and you discovered concept albums.

Yeah.

I remember that from when I was 11 years old discovering concept albums.

It also was effective then.

It's almost like reading a really awesome book.

And this whole scene is really funny because as he is pitching...

Morel on Black Planet, Morel is like, hmm, yes, I know.

He's right.

That album does repass.

And Morel says, this is bad.

I have a hard time fighting someone with the same tastes as mine.

These are two.

This is, you know,

these are two guys who like prog rock or whatever in their guests.

They're talking about fucking Pink Floyd.

Like, literally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're a Ken Crimson guy?

Hell yeah.

Oh, my God.

I think they're more rush.

Well, that's just because Morel looks like he should be in Rush.

He does look like what if Getty Lee got huge.

Yeah, he's Getty Lee on gear.

Like, he's roided out Getty Lee.

And that's where the episodes end.

These ones.

Jump to your mean, mean part.

Ba, ba, ba.

He can't keep a squeaky voice when he's big.

I learned what young Brian Wilson looked like the other day.

Yeah.

From Peace Boys?

Yeah,

I didn't know what he looked like when he was younger.

Yeah.

Is he the one that's still going?

Depends what you mean by still with us.

Well, no.

I went to a music festival a few months ago.

No, that would have been Mike Love, probably.

Probably.

It was like him and his son and like a couple of other people who were like

the official cover band of the Beach Boys, it seems like.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think Brian Wilson stopped playing in 2022, but he's got a new album-ish coming out next year.

Oh, cool.

That guy's great.

Yeah, Brainless and

what a weirdo.

What of the all-time great weirdos?

Yeah.

If you like Media Club Plus, you can go to Apple Podcasts and you can rate us five stars.

Now, you might think, what if I wanted to give them a lower rating?

No,

we have put a NEN contract in place where if we spend

hundreds of hours

making this show, you have to rate it five stars.

It's not like a moral thing.

I'm not saying, well, you have to do it.

I mean, you literally have to.

Yeah, you have to.

You are unable not to.

And don't test that.

Sylvia, do you have a review?

Yeah,

I have one here from someone I would call friend of the show.

Grant from Check Ironicus Fame.

Yes.

Six Feets Under.

They are doing, I think they're covering Farscape right now on what used to be their JoJo's.

SeQuest?

Oh, my bad.

Oh, wait.

Are you sure?

Because I thought it was Farscape on Bizarre Podcast, which used to be their Jojo's.

Sorry, I think I misheard.

Grant is doing a different podcast called

Speaker.

Yeah, Grant is also doing a Sequest.

You used to only have to do one podcast to be a podcaster.

Now you have to do 1,000.

Sweet God.

That's why I worked on it.

Anyway, shout out Grant, who gave us five stars, titled this review, Cracking the Code.

Obviously, the secret of Media Club Plus is that the name is an anagram.

Next season, they'll mud up iceballs or some sub-duple claim before revealing the camel buildups that were in the works all along.

This podcast is the perfect synthesis of its parts and no duplicate sum.

I tried to make the quotes evident when I said the things.

I got it.

I liked that.

Another one, there's another one I want to read.

It's really quick.

It's from two days ago, five-star review.

I'm not reading your username.

It's just a bunch of letters.

It's literally all consonants.

Do it.

G-F-Y-F-U-T-G-Y-F-G.

Thank you.

This is my first exposure to Friends of the Table, and so far I'm greatly enjoying it.

I'm a big fan of Hunter Hunter, and this is the best discussion of the series I've found so far.

They're much more erudite than your average anime fan.

Thank you.

And I have a high bar to clear, but I have a pin that says that I wear it everywhere.

Much more erudite than your average anime fan.

Let's not write checks that we can't cash.

I can cash that.

That's an easy check.

Yeah.

Anyway, thank you, everyone who's

leaved us?

Left us.

A five-star review.

Listen, I've been talking for hours now.

It's okay that I got a little tripped up at the end.

And you can leave us a podcast.

You can leave us a podcast preview at Snapple

Broadcasts.

Please give us five stars.

July?

I think we're on July.

Someone wrote in from August.

So we didn't get any Barbaras because there was Barbara.

Allie's name was Barbara.

Yes.

I'm not surprised that there's no one named Barbara that was motivated enough.

We got a very long Billy review that I'm not going to read, but was pretty all right.

Thanks, Billy.

Thanks, Billy.

It's a Billy-related review, but it's a Billy related

review.

I'm here to do violence against my father is the title.

And

the first line is, My name is Not Billy.

My father is called Billy by many.

So we give that up.

We did it.

And And then write your own.

We introduced the concept of

doing a review versus the names.

So

I think that's what.

And

I don't see your full username.

It just begins with transmutation.

You did a fantastic job.

But it's three paragraphs and I'm tired.

That's okay.

Okay.

So, what are we watching next time?

Next time, the titles are Return and Retire,

Komugi and Gungi.

So we're not done with that.

Yeah.

And taking stock and taking action.

Huh.

Okay.

Yeah, these are all hunter-hunter-ass names, but you know, I remember when the king was born, and he was born in an episode called, like, no X Problem X with Ants.

I think it's really funny after episode 105, there's a different episode called Komugi and Goongi.

What?

Well, 105 was the episode that we just watched that was almost non-stop Komagi and Goongi.

That was called Resolve and Awakening.

Oh, no.

I think we are in Goongi Hell.

Yeah, it's Goongi Hell.

But I do think that we are in Googie Hell now.

Woke is Goongi.

And I have to go to Googie.

And I have to go to Googie.

I have to go to Googie.

You think Kamigi is a good hang?

Or do you think she just talks about Goongi?

She just talks about Googey and all the things both.

I think it's a good hang and talks about Goongi a lot.

If you're into Goongi, it's probably great.

If you're not into Goongi, you're going to not have a great time.

I think we are encountering Komugi at literally the best possible situation to encounter her.

I would say that's Googie.

I think that

a kind-hearted person would love to listen to Komugi talk about Goongi, whether or not they care about Goongi.

I agree.

I would probably enjoy it.

And I would also be like, hey, do you want to

get a hamburger?

I don't think you've had one of those before.

Do you want to get tissue?

I don't care, but I got allergies too.

It's like, fine, whatever.

Yeah.

You have someone who's going to be a little bit more.

If she comes and hangs out in July, I'll be in the exact same state.

Yeah.

But she will be playing Goongie.

Yeah, and I'll be learning Goongi.

You think she can teach?

I bet she can teach Goongie.

She's teaching Googie right now.

No, she's not.

What I mean to say is, I'm not a genius like the king.

Could she teach Goongi to a regular fool?

We have.

That's all she is, Jack.

We have already had.

Komagi is to the king what

Knuckle was to Goan just in the last little bit of Hunter Hunter.

Yes, you're right.

In fact, Keith, that is a cogent point that is coming at the end of the episode.

You're right.

Rather than just like a little throwed away point.

I think that's absolutely a way of thinking about it, right?

Yeah,

these sorts of like uh frame teachers popping in and out again, one of the like Knuckle, one of the better teachers in

Hunter-Hunter.

Is that it?

Okay, is that all we got?

I think so.

I think so.

Yeah, all right, bye,

bye,

bye,

bye,