Blood Red Herring - Hunter x Hunter ep. 101-103: Media Club Plus S01E32

I love technology.

Okay.

It's great.

It's wonderful.

Everybody loves it.

Okay.

So sorry for the delay.

Here we go.

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

As always, we're brought to you by Friends of the Table.

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

Well, you know, Blue Sky is different.

You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com/slash run button, where we're doing a lot of Silent Hill and we're doing Sonic.

We just started Shadow Generations.

We're doing our our replays of silent hill 2 and the let's play 20 years of sonic thing.

Go find all that.

It's a golden age for run button.

So go check out run button.

And let's see, one last thing.

No, I don't have anything else.

With me as always is Jack to Keith.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

You came in with a wild affect today.

I think you like hit, you hit a sentence slightly differently than usual, and then you just decided to lean all the way in.

That's exactly what happened.

Yeah.

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

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Instagram at Andrew Lee Swan.

And Keith, I'm really excited for your shift into selling things on TikTok because that's the voice I was doing.

Thank you.

You both solved it.

You each got half of it.

And also Sylvie Bullet.

Hello, my name is Sylvie Bullet.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie.

I was trying trying to do the other TikTok voice, but it's kind of

welcome to

it's really hard.

I'm Sylvia.

You can find me on,

I say everywhere.

You can't find me on Twitter anymore.

Blue Sky, Instagram, Sylvie Bullet.

Search for me there.

Yeah, my good posts are in Blue Sky.

I'm sorry to say.

Yeah, my...

Oh, I just deleted my Twitter.

You know what?

I'm going to do that right now.

Hell yeah.

I'm doing it on air.

You can also go to, did we mention friends with the table.cash for bonus episodes?

We didn't, yeah.

yeah.

There's a there's a

Dragon Ball Z the seventh bonus episode is in the can currently.

When this is out, that is either like has been out for a week or it's a week away.

So there's now seven bonus episodes, three Dragon Ball Z episodes, and I'm not exactly sure what's up next.

It's kind of an open question.

We'll figure it out.

Maybe you're not sure.

I was introduced to Sal,

and that was very exciting because you know when you go back and you see like a foundational sort of like media object that inspired subsequent media objects, Sal is sort of like a boring chimera ant.

Yeah.

In design.

The

chimera ant.

I think that Sal has a lot of personality that I wish that we had time for you to have seen.

Oh, who did we lose?

We lost.

Hello?

Hello?

Maybe we lost me.

Do we lose Sylvie?

No, Sylvie's here.

Maybe it was webcam turning on or off?

Sylvie.

Are you there?

Sylvie said, I lost sound.

Uh-oh, Discord.

Apologies for my technical difficulties there.

Are we on the show still?

Yeah, I had just thrown to you, and you didn't say anything.

Yeah, you threw to me, and then Discord, I went.

Discord heard it and said, I'm going to foil these plans.

Hey, speaking of foils,

I have a wonderful segment today, which is a friend of mine, when we were hanging out, took me to a hobby shop, and while I was there, I saw

packs for a game called well a game called Union Arena which apparently is like a crossover anime like trading card game my angles are like all reversed there's no video for the listener I'm sorry this is just for the discord call Sylvie is holding up a orange

card card pack like a foil card pack it shows gone kill your and hisaker on it there are how many cards are gonna and and next to her on the on the desk is another little pack of cards yeah so I've already opened one of these there's 12 cards in a pack we can go through the ones that I already opened.

Okay.

Should we describe the cards one at a time or like go around the circle?

I saw the shiny surface of who I imagine is going to be Hanzo under there.

You guys get to see the first pull I made, which made me laugh really hard.

Okay, so our friend Sesgara.

The very corner of his head made it look like it was going to be Hanzo.

Yeah, there's a bit of a shine coming off my ring light, too, that makes this look Hanzo-esque.

So yeah, yeah, I don't know what any of these cards do.

I'm probably never going to learn how to actually play this game.

Three-point says Gara.

Yeah.

Coming up next, we have Bacho.

Bacho.

He's sort of like, it's that scene where we're introduced to him inside the mansion.

Yep.

He's crushing his poem, I believe.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I of course got a Gonfreaks card.

I think he got a Gonkreaks.

Yeah.

There seems to be many Gone Freaks cards.

His ability is

look at the top five cards of your deck, reveal up to one Kilo Azoldic, Karapika, or Leorio card with four or less required energy among them.

It's really good.

I also got the Mad Bomber Gunthru.

There he is.

There he is.

Bona Lemon Kortopi combo.

An insult.

One toss, too.

Kind of.

Bona Lem and Kortopi.

Yeah, it really scrubs them out.

And the ability is basically just Cortopi's ability.

My theory is that this, so I dropped them.

My theory is that this card fact does not go further.

I haven't seen any cards past Greed Greed Island.

Okay, interesting.

But that could be wrong.

Chimera and stuff could just be rarer.

I got Ponzu.

I got Gitoraker, whose ability is this card is also treated as Ilumi, which I think is really funny.

That's awesome.

I got another Genfru.

Get through glasses Genthru.

Wow.

I got Kikia, Kilua's mom.

And I got Heaven's Arena.

With a big hunter

blimp appearing behind it.

Yeah, I think it's from the intro.

Or maybe one of the

exposition segments we got.

And finally, my one rare holog.

I got a holographic pheton.

Not a bad holographic.

I love to say, yeah, I like it.

But those are the ones that I know about.

And now we're going to get the live opening on air.

So excuse me, that's the television.

I'll lay up some

of the trading card game pack.

Okay.

I'm going to.

How do I.

She does not want to open.

There we go.

Okay.

Ooh, that's a C-minus open.

I'm sorry.

You shit, man.

I'm not getting this.

All right.

Our first card is Sub.

It's Sub.

It's Sub.

One of Gimsu's cronies.

Yeah, the red-headed one.

I got a different Gon Freaks.

Let's do a new zero.

Yeah, a less rare Gon Freaks.

Oh, a Bungie Gum.

What card did you all gasp at?

Bungee Gum.

Add one character from your sideline to your hand.

Oh.

I got Goto.

Is he the

butler?

We did get our bald friend Hanzo.

Yay.

I was actually just seeing into the future when I guessed Hanzo.

Yeah, you were.

Oh, my God.

Ooh, it's Mr.

Batera.

I don't know what he's doing with this.

Is he like Bethany?

He's talking about his girlfriend again.

Character gains one energy generation until the end of the turn.

Oh, switch to rest.

I don't know.

I don't understand any of this.

I got Shalnark.

Shellnark.

Play up to one character card with three or less required energy, one AP cost, and Phantom Troop Affinity other than Shalnark.

Okay, sure.

I got my Hunter license, you guys.

Congratulations, Twitter.

Hold on to that.

Yeah, Penny.

I don't know what this is.

What is this?

What the fuck is the fuck?

Torre.

I don't know what this is.

I'm going to the wiki.

I'll find out.

I'm going to keep moving.

I got no Nogunaga.

Hey, guys, maybe the Pokemon YouTubers are onto something.

Oh,

I got another Gone.

I got a Hollow Freaks.

And a Dohisaka.

Yeah, look at that.

Guys, I don't like that these two came together.

No, no.

That's a good Hisa 5, though.

He's a great Hisaka card.

Yeah.

Hisaka doing one of his pervert faces, and then the Gone card is him with, like, he's doing a little turn around.

He's looking like, I can see that pervert face from afar.

Yeah.

Torium on is a greed island card.

Okay, cool.

That is a beast on the verge of extinction.

It has a habit of stuffing things in its 4D pocket.

You never know what kind of treasure it could have picked up.

Sounds like Greed Island.

Sounds like Greed Island.

I love that there are just Greed Island cards in those.

Anyway,

that's.

Well, that was delightful, Sylvie.

I thought it would be a fun little segment when I saw them, and I'm glad it turned out to be.

Hey, guys, double hollow pool.

I'm like, double hollow, yeah.

Yeah, you should.

I wish we might put C-minus opening or whatever.

Yeah, no, I'm good.

You should.

What if you opened it and it was just the complete phantom troop?

I would scream.

It would be pretty loud.

It's probably a bad omen.

Probably for me

of the phantom troopers.

Saying Crowlow is not.

Do we know who number one on the Phantom Troop is?

Because Krowlo is not numbered.

I don't know.

Oh, this is a good idea.

Maybe he's an implied number.

No, because they all wear the tattoos, right?

Do we know he's not in the winter?

I don't know what that is.

He's the head of the spider, and the spider's legs are different things.

But there's 13 of them, so he's.

There's

Nupunaga as one, apparently.

Oh, okay.

I thought that's right, Sylvie.

Be careful looking up Phantom Troop stuff.

Oh, because they're back, yeah, and they're doing right.

Well,

the thing I found it on is the Hunter, Hunter, Reddit.

Shout out.

You guys are nice to us.

Oh, yeah.

Is that so?

I mean, I've just seen a couple.

I've saw just a couple posts recommending us on there and people generally being like, oh, yeah, I like that show.

And I just wanted to mention it and say hello.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

Hello, Hunter, Hunter, Reddit.

Yeah.

Yeah,

what I'm looking at here has a spoiler that's tagged, probably for the manga, but I can read the list if you want.

Oh, yeah, let's just hear it out of curiosity.

This is a sort of ramshackle opening for us.

We are starting to talk about these episodes, I promise, but

they're very, really important and there's a lot of stuff.

I'll just go from zero to twelve because Krolo is zero.

So we've got Krolo, then Nobunaga, Phaeton is two, Machi is three, Finx is five, Hisuka was four,

which, you know, Shalnark is six or nine.

Don't know what they have Shalnark six or nine and Pakunoda nine or six, but okay.

That's funny.

I guess you never get a good glimpse of it, or it's a process of elimination.

Maybe it's upside down.

Who knows?

Yeah, who knows?

Franklin, 7, Shizuku, 8, Bonolinev, 10, Uvogin, 11, and Kortopi is 12.

I've got to say,

the lowest-ranked member.

I think that makes sense.

Although I did recently see classic anime-style post of someone talking about Hunter Hunter, and it was an image of Cortopi holding Kilua when

they were doing their Krolo abduction plan.

And the post was like, Courtopi physically stronger than Kilua?

Question mark.

It's like, this is not, you don't have perfect information of this.

They were, their plan was to get caught.

You can't say either way if that's true.

Anyway, anime brain, it will rot it from the inside out.

Don't have that.

A different kind of anime brain.

When I googled Krolo's Spider Tattoo, it's a bunch of people who got Crolo's spider tattoo with a zero in it.

And I just want to say, if you're getting the Crollo tattoo, I don't trust you as a person.

I don't trust someone who's like,

I'm Crolo.

Oh, okay.

I see how it is.

Do you say I'm Crolo, Sylvie?

No, no.

I know which tattoo, which one I'd get if I was going to get one.

Which one?

It's the Shizuku tattoo.

It's the

coolest option.

Yeah, come on.

I just think there's something about identifying with the leader of the Phantom Troops that makes you

unlikable to me.

Okay.

Well, but you don't identify.

I just love you.

You're putting up energy that doesn't make any sense, Sylvie.

I don't get it.

No, I know.

I just'm goofing.

Okay, okay.

It's a big.

You know who I'm talking about.

I know who you are.

I know who you're talking about, and I agree.

This is like the anime equivalent of a finance bro.

This is like a rise and grind, but anime fan version.

Yeah, no, it's it is a sigma male.

It is a self-described sigma male.

It is a self-described, importantly, self-described sigma male.

Anyway, let's talk about these actual episodes.

We watched episodes 101, 102, 103.

We

next time, I believe that next

episode or two that we watch will be like the halfway point of

fan or Jesus Christ of the Chimera Ant arc.

I think that this is right before the halfway point.

Interesting.

Three episodes, four parallel stories.

We pick back up with Kilua's encounter with the singing sniper Squid Wannabe Ikalgo.

And after quickly bonding over being self-sacrificial, Kilua spares Ikalgo's life before being caught in another long-range death game.

And then we find ourselves with Gon and Malioron, who are working out the details of their new alliance.

Meleoron desires revenge against the king for killing someone close to him, and he believes he has the exact power they need to deal a fatal blow.

And finally, we see Moral's efforts in Peijing trying to keep the accumulated citizens of East Gorto safe from being sorted.

He's intercepted by Chichu, who's anxious to show off his new ability.

And all of this is intercut with the king picking up a new hobby, board games.

Specifically, what someone might call abstract strategy games like chess, Shogi, and Go.

A fictional game called Gungi, which he learns about after quickly beating the national champions of the other three games,

is the specialty game of East Gorteau, and the idea of quickly beating the best in the world at Gungi is immediately appealing to him.

Alright, I'm going to say two words now.

Listener

who is not familiar with Hunter Hunter.

Listener, no.

You will have not heard these words yet, and you will not expect us to be talking about them, but they are going to become crucial over the next 40 minutes.

We have entered the fish darts zone.

Who's in charge?

Me or the devil?

I think I am.

It's wild because this was a real moment where I felt the pain of your setting up the screenshot stream.

Because as fish darts develops, and we'll talk about that,

I was like, oh, that's what I would have shown.

I would have shown some fish darts.

Fish dart came up.

You would have robbed me of the delight that I felt 101 episodes into Hunter Hunter, seeing some of the most high-concept nen we have seen yet and just loving it.

And maybe like the height of

Nen combat as like a theatrical performance.

This is where I'm like, so glad I showed some JoJo to y'all.

The oh, did we get a ripped from JoJo JoJo name, too, for one of the abilities in this episode.

Basically, do we want to, can we, can we, should we say what it is right now?

Yeah, or should we wait?

Yeah, okay,

we find out that Moral's ability is named Purple Haze.

Purple Haze Soldiers Deep Purple.

It's great.

It really is.

It's straight out of JoJo.

Yeah.

100%.

Purple Haze is literally a stand-in Jojo, by the way.

Oh, wow.

I think I knew that.

Yeah, I don't know whose it is, but I think I've heard that.

Just like people who have a lot of people.

Panicatafugo.

Oh, right.

Panicatafugo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Ikalgo, Captain Icalgo, who, if you have forgotten, is the sort of octopus who doesn't like being called an octopus sniper.

Don't call him that.

Yeah.

He flees, planning on, say, you know, he says, I'll let the Ortho siblings take it from here.

But Kiloa sort of catches him.

He, like, grabs him by his rifle.

So he's, like, holding him at arm's length above this water.

And he can't dive down into the water because he's bleeding.

And as we saw at the end of the last episodes, there are these like awful

underwater chimera ants who are just like swarming at the taste of blood, even if it is Ikalgo.

And in fact, I think in the last episode when the host fell in, Ikalgo's previous host, we heard these piranha ants being like, that's Lord Ikalgo's host, but oh, it's too delicious.

I must eat it.

Yeah, they said that the blood calls to us, can't you hear it?

And then they gobbled up the host's body.

So I have two audio clips to play.

There's no new music in any of these episodes, but I did get this little speech from Ikalgo when Kiloa gives him 10 seconds to tell him Flutters, because he's telepathically communicating with Flutter.

Kilo gives him 10 seconds to explain what Flutter's abilities are, or he'll drop him into the water.

And I have that clip here.

I think that it's the English dub, obviously, because it would not help anybody to hear anything else.

That's sad.

Unless you can speak Japanese.

Ikaga's Japanese voice actor goes for it.

It's tremendous.

They're both great.

I'm going to give the edge to the Japanese VO, but they're both so good, and they both have this thing where they have this like super serious, self-serious voice that they put on.

And then also they flip a switch and go into this like cartoony screeching.

And they both do it, and they're both a little bit different than each other.

It's not exactly like the English VO doing an impression of the Japanese VO, but it is like along similar lines, and they're both very good.

Here is Ikalgo

refusing to give up Flutter's abilities to Kiloa to save his own life.

Nope, nope, that's not it.

Was the breathtaking whiplash squid?

If you think Octopi and Squid are similar, you're quite mistaken.

Octopi are ugly.

Squid are cool.

The squid's form is simply flawless.

Hmm.

Two seconds left.

I can't sell out.

One of my own!

Yeah,

I saw it in your eyes.

I only hope that

in my next life, I will be reborn as a squid.

How can you not love Captain Dikalgo?

He's the best Chimera ant.

I like...

Why?

Because I think you're cool.

Yeah!

Yeah, Kilua calves

in Yo-Yo and saves him.

And this was really odd because, I mean, you know,

the plot is going to go how it goes.

I'm curious about Kilio's sudden desire to save a chimera ant.

And I think that this might genuinely be because he thinks that this singing ant sniper octopus is genuinely cool and he's a 12-year-old boy.

This could be like a moment of that bubbling through.

I also wonder if it's like a post-needle being removed thing.

He is in the process of evaluating his own relationship with the world.

And sometimes that relationship is, I can decapitate Ramot instantaneously.

And sometimes it's like, well, you know what?

I'm going to let this octopus live because I know I'll be able to fight if it comes down to it.

It's the sort of Kiryu thing that Keith keeps coming back to, right?

Of like, Killiwa lets Ikalgo live because he knows, look, if this breaks bad, I'll be fine.

Goan has an explicit moment of that later on in these episodes.

I think it's, I think, Jack, it's partly that second bit.

And it's also, I mentioned in the recap, that he recognizes

a similar sort of self-sacrificing nature to his own in Ikalgo.

I think that's what he's saying is cool.

It's the not giving up on your butt, not betraying your friends that is the cool thing,

which does, I think, have a lot to do with the needle and in like sort of having not just post-needle, but post-Hunter exam sort of reformed like a set of values

and kind of gone's willingness to sort of spare

people that like um

that have this like humanity to them

like it's kind of they're moving in opposite directions of like gone losing his insistence on doing that and kilowa sort of gaining it steadily over time

uh yeah yeah there's also i mean there's a later scene with gone and we'll talk about it where it's like, oh, he says something really scary.

Kilua used to do this and talk like this, and he doesn't anymore.

Say yeah, Sylvie, he says a couple things that are real red flags.

Yes, he does.

Yeah.

Yeah, but over the course of these three episodes, Goan and Kilua both meet ants that kind of challenge their understanding of ants.

It was as I was watching this that I was thinking,

a lot of the

chimera ant sort of like articulation of their

uh internal, their complex internal lives is something that the viewer has spent a lot of time with, and Colt has spent a lot of time with, and so presumably have Morel and Nov and the chairman.

But Goan and Kilio haven't seen a ton of like ants sitting down and talking about themselves or about their relationship with other ants.

And over this, you know, Kiliwa meets um

Ikalgo and Goan meets Melioron, and it challenges their understanding of what an ant can be, even though, from our perspective, these are both fairly normal positions for Chimera ants to take.

Yeah, Kilua really takes a flyer on Ikalgo.

And it pays off.

It does pay off.

He is kind of lucky that it pays off.

I mean, I guess it wouldn't.

He's so much stronger than Ikago.

I think that, like, similar to the Ortho siblings who we'll meet in a second,

he's only in danger based on, like, he was only ever in danger from Ikago based on like bad positioning

Yes

Like, you know, that is sort of sort of the strength of Nen as like a system that these fights have to like operate through is

you can take someone like Ikago who poses no real threat to Kiloa and put him like deeply on the back foot by virtue of like

ideal positioning for Ikago and, you know, exact in ideal positioning for Kiloa.

And still, he's able to do that, like, absolutely insane triangulation thing that he does, where he calculates the trajectory of the bullet via, like, what, two centimeters, four centimeters of, like,

of N space, where he moves his head.

Like,

I couldn't have done that with a pen and paper, and Kiloa does it instantly, sort of, you know, instinctually.

It's funny, you talk about them like they're pieces on a chessboard.

I wonder who else is thinking of things like pieces on a chessboard.

Who could say?

Yeah.

A horrible little lizard

creeps out and attaches a badge marked Bar Double Bull on Killiwa.

This looks like Big the Cat's Froggy after it eats the

Chaos Emerald.

Oh my God.

It looks exactly like that.

So if you've seen that, that's what this thing looks like.

Froggy Chaos emerald.

I know exactly what you're talking about.

You're right.

Now, I am not familiar enough with darts to get the clue

of what was about to happen here.

But I knew as soon as I saw this little badge attached to Killiwa's clothes with a fucking safety pin, I was like, all right.

Some crazy nen is about to start happening.

Yeah.

And, you know,

this is probably not the weirdest nen I will ever see.

It's definitely not the weirdest nen I've seen seen up to this point, but I am reminded of Heaven's Arena and all of you and Austin saying, Jack, be calm.

Stay, stay.

Be careful drawing conclusions.

Yes, because

we see...

What can only be described as a merman.

This is Ortho, and he is cuddling with his sister, a mermaid, in a sort of a close-up.

It's not terribly clear where they are.

They have this real sort of like Salem Moon incestuous siblings vibe thing.

Yeah, they're not just cuddling.

She's sitting on his lap.

She's sitting on his lap.

They're kissing.

Yes, it's insane.

Is that...

By the way, by what function can a chimera ant be a sibling in any more or less?

Yeah, my note here was.

Siblings, Questabot, Questerbock, Questabuck?

Yeah.

So maybe they just call each other that because they're insane and not because it's true.

I figured they were like siblings as humans and they had those.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, maybe.

That could be it.

And they played a lot of dots as humans and they were like, no need to change the habit of a lifetime.

Gun to my head, I would say that it's gross simply for being gross and that

there's

by trying to explain it with logic, you're ruining that it's just meant to be disgusting.

Fair.

Or it's meant to be what it appears, however, whatever the intent behind that is.

I don't know.

It's not a consistent Sailor Moon thing, but there are at least one set of Sailor Moon villains that are kind of.

I'm thinking of like these sort of incestuous tree aliens who show up at one point.

It's a weird show.

We gotta watch some Sailor Moon.

Yeah, we gotta watch some Sailor Moon.

We gotta watch some Sailor Moon.

So,

Killiwa, he has a melody in his head, like

the melody of an arcade dart machine starting.

And he is suddenly pierced in his hand and chest by like a sword-nosed fish.

I still hadn't figured out that this was darts yet.

They make it a wild delight.

They make it very clear.

Yeah, in one second, they make it very clear.

What makes it so clear?

What happens?

Yeah, Jack, what happens?

He has like a dartboard projected onto him.

It's as though his skin and clothes and arms become a dartboard.

It's like he gets a very weird image at a carnival.

Yes.

And on his clothes as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

On his clothes, too.

Make me a dartboard.

And then he just starts getting fucking perforated.

Yeah.

This is an extremely long and violent...

torture scene, basically.

But it's also

very funny because he is getting walloped by these sort of like placid-looking sharp fish.

Right, they live in a frozen

movement that they make is to like thong into

him when he

gets hit.

They make a very big deal.

This is, by the way, this is called Death Games Needlefish to Darts.

Such a good name.

At this point, we get a wide shot, and Ortho and his sister are just in a bar playing darts.

And it's funny, you know, you obviously build

in a when you can, you build your

nen power based on like what you like and are good at.

You know, that's the hope that you could do.

But then it's like, okay, did they have this bar already?

And they built their power based on that they already love doing this, or do they have to build a whole underwater bar

just to facilitate them having this power?

It's insane any way you look at it that this is what the ants are.

They have to swim out of the bar at the end and it's like the fucking live in a pineapple under the sea.

Yes, it's the bottom of the ocean, basically.

It's so funny because this is, it's so important to me that this is what ants are doing when they're off screen.

They're building an underwater bar to play dart sand.

When the whole time during the first half of the Chimera Ant arc, when you didn't know about underwater Chimera ants, this is what they were up to.

I said it in the last recording, where I was like, let's cast our minds back to that one single ant that attacked Killua and that kite shot and how far we've come.

It only gets funnier when you see them like playing dust.

Yes, they're playing.

You know, Melly Erwin's smoking.

Like, when did they even have time to start smoking?

The only conclusion you can draw is that he remembered his old self and was like, oh yeah, I used to smoke.

Let me get back to doing that.

Born with a nicotine hammer.

This is, it's so gross and weird.

They spend so much time talking about exactly what's going on here.

Oh, quickly, we do cut away to Goan eating dinner with Melioran, who's kind of concerned at how quickly Goan trusted him.

He explains that liars lie, so you can't trust people who make promises that they aren't lying.

And this is where Ghan says his first scary thing: you know, it's okay if you're lying.

I trusted you right away, but if you're lying, it'll be a lot easier for me.

I won't have to show you any mercy.

I could just kill you, you know.

And is this also where they do like the animation of like murder eyes?

He's got ellimi eyes.

He's

like scary.

Actually, he's got the same eyes as the dog, Mikke, the dog.

Does he really?

I mean, like, but the same sort of like I noticed his like not identical.

I noticed

his creepy, sort of placid expression, but I didn't notice that it was, like, like any other character.

Yeah, his, like, pupils are, like, completely gone in a way that, like, tends to signal this sort of thing.

Yeah.

Um,

it's great.

It's really funny.

The, the, um,

we are with.

Maliaron in this scene, you know, he is our perspective character here, as we see him saying, wow, Goan is so naive and trusting.

And we go, we say to him, yes, we've been feeling this for 101 episodes.

And then we see Goan turn suddenly and Melieron goes, wow, okay, maybe you are the person I'm looking for.

And also I'm afraid of you.

And we're like,

it's amazing that 101 episodes in, we are now getting the protagonist's shift in scenes with Goan in.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He really does have loomy eyes.

Yeah, he does.

I noticed how creepy they were, but it's, it's it's harder to notice because they're like brown.

Yes.

But they're like big and ovular and really horrible.

And the camera knows that it's horrible.

Yeah, his face is like shaded over a little too.

It's creepy.

It's creepy.

It's creepy and it's meant to be creepy and it plays as creepy.

Meanwhile, Killiwa is getting obliterated by these fish.

Because they're dots, Ortho can only throw three at once.

So what happens is Killiwa gets violently impaled by three fish, and then they all disappear.

They sort of like pop out of his body, and then he gets impaled by three fish again.

As the Ortho brother sort of leisurely walks to the board to recollect his darts, he gets a quick break from being like perforated by darts.

Explain how this works.

The nenfish don't exist until they pierce his skin.

They're very clear about this, that he can't dodge them because they don't come from anywhere.

They materialize at the site of impact

which is important

this sort of stuff makes demon world really complicated and i was not prepared for this tell me about i feel like it makes demon world more likely how else could you explain this except the fish are transporting from one world to the other i would love to know about jack what this says about demon world to you because you have we haven't talked about demon world i want to say in 10 episodes of

of Media Plus, I had bigger, weirder fish to fry, Keith.

Yeah, yeah, hey, no, it's I'm not no blame.

I'm just curious what's happened.

Okay,

so as I remember it, of course, I wrote the book on this, but I don't have the copy on my desk right now.

Available where all fine books are sold.

Absolutely.

Yes.

Thrift stores.

Demon World is the source of my headphones.

Hold on.

Sorry.

One sec.

Okay, I'm back.

Demon World is the realm of Nen, and interaction with what humans call Nen is actually an interaction with a sort of like

another place where

Nen is being arbitrated and executed.

And, you know, it's sort of like the spiritual realm of Nen.

This is Demon World.

Fish Darts makes this a little more complicated because

do the does Demon know that it is playing fish darts or does it just sort of be like I have to make fish appear very quickly over there

do the fish darts are they meaningfully different from the indoor fish from York New City to you just because they indoor fish live in demon world they're just demon world animals

but what about when they

are eating away at your body

oh they're the Krollo has brought them over from Demon world

and couldn't isn't couldn't that be the same thing as these fish

no because these are these are dots

but maybe they're also has magical darts I guess I oh I guess it's to me we don't actually know the nature of the fish are they objects or animals

yes this is why it gives me a lot of trouble demon world theory does not hold up well when chimera when high concept nen is introduced.

It actually holds up pretty well to certain kinds of high concept nen i think about like krolo's ability dovetails really well with demon world yeah um

but fish darts less so what about chitu's power we won't talk about it yet but but just a gut reaction to how it lines up with demon world

not well no

no not well some of the chimera ants nen powers feel like someone has like made a mod in minecraft they're like i've modded the world in a a very particular way to let me do my one weird thing.

And that feels like a way of changing the world that you,

the Nencaster, are in, rather than interacting with a sort of external demon world.

How does Kiluwa puzzle his way out of being instantly perforated by demon darts from Demon World?

The short answer is he knows how to play darts, which is really funny.

Right.

Actually,

as far as the show is concerned, that's the long answer because he does a lot of explaining the exact rules of 501.

So

he has intuited the particular kind of like variant of darts that the siblings are playing.

Because of his first move, he doubled in.

He hit a double four and he told him.

So Killua was able to be like, oh.

Yeah.

And he

different parts of Killiwa's body relate to different sectors of the dots.

Yeah, and the Ortho brother is very gloaty about this.

Killua can hear him in his head taunting him this entire time.

It's extremely performative.

It is.

Yeah.

This is like the...

This is like pure distilled sort of like serial killer

or James Bond villain have to explain my plan before I kill you sort of thing.

It is like absolutely...

It is the most that that anything's ever been.

And as far as we can tell, sometimes we see nen powers that require the condition that the power is explained before they fire.

This doesn't seem to be that.

He really does just seem to be gloating.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean,

the whole conceit of his power is that basically he cannot be touched the whole time this is happening.

Unless he misses.

That's true.

All of

the punishment that the target has absorbed will be visited upon the ortho siblings.

Yeah, there's some sort of contract.

There's an implied contract between the siblings that makes them invincible while the game is on.

Did everyone get that?

Kind of.

I don't think it.

I think it's the nature of the ability that makes them invincible while the game is on, less so that the contract itself makes them invincible.

Well, sorry,

it requires them both.

It seemed to be that it's the sister that provides the invincibility and the brother

that provides the menfish.

Yeah.

Yeah, you nailed it.

Yeah.

And as soon as this thing was introduced, where, like, if the brother misses, all the damage is turned back on him, I was like, oh, this is why

we have seen such prolonged violence on Killiwa because we're going to get the sort of Indiana Jones Holy Grail

sudden rush of violence on the siblings when it fails.

But Tagashi is...

No, so

they reverse Greed Islanded you.

How did they do it in Greed Island?

Goan lost his arm and you were like, oh my God, Goan lost his arm.

That's real.

And then they just give him his arm back with a card and you were like, oh, hell.

And in this one, they're like, by the way, all of this damage can be reversed if the guy misses the last shot.

And then you go, oh, well, then obviously that's what's going to happen.

Nope.

He's just dying now.

I love it.

It's so well executed.

Yeah.

It's really, really good.

So he lines up his last shot, which is going to be right in the middle of Killua's forehead.

And Killiua seemingly goes down dead.

The author's siblings have just such a great Chimera ant line.

They say, let's go upstairs to check his corpse.

And they swim up out of their chairs and they hear a sibling kiss.

And a secret handshake with the champ.

Over a nice cup of Folgers.

I guess it is.

Yeah, it's that time of year, huh?

Yeah, it sure is.

Volgers.

That time of year.

You don't know about the famous Volgiers incest dad.

I'll show you after recording.

It's terrible.

The famous

incest ad.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Wow.

I did not expect to hear those words.

How else would you describe it?

I've clearly not heard of it, or I remember.

We cannot.

Because as

they

bend over Kiliwa's body to make sure that he's dead, he does what is becoming a Kiliwazaldic hallmark, which is the instantaneous double decapitation, leaving enough time for the decapitated heads to chat with him.

This is this is so we've had an increase in how long things can stay alive with their heads off.

Like, the first time a guy had just enough life in him to look at the chimera ant that killed him.

The second time, you have some like genuine dialogue happening from a decapitated.

This is a full conversation with two decades with two heads

yeah they talk for like two minutes

they have a back and forth they they really kind of push you into the bath of yes you can just talk with your heads off especially if you're a chimera ant my darts are perfect and then we get funny yelling at the this the girl yelling at the boy and they start arguing in the background while they slowly die yeah this is where he explains the rules of the darts right um

This is what we said earlier.

Oh, Kilua, you mean?

Kilua, yes.

Kilua goes, I knew because I counted.

While you were hitting me, I counted, and I was pretty sure you were playing like 501, and I could tell that, you know, we were getting close.

And so you're right, I never would have been able to catch the dart,

but I knew exactly where you would hit.

And then the narrator comes in with the facts to back up what Kilua is saying.

Kilua chain.

This is the most insane.

I think that this is the most insane thing that they've said in the show so far.

It's understated, but it is insane to have to come out and say this.

Kilua changed his aura into electricity to maximize his reaction time.

Yeah.

Rather than wait for his nerves of his skin to sense the dart, relay the signal to his brain, process it, and send a command to his hand, he programmed the aura around his hand to send a signal directly to his muscles, grasping the dart the instant the aura sensed it it rules that's the problem yeah it makes sense to me

so i'm with you keith this is

uh arbitrary this is i love it i genuinely i think it's really cool the idea of like sending a like using your electrical nen to send impulses to your nerves right i there's there's multiple things going on i think i it is insane it's i think

Secretly the most insane thing that's happened in the whole show so far.

The other thing is,

have we noticed the narrator is becoming increasingly present?

What's going on with that?

There's a third,

like Tagashi in the manga is free to use like a narratorial voice whenever he feels like it.

And then all of a sudden, we get a hundred episodes into the manga or into the anime.

And it's like, oh, this stuff is like becoming really hard to explain what's happening like with visually and with dialogue.

and so they just shrug their shoulders and go i'll just have the narrator say all of it well i wonder sylvie i know you you've said that you're not like fully caught up in the manga into where we are in the show but like i guess some of you have also read it it's been a long time since i've read it no i haven't read it does tagashi like do narration similar to like what the narrator in the show does like is there like a break-in panel where he's like explaining like how fish darts work and shit like that

be like overlaid over images sometimes but yeah there are very famous pages of Tagashi's writing where it's mostly just text.

Yeah, I've definitely kind of a joke about Hunter Hunter.

Is it one-to-one?

I know it's not like perfectly one-to-one, but is there like one-to-one moments where it's like, oh, this is like, this is well-known narration that Tagashi did in the manga, and they made sure to put it in the anime?

Okay.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.

Yeah, there are probably some moments that are in there.

I'd have to check when they come up.

Sure.

If, if, if, my just gut feeling is that if there's moments of the anime directly quoting the manga, these narration bits would be where they would do that.

But this is then re-localized in, like, it's, this isn't the script of the,

of the original show.

This is like the localized script.

So it is different because of that.

I would be shocked if this whole thing and more wasn't in the manga.

One of my favorite sort of like hallmark narrator lines that has started to emerge is um

so-and-so's power works like this he'll just he'll like begin a scene by saying that outright um i think it's fantastic uh

i i i think that the show is well written i think that you know hunter hunter's like uh visual and narrative imagination is really really good i think its pacing is good and when it's not good it's interesting you know it's pacing is doing something interesting i don't often have moments where I'm like, the dialogue is brilliant.

You know, like moment-to-moment, individual lines where the dialogue really sings for me.

It's much more about the sort of like the broader picture.

But there were two moments during these episodes where I thought that the actual, like,

you know, letter and word line writing was really solid.

And one of them was Killiwa describing how he won by knowing how to play darts.

And then he said, after that, I just had to do the math and endure the pain.

And that was like such a good, quick kilo Zelda line of just like, do the math, endure the pain.

Yeah, that's that's him.

That's his character.

Yeah, that is.

That's Kilo's MO.

Down to a T.

The last thing I want to say about

this narrator thing about rewiring your aura, this is like,

you know, so delightful.

It's so funny.

I love it.

I think it's so stupid, but in a good way.

It does.

It is important that we get this stuff now because of how much the show relies on this later, both in terms of like narrator interaction and also

like Kiloa doing stuff specifically.

It's setting things in motion.

Right.

There's in the same way that like

you do get some headless stuff before these characters spend seven and a half minutes talking with their heads fully gone.

The you know, the narrator is also being eased into the show as a bigger and bigger part of it.

Um,

and uh,

and on the dialogue, I think, I agree, Jack, you know, the, the, it's not often that, like,

just like, oh, wow, like the actual words are like beautifully written, but there is this constant, like,

like, wow, that's so

in character.

Like, that's the, that's the thing that Shonen gives, I think, is like, when a character is being super in character is what, is what Shonen really excels at.

And so it needs to be sufficiently written and also wildly in character.

And that's...

It's weird to talk about like economy of writing in a Shounen too, especially Hunter-Hunter, because it was very explanatory.

Yeah.

But I think one of Tagashi's big talents is when he can just completely sum up a person's deal in like one or two sentences.

And like, it doesn't feel cheap.

It just feels like, oh yeah, that is just, that's Kilua.

Yeah.

It's gone, et cetera.

Yu Yu Yu Haga Show is another show that has like a huge dynamic range in its ability or willingness to be economical in its writing.

I talk about like the first four or five episodes of that show all the time.

I think it's some of the most economical writing, like this side of Back to the Future, where the first 25 minutes of Back to the Future, I think is

nearly to a fault.

It is pure economics.

There is not a wasted line of dialogue, not an ounce of fat.

You go watch that movie, every single thing gets like picked back up on later.

Every frame has something in it that's important later on.

And Yu Yu Haka Show is like that

as well in those first five episodes.

And then you'll have something like the Dark Tournament, which is like

the fattiest steak that you've ever had in your life.

It's so, there's so much.

It's like, it's not chaff.

It's just extra.

There's just a rich, it's rich.

Oh, thank you.

It's rich.

Okay, back to Hunter, Hunter.

Kilo is passing out on the ground, dying.

This is new to him.

You get the impression that Kilo has sort of never really thought of himself as someone who would be bleeding out when he went.

Yeah.

Really good voice work here.

Yeah, really good voice work.

Speech sort of slurs a little bit as like it gets worse and worse.

You can tell he's losing conscience.

It's sad.

He's like talking about how warm the blood is and how cold he feels.

It's like gross.

Yeah.

You don't

think of a way to maximize his ability.

The saddest thing he says?

Yes.

Dre, do you have it written down or should I read it here?

He says, Goan, I'm sorry.

I wasn't any help at all.

Oh, my God.

Dude,

fuck up.

We need the therapy hunter to show up real bad.

Yeah.

Yeah, where's the therapy?

We need a three-star therapy hunter.

I think the three-star therapy hunter.

Let's do it.

The three-star therapy hunter does show up because as a great killer line here as well, he says, that's a lot of blood.

Is all of it mine?

Which is another fantastic

killer in Synectoke line looking at the entire show.

Killer saying, that's a lot of blood.

Is all of it mine?

Ikalgo's tentacle appears to rescue him, and Killer just looks up at him and says, octopus.

And of course, Ikalga freaks out don't call me an octopus

runs away on like stout little legs because he's like

he's great Ikalgo is sort of like testament to how sharp Tagashi and the anime team's character writing is that he he is so silly and he looks so silly but you absolutely buy this guy's personhood through and through.

Yeah.

Oh, he very quickly has gone from random encounter to joke character important guy.

By the way, I forgot to bring up my favorite thing about his little speech is

his octopus speech.

He's talking so seriously about like people think octopuses and squid are similar.

They're not.

And then, and you gear up to like hear something like real about the difference between octopus and squid.

And he just goes, octopuses are ugly.

Squid are are cool

it's this subtitle he says squiderification yeah in the in the subs he says uh squiderific instead of cool

uh and and what makes this especially funny for me is that you know ikaga looks like a child's cartoon drawing of an octopus with a sniper but when he looks up at that uh whiplash squid in the water we get this fucking david attenborough beautiful realistic drawing of a squid swimming through blue water.

Yeah, it is a cartoon octopus, a poorly drawn cartoon octopus versus like a beautifully drawn squid.

Um, yeah, and so uh, Killer says, What are you doing?

Sort of passing it out of consciousness.

Uh, Dikalga says, I'm turning traitor, you dummy.

Look, I know an unlicensed doctor.

Uh, and then speaking to himself, he says, You know, you looked at a good-for-nothing octopus like me and said, I looked cool, and slides down a beautiful, sort of like underwater water slide current to go meet the unlicensed doctor.

Hunter Hunter is brilliant because, in the midst of Meriwem, Peto, the dread of the kings sorting approaching, one of the things I am most excited about the possibility of seeing is the unlicensed doctor that an octopus knows.

Yeah, when did he meet this octopus?

When did he meet this doctor?

And

what is an unlicensed chimera ant doctor?

Who is making the licenses?

Well, you don't know that it's a chimera ant.

It could just be a human doctor, an East Gortowian doctor.

That's true, yeah.

He takes Kiliwa to the doctor from Kentucky Root Zero, who replaces his leg with a sort of horrible crackling electricity leg.

Yeah, that's a little bit more

than $1 million.

Yes.

But I know some friends at the whiskey company you can work for.

Would you like to pay $1 million or be a slave?

For the rest of your short life.

Kentucky Red Zero fucking rules.

It's been long enough that I don't know if, like, I need to finish that game.

It, I people still remember it.

It is as good

as it can catch.

I played Act One when Act One came out, and I was like, this is amazing.

I can't wait to play the rest of it.

And then, what happened between then is that the idea of an episodic game became so exhausting to me

that I didn't play it until Act 5 came out.

Act 5 came out, I played the whole thing through, and I went, That's the best game I've ever played.

I should finally

game for me.

It's so good.

Yeah.

Do not be individuals either.

I just remember the first act and me being like, oh,

I know all these places.

I know all these places.

Oh, my God.

I bet, Dre.

Yeah.

I've been in this kind of like the bar scene where they describe like you walking in the bar and the only thing on the TV is like a Kentucky basketball game.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I've been in a million bars like this.

Yeah, you specifically really need to play this, I think.

No, I know.

It's been on the to-do list forever.

You can install it right now.

If you've a lot of big things happen in this episode, yeah.

Delete Twitter and installing Kentucky.

You're out, Sir.

We're feeling your life get better as this episode goes on.

If you're listening and you've only played like me, you only played Act One when it was new, or maybe you played Act One and Act Two.

You cannot even imagine the scope of the game as it continues.

It is like, I mean, it is like a series of games.

It's really not like five acts of one game.

It is like a bunch of games,

like short games with different ideas at different scopes.

It's wild.

Anyway, let's not talk about that.

Let's keep going.

I would love to keep talking about Kentucky Route Zero, but

we're on episode 102: Power and Games.

That's the first one told me Calgo and Lightning.

Goan objects to Maliaran smoking a cigarette, Not because of his health, but because he says your power is invisibility.

And if you smoke a cigarette, everyone will

be able to

smell you coming, bud.

Twitch, Melioran says, you are like a little baby.

Watch this.

And he reveals that his invisibility power is actually a decoy.

You sort of get the impression that he can turn invisible just because he's a chameleon.

His nen ability is something called perfect plan.

God's alibi.

Perfect plan.

Yeah, God's alibi is important because it makes it the coolest name ever.

Yeah

God's alibi is so good.

Yeah,

I'd forgotten about it.

I hadn't written that down in my notes.

This power is

low concept nen.

But the moment I started thinking about it, I couldn't stop thinking about it.

Yeah

when Malioron holds his breath, nobody can detect him at all.

They can't detect him with N.

They can't touch him.

In fact,

based on what he says, you actually can touch him, but your brain refuses to accept that you are touching something.

We see him touch something while doing this, and it's a bird and it does not move.

It moves

and it just pretends like it doesn't know that it's happening.

Yeah.

It's like he's stepped out of existence.

Yeah.

So cool.

Yeah.

It's like, what if a ghost that you couldn't see could act on the world?

And the ghost itself was not only invisible, but so were the effects of its actions.

Well, it's less of a ghost and more if you're just, what if you're just a guy who nobody ever looks at?

And

you won't take your order again.

Nobody even notices you at all.

You know how some guys never get noticed?

Like the guy in the restaurant, the waitress skips over when you've been in the middle of the day.

chain restaurant it's like that but more extreme turning invisible is really this is my favorite part turning invisible is really just a decoy it helps me keep my real ability secret from everyone else

okay it is pretty lots to unpack here lots to unpack here the first thing that i would like to unpack really quickly because we could just sort of we can head it off at the past with uh malearon saying this helps this is a decoy and it helps me keep my ability secret from everyone else we're coming back to that thing that i've noticed episode on episode on episode for the last 10 minutes or so, right?

Which is that like the politics and the tactics of nen knowledge are becoming just as important a thing as the powers themselves.

It is who knows what I can do?

Are they right about it?

Are there ways that I can mask what I can do?

Right.

Etc.

We got a lot of this in the early portion of the show, but when we were dealing with mostly low concept nen at that point,

it was less important than now people are just like playing these Byzantine Nen games and are also trying to like wrong-foot everybody about what their nen abilities are.

The second thing is that this power on the face of it disappointed me a little for like one second because I was like, oh, it's just sort of like super invisibility.

But then there are so many little resonances with this.

It's the fact that he can only do it while he is holding his breath.

You know, he can't have that sort of like open expression of speaking and breathing while this is happening.

Although, I think he can speak.

I don't know how that works.

And it's also this idea that, like,

you can drop out of existence, but only temporarily, and that is sort of presented as something kind of sad as much as it's presented as something kind of powerful.

And the idea that we're now at a point where Chimera ants are expressing this kind of internality is delightful to me.

It is one of those, like, you know, They've spent so long recently going so high concept with Nen that when they introduce a really cool idea with a lot of flexibility that is like closer to like Bungee Gum or Castro's doubling thing right and you're like oh yeah this stuff is like still good like low concept Nen that doesn't have this big sort of theatrical element to it like that stuff rolls still yes yeah yeah that's why stuff like uh kilua just having electricity powers can still hang in a world of aprs you know yeah or fish darts or fish darks although we'll see what happens with those electricity powers won't

Yeah, I don't know.

Well, it's been a while since we've seen them.

We saw them.

We saw the implications.

He turned his aura into electricity.

We saw the fish dart.

We actively cut away while it was happening.

Okay.

Fair enough.

We saw the crackling of the electricity, then it cuts away, and then it cuts back.

And they explained what he did.

And then he does have a moment, we should say, he goes, wow, I think I just learned how to use my powers better.

But we don't actually see

a very funny line, by the way.

It's a good line, it's goofy as hell, but I love it.

Also, him pulling the fish off of his forehead with the suction cup on it, and he's like, octopus suction cup.

Very funny.

I was forgot about that part.

There are two really key moments in this conversation with Malioran, other than the reveal of God's Alibi Perfect Plan and the small bird touching sequence, which we can get to in a second.

The first is that Meliaron is trying to get through Gone Freaks' thick skull that people can betray you.

Can I play an audio clip of this?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Like I said before, we have to trust each other first.

Once you've agreed to be my partner, I'll be happy to tell you everything you want to know.

Okay, I'll be your partner.

That was fast!

You don't know how to negotiate, kid.

Got the trusted crap.

You should be suspicious of me, of the whole whole world.

Think about it before you trust anyone.

Huh?

I said it's fine.

Why are you being such a trash?

Besides, are you even able to make this decision all by yourself?

What about your buddy?

Isn't he gonna have a fit when he finds out you teamed up with a suspicious-looking monster?

Why the hell am I trashing myself like this?

It's not like I chose to be this way.

Gone's answer to won't your buddy feel weird about this is, um, uh, I'll just insist on having it my way.

Kimiwa won't like it, but he'll give in.

We're now at a point where we're just tweeting it out.

I hate to say, I hate to talk to talk about one of the world's worst people, Dr.

Phil.

Oh my god.

But my father was a big fan of Dr.

Phil.

Jack, you know Dr.

Phil.

Of course I know everyone is Dr.

Phil.

Famous for funny shithead Dr.

Phil.

Not personally, but yeah.

He,

but anyway, it's important that the people, you know, the people who are writing thing the people who are wrong in the world don't have to be wrong 100% of the time, and the people who are writing good stuff in the world don't have to be right a hundred percent of the time.

I'm not making a value judgment on this statement, I'm only making a negative value judgment on Dr.

Phil.

But something that my mom used to say all the time that she learned from Dr.

Phil is that you teach people how to treat you.

And Goan has learned how he can treat Kilua.

He's just saying, I can be a bad friend.

It's fine.

I'm a bad friend to Killua.

Gone is very good at handling people, and I mean that in as

a detached way as it sounds, you know?

It's even, it's worse than that.

I think you're totally right, Sylvie, but

I want to reframe this as like

a thing that Goan and Jing seem to both have,

which we talked about a bit in Green Island, is that when you're around someone like them, people handle themselves for you

you don't even have to do anything they do it all on their own

you're right but this also sounds like awful pickup artist bullshit

but it's what it is what happens no you're right yeah uh tell me about the awful awful pickup artist bullshit dre oh just oh i didn't mean that specifically i'm just saying like the idea that like oh you don't even have to try it's just people handle themselves the way you want them let them come to you yeah um i thought this was a specific pick up you just gotta nag millioran and he'll want to be your partner immediately

um it's

i

he's just jing at this point in this moment you know i think gon and jing are different and i think that the story is in a lot of ways about an expression of their differences as much as it about is about their similarities but like uh i'll just insist on having it my way killiwa won't like it but he'll give in.

That's Jing freaks.

Yeah.

I hadn't thought about that, but you're 100% right.

That is, I'm going to spell your name this way, Dune, because it's easy for me.

Totally.

Sorry.

Not sorry.

I'll never say sorry to you, actually.

It's that thing that

shows up in this

show over and over with where like, like charisma is dangerous because it makes people

like, it makes people like you.

It makes people go along with things that they shouldn't.

It makes people change their life to suit your needs with and without you asking them.

You know, it lets

it makes people let you treat them poorly.

And,

you know, like, what motivation does Goan have to not act this way?

No one's ever stopped him.

They've only, you know,

I think there's another character that we're seeing that's going through that same thing of just like, everyone's giving me exactly what I want.

Why should I not slice this guy's ear off for not playing chess with me?

You just made me sad about Aunt Mito all over again.

You mean Gone Shadowpoof?

Oof.

What a great character to have as your.

Goan Freaks is such a wild adventure.

Yeah.

I was about to say to have as your protagonist, but Killiwa Zeldic is the protagonist.

Melioron, in trying to convince Goan that you should be careful, also says,

even a good friend you've had for 20 years could still stab you in the back.

This is not subtle, and it just makes me think of what Silva said to Kilua before he left, which was like, promise me that you'll never betray your friends, right?

And then was like, he'll be back.

I got to remember that for later.

I think Melioron also meets a three-star therapist hunter.

I love Melioron because he is so, he's trying so hard to be like cagey about stuff, but then at the slight, like, no matter what Gon says, he's like, ah, well, fine, I'll tell you.

Yeah, no, he is the, it's not like I like you or anything, Baca character, but just not romantically.

It's really sweet because he spends so much time trying to convince Gohan to be cautious and, you know, ready to go,

to be cautious and, you know,

don't take things at face value.

But he is just leaping at the the opportunity to tell gun stuff you're right he has really good he's a chameleon and he has the powers of like a smooth operator but he clearly was like a human dork and so he has this like conflicting nature of a guy who wants desperately to be a smooth operator because every part of him is like pointing in that direction but he can't quite pull it off because he's just kind of a dork The thing that I really like about him is that it feels like he's like, okay, I've got a plan on how to win this kid over.

I'm going to say this, and i'm gonna say this and maybe i'll give him this information and when he when he pushes back but because gone never pushed back he just still went with it he just still was like yes yes yes i want revenge yes it's because of this blah blah blah blah blah

why does malearon want revenge well that's because he saw the king kill someone very important to him his foster father peggy he says yeah I saw the king behead him right before my eyes, but at the time I didn't even realize that someone who was close to me had died because I'd forgotten who Peggy was to me.

I'd forgotten that he was my foster father.

Now, I had briefly thought, as I imagine we were supposed to think, oh, you mean foster father in like the spiritual sense?

Like Peggy was a sort of senior ant who took the other ant under his wing.

No, it seems that the human that was Peggy was literally the foster father.

of the human that was Melioron.

Sure was.

At first I was like, wild coincidence.

And then I remembered that the ants just slaughtered entire villages right like en masse yeah so almost all of them would have known each other like there'd be you know like for every for every group of 50 ants there'd be like a high likelihood they came from the same small village

yeah it's great this is like the mass ant death of act one not mass ant death the mass ant slaughter of act one that sort of fell by the wayside in light of fears of the king has suddenly come raring back into the plot again of like ants want to do revenge, but not against it's such a weird, like, dispersed revenge, right?

Because they're not trying to get revenge on the ants.

They're like,

we were humans, ants killed us and made us ants.

Then ants killed ants, and now I need to sort of like follow that train of violence back.

Yeah, yeah, to get revenge on the king.

Peggy was apparently an academic, always carrying thick books with him.

He carried a copy of the NGL Bible wherever he went.

Goan looks at Melioron and says, holy shit.

You remember the past?

He says, this is the third insane thing that happens.

I guess it's not the insane thing that Goan says.

It's the insane thing that Melioran says about Goan.

I think I get it now.

I think I'm starting to understand why I felt I could trust you so quickly.

You seem so human, more human than all the other ants I've met so far.

In fact, I would even say that you're still human.

And then Maliaran says, really?

When I met you, I had the exact opposite reaction.

I could immediately sense an inhuman beast lurking deep within you.

That's why I wanted to team up with you.

Rules.

It rules so fucking hard.

We are now, I mean, we're halfway through the Chimera ants, so we're not even close to being done yet, but we are now so transparently in the really fertile realms of we're not so different, you and I, which could so often be done so cheaply but now we have gone looking at a chimera ant and saying you're basically a human and the chimera ant looking at ghan and saying you're an unstoppable inhuman beast it's lovely it's great i should say that the dub does pretty inelegantly say we're not so different you and i at the end of that quote uh

the that is not in the the sub script that I have, so I didn't include it because I thought it was.

I don't think you should write that line, but it's got to feel really good to to do.

It's got to feel really good to write that line.

To have someone say you're not so different.

To be like, I'm doing, I'm finally doing.

Yeah, I'm doing the thing.

Look, I'm going to make him say it.

It was so easy.

They could have been saying it all the time.

I just have to write it down.

In a highly suspicious fake out, not on Malioron's part, but on the sort of camera's part, Maliaron decides to reveal his third ability.

The first one is his shitty invisibility.

The second one is God's alibi, perfect plan, his good invisibility.

And then after learning Ghan's name and shaking his hand envelops Ghon in like a huge wave of den, it is like he was talking so much about trusting and not trusting and his plan and this and that.

And it really, I think it really gives the vibe that like, oh my god, Goan shouldn't have trusted this guy.

But nope, that's a fake out.

It's totally fine.

Melearn is revealing his third power, God's accomplice.

He can pass on God's alibi to anyone that he touches while he's in his sort of perfect plan mode.

It's great.

There's something about the physicality of it, and a human having to hold hands to execute the revenge.

It's not subtle, but it works really well.

This is when they poke a bird and the bird doesn't do anything at all.

Yeah.

Put it with a cigarette in the head.

It just goes like meh, mamp, meh.

Unlit, to be clear.

Unlit.

Yes.

Unlit cigarette.

And now the kind of like the mechanics of Melioron's very simple plan become apparent.

Melieron has an extremely powerful, like two-person or multi-person nen ability, but he is quite physically weak.

So he wants to team up with someone who can, for example, do Jajan Ken,

sneak into, or they don't even really need to sneak.

Just hold your breath.

Right.

Sneak into the king's zone.

Kill him with a single punch.

Yeah.

Go to Disney Channel Radio because this is a simple plan.

I'm sorry.

What?

What?

One more time?

Jack, you don't know about simple plan?

No.

Jack said 30 seconds ago, I waited for them to finish before I said my joke, but they said a simple plan.

And so I said, What is this?

Disney Channel Radio?

Because this is a simple plan.

I don't know what Disney Channel Radio is for what a simple plan is.

Well, right now, I can tell you, I feel like I'm just a kid, and life is a nightmare.

What's happening to me?

Disney Channel Radio is a Disney-owned radio station for kids.

It's an AM station.

I believe it is or was all over the country.

And they played, you know, bowling for soup and a simple plan.

Yeah,

both sounds awful and a fascinating art object.

It wasn't the worst when you were

sure, yeah.

It was not the worst in the world.

You know, and they had like little skits and they did, you know, Colin shows, shows, I think, and they, you know, gave away trips to Disney World.

Yeah.

When I was in high school, I went to a festival where Simple Plan was playing, and somebody threw a water bottle at the singer and hit him in the forehead, and then he said he wanted to fight that person in the merch line.

Whoa, whoa, very cool.

Were they DJs, children?

No, I don't think so.

There's a lot of like

kids like doing this

the channel IDs, I think.

Children, I think, would make fucking terrible DJs.

Yeah, they're not, they wouldn't, they don't have the skills necessary.

Not great at most professions, I find,

but we should try.

And I'm running for president,

we should try, we should try NPR, but it's just children.

No, I mean, any children, like a family, we should try doctor,

no

drive, taxi driver, uber driver, no,

um,

CEO.

Oh, that'd be fine.

Yeah, Yeah, that'd be fine.

Actually, it would be a slight boost to IQ.

Yeah.

Within the margin of error.

Here at Friends of the Table, we fucking hate CEOs.

Yeah, but we also hate IQ tests, so it's fine.

We do also hate IQ tests.

Gohan says that I'm not the partner you want.

I have to assume that he's thinking...

It's not actually clear who Goan is thinking of.

I was going to say Killiwa Zeldik, but Gohan isn't as relentlessly devoted to Killiu or as vice versa.

So he could be thinking of, for example, Knuckle, whom he immediately telephones.

Right.

And then invites over with.

And then invites over.

Melieron says, don't call your friends.

Look, I've put my trust in you, so I could sort of even understand it if you betray me.

But you can't just go and talk to a bunch of other people.

And Gohan says, Gohan does the, Killiwa won't like it, but he'll kind of

get on board to Meliaron immediately.

He says, well, look, look, I'm just going to make the call, and you can hang out and be invisible and watch and see how it goes.

You know, once again, we are journeying down Goan Freaks' path of what he wants to do.

Not a bad suggestion,

like that works, it does work.

It does work, but Melioron says, Please don't do this.

I don't think this is a good idea.

And Goan says, Whoop-de-doo.

There is so much setup for how God's alibi works that I can only assume that it is going to become mechanically essential.

He is not invincible, he is only undetectable.

So, if someone knows that someone with God's alibi is in the room, you just immediately set the room on fire.

Well,

Melieron says exactly: is no matter how powerful the king is, one mega punch to his unguarded vitals and he's done.

yes

yeah sure seems like a statement of fact though and also um

uh

you have to hold your breath yeah it lasts as long as you can hold your breath yeah

uh

they're gonna meet up with uh knuckle and shoot um

who tell Ghan, like, hey, by the way, Moralenov won't be able to help us take out the Royal Guards anymore because of your plan to save five million people.

So it's all on us.

I hope that you have a plan for taking out the Royal Guards.

All of them.

All of them.

The king is at his palace playing Shogi.

His opponent loses, and then the king gets really mad that he didn't give up 22 moves earlier when checkmate was inevitable.

This guy tries to run away, and then he kills him.

Cuts him in half or something.

He kills him so violently that there's just like a massive blood spray.

And then the go player who has to come in next to oh the king is like learning the games on the fly.

He's like leafing through a book of how to play go for beginners.

Yeah.

And then being like, all right, send in the go player.

And the go player

starts freaking out.

You know, at first he sees the a body that has been obliterated so badly that we get the hunter-hunter frightening mode where everything like TV static appears over the image when he looks at it.

It's sort of like

a bloody bottom half and no top half.

Yes.

And he starts saying,

I can't play.

I think I have a fever.

I'm getting really dizzy and sick.

Yeah.

And this is after his first loss.

He's like played a handful of games, 10 games.

He plays 10 games.

He wins his first game of Go.

The Go guy is like making all these excuses.

It's clear to me that he's just afraid.

You know, the thing he's feeling is like paralyzing, awful fear in the face of his own death.

But the king says, rest, take some medicine.

I want to play you at your full strength.

And there's something about the, like, the king can't tell

the.

You get the impression the king really does think he's ill.

Hmm.

I'm not sure.

I think that, because he says, lose again, and I won't be interested in your excuses.

So take, so rest like you mean it.

And

I think that the thing that's weird about the king to me me is that like he sets these rules and he does sort of abide by them himself for the most part.

Like later, we see him conceding early.

It's clear that he's losing a game of

Goongi.

And so I think that what happens here to me, the way that I read it is like, okay, this guy's clearly making excuses.

I do want him at his best.

So let him rest, and then I can beat him for real and kill him.

The king is getting some interesting wrinkles during these game sequences.

He is.

I don't know how to put it.

He's not getting more scary.

If anything, he might be getting less scary.

He's just kind of like this insistence on, like, I have to learn the game.

He has these really weird, shallow lines about, like, how games work.

And, you know, I just feel like I'm ringing the bell all the time.

He says, he has this great line where he says,

chess and Shogi and Go are basically all the same game.

And when I can identify the sort of rhythms and patterns of an opponent, and the opponents make these rhythms and patterns really transparent to me, all I have to do is disrupt the pattern.

You know, there's nothing really interesting here.

And I love the idea of the king who has just sort of like been born too early out of like blood and violence, immediately staging a coup and then making this sort of like grand statement about the the world.

Like, all these games are basically the same game.

It's really odd, and it doesn't make the king look great.

I don't think.

I don't think the king comes out of these few episodes looking super good.

Yeah, I think that one of the things that's happening is he's so

interested in

being

great

that and it's so obvious like that no one can fight the king.

Like, he just slaughtered, you know, invite all the invite the strongest man in the world to come fight me.

Like, he's not, but he wants to prove is that he's also smarter than all these people.

And I think that he's also bored.

And so, they do that.

I like that they don't show him deciding to play games on screen.

This is just like what he decided to do, partially because the Chimera ants are trying to keep him inside.

They're like, for the love of God, don't go out there.

Please just stay in here until the sorting.

And so this is like a thing.

Yupi doesn't have anything to say about this, but Pito and Shaoapoo for both like, like, stay here, stay inside, bide your time.

Don't let him out.

We don't want him going out.

We're like, we want to protect him.

And so he's like, well, I guess I could test my brain against these stupid animal humans.

There's a bit of like, I'm going to prove that I'm better than humans, even at the, like, by beating the ones who are at the pinnacle of their like chosen skill set or whatever and the only place they can compete is is intellect yes, because when it comes to physical Prowess, he's gonna kill them in one hit with his tail.

What's funny is that he is beating them

But his explanation for why is like so stupid

Well, he's got to get a read on them.

Yeah, I mean it really does boil down to I got I just got to get a read on him

Shapu Puff says, so now that you've learned this, I failed to see the benefit of further games.

I believe they will only serve to bore you.

Like,

the Shadow Pooh's story in these set of episodes is like trying to get the king, like, off of this fixation on the games.

It's risky.

This is another way that I think that the king's sort of, like, position.

in the narrative has been like very gently sort of weakened.

Do you remember when Peto briefly said

that they had an idea about what the king should do, and the king tried to kill them immediately with their tail?

And it was only Pito's strength that prevented them from dying?

Now we have Poof turning to the king outright and saying, I don't think you should be playing these games.

I think they'll bore you.

And the king just sort of says, hmm, okay, you know, hmm, fine.

Later in the episodes, Poof turns to Pito and says, I'm worried about him.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

And not just worried about his health, worried about his sort of like mental state.

The thing to, the thing,

the

sort of arrows going from

Pito to the king and then from Shaoapoof to the king are wildly important to the rest of the season.

And this is like where...

Could you say more about that?

No.

No.

Absolutely.

You cannot.

I'll be more specific.

When you say the arrows, what do you mean by the arrows?

Sort of like on a diagram just sort of like oh do you remember oh like sylvie

shipping

yeah just like all the three star things i've ever done

the king the king is so is so above it right that it's sort of like like the world is acting kind of around the king in the same way that like the people that gone knows act around gone

uh that we were just talking about and so

like um

everyone that's surrounding the king sort of ends up making decisions sort of based on how they think things should be happening, but they don't want to be directly interfacing with the king.

Like you said, you know, he almost killed Pito when

they did that.

And I think Poof survives because his suggestion is based in like, well, king, you're obviously so great.

Of course, you're meeting these people.

So why even play them?

It's known ahead of time that you'll win.

So what's even the the point?

You know, you're so good.

I think that's maybe why, or maybe it is, just he's just like so focused on the game that he doesn't even hear what

Poof is saying.

Yes.

Really, really interesting.

At this point, the king

hears about a new game.

This game is not real.

It is called, well, no, it's real in the show.

Right.

We have to be specific when Hunter Hunter is concerned, because it could be like, this is a fictional game within the world.

This is a specialty game in East Gorteaux, a place that doesn't exist.

It originated in East Gorteaux.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's called Gungi.

It is

a language Jojar Bink speaks.

We're not told much about how this game works, and in fact, it is sort of like they play with it being kind of difficult to read if you don't understand it.

It seems to be 3D chess.

It is like

a lot of checkers there.

Yeah, chess and go and checkers.

There's a There's a Korean game show that I love called Devil's Plan, which is the latest show made by the showrunner who made a phenomenal series called The Genius, which is about high-concept

hidden information games.

And one of the games that they have to play in Devil's Plan is

like three-dimensional Connect 4, where they're essentially like trying to play Connect 4, but on a flatboard and

stacking cubes on top of each other to like create this like 3D web of like connect 4 lines.

And you get the impression that that is sort of what is happening but for chess the pieces have names like the cannon, the sentinel, the scorpion or whatever.

And

these are the tiles that we see in the closing credits that the closing title sequence and it's not just the tiles in my notes here I wrote this is the kid I bet the Googie champion because as the as the king learns East Goto basically beats every other nation at Gungi so if he can defeat East Goto's Gungi champion the king sort of like has this like like shit-eating grin is this like slimy sort of weak grin on his face of like then I'll be the best in the world and Poof's like yes yeah very cunning idea to him he's what like he's got a huge East and they're like really upfront about that and I really like that yeah what's really interesting is that when he appeared it was like he has a huge ego and he is the supreme being.

Yeah, he's indifferent in that way.

Like he's above it all and this makes him brings him down to our level.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The more we see the king, the more I'm like, he has a huge ego and he's just talking shit.

He's very, very strong.

He's clearly very, very strong, but

he's kind of just like a...

He's petty and egotistical and weird.

I think it's important for the, you know, structure.

Like, the show

is saying,

and whether it effectively communicates this or whether it sells this idea or not is another thing.

But the show wants you to go

that this guy's a genius.

I mean, he's beating chess champions in, in, you know, from zero chess knowledge to winning in like two, three hours.

And he, you know, repeats that with Go and with Shogi.

So, like, they do

want that to be backed up.

Like, his egotism and his pettiness and his, like, gleefulness in, like, beating people is backed up by the ability to do it.

But at the same time, this is a show where people do remarkable things off the, you know,

Goan will enter Heaven's Arena and beat 40 people immediately.

You know, he's 12 years old.

I think that's why, like, if I'm thinking about like the structure of the show and what's happening, I think that's what is so important about them being like board games and sort of the intellectualizing the challenges is because that isn't something that we've seen really we've seen abstract you know tactical thinking in the context of a fight but we haven't seen like an intellectual playing field where it is a a brain thing where it's it is your brain supporting your brain instead of your brain supporting your fists

yeah

it's worth saying just to make the subtext text as well, that, you know, over and over on this project, I keep coming back to the idea of like the hunter world being about

applying a game logic to existence, even when that might not be the wisest or most equitable thing to do.

And there is something about the king saying, well, I can just prove that I'm the best by playing all the games.

Right.

I want to say that

this is a pulling this from way, way back.

Right before we enter Greed Island, and you say,

We were talking about games and how Hunter Hunter is about games, and you're like, and I think that they're going to go into Greed Island, and that's going to be the height of this game being, or this show being about games.

And I say something like, oh, that's not even the height.

Or I just reference that there's more game stuff coming.

This is the stuff that I was thinking about.

The Chimera Ant King being like, okay,

I've conquered the country.

Let's sit down and play chess, Shogi, Go, and Goongie over and over and over for business

for actual days in a row.

He keeps playing them over and over and over.

We see, we only have like a few scenes.

Like it, it, like, if they didn't give you the context, you wouldn't know exactly how long he was playing.

But it seems like he's, in these three episodes, play something like 20 to 30 hours worth of board games.

Yeah.

And in comes the Googie player this is the kid that we described in the closing sequence yeah she is a blind child she has a cane uh uh just like a wooden cane um unnamed these eyes closed she is unnamed i have her name in subtitles um i don't think it's a spoiler no um no it's not her name it's not like the king's name or anything like that no Her name is Kamugi.

Kamuki.

She has very pale skin, wears very pale clothes.

Her costume design is fantastic.

She wears this sort of like white dress and then this very pale tan like apron or bodice on it.

She's not just wearing white, right?

She's wearing like pale colors.

Yeah.

Her wardrobe looks sickly in the way that she kind of does.

Her hair looks like it's like messy light gray.

With like Princess Leia, if she had a dozen donuts instead of two.

Yes.

She goes out and out with donuts.

She went to the stylist and went, give me the Krispy Kreme.

And she has very thick black eyebrows.

She has snot coming out of her nose.

She's snot.

Plot critical snot.

She is one of my favorite characters in this entire show.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, I don't want to speak for an entire fan base, but I would be surprised if there were not a huge number of people that were like, oh, yeah, Co-McGee, that's one of my favorite characters.

Yeah, when I said in the chat, like, oh, I think we're hitting like my favorite stuff in the Chimera Antarct, it is

about to be these Goongie games.

Yeah, so she says,

the narrator, she doesn't say anything at all.

The narrator says,

she, the champion, will shape the fate of the king, but in what way he has no idea at all.

That's such a great narrator line, right?

It's like big promise.

Isn't it right the traditional too?

Yeah, seconds from

during the end credit theme.

Great way to end an episode.

Yeah.

The traditional ending, right, of

the person meeting, the pauper meeting the king, right, would be like, this person's going to shape the king's life, but she has no idea how important a role she's going to play.

And the immediate inversion of like, the king has no idea the importance of the role that Kamagi is going to play.

It's really, really good.

Okay, Okay, can we take five minutes and then do our final episode?

Sure, yeah.

I had a fucking pristine anxiety dream last night.

I dreamt that I had to look after a human toddler the size of my thumb.

She had bangs and was wearing a parka, and she was tiny, and someone left the window open and she flew out of the window and disappeared.

Slightly grown-up version of the hand baby.

The what?

Yeah, the hand baby.

Yeah, the hunter-hunter hand baby.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

I just saw it.

It just showed up.

There we go.

Brian Eno 1995 Dream.

I'm ready to go back in.

Should we do like a 3-2-1 clap or something?

Well, no, we'll just do a clap at the end.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's see.

All right, episode 103.

Check and mate.

It is six days until Nefer Pito begins the sorting.

And I will be completely honest with you.

I have lost the plot a little as to what this sorting involves.

Oh, do you remember the meat orchard?

Yeah.

That's the sorting.

What are we sorting for?

Sorting humans.

I believe that it's sorting humans into the meat orchard or into

nen puppets for Peto and also sorting the special humans out for the kingdom.

For the king's delight.

Yeah.

Now, I should say that it's...

Specifically, it's the narrator and the hunters that call it the sorting, because they don't know what it is either.

Yes, that's true.

I mean, the narrator probably knows.

Sure.

He's just following the hunter's cues.

The sorting was actually originally going to sort of happen countrywide simultaneously.

It was going to be sort of remote, right?

With Peter Puppets executing whole villages in one go.

But Killiwa's brief stint as Solid Snake put a stop to that.

But now the sorting is kind of still going to continue at the palace.

Is that just like a large number of humans that already made it to the palace?

What was that about?

Like who is being sorted?

I believe it's that

they're sorting through the whole population, but they're calling it the sorting because they're trying to sort out the rare humans to feed to the king.

Right.

And there's more humans than they need, so they're just going to kill all those extra ones.

This was surmised.

Again, this part was surmised by the hunters and never really confirmed by the ants.

So I'll say that their plan being ambiguous will not hurt you going forward.

No, yeah.

It's also not really the focus.

They're mostly using it as like a scary clock.

Right.

You know, six days until Peter does this, etc.

But I wasn't terribly clear what's going on.

Yeah.

Almost immediately.

The important thing about the sorting is that the plan to get the royal guards and the king happens immediately before the sorting is supposed to happen.

Yes, yes.

So it's also turned on to that.

Yes.

Almost immediately, the Googie player, Kirmagi,

starts wrong-footing the king and the viewer.

She briefly thinks that the king is Diego,

and then

learns pretty quickly that he's not because she's blind.

And then

she sort of misspeaks several times.

At one point, the king tells her to shut her mouth, and she shuts her mouth, but because her nose is all blocked up, like the guy in Infinite Jest, she just sort of like keels over.

Yeah.

And then she says, you know, I'm stupid and I'm always saying the wrong thing.

Yeah.

And she's ignorant about the world.

She's ignorant about the world.

I.

I don't know what to make of this yet.

And this is part of the

game

of

doing Media Club Plus without knowing what is going to happen.

Yeah.

Because if I had seen the whole show, I could be talking with some confidence about these sort of plot maneuvers and characterizations, having seen the full length of the runway, you know.

But as it stands, I'm very aware that I am just sort of feeling at the edge of what's going on here.

So, when I look at Komagi right now, I'm thinking that one of two things is happening: either she is

an incredibly savvy, dangerous opponent that is

masking her

real

sort of like sharpness and ability

off the board by sort of masquerading as like a I'm stupid and I'm always saying the wrong thing, sort of like i Claudius guys that she's pulling.

The other thing is that Hunter Hunter could be working through the well-worn and tired sort of like savant trope where she is like

like an uncertain,

stupid in the real world, but extremely clever on the Goongie board, uh, uh, like characterization.

There could be something happening in the middle here, right?

Which is that she is trying to figure out what the king's deal is.

She is actually kind of confused and sloppy and unsure, but is a very capable Goongie player, and the two of them are kind of going to come to some weird mid-ground.

But right now, I can see that something is going on with the way that Kamugi behaves when she is not playing Goongie, and I can't put my finger on it yet.

I think that's deliberate.

Listener, I'm going to find out when you do.

Yeah, the only thing you know so far is that

she has trouble with making her formal introduction and that

she will shape the fate of the king, but in what way exactly he has no idea at all.

I also know that as soon as she starts playing, it becomes very clear that she is an unbelievably good Googie player.

We are well in the,

you know,

old realms of like the blind mystic.

This is a trope that comes up over and over again, where, you know, because you are blind, you are very good at X.

I saw an otherwise really good

horror movie this year by Damian McCarthy called Oddity, which features a blind medium as like a key plot point there.

This sort of this idea that your disability has unlocked some sort of supernatural ability for you.

Did you tweet about this and go, I would hang out with the Oddity?

I did tweet about that and go, I would hang out with the Oddity.

I had to Google it to be like, What's the Oddity?

And it's a statue.

It's an ominous thing who sits.

It is an ominous wooden thing that sits.

I super recommend Oddity if you like horror films.

Although, I would say that in order to enjoy it more, you should watch Damian McCarthy's previous film, which is called Caveat.

It's a film about a man who takes a job, and there is a caveat.

The two films are not linked, they are not connected.

I'm not trying to do a sneaky thing.

But he is such a

specific filmmaker in his tastes and in his choices that watching him do two projects kind of chronologically, I think is a really fun way of going about it.

So that's Caveat and Oddity.

Both really good Irish, sort of folk horror, sort of haunted house stories.

Anyway, Blind Mystic in Oddity, Kamugi is working through this old thing of like, you know, she's blind, but she's really good at gungi.

She opens her eyes when she sits down to start playing.

She immediately beats the king a bunch of times.

Yeah, they play for

eight hours, the entire eight hours that the Go player theoretically is resting.

There's this great moment where she has to sit there while the king learns how to play Goongi silently, and then he just says, Okay, I've got the gist of it.

And she leans forward to start playing.

I think it's really cute

when he loses and he's like, okay, let's play again.

And she's like, yes, let's play again.

I love young Googie.

It's great.

It is made all the funnier by the fact that when we were playing Dodgeball, Tagashi took fucking pains to let us know how Dodgeball works.

So those sequences had this real, like,

rules-based.

Like, crackling power to them because we could actually follow the game as it was going on.

No such luck with Goongi.

They're just moving tiles around.

They're saying check.

But whatever is going to happen, it is not going to hinge upon the minutia of the rules of Googie.

No, no.

This is Gersafrak and Clementine Kesh playing chess.

It's not really about the chess.

Meanwhile, I think it's important.

There's just one bit of this early stage that I want to make a note of.

That thing of like her being so happy and excited to keep playing Goongie, it happens almost right after he threatened to kill her if she doesn't shut up.

She loves Goongi that much.

She also, she doesn't even seem scared when he says, Shut up or I'll kill you.

She just seems enthusiastically abiding.

Well, she is blind, so she doesn't know that he is actually an ant creature monster.

Totally.

100% that's true.

Yeah.

Yeah, she doesn't know that he is, he's an antler.

I don't need that to be afraid of someone's death threats.

Yeah, I was about to say, like,

oh man, the stupid dominoes that Yoshiro Tagashi puts down.

I was about to be like, well, she's heard on the radio about Chimera ants.

No, because in East Gorto, the radio was really heavily restricted before the ants showed up, and one of the first things the ants did was immediately take control of the radio.

It's great.

If she does know about the ants, she would have heard of it from like Killiwa's game of telephone that he created, the sort of like rebel telephone.

What I need you to do is go and run, run, run and find someone.

Which then got the answer here.

All the TVs and radios were like, this was a prank by terrorists.

Do not listen.

It's fake.

I'm the president.

Oh, it's great.

Okay, Knuckle and Shoot meet with Goan.

It's great.

They're all just.

Oh my god.

I love Knuckle.

He's so good.

I'm beginning to see what you mean about how like large swathes of the Chimera and Ark are just people standing around and talking.

Yeah.

Because, I mean,

we had some fun stuff with fish darts.

Remember fish dots?

Yeah.

That was this episode of Media Club Plus.

Yeah.

It was.

In real time, it was, what, 35 minutes ago in terms of like episode clock?

Yes.

Yeah.

Um,

uh.

Sorry, I'm looking at my eyes.

Oh, yeah.

Uh,

go in and shoot a knuckle.

Just stand around in a forest and talk for most of this episode.

Yeah, totally.

It's great.

On the phone and in person.

On the phone and in person.

Meliron is immediately.

He has bad first impressions.

Very bad first impression.

Objection to Knuckles Bosuzuko character.

He says he looks like he's from an old decade.

The fact that Chiner Ants is saying this about into a fight with anybody.

Yeah, Chimera ants looking at a human and going, whoa,

he looks kind of silly.

It's just, it's great.

We are through the looking glass.

But then he notices that the dogs are still following Knuckle around.

This is such a funny scene.

Yeah.

Oh, it's so sad when he says

Goan asks about the dogs.

He's like, what's up?

Obviously, Goan knows the gist of the dog thing because this is not his first rodeo with Knuckle.

Knuckle has been spending the hours where he's supposed to be sleeping, going around and saving and feeding as many of the abandoned dogs as possible from people who have been killed or left behind in the sorting.

And he has this like teary monologue about like, aren't you proud of me that I left the ones behind that were too far gone to save or who were too loyal to come with me?

I didn't even try to force them.

I just let them die.

And he's like,

what's credit for like not being too soft saving these dogs.

Also, clearly, it's clearly really taught him up that he had to leave these ones behind.

At one point, he says, I'm not crying about it.

You want to get smacked in the head?

And Meliron is also crying.

He's like crouching in the bushes.

It's really, really good.

Yeah.

What does he say?

I thought I wrote down what Meliron says, but yeah, he's like,

this isn't enough to change my mind, but need to start.

I don't really want to be your friend, but I guess I will.

If it's important to you, I guess I'll do it.

We have the return of Yoshihiro Takashi's dogs.

Batman and the anime team draw dogs so well.

Even ants know that

good hunters are well liked by animals.

Yeah, because the ants are people.

And animals.

Yes.

Yeah.

They actually know even better, maybe.

We just sort it.

Problem solved.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, the king is being extremely condescending.

He loses to Kumagi, but he says there was nothing to himself.

He's constantly doing all this narration about learning Gungi.

He says there's nothing particularly striking in that strategy.

He sort of gets the sense that she's holding back in the belief that he is not good yet.

And this is confirmed almost immediately as Kumagi's internal monologue is like, wow, he's learning fast i'm gonna have to start really you know i think they do a good job

of making this bit from the king it's like

clinical rather than cocky but yet it's like structurally we know that he's working towards like eventually winning he knows

at this point winning is an inevitability

And he's not surprised that he's losing at this point.

He's not upset that he's losing at this point.

But he is like,

you know, like a cart rolling downhill.

Like, it's only a matter of time before she's forced to use her full power, and then I can beat her, and then we could be done with games.

My game phase will be over.

He says, this is basically the same as all the other games.

Yeah, he's wrong.

You know,

it tells us something about the way the king sees the world.

But I think that

this line that the king keeps coming up with, you know, these games are all the same as the other games, is

a weak spot beginning to show itself.

What is it?

Oh my god,

excuse me, is it the games, or is it Komagi?

Is the king right about the games and is just not seeing the girl, or is he wrong about the games too?

I think he's, I don't know.

I think

the show is so interested in games that having this character make this blanket statement of like, these games are all the same,

it feels wrong.

It feels like the show is positioning that as an untenable

line of thought.

He's about to let Komagi rest.

Komagi is obviously not interested in this.

She will play Gungi forever.

But then she says that she's played Gungi for three days and three nights in a row before.

That seems bad.

This This is that

another Goon freaks.

Yes, yes,

well, yes,

well, well, yes, yes.

This is when my favorite line in these episodes comes up.

Just astonishing line.

Yupi comes in and he's holding up a note and he says, It seems that the Go player hung himself.

It's just, oh, it's great.

This is the like awful wages of the Chimera Ants on the

game-playing

world construction of Hunter-Hunter.

The Go player has hung himself rather than continue to play the king.

It's lovely.

Yeah.

Good writing.

Talk about ego, you know, it's very sad what

they forced upon this Go player, but

his sort of like groveling excuses from having lost, like, can't believe I lost to someone who just learned how to play.

I think, you know, I think

we talked about the king and the king talking about like

weak humans being in power because of whatever political reason, blah, blah, blah.

And, you know, but the king, he's actually strong.

So, like, of course, I can be in power because my power is real.

And

there is like this thin line between the go player and the king, king as like um

like the go play the go player would not does that seem to me like he would be much different than the king if he actually was as good as the king was you know what i mean like his sort of like the tragedy of losing to a new player was

kind of disgusting to him is how it the the line read came across to me

as opposed to the way komaki is feeling right now which is like wow he's really getting it.

He's getting it.

I'm on top of the world.

Yeah, she says something like,

I better pick it up, or you're going to get the jump on me pretty soon.

I just love the contrast.

Yeah, I just love the contrast of her genuine just joy and love while the king is like fucking losing his mind.

Yeah, yeah.

He does soon, very soon start losing his mind about losing.

I don't know how long they play for.

It's unclear.

Looks seems like a day.

Seems like they play for

occasions.

The king just crushes tiles in his hand.

Yeah, sometimes pensively, sometimes angrily.

Something that I think about a lot as a musician is about

my goal when I'm playing an instrument is to be as relaxed as I can possibly be.

You know,

relaxed in all the bits of my body, except for the bits that I am...

you know, actively requiring tension in to play the instruments.

And the number one most useful lesson that I always learn when I'm playing instruments is, you know, the techniques that let me relax, that let me sit more comfortably, that let me hold the instrument more comfortably, breathe more naturally, etc.

And then I go and see professional musicians play, and I thought I was relaxed, and they're just sitting there like...

Like it means I got to see Yo-Yo Ma play the cello earlier this year, and it was as though the instrument wasn't even in his hands.

It was extraordinary.

And this is what I think about with like part of the way that Goongi is able to remain on top right now is that she is just so comfortable.

You called her Goongie.

You called her Goongie.

Part of the reason I came.

I remember you called me Goongie.

I love Goongie so much.

She's just like,

it's my favorite game of all time.

Yeah, you gotta like sniff a lot more aggressively while you say it.

Oh, oh, oh,

sorry, Drake.

What's wrong, Dre?

Now close your nails.

I said, quick, now come to your nails.

But the king is over on the other side of the table, just being like, oh my god, I have to prove my utmost superiority.

And I know I can do it.

I know I can.

I just have to think really hard.

It's great.

It's really fun.

I don't know

is going to happen.

I don't know where we're going with this.

With this Goongie thing, with Komagi and the Gungi games.

Because, I mean, the way this sort of traditionally works in stories, the way that these

two-player

tactical

games...

What did you call them, Keith?

Abstract puzzle games, sort of?

Abstract strategy games.

Yeah, these two-player abstract strategy games tend to work in fiction, right?

Is that you

stage it like a shonen fight, right?

It's actually about fight ideology.

You know, you have one person on one side of the board, the other person on the other side of the board, and over a series of games, they talk through a series of ideas, sort of like

rendered out abstractly in the board game that sort of like lets them talk about broader concerns that they have.

This is a really well-worn way of doing this.

So

the thing that I can sort of feel myself being set up for is the king and Komagi are going to play Gungi and are going to have a series of conversations that are going to change the way the king feels about

humans, about the world.

What's interesting is that those conversations tend to go both ways, right?

Like a change is affected on both players, or they kind of come towards some sort of mid-ground.

It would be very odd if Komagi was here just as a sort of

guide for the king.

You know, she needs to be.

She is as vulnerable to the transformative power of the abstract puzzle game as the opponent.

But then we're also like staging this large-scale geopolitical Metal Gear game at the same time on the outside.

So I don't really know how these two are going to be squared with each other.

Are we going to have the hunters versus the royal guards as the situation gets worse outside the palace and then a continued series of gungi games with the king and komigi and to what end i mean

what is the most interesting position that the king comes out of this in

i don't know i don't think it's humans have value and i respect humans that feels cheap you know um

it just took one one board game with the with the clever girl who helped me see the value of humans i don't know about that

We'll see.

We'll see.

It's strange because I can kind of see the shape of the room in front of me, but I can't make out the contents of it.

It's Gungi tiles.

Or I think I can make out the shape of the room.

Maybe Komagi is just going to pull a gun and kill the king.

Yeah.

Immediately.

That'd be sick.

That'd be

time to die.

I'm really stupid and I can't do anything.

Except pull the trigger.

I would put some money, some loose money on

Komiki.

Karmiki having a gun?

No, Karmiki being involved in the king's death in some way.

I mean, obviously, that's not what I'm hitching with.

I mean more specific.

I mean an essential part of the plan for the king's death.

Being involved.

Yeah, sure.

Okay.

Yeah, I think Bisky's also involved if we trace it back far enough.

My sister Bisky's here.

Biskey shows up and is like, ah, good to see you haven't been neglecting your training, sister.

Now, sit down.

You're going to play Goongie for 28 hours.

And she's like, yes.

Yippee!

Yippee!

That's kamoogi every time someone mentions Goongi.

Moral has been using his power to surround Peijing.

Deep purple, if you liked it when they were the bunnies, now they are ninjas.

And there are 216 of them.

Yes, I wrote, someone's been reading JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Yeah, do you want to talk about why this is cool, Sylvie?

Well, so it's.

I just love the visual of these.

It's tremendous.

Like.

There's a couple of layers of it.

The one, the visual of just these sort of smoke.

Smoky figures, like, literally made of smoke.

Surround, like, sitting on the

sort of rooftops of Peijing and stuff.

And like

it's a very good visual.

And then on top of that, when you realize that

it's explained, not when we realize, Morrell explains that to anyone using N, these would just appear as like, they wouldn't be able to tell they're not people.

Right, because it's smoke, not aura.

Yeah.

Or I guess he calls it smoke aura.

So it's like aura-infused smoke surrounding, thank you for the, to the narrator for chiming in again and explaining uh that he uses his aura to make a nucleus that he programs with actions and then he surrounds that

now yes then he surrounds it with a smoke puppet which allows him to create 216 smoke puppets at any time but he made them stronger so currently can maintain 50.

It's really cool and it's like a really fun like

hey, getting back to strategy games, tactics stuff, it's like a really fun way to

muddy up the board to continue with the thing, you know?

No, I think that's absolutely it.

These are googie pawns.

Pawns.

Yeah, they're pawns.

Yeah.

And then they do a really cool thing where Chitu shows up, and we'll talk about how that interaction goes, but immediately neutralizes the

entire power that was just explained.

Goes like, this is not a part of this Chi-Chu interaction.

Yeah, it's really good.

Although,

Deep Purple still exists in the town.

Morel is worried about this for a while as he sort of begins to fall into Cheeto's Cheeto.

Mace window.

That's our mace window.

It's Cheeto.

And he begins to fall into

Cheeto's trap.

He's like,

is

Deep Purple still going to be functioning?

And it is out there.

I would like,

and we should move on to Cheeto in a second, but I would really like to check quickly.

I don't fully understand Morel's plan at this point.

He keeps saying things like, I'm going to restrict Pito and I'm going to besiege the city.

Oh, I can see that.

What is he planning on doing?

So he's doing his plan right now.

Basically,

Pito wants to get into Peijing to kill all the people there and/or

and/or bring a bunch of them to

the palace for the meat orchard.

Now,

they were going to let all these people die until Gonan Kilua started fucking things things up for that plan to work right.

And

Moral made the bet that the king and the royal guards would retreat to protect the king, letting him be able to basically take the capital solo with his puppets.

And that's what happened.

It's covering fire, basically.

Right.

So, so.

Pito moving back is essentially like, this is confirmation that the king, or at least the guards, are cautious and not kind of like acting rashly.

And so he's able to go in with the puppets, take the capital, and sort of have skirmish fights on the outskirts without having to directly face the king or the guards in the city.

Instead, he faces Chitu.

Chitu.

And he is immediately wrong-footed by noticing that Chitu doesn't have APR.

And he

intuits, oh shit, they have an exorcist.

This is great.

The seed of Nen exorcism was planted.

It is now beginning to blossom.

He twice blossomed.

This is a twice blossoming flower.

He suspects that Chitu might be the Exorcist.

So he says, all right, I'm just going to kill him now.

Because if he is the Exorcist, you know,

got to take him off the board.

He says Chitu's leveled up.

He can tell that he's confident he must have some new power.

And this is when he's like, oh, wait, where the fuck is the thing?

Maybe he exorcised it.

But no, Chi2 tags him and says, leaps forward,

teleports him to a huge grassy field.

Well, looks like a huge grassy field.

Is revealed to actually be a sort of

Truman show-style set.

Yeah, there's like

a Savannah Snow Globe.

Yeah, it's so good.

There's a huge hourglass there.

Of course, this is the nen power he is going to pick.

He turns the hourglass over, and he has eight hours to catch Chitu.

Otherwise, he will not be able to leave.

This is so great because it echoes back to something that we were talking about in the last episode about the ants having a fundamental lack of experience with Nen and with like Nen combat.

Yeah, we have this whole thing, you know, there's not a huge clue.

Moral is not behaving in the way that Chi Tu expects him to behave.

And at the very end of the scene here,

he goes, like, this is not a contest of speed.

This is a, this is like a contest of willpower.

Basically, Chi-Tu turns the thing and says, you have eight hours to play tag with me and catch me, or else.

And he doesn't say what or else is.

And then Moral's like, I'm not playing your fucking game.

He just lies down and goes to sleep.

Yeah, he fights.

He checks if he can break out.

And he's like, I could break out if I called Deep Purple back.

but there's no guarantee that the aura would be able to penetrate this thing.

So it's better than Pizza.

Pizza would have the city.

What's that?

Oh, and then Pizza would have the City.

Yeah, then Pitu would have the City fails.

Exactly, yeah.

So he's like, I'll leave Deep Purple alone.

I'll try to break the hourglass.

It doesn't work.

So he's like, wake me in five hours and takes a little nap.

I love Morel.

This is some really good Morel stuff.

How does Chi-Tu react to this, by the way?

What's going on with him?

He's fine and normal about it.

Yeah, he's being normal.

Nah, never mind.

No, Chi-Tu's really pissed because I don't think he's thought about this plan at all.

Right.

He's more like, I can't, you're faster than me.

What are you talking about?

Catch you.

I can't do that.

So, goodbye.

Oh, but come on.

That's a game.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

Oh, come on.

Movie's so fun.

You try to catch me.

Come on.

He's like a stupid.

He's like a stupid little kid whose parent won't play games.

Exactly the vibe.

Yes, 100%.

Except

he has a nen power.

There's a line I really like here.

Moral says, and Morrel is really sort of tickled by this.

You get the impression that he is stressed, but he knows that he is more capable than Chitu.

Once he can sort of figure out how the nen power works, he says, what happens if eight hours run out and I haven't touched you?

And first Chi2 says, who knows?

And then he says, I have no obligation to tell you that.

That is smart.

Chitu knows, shut the fuck up, Friday.

We have seen many ants and many humans who just tell you what their power is and then die.

Yeah.

Instead, Chitu is like, well,

this isn't how it works.

I don't have to tell you shit.

This is a new power, also.

So he's like not used to it.

He doesn't really know.

Like, this is the debut of this power.

Leo is a lot of this, by the way.

Leo and Flutter are like on Nov's Trail.

And Leo just immediately reveals that

Hiran, who I've been calling Hina because I believe right after this, she changes her name from Hiran to Hina.

The same way that Leol changed his name from Hagia to Leol.

She is the normal human woman.

She's the normal human woman that has a little hat.

And the gang.

Yes.

And to

emphasize how normal and human she is, she

becomes pregnant with the Nen that she exercises.

She becomes fully pregnant with a PR.

What's the fucking hell, Tagashi?

What are you doing?

Yeah.

It's an uncomfortable screenshot.

It's weird.

I don't know.

I just, I just.

It is so entertaining watching Yoshihiro Tagashi and the anime team just go splashing about with whatever.

That when they do produce these bizarre images, I'm sort of like, okay, all right, what's up next?

It does seem like if you are a nin exorcist, your power is

just weird.

Because the two nin and exorcists we have seen so far, one guy summons a weird

slug monster creature snake that like will not leave him alone.

And I, I think it's, I don't know if this was directly explained or if it was just implied, but it seems like the more powerful the nin spell is, the bigger the poop snake monster is.

Totally.

Yeah.

I think so.

And

we have

Ninprag.

Yeah.

I hate that.

I hate that.

I hate that with every fiber of my being.

Hey, blame Tagashi.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Tagashi wasn't the one who just said it.

I really like the

as we as we cut back into this town,

we get another one of these things that the show does quite a lot, where the ants

correctly ascertain the plans of the humans and and vice versa.

Leol looks up at the

Deep Purple, and

it is confirmed.

He can't tell that they are nen.

You know, he just detects them as people.

But he says, I suspect that their leader is kind of hiding among them.

Yeah.

Which is just true.

I mean, well, it's not true right now because Moral is

exactly how the plan was makes him wrong.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

He He asks Pito for reinforcements, and they send an ant that we have seen before.

This is a sort of...

We've briefly seen both of them.

Have we seen both of them?

I'm wondering which one you think that you know that we've seen, because

I'll tell you when they both show up.

But yeah.

One is like a snoodly little pointy-nosed bug ant.

That's called a bloster.

He's a lobster.

Oh, sure.

Okay.

Is that really his name?

Bloster?

Yeah, totally.

Bloster.

Bloster.

He has like scenes.

He's a blue lobster.

He's a blue lobster.

Oh, I know.

I thought that he was a lobster that blasts.

Bloster is also just an anagrab of

poor Daddy Torrence in the depths of the Overlook, looking at the mirror and seeing Bloster written in red on the mirror.

And then the other one is a sort of, it's sort of like Peach Fuzz from Creep.

He's like a wolf humanoid.

Oh, my God.

Wow, Welkin?

what is he he is just sort of a wolf guy he's a guy with a wolf head yeah his name just a wolf guy yeah his name's welkin welkin yeah his name's welcome

well finn no well finn well

fin yeah yeah uh welcome is lightning who which one of them was the one that you recognized

Bolster?

Blobster?

Yeah.

What's his name?

Bloster.

Bloster.

Like Bluster.

Yeah, I recognized him.

Where did you recognize him from?

An early ant assault, right?

Don't we see him in a very early sort of assault on a village?

One of the places that I know that he shows up, because it happened recently, is he's on the news report that

the spiders are watching.

He has like a full freeze frame of like, the ants are taking over the mud.

And then it's just like him shooting up a village and then a freeze frame on him.

And then Welfin is in a background scene a couple times.

Do you remember when they all used to hang out together at the poop palace?

Yeah.

He used to just hang out in the back of the Calcyon days.

Yeah.

The good old days back at the Poop Palace.

Yeah.

Wow.

And then we're basically done.

I mean, the king is really struggling to beat the Gunky player.

And he says,

oh, wait.

Oh, my God.

I think we did briefly miss is they try and contact Chem and Natero at one point, and they can't.

And we get this amazing shot of

an eagle flying through the sky, and then, like, almost hitting a wall of radiant golden men and just like fleeing in the opposite direction.

Instantly is like, I'm going some other way.

Yeah, the king is as the king.

Natero is the figure burning in gold that Kiliwa very briefly sensed.

I know, weird, huh?

I love whenever you accidentally do something like that.

I love when I turn into Paul Nano.

Yeah,

the king sort of notices that Komugi has beat him in a way that she could only have done if she had predicted his entire game from the start.

And he says, impossible, as the royal guards notice that a storm is starting to draw closer to the palace.

I love this because really skilled gameplaying, you know, be that chess or go or something, does look like someone is using Nen, even when they might just be being very, very good at it.

I can't tell whether or not she is actually predicting or if she just plays Gungi that well.

He does have a line

about the atmosphere in the room when she starts playing.

Yeah, because she opens her eyes and she says, she has a line that's like,

I try and keep them closed.

She has like cloudy

pupils.

Not pupils, Irises.

She says, you know, I try and keep them closed, but I can't keep them closed when I'm playing.

And the king kind of like looks up at her and feels the atmosphere in the room change.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Is I'm very good at gungi a good enough nen power?

No.

Can children have nen?

Oh, what a stupid question.

What a stupid question.

I'm sorry to be

jumping there, but damn.

No, no.

Stupid, stupid question.

I know a couple.

Yeah.

I've met a fan.

Zushi.

Oh, Zushi has Zushi has good nen.

Does Zushi have good nen?

You think the hand baby has a lot of fun.

Zushi's not.

Oh, remember the hand baby?

Who?

Oh.

Yeah, how many more episodes do you think until the hand baby shows up?

Where is he gone?

But remember when I said a couple of episodes ago, I think that the girl in white is the hand baby who's grown up really quickly.

I do remember that she's going to kind of be like an opposite to the king.

Yeah.

You don't even know if that's true or not.

She's not the hand baby, but I do think she is a kind of, I mean, she's clearly like a sort of

she's she's the other side of the coin to the king because she's sitting across from him at a gunky table.

You're saying that she's not the hand baby because you no longer believe that, not because we have any evidence to disprove it.

I suppose the onus is on the show.

The button of proof

does lie on the show.

Well, I guess if it was the hand baby,

what would you have expected to happen that it shows up and goes, I was birthed from the queen?

I don't know.

I think I was expecting.

I don't know.

I can't predict these guys.

Me pointing at the production team.

I think I would have been expecting Colts to be involved.

Where's fucking Colt?

He's busy raising the hand baby.

Don't say who.

He has a child to raise.

Yeah, a child child that Morel swore he would protect, and now he's off gallivancing around with the fucking

killing the ants so that he could protect them.

If he wanted to

in the same way that Goku killing Vegeta is protecting Gohan, listen, Morel's got to pack his pipe and fucking smoke it out so that he can save Colt and a child.

He's got a chief on that delicious English blend.

I mean,

I'm like 99% sure Purple Haze is like the name of a weed strain, right?

It's gotta be.

Oh, it's got to be.

Oh, oh, like, you mean like

post facto the song?

Purple haze?

No, dude, I've literally smoked it.

Like, yeah, that's yeah, because in that case, it absolutely is.

Is it an indica?

Sounds like an indica.

Sounds like an indica.

Hold on, I'm Googling.

That's a sativa.

It's a sativa.

You were wrong.

Oh, fuck me.

Sativa.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do we have any any reviews to read?

We do reach the end.

I have two reviews to read.

One's very short, the other is a little longer, but they're both pretty quick.

First of all, May birthday.

Summoned by my birthday month.

This podcast totally slaps from Eevee underscore Lou.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Obviously, a five stars.

And I have another one here.

Titled Hunter Hunter Disease from Little Socrates.

Oh, no.

I don't know.

Watched Conclave and said, I wish this was more like Hunter Hunter, and the camera followed a couple of these background cardinals, so this had a little more life.

Tagashi's floating camera is the ultimate narrative world building tool, and this podcast's analysis will make you a better storyteller.

Keith is insane for not liking Rock the Dragon.

It's me.

Thank you, everyone, for the reviews.

I don't remember what name we said last.

Oh, they'll show up.

It's not even out yet.

Well, I don't know what name we said with the May.

That

the episode that Allie was in, I guess,

was May, or maybe that was the week, because the week after.

Here's what I'll do.

There's no new name.

There's no new name.

We would know what the name was if those people had reviewed.

Exactly.

So, shame on you.

You have a second chance.

If we said your name,

you all failed.

Get thee to Apple Podcasts.

Get the to Apple Podcast to review.

I thee to Apple Podcasts.

Thank you, everybody, though, who has given us a five-star review.

And thank you,

I think, to someone who either deleted a four-star review or turned it into a five-star review, because I swear to God, there was three four-star reviews, and now there's only two.

Thanks for getting with the program.

And I highly encourage the other

ones of you to do that, although I'm not stressed about it because there's so few of you.

Blessedly.

It sucks so much that the way these technology platforms work is that anything less than a perfect score is like a death knell i'll say that we have maybe the all-time best ratio of five stars to other ratings um so i'm not super worried about it we don't have a percentage point we have a full five stars yeah a correct dab of podcasts zero one stars zero two stars two three stars two four stars One of the three stars, I swear to God, was somebody being like, this is the podcast I've always been waiting for.

And I'm like,

did you accidentally hit three?

What happened?

I mean, maybe that's who fixed it because I don't see a three-star on my page.

It's down at the bottom.

It's like one of the first reviews.

It's like really, really.

Why we don't need to draw attention to it.

No, we don't need to draw attention to it.

Were you born in the month of July?

We skipped.

No, it's not.

June is on the episode that is not yet released.

Release schedule keeps fucking me up with these guys.

Were you born in the month of July?

And is your name

Alex?

If so,

you know what you have to do.

I'll explain

Alex welcome, I assume.

Alexander Alexandra.

I was very nearly called Alex instead of Jack.

But I wasn't.

Wow.

So

if that's you, hold off.

If

you hold position.

Yeah.

Hold position.

If the version of me that was called Alex is listening, please get in contact with me unless it would cause some sort of world-ending catastrophe.

We do not want any time cop scenarios here, so please be careful about

it, but don't maybe we have enough trouble with other kinds of cops

down in the

DJCBD out here.

Yeah.

What are we watching next time, Keith?

Next time, we're watching a further three episodes.

We're on a run of three since slightly redoing how things are going to go.

Those are going to be episodes 104, 105, and 106

titled, I'm not stalling.

I'm just being dramatic.

Uh-huh.

Definitely.

Doubt and hesitation, resolve and awakening, and Nove and Moral.

Oh.

Huh.

Hmm.

Huh.

Two guys.

Just two guys.

November Moral.

Guys being dudes.

Yeah.

I will say that I think the bodies are going to start hitting the floor sometime soon.

Yeah.

I mean, we've been told that there are going to be sacrifices.

You know, we're not going to get through this without sacrifices.

And while you could read that very broadly, where the Hunters' first plan involved the death of five million civilians, I think they mean more specifically.

I wonder whether or not Morel and Nove are going to make it out of this arc.

Although, I don't think that Chitu is going to give Morel a run for his money.

I think Morel is fine right now.

Seems confident at least.

Yeah.

All right.

We are Media Club Plus.

Yeah.

You can find us online at friendsatthetable.cash.

If you are able to, your financial support for making this thing

really helps a great deal.

This is a job.

It takes a lot of time and energy to do the person hours that go into making this show is, I don't know,

pretty high, actually.

Like, it, you know, it takes,

I take notes.

It takes me a couple hours to watch three episodes instead of the normal 55 minutes or whatever.

I don't know how long it takes the three of you to watch with notes if you take notes.

Editing the show.

I show three times speed.

You do?

No, of course I don't.

I just try to say the most upsetting thing.

It was very upsetting.

You know, editing the show, you know, it takes like five to eight hours per episode, depending on what's going on in that episode.

It would be great if you could.

You go to friendsatable.cash, sign up to support the show.

Only $5 if you want to hear the bonus episodes we've recorded for this.

A lot of people signed up as free members to get notified when the

screenshot posts drop, which is great.

And if any of those people would like to turn their free subscriptions into $5 subscriptions, that would be great.

Thank you for listening.

Okay, bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.