Melly O'Roan - Hunter x Hunter ep. 98-100: Media Club Plus S01E31

Hey everybody, Keith here.

Just wanted to let you know that the second Media Club Plus bonus for Dragon Ball Z, which is our sixth bonus episode overall, is out on the Patreon friendsofetable.cash.

We covered episodes 31, 42, 46, and 47 of Dragon Ball Z Kai.

Again, that's friendsofetable.cash to get our sixth Media Club Plus bonus episode.

Seven is already recorded.

It'll be out probably in one or three weeks, and then we're free from the embrace of Dragon Ball Z.

Okay, bye.

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

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

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

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on the well-loved website, x.com.

You can find me on the even more well-loved website, Blue Sky.sky.

What is it?

B sky.app.

B sky.app.

I learned, I realized recently that blue sky is nowhere on blue sky.

It It doesn't say Blue Sky anywhere.

It says B sky.

We're going to say Blue Sky Anywhere.

The app isn't called Blue Sky.

It doesn't say Blue Sky when I go to see what my password was in

Chrome.

Anyway, that's a weird thing that this website called Blue Sky isn't called Blue Sky Anywhere.

You can go to youtube.com slash run button to watch the videos that I make on my other thing.

We've been doing Silent Hill 2, so by the time this is up, there'll be a handful of episodes of Silent Hill 2, both the remake and probably the original.

And you can also find us on Twitch at Friends of the Table, at twitch.tv slash Friendsofthetable, and then the YouTube, youtube.com slash friends of the table for this thing, not the other thing.

That's this thing.

Let's see.

Anything else?

Nope.

With me, as always, is Jack to Keith.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

You can find all of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Sylvie Bullet?

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

You can check out the archives of the stuff that we stream on the Twitch channel that Keith mentioned at youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

Keith and I are in the middle of a Virtue's Last Reward playthrough that I think if you listen to this show, you'll enjoy.

It's true.

The 999 and Virtue's Last Reward stuff is very.

I think that there's a big cross-section of people that listen to this that would like that.

And Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey,

when is this episode going out, Keith?

Three weeks.

Okay.

Yeah, I don't know where I'll be on the internet three weeks from now.

Did we, let's see, is there anything left we haven't plugged for the show?

Did we talk about the shop, friendsofetable.shop?

I don't think we didn't.

There you go.

Yeah, go over to friendsofetable.shop what's your favorite thing we'll have a song

what's your favorite thing on friendsofthetable dot shop dre uh it's gotta be my marielda burns t-shirt in the green that's a t-shirt that I have gotten more compliments and questions about than any other shirt I've worn in my life.

That's a great shirt.

Yeah.

And of course, there's the new Celebration Dance shirt in white and cream.

And you can get the Mary Elda Burns poster, too.

I forgot about the poster.

Yeah.

This is a, I feel like these episodes that we just watched were breakneck.

This was, there was so much happening.

And like after a bunch of episodes that almost

that felt like they like relished in their languid pace,

having these episodes where a bunch of stuff happened was wild.

And Chimera Ant Arc will do that to you.

It will go super slow and then it'll just throw a ton of stuff.

And it's kind of funny, it all felt like set up and groundwork.

Like there wasn't anything big that happened.

It was just a parade of detail, it felt like.

These episodes have Gone Kilua infiltrating East Gorteaux.

They split up and they have to take on a series of ants on their own.

Kilua is like extra, seems like extra gung-ho to like do his part now that he's not being mind-controlled by his brother.

Everyone voices their opinion on how bad/slash-necessary it is that by following Netero's plans, 99% of the population of East Gorteau will be killed.

This is so important.

Do not let me forget about this in the future to talk about that.

Nova and Morrell are working with a high-ranking officer in the Gortowian military to convince him to defect.

Hagia, now Leol, which we've been waiting for for episodes now, his pals and Cheetu have sworn allegiance to the king in exchange for new powers.

Moral introduces the idea that there's some kind of high-level power play happening with the Hunter Association, and Goan meets an ant that may turn out to be an ally, and Kilua meets a singing octopus sniper who wishes he was a squid.

My bullets are so special.

Oh, don't worry.

I've got it.

Thank God.

It's a true.

It sounds like he's at church.

It sounds like he's doing like the shit I heard at church when I was a kid.

He sounds like everyone's grandpa when they're trying to sing my way.

Also true.

Also, classic grandpa, my way situation.

I'm glad that neither of you said my favorite line that he says, so I can press the button.

Oh, yeah.

No, I would never say any of the actual lines.

I wouldn't want to ruin that.

Octopus is actually going to arrive pretty late in these episodes, but he is a highlight.

He's a highlight.

I understand.

I want to mention him spoiler.

This isn't a spoiler.

I'm going to say Austin mentioned towards the end of the episode that he was on recently that his favorite character is coming up.

That is that octopus.

That octopus is Austin's favorite character.

Is it his favorite character?

I think he might have said character.

I mean, listen,

he might have said no shade if it is his favorite character.

It's one or the other.

Not sneeze at that.

I just wanted to.

Something that Keith has talked about in the past, I think more in the early part as we sort of see Tagashi start, in the early part of the show, as we start to see Tagashi put pieces onto the board, is how clever and how sort of expeditious Tagashi and the adaptation team are at setting pins up and not telling you when they're going to knock them down.

Or if.

Yeah.

And we have gotten to a point in the Chimera and Arc now where there are so many little pieces on the board that he can cut away to almost any of them and you will be excited about what is happening there.

It really does feel like he has activated all the side quests in his quest log at the same time.

And we're just sort of like bopping happily from one to the other.

This is

such an interesting contrast coming off both the date with Palm thing, which was kind of like a laser-focused diversion.

You know, we were on Palm and Killiwa's Breaking of the Curse pretty single-mindedly.

And then this incredibly focused

Phantom Troop Tupata,

which was, you know, laser-focused to the point where it completely forgot Gon and Killiua existed until the end.

Right.

They almost show you Gonan and Kilua as a joke in the last four seconds of the episode.

Yeah, to be like, remember these guys?

But now these three episodes are like a buffet of

stuff.

Like he said, none of it is immensely consequential.

There is some stuff that happens in these episodes that has some pretty interesting implications for the world that I cannot wait to talk about.

I love that you call it a buffet because in my notes, there's multiple times where I literally wrote yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, because of the stuff that they're revealing.

I love these episodes.

Just to, Jack, expand on your side quest metaphor there, I think it's like there's this extra bonus of, you know, when you're playing a game with a bunch of side quests and you like mark them all in your map, and it's like, oh,

I have like six quests that are all around where the next main quest is.

That's great.

I can go knock all this out at once.

This is where it feels like we've drawn like a circle, like an area of importance.

And it's like, we're just going to bounce around between all of these places that are all in the same zone, encircling the king, basically.

Everything is around the king.

This is one of my favorite modes that Hunter Hunter operates in.

I think Hunter Hunter at its worst is rudderless and confusing.

Or just sort of like lumbering uselessly towards a foregone conclusion.

I'm thinking of like pacing issues that I had in Heaven's Arena and towards the end of Greed Island.

And then Hunter Hunter is also very, very good when it is just, you know,

throwing strike after strike.

You know, and really wild stuff is happening.

The birth of the ant baby, the birth of the king, all these kinds of reveals around what Chimera ants even are.

But the mode that we've fallen into now is one of my favorite Hunter-Hunter modes, which is nothing massively consequential is happening, but the whole thing is kind of like zipping along at a really enjoyable pace.

And like you said, there's an implicit threat that everything that's happening might be a piece for later.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A lot of York New felt like this for me.

Once the kind of like

clockwork toy of York New had been wound up, um, most of the like mid-to-back part of that uh arc before the nightmare hostage situation sort of sucked everything into it like a black hole, uh, was just sort of like bopping along really excitingly like this.

Since there is such a stunning list of facts that happens in these uh three episodes, uh, does anybody want to say a highlight that we're excited to talk about so that we don't accidentally move past it too quickly?

Yeah, I'll go first.

What the hell is going on inside the hunter organization?

Yeah, I have big highlights around that stuff.

That's

okay.

All right.

Okay, we all agree that that is the biggest thing that happens.

Any backup?

Wow, everyone.

Okay, so we're unanimous.

There's some stuff that I want to talk about with regards to the

real-life

authoritarians and dictators that Takashi is drawing on.

Yeah.

But I don't know if it's as fun or as like

lore-heavy as the what is the vice chairman's faction?

What is going on there?

That is also, we basically start with that stuff.

Like, Kilua gives a history lesson to Goan about East Gorteau.

The first thing that we get actually is Hagia and crew sort of

like running through the desert of East Gorteaux and, like, you know, kind of trying to seek refuge at the palace and getting taken in by the king or being taken in by the royal guard.

I guess the king doesn't give a shit, I bet.

You just get a little bit of that, and then we skip to Killua being like, uh,

this place, it's a political system based on snitches and collective punishment.

Uh, failures are an ant.

What's that?

An informant.

We got an informant.

We do.

An informant.

Yeah, it's okay.

I'll take it.

Listen, I'm not afraid of the woke mob.

Family members are split into different groups.

So if a group tries to escape, they can kill your family or imprison them for life.

It's a nasty bit of talk about how the media lies to everyone so no one realizes that everything is bad.

you know just sort of classics to just imagine what would be on the news about north korea in america and that yeah we also got the classic sort of like um social credit thing coming into place where like you get informant points if you are a particularly good snitch and you lose informant points if you're a particularly bad snitch I described it as like McCarthyism meets everything that the news has ever told you about the DPRK yeah yeah yeah definitely there's something really fun going on here that I God I don't know if the show is

they're not playing a particularly subtle instrument when they are

describing they

right-hand man Marcos.

Like, they are not being subtle.

They named the guy Kim Jong-il.

Yes, you're right.

They named...

Yes.

He's making

the Olympic dream team, but for dictators is what Tagashi's done here.

He's like, oh, yeah, I'm going to draft Kim Jong-il

and Marcos into my authoritarian team.

There's this great moment when Killior is describing specifically the informant point system, and he and Goan sort of explicitly say you know oh that sounds terrible that's that sounds awful and it was fascinating to me because i was just like you're the guys from the game-loving organization you know yeah

there's a degree to which um something about the way the hunters play games uh with other people's lives, with their own powers, with their nen abilities, with the blood sports on the island, that's all fine.

But a system of social credit, you know, a sort of gamified society, now that's clearly some sort of evil.

And it's by the way,

when we make a deal with the guy who's been like the right-hand van of this regime.

I thought that bit was actually really clever.

I think that part really excites me.

But yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do think that the stuff with Marco.

Marco or Marcos?

It's straight up Marco.

It's just Marcos.

It's just Marcos.

You know, again, it's not

a subtle thing, but it is more subtle than Killier and Goan going, wow, these guys suck, huh?

It is funny, you know, not like

to

like deliver this very like propaganda-laden sort of Western, like, American Western view of North Korea on top of this place while criticizing its people for

being totally subject to lies in the media.

Yeah, I mean, it ends up resonating more than maybe intended.

yeah um because of that yeah it's been weird writing to get them to an interesting place and the place that they get to is

um

there's some pretty dark business going on like at the moment in this country in in eastgoteau you know setting aside what was happening before which was also awful the the iskoteau that they arrive in is really odd as the show sort of becomes like metal gear for for a second oh yeah we're back in techno thriller they find an old village They stumble upon this old village that turns out to be totally empty in a very weird, eerie way.

Jack, what were you going to say?

Well, they figure out pretty quickly that the sorting process is

the sorting at East Goteau, sorry, at

the capital, is sort of a front orchard.

The meat orchard.

Please.

What the ants have actually done is because the communities are kept isolated from each other,

and because they would have to travel overland to get to the capital, what they've done is they've set up a situation where they can slaughter entire villages

sort of on a modular basis, where they can just go village to village, killing everybody in it.

And I think the implication is recruiting.

They keep talking about the like 1% of people who survive.

And I can't quite tell whether or not they are aiming to create a high-powered military or whether they are harvesting people for the king to eat.

I think it's both...

in the last episodes that we watched, they called humans a self-renewing resource.

So I think the goal is

I think maybe what it is is that Gone and Kilo, who are talking about this, have overlooked that the ants need people to eat and are assuming that they're going to make 5,000 or 50,000 soldiers.

Maybe that's what it is.

Yeah.

But what we end up in is another one of Tagashi's sort of evocative haunted house sets where he has managed to empty out in in the same way that the NGL became this sort of like

buzzing, sinister hotbed of ant activity as they sort of like took a foothold and started harvesting the rural villages and set up the citadel and all that stuff.

Now the entire country of East Goteau is sort of being emptied out by the ants and turned into this ghost town.

There's, you know, bodies buried in shallow graves, there's trails of blood everywhere.

This is all shot like

a war movie or a spy movie.

You know, it's all these like pale green-gray jungles, people moving among the jungles, trails of blood on the floor.

I mean, there's like...

Actually, maybe I'm getting ahead of myself.

I don't know if it's during the sequence that when they're talking about the plan that you see the like field of skulls.

But I know that there's a shot in these episodes where they use that image, and that's like also very evocative of real-life atrocities.

Yeah, this is pretty heavy stuff.

It really is.

Yeah.

Equally heavy is that part of the plan, part of Netero's plan is to allow this to happen.

Yes, and the show is not coy about that.

You know, there are multiple occasions when characters in these episodes are saying, I don't know that I feel great about this.

Yeah, I mean, Kilua goes off plan to save people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Chairman Notero,

besides being

sort of ideologically weird, weird,

has a lot of experience with

sorting people, you know?

Shema Natera's understanding of

I'm not saying this to be like he is selecting for the right people to survive, but he has spent the first chunk of the show selecting for the right people to survive.

His view of the world is one in which kind of like working through a lot of casualties to get to a good outcome is very much within his playbook.

Well, this isn't the episode that we get it in.

It's next episode that we get a new

ending theme.

That's really good.

And so

we'll play it when it comes up, but

the name of the English translation of the name of that song is Two Sides of the Same Coin.

Yeah.

There is something.

Yeah, I don't quite.

I'm trying to figure out which thing I want to hit first.

There is a lot of

a typical American and British view of North Korea.

I can't speak for Japan is that

something that keeps coming up again and again in the way that it's talked about in the US and in England is that it's sort of like a fake country.

You know, you hear all those stories about like fake villages, people coming out for fake celebrations you know

going places where there's a lot of people and then they're like you can tell that they were only there because they were told to be there and it's sort of like the the the story is that it's like a simulacra of a country i don't know enough about north korean history or politics to be able to talk with much authority about that but i do think that there's something interesting going on with the way the show is more explicitly rendering out that idea of a fake country, of being like, as far as the king and the royal royal guards are concerned, the entirety of the country for them now is something to be sort of like harvested or worked through like a factory line or like a project.

And I think that's an interesting mirror of a lot of the sort of real world talking points about North Korea, whether or not they're accurate.

It's interesting because we do see like some images of the bigger areas and like when tanks start showing up to institute martial law, which we'll talk about later, and it's like guys in business suits like leaving office buildings.

It is like

they do kind of this bolder, like, okay, there's these villages that are being emptied out, but this just looks like a place.

This is like a real, this is like a city.

When we see stuff like this happening, though, entire villages being killed, shallow graves, and you know, the poor of us go, this is pretty heavy stuff.

I can see the broader metaphor that Tagashi and Ko are drawing here, right?

Where it's like the kind of consuming power that dictators

operate or ethnic cleansing asks

or like genocides ask

is

similar to the sort of like ravaging consumptive power of a chimera ant king or whatever.

You know, it is once again one of these, like, they're not so different from us.

You know, Marywam talks a big game about sort of being like a true king, a real king of power, but the things he ends up replicating are just the worst excesses of, you know, human atrocity.

Yeah.

It is a unsubtle metaphor.

I can see the way it is working.

And in the execution,

it is...

It's upsetting to see played out.

It is made more interesting by the fact that we get these shots of maps showing kind of the slaughter of the villagers,

except they're hunter maps or they're killer maps or they're diegetic maps.

So they have like a little yacht drawn on one side, like a sunny colored boat and like a little fish leaping in the water.

And the show has always been so good at this sort of like

incongruity between what is going on and the fact that these are 12-year-olds.

And so like a child's map depicting the passage of a slaughter through an entire country was really nice and queasy and you know uncomfortable.

This is where Kilua has the idea that they should split up.

Yeah,

that's big.

Yeah, Kilua basically says, you know,

we can disrupt them easily by, oh, they do a lot of math to prove that they're going to kill 99% of the population and,

you know, 950 million people.

Sorry, 900 and no, 400, 400

4 million 950 000 people are going to die and 500 or 50 000 people are going to survive and they do this to prove that a certain number of nen ants could kill that many people in x amount of time but then with less uh with manipulators you could do it with less people and i'm going to go take out those people and disrupt the manipulators so that people can escape and gone

you don't come with me because we we need to save you for Pito.

Yeah.

There's some great writing here, actually.

You know, Keith describes manipulators, but the thing they're really talking about is Pito and Pito's ability to sort of puppeteer these soldiers.

At one point, Kiliwa says, if they figure this out right, they'll be able to kill 500,000 people with a single punch,

which I thought was really good, especially once we've seen what kite can do.

Right.

And also the idea of the ants making use of

people

for things other than food.

You know, it's like, well, we can just use, we can just puppeteer these people as soldiers.

Right.

He calls them,

the king in the last episodes called them like sheep or pigs begging not to be slaughtered.

And then now they're, you know, beasts of burden.

Be like, these are farm animals.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah.

They're not just for food, but they're also for plowing.

Yeah.

This is

also the history of human atrocity in so many ways.

Yeah, it's literally like, again, the authoritarianism and like the

ants have staged a coup.

Like literally, it is the ants are the new shadow government, right?

Literally shadow government.

Yes.

We keep seeing or we keep seeing Diego, like, who we know is dead on TV, we know is literally being puppeted, like a literal puppet.

There's something so wonderful about the fact that they are chimera ants.

This is, you know, like Sylvie says, this is a coup, you know, it's a fairly straightforward coup story

with

the sort of the military coup taking place and the

sort of apocalyptic atrocities that follow.

Except Tagashi has figured out how to have his cake and eat it because he's also like, yeah, but they're also...

they're also ants.

And you pause and you're like, so bugs, right, Tagashi?

And he's like, well, no, not exactly.

They're not really ants.

They're sort of anything I want them to be.

They look like anything I want, and they can do anything I want.

But also, I'm telling a serious story about a violent authoritarian cooperation.

You know what?

It's great.

Yeah.

We're kind of pulling it off so far.

Aside from everything about Diego.

Yeah.

Every time he speaks, I'm like, oh, that's really racist.

The dub voice acting is racist.

It's real.

Yeah, we mentioned it last time.

The dub is so bad.

The dub is so bad.

I think that this is.

Oh, so Goan and Kiloa split up.

Right as they're being tailed by Melioron,

Goan, this might be a little bit later, but Goan sort of sort of is having this thought of like, maybe I shouldn't leave Kiloa alone.

Like, this team, he was acting kind of weird.

You know, whatever.

It's probably fine.

He'd get mad at me if I went after him.

So I probably should.

Probably nothing.

I should let him do what he wants to do.

And then Moral and Nove are in a very nice-looking hotel room with a guy named Marcos, who is uh, do they give a position for him?

He's implied to be like the head of the military, um,

or like

he's a general, okay, yeah.

Uh, so he's there, he's like, I'm gonna spill everything to you if you provide like political asylum for me and my family, and uh, you know, I'll tell you everything that Diego did.

Moral has his little aside to be like, You did it too, you fucking asshole.

Uh, yes, Yeah.

This is great because as he is describing, you know, he says, I'll tell you everything in exchange for my freedom.

I had two thoughts, kind of like one after the other.

The first was, are the hunters trying to like get one up on the country geopolitically?

Are they, you know, are they looking for something to benefit them?

And then I said, no, no, they're probably looking for something to benefit their attack on the Chimera ants.

They're saying, tell me everything you know about the military, about how it all works so we can more effectively fight the Chimera ants.

And we'll talk about it as the next scene, as the next time we cut back to Morella Nove.

The scene after immediately problematizes that.

I went right back to thinking, are the hunters trying to get one up on everybody politically?

It's really, really odd.

I do want to just jump back briefly to it.

We would have, this is the, we had some

scheduling issues that meant that we're watching a different set of episodes than we were meant to be watching.

These questions would be answered for you if we had watched the full five that we were planning on doing.

We We just didn't have time to record an episode where we talked about five.

Five.

Oh, yeah, watch five.

Hey, what?

I realized it that we, everyone was like, five episodes, that's so many.

And I was like, we've done five twice.

Both other times that we tried to do five, it also got rescheduled into smaller amounts.

I do want to jump back briefly to a little Goan and Kilio moment as they split up.

Because Kilio makes Goan promise not to sort of make a move to follow him.

and Goan says, I get it, I get it.

And then Kiliwa just like turns on him very quickly and very seriously and says, Do you, though?

Do you really get it?

And there's this sort of like uncomfortable pause.

Yeah.

And then he just sort of, he, he, he,

it's like a standoff.

He tries to make him promise that he understands, and Goan doesn't promise.

Yeah.

And then Kiliua sort of brushes it off.

A great echo back to the like the last time Kilua had any idea that Goan was maybe going to be his lackey and follow him around and be his like little assassin buddy which was on the airship in uh uh in the hunter exam

when he was like come on goan and gone's like no i'm going to stay here this is like the

That was the last time that Killua like demanded something of Goan and Goan has not changed.

He still does not give in to people's demands of him.

No, although Killua is now maybe feeling a little more comfortable about pushing on those demands now that he has ripped the thing out of his head that means that he can love Goan Freaks with his whole heart,

rather than a sort of like interim pocket of his heart.

Although we technically don't know if that was there at the time.

That's true, but we have Killiwa's personality has been changing a little post-pulling out the needle.

Yeah, yeah.

And part of that, I think, is his comfort or readiness to push back on Goan, knowing that...

how do I want to put this?

Sometimes I felt like Killiwa didn't want to push back on Goan because he was like, Goan is all I've got.

His love is sort of paralyzing and impossible.

And there's something sort of fundamentally wrong with me.

So nobody wants to be with me except Goan.

And now he's pulled out the needle and has seen that Goan still cares very much, well, you know, in a sort of Goan freaks way, about him, and he cares very much about Goan, I think he's more ready to push gently on Goan when he says things like, you know, when he does his sort of like classic Goan blase.

Yeah.

Yeah, you know.

Well, I think he's been apologizing like without apologizing since this idea that he couldn't protect Goan like really came to the front.

He's been like apologizing by being extremely passive.

And being like, we'll just do what Goan wants to do because I can't do anything for myself because I've got this problem that I'm dealing with that I can't figure it out.

And now it feels like it's weird.

Weirdly, his behavior hasn't changed.

He still has a desire to protect Goan, but instead of being

instead of apologizing for that desire, he's kind of owning it in a way.

He has learned how to love himself, kind of, so now he can love others.

Yeah.

He literally ripped

some of the guilt out of his head.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ain't that the way?

Yeah.

Brief shout out to Melari.

How do we say his name?

Meliarone.

Meliarone's shader work in this episode.

When he's invisible, he appears as this sort of like Lisa Frank style rainbow translucent object.

He looks amazing.

He's like mostly outline.

Yeah, when I was eight years old, I would think this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

What changed?

He looks like a ray traced car from Fort Slack.

He does look like a Fort Scott.

He looks so good.

They've got a reshade installed on Meleora.

When I was a kid, I had a beanie baby that was white with sort of like rainbow-colored paint splotches all over him.

Is it a bear?

Very possibly.

And I thought that that was about as beautiful an object as humans could make.

Wow.

I've got a couple of beanie babies on my desk.

Oh, man.

Have I told you all my heist I pulled off involving beanie babies?

Oh, and you broke into the beanie baby vault?

No.

My cousin agreed to trade me his dreamcast in a bunch of games for all of my beanie babies.

Whoa.

I did not have any worthwhile beanie babies.

Wow.

Yeah, well, there's just no such thing.

Jack, is this your guy here?

Let me go over and see.

Very possibly.

It might also have been Cheeri.

Cheery.

Oh, Cheeri.

I'm learning this now.

I did not.

This is not off the dome.

I talked on Run Button with Kyle about.

But it is this bear.

Okay, the same bear.

This bear's favorite.

This is the famous Beanie Baby Bear.

This is the

BB Beauty Baby.

Yes.

To me, this is the Platonic ideal of a stuffed animal bear, like the design, like the shape of it, the form factor.

Talking about

how

good those

original couple generations of beanie babies were design-wise, just like as

iconographic, sort of like quintessential design.

And was looking up just these beanie babies, and I was like, oh, these were like $2 on eBay now.

So I just bought a couple of my favorite ones when I was a kid because they all got destroyed or

brought to goodwill by my mom.

My mom brought a bunch of my stuff from when I was a kid to, I don't know, donate or threw it away.

I don't know.

I have almost nothing from my childhood because you just got rid of it all without asking.

That sucks.

I know.

Just before we continue, I'd like to propose a very brief mini-game that I call Beanie Baby Ear Poem or Robert Frost.

Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to read you two poems.

You have to tell me if you think they're Beanie Baby Ear Poem or Robert Frost.

Ready?

Or is it going to be one of each or mystery?

Mystery.

Okay.

Okay, ready?

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree toward heaven still, and there's a barrel I didn't fill beside it, and there may be two or three apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

Robert Frost.

I feel like it's so obviously Robert Frost that I almost was like outthinking myself.

All right, well, now he's

got it.

Here's the second one: Bones is a dog that loves to chew.

Chairs and tables in the smelly old shoe.

You're so destructive, all would shout.

That stopped when his teeth fell out.

Robert Frost.

Yeah, I also think Robert Frost.

Both Robert Frost hoods.

The second one took a turn, and I was like, oh, okay, this is...

Just take a turn.

Dog's fucking teethulf.

I don't think you could say destructive on a beanie baby.

Probably.

That was beanie baby, though.

Here's the other thing is that Robert Frost is quite famous as a poet.

That's true.

Some of these are absolute dog shit.

This one's from Waddles, and it says, when I swim, I go really fast, but when I run, I'm usually lost.

That's it.

Robber frost.

Wait, are we still playing?

Trick, it's E.E.

Cole.

It was Yates.

Oh, sure.

And then the general's there, and they talk about the general.

Now, suddenly, we cut to Knuckle and Shoot.

Knuckle is chewing on a lollipop.

I think Knucklebine is the greatest guy on the planet.

Yep.

And I am delighted every time he's around.

This is such an important conversation.

I've already noted that we should remember this stuff for later.

And I'm talking like in a dozen episodes or so.

Do you mind if I play a long-ish clip of Knuckle shoot talking in this tree?

I think that

I decided to cut out the chomping on the lollipop.

I wish now that I had left it in.

Look, if they plan to sort 5 million citizens, then that's 500,000 a day, and only only 1% of them will survive.

Your point.

That means 495,000 people have already been killed!

How can you be so damn calm?

Because if we lose our cool now, it's a death sentence for billions more.

If this plan fails, then everybody dies.

And if we can't draw the three royal guards away, then even Chairman Netero can't defeat the king.

So no matter what, we can't afford to let them discover our existence until the time is just right

if that happens security around the king will be tightened even further

you must endure

so you're saying sacrificed five million to save humanity

pretty clearly laid out stakes there

It's hard to get clearer than that.

It's hard to get clearer than that stake-wise.

What do we just like

just would love to talk broadly about this in the context of what is to come, but that would be ruining what is to come.

Yes.

It's also just like such a blatant, like another blatant mirroring of these two with Gon and Kilua.

I know.

Oh, yeah.

They have the exact same.

They literally have the same conversation that Gon and Kilua just had.

Except Knuckle can do math.

Going did a little bit of math.

Yeah, but he nearly keeled over.

Earlier, Kilua started explaining

east gortow's nuclear arsenal to him and he

lost it so cute and so well animated too the like plumes of smoke coming out at different times until the two yeah it was alternating ears yeah he's like listing as he walks it was really really good he's becoming unstable until and then he over he uh overheats is i think what the show calls it It's cute.

It's such a cute.

You know, this is also the

boyfriend show.

But it's the like recognizing uh something in your partner without them having to say it you know killio without even turning around goes you know like did you overheat or something uh which i think is really sweet so cute um well you can hear the steam it's audible

literal steam is coming out of his ears uh this conversation about the stakes uh immediately following gone and killio having the same conversation just made me think more and harder about chairman natero you know if a substantial percentage of the hunters deployed into the NGL are starting to go, I think this plan might be ethically suspect.

They're just, but they're kind of like locked into place by the whims of, you know, the mad Chairman Natero.

We're heading into some pretty dangerous waters.

You know, if...

When your assault force is basically

seven people, when four of them are saying, I don't think I care for this, that's significant.

Yeah,

Keith, you posted the screenshot of the skull thing I was talking about earlier, and it is wild just how

this is

like this is the Nazis.

Yeah,

like it's

yeah, the screenshot that we're talking about, there's fire burning in the background, and like a line of maybe 25 silhouetted soldiers with their rifles on their shoulders kind of like marching across the skyline.

And then between them and us are just, just you know thousands upon thousands upon thousands of skulls yeah um and they've already used the uh imagery of piles of skulls with the ants before yeah

now it's well it's time to cut that darkness with uh

nen combat

oh and some lovely nen combat there is uh there's a fight uh actually let's talk about the fight when it happens but yeah gone immediately gets into a fight with

uh

my note here says Goan by himself thinks I hope killer is okay then is suddenly attacked by a huge blue snake chimera ant with sunglasses this guy is so goofy I think he's great I believe this guy's name is hollow

Wonderful share, man.

No, that's the name of the owl.

Yeah, that's the owl.

This guy's just called snake in the

snake.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That to me is.

Hmm.

Which kind of chimera ant name do I think is objectively funniest?

It's when they just use animal names, is when it's funniest.

Pig ant.

Snake ant.

Small bear.

Small battle.

We're going to meet bat in a minute.

Yeah, they're cool when they have names, but I do love it when they said to themselves, you know what?

I'm bat.

Holo is so specific that I can't help but think that it's it's like

it me it's something about an owl in Japanese or something.

That's my guess.

Yeah, I don't know.

This ant.

Leave a five-star review if you know.

Yeah, hey, leave a five-star review now.

If your name is hollow.

This ant is a huge,

huge snake with a blue body at the top.

What do you think this is like?

It's 35 feet tall, you think?

It's gigantic, like a llamia.

And he's wearing glasses.

He attacks Kilua.

First, he bounces around like Tigger.

Sorry, he attacks Goan.

Bounces around like Tigger and then tries to constrict Goan.

And Goan

casually pushes the tail apart and takes out the antique.

When he leaps into the air,

the snake's eyes pop out of his head so hard that it shatters his sunglasses.

It's so funny.

It is my eye.

This guy's facial expressions when he's about to get murdered are so.

I mean, I guess he doesn't.

He canonically does not get killed.

It's so funny.

Yeah, he either doesn't die or he dies of starvation in 10 days because Goan beats him in one punch and then ties him to a tree and then says, gee, I hope he doesn't fucking starve to death, but he's a snake, so he should last about 10 days.

It's so like

Gone.

This whole bit, it's like

you get Gone being underestimated by his opponent.

You get him just willtowering through it, and you get the finish where he doesn't actually kill the guy, but he incapacitates him and leaves him in a way where he can feel morally okay that he didn't like.

In another Hunter-Hunter arc this takes half an episode in another anime this takes two and a half episodes also yes he is separated from killiwa so he's just reverting to like the way he knows how the world works and he's like all right here we go yeah um

the the time to do my punching

based on what i have seen uh in dragon ball and in jojo and in this

and this seems so obvious that i'm kind of amazed we haven't really talked about it before but shonen is so constantly engaged with slapstick as a form of humor.

Yeah, totally.

And it's really interesting to watch a

so much of really effective slapstick is about lowering the stakes and lowering the seriousness of a or making so ridiculously absurd stakes and then playing with them in funny ways.

Shonen will shout out to Hercule.

Who is Hercule?

Mr.

Satan.

Hercule's name is Mr.

Satan.

Oh, oh, sure.

Sure.

Mr.

Satan is from

the Cell saga in Dragon Ball Z, and he is the dipshit wrestler character who pretends to be the strongest guy in the world and then goes to challenge Cell.

Yeah, Shonen will really try and walk the line between impressive,

scary, exciting fight scenes with Gravitas and just the most bullshit slapstick you've ever seen.

I think about like that great fight with

Roshi and Krillin explaining how they did what they did, where they like pick each other up and move them around.

It's really one of the funniest scenes in the history of motion picture.

But a lot of these, this early fight with the snake has some really good slapstick.

Oh, another good line.

I love the ants sort of kind of shunting the label of bug off of them and onto other people.

It's happened a few times.

The snake says, now prepare to be crushed like a tiny little bug.

Wait a minute.

Wait a minute.

They don't know.

They don't know.

Hey, hang on.

Oh, man.

I wish I had...

I had to bring it up so we could all just look at it in the chat and marvel.

Remember that first shot of that first chimera ant that bites Killua?

Yeah, the little baby.

Yeah.

Well, how far we've come.

We've come.

Surely this is the end of the road of chimera ants being weird.

They're getting weirder than that snake.

That's the ceiling.

I'll cover 35 more episodes of this.

Gohan wonders why the ants ants are around,

given that they've already

describing it as sorting.

I think that this is probably a reflex to kind of get away from the horror of what is happening here.

But Goan and Kilio and the other hunters repeatedly describe the kind of massacres that are taking place here as sorting.

Yeah.

I mean, they're not wrong.

The ants are sorting, but they are essentially killing, you know, 99% of the people everywhere they go.

Then Goan is attacked by a bat in sexy nightwear.

And she's Deviant Ardenello.

Yeah,

I said she was a hot topic girly from the early 2000s.

I said that he gets attacked by a bat and an owl.

The bat looks like a character from Dark Stalkers, and the owl looks like the Tootsie Pop Owl.

I just want to be friends with the bat.

I want to know where she got that dress.

The owl is wearing overalls with a number on the front.

This is up there with Crocodile in a wrestling singlet of ant costume choices that I don't understand, don't need to, but I'm delighted by.

Yeah, why is he wearing a numbered overall?

No, he kind of looks like a train conductor.

He does.

He kind of does.

He looks like a friend.

Maybe the train condition.

Maybe the number is the train.

It's the train conductor.

Here's my theory.

He's just got done doing

the hunter exam for Chimera Ants.

Chimera ants learned about the hunter exam.

They immediately staged it.

The chimera ants.

example of something that a friend mentioned to me, which is like,

we had already recorded the episodes where it would have been the most relevant, but the way that the

ants talk about becoming different kings, like speed king,

the king of eating, I think was the crocodile one.

It really felt like the way people talk about being like, I'm a gourmet hunter.

I'm a

gourmet hunter.

Yeah, you totally brought that up.

Did I bring that up?

Okay, cool.

That's so great.

I remember when you brought it up, and I remember listening to it and being like, yeah, Sylvie's right.

Well, I'm right again.

Sorry for wasting our time, but I'll take the dog.

Hey,

it's good to still remember.

I mean, there's no end to.

You know, we talk a lot about there.

There's something.

There's something really big and secret that the Chimera Ant Arc is about that we can't talk about yet.

But the other thing is.

It's a 13-digit coordinate to a chest buried buried in Princess.

Yes.

And the first clue is the number on the owl's chest.

But the other thing that it's about is this sort of like transition, like the constantly asking the question of like, what's going on with the Chimera ants?

Why are they the way that they are?

And one of the first answers is like, oh, they're people.

And so it's actually like their humanity that is causing them to be evil.

Like, they're not just monsters.

They've become like, what if a lion could be evil and just went out and murdering sort of like jaws like jaws is a is like a made-up movie monster because because sharks don't decide to be murderers like jaws did but people do and so the ants are like oh they like

what if you had all of the jaws could talk what if you had the the the the evil in the heart of a human but also the like animal nature of a creature and then the thing that it transitions to is going like, oh, actually, they're becoming the hunters.

They're like, what if a bunch of people were born into being hunters already?

And, like, what would they do with that power?

Right.

The show takes a very strange view of sort of like

the populace.

You know, the sort of like regular people.

It sort of has the same view of them as Crusader Kings does.

Which is that, like, speak on that.

Crusader Kings, which is a video game by Paradox, it's one of the best video games ever made.

It's a really

obscure,

obtuse, multi-varied simulation of medieval power.

Obscure in terms of gameplay, not necessarily

anymore.

Before we get people being like,

no, no, no.

It's, I think, opaque.

No, it is obscure.

obscure.

Bits of it are obscure in the play.

Anyway, something that Crusader Kings models really well

is, you know, an aspect of the way that power has always been rendered out, which is that people at the top of the pyramid,

either intentionally

or as a sort of like matter of ease or moral convenience, kind of flatten everybody below them to

straightforward, transparent purposes.

One of the key ways this works is Crusader Kings is constantly modeling almost everything a person is thinking about, almost everybody around them, so long as they are like a count or higher on the feudal pyramid.

Below that, they are simply represented by a stat called control, which is how likely they are to start messing with you.

And as far as you're concerned,

sitting up in the upper echelons of the feudal pyramid, your interest in a populace goes as far as: are they producing enough wealth for me to levy?

Sorry, to tax.

Is the number red or green?

Is the number red or green?

Do they have enough physical manpower for me to call on to produce like

levied armies?

You know, like drafting people into an army?

Do I have physically have enough manpower?

Or are they mad enough at me that they might be something of a problem?

Beyond that, they are not people.

And Hunter Hunter is very interested in the interrelationships between

people, but mostly

ants

and hunters and high-ranking members of the Mafia and

the Mafia community, high-ranking fighters in Heaven's Arena.

And you could say, well, this is just how protagonists work, Jack.

You know,

a story finds its protagonists and focuses on them.

But it's telling that the protagonists that we find time and time again are these

bizarre, sort of like infamous paragons of their respective fields in the hunters,

violent,

strange ants vying for power, or fighters in Heaven's Arena, or genocidal bandits.

You know,

it is a show that has

interestingly little

attention or care for people like Aunt Mito.

And then it's asking you

to like follow Gonan Kiliwood deeper into this world where like the concerns of a normal person become further and further and further away while showing you the ultimate asshole Jing Freaks.

Who I feel like is sort of like the audience tethered to reality.

Like, not through him, but through opposition to him.

Yeah, we're like, what the fuck is going on here?

Him and Notero, I think, are the two hunters that I see, and I go, I'm sorry.

The bat ant kind of,

I will describe what the bat ant does.

And then Sylvie, I know you're very excited to describe what the owl ant does.

The bat ant is using sort of nauseous echolocation to find Goan and also like scream frequencies at him that cause him to become unwell.

We're coming back here to mirror.

Oh my God.

I so rarely get to say his name.

He's a member of the Phantom Troop

who makes sounds with his body.

Oh,

Bonolenov.

Bonolenov.

Bonolenov.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

We have, I think, accidentally come back to sound as a

weapon.

As a weapon.

I don't think that that is deliberate mirroring.

No, it's just cool.

Sound as a weapon is just cool.

Yeah, man.

I love that era.

The bat is giving

gone Havana syndrome.

It's real, and he has it.

Yeah.

They do a good job

joe biden i i love how they the the uh hollow and bat come at gone

using one tactic and when it stops working they like switch tactics uh we get it again sylvia wants to talk about the thing and i i will let her do so but they they start off with the the feather and punch combo with the um the owl doing long range attacks and the bat doing um uh like melee attacks and when Goan immediately is able to use

his ears to tell where

the bat is and dodge, they have to switch things up.

Sylvie, how do they switch things up?

Well, the owl, logically, of course, as everyone expected, goes gorilla mode.

Gorilla mode.

Gorilla reappears.

This was a surprise gorilla for me, and I got so happy because I didn't remember this.

And I just,

I was watching.

Okay, the first time I watched these, I was at the gym on the bike.

And so when the gorilla came up, I got really excited, but had to not show it because I was in public.

And people could just see me doing like a very little clap while I'm like pedaling.

Thrilled about gorilla arrival.

So happy.

It's great.

And it's a completely un

I think Keith mentioned it in early episodes.

What we have done is we have invented a new reading of Hunter Hunter that no other

people have.

You know, no, well, other people following along.

But this is not a show about secret gorillas appearing all of a sudden, but it is to us.

Yes.

Yeah.

No one has ever had such a gorilla-focused time watching Hunter, Hunter.

It's great.

And now we're now two for two.

Oh, well, three for two, I suppose, because the previous gorilla was actually two gorillas, of the gorilla appearing completely without warning.

Well, I knew that the gorilla was coming in the dodgeball, but I was like desperately trying to figure out which closet he was going to pop out of.

Was there not another gorilla recently?

There was a fourth gorilla.

Oh, you're right.

Was there just another, like, one of the random like ants that gets beat up or something?

There was an ant.

There was a gorilla ant.

Yes.

Yeah.

Let me just search through my notes for gorilla.

There are 12 mentions of gorilla in my notes.

The first one says,

This is so funny because I know the gorilla is coming, but I don't know how.

This one says, Am I going to get cheated out of my gorilla this episode?

This one says, No, they have to get the gorilla.

This one says, Here's the crew of useless nobodies.

Where's my gorilla?

This one says, where is the gorilla?

This one says, two gorillas.

Here we go.

We found where the gorilla shows up.

It's in episode 96, A Lawless Home.

We just watched, Finx fights the gorilla crab.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

That just happened.

He punched him real hard.

Punched him real hard, squashed him.

Hey, guess what Goan's going to do?

Punch him real hard, squash him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

uh, yeah, the bat is using ultrasonic dissonance, secret noise, which I think in the dub they called nauseating noise or something.

Yes, they do.

Um,

and uh

uh oh, we also like get a little bit of a retread of um Bisky's chart with Melioron is like watching the fight and commenting on everything, was watching the last fight too, still following Goan because was too scared of appearing to both of the boys at once.

Yeah, um, chooses to follow Goan, which I think is the the right move.

And he says his capability is he talks about how much latent nen he has and how it's much more impressive than the Chimera ants.

But he said his capability is irrelevant without a strategy.

He's just a moving target.

I do like how another

Malarion note here.

Melioron.

Melioron.

Yeah.

The ants are working in perfect sync, so Goan needs to break them apart, which is great because that's exactly what has happened to Goan and Killua just now.

It's nice.

And it's a funny reveal of.

Oh, oh, go ahead.

It's just exactly what Goan does break them apart to.

Yeah.

And I find the solution to this really fun.

Does anyone want to talk about how Goan gets

the win?

What he figures out is that because they're always moving in tandem, I believe it's the owl is always in his front and the bat is always coming from behind.

I might have that reversed, but it's

basically that.

And so what Gon does is he uses

its

paper, right, to create a sort of a sound wave that makes the bat think there's a wall in front of her, and she like flies backwards into the cliff that's behind her, which was the real wall.

And then he just kills her.

And then he just kills her with a punch.

He literally, like, it's...

You got to make sure.

Got to double tap, you know?

And completely accidentally, because, you know, she has these big wings and she's sort of like splayed out in the wall.

She looks like a cartoon character that's been punched through a wall.

When Goan punches her, it carves the X from the Hunter-Hunter logo into the cliff, which is, you know, that's cute.

Snice our direction.

At this point,

the ants that kind of show up to be like jobber fighters against Goan and Kilua do this great thing that I know Austin really loves and has sort of become like a thing that we talk about on Friends of the Table, is that regularly when the ants arrive, they will like deliver a little opening sentence describing what their nen ability is.

It's so funny.

I wrote this down where they just, yeah, they just go, they just say verbatim, here's my whole deal in 12 words.

Yeah, so first, the owl shows up and he says something like, I can always hear you with my ears, you know, wherever you are.

And then later he says, to me, a starry night is as bright as day.

It's, it's, it's so, um,

it's such a nice approach to the thing that we saw in.

Oh my god, where did Goku go?

And he had to fight all those people in the tournament.

No, no, no, kid Goku.

Oh, the

World Martial Arts Tournament?

I was trying to remember the English name because I was like,

I can't just say the Javanese name.

I'll be a nerd.

And the game is like, you know, you meet these guys and then they have a cool power, and then we learn what their power is over the course of the fight or whatever.

Tagashi has gotten it down to such an arch where he can have this bat fly up and have this great, like opening shot of the big wings open up as the bat screams You know, I'll always be able to hear you wherever you are thanks to my bat like hearing us like we're done off to the races.

I

think that I made a note of it because of the bat and the owl, but it was actually the snake that I made a note of it for when the snake first shows up.

He like leaps out at Gone and then says, I use my strong tail as a spring to repel me among the trees.

It's impossible to follow my moves in the dark.

It's so funny.

It's great.

There's like seven lines like that in these three episodes.

It's so funny.

You know what I would buy and display on my wall, and I don't know if it exists, but if it doesn't exist, we should seriously consider commissioning it.

Is a poster with every notable Chimera ant on it.

Oh my God.

Oh, man.

Like standing like a group portrait of like 150

bizarre Chimera ants.

I wonder if it's 150 for all to see.

150 for all to see.

And you know, there's like a bazillion chimera ants.

Wait, but we should write a chimera ant poker app is what we should do.

Hold on.

Okay.

As Gohan punches this bat ant, he says, go back to the NGL.

Yeah.

Go back home where you belong.

Gun is really trying to figure out.

He's 12.

He's trying to figure out geopolitics.

It's just so

aimed west.

Speaking of Pokemon, by the way, he does fucking blast him off again.

He twinkles.

He rockets him.

He does.

He does rocket him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Straight into the sky.

It's great.

Meanwhile, Kilua's plan.

Oh, so Melario, Melurion.

Melioron.

Melioron.

Melioron.

Is like.

There's a little bit of Leorio in there is how I read it.

Yeah.

Here.

There we go.

Oh, yeah.

Melioron.

There we go.

Melioron.

By Jove, I think they've got it.

Okay.

Melioron is like.

Oh, Gaun could be useful for something.

It's really fun that

throughout all of this, well, you know, we can tell that he's trying to recruit him for something.

Throughout all of this, Hagia and his crew, despite having sort of like ostensibly thrown themselves at the mercy and protection of the king, and Melioron, are going.

I don't know that I care for this.

I think that there might need to be some new people at the top.

And I love the feeling that the ants are all plotting against each other, but it is not terribly clear, like, to what end.

There's a great moment early on where

the Royal Guards look at.

Oh, no, maybe that happens in just a second.

Is there anybody else who's maybe plotting against each other here?

Any other organizations where maybe there's some political maneuvering going on inside the organization?

Oh my god.

Maybe.

Is that this episode?

We'll get to the middle.

No, no, no, no.

First, we hear that Killua's plan is working.

We get Killua standing in front of, again, a sort of like nondescript populace of regular people.

Kilo is starting the revolution.

Killua is starting a revolution.

And as we all know, the way you start a revolution is you run to a tower and say, they're killing you.

Everyone be safe.

Goodbye.

And then you run away anywhere.

One the others.

It worked, though.

It did work, though.

And Peto

once.

Peto crouched atop their tower.

Sort of is like, this is really annoying.

They're disrupting my plan.

Poof is playing the violin.

violin, and they sort of like

have this sort of like lazy bickering between themselves about whether or not this is an attempt to draw Pito out.

I love that the ants have sort of figured out at least a part of Natera's plan immediately.

They're just like, well, of course, they want to kill us.

But they don't know whether or not it's a diversion.

They figure at this point to stay put, and Poof has some real difficulty deciding whether or not to stay put.

He appears in like Bishonen Flowers and Rainbows.

Perfect.

So I wrote down what he says.

What did you write down?

I wrote down what he says here.

Please

debating.

Maybe it's not the full quote, but I have, my anguish is intoxicating as I wallow in my dilemma.

That's the pitfall of logic.

Nothing more.

And right under that, I wrote once again, his name is Poof.

He also.

Never mind, never mind.

I think it's the same line.

The

image of him

with the flower sort of like looking up to the heavens, contemplating his own ability to be logical is so funny.

It's great.

I love that he is from like Utena or something.

Like he is presented in such a different way when he gets these little cutaways.

We got your three types of power-hungry weirdo.

We've got like violent, crazed psychopath.

We've got uh bishonen wanderer and like oh the angst of being alive what could it be and we have monosyllabic uh sort of like massive guy who's happy to be there yeah tough idiot

um so they decide that they are going to sing you know that he's an idiot he just likes things he was a pretty quick learner when it came to flying him crashing and rapping was so good power and then and then uh and then started learning more the king kills a farmer goes ugh, this is disgusting.

And then we see him in the background chowing down on the farmer.

I'm just saying, big boy's got poor

impulse control, but doesn't mean he's dumb.

I love the chimera ants so much.

Anytime the chimera ants are way more fun to me when they are doing things than when they're sitting around talking.

However, when they are sitting around talking, it's brilliant.

I specifically the Royal Guards.

I love watching them sitting around talking.

It's one of the best things that they do.

And it'll sitting around talking is going going to improve, I don't know, tenfold in the next handful of episodes.

They say, all right, let's send Hagia and his crew.

Now, Leo.

Finally.

Yeah.

Well, we learn later that he's changed his name to Leo Off-Screen, more really good off-screen name maneuvering.

And he gets really sour about being called Hagia.

T2 dad names him and then's like, yeah, I knew.

I didn't do this by the way.

Yeah.

The ongoing joke that he

is clearly a tiger or tiger-like thing, but keeps calling himself like the king of the jungle.

Right.

And like

himself Leel.

He's fierce and ferocious, but social and with it.

So good.

I watch that jummer clip every

time.

Hold on, I'll get it for you.

It's kind of him describing an aunt Sona.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not the only character, not the only aunt in these episodes who wishes desperately that he was another animal.

Oh, yes,

we'll get to him.

He's great.

But there's a really good, like,

standoff happening here where it is clear that Leol has ulterior motives and intends to betray the king somehow.

He's just trying to position himself well.

And the royal guards are onto this immediately, but they're like, well, maybe we should, you know, betray them first.

We should

prepare for the other to betray them.

But neither wants to be the one to make the first move.

So there's just this really great, like, clammy, uncomfortable

situation developing.

Yeah, we'll let it work for us, even though we're pretty sure he's full of shit.

It's way too early to try anything, so might as well let him do a good job now.

Keith, you need to watch Germano.

Okay, I'll watch German now.

Do I need to or no?

Everyone can watch Gemma.

I mean, everyone can watch German.

Everyone should.

His delivery is amazing.

That flailed me.

The deadline was still social and with it.

I think I'd be a lied.

I think so too.

He's gotten so into it that he's agreeing with himself.

It's great.

It's

The goat.

No one's done it like him.

No one ever will.

Kiliwa, running through the forest, senses an intense golden light, like the eye of Sauron, coming screaming down from the top of a tall tower.

We sort of distantly see a figure up there.

It's not made clear who this is.

I think this is Natero getting ready.

Hmm.

He's standing up there.

He's meditating.

There's a scene later with the character on top of a tall tower, but there's not the remarkable golden aura.

So who's on top of the tower later?

A certain sniper.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Oh, I thought you were talking about.

I guess that was the same thing.

Peter was the same as just on the tower.

Yeah, Pito is just on a tower.

That's why I thought maybe that's who Killer is.

No, no, no.

It's like a tall spire of stone.

He has like a weird rock formation.

It looks like where Goku fights Vegeta.

Oh, maybe it's Goku.

Yeah, maybe it's Goku.

In a second, dear listener, this is going to make sense.

Yeah.

Okay.

Trust me, it's a good bit.

Hey, do you remember my APR?

We're about to learn.

Do you remember?

Do you ever remember APR?

Do you remember that?

Yeah, as we get a refresher, because we've now cut to Knuckle, who is worried about Cheetu, heading east.

So much cross-cutting now.

Almost every scene is taking us to

another ongoing story.

We have heard that the Hunter organization has captured 319 ants,

but they haven't gotten any squad leaders.

The squad leaders are still out there.

They are still dangerous.

They know about what Colt said there were eight squad leaders.

They've had four encounters and no successful kills or captures.

Something like that.

Yeah.

I really like it.

I like the way this is mirrored by at several other points during these episodes.

Some of the ants talk about how tiring and unpredictable it is to have to fight hunters.

And I love that

they have squared up against each other and are finding fighting the highest ranks of each other exhausting.

Yeah, it reminds me of how Silva describes fighting the spiders.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

More trouble than it's worth.

Yeah.

So they call Morel to sort of like check in, and we don't really hear the conversation, but the implication is that Morel is snappy and unhappy.

Yeah.

Sort of like snaps the phone shut.

Well, Moral

feels that Chitu, who he's had eyes on because of APR this whole time, is like, oh, Chitu didn't get killed, and now he's headed to the king.

We should stop him.

You can't stop me, Shoot, you fucking idiot, you asshole.

I'm going to go do this whether you like it or not.

And then Shoot's like, I agree.

It's really good.

So

they call Mr.

Moral for permission and they give it to him and he hangs up on them in the middle of the conversation.

And then we cut to him to learn why he is so mad.

All hell immediately breaks loose in terms of my understanding of the Hunter organization.

Yeah, I actually, this is so, this stuff is so good, and there's so much detail here that I figured that I would grab the audio for this if

we don't mind.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's worth hearing.

I'm always down for a clip.

Guess the review board didn't send over the hunter that we requested.

And who did they send instead?

Some hunter I've never heard of.

Probably just a temp.

A temp?

You mean hired hunters who only take assigned jobs through the Hunter Association?

Not surprisingly, they have less talent.

Damn it!

I should have just gone to talk to Lackey myself.

Come on, now, stop being so foolish.

Bear in mind that if we go over the board's head, the chairman is the one who's going to get saddled with all of the blame.

He had to argue with the board just to get us here.

I can't imagine it would go well for him.

Yeah, but they don't understand the situation here.

It's based on donations and who did what way back when

one little more well, maybe failure is exactly what they want here.

Are you referring to the rumors going around that the vice chairman's faction is bribing the board?

And furthermore, that they're only handing out work to those hunters who have agreed to vote for him in the next election, no matter what?

Is that right?

A lot of stuff.

Hey, what's the hunter?

Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum.

It's delicious.

Wait, hold on.

I thought all the hunters loved Netaro.

Everyone that we have seen on screen as a hunter has just been like, yeah, Netaro's fucking awesome.

Netero's fucking awesome.

What a good one.

I thought the hunters were Netaro.

And then, you know, like a group of people.

They're a petitioner board.

And there's a vice chairman who is at odds with him.

There's an election coming up.

There's like internal board politicking.

They said the

temp work hunters?

So I want to say first, we actually have heard about the people who only take jobs through the Hunter Association before.

In my version, they are called Association Dogs.

And the dub has chosen to just call them Temps, which is...

I got them called Temps into Sub too.

It's really funny.

Yeah, I don't know what the...

I figured out recently that

the sub that I have, the reason that it's different is that.

I think that you all have

the closed captions for the Viz dub, and I have the subtitles for the Japanese Blu-ray.

And

that's why they're different.

So I have like the Blu-ray script,

basically.

But yeah, association dogs have been referenced before in

York New.

In what context?

I think similarly, just describing them as a kind of hunter who doesn't take jobs from like the place that.

Remember the woman with

phantom shows the phantom to

like

what's the alternative

like basically a job listing at you know hunter.biz

on the on the hunter website yeah

there's uh

oh is it the uh is it the cowboy cantina yeah cowboy cantina yeah that's also that's official hunter stuff yeah pretty sure although maybe that is just like it's official hunter stuff but still third party

But there is they have referenced this like kind of hunter who only takes like official hunter jobs and that that is looked down on for some reason.

Because they're they're weaker.

They don't have the resources to find better jobs.

These are like C and D tier jobs, but also they have like maybe slightly more political power because they're working more closely with the hunter org.

So that's what it feels like anyway.

Hey, there's a hunter board.

yeah.

I wonder in hindsight if that's the level of hunter that was mostly in Greed Island,

yeah, maybe.

I think so.

Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a really good way of thinking about it.

It's it's probably like them and treasure hunters, yeah.

Um,

watching,

do you have a guess?

Are we gonna meet the vice chair?

I was gonna say, so watching Chimera Ant feels like I'm falling down like a chasm, and I am like grasping at what I think are sturdy-looking rocks on the wall of the cavern to slow my descent.

And, you know, I'm saying, well, maybe this is the direction we're going in.

You know, I heard Kilua describe

the

nuclear arsenal of East Gorteaux.

And I'm like, is this going to become a story about like nuclear, you know,

is this going to go very, very badly wrong?

Or then they'll talk about the vice chairman, and I'll grasp at that rock and find that it comes away in my hand.

And, you know, I have no idea if the hunter, sorry, the Chimera Chimera Ant arc is going to develop to be about internal hunter politics.

Because as Nov and Morrow continue to talk, they say, you know, if we don't succeed, the chairman will be to blame.

The more the ants kill, the more voices screaming for his resignation.

And I have to ask, you know, how much of the urgency that the high-ranking hunters have been ascribing to this Chimera Ant situation is actually driven by the fact that failure would mean that their man gets driven out of the top of it.

You know, would they be responding as rapidly or as seriously if this wasn't,

you know, a situation that Netero's presidency is riding on?

And there's something really fascinating about the very earliest stuff that happened in this arc where we're watching the fucking G7 summit.

calling Netaro and setting him up to take the fall if anything goes wrong.

Netaro

understanding this is what's happening, gladly accepting that responsibility, and

devising a plan that is not only extremely high risk, but is also high civilian death as like a necessity.

Like

knowing or not knowing.

Moral and Nove know about this.

So the idea that Moral and Nov

know that this is out there suggests that Netero is probably also aware of this.

And, like,

it just feels like a very risky way to play things.

It's like, okay, I'll accept all of this risk, knowing that there's this like weird undercurrent happening in the Hunters Association.

I'm going to get 5 million people killed

and

let the dice land as they may.

I mean, that kind of seems like Netero's whole vibe, right?

It sure does.

Like, it's a game.

It's fun.

Yeah.

And then

I cannot wait to say a phrase later

I'm gonna say a phrase later

hey talk to me in I don't know 50 episodes I'm gonna say a phrase it's gonna be great I and then you think back to that first conversation that we had with the general where Nove and Morel are acquiring East Gorteaux military secrets in exchange for the

evacuation of the general they're very happy to get the general out so that they can get a packet of military secrets but you know a bunch of civilians in the villages are going to get killed and all of a sudden i am

the motivation of the high-ranking hunters in this chimera ant crisis is immediately being called into question

I love that that this is happening at this point, you know, that they lead with, well, we're doing this because the Chimera ants are an apocalyptic threat that needs to be stopped.

And then very casually, in the middle of episode 99, they raise the possibility that this is all dovetailing with like an ongoing internal political feud.

It's wonderful.

Often when,

you know, often when Tagashi and the adaptation team are working, because the project is so massive and because

the stuff they're doing is so odd.

It's like watching

like

a sculptor start to draw out the vaguest shape of an object where you can be like, well, hang on a second.

I think that this is starting to look like a person.

And it's only, you know, as the episodes continue that the type of person is revealed or what they're holding or whatever.

But as

this new little wrinkle is involved, and as we've seen over and over again, that the Chimera Ant Arc is very interested in like structures of power and how structures of power develop or threaten themselves internally or act as threats externally, the fact that the hunters are now facing some sort of internal battle seems really consequential and seems like it is contributing to the kind of like broader shape of this arc.

It's so

coming together.

It's so fun to me how,

like, what a hunter is and what makes sense in the hunter world

so slowly develops now over the course of, by the way, 100 episodes.

We are inches away from the hundredth episode of Hunter Hunter.

And we have gone from hunters, they are either heroes who protect the weak and also endangered species of animals, or maybe they're money-grubbing opportunists who know that being a hunter is key to becoming rich for life,

to hunters being like

this weird club of people who are bounty hunters or also baby chefs, to they have this weird boss who flies around and jumps out of airships, to they have a building, oh, and they there's nen, and there's okay, being a hunter is someone who has nen.

Being a hunt, like it is slow, and like the

hunter as an organization has been built up, you know, brick by brick for 100 episodes in a way that is like

so slow.

It's great.

yeah yeah and this is the final piece this is like the final this is like the breath of life into

like a clay doll that brings it a lot like finally we have the thing that it was missing which is like

conf inter inter conflict

yeah it's it's it's so good i have no idea where we're going but i can see a lot of threads and

we're going to be moving through

one or some of them.

The general

that they're trying to evacuate learns that there has been a coup and that there are mass murders happening all over the country.

Because remember, the way that the Chimera ants have kind of staged this, it's very difficult for the communities to know that there are these mass deaths until they become the victim of them.

And so first he thinks that the hunters are doing it.

Morel denies it, but he is momentarily surprised that the public has kind of figured out what's going on and then pretty quickly goes, This is Killier and Gone.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Kind of like a

kind of face.

Yeah, yeah.

This is what they, you know, they staged that whole silly game about, you know, you have to be good enough, you have to be ready to come into the NGL with us, and then sort of abandoned it.

Remember, you know, there came a point where they were like, all right, fine.

We are actually bringing Gon and Kiliwa back in

to the operation as the ants have spread out of the NGL.

This is what you asked for, you know?

This is Gonan Kilua.

Diego, who we know is Peto,

declares martial law, puts a curfew in place.

Anyone outside without permission is going to be punished.

And then we get an absolutely sick line from Kilo Zeldic, who says, Bring it on, tanks, jets, whatever you've got.

Yeah, I'll take them all down.

Oh, Kilo Zelda.

He's covered in sweat.

Yeah, he's become Snake Pliskin.

It gets revealed.

It was either just revealed or gets revealed at the beginning of the next episode that he's been going for 30 straight hours.

Yeah.

Yeah,

he is exhausted.

He's got his cute little Beetle phone.

Oh, yeah, the Beetle phone.

I forgot about the Beetle phone.

I didn't notice the phone.

Everybody's on phones today.

The next episode starts with Haggie on the phone.

Tail.

Hey, go to an ant concert, nobody's watching, everybody's on their dang phone.

Listen, if

you know,

I saw Grace Spellman on Twitter say, and I think a lot of this would be resolved if, you know, you just gently leaned forward and politely said to the ant that was on their phone, hey, could you stop using the phone?

And then the ant turns and decapitates you with one swing of their

problems are solved instantly.

All I know is I brought home a rare for dinner, and my damn kids wouldn't even look up at me.

What?

They were on their phones the whole time.

Don't they know they're only one in 10,000 is a rare?

I know.

I worked OT.

Wow.

That's a good point, actually.

There is something missing from the ants, which is, like, family.

The ants considered the ants are all one big family, in that they are all the children of the queen.

But

one aspect of humans that

they are completely out of is, you know, having a family.

Yeah.

Well, except one.

Except one.

Yep.

Which is Colt and then the sort of like

the hand baby, who produced a sort of something that I only realized in retrospect that that scene reminded me a lot of when everybody in the room kind of like has this mystical moment with the baby is the fucking shepherds and the wise men and the people coming to witness the birth of Christ, you know?

Wow.

Oh, that sensation of like everybody in the vicinity is like suddenly compelled

by the the the majesty and the power we're gonna get a we're gonna get a holy trinity

i was gonna say let's get let's make a manger scene of everybody who's there in that episode of hunter hunter when the handbag is born

um

it's a new closing sequence this is interesting it is

interesting we got a new song as a rule when new sequences show up i watch them for the first like watch them through

um

this one's notable.

In what way?

Well, we have a huge amount of imagery of what look like uh game pieces, maybe, like, almost like checkers tiles with Japanese characters written on them, uh, and tons and tons of imagery setting the king against a new character who I do not know who this is.

They are certainly going to become

important to me.

They look like a

percentage of appearance within the closing theme is any indication.

It's so funny the way they do this.

I mean, I know, but you know, they know that we haven't met this character yet

when they show this closing sequence.

They simply must.

But at the same time, they are like, you know,

they're writing closing sequences and writing new main animated sequences based on like

the broad shape of the arc.

They're like, well, it's time for this now, you know?

Yeah.

So

I don't know who this is.

I think I this is a young kid in a sort of white robe, like a white gi,

with two big sort of like braids or ponytails sticking out of the back of their face.

They look like a kid.

They're using a wrapped ponytail.

I think this is the hand baby.

I think that what we are going to have is we are going to have a the baby grows very very very quickly and

the show starts staging a sort of like true and false king story can i tell you jack that as usual

there's something that you're right about that's very funny

but but in general no one would hear that and go yes you're right but again it is that thing where it's like you've weirdly got one thing right.

It's fun because I feel like my ability to do this has sort of waned as I've been threatened by the Chimera and Arc.

So it's fun to hear that sometimes it does still happen.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're gonna, it'll be, it's gonna be very funny when that pin drops.

Excellent.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm stoked.

It's it is really notable how much this closing sequence is game pieces, the king, and someone we have never seen before.

So

I couldn't figure out.

I love this closing song.

This is such a good song, I think.

I couldn't decide which part of it, so I just recorded all of it into my mixer.

I'm going to play a chunk from the beginning and then a chunk from towards the end.

Is that okay?

Yeah, this is the song.

This song is called

Hiori Itai.

That's what it's called.

Two sides of the same coin.

They're sort of like

one and the same or something.

Two sides of the same coin.

I think later on.

Yeah, and again, over and over, we keep seeing the king and then this other person.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Probably just nice, nice pop music.

It's nice pop music.

Let's go to the end because it's really good at the end.

Love that.

Just the guitar cues coming in on the offbeat is really, really nice.

So good.

Yeah, that's my favorite part, which is why I had to play that part.

It's great.

It's great.

Sometimes you don't have to, sometimes you don't have to cover every beat of the bar, and you're tempted to.

Yeah, I mean, if I understand this is like tiny little bits of nothing, it's like it's the best part of the whole song.

Yeah.

Let's see.

We've got some snippets from that.

Indulging in the mornings and spitting out the nights.

It's our nature of living, this feeling that boils up inside of me.

Is it white or black?

Like the pieces of the game tile that we just saw.

Two sides of the same coin.

The coin that I flipped dances in the sky.

Which ending do I wish for?

Two sides of the same coin.

The brighter the light, the darker the shadow.

If that's so, then where will I go?

Two futures overlapped.

What the fuck is going to happen?

Love and darkness, love and hate, or light and darkness, love and hate.

They're all powerful emotions with the same roots.

Reach out a hand to the ends of my memory and quietly invite me to go where you are.

What's all this about?

There is no upper ceiling to what I would, what I could predict.

You know, I'll say, you know, just because I think it's really fun.

There's one thing that you said earlier that is like

so bang on accurate that it was scary.

I'm so glad that it passed by without us having to dig into it and dance around it.

I don't know.

We got to

see what happens.

We got to see what happens.

This is episode 100.

We did it.

Hey, everybody, we did it.

In my notes, I put a little firework emoji next to it.

Second instance in a row of a track that opens with Legend of the Martial Artist.

This is a track that I noted when it first appeared as being wildly important and sort of the signature of an unexpected character.

This one here.

That's really good.

And

this is just sort of the narrator giving a quick recap of the stuff that's been happening with.

Oh, wait, no, I'm going to get confused with the last time it shows up, which is when the narrator is recapping the bat and the owl.

No, this shows up, episode 100.

And of course, we want something really, you know, we want to be following our main plot, episode 100.

It's an exciting episode.

So the narrator is going to explain in detail how APR works.

Right, yes.

You got to remind us.

Oh, this is funny.

The dub and the sub have a kind of different way of explaining APR.

My subtitles say APR, the number in APR when it loses track of you is remembered and then picks up where it lefts off.

Nothing interesting about that at all.

The dub chooses to put it in terms of like the NE creature having like...

like ROM in that stores the memory.

It says the remaining time is then stored, saved in APR's memory, which is a very weird way of saying that.

APR, if you

need reminding, is that fun little balloon guy that Knuckle could attach to you and cause you to accrue a massive amount of Nendebt.

I have-

Amortizing

something.

Power redirector.

Amortizing Power Redirector.

Amortizing.

I have to say, I was a little disappointed to learn about how the debt was

paused when you were outside of Knuckle's radius.

I was really hoping that it would be like when

you turn a clicker game back on after having forgotten about it for three years.

Oh, okay.

And you have like...

Oh my god.

And you just instantly

go full Zetsu because you've way overdrawn.

I was really hoping that

the moment that Knuckle got within the range of Chitsu, the cat, the evil cat would just bang, you know?

But instead, it's just that the calculations are going to start again.

This is

such a good example of the way Yoshihiro Tagashi is kind of uniquely skilled, which is that he has taken.

He's not uniquely skilled.

He is uniquely writing cool stories.

He's not uniquely skilled in this particular way.

Other people have done this before, is what I mean to say.

I think he's very good at it.

I think being very good is uniquely skilled.

I couldn't do it.

Yes, I suppose that is true.

Because what we have here is a really straightforward setup.

Characters are lying in wait to set a trap for a character that is on their way.

And then he has chosen to color this.

It's not even like the mechanics of it are made particularly different.

It's just the sort of like the shading on it is colored really novelly by APR and by the like the NEN contract set in place.

Well, Jack, you know what happens?

They get Tagashi's tricked.

They do.

Yes.

In what way?

In that they're waiting, they're on the road.

They're like, okay, we have this trap set up.

You know, APR, they've done so much talking about how Chichu is going so fast that

by the time APR chimes in, it's going to be too late for Chichu to change course.

And then Chi-2 changes course.

And they're like, what the fuck?

And this is when it's revealed that Flutter is flying above Leo's, you know, one of Leo's stooges and is like, like, warned him ahead of time.

And they're like, what the fuck?

What the hell happened?

It's great.

This now suddenly turns into like a fairly large-scale battle.

The thing that this actually reminds me a lot of is what was set up on Zevil Island way back in the Hunter exam.

And as we've seen, the Hunter exam, you know, I don't think Takashi had planned exactly this far ahead.

He's been pretty open about saying that he has some ideas and it's kind of working through them.

But I love how the Hunter exam is intentionally or not presaging a lot of the like broad mechanical moves of the rest of the show, as we get

several groups of interrelated people moving through like a large rural environment, constantly checking in on each other's positions, launching attacks one against the other, you know, like doubling back.

It rhymes.

It rhymes.

It's great.

People made fun of George Lucas for that for so long, and then actually he was so right.

I also think that there is something genuinely really pleasing about describing a story a story as rhyming yeah you know plot rhyming i think is a really nice way of putting it um

george lucas is a monumental idiot but he is also uniquely talented

yeah yeah i'm wondering what whether to argue this point that george lucas is a monumental idiot yeah i don't think he's an idiot

I do unfortunately think he's a monumental idiot who is also uniquely talented.

He's very, very good.

I would say he's very, very good at what he's doing.

He's like a dork.

That's like what I'll say about George Lucas.

The thing that George Lucas says that makes me love him so much is when he has absolutely no interest or reverence for his own Star Wars bullshit.

Yeah.

Him calling them laser swords, him, you know, being like, well, it works like this or it works like that.

Him not knowing the names of his own warships and people have to keep being like, that's an X-Wing or whatever.

It's so charming to me.

And it's useful because one of the worst things about Disney is like taking Star Wars too seriously, but in all the wrong ways.

And it's like characters within the Star Wars universe wouldn't have reverence for the Star Wars universe the same way that I don't fucking have reverence for this universe.

No, I have reverence for bits of this universe.

Have you ever seen a salmon?

I have no reverence for the salmon.

You have no reverence for the salmon?

No, I have a reverence for the fish, but not the meal.

Oh, the fish is what I'm talking about.

Yeah,

I just reconsidered.

The mighty salmon.

The mighty salmon.

It swims up river and then dies.

It's great.

And they jump.

They jump.

Oh, they jump.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They jump now?

Maybe I like that.

To get back to Ultra Hunter.

Okay.

Right.

Getting back.

Flutter spends most of this episode hovering menacingly in the sky, just sort of like with his arms folded.

I love Flutter.

I think what I like about Flutter is that I'm not convinced that it is menacingly.

I think he's fluttering.

I think he's up there menace listly.

Yeah, he's very silly.

Chitu runs into Hagia.

Chitu still doesn't know what APR does.

Bless him.

He was not in the fight for long enough to get the PowerPoint.

This is great.

Because he's just like, I guess I'm being followed by this thing.

He has sort of intuited that it's some kind of a tracker, but doesn't really care because he's very, very fast.

I guess I'm just stuck with it.

Sorry, Leo

baselessly claims that he can remove it.

I sort of felt like a pang of nerves here, which is that as the conversation continues,

Leol reveals that Poof can give people powers, has sort of like set up,

he has prepared a power.

He'll instruct you on how to use it.

So he sort of recruits Cheetu to his let's find and kill Killiua Zaldik scheme.

Many have tried, all have failed.

I get some more people trying in a bit.

I know.

Is

Hagia, sorry, Leol, a kind of

Nen exorcist?

I don't know.

When he said I can remove that, I can't tell whether he's just lying, plausible, or if he genuinely can, you know,

break the Nen power.

The show is absolutely suggesting that there's some Nen exorcising going on.

Yeah, absolutely.

I love it whenever people

touch APR and it bounces harmlessly away.

Just gives it a little flick.

It's very cute.

So off goes Cheetu to connect with Shirepoof and get a new power.

Once again, a new kind of contortion of silly Nen games, which we now have ants able to give other ants specific Nen powers.

How far we've come from punch me in the head in the cafeteria and I'll make you more powerful.

Or rather, you'll make me more powerful.

Yeah, they've progressed.

In terms of like Nen development, like they have now,

as a structure, progressed further than what we know of the Hunter Association.

Yep.

Yeah.

But it turns out I don't know shit about the Hunter Association.

So

we shall see.

You could tell me that Chairman Netero is the only wing of the Hunter Association that knows how to use Nen, and I would consider it.

That the others were just like weird mercenaries, and then there was this one guy who had accidentally invented magic.

Oh, so the rest of the Hunter Association is concerned concerned with the non-men using hunters and netaro is the is like the one men

yeah

uh at this point we move into maybe the coolest battle we have seen in a long time as killua is attacked by uh the kill killua zaldic squad in the forest yes headed up by a dung beetle Oh, I love this ant.

This guy rules.

This fucking guy.

The ambush is triggered, and it is so funny how committed tagashi is to drawing new chimera ants that he's like well we know leol and we know flutter and we know leol's girlfriend i don't know what her name is

does she have a name yeah mindy what's her name uh

hina hina uh but takashi says no no no no

Like 10 new ants are going to explode out of the underbush.

Two who we will see for less than 20 frames.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Weird monkey ants, weird bear ants, an ant that is a humanoid running on top of a huge dung bull, like a dung beetle.

This one I wrote down, dung beetle ant with an explosive ass.

That is simply true.

This little cat we get for merely this frame.

We get like there's no other instance of this guy.

He just shows up, swings this thing, and then dies.

Kiliua is slaughtering these people.

Turns out taking the pin out of Kilua's head was like the limitless pill.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This guy's probably

the limited pin.

I

love Killiua getting to fight.

And it all goes pretty well until Kilua starts getting hit by bullets that are regular normal bullets.

Hmm, I'm disagreeing.

Actually, maybe you weren't paying attention.

These are fleas.

Oh, is that what bullets are like in the UK?

Jack?

Is that the confusion?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So they're just regular fleas, right?

Fleas with no bullet-like traits.

Well, I actually have a character who might want to tell you a little bit about what he's doing.

Sure.

Flutter calls out coordinates to a sniper.

There's no escaping.

No, there's not.

Not from my fleedom.

Oh, yeah.

What about their little tall

guy has?

This is a guy who's wearing a very tall hat.

Imagine like a conductor's hat.

Maybe this came from the owl.

The owl lost his hat.

What if a conductor hat was like three feet tall and he's perched on top of a rock formation and he's got an arm that is or has attached to it an extremely long kind of gross?

It looks like it's from the original prey game, like sniper rifle, that has a gigantic airbag attached to the back that slowly inflates to, I don't know, what, like eight, nine feet in diameter before firing.

It's huge.

My fleas are so special,

so very, very special.

They have a 200-meter vertical leap,

and when you factor in

the power of my air gun,

then they become unstoppable.

Oh, yeah.

Oh my god!

Oh, yeah!

This is the best thing that's happened to the show to date.

Yeah, this is the best character ever.

I love this fucking weird freak.

I'm sad that there's not a lot more of this version of this character.

It's weird.

I didn't remember this.

You didn't remember this?

Wow.

I somehow forgot the singing.

Like, I really did.

Yeah.

Every time I'm talking about it.

I remember him having the human host and everything.

But yeah, the singing.

Oh, totally.

God, the singing is so funny.

It's so...

I've been waiting to get here because this is like one of my favorite scenes in the this is why Chimera ants.

Chimera ants let you do this.

You know when they figured out that they could like um I

had a really I had a period a couple of years ago where I was watching um

best picture winners uh from the beginning.

Ah, the NWs.

It's amazing because uh they are not the best movies.

They are the movies that America, the American Academy is most interested in.

Some of them are really good.

A couple.

Some of them are really, really amazing.

Some of them are not Casablanca?

Casablanca's fucking great.

Yeah.

Anyway,

during the early part of that, you got to see this really great, like, slow buildup of what we consider to be contemporary Hollywood technique, where, you know, they were making silent films, and then they could make sound pictures, but they couldn't really move the camera, and they kind of still staged them like plays, and then they figured out how to do sound and, you know, like moving the camera around.

And, you know, eventually they sort of figured out how to make movies similar to the way we make them today or with the trappings that more modern movies have.

We have spent most of human history prior to having invented the chimera ants.

And Yoshihiro Tagashi figured out the chimera ants and now

we live in a world where they are.

Yeah.

And that's all I have to say.

He's invented the special ant.

This is all within expected parameters.

That one's shinging on the board.

He keeps shooting Killua with these the ants that have a sort of like an an anticoagulant so that they're trying to bleed Kilua to death.

At one point, the narrator pops in to remind us that Killua doesn't know how to use N.

He says Kilua cannot use N, and I was like, Is that

a huge lore dump?

This is so important.

This is such an important moment because the narrator steps in in a way that is so unusual to the show so far to explain something that is sort of understood by Killua, but that he's not actively thinking about.

this is just a fact of the world it's a lord dump and

do you remember the moment with the balloon jack when the when the uh the spiders are all in the balloon yes this is the balloon oh sure yes what the the narrator popping in to say yes welcome to the narrator is a character

Because what he pops in to remind us is that Killua can't use N not because of some curse, but just because he's not very good at the techniques that

cause Nen to, sorry, cause N to be useful.

N is the thing where you can set up a radius and kind of see people.

Kite's N was incredible.

You stretch your 10 out to so that you could like, if someone walks in the room, you can feel the walk in the room because they passed your 10 barrier.

But yeah, the narrator just lets us know this.

So instead, he plans on doing an extremely short range version to dodge the bullet at point blank.

The bullet's gonna enter, you know,

his tiny N, you know, like, like

three inches out from him, 37 centimeters.

He lets himself get hit once to triangulate the location of the sniper, and then starts charging off towards the sniper.

That's when he sings, this is all within expected parameters.

Yeah, that's my favorite bit that he says.

As he's getting found out, by the way, he's wrong.

This is not.

No.

This is all within expected parameters.

And then the one that he, I don't have it on the board because I felt four would be too many.

He's going to dive into this little hole and he goes, it's a trap, but come on in if you want to.

Oh, he's long legs.

I haven't seen long legs, but maybe I should now.

Long legs, you shouldn't.

It would scare the shit out of you.

But he does love to sing.

Something scary.

He loves to sing and he also loves to do cool poses with his hands while he sings.

Sorry, go on.

Just, we're about to learn something structurally about the world of the Chimera ants that never would have occurred to anyone.

But luckily, it occurred to Yoshihiro Tagashi.

And that is that the ant queen was eating all manner of things back when she was alive and birthing her ant children, including lots and lots of fish.

And the thing that was happening this whole time under our noses is that a whole little world of nen or ant fish has been developing under the surface.

Totally

separate from the world that we've been watching.

Were they part of any meetings?

Are any of them squadron leaders?

One of them, we know, is a captain.

What a captain means, I don't know.

But these ants have just been kind of around the whole time, I guess.

It's so good.

Yeah, because the sniper leads Killer into this trap, which is like

a pitfall into a huge underground lake.

And he says, This is a trap, but come on in.

To which Killior replies, I don't care.

Die.

But it turns out that wasn't his neck.

That was the neck of a host.

And that giant air, the giant bag on the air gun, that's the actual guy.

That's Captain Ecalgo.

He is a parasitic manipulator.

The chimera answer so good.

Not content with being, I am a living weapon sniper who sings.

He then has to say, well, he's not actually.

He's a hidden parasitic octopus, not an octopus.

Just quit.

Don't call him an octopus.

Yeah, the awful fish ants seize on the body, and as they're eating it, they're like, ah, Captain Ikalgo's host.

He was dead.

Oh, it tastes so good, etc.

Yeah, the blood calls to them.

And Killiwa says, hang on a second.

So Kiliwa is sort of like severed some of it.

Kiliwa is not at all concerned about the octopus popping out of this guy.

Sever some of his arms is kind of clinging to the rock, surrounded by octopus arms.

And he says, wait, Ika means squid, and you're an octopus, aren't you?

And then Ikalgo, you know, turns around furious.

And as Sylvie says, says, don't call me an octopus, as he levels another sniper.

He has a pistol or something at this point.

I don't know.

It is just like a smaller gun.

It just seems like the gun got smaller.

So why the fleas?

How are

fleas are famously?

I'm just going to tell you now.

I have no fucking clue why fleas.

I have no clue.

Is he still going to be firing fleas?

Or is he going to fire but I don't know.

We shall see.

There's one more scene to talk about.

It's very simple.

Melioron,

I have my clever spelling now.

Melioron

is drawn out by Goan in a desert.

And first he, something weird happens.

He introduces himself as Jail and then corrects himself.

He says, says, My name is Jail.

Oh, sorry.

Meliaron.

Yeah.

What's that about?

I don't know.

What's that about?

I don't know.

We're so helpful.

I don't want to oversell that.

It's not a big deal.

It's really not.

No.

Something weird going on.

And he has a first, he doesn't make clear that he's here to sort of parley with Goan, and Goan, you know,

goes to attack him.

And then he says, no, I'm not looking to trick or defeat you.

To which Goan says, okay, I believe you.

So funny.

And then Meliarone goes to keep explaining why he's definitely not there to kill him, not realizing that Gohan's already agreed.

That's very funny.

Classic.

I love some freaks.

There's another classic bit earlier where Goan yells in the bat's ear.

Character yelling into a character who's got sensitive hearing.

That's a classic.

Goan loves to yell.

Yeah.

He's good at it.

I think that's all.

That's it.

That I have this time.

So it just kind of ends.

Yeah.

The real real big takeaways here for me are

the arrival of

Captain Icalgo as a cool new ant who I hope sticks around.

He's really fun.

Yeah,

the strange white-clad figure in the closing sequence.

Who are they?

I don't know what that's about.

And then what the hell is going on inside the Hunter organization?

Yeah.

I'll tell you now, and this is a spoiler, but,

you know, we're going to have some stuff with Maliorone and some stuff with Ikalgo, and you will very shortly learn about

the white-clad girl.

That is very exciting.

That is what is on the docket for Hunter Hunter, and it's all really fucking good.

It's all really good.

So, because

of our sort of last-minute changes to the schedule,

the next episodes we are watching, I believe, Amir 2.

Let me just double-check my chat.

Not my chat, my document.

That sounds right to me from what I remember.

Do you want to double-check that, and I can read some five-star reviews?

Yes.

Hell yeah.

All right.

So, first of all, we have...

I'm going to read two today.

I've got one that I...

I'm calling someone out who's mentioned in this review.

March birthday reporting in.

My coworker has a Kiloa Zoldic t-shirt and yet they haven't finished the anime.

What the fuck?

They stopped at the appearance of the king i and my other co-worker are now campaigning to get them to finish the show this podcast is part of that campaign the critical lens and humor of this pod elevate my love for hunter hunter to soaring heights thank you all if you're the co-worker and you're listening to this why would you stop at the arrival of the king's review and tell me that is like eating a jelly doughnut until you get to the jelly hey hey hey hey i i think i probably got stopped in my hunter hunter watch around then and it was because a lot of life started happening that's fair that is fair that all we know about this person is that they stopped when the king showed up and so i'm forced to draw assumptions i just like the killowish shirt though yeah

i don't know if i'm such a big killowa fan name one of their songs oh um

uh

the one that plays when he goes gay mode

yeah yeah okay he's always going gay mode he's always going gay mode

And I have a review from a march.

Oh, great.

Oh.

March checking in.

I loved Yu Yu Hawker Show growing up, but didn't keep up with Tagashi's work or anime in general.

So when I found out there was another Tagashi work via my favorite actual play players doing a watch-along,

I stopped early to do a little emphasis on the favorite actual play, and then I was like,

favorite actual play players.

Doing a watch-along, I was in.

I've now watched through the series and then re-watched along with the team.

Sorry, I could not wait.

Don't apologize.

Now you got to make the face we do when jack says something really prescient um

it's paul dano's face excellent show excellent commentary excellent excellence thank you very much nb plaid

um and that first review was from s queso s caso thank you thank you both yeah thank you we also got a a blake review we got you know some other people being like

you know we didn't we didn't read blake's because they weren't basically that episode hadn't had just come up when we were recording uh the last episode barbara by the way is what was Allie's name.

We couldn't remember it when we were last recording.

Allie's name was Barbara.

That episode's not out yet, so there's no Barbara yet.

Yet.

Yet.

Barbara.

You better have fucking.

By the time this is out, you better have fucking heard from Barbara.

I think it's Sylvie's turn, right?

Oh, is it?

Are we still.

I thought we were waiting until the Barbara.

No, no, we're going to do a new one every day.

Barbara.

We're going to do a new one every day.

So is it, what, April or May?

May.

May.

Maybe people very fitting.

That's my problem.

Is it possible that it's already June?

Hey, if it's May and we got two Mays in a row, I really want to see.

And here's what else I want to see.

I want to see the normal, non-named, non-month reviewers trying to beat the month reviewers and force the month reviewers to show up and actually compete.

Damn.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does.

But now I feel like I should read one that did because there were I kind of focused on the ones that were into the theme.

Can we get one that's from a non-theme

The Peto Bricks of Podcasts?

What does Peto Bricks mean?

Guess you just have to listen to find out.

But in all seriousness, it's a wonderful show.

Their discussions are always interesting and add a deeper layer to whatever media they discuss while remaining fun throughout.

Thank you.

We do remain fun throughout.

We do.

We do remains fun.

It's a combination of thoughtfulness and humor.

Everyone's saying it.

If that isn't Peto Bricks, then I don't know what is.

Also, this is edited.

Oh, go ahead.

Peter Bricks' podcast is a high compliment.

I agree.

I will say, when I clicked on this, I didn't realize that it was edited to say April birthday.

Odds are

it will be missed, but I think it actually, you got it right on time.

You got it right on time.

Okay, here's what we've got for episodes.

I knew that I had said to next time, but what I wanted to make sure was that I couldn't borrow from a future.

There's so many episodes to the Chimera Ant Arc that we've sort of compressed.

There's more fours than ever before, and so there's a future four that I've borrowed from to make three threes.

So instead of instead of two, three, four, we've got three, three, three.

And so next time we're going to be watching 101, 102, and 103.

And those are titled Ikalgo and Lightning.

Cool.

Oh, that's sure.

Yeah.

Power and games.

And check and mate.

Power and games.

What an interesting two to put together in Hunter Hunter.

Yoshihiro Tagashi, what are you doing, man?

Haven't got a left field.

Yeah, I haven't been thinking about games at all.

I wonder if that's got anything to do with anything.

A big part of Yuyu Hakasho is a tournament arc, right?

Yes, yeah.

The dark tournament.

Is Tagashi, like, broadly across his work, really interested in games, or is this something that he really dug into in Hunter Hunter?

It's definitely less present in Yu Yu Hakasho,

and whether that is...

Okay, nah.

So here's what happens in Yu Yu Hakasho broadly.

One, there is a bizarre competition to win like a famous

magician's like special move and to be a classic Tagashi game.

Yeah, and then the basically the next thing that happens is that he gets invited to the dark tournament the winner of which gets like a wish granted by like a special committee of demons

and then there is a game in a basically a haunted mansion uh fighting at a bunch of psychics yep and then

there is this like weird series of challenges where he fights like the disciples of a guy that's kind of gone mad and that's its own game.

And then, within that game, there's a character whose whole thing is creating a psychic game that they have to play.

Okay.

Okay.

And then there is a competition to see who becomes the king of the demon realm.

Right.

Okay.

Yep.

Yeah.

So I'm going to have to say this is a Takashi thing.

I'm so glad he's writing again.

I hope he is writing in a way that is gentler on his body than he has in the the past.

But he is so good at this.

And I am so delighted that he is continuing to be good at it.

I'm happy to be hearing from everyone that I know

who

reads Hunter Hunter that they are loving the new chapters.

Yeah, I'm also just very jealous of them.

And I am jealous of them.

Yeah.

And I hope

there's an anime of it.

That'd be cool.

We'll see.

Yeah.

I gotta be Killer with Zelda in Fortnite.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How could you not want that?

He would break it.

He'd break the paint thinner.

He's too powerful.

He's too powerful.

Okay.

All right.

I'm going to edit this so that there's a note at the beginning, but just a reminder, because if you're listening to this, you will have already heard me tell you that you can go listen to the second Dragon Ball Z bonus episode, bonus episode number six for Media Club Plus, which is up now on the patreon patreon dot no well yeah patreon dot com slash friendsofthable or friendsofthetable dot cash um and i'll edit that in to the beginning also

great that was a great app wait sylvie pick a name oh um

um

billy oh good

whoa billy are we accepting

bills are we accepting williams

yeah sure but i'm gonna call you billy yeah

Okay, if you go by Billy, if anybody in your life calls you Billy ever.

No, no, if your name could be shortened to Billy, even if you don't want it to be, write in, but I'm going to call you Billy.

Right.

Do that.

Knowing that that is true.

And if your name isn't Billy, but like you could write in with your favorite thing about Billy the puppet from Saw, and I'll probably read that.

And if you have any other name, show these fucking Billies who's boss.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, we've created factionalism now.

Yeah.

The name and birthdays versus the non-name and birthdays.

I want to be on the news for inciting violence between people with different names.

You said that exactly the way you said, I want to be a mental warrior.

I want to go to space and fire a laser using dead women's souls, which is something I think about you saying all the time.

Why did I say that?

Holy cow, dude.

I need to find this clipper right now.

I want to be a mental warrior.

I said that.

Yes.

Yeah, so funny.

Armored Core stream.

You ad-libbing, not just the line, I want to be a mental warrior, but your like off-the-dome delivery of I want to be a mental warrior is one of the funniest things I've ever heard you say.

That's really fun.

Got it saved somewhere.

Keith, if you never leave the pole of Earth's gravity, how are you supposed to be able to shoot a laser gun really big using the power of dead women's souls, I want to be a mental warrior.

I want to attack planets using dead women's souls.

Yeah, so that's that's why you have to escape Earth Scrappy.

Okay,

are you sure you want to be a mental warrior?

Are you sure you want to attack planets using dead women's souls?

Why wouldn't you?

Uh, war is hell, and I need to go to hell.

All right, I mean, I don't think that sounds like it gets the whole story.