Two Best Friends - Hunter x Hunter ep. 93-95: Media Club Plus S01E29

Hey everybody, it's Keith.

Just a couple quick messages at the front here.

First, Allie didn't get to plug her stuff at the beginning because I distracted her.

So I'm going to say that you can go to friendsofthetable.cash and sign up for the friends of the table Patreon and listen to the behind-the-scenes gathering information series that Allie hosts.

And you can also go to a morecivilized age.net to find the Star Wars podcast that she's on.

And

the second thing is that

this coming weekend, the 26th of October, we're uploading the next bonus episode for Media Club Plus.

It is the part two of our Dragon Ball series, and it's going to be covering episodes 31,

42, 46, and 47 of Dragon Ball Z Kai.

Okay, enjoy the show.

We should talk about this like on a recording.

Yeah, we should.

clap less again.

All right, you want to clap?

We can clap right here.

I was going to go to the bathroom.

I thought you were going to have to be in the middle of it.

We'll do it.

Okay.

It's so confusing.

Did everyone go?

Just clap.

Just clap.

Did you clap?

Just clap.

This is how we do it here.

He's menacing us.

Welcome, Daniel.

What's the podcast about diving into the beauty that interests us and the stories that excite us?

As always, we are brought to you by friends at the table.

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry, and you can find me on X.com and BlueSky at Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com slash run button.

We've got a lot of new stuff on Run Button.

We've finished our Sonic Superstars Let's Play.

We're going to be uploading the Let's Play 20 Years of Sonic remake Let's Play that we're doing where we remake our Let's Play 20 Years of Sonic.

Let's Play.

That's coming up.

We also have a Silent Hill 2 remake Let's Play coming down the pipe.

I've talked about that on fronts of the table.

It's a whole thing.

You should definitely check it out just to see the weird thing that I think that we're going to be doing with that.

And with me as always is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

Sylvie Bullet?

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

You can check out the just started, just uploaded at the time of recording Virtue's Last Reward playthrough that Keith and I are doing on the YouTube for Friends of the Table.

YouTube.com/slash Friends of the Table.

Second one will be up by the time this is up.

Oh, that's exciting.

Got to get caught up.

Second to the game.

Yes, you do.

Yeah.

And you can also catch the 999 and the rest of the stuff there.

Jack and Austin recently streamed UFO 50, a game that is now consuming my life.

Yeah, I bought it.

I edited that and then I bought the game.

game yeah rules it's it's the best game they've ever made uh in the world so definitely go to twitch.tv slash friends with the table and then also the youtube with the same thing and subscribe to both uh also uh andrew lee swan

hey uh you can find me on twitter at swandre3000 i'm ready to talk about hunting and hunters because there's there's nobody else to introduce right

No, there is one more to introduce.

Coming at you for the second time is Ali Akapura.

Hello, Ali.

Hi.

Second time?

I'm literally so bad at Keith right now.

What?

Oh, yeah.

I came prepared to say that I was mad at Keith, especially this week.

And then the full body panic that I just had.

Why?

What you doing?

Through the creation of the start of this episode?

Yeah.

I'm being like, is this how this is supposed to be?

Everyone's talking.

I think music is playing in one of my open tests.

I don't know.

No, that was me.

I did that.

Can you speak a bit about chaos?

Yeah, can you speak about

what the experience was like on your end, Allie?

Because as far as the listeners, I felt fear.

I felt real.

Malicious M.

I felt like it went perfect.

You know, we used to be.

Because it's by our standards, Keith.

We're used to it.

That's usually how it goes.

We're molded by the darkness.

So, what happened that you're so angry about?

Well, because also you really buried the lead on these episodes.

You were like, Yeah, you can come on.

After this, there's something interesting going on, but this deals with the kite stuff.

Yeah.

And, you know, there's a little bit of Gonkilua.

And you were like, the riz check, the like insanity of the first episode here was something I feel like I should have been aware of.

I think you should have a lot of people.

I guess I've never given someone a risk check.

So I didn't know.

If you're familiar with Hunter-Hunter, hunter gone supernatural aura is already something we're well aware of right it's true it's the whole thing

you see him charge it up absolutely insane episode but i felt bad so you al you've meant to be on three other times than the one time that you've been on and scheduling conflicts have happened a lot of them very last minute so uh we had to push it a couple times and then all of a sudden the episode that i knew you were very excited to be on the thing that you saw on twitter or something that made you want to watch or want to read Hunter Hunter,

the scene with Killua bringing the unconscious gone back to the inn from Escaping the Chimera Ants and saying that he's light.

That was your introduction to wanting to

somebody on Twitter posted those pages from the manga

and

I was like, yeah, I want to read this.

This is interesting.

And it snuck up by me.

I kind of forgot that that was in that episode.

You weren't even, you were never meant to be on that episode.

It was just a, I thought that it was late.

Well, you were meant to be on the episode where that happened.

I just didn't remember that that happened in those episodes.

In those, right.

So

you weren't even scheduled to be on for those.

And you've been following along with the manga.

And so, yeah, I thought that you would be prepared for this.

I think it's been a little weird because I've like been keeping pace with you,

but like not wanting to go too far ahead

in case a situation like this happened and I was able to be on.

And then I wouldn't want to know more forward than me and the audience and everybody here are.

But

it's been going.

We're on.

We are Mr.

Toad's Wild Ride.

Yeah, I was going to say, Allie, you, like me, this is your first time through Hunter Hunter, right?

So, and you've just been reading the manga.

Can we talk about what it's like to encounter the Chimera ants for the first time in the manga?

Like, what has your last couple of months been like

Chimera ant-wise?

Well, I also, I also am dialed into, like, quote-unquote anime Twitter enough.

Oh, short.

I'm so sorry.

I know.

No, it's my fame.

It was always my fault.

Yeah.

To, like, understand

that the Chimera Arc, as people say, was like a thing that meant

something to people.

It was

polarizing.

Usually it was very long.

And the thing was like,

you're going to cry for these ants.

So you knew that you were going to cry for the ants.

Right.

It was knowledge that was out there and then I could not even begin to understand.

And like

going through Hunter Hunter in general, I'm not like

the most familiar with a lot of like Shonen

structures and

things of that nature.

But like going through it, there's, you know, I've been interested in a lot of parts and

confused by the pacing in others.

But like the like immediate like, oh,

okay, I understand what the situation is.

And the immediate, like,

like

stretching of the bounds of what the chimeric ants are, and, like, just like, oh, they're more powerful now, and they're doing this now, and then they're here now.

And, like,

I was like, oh, okay, yeah, uh-uh-huh.

Yep, I, I, I'm gonna cry for the ants, I guess.

Do you have a favorite ant and or ant moment?

Okay.

I, do I have a favorite ant moment?

I mean, cult is a standout in the last couple of chapters.

Lovely.

Yeah.

Big cult fan.

Yeah, cult.

I mean, you know,

cult is doing their best.

I think the standout moment, I mean, because it's so fresh in the latest chapters, is the like, yeah, some of us remember our names.

Yeah.

Like, that's how human we still are.

It was like, oh, okay.

Yeah, remember our names.

And we remember like stuff about our lives, too.

Which is crazy.

They just like are like, I remember about 10% of my life, and now I'm a little bear.

That happens to people.

Um, all right, you want to get into these uh episodes?

I believe so.

All right, in the last set, uh, the plan entirely fell apart for everyone.

Goan and Kilua couldn't beat Knuckle or Shoot.

Kilua has decided to leave Goan based on some input from Bisky

Because he couldn't protect Goan.

The hunters couldn't stop the ants before the king was born.

The ants couldn't save the queen and mostly struck out on their own after the king was revealed to be a psycho.

These episodes are all about sort of regrouping, figuring out a new plan.

Killua spends the month protecting Goan from rogue ants while confronting his sort of inability to fight selflessly that was

kind of put on the front burner by training with Bisky in the last set of episodes.

Novan Morrill have decided,

or Novan Morrell have to decide who's going with them to the king's new fortress in East Gorteaux.

Everyone has to figure out what to do with the ants that are running all around, especially the king of speed,

who these episodes focus on a bit.

And Goan has to go on a date with a crazy and adult woman.

Yeah.

Starting with episode 93, titled Date with Palm.

Palm, if you don't remember, is the woman who's been trying to

barely containing herself from murdering Bisky, Gonan Kilua during the month that they were supposed to be training to fight Knuckle and Shoot.

And when they,

I guess we'll get to that in a second because actually we open up on the king arriving at East Corteau.

That's how the last seven episodes end, and that's how these episodes start.

The king.

It's very whiplashy.

Yeah, we get a picture of the palace.

It's they lean even heavier in on the uh the North Korea thing.

I don't know if it's the, I don't know who adds this in.

If this is the, in the original, or if it's the Viz translation, or if it's the, the fun,

no, Viz dub.

The dub and the, the original translation are slightly different, uh, but they also add some like China in there with the North Korea.

The capital we learned is called Peijing, which is, I guess it's like uh

Pyongyang, Beijing, portmanteau.

That's what it seems like to me.

That is kind of what Tagashi has done, right?

Like

with

some other names.

Didn't he do that with

Persia and Egypt in the

York New Arc?

Yeah, there is something funny with those.

Yeah.

I don't remember what it was, though.

It's something like that.

Yeah.

We get some weird episodes.

Some weird episodes.

I want to begin right off the top.

These are odd.

These are odd.

And And I think that

sometimes they are odd in ways that work.

Sometimes they are odd in ways that don't work, but are entertaining to watch.

There's going to be a way that these episodes are odd that we're all going to hate talking about.

For sure.

I'm going to have fun talking about it.

I'm going to love watching it.

But sometimes it's just odd in a way that I don't think is really working at all.

Some of that, a lot of that is to do with the date with Palm.

Yeah.

Which

falls apart apart for me for reasons beyond

the fact that Ghone is dating an adult woman.

There is something.

This doesn't really work at all for me,

but we can kind of get into that.

And also, it's very strange that we have all this business with the...

Colt is not in these episodes at all.

No, referenced

times.

Yeah, referenced really, really enjoyably at one point.

But, you know, we saw him and the little Chimera ant baby thing.

But

that's all gone in these episodes.

But yeah, we begin with Meruem and the Royal Guards approaching East Gorto, where we have this kind of like uncomfortably drawn, grotesque leader.

He is eating.

It's the same way that Takashi and the anime team have like lavished an uncomfortable and grotesque attention on fat bodies and eating as a...

There's a bit of racial like stereotyping there too, in the same way that there was that one.

Oh, I can't remember the the names of the two characters.

Lynn and Padunga.

Yes, and they give them a girl.

Oh, God.

I can't tell you what they're doing with the VO in the sub, but I know that in the dub, they are not.

It's not a generous performance.

No, it is not at all.

No, it's rough.

This is rough.

One of the rougher things about this arc, I think, is just Iscorteau's deal.

Yeah.

He's watching

like a

cabaret burlesque type.

Cat girl ballet.

Bunny girl ballet.

No, they're cat girls.

They're cat girls.

They're cats.

They're cat girls.

Cat girl ballet

and eating.

And he is interrupted by Merioem and the royal guards.

Merioem

is delighted at first to see that one of his guards, one of the king, the King Diego, one of the king's guards, is a rare and it piques his appetite.

The faces that he makes in this scene are so good.

I love this sequence outside of the uncomfortable stuff with this sequence is phenomenal.

And even the uncomfortable stuff with Diego, who's, you know, his name is Diego Masadoru.

Masadoru.

Yeah.

And this is a...

This is a...

The long and short of it, they change his name in the Viz translation to some other thing.

Both of them are puns on the name Kim Jong-il.

Diego Masadoru is the original name, and it is like the Japanese pronunciation of the name written out with Chinese characters.

So that is the that's the way the pun works and then they change it to just be an anagram.

I can't remember what the anagram is, but in the in the in the Viz translation, it's an anagram of Kim Jong-il.

So they're being they're not being subtle at all.

No,

it's it's like

people did this with

it immediately brings to mind like caricatures of like like the thinly veiled like Saddam Hussein stand-ins and like Call of Duty games and stuff.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Aside from him, I even like some of the stuff about like

the ants talking about human politics.

Oh, yeah.

Which we'll get to.

So wait,

you're talking about the rare human.

Do you want to talk more about this?

Yeah,

the king is delighted about this.

We've sort of, we have, we've got a sense that the king has been really hoping to get to see some rare humans.

And he is so happy that he kills this man, I think, by just taking the top of his head off he cuts off the the the men user and all of the guards head with one swipe of his tail

creepy yeah very creepy

and then

powers up his wren which appears as this awful like blue and white ripple it's like a multicolored wren uh and pito identifies this as his power We don't really know exactly what this means.

It's the ability to consume other people's aura and make it it his own and Peter explicitly says the more he eats the stronger he grows this is literally what cell does from Dragon Ball Z which is why we talked a lot about cell and why we didn't

did why we mentioned so many times how much

uh Merowem is like the king is like uh Frieza and Cell because

Eating people and getting their powers is like the whole deal about the second half of the Cell arc.

I have actually a few clips to play here.

The first thing is that these episodes do a lot of music stuff of like using underused parts of already written songs to get like other bits.

A lot of songs have like long drum breaks that you don't normally hear that get used in fighting or they'll like have a different tone in the last third.

And you might remember the song Voyage.

It sounds like this.

One of my favorites.

I love this one.

This is from very, you know, super, super early on.

This is right after they got into the NGL, right?

No, that's like from episode one.

That is like when Goan is, I mean, it's from a bunch.

It gets played a lot, but it's when Goan is like leaving Whale Island at that point.

Maybe I'm thinking of the last time I heard it.

Maybe, yeah.

And then they use the last bit of that called,

still called Voyage, same name, same song.

But this is what the cat girls are dancing to.

And it's just a very efficient use of already written material.

Oh.

Sorry, there's a whole middle section of drum break that gets used sometimes for fights that I included just because I know that Jack likes the drums.

I always like to hear the drum break.

There's like 45 seconds of this kind of thing.

This is what the Cat Girls dance too.

It plays a little while they're walking up, right?

The ants.

Yes,

which feels very much like heralding their arrival.

Totally.

Oh, totally

used, and I really like that.

Yeah, it cuts back and forth between the girls dancing and Merowem, like, killing all the guards on his approach.

He should have been dancing too.

And the second thing is, I got a clip of Merowem because I thought the performances here in both versions were so good.

Meriwem has been ice cold.

Everything that he said has had zero emotion

up to this point.

And,

you know, Shonen, I think, is a genre about characters freaking the fuck out.

And we finally...

That's a good way to put it.

And we finally get Meriwem kind of freaking the fuck out.

It's a rare occurrence, but I got both versions of this.

I thought it was great.

Oh, nope.

I just hit the wrong button by mistake.

This is the dub.

That's it.

The flavor I seek.

Yes,

I can feel it.

This is it.

It's surging through my body.

body.

Love a good freak out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, we've talked as well about Ramot.

VA is very, very good at freaking out.

And he has.

Ramot will return later and do some very good freaking outs.

But it was great to hear Meroem.

A lot of Meroem has sort of been built around his hunger and his intensity for like eating good, eating good food.

Yeah.

So it's no surprise.

Like, almost disdain for everything he's ever seen.

He's a gourmet hunter.

Oh, he's just like Machi.

Oh, no, Machi.

What's her name?

Menshi.

Menshi.

Menshi.

Yeah.

Yeah, Machi's from the Phantom Troop.

Yeah, no, I said it, and I was immediately like, hold on.

But yeah, we get a bunch of really great, sort of like wild-eyed, bloody-toothed,

really upsetting-looking Meroem.

It reminds us, it reminds me of the.

It does.

It reminds of the close-ups when

Peto

launched themselves

fight originally.

Oh, yeah.

How is this frightening Meriwem depicted in the manga alley?

Um, yeah, I, I,

I'm glad that you asked because there is a really striking bit in here in terms of like the page turn in the sequence.

Um, I think the

I think the split between um chapter 216 and 217 are similar in the anime in that like they're both sort of started and ended by this siege of the capital, I guess.

Um, but the way that it's displayed at the end of um

216, there's I'm just gonna copy and paste into my thing.

My keyboard was on.

Okay, hi.

Um,

these are the two pages that you get back to back.

And I don't know how they're like split in the book because, full disclosure, I'm reading on the Shonen Jump app where I'm just like flicking with my thumb between pages.

Um, but you get

merely flicking.

Um, so there's you get like the

Miriam approaching the guards, and like the last panel on that page is like their three bodies just sort of like burst into blood.

And then you get this full page

just

illustration of Miriam alone with like just ink splattered all over the page.

That's so good.

That is the shit.

I love that.

That's so cool.

That's very cool.

It's so cool and it's so nasty.

And then the immediate next page that you get is your eye.

The first thing that you see is this cat girl with a bunny tail in Jack's defense.

But like, just the like.

Just the just the like, oh, yeah, okay, we're in a different scene now, I guess,

is a delight in

why I like reading things.

Yeah, this first one is almost like a, it's, it's like a a jackson pollock painting in that it's it's it's not just a few ink droplets that no

the entire frame is just covered in splots and smears and dots um and merrowem is sort of like only vaguely visible behind it yeah it i mean it really looks like legitimate splatters of ink i don't know how this is going because yeah it probably is yeah you can like there's definitely there's like some that are larger than others in a way that like yeah speaks speaks to the like you know literalness of this.

Yeah, they kind of play another they play with this sort of like

static over gross stuff happening also at the beginning of um chapter 17 the like actual killing of this dude um so that is just a good miriam face to start the chapter

Super iconic.

I think that like the um one in the anime gets uh posted a lot too.

God, that's good gore, though.

Yeah.

Holy shit.

There we go.

Oh, man.

Wow.

Such a good face.

They do

stuff like this in the show.

I know he doesn't know.

The show is fairly gory, but

this is a man who has been ripped open.

Yeah.

And I think Peto is saying, I'll take care of this, Sire.

The shading on this top page just screams an editor being like, you need to just cover this up a little bit because it like stops so

perfectly across the

like viscera.

Such a wonderful shot.

So they, I mean, he kills the nen user, the one

very strong seeming nen user.

His rend is impressive.

This is a guy that feels like

maybe wouldn't have trouble with someone like Tesgara.

You know, like you've put a massive amount of your country's budget into hiring the strongest nen user you could find, basically.

It seems like he gets killed in one hit, uh, less than one hit.

Uh, and they go on into the king, uh, uh,

who immediately is like, What are you doing here?

Oh, by the way, he was notified that there was an intruder and does nothing about it.

He's like, whatever, take care of it, go away.

And then he says, Do you know who I am?

A supreme leader of this era, a king among kings.

I am Massador Diego.

Such a good thing to say to the Chimerant King.

It's great.

It's so good.

There's so many good lines in this.

I've just got to read read this because it's so good and says so much.

They're doing like, they're straight away getting into ideology.

The king is like, why did this fucking idiot call himself a king?

And Xiao Poof says,

it seems to me that in the human world, it is a very common phenomenon.

Humans without intelligence or talent end up in positions of power due to bloodline or connections.

And the king says, that defies all logic.

In the hands of an incompetent, power brings nothing but ruin.

this could only be the work of imbeciles we must provide

oh uh i mistyped something we must provide some kind of guidance i don't know

he says in my translation he said we must keep humans on a very short lease i also have that that's yeah that is like the dub uh closed caption translation the other we must provide strict guidance is maybe what it says i think it says we must provide power guidance which is obviously not what he says if it doesn't make any sense um but i think it says we must provide strict guidance And I wrote the dub there too: we must keep humans on a very short leash because I think it's a little bit uh, it's a different vibe.

We must provide guidance is a lot different than we must keep humans on a very short leash.

Um, and then the cat girl dancers ask for their lives to be spared.

And he says, These humans are idiots.

Now, I want you to think as hard as those puny brains of yours can manage.

Have you ever spared a pig or a cow because it begged you for its life?

Um, it's cold.

And then who wants to tell me what the meat orchard is?

Oh, it's so fucking sick.

I hadn't realized in

Ali posting this reveals that one of these chapters, chapter 217 in the manga, is called chapter 217 Meat Orchard.

Love to be like,

you don't say.

Yeah,

it would give it a completely different feeling.

For example, if Keith had said at the end of the last recording, one of the next episodes is going to be called The Meat Orchard.

Instead of people with palm.

Here we go.

Here we go, here we go.

I mean, we can get into this, but I do think there is actually something pretty great about the fact that an episode in which someone establishes the meat orchard, a human processing plant

in the fields and gardens of a palace in East Gorteaux, is instead given the very sort of like low-key title Date with Palm.

I love that this show is

theoretically trying to spin both those plates at the same time.

It almost feels like I think that one of the things that I like about how the show juxtaposes the slower,

lower stakes,

slower paced stuff that's happening with Gonan Kilua and Knuckle and Shoot before they head to the NGL with what's happening with the Ants.

I think knowing that what's happening with the Ants is so much more interesting, it's almost like

it's almost foreboding to seem to be like the counterpoint to what the Ants are doing is what Gonan and Kilowa are doing, which leaves them woefully unprepared for what's been happening.

And I think this kind of drives that home of like, like,

Goan is still dealing with like interpersonal drama at home while this stuff is really progressing very quickly.

Is theoretically about to establish factory farming?

Yes.

The other translation calls it meat plantation instead of meat orchard.

Meat orchard is is much, much better.

I mean, they both evoke they both evoke really, really rough things, right?

Yeah, violently unpleasant things.

Yeah.

Um

there's some fun stuff going.

I find this um

uh when Poof says uh humans kind of do this sometimes that like stupid idiots become the king.

What's the deal with that?

This is such a like charming counterpoint to uh small bear saying yeah ants sometimes remember their past lives.

This idea that like the ants are revealing to the humans

like small details about themselves that the humans find shocking and weird.

And we have Poof patiently explaining to the king, well, you know, sometimes humans, they're not true kings compared to you, my lord, but,

you know, they try.

It also kind of like demonstrates like

the furth, like how the king is further from humanity than some of the other ones, right?

And the guards kind of have that separation too.

They don't really think about who they were as humans, like the others do.

To connect, to make like a genre connection here, the like that defies logic.

Surely the strongest must prevail.

Surely the most wickedly talented, evil mastermind man must be the king.

That is like super in line with how

Shoden villains typically get introduced of like

having this sort of strict

like

logic and punching combination ideology, where it's like, on the one hand, they sound like they're from 4chan, but on the other hand, they're like a literal superhero.

Yeah.

This is also the sort of inverse of how you get someone like Kiryu, right?

Where like Kiryu is a force for good who I strongly believe could do anything that he puts his mind to.

Because like Keith has said on on the show several times the only real thing that stands between Kiryu and success is efficiently punching and he can do that until the cows come home tiger draft negates all damage yeah

yeah

um there's also something here um that reminds me grimly of the way natero talked about the hunter exam as a way of like uh you know we we're producing someone really really good and the hunter exam is built to make sure that virtuous people succeed And if they're not virtuous, which they might be, at least they'll be very, very, very, very strong.

Yeah.

Which is, you know,

how's this ideology working out for you?

It's fun as well that the king is like, these people, these idiots don't really have the strength and power.

They come from...

bloodlines or whatever.

The only reason the king is as powerful as he is is because of months of like slaughter and effort from the other chimera ants.

You know, he is the very end of an extremely labor intelligence.

The king doesn't like get that he drives on roads that tax people pay for.

Yes.

And yeah, he is strong as hell.

You know, this isn't me being like, oh, the king is actually like a weak baby who thinks that he's strong.

It is fun, though, to see the king be like, well, I just arrived fully formed.

Instead of birthing himself violently and prematurely out of the queen who spent the last, last, you know, however long desperately cultivating the king.

Yeah, but that was his right as king.

That was his divine right.

Yeah,

it's really it's the difference is but the difference between his divine right and

Diego's divine right is that

Diego is wrong.

Is that Merim can punch a hole through the earth?

Vegeta's watching Hunter Hunter and nodding approvingly.

Yeah.

Yeah, I gotta say, we would have have different conversations, I think, about the divine right of kings if the king could point at you and you exploded.

Yeah.

You know, I think that would end a lot of conversations about, should this king really be fit to rule?

You're gone.

He sure should.

Look at that.

Look what he just did.

That's crazy.

I'll get to work.

Two little throwaway lines here.

The king briefly says that

they should use the body of the dead king to, quote, control the humans.

Uh, Tagashi gets a huge amount of mileage from just setting stuff up in the background, yeah, having it uh explained.

And you know, we don't need to spend time going, what's the evil scheme going to be with using the king to control the humans?

We've seen what Pito does, and that lets us have this little throwaway line.

And then later, you know, we see the body of the king with Pito's puppeteer behind him.

It's so, I would say, one of the things that Tagashi is better at

than almost any other thing that he's good at.

And he is good at a lot of things.

I love his shows.

I haven't read them.

But just like disseminating information like that, choosing what to tell you where, and then like when to go all in on explaining it, it works so well for me almost all the time.

And even like the big glaring spot we've talked about a thousand times where like Heaven's Arena doesn't really land the first time through, even that like really solves itself for me every other time I've watched it, or any time I thought, even thought back on it.

Uh,

this it is like really fun to just have the king sort of wave away Pito being like, Can I use the king as a puppet?

He's like, Whatever, whatever.

And

yeah, uh, Pito also calls humans fully self-renewing, uh, which made me laugh.

Yeah, it's a renewable resource, biofuel.

Oh, green energy, Yeah, yeah, green energy.

Now it's time to cut back to the little village of Vienna, Italy, where

we've been over this.

Alan Keith briefly thought that Vienna was in Italy.

I did briefly think that, but I immediately corrected myself and knew where it was.

Sure.

In Austria.

It was an easy mistake to make.

I thought, I was thinking of Venice, obviously.

Right.

Obviously, we come back to Italy, where

Palm's sinister Nen is, or

yeah, I guess, is exploding out of the inn and out into the street where Konan and Kilo are waiting to confront whatever's going to happen to them when they

have to deal with Palm's disappointment that they didn't fulfill their promise to take her into the NGL.

this episode

I don't know why I told you I wouldn't like talking about it no I do like talking about it it's just it gives me it's it's a roller coaster it's the you know the image the like um

it's so over we're so back image of the like the like flying chart that goes up and down i know you don't but other people will um it's like that it's a roller coaster in terms of just like tone uh and quality too because there'll be date with palm shit happening during some of my favorite stuff of the entire series yeah

it's crazy that that's happening like it's like cut from that cut to killua's like intense emotional stuff cut back to oh yeah no i can't give you the time you want with me yeah what the fuck

the show you know let's just say it outright the show moves into a gone goes on to goes on a date sequence And in an initially pretty funny pivot, that

land is intentionally very odd.

It turns out Goan is pretty good at going on dates.

This confuses Killiwa and the whole audience.

So, what were we going to say, Ali?

This is a lore drop, is what I was thinking.

This is really

a crazy lore drop.

It's a lore drop,

and then a weight drop when Killiwa drops the weight that he was holding and shot.

He sets up the lunk alarm.

Our way into

the dating.

Listen, you have to understand, listener, if you are not watching along, this is sandwiched in some of the most violent nen combat we have seen yet.

It's crazy.

The birth of King Merrowem and the birth of the Chimera Ant baby, which does not appear at any point in any of of these episodes.

Hey, welcome to Hunter Hunter.

Yeah, welcome.

We're in it.

Hey, wasn't there just a nen baby?

Wasn't there a baby that came out of the ant?

What was that?

No, sorry.

Don't worry about it.

Hey, don't worry.

Do you want to know about it in the next two episodes?

Because you're not going to.

It's not happening.

No, you're going to wait.

The dating segment opens with a really great image, which is as they arrive in their house, they find that Palm has constructed and then

about a hundred awful Goan Freaks dolls.

She's made these very badly and then like decapitated them.

This is

in a room.

She's thrown them into a pile.

Yeah, full of ruined Goan dolls.

I would say the speed

forgives the low quality.

Yes, that's true.

She has made a lot.

It is such a funny image.

And

is a good way into talking about the way I think that this sequence could have worked well for me, which is that in this shot here, we're seeing Goan and Kilua standing on the right and looking over at Palm, who, if possible, looks worse than we've ever seen her before.

It is possible she does.

Yeah, completely invisible.

She just has two red lights burning where her eyes are, and she is standing on a rug surrounded by oh, 250 ruined Goan dolls

in various states of destruction.

And

going careening into this as like we need to placate monstrous palm with a date and keeping palm like spectacularly, outlandishly monstrous throughout could have been a really funny way to do this where it's like we're going to have to go on a date with a nen monster.

Instead, what happens as they continue is they actually start to try and play it genuinely.

Plus, a sort of real side helping of like women are crazy right misogyny,

which is sort of latent in Palm regularly, but is made more palatable, or at least more visually and narratively entertaining when she looks and acts like the woman from the ring, rather than like a quote-unquote crazy girlfriend.

If we had Palm

doing stuff like this, standing amongst a load of made-up Goan corpses, saying, I don't want an apology, and this was our dating arc, I'd have been way more on board with that than kind of where we start getting to.

But Goan is so chill about this.

He says, is there any way I can make amends?

And Palm says, yes, pointing the knife at him.

You have to go on a date with me.

And if there's one thing we know about Goan Freaks, it's that he commits very hard to a promise if there's one thing we didn't previously know about gone freaks he has a long and uncomfortable dating history

yeah accurate both accurate

uh

i so i i

he agrees to the date he says yes i'll go on a date and it cuts to

Killua at the gym being the most killua that she's ever ever been.

There's some really funny Killua around all this, I will say.

When I heard you talk to Pom, it was like you were right there in your element.

There's something I wanted to ask you about.

Have you ever been on a date before?

Why are you asking, Kilua?

Yeah, why are you asking, Kilua?

Why are you curious, huh?

This is so cute.

No, we're just two bros.

You know, we're just two bros at the gym

talking about chicks, you know?

Yeah.

And Goan says, I've been on loads of dates.

And Killua goes, what?

And Gohan says, oh, well, you know, of course, most of them were with Aunt Mito.

And Killio goes, oh, phew.

And Goan says, and then, of course, there were all those sailors.

Yeah, those boatloads of women who only date younger men.

They call them cougars.

Yeah, the words they call them cougars come out of the mouth of goad freaks.

I want to say that in the manga, they call them maniacs.

And that's really funny.

In my

you have the Viz translation.

I don't know if it says maniacs in your things or it says Cougars.

It says Cougars.

It says Cougars.

So the Viz translation is Cougars.

I think the literal translation is Maniacs.

The dub, the sub that I had called them Fanatics.

Okay.

Each of those is funnier to me than Cougars, although it does produce the image of Goan talking about Cougars.

There is an explicit point made that these are older women taking advantage of a boy.

The show

is not not really interested in exploring this at all it never it never this never ever comes up again

god help us i'm probably glad i'm i so i want to say that the as far as i know so there's two there's two things one this is totally literal and the way that that killua understands it is the way that you're meant to understand it as the audience uh the other way that people understand it is that for some reason tagashi who has filled this thing with adult characters who like to use the children who are the main characters of the show,

is

doing a prank where Goan is just an idiot, an innocent idiot who doesn't understand the implication of what he's saying.

This is a joke that they've done before.

I think, yeah, I think.

I think that it's worth saying that those two interpretations are out there and just be glad that this never comes up ever again.

Yeah.

Definitely.

I will say that I think that the thing that is running in the middle of this scene, which is Killiwa having a little jealous moment, is actually really sweet.

And the show is, the show makes that textual.

You know, you have Killiwa's shock of like, you've, you've, you've,

he dated people.

And then he hears and sees Bisky saying, one day you're going to have to leave him behind.

And the show makes it explicit as Killiwa thinks to himself, I thought we'd always stay together.

Yeah.

All you have to do is look at his face when he's asking about if he's ever been on a date to know 100% hundred percent of what you need to know about how killer feels about gone yeah and then yeah he's in love with him yeah

yeah there were points during this run of episodes where i was like

holy shit this is going to be a yuri on ice type situation where they make it you know what if they have not told me that you know we've talked about how uh they're boyfriends and we've talked about how there's stuff kind of going on

i didn't i was like what if killiwa actually says you know i am romantically in love with gone freaks and there were several points he gets so quite close

um

however

uh

both he doesn't and i cannot imagine how the show is not intending us to read it this way you know these are some of the most boyfriend killiwa zeldic episodes that we have seen.

I think the show knows full well that it is playing with Killua's infatuation towards Ghan.

And if I want to be generous to the show,

regardless of whether I think what's happening is working

with the date stuff, which I don't,

I think that

like the two big things that are trying to get across is like, well, I want to put Killua in like a jealous situation with the pieces that I already have in play.

And then the other side of it is I want to like juxtapose

how far Killua is willing to go

for

Goan

with Goan doing something frivolous and unnecessary for himself.

Yeah.

I think that the structural work there succeeds.

There's some really smart cross-cutting in this episode, I think.

And they even, oh my God, there's a there.

So during one of those crosscuts, we'll get there.

They even do

the they pull the song that they're playing under it is uh Those Called Friends, which is the like um sad friendship song.

Everybody's gonna have those, yeah.

Uh there was something I wanted to say.

Oh, I wanted to check in with uh at this point, and there'll be a check-in later in the episode.

I did want to check in with Killiwa Gone

boyfriend specialist, Alicia Akampura, who we're grateful to have on the call.

Wow.

Uh, how do you feel about the boyfriend levels at this point?

There's a lot going on here.

There's a lot.

There's

the emotions are raw here.

I think Avril Levine wrote complicated about this

set of episodes.

You know, sometimes people grow at different wavelengths, but I think, you know, the

Kilwa makes some strides here in terms of character development.

Sure.

And it's going going fine.

Also, I just think, like, you know, the, the,

it is,

it is played for laughs.

It's not doing very great at what it's doing.

But the, like, the, like,

you know,

a bullet pointed at a solution that that Gone freezes in that like first conversation with um Palm where she's like, you have to go on a date with me right now.

Her voice is so funny.

I actually,

if we want to have that,

you are going out.

You promised me, didn't you?

And why is he tagging along?

And why would we train anyway?

You must be joking.

We're dating.

Wow, her VA is amazing.

It's so good.

God, that's a that's better than the Japanese VA.

It is.

See, we can have a real date later

Is that Goan?

This is the first time I ever heard English Goan.

That was Goan.

Yeah, I left.

I wanted that whole thing because of

Kilua freaking out about hearing the word date.

I've never heard the word date so much.

I mean, listen, he's been in Assassin compound his whole life.

Yeah, it's so funny.

Goan says, you have a peanut date?

And Kilua says, no, too busy.

No, too busy.

I've been with you.

Yeah, literally, I've been with you the whole time.

Every single time.

No, I was an assassin, and since I quit, I've been with you the whole time.

Oh, and then cut to like another, well, you know, the thing they do all the time, the little watercolor drawing of his face where he says, and I really don't want that to change.

It's so sweet.

But yeah, to Allie's point, this is played really lightly.

The show has, in the past,

to greater or lesser success,

featured a lot of adults being violently or sexually predatory towards children.

But it, in sequences like that, has

communicated to us, this is supposed to be really unsettling.

You know, there is something

very awry here.

This is being played as an extended joke.

There's another thing where maybe now that I'm just because we're talking about it, so I'm thinking about it more, of like,

like the other thing that's happening in these episodes is Kilua is being so like neurotically hyper-aware of the danger, the potential of things that could go wrong, looking out for ants, looking out for Goan, being wary of Palm, all of this stuff.

Uh,

against Goan being like, I've got this, this is fine, you don't have to worry about me,

uh, which does not dissuade Kilua at all.

So, there's something there where it's like the reason it's not played for as much danger is because we're meant to

be more worried about Kilua's concern than we are about Goan.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

I mean like to the like the like way that Goan is able to swerve into

I'm able to get out of the situation because I'm going to pretend that I care about you.

And you know, if we're going to go on a real date, which you...

we should plan it and I need time for a surprise or whatever is like,

you know, I don't want to, I don't want to say that gone's quote-unquote experience here makes him less victimized but it it works in a narrative sense in terms of like that the audience isn't what we haven't said is that the whole thing is a plan to let palm down easy by giving her one good date that is like his idea of what will work

Yes.

Then Knuckle telephones.

Yes.

Telling Goan that that they have located and secured Kite.

This is another moment of Tagashi and the adaptation team moving so quickly and with a kind of

I've talked in the past on Friends at the Table about how one of my least favorite plot lines is the kind of um character has a misunderstanding that sits in the back third of a lot of Disney films.

You know, character is led to believe, character A is led to believe that character B getting on the boat, in actuality going to go and save them, is them abandoning them.

And now we have to spend a Com-com dilemma.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now we have to spend 20 torturous minutes as one character,

you know, is like, they've abandoned me, they've let me down.

And only for them to arrive and say, no, I was actually doing it for you.

And we've got something good.

And then they kiss and make up.

And it drives me crazy because the moment it starts, I know exactly where we're going.

And I know exactly where we're ending up.

Which is fine.

You know, a predictable story is okay.

The problem is that all the interim steps are just going to be so tedious.

Right.

You're doing it.

It's like not for comedy,

but for real plot.

But for real plot.

It's as though Tagashi and the adaptation team have decided to jettison even the vaguest hint of that.

They're like, well,

you don't want to see that?

That's going to be tiresome and tedious.

All right.

Okay.

Here we go.

Why would Kite

not reveal this?

Yeah.

Exactly.

And we're going to bring Kite in, and they reveal, oh, Kite, we think he's being controlled by the enemy, which is lovely because it saves us a whole bunch of tedious conversation of Goan realizing, you know, oh, no, he seems controlled, and actually lets us into a bunch of possibly interesting stuff, which is Goan's face lights up.

He's like, this is great.

We've got Kite.

It's going to be difficult, but we're going to try and bring him around and we get to, you know, we get to fix Kite.

And that is so much more of an interesting place to put your characters than, you know, know string them and the audience along.

Now, is Yoshihiro Tagashi saving his stringing along power for other much weirder stuff?

Yes, but I will watch him tell me about art theory for three episodes.

You know, I'll take that.

Yeah, Tagashi is a guy I think who really relishes the serialized format and declines at every turn to like use like um a trope to move things forward like that because it's like why would we why would would I do that when I can just do something weird instead?

Yeah, it's like you ask him, what tropes do you know, Tagashi?

And Tagashi's like, I do, I do know, I do know tropes.

Premature birth demon king attacks North Korea.

And you're like, what?

That's not a, that's not a trope.

Tiny baby in hand of ants.

Tagashi, protected by smoking man.

I love my tropes.

The thing is, though, like, we've talked about how like this story ends up echoing, like, for example, the techno thriller or like other stuff that yeah literally yeah tagachi does have a very deft handle on tropes a lot of the time i think that's what lets him swerve away from he's weaving in and out of like shounen genre tropes all the time yeah that's also true yeah um but is like but is is

i think that has such good control over the way that the story moves that it rarely feels like

uh you know the the version of what jack is saying for for different kind of for like farce uses.

I

see, I have the same thing where whenever there's like a farce used in any other context than like a ridiculous comedy scenario, it's so frustrating to watch people

misunderstand each other in a way that would never happen in reality.

Uh,

and that kind of propellant is, I won't say absent from Hunter Hunter, but it's like so rare that we get something kind of meaningless and frivolous and by the numbers that that is a driver of the plot instead of just like a little thing that happens.

Chichu's walking around town.

Yeah, Chichu has arrived in a film.

Chichu's a happy little guy walking around town.

I wrote here, he could have been famous on TikTok, but instead he decides to eat everyone.

Oh my god, he'd be that guy who lives in Korea and does backflips and stuff.

I'm glad someone got it.

Recently linked in our Discord for some some reason and compared to a character I can't talk about.

But yeah, so close to going viral.

I would like, would you do that?

Would I be a viral aunt?

No, if you were chilling and you were out with your friends and you were going in the mall,

would you be like, wow, a cat person?

Let me take a video of them.

It depends.

Depends.

No.

If he looked like Chi2, no.

I guess, you know, I'm looking at the legs and you could buy that that was stilts.

Sure.

And you would think to yourself, wow,

look at that cool furry over there.

Cool costume.

Yeah, I'll say two things.

You know, one thing is I've been to conventions and I've seen people

taking pictures of like cosplayers and stuff.

Something I would never do, but something that a lot of people feel very comfortable doing.

And I've, I've, I've lived around cities and i've seen busloads of tourists who are very comfortable like taking pictures of anything that they find even slightly interesting including people

um like take a picture with me take a picture with me random stranger on the street

i've seen that a dozen times This screenshot of looking at this woman's phone, her nails painted as she taps the screen, and we're looking down the camera in the camera app, seeing smiling cheetu.

And the subtitle says, I've found a new feeding ground.

So good because

this is genuinely unsettling.

It feels really odd to see a chimera ant in like a city.

And it is very odd to see them surrounded by people with mobile phones and cars.

Later, sirens go off as police officers come around to the Chimera ant.

And this is the...

the joy of the techno thriller as well, right?

You know, this is the moment in the Jurassic Park sequels.

This is

the dinosaur in the city, you know, the horror and the terror of this thing that grew out in the countryside, out in, you know, rural places.

It could never happen here.

Here it is.

Something about hearing the sirens and knowing that they're responding to the chimera ants was a really good, scary moment.

The police arrive to arrest Cheeto and he eats their fingers.

He throws them in his mouth like a handful of nuts.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, it's a great shot.

I like the sequence a lot because I think it's like something that

I felt happening the first time I watched what

sorry, no, I'm just laughing at the picture again.

It's a funny picture.

It's so funny.

I was like, what the fuck did I say?

Okay.

It's good that they kind of like, we get the image of the Chimera ant being weird in a human city because I don't know about you guys.

They do get kind of normalized when you're just hanging out with the furries all the time.

That's true.

Yeah.

Where it's like the screen, the camera has just been focused on them for so long that it's like, oh yeah, it's a Chimera ant with Small Bear and whatever.

And like, when they're all together, it doesn't really, you don't really notice that Chi-2's walking around in his little panties and whatever.

Like, although even this is shot

with him as the main character, which is fun.

Like, the cops show up and we're with Chitu still.

Like, we get a little bit, you know, behind the back of the girls who are taking pictures, but like, we're hearing his internal monologue.

He's walking around having a good day.

You know, like, it's barely, we spend less than a second on the cops who all have their fingers torn off in an instant.

It's really funny.

Yeah.

Chitu is really funny, and he is kicking it this whole time.

He's having a great time.

I love how happy he is.

Yeah.

There's a news report.

An extremely cool-looking news reporter starts talking about an unidentified.

She's called Gothic Reporter.

That's her name.

Oh, okay, sure.

That makes sense.

She's wild.

Can we describe what she looks like?

I don't know that I can.

I have a picture, but she's like a cute zombie girl.

The vibe I got.

Yeah, that is a good way to put it.

Yeah.

And this is made all the more charming by the fact that we see more newscasters later, and they're just like two people in regular suits.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So she is.

She's like the announcer or the like the guy,

the conditional bounty guy from York News.

And we actually, yeah, we see this exact newscaster in that arc as well.

And I think that it was Austin was on.

It was like, is this just a kind of person that lives in Hunter Hunter?

Like, there's just people who have gray skin and pink eyes and like

dress like Wednesday Adams.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Goths exist.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Um.

They say it could be a new species of magical beast.

Killior, who is just, you know, he is,

at this point, kind of weirdly relishing protecting Goan.

Earlier on, he says, I only have to look after him for a month.

Piece of cake.

And here he's checking his phone to make sure that the ants aren't close.

You could tell he's anxious about it, but at the same time, he's sort of like, well, this is the duty of the protector.

I have to protect my boyfriend here in this moment.

You know, it's only later that it becomes really, really dicey, I think.

Well, he says, here he says, at the end of the scene, he he says, Gone can't use Nen right now, so I've got to protect him, even if it means sacrificing everything else.

There's a real like,

oh, and within these 30 days, I hope I find a reason to die so I don't have to live without Gunfreak.

There is some of that, and there's also this thing of like, I've got to give it a thousand percent because this is my last shot.

Yeah, that too.

Um,

maybe there's some sort of hope that he'll convince himself to not go.

God, you know what this also is?

This is the like summer fling romance plotline as well, right?

Of like

we have this connection, but at the end of these 30 days, you have to go back to your accounting job in Cleveland, and I'm going to go back to my art appraisal job in New York, and we won't meet again until the third act.

Kill your account and go an art appraisal.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, yeah.

Killer's got to work at the family firm.

Yeah, and I think it is.

It's easy.

It writes itself.

I think this is the way in which this date with Palm, have to protect Goan,

jealous,

sort of like fucked up inversion of a romantic comedy is kind of, I can see it working in this way, right?

That feeling of like, I have to protect Goan in this last time that we have together, but he's devoting his energies to another person.

This is Kiloa's 10th time being disgusted by

heterosexuality.

Yes.

A girl shows up to him.

And Kilo is immediately off balance and concerned and upset and jealous.

There's something wrong.

I just kind of feel weird and I just have to keep proving myself to Goan during this difficult time.

I'm upset in a straight way.

He lies.

He says he's going to the gym.

He's not telling Goan, hey, by the way, since you're vulnerable.

to everything, I'm going to be protecting you.

This is all Kilua has invented this job in his head and is literally hiding it from Gun.

Which is, again, like all the trappings of a rom-com, right?

And not the first time that he's done that either.

He does it in Heaven's Arena, at least then, if not more.

He does it in Heaven's Arena when he

scares the shit out of the

behaving guys.

And he like...

Yeah.

Yeah, he scares them out of town and then they forfeit.

And he was just like, yeah, I don't know what happened.

They just left.

Yeah.

There's some really good scary

in

that arc.

Yeah.

Palm shows up, and

this is the point at which it sort of starts going a little off the rails for me.

She is like a normal person.

She's like all dressed up nicely and made up and she looks beautiful.

She is

Palm has become trad.

And

she

greets Goan warmly and is like, I'm so excited for our date.

There's something really odd going on in terms of like,

you know,

women, huh?

They're just like, they're like cruel and unpleasant until you give them what they want and then they're like nice and kind and pretty to look at.

That kind of runs through this stuff with Palm.

As the date begins to go wrong, Palm becomes more and more and more monstrous.

I think that this thing really would just work for me so much better if Palm had been Palm with her knife,

you know, like lumbering through the date, lumbering and terrified, and also still legitimately on a date.

Yeah,

yeah, is it maybe is it meant to be, this doesn't make it better because it's, it's like, not only are women crazy, but they're also two-faced.

Of, like, is it meant to be scarier that she can drop the act and be regular?

I don't know.

I, like, don't, I don't know why

I read it as just like she's like crazy and out of control and is like hysterical.

yeah yeah they kind of just play like her obsessiveness over nove kind of plays into that too i think where it's yeah like the obsession gone well when no comes back we see no she gets like stupider like like she gets like younger and like more immature and more when no comes and that's why to me it it's hard to take anything else than a bad reading on it um i i think it's still a bad reading to be like oh she could be like this all the because nove shows up and he's like why are you dressed like that like she's never done this for no

where you're like he's like you're dressed

conversation with no it was was really weird i actually quite liked i quite liked that it's a very uncomfortable conversation we'll get to we'll get to palm's power in a in a bit later yeah this does lead to one of the funniest hunter-hunter jokes i've seen yet the heiros let's point out the heiress is so funny yeah

Killiwa is in a very bad disguise.

Palm and Goan start their date at an aquarium.

They go to SeaWorld.

They're recording an episode of 15 Minutes.

No.

We're in the background recording an episode of 15 Minutes, and there's arrows pointing to us.

And Kilo was reading JoJo's.

Oh,

is that what he's actually reading?

I mean, that's what that pose is kind of for.

Yeah, look at that.

Yeah.

There is kind of a Joe.

Like, there's an half a...

I don't think it's a JoJo reference, really, but the thing that the Ant King says about

the cows and pigs line is very reminiscent to a line Dio says in JoJo part one.

So I wonder if that is an actual

thing.

Well, and Palm is very the kidnapper from part four.

Oh, God, what's his name?

Yes.

No, the crazy hair girl.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm blanking on her name right now.

Who's also like

Yukako?

Yukako, yeah, who's also uncomfortably obsessed with one of the main characters.

Yes, she is basically Palm in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

Well, she was first, right?

Or Palm was first.

I don't remember.

I'm pretty sure she was first.

I'm pretty sure

Diamond is Unbreakable was published in the 90s, yeah.

Yeah, and this was like, what, 2001 or something?

Something like that.

I'll have to double check, but yeah, that was early to mid-90s was Diamond Does Unbreakable.

Yeah.

But as Goan is tailing, sorry, as Killier is tailing them, he is pointed out in all the wide shots with a huge arrow above his head.

It's so good.

Did they do this joke in the manga?

Allie, these are the arrows.

Did you get these arrows?

I didn't.

It's so funny.

It's so good.

It's so funny.

Because they're in this aquarium, and so the color palette is all, you know, pale blues and greys and whites, and the people are silhouetted against the tank.

And you can see Goan and Palm in the left.

And then the arrow that they have chosen to point at Killiwa with is like bright red and yellow.

It's a really good visual gag.

Then they go out into the woods.

Presumably, Elgona's been preparing a sort of secret in the woods.

They see this thing.

What the fuck is this thing?

Yeah,

they see that fucking thing.

Correction, I do get the arrows, but they're only on one page and they're very small because it's a bunch of panels.

I should say we've talked a lot about the

like

the visuals, specific visuals, and I haven't mentioned it in a while.

If you're reading along, if you're not watching along, or if you are, you can go into the description of the episode that you're listening to, and there's a link to a free Patreon post where you can look at all the screenshots that I took.

Sometimes there's 80 of them, and sometimes there's more, and a few times you spend less.

They also see a so yes, they see what you listener will have heard us on this podcast describe as that weird thing.

It's so weird, it is weird.

snail pig fungus,

and they're looking at it like Palm is peering at it like ooh weird and Goan is looking at it like yep, I love this I love this

see a six-legged bear creature like a tiny little sort of bear cat dog with six legs.

Oh

that like walks out of the bushes

I forgot the thing that goes meh

Yes,

Goan shows Palm to a beautiful tree in a clearing and they sit down.

Little vernal pool or something.

Yeah, continuing the like half-hearted list of things about this that sort of work for me, I really do love that this is explicitly a sort of fake, weird normality.

Killiwa is out here trying to protect Goan on a date.

You know, like, I have to protect Goan, let him, you know.

live a good life, but even what Goan is doing in this moment is kind of like bizarre and false and like um awry you know this isn't the keep him safe in a normal life and i think this fits really well with the like killua has accidentally invented a problem for himself where like i i desperately have to protect these people he's the thing he's also trying to protect is also like a fucked up little simulacra of a date rather than a real date i i have some more music to talk about there's a new song here called something would happen i really liked this this is the date music this is the date music there's i want i'm gonna this this is gonna take a minute and it's then it's gonna be weird that I spent this long on it because it never appears again.

This is the only time this song plays.

It was written, it was seemingly written just for the date.

Um, because it starts off like kind of happy, and then it ends kind of creepy, and then there's a middle bit, also.

Uh, and uh, it's also a recontextualization of to give a marionette life, the like kite, like bad kite song/slash pito song, slash general ants, bad feeling music.

So here, here's the beginning of that.

Recognize that as the normal date music, little harpsichord in the background.

Love that.

Is this the song you're thinking of, Jeff?

Chamber music.

Yes, yeah, I was gonna say, this does have this sort of like

walking bass or like um

as a name for this sort of bass part.

Uh, and then there's this middle part, which I don't, I genuinely don't know if we hear, but I thought it was nice.

Also, even more chamber musick-y.

Yes, the type of bass that I'm referring to is called a ground bass.

A ground bass.

Yeah.

Because

the bass follows a melody and everything else.

sits on top of it.

You can hear these chords just walking themselves down the piano very gently.

So

those are the parts that play whenever we're with Gone

and Palm.

And then it switches to this part when it's Kilua watching them.

And that's the to give a Marionette Life part.

That's the.

It's a really lovely cue.

I really like that.

And that's part of why I gave some extra time at the beginning to talk about Voyages because there is a lot of using other bits of songs that, like, being very efficient with soundtracks that change, songs that change and using all the little bits of them in a nice way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Kiloa feels an ant nearby.

Wow, this wasn't all for nothing.

And he says to himself, I'll handle it myself.

And he goes rushing off.

Yeah, he's trying to draw the ant away from where he is, going downwind because they won't be able to sense Goan because Goan is in Zetsu.

So he's like, if I can draw the ant away with my aura, it can feel me going this way.

It'll follow me, and Goan will be safe.

Yeah.

Who is this?

An ant we've never seen before or an ant we've seen before?

Well, there's a lot of torturous buildup.

Some like shadow work where he's like

all in the shadows.

Do you sort of see his arms, his feathery arms?

Ramot arrives with a banger opener line: you're about to get a taste of hell you'll never forget.

Uh, and Killiwa is having a bit of a crisis at this point because he knows that he has led the ant away from Goan, but he's actually not terribly confident about his chances at defeating Ramot.

Ramot says, you know, where's the other one?

Uh, which is a really good underlining of the like themes in this little run of episodes.

Uh, but he says, Oh, in order to find him, it's fine.

I'll just walk around making a lot of noise and swinging your severed head.

Yeah, it won't be long before he comes and finds me.

That's how humans are.

Am I right?

He's right

here and now, no matter what, or it's all over.

I've got to protect God no matter what it takes.

This is a nice little, like, you know, sticking your tongue in the canker sore of like

Killua's plan was what worked:

I can go down wind, and whether I win or lose, Goan will be safe.

This and the ant can kill me, and but it won't find Goan.

An ant that knows about Goan and is specifically mad at Goan shows up because Goan punched him and almost killed him.

And all of a sudden, that plan's out the window.

It doesn't matter that Goan's downwind, Ramot's gonna try and find him

at which point, Killiua's aura burns as he prepares to start to to test Killua's big problem,

should I run away from a fight?

But the episode ends at that point.

Yeah.

On to 94, friends and journey.

Friend and journey.

One friend, one journey.

Killua starts standing up to Ramat, but gets the familiar image of Illumi back in his head from the fight with Shoot

that's telling him to run, to run away.

This is the first instance of Family of assassins since like the middle of York New City.

Yeah, this is the Zelda theme comes screaming back into the soundtrack.

And a lot of this ends up being Killua sort of frozen struggling against this sort of mental icon of his brother,

which Ramot mistakes for an appropriate fear response of Ramot himself.

It has really nothing to do with him.

But he loves it.

He loves that Killua is

and spends a lot of time kind of pummeling him.

Yeah, it's a rare Killer gets the shit kicked out of him because we don't often see Killer get the shit kicked out of him because he runs from fights he can't win.

Right.

And he has just enough willpower, seemingly, to not run away, but also not fight back.

It's the same thing that happened in his fight with Shoot.

Whose power we get a name for later, and it's such a good name.

It is a really good name.

But this is where we get a lot of cutting back and forth between this and the date,

which we've talked about before.

Goan is like grinning like an idiot at this sort of nice tree.

And Palm's like,

I'm confused about this tree.

Is it special?

Why are we here?

And Goan's like, just wait a little longer.

And then does it, do we cut back?

Or I guess, no, we cut.

Away and then back to this.

And it's like nighttime now.

And still nothing's happening.

Goan's still happy about the tree.

Palm is still confused about the tree, uh, and then it starts glowing with thousands of fireflies, which Goan describes as sea fireflies, they like to live near brackish water, and it's breeding season.

Uh, for whatever else, this episode doesn't have what it does have is like Goan kind of reaching back to his whale island self to like do a bunch of nature stuff.

Like, he has prepared this weird surprise, he knows about these bugs, he knows where they live, what season it is, what their habitat is.

He's like come up with this whole nature-based thing.

And I do like seeing that side of Goan for whatever it's worth.

Yeah, I think that's why I think I a little bit disagree with Jack here in terms of the date seeming strange

because it does seem like this is the date that Goan would choose

legitimately.

Like

he's doing what he does and approaching the situation with like

legitimacy and like respect and like, here's the way that I know how to get out of it.

That's why I think aquarium and looking at bugs is really

there's a real sincerity to it, right?

With like Gone has with a lot of stuff that he does, but like in particular, like the, when it comes to the nature stuff, it really shines through.

It's just a real shame that he's 12 and she's 22 and it casts a paw over

not saying, not saying I can down it.

Just saying.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It just doesn't seem it doesn't seem out of character for Goan.

And that's why I think like

it is able to be played for laughs.

I mean, I'm like, I was impressed by this moment.

I think that it's really sweet that he's like, here, hold this twig.

It's really easily done.

Yeah.

No, it's like, Goan is good at dating, unfortunately.

It is a lesson we learn.

Well, this is the Goan Freaks.

Goan can plan a really good date for you.

Yeah, this is the Goan Freaks maneuver, right?

Which is approach everything with perfect, pristine sincerity.

You know, it's not just that Goan is guileless.

He doesn't like to lie.

That's true.

Remember there was a bit where

two things Goan Freaks doesn't like, maths and lying.

The idea that people were playing Greed Island wrong really, you know, got on his nerves.

He's very much someone who was like, well, you know if you're going to do it do it um

and I think that's so much of these episodes are like

who is Goan as a person and what does Killua see in him and so to sit um Goan's like really kind-hearted genuine and successful attempts to plan a date against both The date he's planning is with A, an adult woman and B, a literal monster.

And Killua is out here

intercutting with Killiwa rolling into the fetal position and getting stamped on 23 times by Ramon.

For his benefit totally.

For Ramont's benefit.

For Gon's benefit.

Killiua's doing it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think the, like,

the cut that I really stood out for me the most, and apologies, I hope I'm not jumping out too much here.

There's a, when Gon kind of starts letting her down, doing the, like, I can't give you

I can't give you what you want Which is more time with me and it cuts right back to Killua getting the absolute shit beaten out of him.

Right.

I was like hey hey hey hey I know you're using oh my god.

They're using a smash cut to provoke an emotional effect in the audience.

I know how that works.

Yeah.

I really liked it though.

Like it really just puts everything on display and I think it's just like a very succinct

Yeah, so the so we that is jumping ahead a little bit, but it's fine because it's just they we just cut back to we missed one cut back to Kilua dealing with the getting beat up and the Ilumi's face going run-run.

It's really not anything.

It's just texture, I guess, to like break up the date.

But like Allie said, when it cuts back, it's the palm.

He calls it the most beautiful, sorry, not the palm, the branch.

Calls it the most beautiful flower in the world, and it's just a scraggly little branch.

It looks like, it's like, it looks like a mini version of the tree that they've been looking at.

And when the fireflies

tree, Charlie Brown Christmas, even sadder than a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

Wow.

He says

the fireflies are attracted to it, and it becomes like this.

It looks like a glowing flower thing.

The sap is similar to the pheromones the fireflies emit, and that's why they all flock to it.

Palm is moved to tears by this.

And this is the moment that Goan chooses to be like, we have to break up.

Which I think, I think

is, is like

not the wrong.

Like,

I can see a version where this all works out really well for Goan.

And I think that's why the thing that happens next is a punchline where Palm Space drops and is going back to former crazy mode,

which I think the whole thing of her being normal for this date hinges on this moment where it feels like this is going to work.

And wow, Goan really did it.

He kind kind of talked her down from murder mode.

No, it doesn't work.

She's back to it.

And that's it.

Yeah, it is all like, if everything is in service of the pungeline, it does kind of like lead to some very unfortunate things

being said in that pursuit.

Yeah.

This is where

Those Called Friends plays.

Those Called Friends plays actually a lot in these episodes.

I'm not going to play it now because I have another clip to play.

And

there's two times in these episodes where Those Called Friends leads into the kind of sacrament, sacrament, sacrament instrumentation of Reason, the title track.

That the first time it played, I was like, ugh, this is too sticky for me.

But I think in these, it works.

But

Killu is like crying now from being immobilized by Illumi.

Do we want to talk about this here?

I actually wanted to ask, like, how is the Illumi stuff rendered in the manga?

Because we just get like full page flashes of it.

Yeah, I was curious, because I watched the episodes too, and I like didn't recognize the

like sort of bell sound effect that they play and like the Illumi's voice playing in the background.

Because there's like sort of just a single page dedicated to this, I really like how it's done.

Cool.

But I

so

it's

like a page cut into three sections, and the top of it is

Kiloa just in like pencil work, all white.

Leading him away doesn't mean a thing if I don't get rid of him for good.

And then the his like inner monologue is interrupted by like the the frame being filled with this sort of black

texturing in the sort of a similar way that they covered the violence before.

Yeah.

And Illumi's single eye is in the background.

And then

the third of that is

the single eye is replaced with Kilo's eye getting larger in shock and like a

heartbeat on a papilla to be like, oh no.

Oh, it's a heartbeat.

This work is so good here.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really cool.

There's some great panels and wolves.

Uh-huh.

It's, yeah.

I.

This Tagashi guy is pretty good at this.

You know?

He knows how to draw.

By the way, this is, I think, the first episode that we've recorded since more chapters of Hunter Hunter have been coming.

Exciting.

If anybody listening to this tries to spoil me on that, I will shoot you with a gun.

I have seen two pages actually from it.

And

I would love to tell you about how cool it looked, but I can't.

I don't care.

I don't want to know.

I'm not going to.

But if I look at a single page, I'll say there's some similar, like in the vibes department, there's some similar vibes to this page here.

That's very exciting to hear.

Kellywar is really struggling with this, and Ilumi's voice is, you know, forcing him or trying to run.

And it's clear that he is fighting a physical compulsion at this point as we kind of get this really sharp um sudden flash of images first of illumi's eyes and then of the times that gone and kilua have spent together as as uh kilua tries to to stand up and succeeds would we like to hear some of this please

yes

A lot of show clips, but there's been a lot of clips.

There's been a lot of high emotion here.

This is one of my favorite moments in the entire show.

Do you want to say the thing that he does in this before or after?

Is it in the clip?

It's in the clip, but they don't

probably talk about it.

Yeah.

He reaches up to his forehead, and it's not clear exactly what he's done at first, but it's as though he has pulled a piece of himself away.

There's like a spurt of blood out of his head.

And when we get closer, we see

blood staining his white hair.

And at first I thought, oh, has he pulled out one of his own eyes?

Which would have been a very Tagashi gore move.

Tagashi loves head mutilation.

Yeah.

Um, we literally had a last batch episode, we had eye stuff with Kiloa.

It would be foreshadowed, even.

And, but instead, what he has done is he pulls out of his forehead a it almost looks like a hairpin, yeah, like a little golden piece of metal, which, not to put too fine a point on it, is the curse or restrictor that Illumi has been working on him.

Yes, and he literally means a piece of curse.

Yeah, his demeanor changes instantly.

It is wild.

He laughs and he's like, I'm amazed you, like he got away with that for that long.

It's not just like

there's this real vibe of like, my brother got one over on me, but I've beaten him.

The weight comes off his shoulders.

You know who it feels like?

It feels like Kilo from the first arc, first two arcs.

It feels like pre-Zoldic arc, maybe a little heavens are.

Like, who knows how long this has been there?

Has it been there since before the show?

That's the beauty of it.

Has it been there

since the end of the

Hunter exam?

Has it been there since he was kidnapped by his family?

Who knows?

I have no clue.

There's.

And as if.

Oh, sorry.

Oh, no, go ahead.

As if to make it as clear as possible, he says, he explicitly says, I feel like I've been freed.

Yeah.

You know?

It's like such a good visual metaphor for what it's like to

feel like you've overcome something

like this.

Like, it's it's not the most

hey, guess what?

Your some your abusive family member planted something deep in your brain that took was very painful and took a lot of work to rip out.

I wonder what that could be, like, a metaphor for.

But it is still, like, really well done.

And, like, I don't know.

It's

it

doesn't feel out of nowhere either with what Killow has been doing.

I feel like if in a weaker show, this just is, like,

done out of nowhere and it's Kilo's problems are solved.

We don't get him trying to fight it in the episodes prior.

We don't get the sort of like

slow.

There's like been a whole thing since the Hunter exam of like this being an increasing problem.

It's been an increasing problem and increasingly present in Kiloa's behavior, right?

And then this is sort of what I was talking about earlier with like Tagashi's dissemination of information where like we get a long drip of this stuff before it becomes immediately present in the last set of episodes and like literally present in these episodes.

And I really like it because it's one of those things that you can pick up on earlier if you're really paying close attention, but also you can get clued into it the second Kiloa gets clued into it when like people start talking to him about it or like someone maybe in some internal dialogue there's something before that.

But like we know when the first time they introduced this idea was

and it was when he killed the guy during the hunter exam when Karapika invents the mind control theory.

Is that true?

Yeah.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I was talking about Killua's

fearfulness, not necessarily the specifics of the needle being planted.

Oh, well, I mean, but his fearfulness is the root of his fearfulness is the needle.

So I was just like.

Oh, for sure, for sure.

I just meant like character, like, from a personality standpoint, from a character development standpoint, there is a really there is an easy way to have the character just does the

removes the MacGuffin or whatever that hasn't been having an effect and it feels cheap and unearned and this does not feel cheap and unearned.

This feels like it was the culmination of a long character arc.

Even though we just had a character say it'll it's really hard to overcome something like this.

It'll take you a long time to work through your trauma.

I do want to say it is probably hard to stick your finger into your brain and when you can shock them.

It's probably hard.

There's a

the change, it changes from something mental to something literal, where it's like, oh, it actually won't take like a long time to get over this because I can pull it out of my brain.

That is like, I think, a cheapening on a literal level.

Like, it is, but, but it has been, it's so successful in how they play it in the episode and so long of a lead-up to the moment that I think it doesn't actually negatively impact anything.

And it gives you, it gives them an opportunity to do something really cool and meaningful and powerful in the moment, which you couldn't do if the arc is about Kilo slowly not becoming like this anymore.

I guess I don't want to get too into it, but I do feel like that these impulses do come back a little bit later, but in less of a completely paralyzing way.

Yeah.

I don't think that this is like because it's really good.

Yeah, go ahead.

Run.

Oh, I should say, this is

the sad part of those called friends then cutting into

reason, which I mentioned earlier.

This happens twice, but it happens here as well.

Run.

I don't ever

want to lose him.

Run.

Gonus

run

He's my

run, run, run

He's my best

run

I can't do this without Kilua

My best friend

He's gone

me, Lumi.

Why the hell didn't didn't i catch this before

i think

as this is playing we're seeing like a montage designed to make you tear up and it works and it works a second montage there's a there's a there is a negative

like like dark side montage that happens later also um that is such it's so good that we get two montages that are saying kind of like the opposite thing and like pulling up like mirror emotions in Gonan Kilua.

Uh, we'll talk about that more in the next episode.

Uh,

this

stuff is

so the reason I think this works so well for me is that

this level of emotion, this like melodramatic or even like high melodramatic

mode is something that Shonen plays in

like Shonen buys this stuff from the supermarket, like a supermarket sweep.

It is

the speed to which you get to that level of melodrama in like Naruto or whatever is

so it's so fast and they do it so often.

If you're not kind of used to it or like immune to like an over-emotional a thing, then it I can see how it would be grading.

I really like Naruto, but um

Hunter Hunter is so reserved with hitting these levels of intensity that when they finally get there, it feels...

I remember watching it and feeling like, oh my God, they haven't done that before.

I can't believe it.

It felt like kind of a monumental release of the show

to go that

high with the drama.

Yeah.

This is when I thought he was going to say, you know,

I love him, but not like in a bros way.

Right.

And he could have said it.

Yeah.

And he could have said that verbatim.

And I'm not the s I I don't

I am not someone who

really relishes and gets a lot of weight from like these relationships being made canon um in stories.

That that that is not a consideration that particularly animates me.

So I feel I feel fine about it as it is but I was like, whoa, holy shit.

Is this, are we gonna, is this gonna be the show from now on?

Because there's no way you can cut it where this is a show about Killiwa Zaldic's love for gone freaks.

But that's what it is at this point.

Yeah.

And the show knows it, and the viewer knows it.

That's where we are, and it's great.

So now that the needle's gone, it's time for a fair fight with Ramote.

I have, before we move on from this I do have more pages that I want to share because there's like an economy of drawing the way that you get through a montage on the page,

which is a full page spread of just

like

clips of other pages.

That's like,

yeah.

Oh my God, it's so good.

It's really good.

It's the same clips, too.

They show like the same things.

Wow.

Good for the fucking anime.

Like going in and getting all of these clips and finding the episodes from them.

That's great.

Yeah.

I love Killoa's face on that third page, too.

Beat its pen inside my brain all along.

Yeah.

He looks so relieved.

Yeah, like

we get

moments of Killua living in another world.

You know, it used to happen all the time.

It's so much rarer now, but Kilua would be like, he fucking put this shit in my brain.

That's crazy.

You know what?

That's kind of how I talk about my dad sometimes.

Fairly.

Like.

The bizarre little needle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's also that tweet that's like,

I wish I could remember the exact tweet, but it's like, I wish I could go to the doctor and the doctor would say, there is one problem with you and you have to take one of these pills a day and it will fix you.

And it fixes all your problems.

That's Kiliwa Zoldic pulling the thing out of his head and going, shorted.

It's also going screaming and going, I'm better now, except it's true.

I also love, we have this thing with remote.

This is his second time of like having a bizarre kind of like literalized mental image of something that's happening to him because remote was the person who first perceives Pito and has the hand on his head that becomes a massive hand.

And then now we get him paralyzed by this gigantic snake that has become Kilua.

Yeah, I think I have a theory for why this is.

It's because he's a rabbit, and rabbits have that thing of like they're prey animals who freeze when they're faced with another.

And, you know, they've told us over and over again that chimera ants do retain some of the characteristics of their

sources.

And I love that Ramot is undeniably a violent, dangerous predator animal.

But still, in these moments where the table turns, the thing he sees is like a massive hand bearing down on him or a huge snake coiled to strike because he was a little rabbit.

Little rabbit.

He's got a cottontail and everything.

Snake Killiua is one of my favorite new types of Killiwa.

This is like the opposite of kitty cat killier.

What's fun is combined with the like,

huh, crazy.

He put that thing in my head of like Killiwa lives in another world.

Yeah.

Having seen Killiua sort of like freed from these mental shackles, my first thought was like, is this a Zaldic trick?

Can they make a giant snake?

But no,

I think it's what Ramot saw.

Because we've seen Killiua do some really wild Zaldic stuff.

Oh, wait, he has serpent arms.

I think that that's probably just consistent imagery with the snake.

Then he says to Ramot,

Go, run, tell the ants that if they come anywhere near us

expect to end up dead is what he says in the manga i think he just says we're gonna

they'll they'll die and ramot says uh and then killua pulls his head off with one blow and says ah maybe not in the anime at least Ramot is alive with his head off.

This is the second time that a character's been alive with his head off.

He's looking straight forward, and then you look, he looks to the left to like see his body.

It's great.

It's great.

It is very Looney Tunes, yeah.

There's another Looney Tunes thing that happens in these episodes, too.

What if Roger Rabbit was evil and he got decapitated by a child assassin?

That's why we trapped Roger Rabbit.

I want to watch any Roger Rabbit.

Hey, Hollywood.

Let Keith Jay Carberry make a Roger Rabbit.

Let Keith Jay Carberry play Roger Rabbit.

I would also do that.

Oh, yeah.

But you could only do one because that would be so exhausting to be directing Roger Rabbit and playing Carlos.

But then I would just retire.

Yeah, the star would be really hard to deal with.

I love how this whole little thing is about Killiua's impulse to run,

his unwillingness to stay in a fight that he thinks he can't win.

You know, Bisky has said to him, basically,

you might have more of a chance than you think,

which is

borne out here, but I love that he says to Ramot, he offers Ramot the chance to run, and then he says, No more running and just takes his head off.

There's like the thing that's like, you know, don't fight an opponent that's stronger than you.

Don't like fight, go up against an unknown opponent.

Like, that the needle was so overly cautious.

Ramot didn't stand a chance against him, he got him in one hit.

It was so over the top in how

afraid to engage it made him.

And then it also like releases him from, you know, Bisky,

Moral, Ilumi, all of these people who have said, like,

there's something wrong with you that you can't engage.

You can't save your friends.

You can't make friends.

And, you know, to be able to release it all is like, no, Illumi did this to me.

I, like, this wasn't me.

It was the needle over there.

It's really moving.

Like,

have all the weight that he's felt from what Illumi has said about

that it's because of you, it's because of who you are, you know, that you can't make friends.

You're a killer, you're a Zoldic, you're not a guy that can have friends biologically.

Uh, and it's like, no, this is like a nen trick.

I've been nen tricked by my brother.

This is like if, at the end of the scene in Goodwill Hunting, Matt David just like pulled someone's head off.

That would wait.

Oh my god, if he did that to Stellan Skarsgaard, I'd like that movie way more.

I heard that movie's good, I like that movie, but oh my god, five stars.

Oh, five stars.

uh it's it's really moving and you can see in his relief his relief is so multifaceted and it's like he's feeling the warmth of ghon's light for the first time rather than it being something sort of like awe-inspiring and compelling he's actually feeling the warmth of it where he goes you know maybe this is going to work out i don't have to abandon gone

you can see him sort of thinking i might actually have the strength for this where he spent the last he spent the last two weeks of the summer fling in in lisbon saying to himself i have to go back to my accountancy business

i have to help my family embezzle

it might be on track for a talented mr ripley situation oh no oh no I haven't seen talented Mr.

Ripley talking about Matt Damon pulling people's heads off

in that movie

do you want to hear very funny I think I've got it down now but for a very long time in a similar way that I couldn't get the names of two bands straight in my head, I think it was My Chemical Romance and My Bloody Valentine.

I couldn't figure out which one of those is which.

I also got Talented Mr.

Ripley and Mr.

Holland's Opus confused.

That's really good.

Two very different movies.

One, an extremely boring movie about a classical music composer, and then one, a movie about a murderer, right?

No, he's a con man.

He's a con man.

Does he not murder?

Spoilers, kid.

I haven't seen it.

He rips a rabbit's head off, and then it makes a funny face.

And then there's something about the number nine.

Yeah, and he pulls a needle out of his head.

Killua returns to the house to find Palm back in zombie palm mode, making Goan essentially write lines.

She's having Goan write, you know, hundreds and hundreds of pieces of paper that presumably say something like, I won't abandon a nice girl on a date or something.

I won't tell Palm that I think she's pretty and then tell her that we can't be more than friends.

Palm logging on and being like, this 12-year-old love-bombed me, and everyone, being like, why is everyone mad at me?

I don't know what the problem is.

Oh, they're cancelling me, Master.

Um,

uh, Palm goes to stab Killua after he confronts her.

Killua basically says, Killua, now,

snake Killua mode, he's, he's empowered.

He says, this is bullshit.

And Palm goes to stab him with a knife, and he says, I could dodge that in my sleep.

Goan doesn't notice, really, that anything has changed, and he will continue not to notice.

Palm chases them out

in a comedy bit that doesn't work.

I called this a Scooby-Doo chase sequence.

He skipped battles.

They play the bam-bam, baddle-bum-bum-bum-bum-bam-ba music.

They really will do.

I think that they get a real kick out of the tonal whiplash with Palm.

They use her for horror.

They use her for

exposition.

They use her for normal date.

They use her for horror again.

And now they're using her for slapstick.

She is funniest to me when they use her for horror on a normal date.

She's also the funniest Palm moments for me have been when she like very politely goes up to Bisky and says, if you don't train these boys, I will kill.

That's good to me every single time.

A lot better.

At this point, she reveals her nen ability.

She produces an awful crystal bull

with like a.

It looks like something from the fucking case of the golden item.

Jack, I heard that you're watching the X-Files.

You'll recognize this from an episode, upcoming episode.

There's a character called the Fiji Mermaid that looks literally exactly like this.

Oh my god.

She then slashes her wrists and bleeds into the mouth of the mermaid crystal ball, commanding it to, quote, find that infernal brat killuer.

This is my favorite mode that Palm operates in.

It's great.

Yeah, this is, I'm really excited that we got to see Palm's then ability.

It is weird.

We now know how she found Biscuit.

Who knows what she can ask this thing?

It's got a sort of mirror, mirror on the wall type vibe, which is very much in line with Palm's sort of like bizarre, twisted femininity that they're talking about.

It's like dark magic, right?

With the like blood of it all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I don't know how else to put it.

Yeah.

It's really funny how most of the time it seems like her defining characteristic is knife.

Knives.

And she reveals those.

Sure.

She produces like 500 knives and makes a bandolier of them.

She, yeah.

So

proving that the horror palm is the funniest palm, she opens a cupboard to reveal like a thousand knives.

The way that a cartoon character will open their closet and reveal that they've got a thousand of the same outfit and that's why they wear the same thing every day.

It's a fucking scene in the Matrix where like the shelves of guns just come flying out of nowhere.

Yeah.

Why does she think she needs so many knives?

They're all the same knives.

This is not a collection.

It's a warehorse.

Some new slippers the other day.

I've had these slippers for five days.

They have improved my quality of life so much that I'm immediately thinking to myself, I should just buy another pair of those slippers.

Yeah, okay.

So she eviscerated someone and was like, you know what?

You know what?

I could have a thousand of these knives and it wouldn't be too late.

Yeah.

Just keep

them sharp.

I don't have to deal with resharpening this one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You got to get it.

It's economic slippers.

It improves your quality of life so much.

If you don't think you're a slippers person, try out slippers, see how it is.

The first thing I'm getting when I find my new apartment and move in is getting slippers for it.

I can do you some good slipper recommendations.

I'll hit you up to class.

I'll hit you up after, yeah.

So they have to close.

No shows back up.

Yeah, I love this little scene.

This scene was really uncomfortable.

A second where I was like, what the fuck does that have to do with Slippers?

It doesn't have to do with Slippery.

It doesn't at all.

It doesn't at all.

Yeah, no.

Tom's like, you're here early.

You're supposed to be here in two more days.

And Nova's like, yeah, we basically lied so that we could observe Gonan Kiloa.

This is just a nice moment of the senior hunters have their heads screwed on in a way that the pupil hunters don't.

The senior hunters are just one step ahead of the game all the time.

The dynamic is crazy with these two.

It's not good.

It's like.

this is.

I'm even if Tagashi had watched Secretary before he wrote this or something, like what the deal is here.

Um,

James Spader, is that his name?

James Spader,

James Spade, Jim Spader, Spader, and then there's James Spadest.

Jim Spader should play Mr.

Nove.

That'll be good, yeah.

I like this scene a lot.

This was like creepy and uncomfortable in a way that I think worked really well.

He immediately reprimands her for using her power.

He says, Your blood is a precious resource.

You must use it only for me.

This was a moment where I was like, oh, Nove is also playing this.

Creepy.

Yeah, maybe, maybe this explains a little bit of why Palm is so fucked up.

Yeah, I had thought that Nove was an oblivious boss and Palm was projecting a lot of love onto him.

But I wonder whether Nove himself is involved in this sort of secretary-ass relationship here with like your blood is a precious resource.

You must use it only for me.

Of course, Palm says, he called me precious.

Yeah.

It's good.

And now they, again,

they can use Palm so well that it's a shame that we lost any time with this kind of Palm.

Every scene that Nov is in, you can now see Palm in the background with a sickly black heart.

floating above her head.

It's so funny.

Or like little red hearts just like floating off of her.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they're here.

No, Nov and Moral are here, or I guess Nove and Shoot actually are here to observe Goan and Kilua to make sure that they're

up to the task of meeting Kite.

And then we cook to the next day, and Goan and Kilua are opening blind boxes of robot toys.

These are the candy, the candy blind boxes that we see Killiwa with all the time.

Killua gets another dupe.

He's got three of these little guys.

And Goan, because he is inherently lucky, the show shows us again and again, Goan is inherently lucky.

He gets a secret gold robot that is like extremely valuable, uh, that he tries to give to Kilua, and Killer goes, nope, and then he just tosses a bunch of candy in his mouth.

It's, um,

it's

he's happy to be back to normal.

Hunter exam Killiwa again, yeah.

It's Killiua who is like playful and kind of bratty and kind of like, um,

he's other Killiua would say, no, I won't take it because of some duty to Goan.

Goan deserves the good things.

Here, he sort of probably believes that, but he's being a little stinker about it.

Yeah.

He wants to get it himself is the vibe I got.

This is where we get an explicit declination to explain to Goan what had happened.

Yeah.

Like,

you know, there was a chance to come clean about what went on, and he didn't.

He didn't tell him about the needle.

He didn't tell him about Ramot, didn't tell him even following him.

Yeah.

There's something really...

I'm so curious to see how this is going to work because the last run of Killiua's character arc has been this really powerful arc as he both

realizes the extent to which he has been in literal thrall to his family and the depth of the abuse of his family and especially his brother and then his dawning sort of like

as exciting as it is paralyzing realization of his love for Goan and seeing that love as possibly a way out of this.

And now we have Killiua, who is, and he took that so seriously, and he sort of felt it so seriously in his whole body.

And now we have Akilua, who is a little stinker, who is, you know, making jokes, who is

saying, I'm really powerful, I'm really strong, you know, you better watch out, or I'll tear your head off.

I don't want, and then he will, I don't want this gold toy.

I really want to see the way the show continues to write

Killiwa's love for Goan and the love story between the two of them while also making Killiwa this kind of like bratty, powerful, funny individual, which he kind of hasn't been allowed to be for the last 40 episodes or so.

I'm exploding to not to keep myself from talking more about this.

It's interesting being

the reader here to hear about this

like moment being used as like this like potential for a bigger conversation that wasn't used.

Because when I initially was watching it, I thought that it was like a scene that was added in for runtime.

And I was like, it's really interesting that like they're ending this entire thing with like spending time with Gone and Kiloa being children

in this like, you know, 40 second pause between

the senior hunters showing up and this like bizarre older woman date.

Um, because I've, I've included, this is like the very end of chapter 219, I think, 221, um, where it's a single panel.

Like, in a comic book, this is like

three inches by an inch, and it's just like them chilling.

Look at shoot in the background.

That is great.

Yeah, I so like it's it's this like like a single establishing shot of like here are our protagonists after you've been spending like pages and pages on this other fight between um I guess we haven't spoken of it.

Yeah, they do it in the reverse order.

In this one, they haven't started that fight yet.

Right.

Yeah.

Chitu and um the

not

knuckle, knuckle,

knuckle and moral.

Not Jose K is what I was gearing up to say.

Yeah.

Open the right tab up.

Are fighting a cheetu in like a faraway field or whatever.

And then, you know, it's just like this like brief camera shot of like, this is what Killow and Goan's life is together outside of this violence and this like invasion and this terror.

I think this is.

Oh, go ahead, Dally.

Well, just that, like, you know, the

dedication of time in between like an adaption of this moment and then also just like, this is the the last page people are going to see for about a week or so so I'm going to end it with the the

person who's on the cover you know yeah um is fun I think that one of the benefits of

adaption is that they get to look at

I believe everything that was published that gets animated was already published by the time the 2011 anime starts um as far as I know which means that they get to look at like the whole project at once and make changes based on that.

This is why I think that a lot of the conversation of the changes from the

manga to, or the original Dragon Ball Z to the Funimation dub, where like makes Goku like a nicer guy who's less obsessed with like personal growth, is because like

they're making a comment on Dragon Ball Z as a product, uh, and if you take what Goku does as a whole, he does end up doing a lot of that stuff, and they just kind of like work it into the narrative earlier on and more often.

And I think that in Hunter-Hunter, what you see when you look at the whole of it is how the Kiloa Tagon relationship is like, and specifically in that direction, is like basically the main thing that happens in it,

and getting to spend a little extra time developing it in spots like this,

which I think work well.

Because,

and also, I think reminding the audience, I think maybe also like seeing, feeling what I feel when I watch the show is like how important

the original characterizations of them are from the Hunter exam and like always having this sort of like wistful longing for a simpler version of the show in a way that amplifies

the show instead of detracts from it.

Like, I can see how someone would be like, if I was always wishing for things to be like how they were in the Hunter exam, that would be bad because we're never there except for when we're there.

But I think that in Hunter-Hunter, it works in the opposite way, where it like

works with the way that the story is told that

it's sad that they don't get to be like that.

And

again, being adapting it instead of having to to fit in a manga chapter lets them stretch that out a bit.

It's extraordinary that this is a show about two guys.

And it's also

a show about the Phantom Troop, the Chimera Ants, the Hunter Organization.

You know,

it is

wild how, for a show with such a broad palette,

Togashi's focus on the character study of Gon and Kilio is so consistent.

It must take so much energy and so much skill to be balancing.

I'm the captain of the ship full of crazy people,

says Yoshihiro Tagashi.

And also, there are these two guys standing on the bridge who this whole thing is about.

Yeah.

And then we see the very beginning of this encounter between Knuckle and Moral, who are lying in wait for Chichu, who's running down

Sonic.

I really like this set.

It's like a field surrounded by corn.

It's like a tomato field surrounded by corn.

And Knuckle and Shoot, not Knuckle and Shoot, God.

Knuckle and Morel are lying in wait.

Yeah, I just'm so used to Knuckle and Shoot being a package deal.

You're a lot faster than the guys from yesterday, but not by much, I'm afraid.

This guy is such a little piece of shit.

I love this guy.

His dub is like in 100% Sonic the Hedgehog mode.

It's so good.

It's perfect.

Okay.

On to 95.

The fight with Cheeto doesn't Cheeto.

Grudge and Dread, by the way, is this episode title.

The fight with Cheeto doesn't start great.

Knuckle and Morel have real difficulty with his speed.

Yeah.

But they start getting better and better at intuiting his movement.

Yeah.

This fight starts with...

I love the literal song titles.

It really helps drive home exactly what's happening in these.

When this fight starts, the track Obvious Power Difference or Obvious Difference in Power is playing.

Oh, sure.

That's this one.

Very common one.

Yeah, I like this one.

Yeah, I like that one a lot.

This is kind of...

This made me realize that ants don't actually have a ton of experience with hunters.

They've met hunters and have been been able to defeat them through a combination of brute strength, numbers, and like surprise, sudden deployment of ant nen, or like ants' understanding of nen.

But ants have killed thousands and thousands of people and have like captured more.

And they've met people who have nen, but they have met a ton of hunters.

And so there's definitely this feeling from Chitu of like, whoa, oh, these guys mean business.

Yeah.

Yeah, because of the way, the way that Netaro,

Moral, and Nove were dealing with the ants.

They never met an ant that didn't die

until cult.

True for many of us.

Never met an ant that didn't die.

I let the ants.

Well, we've been through this.

Ant outside, wild delight, and inside.

I just mean like statistically speaking, I don't think I've met any immortal ants.

Oh, let's keep it moving.

No, no, hold on.

Let's dig into this.

Eventually,

Knuckle lands a hit on Chitu, and

I saw this coming the second before it did, which is my favorite moment to anticipate Yoshihiro Tagashi, because Chito is like, wow, I feel better than ever as we see APR float into place behind him.

And

he says, what is this?

And Knuckle says, gee, I wonder.

And it's such lovely storytelling because we spent all the time figuring out how this worked.

We had the full PowerPoint.

And now it can appear as a you're in the know punchline, right?

Where we can be like, oh, it's another

microcosm of Heaven's Arena, where they're like, we'll do it.

We'll do, we'll spend 10 minutes explaining this.

And then in five episodes, you'll know exactly what's going on.

As soon as that little fuck arrived, I was like, I was ready for him to say, it's time.

What does he say?

He says,

you have a crude interest.

It is time.

You have a crude interest.

Thank you, Dre.

At which point, Chi-Tsu cuts his losses, and he says, all I have to do is leave you in the dust.

And he runs, APR bubbling along behind him.

Yeah.

Can't outrun it if you realize it's made of nen.

And then we get a little extra info on APR.

Apparently,

you can track someone that you have APR on.

It'll stop accruing interest once it's out of range, But apparently, Knuckle will know exactly where Chichu is for as long as APR is attached to him.

How do you feel about APR, Ali?

What's it like being introduced to these kind of like big nen PowerPoints in text?

I,

um, in this particular instance, I'm confused on whether we know what

we won't even need to change it to IRS means.

Oh, IRS,

IRS is what Goan was suffering from when

Chi2 ran out, or sorry, when Goan ran out of Nen and it enforced a state of Zetsu by him not being able to pay the Nen balance on APR.

IRS is the thing that forces Zetsu onto you.

And I was confused by that line, like what exactly Knuckle means we won't even need to change it to IRS.

I think it just means we can beat this guy without

even getting all the way there.

Yeah.

But yeah, IRS is the part that makes it him not be able to use net anymore.

Okay, fair.

There's like the

time that is spent on some of these things sometimes when I'm reading it makes it hard to are you going with the numbers coming out of your ears and the smoke?

I am going with the numbers coming out of my ears.

Hey, I am

Sam.

Can you remind?

Oh, God.

I was just going to say, I remember the Austin Walker tweet about this more than I ever will that was actually on the page.

Can you remind me what Zetsu is again?

I mean, I know what it does in practice, but what's happening there with Nen?

Zetsu is one of the four main principles of Nen.

It is the one that Goan teaches himself when he's in the hunter exam before he even knows what Nen is, and it's when you suppress your Nen in order to hide your aura.

Right.

And so shoot Nen suppression.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Shoot can force you into an involuntary state of that.

No, meaning that you can't use your net shoot.

Oh, my God.

I mean, it is kind of what Karapika did to Krolo, too.

It is what Karapika did.

Yes, that also does enforce Zetsu.

That's actually...

I say Enforce Zetsu because I think it's good to

use the Nen terms, even though they don't ever say Enforce Zetsu.

I got that language from Karapika.

Karapika says that in York New.

Although, Krolo's

trick is something that Krolo could support.

he could act.

It would just kill him immediately.

Whereas you get the impression that with the IRS Evil Cat, it's just impossible.

It's impossible.

So there's two things.

That is 100% true, Jack.

The other thing is that when he's got his chains around you, Karabi's got his chains around you, that also enforces Zetsu in a way that

he couldn't act.

Like,

with the...

With what Krollo has now,

it's a self-imposed Zetsu where I have to maintain Zetsu or I will die with the chains when they're around you, like he did to

Uvo.

Uvo couldn't break out of the chains because the chains enforce Zetsu onto you the same way that Knuckles IRS imposes Zetsu onto you.

None of this is real, but it is fun to think about it.

It's all real.

It's right there on the page.

It's real to me, damn it.

It's real to me.

To some of the question of like, how does it feel encountering this?

I, you know, I I have a little JoJo's background, so the like

my special secret power is completely individualized, and just it could be anything that serves the story in this moment is not like a shock.

And then, you know,

the

expansion of what

Nen power is and can be, and how it's utilized in the

Greed Island arc

is already such a like, oh, okay, well, so anything's going to happen now because the like the boundaries of what's actually capable

of this thing in terms of like the charts that were explained to me are so like

separate from the way that they're actually going to be utilized.

Like, you know, I appreciate that like, you know, it means something

when Kiloa says, like, he's a manipulator.

How did he take my eye?

But at the same time, like, oh,

a person phantom grabbed a piece of your body and you can't use it now.

Like, yeah, okay, if you fucking say so.

It's just one of those.

Like, okay, I'm reading, I'm reading Hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

The thing I love about Knuckle in particular is like, it's a comedy bit.

It's like confusing on purpose to be funny, which I think is a very

interesting way to approach introducing a main character's very important power that gets used several times.

This is a plot-critical power that

is convoluted as a joke.

That's why, like, the, the, the quickness with which kite is removed from the story is really interesting to me in terms of like a team player, right?

Like, we're, where Kite, you know, cuts down the forest and like has this like side, the moon scythe,

and like this has this like antagonist relationship with his, his nen power, which I don't know that we've seen that in another character.

Um, and then just like

as all of that intrigue is built and immediately brought down by like a funny cat girl, um, is

a way to structure a story.

I would love to know more about that, but I will not.

I have yet to learn.

Crazy Slots and Kite hating each other is one of the funniest things in the show.

Yeah, it's so good.

It's so good.

Every single time he summons an objectively great weapon and says, bad roll.

And Crazy Slots says, you piece of shit, I only ever roll good rolls.

Kite motherfucker.

And then he poofs and disappears.

It was funny every time it happened.

And I think wisely knowing that they were about to kill Kite, they played that joke every time and it didn't stop being funny.

No, it was funny every time.

Oh, Rich Kites.

They decide to skip over the

trial period where they're going to observe Gonan Kilua.

They just decide that they're fine.

Two days later, I guess, or whatever, but they take Gonakilua down to wherever they're holding Kite and introduce Shoot's ability, Hotel Raphalasia.

Dark Inn.

Hotel Raphalasia.

Dark Inn.

Great name.

Raphalasia is a predatory plant.

It eats you.

It eats a bug.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And

we explain, we get Killua.

Understanding finally what was happening to him when Shoot does enough damage to you, a part or all of you goes into his Hotel Raphaelasia lantern

until he lets you back out.

Yeah, and kite's in there, whole thing.

And when you're in there, you're tiny.

They open it up after like some initial moments of like, watch out.

They warn Goan specifically, he is no longer the person you knew.

And then the little door slides open and a tiny Frankenstein kite emerges.

Scuttles.

He's so little.

He's very little.

He's so little.

And then he, you know, grows to his original size, you know, tall, lanky kite, now posed.

Yeah, sort of zombie kite has this really distinctive pose where he's like got one arm out crooked and he's sort of like his legs are kind of skewed really really odd

and

shoot

now I'm doing it backwards.

Knuckle says

he has suppressed kites Nen.

He can't use Nen, but he's still as strong as ever.

I can't tell whether this green pulsing energy that is kind of crackling over Kite, that is a side effect of Hotel Raphleisia, right?

That's not Kite's.

Yeah, presumably that's...

Because that's the color of his Nen when he fought Kilua, and then it does disappear when Kite gets bigger.

Right, he has red Nen.

Red.

A green is a sort of red.

A green is a kind of red.

It's kind of like an opposite red.

Yeah.

We learned that Kite mechanically attacks anything that gets close to him.

They skeptically using him to train the ants.

Which is sort of right.

The impression that I got is that Pito, proud of their creation, was just setting Kite on ants.

Maybe.

Potato, potato.

Yeah,

I hadn't considered that, but Kite, or Pito is like,

had never proved that they were very concerned about any of the other ants or what they were doing.

Yeah, but it does have levels, so that's kind of weird.

Yeah.

The ghan is sort of like a little approaches.

Goan approaches Kite, telling him that, you know, he's safe now.

It's all good.

But Kite, you know, lashes out.

with a punch.

And Goan, with that completely misguided Goan romanticism, thinks to himself, this is the second punch he's ever given me.

I'll treasure this punch like the first.

You haven't punched me since the day we met.

This is the second instance of those called Friends being intercut with the instrumental version of reason.

The sad friends song.

Sure.

Yeah,

because it's sad friends.

Sad friends.

At which point, Goan throws himself into another one of these sort of like Goan takes a load of punishment sequences as

he's self-flatulating the black

from Kite.

It's clear that a lot of this is built up in the guilt of the thing.

But all the people observing, people are like, should we step in?

And Killer is like, no.

They're concerned, but also doing nothing.

He's like memorizing the pattern of the punches to determine like, oh, he really is like a robot.

Something's really wrong.

And then he does, it's really well animated.

A dodge down the first time he lets one not hit him, and then he goes in for a hug, and he starts hugging Kite.

And it's so sad because it looks like Kite is like responding to the hug or is stopping attacking.

And we get like 10 seconds of this hug before I can't remember who, but someone goes, like, be careful, he's going into level two, and it's more dangerous.

Yeah,

yeah we see the puppeteer appear and like get beefed up as he as he sort of steps back to start fighting

which also explains the the uh oh god what's the word on the posture you mentioned earlier right because it's his his legs and his arms are all at crooked angles because they're being marionettes

yeah yeah it's very sad

And at this point, Goan leaves, which is wild.

We see Goan back down from an ideological fight.

Well, in part because he knows that, or he believes, that he's going to be able to come back and, you know, do better.

But we see Goan Freak turn and walk away, which is interesting.

Allie, when we were talking about what episode that was coming up you were interested in, and I gave you a little bit of what was going to be in these.

We've got this three-parter, which we've talked about a lot.

We have the next set of episodes, which is going to be a little two, a little vacation two.

And then

I can't remember what's after that, but a lot of vacation, it'll be.

Oh, yes.

Why have you programmed two episodes?

I'm afraid.

What do you mean?

Yeah, what?

Huh?

Why have you done this?

Why have I done two?

Yes.

Just because that's how they go.

These two just go together.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You don't need to be scared about these two.

This is, I'm not being, uh, I'm not being mean by saying it's a little vacation two.

It's a genuine little two.

They go together perfectly, and then no other episodes can go with them

in a good way.

I promise.

Okay.

It's like that song from Greece, Jack.

It's wop, baba, doo, bop, baba, bibbidi, bang-da-boom.

That's how well they go together.

Yeah.

That's how good they go together.

Yeah.

And that calmed me, Dre.

Thank you.

Dre, do you know which two they are?

No, I was going to go look.

Okay, Sylvie, do you know?

You seemed to react like you knew.

Yeah, because I saw the next time on at the end of the episode.

Oh, it's those ones.

Oh, no, I do know because I saw like five seconds of this.

Yeah, okay.

And no one's concerned?

No.

No.

Okay.

Genuinely?

No.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I know what happens.

I'm excited.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Allie, you picked this set of episodes, and it seemed like

you were interested in kite and the kite stuff.

And I knew that there was some kite stuff in here.

Did you have anything about Kite more that you wanted to talk about?

Or how did you feel about this reunion here?

I, yeah, I mean, the kite stuff is interesting to me just because,

I mean, I'm aware of the like bizarre reverse of the anime versus the manga experience where I meet Kite on the first page.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh,

I mean, you've been with this guy

so many times, and then I literally forgot

for these episodes.

Where it's like, yeah, you know, this is not confusing.

Like, Kite is the person who sets off the story.

Oh, yeah, this is the guy who hits.

Yeah, the NTC who gives Goan their,

you know,

quest for

what this is going to be.

And then also, I think, like, I, one of the Green Island episodes that I miss, but like, the

one of the most memorable scenes in this show for me is like Goan

um

doing the spell to go find his dad and then the reveal of like yeah he said that if Goan tries to show up with somebody

I have to do something else because he's only allowed to see me if he does it by himself.

He's so anxious.

Yeah, he's neurodivergent.

Right.

He literally can't criticize it.

Will Osprey, whatever you say, be nice to him.

Bruv, be nice to me.

Yeah, just like, you know, it's okay.

It's we can have as many bruv moments as we need.

But just the like,

the, the,

the, the, the, like, surrogate that kite has to be

in that moment specifically, and then like awareness of the like

just

outrageous card,

like

a card house that has been created by Goan's father to be like,

I am not only going to abandon you, but I am going to like leave the

most manipulative, like

tokenize hundreds of people in my path to like set them up for you to knock down right yeah and like you know kite's kite's um

participation in that the gorilla guys participation in that the the like game master's participation in that like further

making you think about

his father and like what his relationship with all these people are and there's just like this like future of of what you know the

you have the same goal that Goan does the more strange it becomes in terms of being like well what is this guy's fucking deal like

like what is this guy's fucking deal so I

mean yes yes yes yes yeah um so that's why I I find Kite to be a compelling character also the like just like slotting him back into this plot in terms of crazy slotting him

yeah

Well, not even like he, he's locked in this little cage because he's actually still alive, but the thing of like,

um,

we, we just finished Green Island, which was this, this, like, this, you know,

bottle episode of rules.

And then it's like, oh, we're going to the mountains with

with environmentalists to go look at, you know, it was just like such a weird transition into what is clearly a new plot and a new tone and everything to have like Kite as sort of the like

guide there was really interesting.

And also, in terms of like what I said before, which is like all of Kite's potential as an interesting character is cut off so soon.

And now we have this like

marionette version of him is

really fun.

And Jing is still out there, and Kite is like this.

And like,

I love how the show

gives you this version of Jing, who like

doesn't have a steady crew, doesn't have consistent friends, is jumping from place to place.

Is like, I don't know if you've ever met anybody, this happens a lot like

in

like if you've been a waiter or whatever, if you've done service work or retail stuff, if you meet someone, you know, everybody's friendly with each other or whatever, but there's one person who's like super nice, but also

really, really willing to ask

other people for help with it.

Like, like I'm delegating my work super actively, giving other people more work because nobody else is like, hey, can you go get this for me?

And it's like, why, wait, why don't you get it for you?

This is how I feel about Jing, where it's like, he's very strong, he's very charismatic, and he like,

puts

work for, gives people work for him because he doesn't have the thing in your head that's like, you shouldn't force your friend Kite to become a surrogate father.

Oh, yeah, no, there's a word for that.

It's sociopath.

And

then we see Kite, and we spend time with him.

He's got his little crew that he takes care of.

All of them are safe.

He never stops liking them.

He never abandons them.

He, you know, they're in his debt, like monetarily.

And instead, he's like, no, we should hang out and I'll teach you guys how to be hunters or whatever.

They never even say that Kite wants this money back.

He certainly never mentioned it.

This feels like a Goan situation of like, I have to give back this money, even though it wasn't asked of me.

Maybe it was.

We didn't see.

You know, Kite is so different from Jing.

It's almost weird that Kite likes Jing with how different they are because kite has seemingly lived his life in an opposite way

but killer is so different from gun yeah

i

on on the the kite stuff and some of the backstory there i've included some um

pages of the the kite uh gone fight here just because i i i think that the like use of flashbacking in the the manga by being like here's later pages it has been really fun and really effective.

I love the double, the thing with the bar, the like, I don't even know what you'd call this, but his face crossing the

yeah, where it's like in two different panels.

I, yeah, I, there's, so I,

I can't speak to Togashi's health at the time or the timeline or like the, you know, any of the drawing instinct there, but I do think that there's like an economy of drawing that comes across really well in these chapters in terms of like, you know,

even talking to like comic artists I know

and the impulse of like, you know, you're not going to spend

two hours drawing a picture that people are going to look at for 20 seconds.

And I think that's why I have, like, even if I find manga really hard to follow sometimes, I think that, like, seeing where the pen was actually put on the page is like a a way of like you know seeing the artist's intentions in that way you know um so like in the in the like cross-face panel on this page here or even this like full white box of gone just walking towards uh

uh kite's body in like a inhuman posture is like you know there you don't have to draw more than that to to uh

communicate what's happening here.

In fact, the the fact that they are blank and contextless and the only relationship between the page

in a

physical sense, in a like, you know, um, dynamic sense is just the two of them is really good.

Yeah.

Um,

there's an earlier

going back to the debt, there's an this is like a page from 216 that I'm not sure how this is played in the anime because it wasn't in the episodes that I saw, but like this is

page five of that chapter.

And I was just like struck by how,

like, if you sent this to somebody alone, it is a short story in itself.

This is like, this is baby shoes never worn to me.

This is Spinner telling going and kill you.

Yeah, this, like,

just so, like the the first panel is these birds over the sun.

And then it's the, you know, just the single story of

this was the memory of our home and this is what Kite said about it.

And then I'll take you there one day.

It's just like

fucking good.

Like,

full sale baby shoes never worn except there's a guy doing a handstand.

Yeah.

It's really good.

This punchline had no setup.

That's how you know it's good writing.

Yeah.

It's comedy and tragedy wrapped into one.

He really seems to know where to put his time on these panels.

He's really good with negative space is the thing that always stands out.

Like, holy shit.

I would much rather

like the panels that

should have detail and depth have that at the expense of another panel, then have everything be averaged out to a medium.

And then, not only that, but the panels that he's taking away from enhance instead of detract.

It's not like, like, like you said, Allie, by having, you know, Gohan shuffling towards Kite and it's the only thing on the page, like, that's, to me,

better than if it was like a fully rendered out scene.

Because it is like Goan is seeing only kite.

and so that's also what we see, and it feels right.

Yeah, that's good, I recommend it.

Um,

we have a sort of a techno-thriller line here.

Knuckle asks Killiwa, what's changed, and Killiwa says, We did nothing, they're the ones who changed us.

Wow, you know, fucking crazy good line.

But also, I did pull that needle out,

yeah.

29 days later, yeah, Goan's Nen is about to come back.

It's so funny that Kilua spends so much effort going, I have to protect Goan for 30 days.

Goan can't use his Nen for 30 days.

It's the worst thing in the world.

He tears the needle out of his head and is like, all right, sorted.

And then the title card says 29 days later.

You know, it helps that he's got the whole crew there now, probably.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

It's just, it was so funny.

It's such good Takashi pacing to be like, I'm setting a clock for 30 days and then move over it in one

I'm going to get another one set in a little while.

Imagine if every time Austin set a clock on Friends of the Table, there was a 75% chance that he would smash the clock with a hammer.

It just filled it.

That'd be fun.

Austin, if you're listening, hey, try it out.

These are some surprise-filling clocks.

I love this.

This is so horrible.

Sylvie, I also love Morrill.

He's such a piece of shit.

He's the worst piece of him.

He's pretending to not think Goan is ready for this.

And he's like kind of torturing an explanation for why

they're here out of Nove.

And Nove is like,

come on, you know that we both want to do this.

And then shoot like introduces doubts about Goan specifically.

And

Morrill says

they're full-grown tigers now.

And the best thing about full-grown tigers is that they can take care of themselves.

They're 12!

They're 12.

The narrator reminded us at the end of the day with Palm episodes.

Yes, they're 12.

And their bloodline was really funny.

Jokes on you, Keith, because the average lifespan of a tiger is 10 to 15 years.

Oh, full-grown tiger.

Okay.

There you go.

Yeah.

So you can be a kid, but a full-grown tiger makes sense to me.

They're on a train.

This is a really nice set.

They're all riding in this train car, looking back at Goan and Kiliwa, who are kind of talking and bickering.

Shoot says Ghon is inconsistent and his power varies wildly.

Morel replies, saying at least he's consistently inconsistent.

Yeah, funny.

And a lack of motivation is a coiled-up spring.

Yeah, he's been saving up all that energy, biding his time till he finds an enemy he hates enough to unleash it on.

Well, we'll see soon enough.

At this point, oh, remember King Meriwam?

Huh.

Yeah.

There rings rings a bell.

At this point, the horrible nature of his meat orchard is sort of beginning to come into focus off screen.

As human newscasters say all citizens of East Gorteaux have been invited to the palace to celebrate the country's anniversary of the nation's founding.

The nation's founding.

People really aren't sure what to make of this.

And as they look up, as our hunters look up at the TV, they see Pito's puppets.

It's so good.

This has been set up.

This is another Tagashi setting something up slowly.

Cameras can see Nen.

We saw this way back in Heaven's Arena.

This is a ball.

This is a bowling ball that's been rolling towards a single pin for two years.

It's great because it means that,

you know, it seems like a small detail, but it lets Tagashi do exposition.

Effortlessly.

He writes like a Rube Goldberg machine in a lot of ways.

I know.

I really love it.

Because Because let's assume that he hadn't done this.

Our characters would look up at the TV and they would go, huh, weird.

Why is everyone going to the palace?

You know, the newscasters actually start, the newscasters are suspicious about it for different reasons.

They sort of view East Gorteaux as like a military, you know, an isolate military dictatorship.

So they're suspicious of it for a different reason.

But let's say they look up at the TV and they just see the guy talking.

All right, now we have to put elsewhere in the story our crew finding out that he's being puppeteered by pito that the ants have already gotten there even if we say all right we'll skip that and we'll have it be a horrible revelation that the ants are that the ants are there already yeah that's different writing that you have to do later tagashi decided to front load that

way back in heaven's arena so that we could just have an insert shot of the tv and we'd go all right all right there you go so good because

the nice thing about writing a story is that you get to decide all of the order that things happen and all of what everybody knows.

Yeah.

He's right.

No, let him cook.

Let him cook.

But the thing that Tagashi is so good at, this is the third time that I've mentioned it.

He's so good at like getting all of the pieces and reusing them later in a way that it's like, would it have ended up being a lot?

So if we didn't, if we couldn't see that Nen on TV, if nen didn't work on tv then

another way of getting in this information might have been just as quick but the ability to like reach back and pull this fact from the past into now is so satisfying and we get it stuff like this all the time and it's so much fun to just be reminded about all the little things that we've seen by recycling them in new ways it's well like that's the other benefit right when you're the one in charge of like a serialized thing for so long, you can choose when you can look back at something and be like, oh, I've done that.

I can just do this here.

And it doesn't necessarily need to even be

that you're setting up dominoes in the sort of like mastermind way, but that you just have a really

depth knowledge for knowing like

what you're looking back at your past work and being like, what can I pull in?

Yeah.

What have I already explained?

What does the reader already understand?

And how can I use it in new ways or to keep the momentum going?

He's really good at that.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, the stupid deuce casters are like, maybe he's going to abdicate the throne, but he would never do that.

That's crazy.

The celebration, the hunters suspect, will be used to sort the population.

And in fact, it's not the hunters that suspect this.

From out of nowhere, shoot

fucking hell, Jesus Christ.

Morel

says.

Give it time.

You'll get them eventually.

Colt's theory is that he's going to use it to sort the population.

He's going to try and separate the rares.

I suspect everyone's going to die, but we don't quite know

how or why.

And I love that Colt is now such a member of the Hunter crew that his theories are being sort of said off-screen.

Yeah.

In the same way that we've heard, like, oh, the chairman believes this.

They're like, well, Colt believes that.

It's our

expert.

The funny thing about it is that actually they've interpreted it backwards

it's not the people that will die it's the rares the people are the everyone's resource

oh yeah that's the yeah that is the

subject yeah because you do grow things in an orchard yeah

how are you doing jack this is a fucking great story

This is really good.

At this point, they are wondering where Notero is.

He is already

so funny to me.

This is the funniest joke.

This is tie with the arrows for me.

We don't know what Chairman Natero's power is, but all the characters except Gonan Kiliwa do, I think.

And the fact that Tagashi is playing with this is so funny.

So they start, they say, Chairman Natero has infiltrated the Iskoto already.

And he said that if we don't hear hear back from him today, assume the worst.

And they're all like, oh no.

And then the phone rings and they're like, it's the chairman.

And then Moral

is like, wow, old satellite ears.

It's amazing that he's, he probably heard me say that.

He probably heard me complaining already.

And Notero, speaking down the phone, says, all right, everyone, split into pairs and lure the Royal message.

It's a text.

That's why it's crazy.

He sent us an email or something.

Before Moral said he's got satellite for ears.

Yeah.

So he said, the text had already arrived.

And the text says, split into pairs and lure the royal guards away from the king.

And then he makes a joke about being the old man signed the old man with satellite ears.

Yeah, starting at midnight, the night before the rally from the old man with satellite ears.

The other thing about this is he doesn't know that going to kill Gonikillo are there against the rules.

And he already seemingly knows about this, or otherwise pairs of three wouldn't work.

This is the scariest thing I've seen Chairman Natero do.

He sent the text before Moral said satellite ears.

And because this is Tagashi, I can't tell whether this is purely a comedy beat where they're like, oh, Notero knows everything, or if it is genuinely setting up a payoff of like, Notero has bizarre time/slash

like scrying abilities.

Yeah, maybe maybe he just knows that Moral calls him satellite ears.

Yeah, that could also be.

He do be having them big ears, though.

Yeah, like he could have just heard them.

He do.

He do.

And how did he know to send the text at that exact moment?

It's just, it's really funny.

It's really funny.

Yeah.

IRS disappears.

Oh, but IRS does disappear silently, right?

No, IRS does not disappear silently.

He has a polite, friendly voice.

No, he has a little goblin voice.

Yeah.

He has a funny little goblin voice.

What does he say?

He says,

actually, he says something very different in the dub and the sub.

In the sub, he says, I'm sorry to say that

your thirsty days.

Your 30 days are up, so I'll make myself scarce.

And then he does a little flip and poofs away.

He has sort of Beetlejuice vibes, like Michael Keaton Beetlejuice vibes here.

It's very cute.

I think this thing is cute.

Yeah, I think it's adorable.

adorable.

There's a bit of business before we begin, which is that Morel

more lying.

Kind of lying, says, all right, we have to test Goan.

So he says to Goan, pretend I'm the enemy who did all that to kite.

Keeping in mind that Morel has said Goan will bide his time until he sees a true enemy.

Sorry, I really like that Morel keeps doing this thing where he positions himself as the like hard ass kind of like puff on them, but he's always doing it in service of like showing the other people that they're ready or like seems to be doing it in that way.

That's what Knuckles says.

He's like, I can't remember, but he's basically like,

I can't believe Moral is still pretending like they're not ready.

He's the one that said that they were ready.

Yeah, it's really good.

I like good moral stuff.

He says,

I'm sorry, Gone, but I'm not convinced we should keep you around.

Show me resolve.

Pretend I'm the enemy who did all that to kite.

If your attack isn't powerful enough, I'll call for a replacement hunter.

If you hold back in the slightest, you're off the team.

And Knuckle is like, don't hold back.

Use your judge on Ken.

Uh-oh.

Yeah, as an old cue starts swirling.

We haven't heard this for a while.

This to me is like...

A classic hunter-hunter theme.

I associate it really strongly with like moments of heroism and and triumph in the Hunter exam.

It was used to cut to credits in a lot of early Hunter Hunter.

Do you have this on the board, Keith?

Hmm, let's see if I do.

I don't know.

You keep talking and I'll figure it out.

Yeah,

I have a little bit from the pages here because I think that like

Pateau is always drawn in this really sparse,

not like larger than life, but like sort of like

disembodied sort of ghostly way

in a way that I really appreciate.

And in this moment of like,

you know, hit me as if I had done that to Kite,

this panel of like Kite's usual body, I guess you could say, in his like little outfit and his little hat,

overlaid with Kite's like deformed face with the toes,

um, like

very unnatural stare fucking goes, in my opinion.

It's not just him, like, in his normal stuff, it's him when he's getting his arm ripped off by Peto.

Yeah, yeah, it's that specific crotch too.

That's,

yeah, that is a lack of his arm.

That's true.

That is

cool.

Um, yeah, these are pages 10 and 11 in chapter 223 when the scene is happening.

And it's really good.

I just think it's really good.

Pito

always has a look on their face like I feel in the first 10 seconds of realizing that I'm getting a migraine.

Just like the sort of like wide-eyed, spaced-out, dreamy horror of like, oh, God.

Can we get this?

It sounds unpleasant, Jack.

Oh, it ain't good.

I can get this song.

I'll be give me 10 seconds.

I was just going to say, you know, it's bad news because Goan has the murder lines on his face that we only ever see Kilowa have.

Yeah, because Goan starts charging Jajan Ken

mega.

Yeah.

Super Saiyan Jajanken.

Goan is really going for it because I think he knows that

Goan doesn't know that this isn't a real test, but he does know that

he wants so desperately to be in the fight, to be able to take it to Pito, and this is the only thing standing in the way, and he can feel that horror and that anger sort of bubbling up inside him.

And at this point, this sort of cue that Keith is finding becomes clearer

until Killua just very gently places a hand on his shoulder.

The power of a completely normal and platonic friendship.

Just two bros being dudes and the power of being dudes, just hanging out.

What makes this show so good is that I think that Goan believes that this is the power of a noble platonic friendship.

You know?

I mean,

it should be.

Yeah.

I mean, that's always it.

Like,

there's like

a wrestling aspect to, you know, the shonen thing where it's like

you know men feel emotion and the way that you work through that emotion is via combat and all emotion is legitimate and like you know you can within those boundaries you can fit like I lost my dad and here's my surrogate father who keeps reminding me that my dad is dead or like we trained together for a long time and you beat me once and had a good career, and I didn't.

Like, the way that you get through that is to hit somebody.

I think, you know, there is

the like

friendship will strengthen us through all things.

Yeah.

The

trouble, though, and I missed exactly what we're talking about because I was getting that song.

Kilua's gentle hand on Gun's Shoulder.

Oh my God, it's the best thing in these episodes.

It's so good.

And

the

terrifying strength in the Jajun Ken, I mean, Moral is scared.

He's literally sweating,

which is crazy.

And then the effortless, like, I was really going to kill you.

I'm sorry.

I'm really sorry.

And everyone believes it.

Nobody goes, you weren't really going to kill me.

I'm Moral.

I'm a two-star hunter.

Or three-star.

I don't know.

I don't know how many stars Moral is, or even if he has one.

The problem, though, is that their relationship is so lopsided.

Yeah.

Oh, Killiwa and Gone.

Yeah.

Killuwang.

Oh, yes, yes.

Absolutely.

Like, this is the one.

It's where the juices, as far as

these three episodes, more than any other set of episodes, have been about like

Killua being sort of emotionally fixated on his relationship to Goan and like being there for Goan, and Goan being fixated on Kite in a way that doesn't really require Killua at all.

Yes.

And I think we, you know, in the last scene where Kite is there, we watch like Goan is not in, or Kiloa is not involved in that scene.

Goan goes up, does his thing with Kite, and then like walks past everyone.

The only thing he says is dibs on Pito, basically.

Yeah, that is his only interaction with Killu at all.

To Allie's point about like

this sort of like high-masculine melodrama of emotion and

that being this way into talking about love or talking about hatred or fear or

you know, we were bros and now we've turned against each other or whatever.

I think I can see that reflected in Ghan's relationship relationship with killiwa through and through i think where it just gets so delightful for me is that i sort of have no

way of reading killua's relationship with gone

as anything other than like i love this man romantically yeah

i and i don't think it's useful there's no there's nothing useful to leave that behind like you don't gain anything from putting that part of the story behind saying,

well, it's not like, it's never literalized.

No one ever says that.

It's only ever implied, or maybe even it's not even implied.

It's just high emotion.

Like, you don't get anything more useful out of their relationship by putting that on the back burner or discarding it.

But we could also read it through Ghan.

You know, if we can read, we can read this relationship.

It's two sides of the coin, right?

And we can turn the coin around in our heads and admire it.

Not you, Keith.

Sorry.

Sorry, yeah, that's fine.

I'm doing it right now.

I love the montage that

Goan has about Pito and Kite, sort of as this is, I mentioned it earlier.

This is like the photo negative montage of Kiluwa's sort of

love and loyalty montage.

This is like a hate and loyalty montage.

Yeah.

It's still loyalty crucially, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do you want me to play that song?

Yeah, yeah.

This song, it is an old song.

It is called

Sprint.

It's called Sprint.

He's played in the exam, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lots of the exams.

Piranha is so good.

That song plays 14 times in the Hunter exam arc.

When did we last hear it?

Sprint.

We last heard it

in episode

88, 89, 88 and 89.

What's happening in 88 and 89?

It was.

Oh,

there is a man targeting Gonan Killier, and his name is Shoot McMahon.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then it plays in 86, Promise Promise and Reunion.

It plays in 84, 83.

This song plays all the time.

I love this song.

It's a great this is this is hunter exam music to me.

Yeah um

blissful chaos note that I've written down here just in terms of like seeing these words out of context.

I wrote down

Gone and Killiua have requested to target Pitu, Knuckle and Shoot Yupi, Nov and Morel, poof.

That means they disappear.

Yeah, yeah.

Two-thirds of the words there are just proper nouns.

The preparations for the final battle are complete at last.

The victor will be decided in 10 days.

We're still at the beginning of the Chimera end arc, aren't we?

We are like one-third of the way through.

Next

set of episodes, we will be one-third of the way through.

The preparations for the final battle are decided at last, eh?

Narrator?

Yeah, the victor will be decided in 10 days.

What can happen in 10 days, John?

Yeah, what can happen in 10 days?

I know a lot can happen in 10 days.

Yeah, what could happen?

Answer a lot.

I have no idea.

I have no idea where we're going.

I have no idea.

The king is going to be born now.

Yeah, you know,

there you go.

When you're opening

was the last, like,

um, fixed point that I could sort of foresee.

But now I'm like, really, that little baby, which has not been at no point did any of them say, oh, by the way, also, the Chimera Ant Queen birthed a human baby.

Yeah, that's why Colt's not here.

Colt's off raising a little, a little great baby.

Put him on a rock surrounded by dinosaurs, stand at the distance.

Yeah, go bring him to Spykitz to land.

Oh, meet Steve Bascemi.

Yeah, meet Steve Bascemi.

He is a little late.

I'm having a great time at Spykits.

I think so.

I think any of the Hundreds of the Speakers.

I'd miss Colt.

bring bring back my eagle bug.

Me pointing at Tagashi.

Do we have any final thoughts today?

No, these were weird episodes.

Yeah.

No,

I had a final question.

I think that

there was a paw cast over the first episode.

Even still, there was some stuff in there that I liked.

And

there was not a lot.

We've gotten so used to the ants that there was so few ant stuff felt strange.

I really liked these.

I'm not gonna like other than the uncomfortable stuff with Palm, I enjoyed pretty much everything else.

The stuff with Kilua and the needle, I love it.

The stuff with Kite and the hug, I love it.

The stuff with the

with Gones Way Too Powerful Might Kill Moral Jajan Ken, I love it.

The hand is so good.

Yeah, it's so good.

That's good shit.

All of the energy is immediately sucked out of the show in a good way.

Like,

everything quiets down.

Everything goes from glowing gold to, like, white, like, soft white.

It's really, really good.

Um,

there was another thing that I thought was fantastic.

Um,

oh, APR showing back up again.

Right.

Yeah, APR showing back up again.

Cheetu, all of a sudden, cheat to, I thought, the king of speed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really well animated stuff there, too.

Before we, it sounds like we're wrapping up, but I got a

very

short, just a little short review for this week.

Oh,

we didn't get any, first of all,

I don't even remember what name y'all said.

Yeah, not a single Blake listen to the show.

There is an error here.

Yeah.

It's that very little time has happened between that episode releasing and now.

Fair enough.

That episode came out.

You're right.

That's true.

It feels much longer for me.

Yeah.

So

the Blakes who are listening and did not review, you will live for now.

You have a second chance.

Blake's and March's.

You have another chance.

Okay.

Don't have to.

Did you know about this, Allie?

I know vaguely about this.

I didn't know that we were calling out specific names.

Oh, yeah, right down the line.

Which I think is interesting.

Yeah.

It worked for Mitchell.

It worked for Mitchell and it worked for

Emily.

Yeah, it did.

So, okay, review this week.

Five stars.

Top tier watchcast from user JSIX4732.

I love this show.

Everyone is wonderful, but I really appreciate Jack's musical critiques.

That's it.

It's short and sweet.

And then here's another one, because I want to shout out my own countryman a little bit and read something from the Canadian reviews.

Geography from OMG Pop, a bunch of numbers.

I've been to Vienna, but I've never been to Italy.

Just to remind us.

Ask because you have been to one without the other.

I'm confused.

It's never, we're never getting through to him.

Okay, listen up.

April.

Were you born in April?

It's your also.

I'll see both.

Is your name?

Yeah.

Well, Allie gets to pick your name.

Okay.

Oh,

I'll bleep that one out.

No one will even know what the fuck we're talking about.

They'll probably guess.

No,

I'll bleep it good.

Hold on.

We said, if your name is.

Okay.

If your name is

something about the phrase, I'll bleep it good

tickled me.

Yeah, that's really funny.

Allie, if you don't know, I leave the bleeps there so that I can put them back.

Yeah,

you can do a little

scrapbooking there.

That's interesting.

I'm gonna bleep this out.

I actually learned

this.

What the fuck?

Wait, what?

Because it's really funny.

I can't

show up.

It will

the file.

Oh,

the sound effect

doesn't do that.

That's really funny.

It gives me the.

That's really funny.

I think it's a really good joke.

You're right.

The first,

and then I couldn't.

That's.

I love that.

This will be unedited out.

I will just be one long bleep.

Okay.

I'm for sure.

I'm going to take the microphone for a little bit.

Yeah, go ahead.

My final thoughts is...

Do you have a name?

My name is not my name.

The name that I am picking.

The person out there who's listening to this who should write a review is Barbara.

Barbara.

All the Barbs.

Babs.

Babs.

Yes.

All

Barbie.

iTunes.

Hasbro employees.

They're not all named Barbie.

No, but if you, but if you, I think if you've got a connection to a Barbie, you're part of the family, you're part of it.

Sure.

Sure.

Sure.

The other thing that I wanted to say is that it's extremely funny to me that this final chapter is called Ted Part 1.

Yeah.

Oh, oh,

oh,

I can't say anymore.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

I appreciate that as just

in terms of making making words work.

I really like that.

And

if I can say one final thing in

defense of palm, which I shouldn't,

our problematic fave, that's nobody's fave.

I think that the way that you are able to

introduce a romantic panic in Kilua in this

is making the

partner that Goat is with inaccessible.

Yeah, and that's all I'll say.

Yeah, hey, I think that you can mine some really good stuff out of the palm situation.

Yeah, I is

the palm situation, yeah.

Like, wow, is it better that it would it be better if she wasn't an adult, perhaps?

Yeah, um, or

is there something to gain, a single thing to gain there?

I've mentioned it.

Um, yeah, we've got delicious kilowa food i have one i have one palm thing to say also actually it's a killer it's another kilowa thing welcome to the palcast uh

this is this is when she first met they basically decided okay gone you said if you couldn't take us to the ngl you would swallow a thousand needles neither of us think that's a good idea and palm and uh gone says i agree uh

and then she says okay you need to do one thing that i say anything that i say you have to promise.

And then Goan is about to agree.

And then Killua says, wait a sec, think about how Goan is feeling.

And then I wrote, easy for Kilua to say because that's all he thinks about anyway.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Very good.

And that's it.

Yeah,

I feel like something is about to happen in these next.

The send-off in the end of this chapter is just a really funny illustration of all the characters that says, I wish you good luck.

Oh, wow.

Which I thought is

hilarious.

I was like, okay, right.

I wish you luck, too.

Who is that?

Is that Men Through the Yupi?

He looks crazy.

Yeah, that's Yupi.

This is the split.

It's really cool.

It's Gonan Kilua with Pito standing between them and then Shoot and Knuckle with Yupi standing between them and then Morella Nov with Poof standing between them and then Natero staring at the king.

There's a polish to the anime because of how much money and production goes into it that adds a layer of polish to this that really works on its own terms but removes so much of the charm that is here in this image that is just like almost a ramshackle version of the same idea.

I really recommend checking it out if you can, the only way that you can, however however you choose to i um i a thing that i like to tell people is that a subscription to the showdown jump app is three dollars yeah yeah it's three dollars a month uh which is an amount of money ton of manga yeah there's so much there i um i really wanted to

I wanted to see the look back in theaters before we recorded this so I could talk about it here.

But if you do end up spending $3 for the Shonen Jump app,

I cannot recommend reading that enough.

What is it, Lookby?

It's a Fujimoto, Tatsuki Fujimoto short story, right?

The author of Chainsaw Man.

He has a lot of short stories that are on the app, actually.

And his short story work is really fantastic.

It's very good.

Goodbye Ari and Look Back are some of like the best stories that I've read in Goodbye Aerie is so good.

They're so like Goodbye Aries, especially just like a like a snapshot into someone at the height of their career and their talent showing you in like 40-ish pages their

their capability in that matter just in terms of like

like just tone and being able to hit emotionally and still being really funny and then like the the like

punchline in the page flip that Chainsaw Man is able to accomplish.

Uh-huh.

It's very good.

I really recommend it.

And then

go on.

No, no, you go ahead.

You go ahead.

I was just saying the look back is

similar to that, but also

like

such a thing that was created at the time in response to like a

national event and a response to like someone grappling with their own success that is so intriguing and is really good.

And I recommend it.

Yeah.

Could you, could you say what the premise of each of those is just in one sentence?

Oh, absolutely.

So The Look Back is a story about two girls who become unlikely friends

via their

interest in drawing manga together.

And it's the sort of like the way that their lives branch apart and back together.

It's devastating.

It is a very sad story.

I'm going to say that up front.

Both of them kind of.

Yeah.

And then Goodbye Ari is a

story about a

kid whose dying mother insists that

he record a video of the last moments of her life.

And he

like shows the video at a school fair and

there's a a lot of backlash about that and then the ending is controversial.

Yeah.

Oh backlash in real life not backlash from other characters in the thing.

Right.

And then

somebody enters his life who makes a similar request of him.

And it's very good.

It's really good.

It's really good.

They're both really good.

I gotta read some Fujimoto stuff.

You really do, Jack.

Yeah.

Change of mind is the place to start, right?

Yeah, probably.

Yeah.

I mean, I would start with, you could start with The Look Back and Goodbye Airy.

Both the short stories, I think, are fine to start with.

I think Goodbye Airy is interesting in adding some like

creative like context to the way that he

will like pace things in a way.

Like it feels very like

not fully autobiographical, but it does feel like someone letting you get a peek into their like feelings about their own creative process and their own things they make.

This is a little bonus podcast at the end of your podcast.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I think we should probably say adieu.

Probably.

In whatever language you so choose.

Uh-huh.

Ah, the Italian language of Vienna.

Bye, gay.

I did it in pig Latin.

Oh.

I wasn't able to plug anything at the beginning because I dedicated my time to scolding Keith J.

Carberry.

Oh, yeah.

I guess you're not going to be able to do that.

A thing that you should listen to, Friends of the Table, if you enjoy me scolding Keith J.

Carberry.

And I also am on a Star Wars podcast called AmoreCivilized Age.net.

Just type that into your browser.

And definitely check out the YouTube and the Twitch because I've been playing Fields of Mysteria.

If you don't know what that is, I'm not going to explain it here.

Go to those pages.

Fantasy Star Wars.

YouTube or Twitch.

There we go.

I did it.

I did it.

Appreciate it.

I'm playing those games on Monday, Monday afternoon.

And I would like to make a second call that you check out the screen cap posts on our Patreon and consider signing up for the Patreon.

Even if you don't do any other Friends of the Table stuff, but you like this show, you should consider supporting us there because that's how you get bonus episodes.

What are we watching next time, Keith?

Next time, we're having a little vacation,

a little vacation two.

We're watching episodes 96 and 97, A Lawless Home and Carnage and Devastation.

Hmm.

Okay.

And that's it.

What?

You reacted the same to Carnage and Devastation that you did to Austin being announced to be on the show.

Look, I've made you a promise, Jack.

You'll like it.

I know that I will like it.

Yeah.

Keith knows I'm a sicko for when Tagashi draws people's heads coming up with stuff.