The Light That Illuminates All - Hunter x Hunter ep. 89-92: Media Club Plus S01E28

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

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

This season, we are watching the 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by oh, this season, we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manga by it.

Oh my god, are you okay?

I'm not, apparently not.

It's okay.

This is all just snip this out.

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

You can find

many combinations of us streaming over at twitch.tv/slash friends of the table, and then find those videos uploaded to youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

With me as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

Sylvie Bullet?

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And an extra little plug for the YouTube, the final part of Keith and I's 999 playthrough just went up.

So you guys can watch all of that.

That's true.

And the first part of Virtue's Last Reward will probably be up when this goes up as well.

So you can watch that too.

And Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey,

you should go watch those.

I watched the first three episodes of that yesterday.

It's really good.

It's really good.

I really want you to watch those.

Yeah, it's a wild game.

And for the second time, this Chimera Ant Arc, Austin Walker.

I thought you said this Chimera Ant Arc as if there was a lot of

leader.

Sorry, Jack doesn't know about Chimera Ant Arc 2.

Yeah.

Oh, you've heard of the Chimera Ants, right?

That's the sequel, like Alien and Aliens.

Yeah, yeah.

So this is the kind of ants.

They added the you, though, weirdly enough, also, in the sequel.

Yes.

I'm here.

I'm here to talk about the ants.

Hooray.

When I was watching these episodes, I was like, why is Austin?

And then there came a point in the second.

The Metero show episode.

Like, why is he here?

Why is he here?

Austin's wearing his heart shirt.

My guess, and I'm, you know,

there's a lot going on in these four episodes that Kiefel begins to talk about in the recap.

My guess is that you are here in part to talk about debt.

I'm here to talk about debt, everybody.

I'm here to talk about debt and about how we as a people have advanced into financialization.

We've advanced into speculation and debt.

Even your aunts don't know it yet, but one day maybe they too will develop debt.

Yeah, God.

Then they'll be just like us.

And then did you have any idea,

Jack, about why Austin was killing?

I will,

you know, we can talk about this as we get to it, but

every time I finish a block of episodes with the Chimera and Ark, I feel like we are more and and more in trouble and we're in trouble in different ways each time we finish.

I'm like, oh, now we're really fucked.

You know,

the train has come off the track completely.

And then another block of episodes comes down and it's like revealed that there was a completely new way this could go wrong.

I finished these episodes feeling pretty, pretty...

Pretty bleak about the chimera ants.

It's like you got your hand caught in the cookie jar and then you dropped the cookie jar and it broke and then there was a second hand in there, and it started eating the cookies, and then started putting the cookie jar back together.

Yes, yeah, so no harm, no foul, no harm, no foul, yeah.

And it said, This is my cookie jar.

Actually, it said, it said, you repair it, and then watch and you have to repair it in like a weirdly psychosexual intercounter.

We

have a deeply psychosexual encounter.

Oh, my goodness.

Oh, my God.

I didn't remember the specifics of that situation.

I didn't either, Austin.

And I

screamed.

I remember it.

I remember.

I'm not forgetting it now.

I didn't fix the cookie jar either.

Even before the recap happens, dear listener who is listening to Media Club Plus but not watching Hunter Hunter, you know,

you are not ready for

anything that you are about to hear in this recap.

From the goofiest shit to the most dire, like deep horror, deep, deep psychosexual horror.

Yeah.

I want to know the psychosexual horror is not in the recap, but we will get to it in the end.

We all talk about it.

Don't worry.

I'm on Media Cup Plus.

We will talk about psychosexual horror.

In these episodes, the first thing that happens is that Knucklebind reveals that he's a math guy.

This whole time, the dumb idiot who's been walking around taking care, literally taking care of lost puppies, uh shouting parading down the streets um being made fun of by his cowardly friend friend shoot uh

he's also like a weird math guy and maybe even like a tweeting financial tips guy uh but he also might be a nen genius he breaks uh poor gun's little mind by revealing that he has the power to use some sort of inherent quantifiable nature of nen to create a debtor's prison curse for his opponents

So we deal with that.

And then some heavy killist stuff.

He's also got a curse that he's dealing with, a more literal curse, or maybe two curses, an old curse and a new curse.

And also the Chimera Ant King is born.

That happens while all this is happening.

And that's bad.

It's a curse for the ants, maybe.

The Chimera Ant King shows up, and it's not really working out for anybody.

except for the king and the royal guards, maybe.

This is the first episode in the Chimera Ant arc so far where, like, uh, or the first set of episodes where there's no question that more time is spent with Gonan Kiloa.

Um, every other episode has been extremely ant focused.

And I think it was, it was at the end of the second episode, they cut back just for one scene.

It was our first NGL scene.

in the entire

first two episodes of the four that we watched.

And I was like, oh yeah, we we haven't been to the NGL at all.

And it was to

heavily imply that something very bad was going to happen.

So that'll be interesting.

There's a very clean break.

It's not going to be like in the last couple episodes where

we've been choosing to not ping-pong with the show back and forth and kind of making ourselves stick to telling a little bit more of each side per swap.

This one, it'll be, it's super clean cut.

These are like

45 minutes of

Gonan Kiloa, 45 minutes of the NGL, and then kind of a little bit of mix back and forth between the two.

So very like it's just like everything over there is fine.

Everything over there is fine.

Everything's doing a good job.

Both sides are candidly.

Yeah, and we're trimming them down.

We're pruning the ants, the ant tree, and it's going to go fine.

And now we just, we have some time until the king shows up.

So let's just chill.

And it really gets you.

It really makes you think we finally have time to go back to our good, good friends.

Go and kill us.

Yeah.

And it also makes you think, and that won't have any sort of emotional stakes.

That'll just continue to be a fun little fight quest, a fun little like training montage where

their relationship isn't putting in any peril.

Yeah.

Tagashi, you've done it again.

This is some beautiful, beautiful Tagashi pacing.

This, I feel, is the most...

I mean, we've...

We've talked in the past about how Tagashi and the adaptation team are ready to dramatically shift the pace at which they are moving and change what their focus is at to wrong foot the viewer or to lure the viewer into a false sense of security.

Perhaps the most distinct version of this in the early portion of the show was skipping the end of the hunter exam.

And after episodes and episodes about building up to the birth of the Chimera Ant King, the way that it is paced and the way that it happens still, after all the ominous foreshadowing, still manages to be like jarring and upsetting and sudden.

It's worth saying at this point that the Chimera Ant King is born prematurely within the fiction.

Even as far as the, especially as far as the Chimera Ant Queen is concerned, this is not supposed to be happening yet.

And within the sort of pacing structure of the show, they sell that by it just coming out of nowhere with no fanfare.

You know, here comes the king.

It was about a month early.

Everybody was kind of, including including the queen was kind of expecting another month of no ant king which

sometimes a king decides it's now it becomes terrifying to consider uh uh uh

what happens with a chimera ant king that's in there for another month sure it does however we're not there right now we're here as gone begins to wind up for gone's punch in his fight with knuckle almost exactly it's called jajan ken well it's called it's called it's called Jang Ken

no exactly

I'm pretty sure he said Jajang Ken I mean he said jajang that's what knuckle calls it that's what Kilo calls it that's what it's called now that's its name now obviously what he's doing is putting a little tada flourish on it

it is the funniest shit ever it's so great

Gohan stutters briefly in the moment of naming his attack first

what do you call that thing what do you call that really cool bunch that you do you gotta name you know?

You got a name.

And Goan says, Jajang Ken.

And Knuckles says, oh, Jajang Ken.

Hmm, okay.

Yes.

Literally, like what Keith said, a little ta-da at the beginning is the line.

And I love him for it.

So funny, yeah.

That's a clever name you got there, Kim.

So I am really slipping towards like wrestler voice with him, but that's he's close to that.

Yeah.

But he says fool instead of saying like brother.

You know, he doesn't say brother.

He says fool.

He's great.

And from this point on all the characters call it jajanken uh including kilua i don't know if gone calls it jajankan gone just says like i does he calls it jajang as well that's really sweet uh yeah it's it's so funny killua's reaction of like i can't believe he didn't name his his move this is such a horrible name and then and knuckle being like wow i'm really impressed what a clever little bit of word play

gone tries to come clean too he tries to say like no no that's not really what it's called and knuckle just fully ignores it.

Nope.

Just keeps going.

He just keeps going.

I do love that we get the one of one of the sometimes funniest tropes in Shonen is like the biggest idiot in the world is also a genius in a very specific way.

And that's, that's, that's the reveal with Knuckle here.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Well, it's also, it's, also, it doubles down on what we got a little bit of in the previous episode, which is, oh, he's being kind to us.

Right.

He's a good, he's a good dude.

You know, Vince Staples' voice, you're a really good dude, actually.

He's inviting people over for dinner.

Yeah.

He's inviting people over for dinner.

He's taking care of dogs.

He's teaching them when teaching them is like counterproductive to him.

Like

there is,

there's a risk that Goan could do it.

It could beat him and take his slot.

But he,

it's funny, he's he's pitched as an assassin.

The first time we hear about knuckle, it's an assassin.

But he ends up being like one of the more normal teachers that Goan has.

Truly.

Because we learned very, very clearly, like, if he didn't want to do this, he could have ended this all day one.

Right.

Yes.

Easily.

Like, just hit him without him even knowing what's happening, run away, and then it's over.

But we, so we ended the last set of episodes on

Knuckle explaining to Goan what the two or about to explain to Goan what his the two fatal flaws in Jajang Ken are

and they're pretty obvious that the they kind of pitch it like prosaic what's that they're kind of prosaic I thought they would be really I thought there would be like a hidden flaw you know like some sort of like there is like an actual problem at the core of your nen but in keeping with the theme of like um

Their contemporary nen teaching being about revisiting the fundamentals

They're actually just really, you know, straightforward things the first is that it its wind-up is way too long.

Knuckle calls it an eternity in actual combat.

And then it is also far too risky.

You know, it requires you to pour so much aura into your fist rather than protecting your body, which, to the viewer who doesn't know what's about to happen, feels like a really nice payoff to the way that...

Biskey talked about aura.

Talked about aura being like a calculus within your own body, you know, where I can put 10% of my aura into my pinky finger and the rest into my palm to do that.

You know, we saw this a lot during the Gem Through fight.

This was kind of the internal Nen calculus that,

the Nen calculus of the self that was, you know, the linchpin of the back half of Greed Island.

But in retrospect, what this is actually doing is setting up the realization that your nen is in convers, you are an interlocutor in your aura with those around you.

and that is what knuckle is about to start exploiting and so it feels really cool that his way into this is you know

you are misapplying your aura in your own body and now i'm about to show you how that can be taken advantage of beyond just oh you're too weak to block this punch that i'm throwing at you

There's something interesting about this too.

When they start their little fight, Knuckle is easily able to read what Ghon is going to do, where he's going to block, where he's going to move based on on the reading of that aura, which isn't the first character we've seen that's able to do that.

But it's the first time that they've like really kind of spelled it out, put a main character in there, like had

them go into detail about what's happening and why it's happening.

Right, because we're in Knuckles' voice, or we're in Knuckles' head for this opening fight, right?

We are not in Goan's head.

Knuckle is the one who is saying, like, ooh, I know what he's protecting.

Oh, if I stagger my blows, that's all Knuckles VO, which is a really fun twist from where we normally are in a gone fight.

Yeah, and he says that in terms of volume, he has as much aura as a mid-ranking pro.

He's close, but there's one thing he still lacks, experience.

He needs to see more real combat, a lot more.

And one of the funny things is that Goan has like really benefited from unpredictability and like surprising his opponents, coming out of nowhere with a strength that people didn't realize that he had.

And this is like because of the training that Bisky has given him in Ko and Ken and Ryu, where he's able to move his aura around like a real pro hunter would do.

It has taken away his like element of surprise where instead of going in with no ideas and no shield, risking his life, he is actually protecting himself now, but it has like removed this key part of his fighting style from him, which is his opponents not being able to tell what he's about to do because he's just not good enough at it yet.

Well, and another thing that just keeps getting hit here is like, man, you have not actually fought a lot of people.

Like in what is what is real, real combat.

Like even the Heaven's Arena stuff is like a one-on-one fight with certain rules inside of a ring, you know, and you're, you're even against Hisoka in that, in that fight, like you were trying to land a clear punch so that you could return the...

No one says this out loud, right?

But like that was like the goal, right?

For

that, the Heaven's Arena fight.

There are lots of

the dodgeball match.

That's a dodgeball match.

Like it's a high-speed, intense, men-in-fused dodgeball match, but it's a dodgeball match.

Like we're not here trying to kill people, you know, it's different.

It's different in the NGL right now, you know?

Yeah.

What that reminded me of, Austin, about specifically about Heaven's Arena and the Hesuka fight is like Ghon's thing that he's been doing since the

I can't win the game that they've laid out, so I'm going to make my own game to win.

I'm going to like figure out how to win on my own terms.

And then we come to the Chimera ant, and it's like, Ants don't let you pick your own little game to win.

We actually literally get that.

Yeah, we get one of the ants not giving him his version of a game to play.

And then he ends up having to kill that ant because there was no other way to get through the fight, probably,

maybe.

Hunters in all their games, like there's a limit to that.

Yeah.

And so

one of the things that it's done is like, yeah, he just doesn't

have, not only does he not have the experience of like

fighting, he barely even has the experience of like sticking to the actual stakes of something instead of making up his own tertiary stakes.

Yeah.

And in terms of just like broad thematic moves being played here, there is, you know, we're not just talking about lack of experience, or rather, we're talking about lack of experience through the lens of this like adults and children thing that Underhunter keeps coming back to in terms of like,

Gowen hasn't had a lot of experience in a fight, but he's also a 12-year-old.

And when Knuckles says to him, you lack experience or thinks, you know, the thing you are lacking is just time doing this.

You know, you are skilled, but you have not been doing this as long as other people.

You know, a recurring motif in the early portion of the show was everybody being like, this kid's really great and is stepping up and is going to be able to do the damn thing.

And isn't that odd and surprising?

And now Knuckle is saying, you know,

there is a serious weakness that you are getting coming early that you might have been able to coast on for a while.

And it also primes the viewer to start thinking about

other things happening early.

You know, what happens if you come out underbaked, as it were?

You know, as we see Knuckle say to Goan, you haven't been doing this for long enough.

I don't know that they're drawing a straight line between Goan and the Chimera Ant King, but it's interesting to me that we have this very explicit conversation about a lack of experience, a lack of time.

There is something

wrong.

There is something missing.

And then we move into the next episode and the king comes out wrong.

you know or quote-unquote wrong not not what the chimera ants were expecting

yeah he tells his mom to shut up right away.

Right away, first word.

Shut up.

I mean, even even just within this little relational, you know, kind of map, there's a lot of there's a lot of Goan in Knuckle.

And there's a lot of like, you know, right now we've been thinking a lot of like, who is Goan growing up to be?

Is Goan going to be like Jing?

And Knuckle is someone where you're like, oh, Goan could grow up to be like Knuckle, this like nice guy who am

kind-hearted, still very powerful.

And in fact, as we come to learn what Knuckles' real nen power is, there's a real like, oh,

you know, when I was little, I also, you know, did fun nen tricks that made me like punch harder or punch further or whatever.

But eventually, I developed an adult's understanding of nen, and it's this weird, complex thing that we'll talk about momentarily.

Um, and and it's like that is one route that Goan could theoretically grow up to be if he gets the right sort of experience.

But right now, what he's doing is trying to kill a guy so he can go kill hundreds or thousands of ants so he can save a guy who he feels deeply indebted to, who we've seen in not the best state, you know?

And it's like, well, what type of experience is he lining up to get, Knuckle?

Because

it might not be the right experience, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's getting all the wrong effort values.

Oh, right.

Sure.

Right.

Good IVs, but bad EVs.

Yeah, good, great IVs.

Perfect IVs, bad EVs.

I'm doing the gone follow over with Steam

whenever anybody brings up fucking IVs or EVs.

Yeah, I don't really know how it works either.

No, I take the cute ones.

Yeah, that's fair.

And I was going to say and Dragonite, but Dragonite's really cute.

So I take the cute ones.

Yeah.

My Pokémon strategy is to play for three and a half hours and then stop.

I started playing Pokemon Go recently, and that's interesting.

Hit a little button that goes to the Pokemon.

Go to the polls.

Pokemon.

That's right.

That's right.

That's what I'm going to do, everybody.

I'm so excited for this election season.

I want to go defy the Chimera Ant King real quick.

Okay, so

the fight kind of continues.

It's an interesting,

you know, like it's an interesting thing.

It's a piece of hunter-hunter.

Yeah,

there are feints, you know, sort of the people learn stuff about their powers that is interesting, but not necessarily transformative.

We see Goan

use the extensive warm-up of Jajang Ken to act as a feint.

You know, he was never intending to launch it.

And Killiwa and Goan and Knuckle all realize at the same time that actually one thing that Jajang Ken benefits from is it gets stronger if you know what it does.

You know, if you have been hit or if you have narrowly dodged a punch, you are more likely to fall for a feint.

At least in theory.

Then we get a little bit of a...

That's called mind games.

That's called motherfucking yomi.

What do you know?

What do you want to say?

It's so sweet because it's going freaks going, oh, I can lie.

I can lie.

I can lie.

I mean, it's a beautiful time in a child's life when they learn how to lie.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

They learn how to do a mix-up combo.

We get a beautiful little baseball PowerPoint while this is going to be a little bit more difficult.

Yeah, I was going to say we also have some PowerPoints.

Karapika and Leorio show.

Yeah, when we say a baseball PowerPoint, of course, Keith, we mean something that, you know, we keep saying baseball, but it's not literally baseball, is it?

It is literally baseball.

It's literally baseball.

Kiloa pl puts on a little play in his mind.

For some reason, Kilua has cast Leorio and Karapika as other players in this baseball game.

Yeah, he's thinking of his mom and this is Frank.

He's thinking of his mom.

They're on his team.

Yeah, like Jack said, he uses Jajanken's weakness long lineup to his advantage.

From Knuckles' perspective, Gohan's Jajankan is an easy pitch.

He has to swing for it.

And they do the little play.

And what I like about this is that it shows that,

like,

Gohan and Kilua have had several sort of tactical discussions about like how to proceed and should we hang back and learn about our enemies or should we just go forward and figure it out as we go along?

Which seems like a real personality thing between the two of them and it is, but it's also like just going into the fight is what Goan is good at.

He's like way better than Kilua is at like figuring stuff out in the middle of a fight, but way, way, way worse at doing any sort of of practical thinking outside of the fight.

So it makes a lot of sense,

you know, more sense than ever that Goan is like, no, no, we should just start fighting people.

We shouldn't, we don't have to like learn anything.

Yes.

It's at around this point that something that's going to become really critical in a few minutes is first introduced.

This idea that aura fades during combat.

While you are in combat, your aura is ticking down.

like a breath meter in a video game.

And it's ticking down slowly and constantly.

It's almost like one aura a second or something.

You're hearing me describe aura using numbers.

We'll get to that.

But when you start throwing punches and things, your aura depletes more rapidly.

Yeah, this is introduced.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or star.

This is introduced very casually.

Knuckle sort of says,

it's so funny because Knuckle knows what he's about to do, but this is not revealed to the viewer at this point.

Knuckle is just like, he's just going to run out of aura, you know?

Yeah.

He's going to exhaust himself.

Goan charges a Jojang Ken from far away

and appears not to be able to hit him at the distance, but actually launches scissors.

No.

Paint time.

Paper.

Oh, launches.

Right.

Yes.

Scissors was the one that killed the Killer.

Scissors is the cutting one.

I like the moment where Killua and Knuckle are both kind of confused and nervous about why he's doing this from so far away.

And then he launches the paper, and it's so huge and cool,

but Knuckle is immediately like, this is nothing.

I can tell that this is nothing.

Uh, and then the way that they show the feint happening, where all of a sudden you see the yellow glow appear from behind Knuckle, where it's like, oh, he's got a second one.

He's behind him.

He's going to get him is so good.

And then they rip it away.

They're like, no, no, he passed that before he could punch.

Knuckle reacts to the punch as if it hits.

It's so funny.

I didn't know what had happened at first.

He's playing along.

He's selling, you know, he's trying to

make it feel real.

Yeah.

We kind of glossed over one of my favorite lines from Gone this episode, which is when...

Or actually, did we yet?

We haven't gotten to Knuckles power, have we?

No, that's next episode.

Okay, no, never mind.

We haven't passed it yet.

I'll get there.

This is maybe the third time Gone has physically passed out at a plot critical moment.

This keeps happening.

I think that that is

pushing himself too hard.

Who can say?

That's the thing, right?

It's like, it's such a nice, clean way to just really drive home.

This character is pushing themselves too hard to keep showing themselves.

What would Tagashi know about that?

Oh, yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, God, your absolute moment of triumph, your body physically gives out.

Gives out.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a really nice motif.

Oh, yeah.

Anytime I get days off, I get sick because it's like my body is like, oh, finally, now we get to get sick.

Now is the time.

I've been waiting for this.

I've been waiting for this.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

It's time to get my chance.

Yes.

By a remby.

I'm critical hit graphic, but it's like a virus.

Tell your body, get sick earlier, then I can take sick days.

And then we get Killua taking Goan's bottles.

Goan passes out.

He's not going to win this fight today.

There's one day left.

Killua picks up Goan, and on his way walking away,

Luke gives Knuckle a fucking death glare.

He's got assassins.

Yeah.

And what's he say?

Does he remember the exact line?

You can fight Goan tomorrow, and the result will probably be different.

Then I'll defeat Shoot.

Tomorrow, and then Knuckle says, tomorrow I'll fight him for real.

He better be better.

be ready to die.

And then Killua says, sounds like you're trying to amp yourself up.

Are you sure you you can do it if you lose without fighting at your full strength i'll never forgive you never in my life yeah

rules it's really good

because gone will know right

and and and that will break gone in a way that's a little dangerous you know like we we don't need we don't need gone saying no he didn't give it his all so now i can't go to the ngl we don't need gone doubting himself we don't need killua doubting gone right right it all needs to be on the up and up or else it's fake.

It's got to be trust it.

As our good clown friend once said, it has to be the perfect victory.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's true.

Gone won't accept anything less.

That's right.

It's God.

First, you know, this is again not the not the last time, or not the first time we have seen Killua carrying Goan on his back.

Just let's get the literalize the

metaphor as directly as possible.

That's the third or fourth time.

It just happened like like five episodes ago.

It is so grim

how

much of Killiwa orbits around Goan.

You know, everything you just laid out, Austin, all the possible outcomes of, you know, it can't be this way because we can't have Goan feeling this way, or we can't have Killiwa feeling this way about Goan or whatever.

It's like, you know,

this is the golden light that is absorbing everything.

You know, it's all the culture

to do.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Is how will this affect Goan?

How does, you know, how does this do that?

You ever been in love in kind of a bad way?

Uh-huh.

Never.

Yeah, it turns out that's a lot of kiloa, huh?

Yeah, dependency is a hell of a drug.

I mean,

it's, it's, it's wild.

We were just talking the other day about a couple characters from Yu Yu Haka Show that this conversation is reminding me of.

If anybody has watched the chapter black saga of Yu Yu Haka Show, you probably know what I'm talking about.

Maybe we'll watch an episode or two of that for a bonus, but it's unlikely.

It actually raises a question: is this a theme that Tagashi is broadly interested in?

I mean, he's clearly interested

in Hunter Hunter, but is this like a hallmark of his

thematic work as a storyteller?

How many characters have borderline personality disorder?

I was going to say PTSD.

this comes up in Yu Yu Haka Show as well.

This idea of

the

there's a character who has a

it is not it's it is it's given a totally different tone, but there's a character who has like a kind of sick fascination with another character in a,

I would say, explicitly and implicitly sexual way.

Oh, is this the long legs guy you posted about the other day?

This is the long legs guy.

Yeah, yeah.

He is a D the long legs guy has a demon that's in love with him and sort of lets that lets that fester into

a pact to destroy humanity.

Gotcha.

Normal.

Yeah.

A lot of people thought that the marketing campaign was overwriting the pudding, but I mean, I was impressed by it on its own.

I mean, you know, to kind of the point of a thing you were just talking about a second ago,

the baseball slideshow,

you know, Kill is is also kind of doing it all on his own.

You know, Karapika and Leorio have not been here for this.

Biscuit's here to help do the massage healing or whatever.

Yeah, Piano Massage.

Goan, yep, uh-huh.

But Gohan's friends are not here.

And I mean, actually, here's a thing, Keith.

You constantly talk about, maybe not so much on the show, maybe a little bit on the show.

Definitely privately, we've always talked about how Hunter Hunter is a show that tricks you into going, man, remember when things were just so much simpler and so good back in the Hunter exam when us and our friends back in school?

The death game?

The death game in the death prison tower?

You know, that's when things were simple.

Remember when Killer ripped that guy's heart out?

Right, exactly, right.

Those are the good old days.

I'm curious, Jack,

what do you think the next time we see our good, good friends, Kropica and Leorio, will be?

And what are the conditions or what are the circumstances of their return to the show and how far off do you think that is I think it's a ways off I think I think I don't know that we're going to get much more of them if I'm honest in the whole show in the whole show you know we've still talked about a bunch of episodes but yeah we do still have a bunch of episodes we've talked about how actually right I have two predictions either

They reappear for this sort of small arc after Chimera Ant, sort of the final chunk of the show before the show wraps up, Or in the way that we have talked about Chimera Ant actually being a sort of series of nested arcs,

we go to them to close a loop or to

fulfill a side quest.

You know, we need to get X and we're going to get

Leorio and Karapica involved.

And then we're going to say goodbye to them again before the ending.

I think I've been so

wrong-footed by the last time the group was brought together during that picnic, where it all happened just sort of very quickly and casually of like, oh, you're in town and I'm in town and now we're going to meet.

I don't, yeah, I don't know how much.

I can't, I don't think we're going to have much more Leorio and Karapika.

I think that Karapica's story was the York New City arc, and I don't think that, at least in the adaptation he might do in the manga, I don't know that Leorio is going to have a similarly sort of like sized and themed arc for him.

Right.

All right.

And I mean, like, to bookend this, we then kind of go into the back half of this first episode, which is all about stakes for Kilua and Ghan's relationship, as Biskey sees them, at least.

And also reminding us that Killua is not...

Killua's not alone in there in his in his poor little head, you know?

Not literally, but like, you know, he's got a Lumi's voice in there constantly torturing him.

Yeah, and we get a lot of that.

Yeah, Biskey says,

there's a lot of Bisky internal monologue in these episodes as she's sort of figuring stuff out.

And it's really welcome, actually, because she has a really useful perspective on this individual situation of like, can the kids get stronger?

What do we mean by stronger?

What is that useful for?

Etc.

And she outright says that she thinks Killior is actually the real problem here because she had expected him to be fighting two.

And instead, once again, the focus has drifted, you know, like a magnet onto Goan.

And so

she is wary that Killio is weak.

And it's, she, it's funny, it's almost like the show itself is surprised that Kilua hasn't been doing anything.

Like, wait, yeah, Kilua hasn't been doing anything.

Yeah.

And she transforms into big biscuit mode and kicks the shit out of him.

And then also becomes his therapist.

And then also becomes his therapist.

Yeah, because you know when your therapist beats you up

and tells you I'm reading the biscuit quote that to me was like, oh, yeah, I've said this to clients before.

Please.

When she's talking to Kilua about like his, his fear, right?

Because that's the thing.

She's trying to like almost beat out of him his fear of losing and that he has learned to just run away with you to guarantee win.

No, I don't do.

Well, no, I don't do.

But she says, like, hey, man, you should know this isn't your fault.

And then she specifically says, it's the product of a smothering kind of love, a love that's abnormal, obsessive, and distorted.

In the end, it becomes a burden, smothering him under its weight.

It's a curse that will take an enormous amount of effort to break.

And yeah, man, that's just me explaining like childhood trauma to people.

You can make sure that it's a screen for that too, right?

Yeah, it's not subtle.

They show Illumi.

Yeah, they show Illumi and then have Illumi like even be scarier by making subtlety is overrated sometimes.

I think this is one of those cases.

I think it works really well when they do the fuckers.

Yeah, I'm glad you wrote down that quote, Dre, because God, the Kiliwa girls eat good these episodes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because he's weak, not just because he has been not fighting, but because of this, you know, we've heard about this in the past.

This is sort of tied to what Morel, Morrel, I keep saying Morel, like the guy from Disco Elysium, what Morrel said of, you know, like, you know,

you fight like a loser, essentially.

Yeah.

And Bisky identifies that Kiliwa gives up far too easily and is much too cautious.

He underestimates himself and fights to escape, not to win.

And this is where, yeah, like Dre said, she digs into why and she spells, you know, the subtlety is overrated.

She spells out

there is a curse, possibly real, possibly imagined.

What's the, what's it, does it matter, you know,

that is, you know, inside you that is causing you to massively undervalue your own capabilities.

It's so clever because

Go ahead.

Finish up.

I just remember earlier in the show being like, can anybody beat Killiwa?

And the answer is, we've only ever seen Killiwa picking fights that he knows he can win.

So of course he's.

Because that's what Illumi has explicitly taught him to do.

Always run from a fight you don't, unless you know you can win it.

And intercut with the

sort of haunting pictures of Alumi kind of coming out of Killiwa's eyes, like, you know, this kind of spiral of

like letters in Killiwa's eyes become a Lumi, and he's surrounded by a Lumi.

We also get a flashback to Kilua knocking Goan out and running away with him during

the Pizza Pico fight, which you have to imagine partly here.

Biskey is saying, Biskey is not saying this explicitly, but Killua is hearing this and thinking, oh my God, did I fuck up?

If we had stayed there, could could we have saved Kite?

Right.

What will Goan?

Is that what Goan thinks?

Does Goan think I fucked this up for us?

Oh my God.

And then, as if he wasn't worried enough about that already, Biskey says she knows one thing for sure.

Yep.

One day,

and this is, Biskey is rendered in like watercolor, like, or water, or like color pencil, a completely different, high-fidelity, different art style.

One day, you will leave Goan behind to die.

Which I

also need to bring up.

Remember his conversation with Silva right before he left?

Yep.

Where he made the blood pact to never betray your friends.

This is the second.

Oh, go ahead.

So, it's audible shout-out, Silva.

It's just, bro, this is the best fucking TV show.

Yeah, it's all I could think of.

It was like, oh, Killua is stuck between two promises now.

Yeah.

We'll talk about this.

Well, and what's Silva's promise actually about?

It's, oh God.

I need to find the actual doesn't believe he'll keep that promise.

So he thinks he'll break the promise and that will break the episodes.

This becomes explicit in friends.

This becomes explicit in the next set of episodes.

We'll talk a lot more about why that is

in the next set.

But yeah, there is this like horrible...

He'll come back because he's my son is the quote.

I wanted to get it specifically.

That's right.

He'll come back because he's my son.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's this horrible trap that he lays where you've got, you know, this is stuff that's already been on screen screen of Illumi being like, you can't make friends.

You're a killing machine.

That's how he raised you.

Like, you don't have the capacity to feel for someone the way that friends need to feel for each other.

In a way, it like shows that Illumi understands what friends are supposed to be and is just hoping that that's true, that Kilua isn't like, can't be like that.

That's their goal is to make him unable to sustain what it takes to have a real friendship.

Yeah.

And then

to put Kilua through everything that he's been through, and then to have, like, this new

half of the, of the curse of, like, you will leave your friend behind.

You can't do anything about it.

Like, you'll, you will betray him.

And then when you betray him, you have to come home.

And then for Biskey to agree, like, you will betray him.

So you have to change.

In the next episode, we see this, like, becoming this sort of

paralytic that keeps him from acting because he's trying to fight against this thing that, like, Biskey's like, she says, like, uh, let me see.

Uh,

she says,

habits that are burned into your body and soul aren't easy to break, but one thing is for sure, one day you'll leave Gone behind to die.

And so, he's in the middle of his fight with Shoot, trying to, like, break this habit that's burned into his body and soul.

And it, it causes him to not really do very good in this fight because he's like, do I go forward?

Do I go back?

And instead, he just stays there and gets hit.

There is,

I don't want to like just go down like the I'm a therapist rabbit hole here, but there is so much,

just really good stuff here in terms of, and I don't, I don't even know how much of this is intentional on Tagashi's part, but like there's just so many good representations of like.

Obviously, this is like heightened and stylized because it's a shonen anime, but like there's so many realistic representations of like, no, this is how trauma fucking works.

Like the kite fight is another great example of like trauma continues in our brain and continues affecting us because every once in a while it's really fucking right

and that's what makes it so hard to overcome because like it's true in certain situations at certain points in your life whatever lesson that trauma taught you was true because you had to learn it to stay alive or to stay safe right um and like basically unlearning that all these situations that feel like that situation or in kiloa's case no this situation is that situation I just have to learn to do something different.

Yeah, right.

There might be another way this out, a different outcome here than just my survival.

And that's really hard either.

Right, totally.

Right.

Yoshi Hiro, you've done it again.

This is one of those things, you know, like we, I've, I've definitely talked about Hunter Hunter

as like something that deconstructs Shonen tropes.

I know a lot of other people have.

I've also

disagreed with that, not like on the absolute ground level, but that it does.

So one of the things that's interesting about Hunter Hunter is that it's so long and so many things happen and it changes so much over its run that

it is sometimes extremely doing exactly what a shonen would do and sometimes it's swerving in really fascinating ways and sometimes it's doing its whole own thing that isn't that is neither constructing nor deconstructing shonen just being hunter hunter stuff right and And, but this is the part of the show where, to me, the like the

all of those pieces that have been put on the table start to click into place.

Of like, you know, when I described in episode zero, like that Goan is kind of a version of Goku that like gets taken seriously.

The problems of being a Goku type get like put into reality instead of kept in like the realm of like super high drama comic stuff

uh like this is the this is the kilowatt side of that same dynamic where we see characters who exist in like what is it like to really be krillin

not in terms of strength but in terms of like relationship to the main character uh um

yeah

or what is it to be the i mean this is a contemporary character right but the like the emo assassin side character, what is it like to be Sasuke?

What is it like to be

what is it like to be

what is the Riku?

What is it like to be in Kingdom Hearts?

What is it like to be the like the dour the dour side character who like gets to look cool and gets to be disaffected?

Yeah.

But like D?

Where does that come from?

It's Vegeta, right?

Too Vegeta.

It is Vegeta, too.

It's Vegeta.

Well, and I mean, one of the great things about the pairings here, we already, I already talked briefly, I was like, Goan and

Knuckle feel like they, that there's like a, hey, if you get the right experiences, you can grow up to be someone like Knuckle.

Uh, it, in a way, um, shoot is like, if you don't get over your cowardice, you're going to grow up to be like shoot.

It's so good having them fighting each other and like having their own little meltdowns at the same time.

Yes, yes.

But of course, in seeing Kiloa shoot, it's it's seeing Kilua that changes shoot, which is amazing.

right?

And gives him, ironically,

the exact attitude that any normal Shounen character would have.

It's like,

I need to do this fight for real in order to respect my opponent.

It's not about me, it's about them.

And it's like,

it's so funny to have to push a character into that mode in a show like this when that's like where these shows live normally.

Totally.

There's such clever writing in this,

you know, uh, breaking down exactly the kind of curse that Illumi and the Zeldix are working on Killiua.

Because

we had had spelled out to us that there was a

very serious and very consistent thread of abuse from Illumi towards Killiua in the sense of like you're always going to keep pushing people away because that's who you are, you're not capable of making friends.

You know, we saw this right from the end of the the hunter exam.

And what this little wrinkle adds is it ties it into the sort of like broader project of the Zeldic family of assassins, where rather than just saying, oh, Ilumi is a sort of vaguely, broadly abusive towards his younger brother, we can instead say, there is a project, you know, between Silva and between Ilumi and between Kikyo

that is creating Zaldic assassins.

It also presumably happened to Ilumi in some regards too, right?

Right, yeah, right.

And to have that broken down into, like,

here is how don't fight unless you can't win, always run away from an opponent.

I'm going to cause you to undervalue both yourself and your combat abilities.

And getting that to dovetail so well with the broad, relatable push from Ilumi earlier of like, you can't make any friends is so great.

It's one thing to see this kind of abuse being worked through through on just like an interpersonal level, but then as almost like a state construction from the Zoldic family is really special, clear writing.

And it's a special project, but each of the members in the Zoldic family has their own outcome, it seems, in mind for Kiloa, right?

Like Rexikio's outcome and Silva's outcome and Ilumi's outcome the same.

Obviously, I think they all want...

Kiloa to associate with the family and the family business, but I would, even with just what we've seen so far, I think it would be fair to say what Silva wants to happen to Kiloa is different than what Illumi wants to happen to Kiloa in the end.

You know,

their project is towards a different sort of familial like return.

You don't think they're both trying

to come from different angles to push him into being the next Silva?

I don't know that Alumi gives a fuck if he becomes the next Silva.

I think Silva wants him to be the next Silva.

I think Alumi, some of Alumi's stuff is so bitter and it's so like,

I think that Illumi probably has some of his own built-up trauma about not being the perfect son who was going to get to become the next Silva, you know?

Yeah, I mean, like, it's, there's more of that is externalized through Miluki.

Miluki's the other older brother, right?

Yeah.

The one that gets all the really bad writing.

He's the complaining.

He's the complainer.

Yeah.

He's, he's very open about like, I'm an old, I'm an older son.

I should, like,

I have more of a claim to this than Kiloa does why does he get all the attention and like you can extrapolate that there's some level of that happening with Ilumi too but Ilumi hides all that there's definitely a first time like Illumi is meant to be the next Silva until Kiloa comes along yeah and then they go Ilo is supposed to be a very effective attack dog yeah um the first time we see illumi he is physically hiding his own body you know he is he is taking on the persona of somebody else but

there is this way that the thing that Illumi does to Kilo at the end of the hunter exam and the thing that Silva does

during the Zoldic arc, like they are

complementary towards the same goal of like keeping Kiloa around,

having him be under both Illumi and his dad's thumb.

Yeah, it's like there's 360 degrees of possibility.

I think they both want Kiloa within the same 40 degrees, but they might be on the

sides of that.

There is a latitude.

And that's the way familial manipulation often works.

Uh-huh.

So,

and

I think that's why Silva feels different than Alumi feels is because, like, I think Silva's the one in the family that like knows what it's like to be the closest to a real person.

And I think he has this like way, like, like,

the

in terms of in terms of like ability to to

terrorize the outside.

You know what I mean?

Well, we saw all that stuff in the York New City arc, right?

Where like it's it's the difference between when when this the fight with Krolo happens and the way that that stuff shakes out,

contrasting that to like the way Illumi and Hisoka engage with each other is so much more natural, you know, than the sort of like, well,

I guess I did meet you first stuff with Ahsoka and Alumi, you know?

Yeah.

All of that like

tenuous, strange,

like just barely, just barely not hostile, you know?

And just barely even readable as human interaction.

Right, right.

It's such lovely writing.

The scale of this project is wild.

It's crazy.

Yeah.

And, you know, Tagashi and the adaptation team aren't always hitting homers,

but they are

making a very

complicated quilt and are doing a pretty good job.

I think the other thing, just before we move on, two things here.

First, Biskey keeps calling this a curse, and as we see later in the fight with Shoot,

I love that they are blurring.

How real is this?

Because we know that the Zelda family works a particular sort of dark hypnotic magic.

Yeah, introduced way back in like episode 19 or something.

But I mean, was it?

You know?

The concept that it could be.

That it could be.

Yeah.

But it was the concept that it could be.

And, you know, even then, we were like, was Killiua hypnotized or was he just awfully compelled by his abusive family members?

Both of which are real, but there is like a thing going on of like...

And this is part of the power that the Zaldic family wields and knows that they wield.

We see Killiua exercise this power as well.

Of like

you are constantly having to ask your opponent,

whether your opponent, a Zaldic Assassin, is capable of pulling out some strange dark magic.

We knew this before we knew about Nen.

And I love that now we're talking about the curse.

You know,

is this something that is actually inside Kilua's mind in like an active Nen sense?

Or is this the just as real, but sort of existentially different

result of decades of abuse?

Do you have a guess, or do you think it's ambiguous forever?

I think that.

Oh, it's such a good question.

I think that the show gets really different depending on the answer it chooses.

In what way?

I think that if we can say

there is a curse inside Killiwa Zoldic's brain that was placed there, nen-conditioned-like,

by

the Zoldic family, then all we have to do is break it.

And you can do that

materiously.

Oh my God.

You can do that materially.

You break into the Zaldic mansion, you burn the paper.

You do whatever.

Or you get a Zinx or a Ninx or something.

Well, that's the thing that I love about this is we have an example of this.

It's what Prop Du did to Krolo.

And what we've seen is like, all right, well, to do this, you have to have a bunch of friends who are going to go out of their way to do something really hard and expensive and like traverse the world in order to help you, you know, and I think that there is something kind of fun about the

in other words, like so far, what we've seen is I think Takashi has been able to

kind of thread the needle and metaphorize it in a way that's like not

dismissive of the idea that trauma is still trauma or that like, you know, something like this costs in order to be in order to be addressed, you know,

but we'll see.

I think the other thing is,

is Goan just

is Killiua just trading it out for another kind of curse?

You know, we've seen the way that this sort of like strange, smothering kind of love that Goan, that Killiua feels towards Goan, or rather, that Goan is able to exert on him.

I think there's something really odd about, like, it's not quite as straightforward here as break out of the Zaldic way of

and into the light freedom of your love for God.

Yeah, I mean,

we see that Biskey's side is like not a fully freeing version of

no, because the linchpin that she uses on that is, um, you'll leave Dawn behind.

You know, it's, it's just evoking another kind of curse.

Two more things about the Biskey conversation.

The first one, I'm sorry to bring us crashing down into the realm of the normal,

but Biskey has a chart about who can beat who in an end fight, and this is both um implicit in the genre that in a way that anybody who's seen a battle shonen before will understand immediately what this is all about, but also it's great that it's so explicit.

I love it, and it's basically four characters and their possible ranges of power.

And this ends up becoming important for a little bit for uh the fight

with uh with Knuckle.

This is like the baby steps version of the same concept of like character A has this much power, B has this much power, C has this much power.

The idea is basically on his best day, the worst guy has a shot at taking out the best guy on the best guy's worst day.

Which is like just kind of a theme.

That's just this arc, I think, in general.

End of Shounen.

End of Shounen for sure, but like it's something they really

play with by making the ant so overwhelmingly powerful.

Naruto wins because he has a lot of best days and villains have a lot of bad days.

Sure, he has them in his ramen and it makes him happy.

Well, yeah, I power a friendship.

He needs to get his boyfriend back.

The

two things.

One, Biskia is like an advanced power scaler.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

She's got a PhD on it.

And like in a way that's that's like and I say that like as a joke, but not really as a joke, which is which is like uh

it is always less annoying when a power scaler is like, now, first of all, we understand that characters don't have like a

an explicit single power rating.

They have a range and context matters, which is so much less annoying historically to deal with than the power scaler scaler than

right, exactly.

And then flat, whatever.

The second thing that I is that I literally just watched a YouTube short

from Paul Pierce,

the the former.

Where was your first mistake?

Well, I mean, it wasn't, I didn't go out of my way.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't think

that's a YouTube short.

No, you know how I feel about Celtics in general.

But literally, it's him saying, like, is Paul Pierce better than LeBron James?

No.

But on any given day, is Paul Pierce better than LeBron James?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

But on any given day, Paul Pierce can also shit his pants and fake an injury and ride out in a wheelchair.

I know that's that's goat shit for me.

You fake an injury, so you got it, so you can go take a dumpy.

Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.

So, we get this character range.

I really like this.

This is this is this is the like thing that Biskey uses to explain to Kiloa.

You always assume that you're at your worst and that your enemy is your best, and that leaves so much potential on the table.

That is like the long and short of it.

Uh, and I don't think that we said this part after she says that one day you leave Goan Goan behind to die.

She says,

you would run because you think like a loser.

And tomorrow, if you can't defeat shoot, you must stay out of Goan's life.

You think like a loser is brutal.

You think like a loser.

Yeah.

You need to overcome this bad habit right away.

Yeah.

Otherwise, you're going to get Goan killed.

Right.

Exactly.

Yep.

Yeah.

I mean.

Closer to something, I'd say, as a therapist.

Maybe not that harsh, but maybe not.

You're thinking like a loser or not.

Yeah, Yeah, I wouldn't say you're thinking like a loser, but I would say, like, hey, man, you keep doing this.

All this bad stuff is going to keep, like, all these things you hate that you say make you unhappy.

Like, this is where it's coming from.

Would you ever say if you can't win this fight, you can't talk to your best friend ever again?

Oh, yeah, like every day.

And by the way, I can't

because I'm leaving town now.

I'm skipping town immediately.

Because that weird goth lady that hangs around is going to tell us the girl with the hair.

Yeah.

Which, by the way, are curses real?

I don't know, but I've seen Palm.

Yeah, but Palm is.

Something's happening there.

I just finished the Tomi, our Tomi, or our Juji Edo arc over on Shelf by Genre.

And I think Palm is a Junji Ito character who is snuck into Hunter Hunter in a way that's

deeply troubling.

Have you heard our episode talking about Palm?

I did.

Okay, good.

I'm glad that you've had our Palm Palm Delight.

Our Palm reading?

Our Palm.

Yeah.

I don't even know if we see palm.

We just see malevolent Ned.

We see the hair over one of her eyes as she peeks out.

I love her.

Here's

the cat.

It's so good.

It's one of the best images of her.

This is terrifying.

This is monster movie shit.

This is what I mean.

Like, this is literally the panel.

There's a panel in Uzumaki, the one about spirals, where this literal thing happens, except it's a kid who's slowly turning into a slug.

That's exactly how.

Oh god, I remember the

door being pulled open.

Yeah.

Ito would draw her eye wide open, though.

I feel like half-lidded eyes.

He doesn't play with that stuff.

He's like, you gotta see all the white.

They do a little bit of a let's end the episode by getting all four of them together.

They show up in the park.

They do like a split four-shot thing of each of their faces.

And the narrator says, gone and knuckle, killua, and shoot.

Their long-awaited final battle begins.

That's great.

I thought these episodes were so well-paced.

I spent,

I, I, there was not a moment in these four episodes where I felt resentful or unhappy.

I'm glad to hear that.

Have you been feeling resentful and unhappy recently a lot?

No, I just don't.

I don't have a good attention span.

No, my attention span is fine.

I just don't like watching big chunks of episodes in a run.

We talk about this a lot.

I like to sit down and watch one.

And then when my scheduling has been such that I have to watch four back-to-back, my thought is like, no one has ever suffered like I have.

Yeah.

Which is not true.

Is this what happened at the end of Greed Island?

Is this what happened?

No, I just didn't think the end of Greed Island was very good.

Well,

it felt like it was going well up until the last set of episodes.

You showed up and you were like, I'm so upset about Greed Island today.

Maybe I was just feeling, you know, look, do you make a project like this over two years?

I'm just trying to feel it out.

Yeah, I don't know.

Wasn't a big part of that, the undoing, like you being excited about Gone losing a hand and then that being undone.

That's a good idea.

That was a big

one.

Yeah, also, I feel like they tried to spin two really complicated, really interesting plates through a greed island and got to the end and were just like, well, what if we just drop them to the rhythm?

And then maybe people will like that.

I like it.

Speaking of music, episode 90 begins with a phenomenal Hirana drum break.

This is the extremely long drum break from Boys Be Courageous, which we've heard a few times before.

That sounds like the name of a K-pop group.

It does.

It does.

This is also evoking the tiny one-measure drum break we get at the beginning of Biskey's theme.

I think Biskey's theme actually begins with one or two measures of drums, much like this, sort of this.

Do you have it on the button, Keith?

I may have removed Biskey's theme.

Let's see.

Oh, no, I meant this Hirano.

The drum break at the beginning.

We've talked in the past about how well Hirano writes drums, just generally, and opening an episode over this four-way fight with like 25-30 seconds of drums is really, really impressive.

I think what's about to happen is some of the funniest shit in anime.

Yes.

And doubly so because we just got a perfect setup episode of traditional battle anime stuff with space

and

he debuts a ranged attack.

Because the first time I came into this episode, I was like, all right, here we go.

Like, we're going to get Goan has learned like Hame Hame Ha, right?

Or like some sort of key attack in a traditional sense.

And like, he's coming in with like max energy.

You know what I mean?

He's been, he's been healed up.

And this is going to be

exactly.

He had the Senzubine.

He's here.

He's ready to do.

We're going to see.

Does Goan have what it takes to win a fight,

like a one-on-one real fight?

Because

we get

Killow getting the promise from Knuckle that he's going to give it all that he has.

And of course, what I thought that meant was like, make sure when you hit him, you really hit him.

Make sure that you don't.

Goathead noticed that he would announce himself before attacking sometimes, right?

That Knuckle would, and I was like, okay, we're going to get a little, something's going to be a little different here.

My God.

What is absolute.

I'm going to pull the rug out right from

the start here.

They don't even finish the fight on screen.

It's a classic Tagashi fuck you.

Like, they cut out the end of the whole last half of the fight.

I think it's some of the best shit he's done.

Honestly,

I adore it.

The way that they reveal it.

We can get to that in a little bit.

Yeah, I think that, you know,

there are so many vectors of skill on display here between the voice actors and the writers and the people in the writer's room trying to figure out how the hell they're going to adapt Hunter Hunter and Tagashi drawing the thing and the animators and the colorists.

Um but I do think that on a basic level, Togashi's imagination is really something special.

Um the way he will he doesn't just swerve, he swerves in ways that I had not thought were within the realm of this story whatsoever.

Because after a short but interesting, you know, Shonen fight,

a note I wrote down here as it began was, I wonder how they're going to stage this fight.

Because like you asked it, I was like, all right, we're building up to a really big fight.

There's some really nice images of Knuckles' fists bursting through Goan's aura, like hands coming out of a waterfall or whatever.

And then Goan feels a new power coursing through him.

You want to describe how this appears, Austin?

Well, after he gets hit in the face, right?

He breaks, a knuckle breaks through his defenses and slams him with a left hook.

And he goes flying backwards and he goes, ah, you know, a little late, but

I didn't quite put together what he was doing.

But wait a second, I don't get it.

And he looks down at his hand and he summons his nen aura.

And he's like, I feel stronger.

Like there's a new power coursing through me.

That's not what's supposed to happen when I get hit in the face.

And then a hand appears on his shoulder.

It is time you have a crude interest.

A little white mascot, angel, this like little, like, chubby cherubim appears.

This little, like,

a big white head and like red clown cheeks.

Red clown cheeks.

And a digital numeral display on its head that looks kind of like a clock.

Yes.

And it says 210 on it.

And then it ticks up to 231.

And the whole thing grows bigger, and it's still on Goon's shoulder.

Pretty confused, aren't you?

I'm genuinely getting tense thinking about this.

I can feel my shoulders tensing up.

And I charge 10% interest.

That's for every.

And then he waits for it.

10 seconds.

And the second 10 second hits and he goes up again.

Pay me back fast, or you'll go bankrupt.

It's, you know what it sounds like?

It sounds like um

uh it sounds like it, uh, like an arcade cabinet, like, uh, explaining the rules of how to play the game to you.

Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, that's APR, amortizing power redirector.

I alone lose when it reaches the heavens.

Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

That's the mascot.

Amortizing power redirect or APR.

Attacking APR is a waste of time.

He's just here to announce the interest increase.

He's harmless and indestructible, though he can be a bit annoying.

Yeah.

And he just like bounces like a helium balloon relentlessly.

And then Knuckle hits him again and lends him more power.

And Goan is like, wait, it doesn't hurt.

What's going on?

I don't understand.

Goan is not getting it at all.

They don't have banks on Whale Island.

No one ever set up Goan with a little like

child of cowards.

You know what I mean?

He didn't have the college.

Gentrification, even.

Oh, you're having him to do interest now?

Yeah, yeah, no.

he didn't have he didn't have like the home ec class that was going to teach him how to balance a checkbook yeah but he went to catch a big fish school he went to catch a big fish school this is where this is this is where knuckle blows the lid off of what ned is when he says that his he punched him for 180 aura

and you're like for what 180 excuse me yeah well 180 aura why not haven't you noticed that since the fucking beginning we've been talking about this stuff in the sorts of terms that could cash out into particulars.

And

what is it that exists in you?

I mean,

what's Leorio's story?

His fucking best friend couldn't get the treatment he needed because he didn't have the money for it.

Because we live in a fucking world with banks and APR.

What's the thing that's going to be a matter of

shatters his money?

That's right.

That's right.

You didn't think that we were going to bring that shit to Nen?

You thought that Nen was pure and that we weren't going to learn how to tax Nen?

It rolled.

It's so good.

It's such a funny, it's such a funny parody of

there are six Nen types and each one does a different, like, it's so on the nose, and then it's both, it's both a comedic follow-up to all of the particular Nen stuff and all of Wing's lectures on Nen and all of the diagrams and all of that.

And then also it's, we're in the arc about what is human civilization and like what does it mean to develop in over time in history and society?

Yeah, it's so good

and it's the big buff guy who seemed like a himbo

with the math punch still seems like a himbo because he keeps explaining like uh he goes on he I swear to God, he says like 4,000 words on maximum aura output potential and present aura

actual aura output potential.

And then he's like, get it now, fool.

It's so good.

And then Gon says, the line that I really enjoy is when Gon says, I wasn't expecting that kind of attack after he falls over because he's got too much information in his head.

It's cute.

It's good.

It's really funny.

Knuckle just does a PowerPoint here that is functional.

You know,

the joke is that it is

way overcomplicated.

Goan is being surrounded by more and more glowing numbers.

Steam starts coming out of his ears and doesn't stop for about 40 or 50 seconds before he just keels over.

You know, we don't really need to learn anything here other than that, you know, aura can be moved around between people and Knuckle is going to exploit that.

There's not like a secret that we can learn from following this scene.

Other than,

quote, this is a perfect example of how debt could spiral out of control.

I mean, also, like, the explanation

of how you get into debt being so inscrutable is also a great example of how debt can spiral out of control.

A great lesson for children watching Hunter-Hunter.

If Ghon becomes bankrupt, that is to say, if he spends more aura than he has, it's

we put this into numbers once, and now it's all we're talking about.

You know, this seems to be a good thing.

Well,

if he spends above his estimated by knuckle 21,500 aura.

And remember, APR is taking aura at the whole time.

APR will become IRS, individual Ren Suppressor, and will haunt Guy for 30 days

as an evil cat,

blocking out his use of Nen during that

2

right.

Well, and there's two things being echoed here.

The first is

you can give me back the badge when you land a clear hit on me, because the way you pay back Nen is by using it in attacks against Knuckle.

Except, again, we're not playing your little hunter game.

We're playing my hunter game because I have the power here.

And my hunter.

Right.

My, you know, my power means that when you hit me back for 180, who cares?

Because I've already...

I've already taxed you down to, I've already, you know,

insurance, not insurance, you APR'd you down to or up to 500 or 600 or 1,200.

You're not going to keep up.

You can't even touch the principal.

You know what I mean?

Like, you're just hitting the monthly increase, basically.

I love student loans.

I love student loans.

And then the second thing that it feels like it's

an echo of

is the bit where Wing says, and you can't use, you're not allowed to train

until I'm going to tie the thing around your finger that says you're not allowed to use Nen.

And I'll find out, I'll see that you use Nen because the pinky string will have broken.

And we kind of get a follow-up on both of those, except with stakes in a way that's like, hey, listen, like all that stuff that you were talking about before is not real combat.

In real combat, it is not just the thing will show that you use Nen.

I can prevent you from using Nen for 30 days.

Internally enforced Zetsu, externally enforced Zetsu, internally enforced rules, externally enforced rules.

Right, right.

It's what Kite said: it's bad from here on out.

You have to, you know, the person who's stronger dictates what the rules are going to be.

Uh-huh.

What's uh, what are those?

What's one of the major songs from this season called again?

What's the hegemony of

It's the

hegemony of the food chain.

Hegemony of the food chain.

Kingdom of Predators.

Yes, yes, yes.

In the last episode, I talked a bit about how I felt like the show was priming us even more specifically than usual to be like, what's that guy's nen ability going forward with the ants?

And I think it's another really good demonstration of that to have Knuckle reveal his nen ability.

And like you say, Austin, it turns out that this Himbo's weird Nen Nen power is

like

interesting.

It's interesting.

It's a stand is what it is, I should say.

Yes.

People are yelling at me to say that.

It is a stand in multiple ways.

It is very similar to one that we didn't see in part four.

Called The Lock, which works similarly, but

it grows based on someone's guilt, not based on an energy output.

I should say.

And also design-wise, it being a little dude makes it very standy.

I should say that when we were watching JoJo's, I can't, I wish I could remember the line.

I couldn't find it.

But

when we were watching the stuff with Okiyasu, I think it was right, Okiyasu,

Jack says something about, like, if this was in Hunter-Hunter, I think that Togashi would do this.

And have money powers or something.

Explain.

It wasn't exact, but it was very close to what.

Oh, great.

Uh, because you shared it with us over in the chat.

Uh, uh, uh, Dre says, Jack just out here casually predicting the Chimera anarch again.

And I said, Lol, what did they say?

And Keith, you said, talking about how if Togashi wrote the Okiyasu character from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, he'd have a nen power that buries you in money, which is basically what Knuckles' power is.

Yeah, and they share a VO, they share stories of

designs, basically.

Yes, yes.

Um, Yeah, I think the only line here before we move over to Killiwa that I love is, if you just stand there, you'll go bankrupt anyway, which is just great.

Which he then wraps all of this explanation up in like four minutes worth of accumulating interest.

Like, just explaining the power does have to work.

Huge by the end of this, right?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Did we say that his character gets like extremely big as this is going on?

Gigantic, bigger than Goan, bigger than any character on the screen at this point yeah yeah like you know like 12 feet tall and boiling out like a liquid yeah

bigger than i could

i could watch new nen powers

just appear day in day out you know when they when they

when they were making no man's sky they built like a wall of monitors that would just show random procedural planets in their offices so they could check that the procedural algorithm was working correctly.

I just want that in my office of people revealing new nightmarish nen abilities.

You know,

it's such a shame that this is the last nen power we're going to see at the show.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I do feel like we'd be remiss if we did not shout out Austin Walker for one of the posts of all time.

Thank you so much.

This is why I'm here today is that I recut this scene with Scott Steiner's famous math promo.

That's it.

That's the ability.

That's the ability.

That's kind of the ability.

And they're kind of very similar in attitude and characteristics,

except that I think that Knuckle is a is a Knuckle's a good boy.

Knuckle at his heart is like

a good guy.

Knuckle

treats every day of the week, but he doesn't.

That's right.

I don't know that Scott Steiner, I would not vouch for Scott Steiner as a

person.

Yeah.

That's entertaining, but he's very entertaining.

But that's still out there.

You can go find this.

I forget how I forget what I titled it.

I linked it recently, though, didn't I?

I swear he did.

It might be in our group chat.

Someone just listened for it.

Oh, someone did.

Oh, I found it.

I found it.

If you do a search on x.com for Austin underscore Walker, I'd heard a lot about the Chimera

Hunter Hunter, but wow, this scene really took me by surprise.

We both linked it.

It really is the everything app.

It even has this.

It even has this.

It even has this.

Well, speaking of new cool powers,

I know.

She reveals his power, and I have no fucking idea what it is.

I like this.

Oh, yeah, we really don't.

I guess we don't really know the...

Yeah, that makes sense.

We know what it does, sort of.

We know one thing that it does.

And we don't know the name of it.

No, right.

And what we do know is.

And we know the condition.

We know a condition under which it functions, which is interesting.

love getting at this point a whole new color that someone's nen or can be.

Jute clothes like radioactive green.

He looks right out of the fucking Simpsons.

It is the exact Simpsons radioactive color.

Oh, you think it's stinky?

You think he has stinky eyes?

Oh, you think he's stinky?

Do you think pin lines?

He's, he, you know, we've already, we've meant purple poison.

Now we're meeting green poison.

The two types of video games.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Miyazaki is going to introduce Scarlet Rotnen soon.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

No, boy.

Why do we think that he has green nen?

I mean, what's going on here?

Why would you do that?

They've been so careful about the color of Nen and when they deploy it.

You know, first from that kind of like pale gray that then became white as they got better.

We see Goan burning with

golden nen, and that was really significant.

Malevolent purple Nen,

first associated with Kisaka, some red content, overpowered red nen from like Razor.

But here comes Shoot.

I will say, I think it is interesting that Shoot, who is bad at this,

Shoot McMahon, is a man of faint-hearted,

says the narrator.

His character design is really, really interesting.

You know, for someone who is apparently very faint-hearted, the show, because we're going to go on a journey with Shoot, I have to imagine, the show has given him a really interesting-looking character design.

He burns with this green Nen, and then as his powers develop, they are very visually striking.

But yeah, I'm curious if any of you can like pull out a thread of why change the nen color here in this moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He is green, green, bean, jelly man's cousin.

Okay.

Tall cousin, or tall, green, green, jellybean, man cousin.

My genuine, like, only read that I've got on it isn't necessarily thematic or anything.

It's just that green is like the,

oh, is it complimentary when it's across the color wheel from purple?

And purple is the Eloomi color color that we see a lot.

And I just figure, like, if Elumi stuff is going to be happening to Killowa here, they want to make sure that they have something as far away.

But I think.

Oh, so he's got Levelant then.

Yeah, he's got Levelant then.

I see, I see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think it's just because he has a sort of ghosty vibe.

I think it's just sort of creepy and maybe meant to scare Killowa, who's like...

uncommonly susceptible to being scared by something unknown right now.

Also, he invites the viewer to do what,

Jack, you were doing when Knuckle showed up to the second part of the fight, be like, oh, what's their power?

Like, what's his power?

Oh, it's a different color than I've seen before.

Oh, I gotta find out what this is.

Yeah.

So, Shoot, who is a weird-looking guy with a very sharp face and a side ponytail that terminated in kind of quills or spikes, and a big purple robe with a huge collar, but only on about a third of it.

The rest of it has like no collar.

He reveals he has

three floating hands where and they have like these sort of metal clasps around the forearm where it then just sort of terminates and floats.

And then also a kind of spooky lantern.

Mm-hmm.

Cage.

They call it a cage as well.

Sure, yeah.

Also, to be clear, he also has a right arm with a hand still.

Right.

He has

a right arm with a hand.

And then three additional floating hands,

which Kilua checks to see are those illusions?

This is great.

And they're not.

They're not real.

Which means he's probably a manipulator.

Uh-huh.

I don't know why it means that, but I believe Kilua.

Because if he was conjuring them, then they would have

een nentrails.

So what are they?

Where are they from?

They're from his arm, is how I read it.

His left arm

attaches.

He's manipulating

the left arm of his arm.

No, no, I think it's a prosthetic.

Well, it's like with moral how if you were to use nen to look at moral's ability you would see the rabbits but they wouldn't necessarily be connected back to him via a nen trail because he's moral

why do you think that they're a prosthetic and not just his flesh

because um that's how i read the uh

metal cuffs as that they were like fossils almost uh because he has a cuff uh just below his shoulder uh when his left arm is missing right but why all this why do they have to be prosthetic and not flesh and bone made by manipulated his own flesh and bone?

I don't, I mean, the answer to that might be: I'm not thinking broadly enough in terms of net.

We're in a nen world now.

Yeah, I don't.

I don't know the answer to this.

I was just thinking in terms of what I understand a manipulator to do,

it's manipulating thing,

it's controlling things that already exist.

This is the inverse of the great reveal that Karapaka is actually conjuring chains

from nowhere.

Karapaka doesn't actually have any chains.

He has the jewelry that he wears, presumably.

No, those are also conjured, right?

Those are all conjured, yeah.

It's all conjured.

His rings, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

And this leads to some sorry, go ahead, Jack.

Just leads to some lovely fight choreography that we don't really get much of because this fight goes off the rails in a fun way.

Yeah.

But we I can tell that we are going to get some really good striking imagery with Shoot of him launching himself through the air and his hands and the weird cage moving in like an attack formation around him.

It's a really striking piece of character design.

He says at the beginning of the fight, this is partially to Kilo and partially to himself.

I don't like hurting people.

That's why I chose an ability that only activates when I must hurt someone.

To give myself a weapon that only works against those I have no qualms about hurting.

However, you boys have taught me that there are times it becomes necessary to fight as a sign of respect for your opponent.

It feels very reminiscent of Karapika, right?

Yeah, cowardly Karapika.

No!

The ability thing, because

I can only use certain abilities on the spiders is

the gun contract.

That's more what I mean.

Yeah.

Yeah,

it's like if Karapika had been a little more

calm and thoughtful, maybe

he would have used that instead of just the spiders.

You know what I mean?

Where, like, only things I want to hurt, only people I'm willing to truly, only people I'd be willing to kill or something like that.

Right.

More limited.

Because, as always, I think that hangs over everything for Karapika.

Is like, all they got to do is like break up the gang and rename themselves something else.

And that power fucking stops working.

Oh, my God.

Change the conversation.

Maybe it more has to do with Karapaka's understanding of what a spider is.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Well, typically.

I always

use my chains to.

Oh, my God.

The Kilo breaks out his yo-yo's for the second ever time, I think.

It rules.

I love that it looks like his snake arm technique that he used early in some earlier episodes, like not too far back.

I think it was when he was fighting the.

It was when he was fighting that ant.

Oh,

I know what he's talking about.

Yeah, snake arms or whatever.

Yeah, and he, I like that it, it feels like he just adapted that tech, like a Zoldic technique to fit his new fighting style by adding the yo-yos to it.

Yeah.

He put more points in that skill tree is my note.

Yes.

Another character in another anime.

If this is in Naruto, this would be like a side character's whole deal would be like, you know, unlimited yo-yo's perfect defense.

Yeah.

Because that's what he's doing, swinging yo-yos all around, blocking everything.

Yeah.

We have like 15 minutes about how to break through the yo-yo defense.

How's the fight?

Only 15-bee-kind.

Killiwa starts to hear Ilumi's voice in his head.

He hears Illumi say, jump back.

And,

you know,

he's being compelled by Ilumi, either through this real curse or through his,

you know,

it's purely an internal sad brain.

Yeah.

And Kiliuo sort of feels paralyzed in this moment and turns to run, and then hears Illumi again.

That's the way.

Don't fight an enemy you can't defeat.

And then he gets whiskey in his head too, and then he stands his ground instead.

Yeah, with no consequence.

He, in my notes, I wrote, Killo activates game mode in this theme song.

He goes, I have to do this for God.

how's it work out

well turns and immediately goes blind in his left eye um this is visualized

it's worth saying

when when did he actually go when did this actually happen to him

he say more he gets hit in the yeah because he doesn't go blind right away I guess actually sorry so yeah sorry I'm I'm confusing two things because he does see Bisky before the face before he gets hit He doesn't go blind right as when he gets hit, right?

He goes blind 30 seconds later or something like that.

I was confusing a time thing.

So yes, this does happen basically right away.

Yes.

Yeah, he gets hit and then he jumps back.

There's like a couple cuts back and forth to

shoot and then back to Kiloa.

And then all of a sudden he tries to defend and then he realizes, oh, I can't see out of my left eye.

And it cuts

a picture of his face and it's just like TV static covering about a third of his face.

There's something about the way they deploy this that, like, really took me by surprise because he gets hit in the face, and we see his face get like

a blurry, weird effect for a split second.

You know, there's like a

ripple, like a black ripple moves across his face, and then he's like running around and like jumping and staying out of sight.

And like, the left part of his face is in shadow, but you don't get to see straight up what has happened to it.

And he's mostly shot in profile from the right so that you don't get to see what what shoot just did to him and then

turn him into Mr.

Blurry Face.

Fucking turn him into Mr.

Blurry Face.

I think a really fun thing they do here is there's a shot where shoots coming at Kiloa after this happens and the background's just completely.

I don't know if it's intentional to show the like vision loss stuff, but all he can see is shoot.

He can't see the background or anything like that.

Or maybe the viewer can't.

That's really good.

And I really like that.

That's a nice evocation of the way Tagashi will sometimes draw a panel, too, right?

Yeah.

Just like

a hyper-focus on the character and no background.

Yes, this is probably, you know, it is probably going to be revealed that this is Shoot's Nen Power at work.

But I do love that it happened at the moment that Kiliua turned away from Ilumi's

voice in his head.

So we're back on the game,

you know.

But Dre said is there.

Sometimes trauma is right.

Sometimes you should try to dodge the trauma in your head is like, dodge this hit.

And

not dodging it means you lose your left eye

yes or or the other way of thinking about it uh this is punishment from the zaldics right

you know uh there is a physical cost on your body if you disobey us in this way you know if you push against your training we're going to start taking you apart the curse the curse was put on you long ago um

And, you know,

I think that what we're seeing here is Shoot's power, but I love this idea that Killiwa might not know right now.

You know, I mean, he's like, is this a Lumi?

I think,

yeah, I like that.

Okay.

I was going to say, I think it's worse that it's, it's, it makes it worse that it's not the Zoltex actively doing it because it reinforces what they've taught Kilua more.

Right.

Right?

Yeah, right.

Where it's like, if you stray from the path, this is what happens.

We were right.

We told you, don't fight with someone who you're not 100% sure you can beat, and now look at you.

Meanwhile, Shoot is having his own little internal monologue about what's happening.

And from his perspective, he's like, I can tell something's wrong.

Killua has slowed down.

Why didn't he react?

Like I know that he can react.

And he has to put all that stuff out of his mind to be like,

no, I just have to fight.

I can't do, I can't just be worrying about my opponent,

especially from a guy who's been making fun of Knuckle for doing that for a month.

But it's sort of,

it's like for Killua being like, I don't know what's going on I'm having these flashes of Illumi also.

He's thinking of biscuit.

It's making him react slowly.

Whatever that's making him feel

Even Shoot can tell like oh something's like this isn't like really going the way I thought he should be doing better

Then he breaks the rings on the yo-yos and he charges Shoot, you know electricity beginning to crackle screaming I won't run anymore.

We got a a nice mirror here resisting or falling into the urge to run uh uh of shoot's very first appearance being unable to strike at go and kill your in the forest um

he's gonna charge ahead and use the electricity attack and shoot dodges backwards away from it and uh puts distance between them and killwa like locks up and he goes he hears a loom he goes like electric shock?

Yeah.

Before it happens.

Before it happens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I didn't quite follow the overlapping dialogue here.

There's this, you know, he's hearing these internal voices and then having them shut off by other internal voices almost immediately, the lines kind of falling very quickly, one on top of the other.

What's happening here?

I'm not sure I followed it fully.

So Killiwa charges and he's going to use his electricity.

Before he pulls out the actual electricity, Shoot knows that it's about to happen and he jumps back because he's like, oh, electric shocked, scary.

And Kilua is startled by Shoot knowing what he was about to do.

And he freezes up because he's nervous about like, what does it mean that he could tell what I was going to do?

And

his internal monologue is...

is trying to get him to keep charging, keep going and fighting.

But outwardly, he's asking about like trying to get information like he normally would.

Like, why did you know that?

How did you know what I was going to do?

Right.

Right.

His internal monologue, meaning his own voice in his own head saying, go, do it, attack, basically.

The Illumi voice in his head being like, never over pursue.

And then the thing he manages to do is to say out loud, how did you know?

You know,

so he doesn't even know why he's asking it, is what he then thinks internally.

Yeah, he's like, why are you asking that?

I think, I think, because he's that kilowa internal voice is trying to be like, just fight him.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

And then we cut to the NGL, right?

Like, just like super abruptly.

Yeah.

For the first time.

Yeah.

As the heartbeat of the king gets faster and louder.

Yeah, the king's egg sack is shaking like a Pokemon trying not to be caught in a ball, and then the episode ends.

Yes, that is what happens.

Yeah, if you just put this in a little ball, that would kind of stop the whole problem.

Yeah, well, Nintendo might sue.

Oh, you're right.

Damn.

Nintendo.

I don't think Nintendo's lawyers could sue the Hunter Association.

King of the Ants versus the Nintendo lawyers.

Who wins?

It's the Ant King.

I've seen that guy.

In this next episode, we come in on the awful.

God, I just hate their fortress.

It is so tall.

It's like a necrotic hand

exploding out of the ground into the sky.

Giant fingers reaching out.

It's terrible.

And

is it the queen?

Oh, no.

It is the narrator that says, At long last, the time has finally come.

The queen is screaming.

The egg is pulsing.

It's kind of gross.

And the queen's trying to stop the birth.

She's screaming that it's too early.

And this is where we get, we said it earlier: the king's first line, shut up.

He explodes out of his egg sack, like sort of ripping it open.

Uh,

does uh

I have what I does.

Anybody have a description of the king for our first shot of what the king looks like?

The if the purple man from the uh from the artwork that Jack saw many episodes ago,

he is

smaller than you would think.

He is smaller than a lot of other ants.

Yeah, just like when Vegeta said that?

Is that who it was, Keith?

Yeah, yeah.

Vegeta says that.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

He's about the height of Peter.

Even shorter.

He's shorter.

He is the shorter.

He's taller than Peter.

He is a short king.

He's light and dark green, like a watermelon.

Yes.

He is very slight.

Murderous aura.

Murderous purple aura.

He has a human face and human hands.

He has a sort of like bug-like carapace helmet on his head almost.

Yeah, it looks like

what if a turtle shell was the size of a bicycle helmet resting on top of his head and his ears are pulled down like taffy, like looking like

the straps to the helmet.

They are explicitly the way that the Buddha's ears are depicted.

Yeah.

I think a lot about him is meant to evoke the sort of physical, there's a list of like characteristics of

both like there's a there's a list of like the great signs of a of a of a physical signs of a great man and then there's like a list of 80

secondary physical characteristics of the Buddha.

And in a lot of ways

our Ant King is supposed to be a

our Ant King is a little Frieza, a little Sal, and a little Buddha.

I wonder if that if that comparison is ever going to come up again.

Who could say?

His coloration is white, gray, purple, and like a pale green, or is there like a pale green on him?

He's all green.

His arms are purple, but yeah, his body is like light and dark green together.

He has these big purple eyes.

And he has a bizarre prehensile tail that is sort of cylindrical and striped.

Gray and purple striped, and the tip of it is a syringe.

Yeah, it's like a giant hypodermic needle.

His eyes, for what it's worth, right down to the eye, the heavy eyeliner, are exactly Frieza's eyes from Dragon Ball Z.

It's almost the exact shape of Frieza's eyes

and heavy eyeliner.

Comes right out of the womb with eyeliner.

And his tail is, I mean,

there's no getting around it.

He looks like Frieza and Cell at the same time.

He looks like Frieza and Cell at the same time.

Also, there's no getting around it.

If you are listening to us talk about this,

this is not the experience of meeting the king.

The experience of meeting the king is

rapid violence,

heart palpitations,

yelling, killing.

You can't even get a good look at him because every time that we cut to him, he's about to kill someone else.

Yeah.

Including characters who we've come to kind of like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

His first words to any of the other ants are demanding that they give him a feast while the queen is laying behind him, her organs spilled all over the place, twitching, obviously dying.

He also is like, this place looks like shit.

He says, this place is extremely filthy as he looks back at the queen.

He calls out their poop fortress.

Yeah.

This happens so suddenly after all this buildup to because, you know, the other thing that we're having is a shock and confusion and disappointment on the faces of the squadron leaders.

Far from the feeling when the royal guards were born, quote-unquote, properly, when there was that, like, that sudden burning of like loyalty and love and terror all at once, you get this, this, this look on Colt and on some of the other squadron leaders' faces of like, is this it?

Is this is this the king?

And, you know, this happens in the first,

you know, 80 seconds of episode 91.

It just begins.

It's so well-paced to just, you know, wrong foot the viewer with the king's birth immediately.

No build-up.

Who wants to talk about Peggy?

Peggy runs down.

The other squadron leaders are here already.

Peggy begins running down the hallway late to this, to the king's arrival,

carrying a book, the way he always is,

you know, running out of breath.

And he's like, Your Majesty, this is terrible.

Her organs have been severely damaged.

He stops, like, I don't know,

let's say 15, 20 feet from her body.

The king is just in front of her body, and then there's kind of like empty space between the two of them.

And he starts moving towards her, dropping the book to the ground so that he can go attend to her.

We get, what's the chameleon ant's name?

Meleorion.

Yeah, Melorion looks as the book falls down, and before he can look back up, the king has decapitated Peggy in a single stroke of the syringe tail.

Unbelievable shot of this.

I just love this.

It rolls.

And I also love the heavy use of the tail in these episodes.

Like that

the world isn't fit for him to even interact with it directly.

The tail is sort of like a kingly medium between him and the world.

It's so good.

We'll talk about it later when he climbs the tower.

It's one of my favorite things in the whole show.

His tail is also constantly like

flicking and whipping around him.

Yeah, like an angry cat.

I was going to say he's an evil cat.

Yeah.

And he is so still,

like Austin said, we actually don't see a lot of him.

You know, we're usually hyper close on his face or his tail or the wreckage.

Yeah.

But like when he is standing there in a mid shot or whatever his but he often has his arms folded across his body but his tail is just whipping around above his head or you know also very freezer

really in a way even more so than sell who the tail is very sell except instead sell you know famously has a tail that swallows things right that expands to eat things and consume them um whereas this seems like a tail that's meant to stab and slash and inject uh in terms of its the the kind of capper design of it um uh which immediately becomes a focal point of a thing he makes cult do sylvie

can you describe god damn this

because you were the one who brought this up like me earlier so i'm passing the ball to you

the

there is a moment where uh the camera i think it starts with the camera just focusing on the tail, right, with the blood on it.

It's on the king, and he pulls it into frame.

Yeah, which

next to his head.

Yeah.

Wow.

And he looks at Colt and he's like, clean it.

And then the turtle man is like, oh, well, I just so happen to have my handkerchief here.

Head cut off immediately.

Immediately.

It's like, no.

I told you to clean it.

Yeah.

And by clean it, he means clean the blood from Peggy off this and now the turtle guy.

You're two buds, by the way, right?

Like Colt, Colt, and Peggy are like the two

Colt, Peggy, Turtle, and Turtle.

They're the three closest of any three squad leaders.

Yes.

And yeah, come clean it.

It is

normal.

Sorry, it's so normal.

That's what I meant to say.

Right.

Yeah.

It's so normal.

Zero handy vibes to it.

The psychosexual stuff happening here.

I mean, we've already gotten the prince has decided it is time for his own birth

and then attacking of the mother.

And, you know, we're already filled with all sorts of stuff happening there.

And then, yeah, the first sort of show of authority, not authority over life and death, but authority over what you do with your life is to make cult our die-hard loyal, you know, in it from day one,

is to make him kneel and clean his bloody tail.

This, like, you know, it is an undeniably phallic symbol.

It is meant to, to, it is, it is in a long line of phallic symbols meant to suggest certain sorts of masculinity.

Uh, and, and then, and then the insult to injury.

Insult to injury, what's he do after, after

he picks up Peggy's foot off the ground and starts eating it.

And he spits it out.

He's like, this is disgusting.

Fucking rules.

I like

they're cooking.

I know he ate it raw.

He ate it raw.

But the animation team, they're cooking.

Right, yeah.

Uh-huh.

It's amazing how when Pito showed up as a viewer, the horror was like the magnificence of the Chimera Ant project of like, you know, here comes a royal guard.

We're in real trouble because the Chimera Ants are unstoppable and dangerous and precise and terrifying.

And all I could think when the king showed up, which is all that the squadron leaders are thinking, are this is wrong.

This has gone wrong somehow.

You know, there is something, this was not supposed to be how it, you know, this was not how it was supposed to work.

However, at that point, the three royal guards show up and they say, the three of us will be honored to be your devoted servants, says Yupi, Pito, and Poof.

And this is where the split is.

This has got to be, you know, I can't believe believe I didn't see this coming.

We saw a diagram of it, didn't we?

Yeah, we had a diagram of it.

We saw this.

We told exactly how this would happen.

Well, no, because the diagram is importantly distinct in one key area.

Is it the king?

The king goes off and the queen, the queen survives, and

the other chimera ants.

The queen keeps making kings.

Right.

Right?

Yeah.

Or does the

king, the king goes and takes a new...

Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

Yeah.

The queen keeps producing queens.

and then the king goes out to go make a new queen.

To make a new queen, and so on in perpetuity in this like incredible, geometrical, pure, fascistic diagram of the perfect society, right?

Here comes the king a month too early.

And the first thing he does is

it's not killing the queen.

That's not what's that's not what's happened.

What's happened?

Leaves.

He's taken away her ability to have

birth.

That's what we're told.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Even if she lives, she would not be able to have any more children.

It's like explicitly said during the 3-3 season.

I believe to remember when we earlier got like lore expedition dumps about the Chimera ants, did they?

I feel like I remember them explicitly talking about how queens can

give birth to multiple kings.

Yeah, he just ruined it.

for her.

He ruined it.

He made it so that that doesn't work anymore, which is fascinating, partly because it completely changes what we thought the stakes were, right?

Because now the stakes aren't.

Can he produce more Chimera ants?

Wasn't this whole thing about how Chimera ants were going to spread to take over the entire world?

He can make a queen.

And also, well, it makes queen.

Well, then he's going to have to do that.

He's going to have to do that right the second.

He could.

But he could.

And then

they also say that the officers and squadron leaders will now go out and try to become their own queen's gone and make their own.

They're going to try to start breeding.

This is all new territory, right?

This is all like, wait, is this a thing that we can do?

Have we seen any evidence of that yet?

That's fascinating, right?

Yeah.

The

moral is like, is that even possible?

And Nova's like, yes, it's possible.

And then add to that, when you've now undercut the clear exponential growth story that you were telling, does that necessitate a change from the governmental public response to what's happening here?

Because it's not the same, the same thing isn't happening anymore.

And so there's all sorts of questions that get raised around what are the stakes and what, how are we supposed to respond to this thing now that everything's changed?

It doesn't happen yet, but the queen very graciously gifts us some new stakes.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah, the queen, as she's dying, tells Colt that the king has the potential to take over the world.

Oh, yes, she does.

Because

as she is fading, the queen is only thinking of her son.

You know, how is he?

How was the birth?

Yes.

She has no regrets.

Yes, and Colt says, well, she's going out to, you know, get

herbs.

Herbs to heal her.

Oh, this is the best.

I love this.

The octopus guy looks so sad when

The Chimera and Doctor emerges for the first time.

Of course the Chimera ants had a doctor.

I guess I thought it would be Peggy, but no, Peggy is like a sort of was, sorry, was sort of like an administrative person.

The doctor is an octopus sailor.

I've never

regretted.

I've never regretted the gorilla screenshot, but in this moment, I felt like I missed an opportunity seeing the octopus next to the surgeon.

I posted a screenshot of it in the chat.

And I really dislike

the first time in a long time there's been a real contender for an alternative screenshot.

I'm so glad you said that because I was also thinking, you know, this would have been the smarter one.

The one I would have thought is the shot we see later of the Chimera Ant Queen on the like.

Tarpaulin on the floor, surrounded by a bunch of doctors, medical equipment, and an octopus.

Let's save the octopus for when that stuff comes up.

Yeah, we're jumping a little.

The royal guards and the king

fuck off to the roof.

Oh, yeah.

Their leaving line from Pito is, now that the king has been born, she doesn't matter very much to us.

We don't need that matter anymore.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That thing is like very crucial.

It's both.

It says in the subtext, it says

that thing and then the dub she she says she doesn't matter to us anymore.

So they do it.

They do it both ways.

That happens a lot, actually.

There's like

specifically differences

calling people it in

the sub

text versus the actual subtitles for the dub, which sometimes

the

dehumanization

is like the really important part of Pito's line there.

Reducing the queen that

theoretically she was serving up or they were serving up until recently

into nothing more than garbage

truly just doesn't care yeah yeah no and then colt says they may have the power we need and then runs away i think it's they they show us obviously but it's pretty clear right from the start that he's gonna go try and get help from the hunters

it's great the the the speed with which this maneuver starts happening uh you know the the the power structure being shaken up and now can we get the ants and the hunters working together it's executed so briskly uh that i was really impressed

uh but yes you were saying keith the uh the royal guards and the king have left um where do they go they go to the roof to have a feast they've got food ready for the king and he's and then he's like uh like well the fastest way to will go will be will be to go through this fucking wall then he blows a hole in the wall

sticks his tail into the rock of the mountain or i guess the hardened shit of the mountain and then just effortlessly flicks himself suspends himself from the tail and then flicks himself like a cannon up to the top of the tower arms crossed the whole arms crossed board

over it

put the camera ant king in fortnight

sure

yeah please oh yeah they got frieza right that's the same that's the same frieza they got cell they got cell they got trunks they got like everybody now

I want Leorio in there.

God.

I want to see Leorio doing the dances.

And doing the

Leorio's run.

You know what I mean?

Oh, yeah.

Big Goofy running around.

That's Leorio's NBA nickname, Big Goofy.

Oh, my God.

Poof pulls out his wings to go fly to the top with the king.

All I wrote down with the wing reveal was just

capitalized each word.

His name is Poof.

Just cannot emphasize enough.

His name is Poof.

The like heart,

they look like monarch butterfly wings, but there's like hearts along the

end of them.

It is the rainbow.

We also get his theme in the palace

Lakramosa.

Oh, the violin.

Lamatosa.

That's what it is.

Yes, he's playing for the king.

As as the king is uh so good.

Um, I just love that.

Oh, it's beautiful.

And cyogenic.

Like, literally, what you're saying is he's

there playing for the king while he eats his meatballs.

Yes.

Yupie also sprouts wings.

We learned that Yupi can change his body.

He's like, oh, flying looks fun.

He pulls out, he like grows some wings out of his back, and then immediately

crashes, crashes into the side of the fortress.

He goes like, I gotta practice.

And then you see him practicing when the king's eating later.

Yeah, yeah, you see him practicing.

He's like flying around in the background.

And then it becomes really important that he can fly because there's two with wings and two without wings and they go off to find their own place to live.

Go ahead.

I just wanted to point out some really good animation stuff with Yupi's transformation before we got away from it.

Because it's all like, he's super muscle man, right?

And this has this very gross

body hoarder transformation that happens.

I noted that there's a frame where it literally looks like two fists punching out of his back

before

they burst out into wings.

And I just think it's like, I like that each of the guards has a distinct

way of moving through the world.

Poofs is very, you know, flamboyant is the word I'll use.

Flying.

And then

UP's is very just like force of will.

Like, I see a thing, I'm going to do that.

I'm going to be that.

And then we get more of Pito later, but I won't step on that.

Yeah, they show that with Yupi again when they land at the farm and the king won't eat the food that he's gathered.

But then you see Yuppie in the background eating it instead.

Yeah.

I'll eat that if you're not if you're not gonna have it.

It's like all impulse.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're great.

It's really interesting that the three royal gods

have very transparent, sort of crackling personalities.

Poop's flamboyant, sort of like Bishonen, beauty, Pito's,

like

violent, exploratory delight,

and then UP's, like, wow, like, like Sylvie said, you know, I can like, I can force out a personality, I can force out physicality from my, from my own body, and then the king is kind of just like a black mirror of violence, you know, the king is just like, I'm, I'm the king, you know?

I'm the king.

It's as though

the personality is offset through the

through the royal gods.

He has his first smile.

Do you want to talk about what causes him to smile?

Really quick, just on the different personalities of these folks.

The thing that I caught here, which, again, I know that y'all are going to probably watch some cell stuff at some point, but there's so much cell stuff.

And I don't know what you're going to watch.

But for context, Jack, the cell saga of DBZ begins with the arrival of these androids who are here to like take over the world and kill Goku and like do bad shit.

And eventually it spins off into, oh my god, there's this biological android that's really a problem

that can evolve and change and absorb people and take their powers, right?

And there is a sort of core set, there's five androids, but there's three core ones by the kind of like midpoint of this arc.

And they actually map kind of nicely onto the three.

uh the three royal guards except they are not in in dbz they are they are explicitly in a hostile relationship towards Cell.

And here, it is like

this

really

inverted relationship where it's like, oh,

let's play out the game where

instead of being at war with each other, there was an explicit alignment of them.

What's that do?

Oh, and I'll say this.

What Cell is, is basically what if you made a robot that was made of rare humans.

Right.

Okay.

Sure.

Yeah, selling of rare humans.

He's explicitly a designed being that's like the genes of all the most powerful people on the like it literally like, yeah, there is a lot of, I am very excited for y'all to watch some sells.

Yeah, I don't want to ruin anything.

Yeah.

Because I don't know what episodes you're going to do, but it's the funny moments that come from that.

Yes.

Yes.

Um, yeah, so the king does not care for this food.

He has a taste for rares.

He doesn't even know what they are yet.

No, he doesn't know what they are, but he's like, I sort of craved that food from my memory.

Yeah, whatever I was having while I was in the sack.

No, no experience of like

gratefulness for being fed, for being nurtured by the ants.

It's just like, I had that and I want more of it.

He craves the satisfaction of what he now knows are rare humans.

He tested or he tasted while he was in the queen's egg.

I wish to feast upon one of them.

It is a desire that consumes me.

It's almost like this is a show about obsession or something.

It's weird.

You guys know what a hunter is, by the way?

Anybody inform me?

At this point, Colt is seen flying towards the headquarters of the Hunter Association, which is a building with the giant.

We've talked about it in the past, but we haven't probably talked about it for a while.

The Hunters have a big logo that is sort of like a double-crossed X almost.

Is that a way to describe it?

Actually, I think Moral and Nova are just hanging out in the mountains of the NGL watching still.

Oh, right.

We see the building go back to the back.

Yeah, they go back to the building later.

Maybe they teleport, I guess.

What I liked with the shot of Colt flying is how much Colt's design directly evokes the other royal guards now.

He does look a lot like the king, too.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And like, there's a real like

the shitty older, the king, even though it is younger, but but like the shitty older sibling who doesn't appreciate the family and then cults like i need to take care of mom yeah like a lot of weird family stuff huh yeah

a lot of weird family stuff um yeah he he he flies up waving a white flag and um surrenders he he offers a complete surrender on behalf of the uh you know non-king non-royal guard chimera ants on the condition that the hunter organization brings to bear their knowledge of biology to

save the life of the queen.

And again,

he restates immediately she is no longer capable of giving birth, recognizing that that would be a make-or-break.

If she could still give birth, they're never going to agree to this.

Right.

You know?

Right.

He calls the king and the royal guards in the

sub-text,

he calls them devils.

In the dub, he calls them evil.

Yeah, he says,

he also says later in the sub, he says, the king is, they all are evil.

And there's this, just this immense moment of like sharp shock from Morrell and Nove.

You know, if during the king's birth, we were so caught up in the violence and the sort of terror of the moment for it to really sink in, seeing the look on Morel and Nov's faces when they realize, you know, sort of what has occurred here is the sort of first big reverberation of that.

And I think to their credit, they don't kill Colt.

You know, they have,

we had some talk about wanting to treat the ants as humanely as possible, says the government, and I didn't, I didn't believe them.

And then we had Natero saying, I want to try and see if we can find a non-violent solution to this shortly before tearing apart, you know, 400 ants with his bare hands.

But in this moment of cult waving a white flag, and we know that there's been some rumblings about this because knuckle is talking about you know we i i want to be able to talk to them

you get the impression that off screen there has been some sort of a conversation about what happens if we parley you know if a parley is offered to us what do we do well also it restates it or makes you then reconsider something which is like what if netaro is saying i want to do this in a non-violent way and then the non-violent way is trap hundreds of them in a room and kill them like what if that is non-violent for the hundred like what if the alternative

right what if that is as quote unquote humane as possible because the more violent way would be let's just call all 500 hunters here and invade right right um we go back you know i just watched all these episodes in a row to catch up again and i was really struck by the initial conversation between quote the world leaders and netarow i swear something else there's a yeah i'd forgotten about the g7 lunch the g7 lunch yeah with like the red tablecloth And

they call Netaro and Netaro recognizes it as like a trap that they're like going to put it all on the fucking hunters and

whatever the blowback is from that, that goes to the hunters instead of the World Association.

So that, for instance, let's say they had to invade and

all of the citizens of the NGL got caught up in a,

you know, in crossfire between.

That's a war with the Hunters.

Right, exactly.

That's not a war with the world government.

Exactly.

And

the other side of this that is equally startling is

despite recognizing that that's the reality, Metau accepts that

with no hesitation.

He just goes like, well, that's the way it is.

That's the way it is.

Like, that's how we get to go to any of these countries.

This is the

one who's got to figure this out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But, you know,

I had wondered

why they didn't just shoot Cult out of the sky.

Well, he's got a white flag.

He got a white flag.

It's kind of curious.

The hunters are always fascinated by some weird wrinkle or twist.

And yeah, I think that, you know, I think that to your point, Austin, maybe their non-violent solution is Natero just wipes them out one by one inside their portal test chamber.

But I do think that what we are seeing is the output of an off-screen conversation, maybe.

Of like, you know, is there an outcome here where we start talking?

What would that look like?

Meanwhile, the king has landed in a field.

He dive bombs into

a farm.

Oh, they're flying.

The king flies by

the, it's so good.

That's great.

He flies in a really wild way.

He wraps his tail around Poof's legs and it's sort of suspended.

He has his arms folded in front of him.

Pito is flying behind, clinging onto Yupi's

heels.

I love this image.

This image is so good.

Just

the way this character art is drawn differently, Pito kind of having to cling on with their hands and the king just casually hanging on with his tail.

He lands and immediately decapitates two farmers

eating it and eating them and saying, awful.

That one was a dud.

At which Peter points out that the tastiest part of the human is the brain.

Luckily there's one human brain left here.

In the form of a small child who is looking terrified yeah and the king says like this and strikes off screen and pito says exactly yeah uh and of course this is also not a rare uh this is just a an innocent child that the king has taken out but then the king turns and strikes pito i think with his tail there's a second piece of advice that pito has they try to tell the king like there's a way you can identify the rares

And this is insulin.

The brain tip was good.

They were right.

The brain is the tastiest part it's still not worth eating and then pito's like well if we want to find rares i'll tell you how to find them and the king strikes that with his tail the way he has four or five times now uh

and the blow that is intended to kill yes um but does not kill pito in fact barely you know pito sort of staggers back and is like i'm sorry my king yeah a little bloodied seriously wounded which is interesting right because would that have been the case if the king got another month in the chamber?

Yeah, no, I don't think so.

Yeah.

And

the idea, basically, the king is like, of course I fucking know how to focus my aura in my eyes so that I can see the aura gather around a person.

Which I know explicitly is how you can tell how rare a human is.

I'm not a fucking idiot.

But I didn't know the part about where their brains were delicious.

Right, because

I've only had digested food, you know, mediated through the egg sack.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

The king is also very interested in the moment between knowing whether or not the person is a rat.

Yeah.

You know, in the same way that he's a bad person.

He loves to pull the gotcha lever.

He loves to pull the gotcha level of death.

It's a really good moment, the moment of respect that the king has for Pito when they don't die from the strike.

He describes them as quite strong.

Yes, it's really good.

And that makes him smile.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Nice.

Back at the

Citadel, the Ant Citadel, there's this amazing, like, long moment of silence, and then it's clear that one of the ants, possibly Bihorn, I don't remember.

I think it's Bihorn, basically is like, well, that was weird, wasn't it?

Don't feel good about this.

They brought Small Bear back in a picture.

They brought Small Bear back in a big way.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah.

Yeah, they did.

He's just chilling there.

Sipping his sips.

Yeah,

we ate Koala.

I can't believe he ate another soldier ant.

And Small Bear says, that's not quite right.

The king, well, he seems completely different from us.

We're like other creatures to him, nothing more than food.

I love that there is this weird sort of shivery nervous buildup to saying this where

they're like, well, clearly the king is a monster and doesn't make us feel good.

But we thought that we'd feel great about the king because he's the boss of the Chimera ants.

So there's like a real sort of standoff moment before one of them decides to say,

I don't like this.

Jesus came back, but he cut someone's head off immediately.

Like, literally, right?

Like, he showed up with a claymore instead of absolution.

I mean, like, truly again, literally looking like the Buddha.

Like,

truly,

the Messiah figure.

Yeah.

Like, I'm like, I say it funny, but I mean it.

Yeah, there would be, there'd be a, there'd be a few hours of, like, awkward silence and of, like, isn't it great that Jesus is back?

And then someone would say, I didn't think he'd be killing.

And then they'd go, I didn't marry killing.

You mean comedically killing?

No.

No.

His material could use some work, actually.

I love this conversation that they have, Beehorn and Small Bear, and...

Who else is there?

Is Melioron there?

Well, eventually, like, Leol shows up.

Yeah, Leol leol and hoggy show they're well they're having this like leol is hoggy they have this like

totally normal seeming conversation about the events that they witness which is like this very interesting veneer over

legend chimera well it's this is like explainable chimera ant behavior this was what they're about to do would have been true about chimera ants if they looked like ants if they had no human in them at all if they were just bugs out there eating grasshoppers and stuff and like trying to get trying to turn from an ant into a grasshopper, they would still be like, well, we should all fucking go out on our own and become our own kings.

But they have this whole sort of like

weight of society that is a dressing on top of like explainable, already explained chimera ant biological behavior.

Which is, it's saying a lot.

It's saying a lot of stuff.

Sure.

Okay, there was a time in history where

we had a queen.

And that queen, we were really sure that's the way society was supposed to be.

Now, that queen seems like she can't reproduce the society that she used to uphold anymore.

So now, without a,

without any sort of nobility forcing a structure, what should we do?

I know.

We should all become kings.

Individuality is fucking here, buddy.

We don't need a neoliberal state.

We can just jump straight to a sort of dog-eat-dog libertarian.

Like a petty kingdom, libertarianism, 100%.

Doggy dog.

Now you're talking Chimerians.

Now we're talking Chimerians.

Exactly.

It's so funny that I had not...

I had not...

We'll talk more about what I'm about to say in the future, because it's about to get even worse.

I had not for one second thought multiple kings.

I had thought the king is going to come and it's going to be a problem.

I had not thought, oh, oh, God, now there's going to be like a nate, like, like a plurality of nations.

Discovered their mindset.

And they just fall apart immediately.

There's this amazing shot later of like thousands of ants pouring out of the Chimera ant headquarters.

Yeah, and Agira is one of the big believers in let's all go be the king.

I don't see why we shouldn't all try and become a king.

And Colts figured this out immediately without even being there.

Right, yes.

Colt's very smart.

Yeah.

For a three-year-old boy, Colt is very smart.

This is at least eight.

Yeah, he was.

It's intercut so nicely.

You know, we're seeing this happen.

And then Colt, who is not here and didn't see this, is talking to the hunters, saying, if the queen dies, the squad leaders will be unleashed.

They'll imitate the king, spreading their seed and building their own kingdoms, destroying ecosystems all around the world.

and yeah this is when we have the can chimera ants uh mate with females from other species to which everyone's like yeah uh-huh but only if the queen is dead right right yeah yes otherwise they wouldn't try to do that they'd stay loyal to the queen uh which that's what i i love about um

the wrinkle that haggie and zazan add by being like we should just go out and be our own kings because they're presented as like a chaotic offshoot of dangerous ants who are going to go off and do this very awful thing, which is like sort of true.

But they're the ones who are actually instinctively following the thing that they would could predict that a Chimera ant would try and do.

And it's Beehorn, Colt, Small Bear, who are like loyal to the queen even as she's there dying.

Like they're the ones who are going against their nature to

be...

They're the actual individuals of the group who are...

And the king.

And also the one who is doing something surprising.

Yes, right?

Yeah, and the king, yes.

Because presumably the queen once had a king

of her own, previous, like not had as a bird, but mated with a previous king to begin with, right?

Presumably.

Or is the child of a queen and a king?

Right, exactly.

And so that system seems like that has worked historically,

but they were tiny little baby ants.

And then with this one big ant, something is different about this king.

Well, once again, we're in the Crichton Wyndham techno thriller space of this would have been fine, but for that one little thing, you know, the domino falls, uh, and now everything is, you know, the, the, the, um,

the electric fences aren't working in Jurassic Park because Nedri was doing X, you know, and all of this can be traced back to something I love about, yeah, like, like, like, Keith has really been digging into in terms of like how the ants would have behaved.

You know, there is a version of this that looks very different if they don't settle in the NGL, or if the queen is found earlier, or, you know, etc., etc., if they don't discover the rares, you know?

Um,

uh, let's see.

Morel and Nove take Colt to Natero, and they are like, Look, he might not let you live.

To which Colt says, Okay, it's worth a shot.

Yeah,

and that this works for them.

That's like a good answer.

Remember what was happening two episodes ago?

Because

I'd forgotten in the midst of all this.

You mean one episode ago?

One episode ago.

Yeah.

19 minutes of television ago.

Yeah.

Colton.

Sorry.

Nova and Morel say, I completely forgot.

Today's the day of the apprentices battle.

And then a truck approaches the border checkpoint.

And out of the truck come Knuckle, shoot,

gone with an evil cat clinging onto his shoulder.

So good.

And Killiwa.

We have been hunter-exammed once again.

I think it's even better than when the hunter exams are.

This is why they do a double because they remind us of the bet between

Morrel and Nove where Moral says, I bet a million, Jenny, that it'll be our apprentices to show up.

And Nove says, I bet five million that all five of them will show up.

I really when you see the third set of boots show up, you're like, it is going to be all five, but it's not.

It's just, it's just, it's just a knuckle and shoot and go and kill a word, just seeing them off at the border.

Palm's not there.

Uh, moral wins.

I like it for a lot, a couple of reasons.

One, for the one you just laid out, and also because it's nice to characterize Nove as the one who's kind of the optimist, even though he doesn't really seem like it.

I think that's like a nice little detail.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love how casually the like they don't draw attention to the little

evil cat fox.

Yeah, IRS.

Thank you.

Of course.

How could I forget?

They don't explicitly draw attention to it until after the conversation, really.

It's just like the viewer understands, oh, gone.

Gone lost.

And then gone breaks down into tears and it's very effective.

He says, I just never thought that being weak and powerless could be so frustrating.

What a weird thought.

What a weird idea.

He's never been, he's never been what he feels is weak.

Yeah.

I was expecting them to do this, and they might in the next episodes, though.

I don't think they will.

I was expecting them to do the hunter exam thing of like flashing back to show how it went down.

And I was really impressed with the restraint that they don't do that in these episodes.

We get one tiny flashback as we we see Goan launch Jajang Ken while in debt, so it does, it does nothing.

And we get, I think, a very brief shot of Killiwa's face as he loses, but we don't really, it's never broken down to us how the fights are lost, because it's been ceded to us the how they were going to lose.

You know, we could see the cracks first in the the sort of like um more specific internal problems that they were having, you know, Goan's uh debt and Killiwa's fear of

his own ability and his own ability to fight.

But also more broadly, Bisky has been telling us for episodes and episodes now that they are inexperienced and they're probably going to lose.

Yeah.

And they do.

The best she ever says is, I don't know how this is going to go.

Yeah.

And she never watched one of those fights, so she never really even saw what Knuckle or Shoe could do.

I don't think that, I think she is good enough at this that she didn't really need to.

But she also had the knowledge of like it was Netaru who laid out the time frame, and he is particularly mean about that, right?

And it's more of a Nov's pupils.

Right.

So, like, your mind's not.

I think a different person might have been interested in the fights, whether or not she needed to see them.

Yes, but that's not Bisky.

No.

Bisky is the one who sits there.

She's present, but she's reading her Boys Magazine.

Yeah.

They're headed back with the...

Just really quick.

Oh, sure.

Gone is crying.

Yeah.

And Killer is

all.

Silently.

Silently.

In the back.

Watching.

Yes.

Oh, God.

I wish I could say the name of a video title that I once saw that I never forgot to watch the video because I've seen the show.

Can you send it to us?

Yeah, I'll send it here.

We can.

It was someone who's about the dog that kills Killua.

It was

called

Canine Weak Boy Cries Gay Tears is the name of the video.

Just to get it verbatim,

it wasn't a video, it was a

post.

No, no, it's an actual, it was a compilation post on a compilation video.

RPG Make a game.

Wow.

Yeah, that's a banger.

That's a banger.

We'll bring those up later, I suppose.

Yeah, yeah, that'll come up.

As Kilua cries, he says to himself, I'm going to protect Goan during the 30 days that he can't use Nen, and after that, we will go on our separate ways.

He is doing the, I just can't be in a relationship with you right now.

I need to work on myself.

I've been told by my teacher that I need to work on myself.

Yeah, it's not quite as emotionally intelligent as you make it sound, Jack.

Yes, that's true.

Off he goes.

Inside the Hunter Headquarters, which is a huge, slightly faded tower block, you know, the vibes of this, it's not quite pristine.

It's also not got that

monolithic majesty of something like the Jedi Temple.

It's a little office building.

It's an absolutely available.

It's got a slightly interesting design.

There's like some.

It's not just a big skyscraper.

There's like some stuff going on, but it's pretty plain Mm-hmm By the time we come in the the meeting between cult and a tero has happened It's gone well.

I think it was wise.

We didn't need to see that.

It would have been interesting television, but you know

we can we can we can get there.

He said all the same stuff that he said before and nettero said all right.

Yeah

Yeah, Notero starts calling in favors with doctors and organ creation specialists and then cuts his ponytail off donning his lucky shirt.

Really good.

His lucky shirt's t-shirt.

About Netaro's English VA and you saying someone, I think it was Jack you just mentioned it at this building's unlike the Jedi Enclave.

His voice delivery is so yoded out in these episodes.

Yeah.

English Notero.

Interesting.

I like English Notero.

English Merrowan is also really good.

Yes.

Very similar.

Not every character is doing.

We had not said that name.

We've not said his name yet.

His name is going to show up in the middle of the day.

I was shocked that they were revealed in this i thought that there was like 10 more episodes before they said i also thought that it was like a whispered in the ear yeah me too i don't know why i thought that maybe it's because

maybe it's because it's a while before we hear it again

um

i like to imagine being a highly paid um trauma surgeon inside the hunter-hunter world at this point because you get a telephone call

and it's from chairman natera

we we skipped one really important part of the cult Yeah, we did.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

Of cult and netero and netero cutting off.

So he cuts off the hair.

And then what's the matter?

What's on this on his second set of athleisure wear?

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

It's his lucky alpha that he only wears when he fights for real.

And then expresses his nen.

Yes.

Oh, my God.

The look of his wren is unbelievable.

It's unbelievable.

It is so dense.

Yes.

It looks thicker as a substance than anyone else's.

It is like a a combination.

It's like boiling and rolling.

It's like a combination of the times when Ghon and Kilua have like smoothed out their nen.

There was a time in

the

there was a time when he's fighting Razor where Goan's Ren looked like

he was suspended in a drop of water.

It has like the mere calmness at the center, but then it's exploding outward like a fucking

but it's also like it's also like like glistening on the walls, right?

The way like like refracted light in water is, and it's also spiky, like hard spikes.

And in fact, as he's using it, is it moral who is like, oh my god, it feels like I'm being stabbed.

Yes.

He's like, kneels all over him.

I like this.

And that's more

description.

Got his own, you know, defenses against us.

This isn't going to kill it in the hallway

at Heaven's Arena.

Yeah.

Something I try and think about a lot, and something that I'm almost always trying to

do in my work in front of the table and always feeling like I'm falling short on is like, what does it feel like to be in this space physically?

Is it warm?

Can I feel like sweat on the walls because of the humidity?

You know, is there loose gravel under my feet?

This kind of just like physicalizing or embodying yourself in the space.

It's not easy to do when you are in the middle of a scene, but it adds so much.

And I loved this first description of Morel saying, the Nen feels like little needles stabbing all over my body.

We've never had that, you know, we've had the kids say, the Nen feels bad.

But I really liked this description of what it would feel like to be in the presence of that Nen.

And he says, so, so tell it to me straight.

I got a chance to take on your king.

And I said, no.

No, I think one of the royal guy can lay a finger on him.

Yeah.

Well, I think one of the royal guards would probably kill you.

Yeah.

And then he says, I sleep until the king.

That's good to hear.

I found a challenger at my age.

This is thrilling.

Quite thrilling.

Goku.

Goku.

It's so funny the way that the world that has birthed Goan freaks is full of different weird kinds of Goan freaks.

This is a Goan response.

You know, even in the fight with Knuckle, Goan was saying, Thank you, Knuckle, for telling me about how debt works.

This is an elderly man saying, finally, what if Goan was 120 years old?

Yeah.

Chaminotera is so cool.

What a cool, weird character.

I love that his reaction

is a little Master Roshi taken seriously.

And

I don't want to dismiss, you know, sometimes I say that sort of phrase, the sort of like,

I once said to someone, I described something as like, you know,

as if it took itself seriously.

And I realized afterwards I was like really dismissing the idea.

I was dismissing the thing at hand or out of hand.

I don't remember what the particular thing was, was that I was saying.

I was like, X is like Y if Y took itself seriously.

And I don't want to diminish Master Roshi because it's not that Master Roshi isn't taken seriously.

It's that the ends are just towards a different thing, right?

And by the way, Master Roshi is stronger than Adoro.

Come on, let's calm down.

All right.

All right, Scaly.

What a horrible little freak.

Let's return to that in,

you know, let's see how all the Chimera ant stuff shakes out.

Yeah.

But

it is towards a different end.

And that end is fun and scary.

And

it is interesting to think, well, what would happen if someone was a Master Roshi type figure in a real world where they did end up intersecting with professional organizations and governments?

Because part of what lets Master Roshi fuck off to an island in the sea is that Dragon Ball World isn't real world.

No.

Dragon Ball World doesn't.

And like, there are ways for this to go really bad and to get really corny.

There are about about a thousand versions of what if superman existed in the real world and some of them are really good and some of them fucking suck yeah uh and there's so many versions of what if the justice league was good or bad or you know in the real world and some of them are good and some of them suck uh some of them the boys say this right a lot of them are a lot of them are good or bad based solely on how

well and meaningfully they portray what it means to be in the real world.

They actually interrogate that question.

Like, truly, Sylvie, the Boys the TV show is actually steps ahead of the comics that Garth Anderson.

That's crazy.

I only know the comics, which are dog shows.

Okay, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

The TV show is like...

The TV show has taken some

decisions to leave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have the same feeling.

Yes, I'd read the comics and I was like, they adapted what?

They're doing what?

I've been like that for years.

Yeah,

it is a lighter touch, I would say, to many of the same ideas Okay, okay

I'll rescind the shot I took no no no no no you can still take the shot because I still don't know that it hits you

recently people have been people

recently

but the comics fucking suck man and and so there's ways to do that sort of what if we took it seriously really wrong and and in a misplaced uh poor-footed way and i think that netarow even through where we're at now is like ooh this is juicy.

Like, this is, this is, there's a lot happening here when you start thinking about like, no, the old man doesn't get to go live on the mountain.

The old man has to go live in the conference room at least a little bit.

The thing that I like about Dragon Ball Z and Hunter Hunter as like two different

images of the same kinds of characters is like, it's not that Dragon Ball Z like isn't serious, it's that Dragon Ball Z is intentionally like broad and like full of caricature and, you know, full of fun all the time it's always doing fun stuff and like it's not that um

dragon ball z is unserious and hunter hunter is serious it's that

hunter hunter is like okay let's narrow the character a little bit and like put them in a situation where they've got to like bump against real things

right yeah i think like a big thing to always remember with dragon ball 2 right is that it is the thing that defines a lot of these sort of like broad Shounen archetypes.

Like they are being not fully invented in Dragon Ball, not to say that

Akira Toriyama invented Shounen out of like thin air, but modern Shounen like protagonists.

Yeah.

Right.

So like that, that's why it ends up being such a good sort of like callback because it's like

it's this is it.

It's a language that everybody speaks.

Everybody who's the target audience of Hunter Hunter knows the language of Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

Right.

And obviously, there are lots of other texts here that, like, we talked about JoJo's earlier.

Obviously, I think there's stuff in Naruto from my understanding of Naruto because I'm not a Naruto person that is also thinking about things like world history and organization and class.

I don't want to diminish anything

influenced by Hunter Hunter.

Very much so.

And we live in a world now where I think a lot of Shonen is

wants to brush up against this stuff at the very least um uh the very least wants to evoke it uh yeah I mean I mean I've I've talked a little bit about my feelings about a certain show called Jujutsu Kaisa right yes exactly and that is something that uh Gigi Yakutami the writer has been like very open about like I am a huge Tagashi fan I'm a big hunter hunter acolyte um

and I think like

I think part of what what you get when you end up with a show like this or when you end up with in Cape Comics something like Watchmen or the other kind of like big major 80s show you know 80s books that were trying to say well what if blah blah blah what if we took this stuff seriously is you end up with a bunch of follow-up you know uh attempts to reintegrate those feelings to duplicate them to you know follow after them to counter them to counteraddict them all that stuff and some of that stuff just doesn't fucking hang you got like all-star batman i well

versus let's say all-star Superman, which is like, no, let's take it, let's actually take it seriously in the way that's like, what if there was something there not to undercut, but to inhabit?

Or like, there's all sorts of ways that you can respond to that.

And I think that one of the my most interesting things after finishing Hunter Hunter was going back into the world of Shonen and be like, oh, I get it.

This is a text that everybody has then turned to respond to for the last 15 years, you know, which I did not understand as someone who was just watching Shonen shows and reading Shounen manga in the inner in the interim.

I, you know what I mean?

Like, in some ways, now that I've watched Hunter Hunter, I'm actually more interested in Naruto because of it, in its relational, uh, you know, because of its relationship with Hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

Anyway.

Surgery time.

It's surgery time.

They have arrived.

The hunters have arrived in the citadel, which has been almost completely emptied.

There are a few Royal Guard loyalists staying behind, including, I believe, Bihorn and the weird Koala.

Remember him?

Yes, yeah.

That fucked up little guy who had

extremely menacing,

and he had the How Are You and I Different speech, the sort of like

Mafia bear.

The fucked up little bit of a bear.

Mafia baby bear.

Mafia baby bear.

Koala is such a good character.

I can't figure out yet whether...

There's a weird sort of Boy Who Cried a Wolf situation happening with

the diversity of Chimera Ant designs, where I can't figure out yet whether or not Koala is a major player who the show is building up to doing something sinister and uncomfortable with,

or whether he is one of the chimera ants who we're just going to see occasionally.

Do you want to pick two Chimera ants that we've seen that you think have the best shot at being big future players?

And should we maybe strike out Colt from that?

Because Colt is currently a player.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, we'll strike out Colt.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's Hagya.

Okay.

And

it's.

Oh, it's so fucking hard because there's like 500 of these.

Yeah, that is kind of the thing, huh?

I also haven't even met my favorite ant yet.

No.

That's true.

There's some great ants coming up.

Oh, yeah.

But there are others that are established that have.

So, yeah, I do want to second guess also.

It's Bihorn.

Bihorn.

Lord Bihorn.

Lord Biorn.

Lord Bihorn.

Oh, no, possibly, um, um...

Um...

Zazan.

Bikini Scorpion.

Okay.

Um,

okay.

They have set up a full operating theater on the floor of the queen's chamber.

It's great.

This is such a good image.

The queen lying there, full of all these weird prosthetic

organs and surgical equipment, the big bright lights of the surgery around her, surgeons and nurses in scrubs and masks, and also the octopus ant, and also small bear, and also cult, and also Nova.

The surgeon has like the fucking like create your own video game protagonist iScar,

which is just hilarious to me.

So funny.

Like, outside of the shock of the incongruity of this image, the moment that I just thought was just so joyful was when the doctor,

the surgeon in scrubs and a surgical mask and the octopus man were turning and having like a medical conversation with each other.

Something about just being like, right, we have to talk about the surgery now.

You're an octopus.

I'm a surgeon.

Let's figure this out.

I thought was really great.

This is when the queen has her conversation asking about the son.

Was there anything wrong with him?

Because she knows he was born prematurely.

And

Colt says, no, he's out finding herbs to heal you.

And then she says, he should go his own way.

I've fulfilled my destiny.

He has within him the potential to rule the entire world.

That's enough for me.

I love

the two beats of...

Colt telling the lie, the octopus like responding sadly to the lie and explaining the truth, and then the queen just sort of like brushing it all aside, being like, no, no, the thing that the king actually does, that's what she wants.

Yeah.

It's really, really sad, right?

Because the octopus is acting as an interpreter here, because the queen can't

speak in a way that humans can hear.

Hey, were you expecting to get emotional over the death of the creepy Chimera Ant Queen?

No, but Yoshihiro Tagashi and the adaptation team can summon up emotion for a character extremely quickly.

Sometimes it fails, but even when it is failing, you can tell that they're trying.

I think about the ridiculous Scissors Pervert backstory.

I think about the

I made her a frame, my much younger lover, I made her a frame.

I think about the

giant.

They really tried with that one.

They were cold.

They tried so hard.

The TR team was like, We gotta figure something out here to make this normal.

I feel like their ability to do that is like someone looking at you and saying, Watch this: this car can accelerate to zero to 500 miles an hour in four seconds.

And it's true, it can.

It's just sometimes it accelerates to 500 miles an hour and goes off the edge of a cliff, and sometimes it goes beautifully and gracefully down the track.

And everyone applauds.

It's impressive even when it goes off the cliff.

It is is impressive.

It really is impressive even when it goes off the cliff.

I think, as well, about, we talked about this a lot in the podcast when it happened, was Tagashi and the team suddenly realizing that they wanted to give Tesgera characterization in about 40 seconds.

I know.

Yeah, that's a great moment.

I thought that was really, really nice.

And the queen has a final request because she can tell that she is going to die.

And they play this like

a deathbed scene, you know, in any other form of media or in real life.

There are, you know, comforting lies being told.

There are, you know, revelations.

But it's an octopus, a dying chimera ant queen, Colt, who is the reborn eight-year-old boy, a bunch of doctors, a hunter.

It's staged so well.

Knuckle trying desperately not to cry and failing.

Moral trying not to cry.

And succeeding mostly.

Colt crying and

someone saying,

Colt saying, I can't protect anyone.

It happened again.

And Moral being like, what do you mean?

It's such a human being.

What do you mean again?

And the little bear being like, oh, no, he's probably referring to a memory from when he was human.

And everyone's like, what?

It's like, you guys have memories from when you were human?

And the bear goes, oh, yeah, of course we do.

Though some of us remember better than others.

Doesn't that line also lead right into Moral's...

Oh, no, no, it leads into the next thing, and then Moral has the little moment with Colt.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

Yeah.

There's some stirring in the abdomen surrounded by these organs.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

Wait, Jack, what did you want to say?

No, there's two things before this.

First, the queen says that she has thought of a name for the king.

Right, sorry, we've moved past that.

Somebody said that already.

Okay.

No, we don't.

And

the...

We have spoken on the show in the past about the queen naming things being significant.

The queen is named the royal guards.

There's a lot of wonderful stuff happening here where the queen can kind of sense that there is some sort of individuality or authorship or imagination or power in a name and is working through it herself.

But that storyline is sort of off-screen, is sort of always kept vague.

I talked about how her names always sound really good in the mouth or feel really good to say because she's an eater, you know, she consumes things.

And I think it is just so perfect and sad that in her final moments,

she thinks of a name for the king.

And she says,

his name is Meriwem.

It means the light that illuminates all, she says as she looks up at the surgical lamp above her.

She says, let him know, and she dies.

This is great.

This is really, really good stuff.

I love that she's named him.

I love that she's given him a really distinctive name.

I love that it means something.

There's a means something by whose is she translating from a language?

Or is she just saying like a

she invented a signifier no is she just like this is what these syllables mean to me when i say meruam

it means the light that illuminates she calls him her beloved son which is like

until recently it's like

uh you know you could tell that the queen really wanted the king to be born but like beloved son seemed like an impossible direction for this to go a handful of episodes ago

yeah it seemed like an impossible direction for it to go a handful of episodes ago is what scrolls across the screen at the top and bottom

in every Chimera Ant episode.

I also want to talk about

this name more.

Oh, the name, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean,

you know, what's the most recent clear comparison?

Goan, you are light.

Sometimes you shine so brightly, I must look away.

Even so, is it still okay if I stay at your side?

There's that.

It sounds like the name of an angel, too, and we've talked about

the, I mean, like, I was checking this, and, like, people, people have, like,

a high-profile

name

of the names and stuff, and, like,

here, I'll just paste this a little bit from the wiki that I thought was interesting.

Merun's name resembles the Arabic name, which can be romanized as either Mariam or Mariam, Mary, right?

Yeah, equivalent to the English name Mary.

The origin of the name, however, is uncertain.

And the rest of the Royal Guards, yeah, it says this here: the rest of the royal guards are derived from Egyptian deities, right?

So we're very much

Middle East

East Africa

that

we have Nefapito, we have Shia Poof, and we have

I can do it Menta to Yupi.

Yep, Menta to Yupi.

All of which are names that are beautiful and interesting to say, but kind of have a sort of mangled quality to them.

Like you're trying to figure them out.

The syllables sort of stumble over each other.

And now, finally, with the light that illuminates all, we have Meriwam, three

straightforward syllables down the barrel.

You know?

Yeah.

Ooh, this is a culmination.

In some Japanese Hunter Hunter goods and the extra book covers of Hunter Hunter, uh soshuhen treasure volume nine also features the reminiscation of his name uh other merch stamps and alternative ma'ellium m-e-e-l-e-e-m uh uh a palindrome i really love maelium as a as a play on meruam sounds almost like meleoron

wow yeah so palindrome is the real king yeah yeah uh-huh and the palindromes are always fun with the sort of yeah yeah

um to the panda ant's point uh when he just says outright and everyone freaks out and he says, oh, of course.

This is such a nice example of the way that Tagashi has always been playing the like hidden information game.

Tagashi is fascinated with when information is revealed to the viewer and when information is revealed to the characters.

There is a real power in

the storytelling, in the moments when Tagashi is very open and very casual about things that would have been the hidden pivot point of another story.

You know, you could see an adaptation of this that would have spent an arc coming to the awful, dreadful realization that the ants can remember what they were like as humans.

And instead, we have Small Bear, a B or C tier chimera ant, saying, oh, yeah,

saying, oh, yeah, ants can remember their human lives.

And it just sort of happens.

And some of them do it better than others.

Yeah.

And our personalities are reflected through who we were before.

And yeah, that's just how Chimera ants are.

It's so good.

It's sort of like what we've been observing for 15 episodes or whatever.

You know, the ants have also been observing and all living those memories.

And it's just become sort of knowledge to them.

You know, there was a time when Colt was like, Reyna, and Peggy was like, who the fuck are you talking about?

And now there's like, oh, he's probably talking about Reyna.

That's probably someone he knew.

We get this great shot of Nove and Moral and Moral has like the sweat drop and it's real like uh-oh, uh-oh.

And we were killing just like people, they're just people, right?

They're just people.

They're like literally one-to-one people.

Yes.

It's so good.

They're zombies with agency.

Is there another way we could maybe put like a real heavy capstone on they're just people?

Is there another way somebody starts moving in the ant queen's body?

and cult reaches in very gently and produces something.

Before you reveal this, I just want to say it's crazy that there's something so big that is still happening in this episode.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

This was, this was like a, I'll talk about it and then I'll talk about how I felt.

He reveals something.

He opens his palm and looks at it.

And we look at his face in shock.

And I think we see people behind him react in shock too.

And then we get his point of view shot.

And inside the palm of Colt's hand is a tiny human infant.

It's smaller than a palm.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's the size of a grape.

And it is crying in this like high, bird-like cry.

Um,

this

felt like a Rubicon moment for me in terms of

my understanding or readiness to accept what is happening.

I mean, I accepted it because it's Takashi.

He just flings stuff at you, and you go, sure, okay, right, let's go.

I was not expecting,

I had not even considered that there would be multiple kings or that there would be twins or something.

You know, this idea that, like, we had been primed so well to build towards the king.

You know, you're saying this is a Danny DeVito Arnold Schwarzenegger situation.

Twins.

Twins.

But the the appearance of a human baby in Colt's hand in this moment was like a real

genuine moment of shock for me.

I talk a lot about being surprised by Tagashi's maneuverings in this show, but I want to be clear that I'm not like watching this show every week and standing up and hollering, or that it's comparable with the weirdest or strangest stories that I've ever told.

The thing that ever told, I've ever seen,

the thing that I experience most of the time is kind of like surprise and delight.

You know, I'm just like, oh my God, whoa, we're going in this direction.

Or this is really surprising, or this is really cool.

The baby appearing in the hand was like a real

cold moment of like, what the hell is going on here?

You know, like actual shock in my body of,

wait, wait, wait.

What does this mean?

Well, and what does it mean?

They explain it, right?

Well, sort of.

Everyone's fucking crying.

Everyone's crying.

Because everybody.

Something sublime and strange has just happened.

You know what this feels like?

This feels like the moment that Pito is born and the entire hunter.

Sorry, I keep saying hunters when I mean Chimera ants.

Oh dear.

Interesting.

A beard.

The entire Chimera ant organization snaps into this weird thing because then something

remarkable happens because Colt cries and he like cups his hands around the baby so that he can like shelter it and he says I will protect this baby.

And then Morel behind him swings his club.

And I was fully expecting him to do the classic, like, we have to destroy this.

I'm so sorry.

Hand him over, you know.

But he makes Colt and the baby promise to never eat a human.

And then he says, if so.

I will protect you as long as I am able.

And the camera work and the vocal delivery of Morel snaps us straight into place of like, he is now the big, big strong protector of this.

This is Pito showing up.

A new command strap.

The bird-like cries of this human chimera ant baby has somehow caused everybody here to snap into a new

like line of loyalty and protector.

You keep calling it like a human, and we have to emphasize it's the size of a peanut.

Like,

it is completely humanoid.

It does look human.

It is completely humanoid.

Like, you're right to describe it that way, but for people who aren't watching along, like, I I cannot emphasize enough that this thing is tiny.

Weirdly, the size of it was part of the shock for me.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, it's absurdly.

Yeah.

We are in 1960s sci-fi films.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

We are in that sort of social sci-fi shock stuff that's incredible.

Kojima will do this sometimes, too.

I mean,

I don't just mean in the sense that a lot of Kojima's work recently has been about babies and about the surprise appearance of of babies.

But something that Kojima has Kojima has always done is these like

aesthetic

and

almost like scientific paradigm shifts very suddenly.

Tiny baby is very Kojima.

Yeah.

Tiny baby.

And Colt swearing that he will project

it, protect it.

And then Morel swearing that he will protect it.

Oh, I've just realized it does have a tail.

I think I had named it.

I thought it was an umbilical cord.

That's an umbrella.

No, the umbilical cord is coming out of its belly.

I also thought it was just the umbilical cord.

Okay, it's pretty cool.

Yeah, I see the image of the because Colt, it's worth saying, has a chimera and hand, which is bizarre looking, especially here in close-up.

He has one, two, three, four

fingers.

No, more.

How many fingers does Colt have?

That's two hands under each other.

So I think that's the other thing.

Oh, it's two hands under each other.

I think that he has

two and a thumb.

Yeah, he has six both hands included.

And then, but then like the double claws, so two claws claws per finger.

And then this tiny baby in the palm of his hand.

It's

yeah, I hadn't thought of like a like 60s work here after, but it's absolutely out of like, yeah, yeah, totally.

Um, I'm thinking of like um

uh Saul Bass, the director of, uh, the creator of those incredible, famous,

you know, opening and closing sequences for hitchhik movies and things, directed a film called Phase Four, which is about a bunch of ants that take over the world.

And Phase 4 has a very- Wait a second.

Oh, wait, I didn't even mean, I didn't even mean that.

Well, because we've spent a very few, a very small amount of time thinking of these ants as ants.

As ants, that's true.

They are not ants.

And it has a very, very uninteresting sort of flat 60s ending, except it was revealed.

It's a 70s film, but I, but

I should say I'm thinking of stuff ranging from the 60s, 70s kind of era generally.

So you're right.

We believe in the Janine Hawkins method of

decades.

Right.

A decade is really two decades, yes.

But Phase 4 actually ended, and they shot an ending for it that turns into this astonishing.

I'll have to link this so we can watch it later because it's just really special.

Bizarre ending full of this sort of like

psychedelic, but sort of more broadly psychedelic, you know, in the sense of like, we are pulling from a bunch of different aesthetics.

We are very interested in like the

the fetus as a source of humanity and a source of like, we were all there, we want to return to the womb,

that kind of stuff that I think is being pulled on here.

It is an aesthetic step that I haven't seen Hunter Hunter do yet, and I am fascinated by it.

Apparently, phase four based on the HDUL short story, Empire of the Ants.

Huh, much to consider.

Ants all the way down.

Yeah.

I would like to say that this moment gives me a perfect opportunity to mention that I am a huge moral girly.

I love him.

Morals.

He has not come across great up until this moment.

This is a turning point for Morals.

Yeah.

Yes.

This is what lets people like him.

There is so much to go.

One of my favorite bits of this moment is

it feels like what he's doing is like a,

you know, your promise to not eat humans or you can't get out of here with that baby.

But actually what he says is, if you can't promise that you won't stop killing and eating people, then get out of my sight.

He's giving him a head start.

Just go with the baby.

If you're going to kill people, then go now.

Yeah.

Hell yeah.

It's great.

And I can't read this in any other way as the,

you know, something that we talked about a lot when

Pito arrived and it all snapped into place is that, you know, we were talking about two things sort of happening at once.

The

quote-unquote biological impulses of the ants bringing them into line.

And then also the sort of like, quote-unquote, emotional or interpersonal thing of like, here is a source of power.

Here is someone that I can view as a totem or stand behind or something like that.

And to see this happen again with the birth of this little

human ant and then cult swearing loyalty, and then Morel swearing loyalty.

It's not coming out of his face.

It's such a good moment of like

I said, it was a Rubicon moment for me watching the show, but this is a Rubicon moment for the characters going, all right, here is here is something that we know to be true about the world.

We have to protect this little thing.

And in that way, is the vindication of the thing that we've been saying and that Tagashi has been saying about the Chimera ants from the beginning, which is like

they're us, and we're them.

They invented, you you know and they're reacting the way that someone would react if you saw an actual miracle happen that is exactly right yes yeah

oh or or a little baby you know uh you know yeah that's the thing it doesn't even need to be miraculous it's like just the you save a baby following the death of their mother and you look at them and you go all right we need to protect this thing this everybody in this special room yeah we are now bonded in a way that we were not before we have been here in this moment.

And like, you get the sense also that, like,

part of it, it's one of those sort of like chain reaction sets of tears because at a certain point, Knuckle is crying about moral crying, and he's like, My master has a soft side.

Because we just went through all that shit about, like, when it's when it's war, it's time to kill people.

And you've made no second guesses.

I inherited myself.

He can't come to the NGL because he has a soft side.

That is why he stayed behind.

They were worried about him wanting to be merciful to the ants.

Right.

And look at us now.

Yeah, and here we all are crying.

And then we get that.

Yes.

We get that frame of

remembering Kurt and Raina and his mother.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, with the basket of fish.

Oh, it's so good.

The big basket of fish is the octopus guy.

He's got a little on the nose.

Oh, no, there he is.

You said early in the Chimera Ant arc, and I think maybe even as we were beginning to approach it, that one of the hallmarks of this arc is that it's very weird.

It's weird

from a palm perspective, and it's weird from a.

We haven't even gotten to the weird shit now.

We literally haven't is the thing.

I think we're turning the corner.

I do think this is.

I was about to say, I know that there is further weird stuff down the road, but this kind of aesthetic jump to the little human baby in Colt's palm was kind of the first real moment I felt, oh, there is something really weird happening here.

This is standout.

This really is.

It's so good.

It's to my point earlier about, you know, I'm not often shocked by Hunter Hunter.

I'm usually surprised and

delighted.

This was a real moment of like, oh, this is very odd.

I don't know what to do with this.

It's one of those things.

It's one of those things where it's like...

I've mentioned before how I kind of can conceptualize the Chimera Ant arc as its own anime series in my mind.

Like I can put a cut together in my head.

And this is like a season finale

in a lot of ways.

It's like, oh, this is the king's born.

So is the last Chimera ant from the queen

and the alliance between the queen loyal ants and the hunters.

For Hunter Hunter, this is even a mid-season break.

No, it's not.

Not even at all.

This is a week.

This is just weekly TV.

Because they're editors of this.

The adaptation team are so good at editing.

You know, we have talked about how people had some difficulty with the last set of episodes.

I found the cutting between them to be really charming and really entertaining.

They cut away from this.

You know, anybody else would be like, now we're going to go to credits.

But they're like, no, no, no, no, no.

No, no.

We have to watch sad truck stuff.

Well, sad truck stuff briefly.

Goan is distraught in the truck, and then he screams, and then he says, Right, I'm over it.

He literally screams.

He goes, ah, okay, I'm over it.

It's, yeah, man, same.

That's how it works for me, too.

Yeah.

He says, Kite's coming back, and I don't want to disappoint him.

And Spinner, incorrectly,

who also intuits that Kite is alive,

reinforces this.

She says, you know, yes, you feel weak.

That's okay.

You got to go and train.

I know that Kite will be proud to see you when you see him again.

You know,

this is a good place that you're in.

You are not at the bottom.

Do you think he is over it?

No, gone, freaks.

When has he ever held on to something?

I think he's over it.

Why would he lie about things?

Is this how, Dre, do you just have people normally get over things?

They just go like, that's it.

I'm not done.

I'm done with that now.

I'm done with those feelings, and I'm moving on.

Don't tell them that, Dre.

You'll be out of a job.

Joker's Dream.

It's actually a combination of words that the therapist teaches Sylvie.

You can't just do it.

And Dre can confirm this.

What you have to do is you're going to be a dream candidate kind of thing.

Yeah, you have to say, now I'm well.

now I'm well, now I'll be well.

And then who do they kill?

Their inner child.

Oh, oh, no.

Oh, so you do want to kill the inner child.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's the secret.

Where, by the way, where was

Netero during this

miracle moment?

This miracle moment.

Unified all people around what the...

Great question.

Not in the room.

I've got to go find a friend.

I have to go see an old acquaintance.

See an old friend.

No, he's friend.

I'm pretty sure he says friend, yeah.

Can you imagine he would be the person who has to catch Netero up on what happened in there?

Well, actually, I think it'd be great because he'd just be like, okay.

Yeah.

Sub says an acquaintance, dub says friend.

So

it's Yoshihiro Tagashi.

I don't know if this is someone we've met before or a new weirdo.

You know,

who knows?

Yeah, we'll see.

It's he.

I could play silly games and go, oh, he's he's going to go and get Krollo, or he's going to go and get Silver or something, but it could just as easily be like,

like Krolo?

Did I miss?

Did I forget a Netero Krolo scene?

Not as far as we know.

Okay.

He's going to be like, I'm going to go and get Bronk Shiltons.

And like three episodes from now, I'll be weeping as Bronk dies at the hands of a new kind of chimera ant.

This is how it works.

Please write that down.

We need

a part of Jack's new OC, Bronk Shiltons.

released a country album.

Yeah, Bronk Shiltons.

That's Notero's friend.

Go and ask Spinner why she wanted to be a hunter, ringing the bell.

The new what is a hunter?

Someone who has a huge amount of debt.

She

was investigating a small-build swan.

This is such a nice background joke about how weird the hunter-hunter world is.

We see the small-billed swan, because she said a small-billed swan.

I was like, hmm, yeah, it's okay.

And then by the time we see the swans later, I was like, wait, swans already have small bills.

What are you talking about?

Answer.

This is not a swan.

Yeah, it's like a crane or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they only lived around a certain sort of like mine that was going to get used as a

like a dumping ground.

Toxic waste dumps.

I'm sure that the way Hunter-Hunter thinks and talks about toxic waste dumps is going to be something we're going to come back to at some point.

Wait, we already have a toxic waste dump.

Yeah, the whole city is a bit more dumb.

We do, we do.

But

I know that the manga gets really interested in Meteor City in future.

So this is an ongoing thread for Tagashi is like toxic waste dumps, etc.

And she borrows a huge amount of money

from kite.

She describes stick dinner is also from there.

She describes the memory of the swans flying over the sunset as the most vivid memory she and stick have.

We are also shown this.

I think that they're shown this image, and it is very impressive.

I think that there's something going on where the team know that they've just shown us five minutes of the wildest television you've seen in your life, and then they're like, okay, this will really touch them, seeing these beautiful swans flying.

And they're right.

I was like, oh, look at them go.

You've been pressing.

I saw a miracle happen.

Yeah.

You were John Cuzak holding the baby and breastplate blank.

I passed out while barbecuing while seeing those

Karapika would love this story about becoming a hunter in

in order to save an endangered species.

Also, by the way, Goad is handstanding during this entire story.

Yes, she says, Why don't you train while you're here?

So he starts doing hands.

Kilowa declines to train.

Go does handstands.

Kilwa's given up.

Yeah, he has.

He's like, I'm going to protect you, and then that's it.

Nothing else awful happens in these?

Well,

so,

well, firstly, I like that uh, Spin is indebted to Kite.

He's also holding on to the possibility of Kite being alive because she believes that she needs to repay a debt, which is similar to how Goan feels, you know,

she has where she's like, listen, you might have met him first, but like, I've known him longer.

We knew him, knew him, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I thought that was- Did I mention like a number of years that they for some reason in my head, there's like a six-year number, but I think I

just made that up.

It does does have the impression of years,

yeah.

Yeah, I don't know.

Knuckle and Shoot are moving through the empty Chimera Ant Citadel, and they are scared, as would I be, even though we have this sort of like allegiance going.

There's this great, um,

this is a really well-paced little tiny scene in that, like, you see Knuckle and Shoot moving through the dark of the fortress, uh, and hearing around them the sounds of, like, chittering and scraping.

And I was like, oh, yeah, it would be scary if you're a human to be in the chimera ant fortress because all these noises that we understand to be the regular middle management work of the chimera ants bopping around they got to go talk to a pig or whatever they got to do this and that to a human don't let the hunters see pig they will not understand

the situation with pig they will be like meat balls

um you would be like oh these sounds that are very normal to the ants are very scary to me.

However, the punchline is that it is actually terrifying as a chittering, awful Frankenstein kite comes briefly shuddering out of the shadows before we cut away.

We get two seconds, two seconds.

Wait, it's not just the shuddering, there's another thing that happens first.

What happens first?

It like the hair first launches at them through the dark, yeah, like a project.

Yeah, oh, yeah, um,

one of the only two new songs in uh any of these episodes, they are both in 92, this one that we just watched.

This is the horror movie stuff taken to the extreme that we've been hearing.

In this episode, this one's called The Prey.

Yeah.

This is what's playing as they're hearing the skittering, chittering kite running all around them.

Poor kite.

Yeah.

And then,

moving quickly and barely stopping to decapitate a border guard.

No, not decapitate.

He cuts her throat or something.

She falls down.

She was kind of falling.

I thought she just fainted because he was running.

Yeah, there's blood on the back of her head.

Yeah.

I think she kind of swooned because she's like, ooh, is there blood?

She was so taken with it that

brain account.

She just loves Cheetu.

Yeah.

Chitsu escapes and he says, I saw those panties of his.

He escapes the NGL and says, I'm the king of speed.

And then similarly, we see wrestling singlet.

We see wrestling singlet crocodile

sneaking up on prey and then saying, I'm the king of eaters.

The text for the sub

is

the glutton king.

That's better.

Yeah, the dub calls him the king of eaters.

That's really good.

Just for because I know that sometimes I'm watching both, sometimes skipping back and forth.

I know mostly everyone else is watching the sub.

I watched the dub this week just because of time restraints.

So, the thing that happens is on Netflix, they don't give you the subtitles

when you have subtitles for the dub.

The dub subtitles are the subtitles for the dub, where just captions, yeah, yeah, where mine are the yeah, they're captions, yeah.

So, uh, when I'm watching the dub, it still shows me the text for the sub,

um, which is useful to know when they use weird like changes in wording and stuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I really like this.

This is Austin's Petty Kingdoms thing emerging.

The ants saying, you know, we've invented individualism following the death of the queen.

The king's gone rogue.

Why aren't we all kings?

And they go one step further and they say, I'm the king of X.

I'm the king of Y.

You know, it's really, really good.

And it sets up.

I can, I don't know what's going to happen, but it sets up the possibility that what we are about to see is like a large-scale pseudo-civil war among you know as many different rival Chimera ant kings as Tagashi and the team are interested in.

How many rival kings do you think we're gonna get?

How many like total

seven princeps, baby?

We're gonna have it's no, it's gonna be like fucking tons.

There's gonna be it's it's going to be tons, some off-screen, some on-screen.

You know, we're probably gonna focus on maybe like

three

to five big ones, but including a Meroem.

No, no, Meroem is

a different kind of king.

When we see Meruem, going to somewhere new, somewhere new, very exciting.

He is going to East Gorto.

Now, you might be thinking, Deer Viewer, what does East Gorteaux look like?

And the answer is, it is a cross between

an endless expanse of plain,

the

Korean demilitarized zone in terms of like helmeted white helmeted soldiers patrolling

and the palace of Versailles.

I'm comfortable saying you got it in one.

You kind of got it in one.

Oh, Tagashi.

It is a gigantic palace.

Yeah, it's there some is there some uncomfortable real world or thoughtless real world drawing it's definitely I would say a not ideal North Korea thing happening.

I would yeah, I think that is mostly the thing I'll tell you.

I think that it is a pretty rough North Korea parallel.

Interesting.

Oh, right.

So what we're seeing here is the

decadent palace of the rulers while

we are doing, yes, exactly.

Now, where's this all going to go and how does it cash out and who we are?

Where do we go?

I will say that in the same way that the NGL was a very interesting place to send the ants to, I could see doing some interesting storytelling within a realm of like we have a like a leader who is only looking out for himself and a populace under his thumb or whatever, but you know, I can see part of the road we're going down here.

It is what it is.

I don't tend to watch the next time on

because

I don't want to be spoiled, but I do just want to note that the end of the next time on ends with that shot of

Reina and

what was Colt's previous name?

Oh, Oh, I thought it was this one Kurt posted in the chat.

Oh, no, that was from when, that was from earlier.

I just saw it in my screen caps.

That was when Goan said, ah, I'm over it.

Right, right, right, right.

Yes.

He looks like some beautiful Joe.

Yeah, he does.

Pension of Go-Go, baby.

Sorry, you were saying the lost image of the body.

Yet again, they're like, and, and you know what?

Even though it's unconnected to the next time on, let's end with Kurt, Reyna, and their mother.

Right.

That like, you know, sunset shot, the perfect family photo one more time

they have always done like chose really interesting things to do with the sort of final frame of the the broadcast because like they've done this before right where they'll take a frame from the episode and then just like sort of give it a few seconds while the like sting plays at the end right but I think in the chimera anarch they really are using it like extra effectively

for sure

yeah

god I have some episodes right there

what is gonna happen these were great, I think.

Yeah, these were

no, these were fantastic.

I was like, oh, we're only doing four.

And that's how you know it's a good set.

Yeah.

This is our first four in a while, too.

Yeah.

Sorry, who was saying something?

Oh, what are we watching next time?

Next time,

we are going to be watching

episodes 93, 94, and 95.

That's a classic three.

Those are titled Date with Palm,

Friend and Journey,

and Grudge and Dread.

Okay, good to start next week.

Yeah.

I do just want to say, again, something kind of absurd.

And when we talk about things like people get

the momentum, people lose momentum, people lose whatever.

Yeah.

We aren't even halfway through the Kingdom Anarch yet.

Yeah.

60 episodes long.

We aren't even at episode 20.

Right.

I know so many people bow out in those first 15 before these, and to miss the episodes that we just watched is such a shame.

Yes.

I think the ones before that are a big drop-off point.

And I think there we are probably

15 away from another big drop-off point.

Here's the really sad thing, Austin, is when you talked about that we haven't met your favorite aunt, I know for a fact that that is where most people who squit Chimera Aunt 100%.

It's crazy.

Insane.

I agree.

No taste.

No taste.

Well, you know.

You know who does have taste?

Me.

Well, yeah, you.

But also, everyone who's given us five stars on how good it is.

Yes, I love this.

Last time we put out a call.

for, I believe it was February birthdays.

And Mitchell's.

Mitchell's.

And I have a Mitchell reporting him.

There's a Mitchell.

there's a false, there's a pretender Mitchell.

Well, there's a Mick, not a Mitt.

Right, but it's I'm.

Mickle?

It's Michelle.

Yeah,

Mick short for Mickle.

Okay, thank you.

I'm reading this review from MJ Graham.

Begins with an M, so you know that stands for Mitchell.

First, Mitchell, reporting in.

Firstly, I would like to protest the

malevolent men radiating from Jack's voice when they intoned Mitchell and compelled me to type this review.

The shock that rippled through me made my teeth start chattering, and I immediately ripped my headphones off, went to my roommates, and played this out loud.

It's me, I shouted.

If I directed my nun to guard my ears, I might have been able to avoid getting defeated.

This defeated this way.

The moment I heard the beginning of the M, I should have known.

I should have known.

Secondly, the terms of this nun contract are unclear to me.

Will I be free after rating five stars?

Will the burden pass to another Mitch?

If I am to be the progenitor of the five-star podcast Mitchells, why what tyranny will I enact by being true to my reviewing nature?

These are dark times indeed in the podcast reviewing sphere.

Thirdly, where are the other Mitchells?

Get on.

There's four question marks after that, by the way.

So this first Mitchell is putting the rest of you on.

Yeah, get on it.

There are literally dozens of us worldwide.

Come on, Mitchells, pull it together.

This is a fantastic podcast with some truly incredible people sharing fantastic analysis of a beloved media franchise.

I don't know that I've ever been so engaged with a rewatch podcast, and this truly feels like rediscovering a beloved media property with a group of friends.

You make my weeks so much better.

Thank you, Mitchell.

Thank you, Mitchell.

I gotta say, there's one self-named Mitchell.

No self-named Februarys.

What the fuck?

February?

No, we got a February.

Oh, did they get a February?

Do you want me to read the February too?

I can read a February.

Yeah, read a February.

Five stars from Oliver.

Hello.

From a February.

This podcast has been my stalwart companion for the entire year.

And then four exclamation marks in brackets, which is, yeah, I'm doing that too.

The entire year it's been running.

I look forward to each new episode, both because I can then watch more Hunter Hunter and because I can get excellent takes on it.

Thank you.

I love the music talk, especially, because I'm not someone who understands or thinks very much about music other than, wow, this is good.

So the discussion of the soundtrack is particularly interesting and useful for me and has actually changed the way I engage with shows.

I pay much more attention to scoring now.

Thank you, Media Club Plus.

Thank you, Oliver.

February.

Thank you, February.

And next month is March, unless I've gotten things very wrong.

Are we going, we're sticking linear?

I think we're sticking linear.

Otherwise, we'll get refused.

And Austin's a

guest.

So, Austin, do you want to summon?

Yeah, I actually would love to hear from any Blakes.

Any Blakes.

Finally, Austin's naming names.

I'm naming names.

Blake.

Hello, Blake.

Hey, Blake.

Hey, Blake.

Blake's in Marshall.

There is, speaking of the soundtrack, there is one song that I didn't play because we were on a roll talking about

the death.

The queen's death.

Great title on this one.

It's called Victims.

and this is what plays during the scene of uh the queen dying and everyone trying to save her

very long slow sad piano piece that i yeah i thought we didn't want to derail to play but i thought that i would say that the soundtrack calls dance victims

It does, and this is right out of the playbook of like a sorrowful, you know, if you're writing sad piano, this is exactly what you write.

Which I say not to be like, oh, it's trite, but look at the soundscape that is being afforded the Chimera Ants.

You know, it is like right out of the playbook of when we want...

humans to feel sad about other humans dying or you know a tragedy this is the kind of music we play and here's the chimera ant queen laid out on the operating table getting this music one of the things that you have to do when you're revving the car up to go from zero to 500 miles per hour in four seconds until it rolls off the cliff is you don't have a lot of time to like paint a nuanced picture with your

go for it.

You know,

just go for it.

There's a couple of partisan episodes, and I know one or two in Palisite, there's an episode towards the end of Partisan, where Austin and I were like, oh, we need the loudest, most active sounds to be the first thing the listener hears.

It's just like this roar that comes in as

combat starts at the very beginning of an episode.

And it's like, yeah, look, you got one second.

Use it.

Use it.

That's right.

Is there anything else that we have to say here about these episodes or anything else?

No, thank you for coming on, Austin.

Yeah, of course.

Of course.

It's very funny that these episodes ended up together because otherwise I would have just had the very nice light episodes of

training with or you know learning about debt and instead

we get the miracle of life.

Yeah, you know,

there was so much much

going to knuckle stuff that it would have been like five episodes of that fight ending with the king about to be born, and then two episodes on its own before we moved into a whole new thing.

It just didn't work.

So, this was the I'm glad that it worked out this way.

I think it ended up going really well together.

Yeah, yeah, it was great.

I am so excited to see what's next.

Yeah.

Well, we know one thing.

Why do we do it, Keith?

We do it.

Wait.

What?

That's the wrong podcast.

Oh, wait.

Sorry.

I forgot who I was and what we were just talking about.

We do it for the king.

We do it for the king.

We do it for Merrowam.

You know,

they used to do it for the world.

They stopped at some point.

They stopped doing it for the world.

They've only been doing it.

I'll ask.

Early on, they stopped doing it for the world.

No, we're not doing it for the world anymore.

We just do it for Steve.

Shout out to Just kick pigs crazy

i think that i think about that every week every or every month every month no probably once a week more than the show comes out more than the show comes out

why would they stop doing it for the world we don't just do it for the world we do it for steve now they just do it for steve now they just do it for steve crazy i don't know

over on um over on shelf by genre michael has a little poem that he says at the end i don't know if you've heard this uh we're we're shelf by genre friend and someone wrote in to a Patreon like Q ⁇ A and said that whenever they hear it, they like to imagine that we are shelved by genre friend, the genre friend, who's sort of like a little creature who puts books up on the shelf.

And I can't not hear it every time Michael reads the poem now.

Shelved by genre friends.

Genre friend, our little Yeti friend, the genre friend.

While we're briefly taking this detour, Austin, I do need you to know that you guys are currently reading the last Harold Mage trilogy.

We sure are.

And

there is a man who used to run New Japan Pro Wrestling whose name is Harold Mage.

Whoa, is there Harold like the name H-A-R-O-L-D?

And then his last name is spelled M-E-I-J.

And every time you guys say it, I think of, oh, that's the guy who ruined the wrestling company.

I like.

I'm so sorry.

It's really funny.

That's really funny.

It's very funny.

Instead,

what if you wanted to hear me talk about the gayest wizards who ever existed?

Wow.

It's genuinely, like shockingly just straightforward.

Stereotypically.

Very, yeah, absolutely.

You meet this upperclassman wizard who's like walking around being like, what's up with you today, bitch?

And it's like, what year is it?

What are you doing?

They're cleaning out.

It's truly.

Is it good?

It's been great.

It's a blast.

And it's like,

it is, it is, you know, it is high fantasy in the, it's not high fantasy in the like, what would you have me do?

Kings and queens are moving around at court, but it's high fantasy in the like, well, there are heralds who have kind of empathetic psychic powers and there are mages who have traditional magic powers.

And the herald mages have companions who are magical horses.

And it's like really high rule set, but then also.

It's just about the like these two boys falling in love and like this guy getting out from underneath the thumb of his shitty family and you know it's starting your world

yeah yeah exactly it's basically just that yeah a hundred percent uh it's been a joy and it's been light in a way that i mean some dark shit just happened in where we're at in the book but like you know uh it's been light in comparison to the world that we live in oh yeah

yeah more than more just the world junji ito somehow lighter than the world we live in so

that's how you know you've gone wrong.

No, he's a sweetsy, he's a kind heart.

He has a kid,

yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%.

All right, well, thank you for letting me plug that.

Yeah, of course.

Check out uh, Shell by Genre, check out the Friends of the Table Patreon for all of the Friends of the Table stuff, plus the Media Club Plus bonus episodes.

Uh, go watch some Friends of the Table stuff on Twitch and YouTube at youtube.com/slash friends of the table, and the same for Twitch.

Uh,

and uh,

that's it.

Do we call him by the a poem?

Do we need to do that now?

No, we don't need a poem.

Well,

we don't need a poem.

Okay.

I just want a genre friend, I guess.

Keith hit Chain Bastard.

All right.

That's a great song.

It's a great song.

We haven't heard it longer, like, like in a long time.

Yeah.

No, I just need to say, I need to just m invoke it more so we can yeah yeah yeah when we record even if it's not in this show uh absolutely okay bye bye bye bye

bye we didn't clap