Indoor Ant/Outdoor Ant - Hunter x Hunter ep. 86-88: Media Club Plus S01E27

Hit it, Maestro!

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

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

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me on X.com, the famous and well-liked website, X.com, Keith J.

Carberry.

You can also find me on Blue Sky Now,

tweeting up a storm on a site that doesn't technically have tweets on them.

I don't care about it.

I'm doing it anyway.

Why not?

Uh,

also, by the time you're hearing this, um, the run button, youtube.com/slash run button, uh, media, uh, uh, Metal Gear Solid 3 Let's Play will be completed, and you should go watch all the Metal Gear Solid stuff, especially, I think, one and two.

Not that the three is the worst of the three, it's just we didn't like the game as much.

Um, so, uh, why don't you go listen to them to the I know,

I heard for years and years that three was everyone's favorite.

i really think it's not very good of a game um i i we can talk about this another time i like it because it's a puzzle game um

uh i think they're all puzzle games in a way they are all puzzle games and i just think three is my favorite well no

two is good too yeah

uh

let's see uh and hey you were closer than ever to uh fully caught up uploading all the streams and stuff on uh twitch.tv slash friends of the table over to youtube.com slash friends of the table so you should go to those to watch us stream live, then watch us have streamed live if you want to do that.

Those streams are great.

I can't stress enough how good Run Button and the YouTube and the Friends of the Table streams are.

I have a blast doing all of them, and they're all really fun.

And with me, as always, is Jack Takeed.

Hi, I'm Jack.

You can get any of the music featured on this show or on Friends of the Table at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

You've heard Sylvie Bullet already, Sylvie.

Hey, it's me, the yapper.

You can find me everywhere as Sylvie Bullet.

Sylvie spelt without the E.

And I guess you mentioned all the YouTube and stuff.

You can check out friends at the table.shop.

We have a new shirt for the 10th anniversary of Friends of the Table up there.

The 10th anniversary of Friends at the Table?

I know, right?

It's a button fee there as well.

Yeah, okay.

That works.

I didn't know what button that, so that was the.

Oh, I actually do know what button.

It was, I know that what you wanted was this.

Friends of the table.cash.

Yeah.

Friends of the table dot shop.

Shop.

Yeah, we have a really cool anniversary shirt designed by Raven Warner.

It features 10 characters from Friends of the Table dancing in a ring.

And let me tell you,

the discussions that went into getting those 10 characters were complex.

And most of them initially happened before we said to the cast, what characters of yours would you like to see?

Because we initially put together some lists, and then it was basically like one of those shootouts where everybody fires simultaneously and falls over.

And then we said, all right, well, we'll just ask people what what what they want.

Um, but the shirt is is so cool.

Um, and we also have another piece of anniversary merch.

We have a 10th anniversary poster designed by the great Annie Annie Johnston Glick.

I am so excited about it.

And it comes in,

I'm doing my very best, salesperson spiel.

It comes in three handy sizes.

A small poster, a slightly larger poster, and then a cute little postcard.

If you want to, I don't know, hold it in a large pocket of yours and pull it out and show it to people occasionally.

Say, look, it's the 10th anniversary.

The people want to shop.

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Shop.

I meant I hit.

I wasn't looking.

I meant to hit this.

I meant to hit that.

I like

the rim shot a lot more, actually.

It's way better.

Introduce Dre.

Dre, how are you?

I'm good.

Hey, if you want to follow me, you can, you know what?

You can follow me on Instagram at Andrew LeeSwan.

Here's the last three things I've posted on Instagram.

Number one,

tool organization in my workshop.

Number two,

cookies I made.

Number three,

my dog.

You've got an excellent set of color-coordinated tools.

Thanks.

What type of cookies?

They were a style, a Levan style, I think that's how you pronounce it.

It's a bakery in New York and they make like big fuck off like huge thick cookies.

And I made them specifically because we made an ice cream with them to give to my father-in-law for his birthday.

Is the tool picture the one that I'm thinking of where it was all the green?

No, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, it's one of them.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, it's one of them.

We watched these three episodes.

We watched

86, 87, and 88.

Any broad thoughts before we hit the recap?

Anything that we're excited to talk about?

These are funny.

Yeah, they are.

There's a sort of tone trick being played here.

There you go.

The place to talk about the tone trick is probably after the recap.

I had a good time with these episodes.

They're sort of like a little dogleg

in terms of the main plot.

Dogleg.

Like, we've doubled back on ourselves.

I don't know.

I've never heard of that fun.

Me neither.

Yeah.

Is that a British thing?

It might be.

Well, I just assumed it was a thing everybody said, and I learned maybe six seconds ago that it might be a British thing.

I bet the same guy that made up dog holes made up dog legs.

Yeah, we don't want to talk about that.

This is like me learning about hoodsy cups is not

everywhere.

You don't have hoodsy cups.

We absolutely don't know, Keith.

We don't have a hoodsy cup is a New England dessert.

It's hood, which is a local dairy distributor, manufacturer, dairy farm.

I don't know what they do.

But they also make a dessert treat called the Hoodsie Cup, which is basically like a half, a quarter of a pint.

It's like three ounces.

It's like three ounces of ice cream, usually half vanilla, half chocolate, in a little cardboard cup with a lid that you peel off and then you love it with like a tongue depressor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've had these.

They were not called hoodsy cups because I wasn't the brand, but yeah, yeah, yeah.

I believe

Hoodsie invented this.

I don't know, but I think they did.

I hope they did.

I hope they did.

I hope they did.

Something that I think is really funny about this, firstly, is that when you say this is a regional milk-based snack, you wouldn't think that

you wouldn't put a comma in that at all.

But what this actually is, is a regional milk comma-based snack, and that it's like a local milk company.

Yes, it's a regional milk milk snack.

Yes.

And this blew my mind when I came to America because Americans haven't figured out how to do this yet, and it's a number one like

quality of life improver.

In the UK, at shows and theaters, during the intermission, they they serve tiny little pots of ice cream that you eat with a tongue depressor.

They serve hoodsy cups, basically.

Look at the logo on this.

It's unbelievable.

It's so good.

It is good.

What is the look?

Whoa, okay.

It's

such good branding.

It's really good.

It looks like it is a logo for a sort of like

soda shop from the 50s, except the logo has been rendered out into the 60s.

So it's this, all this sort of like very like bubbly, sort of like lurid letterwork of the 60s, and then these red polka dots, and it just says, hoodsy.

It's popped right out of the golden age of cinema.

It has.

I bet Steven Spielberg was eating.

Where was he from?

I think he's from California.

Oh, shit.

Steven Spielberg was eating in-and-out burgers and like inventing new ways of working.

He's a school in California at least.

I don't know.

Maybe mom grew up there.

That's the only thing I know about the Fable Mills.

I haven't seen that, but I know that it's like weird.

So all this is to say, no, I don't really have thoughts about these Hunter-Hunter episodes prior to the recap.

Great.

I'm glad that we got that all in.

Okay, so

we've talked about a lot about how

this season seems to be incorporating some horror elements.

And in a very funny way, a lot of those horror elements have sort of melted down into sitcom and melodrama scenarios, which is very funny.

And then these episodes twist that and it introduces like sitcom and melodrama elements that then get baked into like a horror cake.

Uh,

and this comes in the form of a new character named Palm.

Palm is not one of the assassins that Ghana and Killua are sent to eliminate.

She's actually their ally.

If they beat, if they beat the assassins, knuckle bind and shoot McMahon, she gets to go with them to the NGL, which she wants to do because she's in love with Nove, one of the two hunters

that are accompanying Netaro.

She wants to do that really badly, and she's willing to kill to make it happen.

Not kill Knuckle Bind and Shoot McMahon,

but kill Gone, Kilua, and Bisky, who's there with a new outfit, new hairstyle, and the same old attitude.

And while this training to beat Knuckle and

shoot occurs, there's movement in the NGL, specifically a downward movement, into a pocket dimension where Nov is sending

ants by the squadron load under cover of Moral's pipe smoke

into a weird little interdimensional room that Netero is waiting in to punch all the ants to pieces, into little bitty ant pieces.

And while all this is is happening, the remaining two royal guards are born.

Do we want to say their names or should we wait?

Oh, let's wait.

Let's wait.

Let's wait.

You want to hear the names, folks.

They're so.

Yeah, you want to hear the names.

Stay tuned.

You're going to want to hear these names.

As if a clock has hit its maximum and a bell has rung and it needs to happen again.

Chairman, we learned that the little tiles that Chairman Natero gave Gonan Kiliua at the end of the last episode as part of this sort of like assassin thing are tiles from the game of Shogi, which is sort of often referred to as Japanese chess.

It is its own thing.

It is a two-player competitive board game.

Chemon Natero can't help it, and he is literally pulling the boys into a game.

uh once again yeah even when the very fate of the world is is uh you know all to play for uh chemonnatero says well why don't we play for it and you know introduces shogi tiles as

the things that the boys need to interact with.

And he says, you know, you need to beat my two assassins and you need to take their pieces.

They have the other halves of these Shogi tiles.

Yeah, I don't remember exactly what

Nove and Morrill say, but it's something like

the chairman really loves to take risks.

Yeah.

He says something like that.

Or he really, he likes to make risky gambles or something, and then they make their own.

It's definitely about gambling because then they have a little

bit of interlude about gambling.

It's

and we'll get into it because I think the moment that it actually starts happening,

it feels very sudden and kind of transformative.

But we begin to get a bit of a hint as to like how Chairman Natero operates when he's out in the world on a mission.

And

while still not really revealing the extent of his nen power, and to see Chairman Notero kind of in like

like like full-scale professional active mode as we get later uh really helps inform his he likes to take risks he's playing weird games with people um Keith was not kidding when when he said he's hanging out in a pocket dimension punching ants into small pieces yeah he's literally down there wearing athleisure

athleisure wear on and uh punching yeah there's just like he's there's a shot where he's just in a room full of dozens of totally dismembered ants

But Ghon and Kilua head out of the NGL.

Oh, no, they're out of the NGL already.

They get further away and into a place that's sort of Vienna.

I don't really know where this is.

It's very Italian, yeah.

Vienna is not in Italy, Key.

No, no, you're right.

It's in Austria.

It is.

I think it is in Austria.

Yeah.

I don't know where Vienna is.

I don't know.

If you're from Vienna, write a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and let us know what country you are in.

Okay.

And almost immediately, they encounter

who I described in my notes as a sinister entity.

Do we want to talk a bit about how Palm, which is spelt P-A-L-M, like center of your hand, is introduced?

Palm Siberia?

Whoa, that's her full name?

Yep, Palm Siberia.

Palm Siberia.

She looks like the girl from the ring.

I do.

I wrote The Grudge, but I almost wrote The Ring because I can't remember which one looks like which.

I feel like The Grudge is just like a little kid.

The Ring, I remember.

The Ring, I don't know.

Blanking on the name of the game.

It's a younger girl, too, I think.

It is a younger girl, too, but has the very distinct creepy hairy.

It has the creepy hairy.

Oh, The Grudge also has the creepy hair.

I haven't seen The Grudge.

I'm a fraud.

Yeah, I don't watch those.

I'm baby.

I don't watch those.

I'm baby.

I love that.

She looks a bit like Sarako from the ring or Kayako from The Grudge, except like her hair has either been wet and hasn't dried fully or has sort of frizzled and fried away.

Rather than having sort of like a sheet of hair over her face like Kortopi, it is almost like dangling down in these presumably very irritating to draw threads all over her face and body.

It looks, yeah, it looks wet or greasy, or it looks distinctly unpleasant.

Like, what's the it looks like like crispy to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she has a very sharp face, very big eyes,

pale, pale skin.

The impression that you get from her straight away is that she is, you know, barely restraining herself from violence, and that's true.

That is sort of what we learn about her.

That is accurate.

Immediately.

But we also,

she she is uh like all of tagashi's great scary characters um ready to kind of say what her deal is uh like keith said she is one of nove's pupils who has been sent out of the ngl or rather has not been allowed into the ngl because nove says that she is not ready um and she is uh

um

like adamantly devoted towards her master and it is not initially clear whether she is, or rather, she can't quite tell whether the thing she is feeling is like deep devotion.

I think she explicitly says, like, I don't love him.

I'm not in love with him.

But then she overpleads her case.

And she gets tangled up.

It's a lie.

It's the least convincing lie we've had in the show.

I think.

I'm not devoted to him.

I just, I just,

I'm, or rather, I don't love him.

I'm just so devoted to him.

And, you know, this is a nice moment where.

Sorry, was that Palmer Kilo?

This is a nice moment where the scope of what is going on is kind of revealed to us a bit.

Because to hear Chairman Natero say it, it's just sort of like, look, Gonan Kilua, I don't know if you're ready to do this yet.

So you go out and kill two assassins or take Shogi Tales of two assassins.

And then you'll be ready to join us in the NGL.

And what Palm's arrival sort of reveals, and what we learn about the two assassins a little later, is that

the whole squad, Morel and Nove, are both doing this.

We have like masters out in the field and then a sort of Hunter Battle Royale in Vienna to determine who they're going to send in as secondary people.

Now, this is like straight out of the Hunter playbook.

The Hunters have never turned down a battle royale for younger people

whenever they get the opportunity.

Yeah, I was about to say this is Hunter exam three at this point.

It's page one of the handbook.

But I do think that there is something about the fact that Natero looked down at Kilua in this moment of like distress, in this utter breaking down of what he believed he was capable of.

You know, remember, at the end of the NGL sequence, Kilua essentially believes that he killed Kite.

You know, he said Kite thought

we were worth less than a one-armed kite, etc.

Someone said, I want to bring this up just because someone

said this in a comment somewhere, and I I didn't check, fact check it,

but someone said that

Killu was actually saying that about Pito, saying, calling Pito,

Pito is the he that thought they were worth less than a one-armed kite.

And that Pito holds the kids.

That

is we didn't get attacked

because he was more interested in kite than in us.

Oh, that line race makes so much more sense.

I remember in the last episode, I was like, what was Killu talking about?

But yeah,

thinking of Pito there as the, he evaluated our combat capabilities.

Anyway, all this is to say that in this moment, this really low moment for Killiua, Natero looks down at him and he says, if you want to come to the NGL, I have placed two assassins in Vienna.

You have to take them out and then you can come in.

Rather than saying, welcome to Hunter Exam 3, Killua.

There's like a whole little ecosystem of pupils out there who all want to come and join us.

Join that fight instead of this one.

It really is another little hunter exam.

It's also a lie.

These aren't assassins.

No, they're other pupils.

Yeah.

It's like, why did you lie?

To make it more interesting?

Because it's an assassin game, right?

Like, that's the thing.

Yeah.

They're not assassins in occupation, but that is kind of what they're trying to do to each other.

I hear you, Sylvie, but in the world of Hunter Hunter, where the boy in question you are talking to is from a famous family of celebrity assassins.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

You've got to be specific.

I also do wonder if that says more about Netaro and like Netaro's conception of the only way to handle the ants is to assassinate them.

Whereas one of the first things we learn, not one of the first, but one of the things we learned about Knuckle is he is a guy who explicitly says we shouldn't just kill something because we don't understand it.

Right.

Very, very gone.

Yeah.

Super, super gone code.

We'll get into Knuckle.

Knuckle is so, so cool.

What a funny character.

I love Knuckle.

I love him.

By the way,

did you listen to...

Actually, I don't remember if...

I can't remember if it was about the English VA or the Japanese VA that it's the same actor as one of the

Ninja brother that we spend.

Okayasu?

Yeah, yeah.

I can't remember who that was.

Really?

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

I got big Okuyasu vibes from him, actually, kind of like a.

I was about to say like a gentler Okuyasu, but the Okuyasu twist is that he's actually kind of a softie.

Which is also the knuckle twist.

The knuckle twist.

And it's also

the same as Kuobara from Yuhakacho.

It's also the Kuobara stock character.

God, what is it?

I don't want to.

It's the Japanese voice actor, by the way, that is Okuyasu's voice actor.

Which means I believe this performance comes before that, if I'm remembering.

Yeah.

If you would like to hear us talk about Okuyasu, a loud-mouthed, brash,

deeply likable,

how else to describe Okuyasu?

Delinquent?

Yeah, delinquent.

You can listen to our bonus episodes talking about JoJo's bizarre adventure over at the Friends at the Table Patreon, friendsethatable.cash.

We have a bunch of really cool bonus episodes.

I had so much fun watching Jojo.

I think actually there's a lot of Jojo in these episodes, not just because the SBA for

Buckle Up.

Yeah,

just to knuckle up, yeah.

Another in a long line of great 90s characters inspired by the Bosuzuko biker gang stereotype in Japan.

Yeah, it's a good luck for a character.

And attitude.

Just like a horrible delinquent who's fundamentally kind-hearted and misunderstood.

It's just over and over and over again.

I'm like, God, I just love this every time.

Yeah, it's always going to hit.

Some more stuff about Palm really quickly.

I think that there's a really fun thing going on here in that Palm has found herself sort of trapped in like a reverse base situation.

Do you remember Base from

Beast?

I think it was like Bayes.

Base.

Oh, Bayes, yes.

The woman who kisses you and you sort of become like a hypnotized thrall to her.

You get hearts over your eyes, and she usually uses this to like manipulate you and then kill you almost.

And then she got killed by a vacuum.

And then she got killed by a vacuum in one second.

Yeah.

Palm is sort of a reverse base in like the effect and the love.

She has sort of like turned an obsessional focus onto her master who has showed no real...

She's sort of like

base powered herself into a problem.

And I do think that that in a show like this, which is so interested in devotion, in people's devotion to each other, you know, whether that is Killua's devotion to Goan or Goan's devotion to Jing,

and the Weird Thrall's violent devotion towards Baze.

And now we have Palm, who has sort of like summoned up this like sapping, rotting love that is causing her to become this sort of like shivering, violent wreck.

And as far as we can tell, that is not nen-based.

She's just like this.

She She seems to just be like this.

She has her own theme song.

It's called Manhunting, if you can believe it.

Oh, how does it go?

It goes like this.

She is a horror movie villain.

Except she has gotten the wrong script sheet.

And she has instead picked up the script sheet for a B character in a sitcom.

Yes.

Oh, see,

I always thought you were going rom-com, which is also how I see it.

But like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that is fully correct.

It's like, it's like, what if the girl from the ring had to show up in the nanny and was like game to say the lines, but at the same time was like, I'm the girl from the ring.

You better fucking watch out.

It's, it's really great.

Also, this is Natero again using Gon and Killure to test palm.

This isn't just the, you know, um,

There's a,

I've been reading

My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, which is a sort of like Buildings Roman novel,

sort of pseudo-autobiographical about growing up in Italy in the, I want to say,

60s, maybe 50s or 60s.

And there's this great scene early in it where her and her friend at school

are...

being sent to other classes in the school to beat the other class's pupils in quizzes.

And what the kid doesn't realize, but what the author realizes looking back, is that they were just pawns in teacher games, basically.

You know, it was like, oh, Mrs.

So-and-so of class A had a bone to pick with Mr.

So-and-so of class C, so he sent his smartest children over there to beat his smartest children in

a quiz.

And this is all Notero is doing and all Morell and Nova doing as well.

You know, the hunters love to talk a big game about like, I want to get the best squadron inside the NGL, so let's have these new hunters fight each other.

But really as well, there's like, you know, they're playing betting games on who they think is going to win, you know,

I want my people to do better than their people.

Notero has very clearly sort of like picked Goan and Killiua as his champions, which is a real poison chalice, I think.

But yeah, Goan and Kilua are a test for Palm as much as Shoot and Knuckle are a test for Gone and Killiua.

Yeah, otherwise, Palm would be on Knuckle and Shoot's side.

Yeah.

Nove and Moral are obviously friends or at least friendly and know each other.

And why would she be on the other side?

It doesn't really make sense.

Because it's the weaker side.

Yeah.

I just some specifics here.

She's talking about Nove and is

pouring so much sugar into her coffee that it's mounding up above the cup.

And then she's like explaining how she's absolutely, definitely, definitely going to the NGL and nothing is going to stop her.

And she's used her,

she basically does the leaf in the water thing to her coffee and makes the coffee explode everywhere.

Going to kill her, like, oh, I guess she's an enhancer.

She also explicitly says over and over again, like, I am willing to kill to get into the NGL, and I will.

But again, not knuckle and shoot.

No, I'll just kill.

Her threats of violence are

a warning, a motivational.

They are not helpful.

She says, if you don't get your act together, I can't hold on for too long and I'll just kill you.

And she says this basically from her opening scene.

This is what I mean.

She is ostensibly a helpful character in these episodes who is constantly just threatening like an awful oncoming violence against anybody who isn't learning quickly enough.

With one exception.

Yeah.

Which is her rapidly developing feelings for Goan.

Yes.

She gets the Goan will say something heartfelt and inspiring, and we get the like smash cut to her face and the boop boof.

Yeah.

Awful like jungie ito.

Yeah.

And her heart grew three sizes that day.

It's impossible to overstate how

Palm is explicitly portrayed to be like a horror movie monster.

It is not like.

Palm is scarier than the Royal Guards by a lot.

Palm really

makes this sort of like doubling back out of the NGL, slowing down the pace, work.

Because

what begins to transpire is, as Goan and Kilio go back to their room where Palm is waiting for them, Palm reveals that she has brought in a special guest thanks to some indistinct facet of her nen power.

I think she said, like, when I touched you or something or like she did research.

Yeah, she did research.

And a special guest kicking open a door so hard I think it knocks Killiua backwards.

Frowning immediately.

Frowning immediately.

I think the first thing we see out of the door is her fancy little shoe and then she comes out and she's already pointing at Gon and Killiua.

Bisky has returned and like Keith said her outfit has changed but her entire demeanor has not.

Part of me was like is Bisky going to come back worse?

But somehow it is it is almost worse that she's just the same.

No change.

No change.

In Green Island, out of Green Island, this is Bisky.

She can be dressed like a magical girl or like she's working at a Christmas theme park.

I will say her new design is very cute.

I love her new haircut.

She's got a sort of like

dress.

Yes, yeah.

Yeah, what is her new haircut?

It's like a sort of like asymmetrical shock of hair behind her.

Yeah, and it's like a messy bun.

Yeah, it looks like Swiss to me.

Looks like a Swiss thing.

Probably Austrian since they're in Vienna.

Yeah, it's probably Austrian.

Vienna is in Italy.

Biskey's

gaslit.

What does Biskey do?

Jack shit.

She points at them and tells them that they need to train.

She sets them absurd training regiments.

Her first one is just so punishing, which is she tells them to express their nen and hold it like that for two hours.

Her first one, it's the only thing that they do for a month.

There's no second part.

She basically shows up and she's like, all right, I'm the fucking genius teacher around here.

Here's what you guys got to do: pick up a heavyweight and hold it.

And then she just sits down, crosses her legs, and starts reading like a magazine of hot boys.

She's reading like for like

she's the

inverse of

Masteroshi and

who, what's his fucking name from Naruto, who writes the

fucking porn books?

Jiraiah.

Jiraiah.

Right.

She's doing like the dirty old master inverted, sort of like 59-year-old who looks like a kid, but who's reading like Playgirl, if that even still exists.

Part of what is so funny about Bisky's whole deal, and

it's really only gotten funnier the second time it has happened, is that she doesn't show up, give them a task, and then fuck off.

She just sits there.

She sits there and watches.

She's like, I'm in for the long haul.

Remember when she put them in that pit with the scissors pervert and just sat on the edge of the pit for days watching?

Bisky doesn't seem to sleep ever, which is like another great I'm afraid of the teacher thing.

There are in fact moments in this where

Gone and Kill You actually do sleep and Biskey doesn't, you know, just seems to be sitting there hanging out.

There's just this constant, like, the thing that is underwriting Bisky's brutal training uh first is that it's really funny and i mean that that's underwriting it in the in the narrative sense you know the reason that we as viewers buy it is because it is part of an extended comedy bit and also we saw her beat that guy without even thinking about it and she is constantly outputting this kind of like um

latent power you know

all of her affect is like there is some uh nan majesty going on here that she doesn't even need to show us god the screenshot that keith posted in the Discord of Bisky with her hands on her hips frowning, looking like Bisky, and then behind her is Palm.

Palm is just like coming up from the background like the creature from the Black Lagoon.

It's crazy.

She was just fairly withered in that shot.

I posted a picture of it, by the way.

I realized that when Dre said crispy,

the thing that it reminded me of was she has like

those long strands of Christmas tinsel is what her hair looks like it's made out of.

Yeah, yeah.

Just like this horrible plasticky, like if someone had turned

cassette tape into hair.

Yeah.

There is some

and I won't belabor the point because we sort of already talked about it a bit with like Palm's devotion.

But I do think that there is something interesting about, you know, we often talk about like love and the look of love in this show as being like a bright golden light that you can't look away from.

And I really like that it is outputted in Palm.

You know, the experience of staring into this light has sort of like ravaged her or like fried her with the crispy hair and the pale face and the weird demeanor.

There's two things that describe me.

There's two things that I want to talk about real quick before we move on that happen right before Biskey shows back up.

The first thing is that we meet Knuckle already because he is parading down the street.

He's a beautiful idiot.

I love him.

He's basically a one-man marching band down the street being like, I know you fucking guys are here.

You better come out and fight me.

Meet me at 5 p.m.

And then we get like...

If you wanted ass kicking, meet me at 5 p.m.

in the park.

And then we get chatter from people watching being like, he's not telling them where to meet him.

Yeah.

He's just like, pam, param, param, I'm an assassin.

It's so funny.

And then because they've figured out who and where Knuckle is,

Gonakilo starts strategizing.

strategizing, and I think that this is a really good illustrative scene about where they're at.

Yeah, 100%.

We get Kiloa sort of like now that he's recovered a little bit from the shock that he was in after Kite dies and leaving the NGL, sort of reconsidering what Moral said, which is, according to that guy, I'm not qualified to judge if a fight can be won, but I disagree.

If you're fighting someone you can only beat once or twice out of a hundred times, don't bother.

You want 50-50 at least,

which I think is a very fair point.

And then Gohan says something extraordinary.

Yeah.

Goan like really opens up the barrel for a beautiful Goan's mistake here.

He says, So the first thing they say is, Killu says, Well, we should just like, we should figure out what these assassins' nen abilities are.

We can prepare best if we've got a real sense of what we're up against.

And Gohan says, Absolutely not.

No, we are going to be going into the NGL and fighting Chimera ants that we won't know what their deal is until they start using nen powers.

So we should practice fighting ants with unknown abilities.

And this is front-loading or starting to

pick at something that I think the show has always been interested in

since we first started talking about nen.

But I suspect with the ants gaining nen powers is going to become

more and more significant, which is

what is that guy's weird nen power?

You know as soon as soon as we learned that

there were nen powers, everybody on the show said to me, you know, the thing that it becomes is like, you're going to meet a bunch of people with a bunch of weird, cool nen powers, and a lot of the delight of the systematized magic system is, you know, someone squares off against our friends and they're going to pull something out of the bag that is completely unexpected.

And the show is now starting to work that.

directly into the text where characters are talking not just about nen powers in the abstract but they're talking about like what does it mean mean to not know what someone's power is?

Do you build up anticipation in yourself in a fight before figuring out someone's nen power?

And that like sort of like turning nen abilities into a hidden information game that everybody is trying to work out or is kind of like feeding off the energy of not knowing is something that comes up, I think, more and more in these episodes.

And sort of the starting pistol for that for me was Goan saying, you know, I don't actually want to know these assassins' nen abilities because we're going to to be fighting ants with mystery abilities.

It is, it, it, he, he makes a really good argument.

It makes a lot of sense.

Like, and it's, and it's a handicap in their immediate goal that is uncharacteristically

self-preservationist, I think.

Like, if we can't handle in a controlled environment someone else's net abilities that we don't know, then why would we try to handle the ants?

Yes.

Although it's a, it's a real difference in like i i i often feel that when when we see killer doing this kind of stuff he is coming from a place of like this is my job is like you have one chance to hit the target you plan prepare execute them collect the zeldic money and leave and gone is like yeah trying to think of a much more sort of like holistic view and as the episodes develop we learn that biskey is also trying to do a kind of

Biskey is interested in a training broader than fight the assassins right um

but to my point about the show starting to pull on this thread of like a question the show is interested in isn't just there are nen powers, but what are their nen powers?

This scene is immediately followed by two tests of it.

This is when Palm reappears and sorry, this is when Bisky reappears and Palm says, once I used my ability, it was quite simple.

What is the ability?

And then in the scene after this, which we'll talk about in a second, we see Peto planning something uh and sort of beginning to talk about their ability and again we are immediately forced to ask you know what is pito's ability so i think as soon as goan raises this question we're then presented with two scenes that say you know gone might be onto something here uh yeah i i like this it's really it's it's this is classic gone it's so fun uh

Once we're inside, that's what we're going to be facing.

Our goal isn't to defeat Knuckle and Shoot.

It's to get stronger, strong enough to go back in the NGL and rescue Kite.

We need to be strong enough to beat enemies we don't know anything about at a moment's notice.

Uh, if we always need to plan ahead, then what's the point?

And then Kayla was like, Okay, but we still need to focus on beating knuckle and shoot, and we'll only have a month.

And then Goan's like, No, let's do it in a week.

And then,

once we've met Biskey again, Biskey hits him in the head and is like, What the fuck are you talking about if you're going to do a week?

If Netaro said you have a month, what he really means is this should take someone a year.

Fish is like, He is so

cruel in his expectations that the idea that you'll be able to do what he's asking in a month is itself mean.

This is also like, we mentioned underpinned, but Gone is constantly being like, we have to do this for Kite.

Right.

Whose head we have seen in a lap.

Yeah.

No, my note is who's going to tell him?

Like, every time it happens, that's just all I can think is.

Oh, who's going to tell him?

It's great.

And, you know,

it guides a lot of the lighter tone of these episodes, which is that, you know, Goan believes that they're on their way to fight Kite.

So, you know, we got to get strong.

We can't be sitting around feeling sorry for us.

What is there to feel sorry for?

What did I say?

Fight Kite.

Oh, no, no, no.

We're not going to.

Well,

because...

Maybe after they rescue Kite.

Yeah.

Maybe after they'll...

You know,

to prove their strength.

Meanwhile, in the NGL,

Peto has

re-fixed Kite's head to his body and has stored him, sleeping beauty-like, in a glass coffin.

Yeah, that's why they did the Sleeping Beauty.

That seems fine.

Like all capital.

She, we've got a, we, we've got a, uh,

I just remembered this.

I remember them being, like, chopped into different pieces in the ice still for some reason.

No, that's a, that's wrong.

I'm just flat out wrong.

Yeah.

We get this, like,

weird, uh, sort of like sexualization of the kind.

It's a very Hisuka moment of like she's relishing the time that they fought together, and like, I need to, I need to have that experience, experience that feeling again.

Yeah, it's like it's very like

Raiden, like naked in the tube in Metal Gear Solid almost.

In which one, Metal Gear Solid 2?

I don't remember that part.

That's the one where Raiden looks around naked, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

We thought you meant, like, when does Raiden Ryden talk about being horny for combat?

Yeah, no, sorry.

Metal year rising, I think, but probably, yeah.

No spoilers.

I'm on my way.

They say, I, you know, if only I could feel that moment again, that moment of fighting, fighting you.

And I wrote down: is Pitu a necromancer?

Interesting.

We shall see.

In a park, Knuckles, Knuckle, Knuckles.

Knuckles is a short red echidna.

Yes.

Knuckles

is a likable.

echo.

Rather likable, to be clear.

Oh, that's true.

I'm not super familiar with Knuckles.

Knuckles the echidna.

Knuckles is sometimes likable.

They've made Knuckles more likable over the years.

Yeah.

Knuckle is immediately likable because he's first mad that they didn't show up and he has a small brown dog with him who is not his, but he is trying to take care of this dog.

He's sort of like

do you want to know what I called this dog in my notes?

What did you call this dog?

Oh my god, it's the dog that kills Kilo.

Kilua.

Oh no, he's a beer.

Yeah, they say in the subtitles.

My bad.

This dog is really funny.

The anime team, I haven't seen the panels from the manga, so I don't know whether or not this is the anime team making decisions about how to draw this, or Tagashi just draws dogs really distinctively.

But between Squala and

Knuckles, Knuckle,

this little pudgy dog is fantastic.

He looks like a pygmy hippo.

He looks like Mu Dang.

The pygmy hippo.

The real Us.

Sylvie, do you know?

I actually was not able to catch up with the manga this week, unfortunately.

That's fine.

The time got away from me.

I might have it here, but

we can keep going and I'll double-check.

What are we looking for?

Oh, just how these dogs look in the manga because they're so distinctive.

Yeah.

While Gonan Killio asleep,

having been given a small rest by Bisky she activates her nen ability which in case you've forgotten is a massage therapist and

cookie god cookie it's cookie right magical esthetician cookie

so good uh who appears in like a magical girl transformation sequence but is not bisky just seems to be like a you know straight from demon world she's crawled out of demon world and my favorite thing about uh uh esthetician cookie is that the first time she appeared, I thought to myself, the joke here is that she's going to be a massage

person who then does something lethal, you know, because Bisky is like violent and,

you know, powerful.

But Bisky is also cares very much about her appearance.

And so the fact that she really is just an aesthetician is really funny.

We didn't super see it actually in action in Greed Island, but here, aesthetician Cookie gives Gonon Killier a massage, and she plays the piano, and this is a nen ability called piano massage.

Yeah, it totally is.

It really just is that.

And there's a piano, and she gives a massage while the piano plays itself.

It's a nen player piano.

Jojo as well.

This is Let's All Go and Have a Good Time at the Italian restaurant,

where they eat special Italian food that causes their bodies to violently

expel impurities and like

tired muscle, etc.

This is sort of what is happening here with magical aesthetician cookie.

After this,

I just

I really like it.

It's sort of it's the

the other side.

It's like a mirror image of

Castro from Heaven's Arena, who has chosen to specialize in two extremely

difficult forms of nen for his nen type, which is enhancer to Master.

And

Bisky is like the other, and it leads to his death.

And the other side of his Bisky, who's like so powerful, seemingly, this is what it says to me anyway.

Bisky is so strong and so powerful, such a competent fighter that instead of having a Nen ability that works with her strength, she has chosen to have a Nen butler that recover that like helps her recover when she's been hurt or when she's stressed or when she's constipated.

I think

we talked about this before.

I feel like...

We talked about what Cookie does.

I don't think that we mentioned...

I don't think it was

Castro.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I thought that I had Castro.

I said this exact same thing, too.

But I might be wrong.

Okay.

I mean, her nin power is that she never has to take a day off of training if she doesn't.

Yeah, it's like, I think I compared it to like how athletes have to ice themselves.

Like they like they do like the ice bath thing after fighting.

Or not fighting, but like computing, you know?

Yeah.

only the only point I wanted to make was that

it's for Castro, it's bad, and for Bisky, it's good because she's just much better.

He's just, he's got the sauce.

She's got the sauce, yeah.

Yeah.

I

will not ever be caught power scaling.

So I will say that Biskey

invariably climbed.

Heaven's Arena.

Yes.

Oh, do it.

You just won't catch me.

Because you're too fast.

Like how you just power scaled, but I couldn't catch you.

You can't get me.

Oh, because if you're power scaling the Media Club Plus members, Jak is the fastest.

Yes.

Keith has found the dog from the manga, and I have got to say, Togashi did it even funnier than the anime team did.

This dog is fucking incredible.

Why does it look so weird in the second?

I I love it.

I love it so much.

It's because he's just drawing a loose gestural dog.

Yeah.

This is so good.

God, this dog looks so funny.

Yeah, the dog's really funny.

The first drawing of the dog, it looks much like it does in the show.

It is sort of like a small, soft-eared little dog with a short snout wearing a collar.

In the second image, it looks like someone was told to draw a goblin dog, but they could only do it in four line strokes.

They just had to be like, go.

And then here in this other panel, he's drawn one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight beautifully rendered dogs.

Yeah, these are lovingly rendered, like, and one golden retriever puppies.

There's one cat in the corner.

Oh, there is.

That's so cute.

It's probably a little bit more.

This just makes dog number two so fucking funny to me.

He just sat down and he said, I'm going to do this in 10 seconds.

Watch.

Well, it's like a joke because it's taking a shit.

Is it taking a shit in the second?

It is taking a shit, yeah.

It's dumping.

I thought it was sitting there wagging its tail.

It's probably ten seconds.

I mean, it must be doing that too.

Yeah,

dogs do that.

They're nasty little animals.

Well, the Texas, you got to pick up after your dogs.

Keep our parks clean.

Where's your dang owner?

I think it's dumping.

I love it.

Because Knuckle immediately starts selling himself to us as a likable, good-hearted guy.

And

we've had this instilled in us about hunters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The strongest hunters, animals like them.

I don't think that is what Jing said.

Let's get back to it.

People who like...

No,

it says a good hunter is well liked by

the hunter.

Yeah, yeah.

Sorry, that's not good.

Jing said it to Kite.

No, didn't Jing say to Kite that hunters are well liked by animals?

I thought it was a good hunter.

being well liked by animals is a sign that

you could be a good hunter, yeah.

Okay,

that is important because later on Goan says good hunters are well liked by animals.

And I had thought that this was a moment of Goan misremembering what someone had reported his father as saying.

But that's not actually the case.

In any case,

Palm offers some advice to Biskey.

And her advice boils down to this.

I want to go into the NGL to be with the man I'm devoted to, and I don't love him, but I am devoted to him.

I am going to kiss him when I get there, but it's not because

it's like a love kiss, it's a devotion kiss.

No hetero,

no heter, and I'm going to get there.

And if you make me wait any longer, I'm going to end up killing everybody.

It's really funny.

And she says this both very matter-of-factly and as though she is describing: like, there is a bus I have to catch, and if I am not at the bus station in time, all hell is going to break loose

um

she's having a she's having a bad time yeah swirling

ominous nen

i'm biskey also kind of having a bad time keeps making little faces got i gotta get out of here yeah a lot of internal monologue being like oh i gotta get the fuck out of here

it says a lot about uh palm that biskey is afraid of palm yeah it does i think biskey is afraid of being being killed.

I think that Biskey is sort of like less afraid of palm in the abstract and more afraid of like trouble.

Yeah.

It is going to be really annoying to have to deal with this.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't want to deal with the drama.

It's yeah.

Meanwhile, in the NGL, Notero and co are starting to, you know, make some plans.

Notero or someone, I didn't write down, I didn't attribute this.

Someone says, the experts experts can't come to a consensus on how long it's going to be before the king is born.

The chairman thinks it will be in at least two months.

I believe that's Palm that says that, right as they're cutting to the NGO.

Oh, sure, right.

And I like this a lot because I don't trust that that's true or right, but I think that Chairman Natero probably has a better idea of it than maybe like Spinner or somebody, just because he's Chairman Notero.

And so it does make the sort of like

awful anxious like portence of Kite's last days seem kind of like sad and flat.

The thing that Kite was actually so anxious about was the royal was Pito's arrival.

You know, the king might actually be two months out, you know?

I don't think it's two months.

I think we are looking at a week or so, but to ask Kite, you know, just before he died, he'd have said we're maybe days away.

Well,

the important thing is that between that line being delivered and the end of these three episodes, one month has passed.

Oh,

I don't feel good about this.

Yeah, that month went by really quick.

That's half of the two months.

I also like it.

It sort of illustrates the difference between like being Netero or like being kite or a spinner clow, where kite and spinner are experts.

Netero has access to expert consensus.

Yes, he does.

From possibly the government.

Right.

Hundreds of, you know, who, how many people can we possibly ask about this?

That's what we've got.

Well, the other thing is that, like, Notero is not a

God.

What did Kite call himself?

Like a

biological something hunter?

Yeah.

He's like a biospecialist.

He's not a magical beast hunter.

Yeah.

But it's like, it sounded like cryptozoology, basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, Notero is not one of those, but you can bet your bottom dollar that he has access to like 10.

You know, Kaida's Kite not the only one of those, and Notero has probably been talking to them.

Yeah.

We also see him doing the eye thing that we saw Hisuka do ages and ages ago.

I know!

I was so excited to see that!

He holds his hand up to his eye.

Just really good little...

Takashi absolutely cannot resist explaining a background detail and building it into his whole thing.

So it is really charming in the instances where we just get one of these little, you know, this must just be a hunter technique that we've seen Notero and Hiseka use.

And I like that

it's sort of a little, like, a little confirmation or suggestion that, like, that's basically the first nen power we ever see.

Yeah.

We got some.

One, I do really like that.

I didn't actually think about that recontextualization.

That's really fun.

I was just going to say, I really enjoy the extra Netaro characterization we get here because we don't see him in

hunter exam mentorship mode.

Right, teacher mode, kindergarten mode mode.

This is him in the field.

This is him working.

This is him trying to get his groove back, as he says.

It's his first time in the field in a long time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which also speaks to the threat, right?

Where it's like, oh, we got Netero out of retirement mode.

And he's totally clowning on

Nov and Moral, which is so funny.

So good.

But they don't seem to be too mad about it.

They acknowledge how they're like, oh, he is better than us.

Yeah.

He's Michael Jordan, you know?

He's doing that thing.

He's looking at Pito and says, this isn't good.

That thing is a lot stronger than me.

And they kind of can't believe it.

They're like stronger.

This is Nove, who I think

in these episodes is categorized as being

extremely confident.

So sort of like no selling the ants almost.

Like, this is fine.

We've got the chairman.

Everything's going according to plan.

He's stronger than the chairman.

Surely you jest.

If that's the case, not a single hunter in the world would stand a chance against it.

Which is a little, it's a great little thing like, oh, Netaro is

confirmation, Netero is strongest hunter.

But then Netero says, it's been more than half a century since I was the strongest among non-users, but I do see your point.

Although I'm flattered, I'm currently just about even with the two of you.

And

then he's like, oh, then you shouldn't have any problem.

Yeah.

And do you have what Netero says verbatim?

Because it's really good.

No, I don't have it.

Yeah, if you have it, I don't have it verbatim either.

He basically goes like

he laments how sad it is that he's become so weak.

And you know, less than half his former glory, and he's like crying big, exaggerated tears.

It's really funny.

I really like Chapman Netara.

Yeah, it's like, oh, yeah, he is like this with everybody.

It's not just when he's talking to precocious 11-year-olds.

He is the uncle who's always clowning.

Before we learn what Morrill's big club thing is,

the last thing that I want to say is the chairman says that he would prefer a non-violent outcome, which is a very interesting thing to say.

Just an episode before we see him in a room full of slaughtered ants.

I know.

So funny.

It's very like Spider-Man video game of like,

I'm a bunch of less than lethal ammunition, what it's like to me.

Yeah, I meant non-violent for the in-charge ants.

These other ants, no, no, we'll kill all of them, whatever.

That's sort of the implication that

I think.

But

who wants to talk about the big weird club thing?

Oh, just before the big weird club thing, tiny detail.

As we've talked about the ants using nen vocabulary and, you know, it being really notable the way the ants are suddenly talking about, you know.

enhancers and whatever.

I did really like that one of the extermination team talks about Pito having, quote, nen surveillance stopping them from getting closer.

We have a word for that, but they're not using it.

I don't know whether or not that's deliberate, but I think that

it's N, right?

Your N.

Yeah.

And the Extermination team knows that language.

Sure.

But as does the viewer.

Just being casual.

I really like that they said...

They could just be being casual.

Yeah.

I love that they said

that thing has NE surveillance.

Yeah.

Oh, actually, there's even one more thing.

Oh, Oh, what?

A chairman pretends to ask them what their plan is, and Nove is like, obviously he knows what the plan is because he asked for us.

There's only one thing that we would do with the three of us here,

which is very funny.

We don't know the plan.

We're going to see the plan happen as Moral reveals what his big thing is.

Well, Moral doesn't actually reveal it.

Nove opens a portal in the ground.

A portal-ass portal.

Like a...

light portal or like a wizard's portal.

You're pondering your orb and you turn around and you open the portal with a wave of your hand.

This is the most like capital M magic I've seen Nen look in a while.

And he produces effortlessly Morrell's weapon from this.

And Morrell throws what is revealed to be a cover over it.

We talked about it in the past as being a big sort of like wooden club, but it's actually something wrapped in a tarpaulin.

What is it?

Dre, you were excited.

It's his fucking rig, bro.

His truck?

He's got a fucking truck.

No, no.

He's fucking blasting ohms in this thing.

He's got a giant pipe.

He's a giant pipe.

He's a huge pipe.

He has a pipe.

He's the size of

bigger than a human man.

Because Moral is a giant, and this pipe is big compared to him.

That is

really nice.

It is really nice.

And it's like, it's like ornate.

The way they shoot this pipe and the reveal of Morel's Marl's Nen ability is really painterly and interesting.

They take their time with it.

This is a really charming Nen power to see unveiled because Marl starts smoking and he smokes out a huge amount of smoke.

Yep.

And then

he's smoke.

He absolutely is.

He summons...

hundreds of tiny, perfect white smoke rabbits that go darting.

Well, first they just gather around him in like a crowd of these white rabbits, and then they go darting off through the forest, kind of like puffs of smoke blowing out behind them.

It's such a cool image.

Gandalf only wishes he could be this cool with his pipe tricks.

Check, what nen-type is Nov, do you think?

He is a conjurer.

Why?

Because he conjures?

Yeah.

Nope, he's an emitter.

why

he's emitting all that smoke

no no not moral not moral no oh sorry uh nov is oh no

okay why is he an emitter uh because he can detach aura from the body

what why

by making a portal that's nen that's nen that he's detached from the body he emits a portal oh the like room is also his nen right yeah yeah yeah right right right but you you could just say that Hisaka emits bungee gum, which has the properties of rubber and gum.

Huh?

Yeah, he does.

No,

Hisaker is a conjurer.

Well, he's a transmuter.

He transmutes his aura into gum and then emits it.

Also, Moral is a manipulator.

Is manipulator a type?

Yeah.

Manipulation, yeah.

He's not a fucking conjurer?

No.

No.

The nen wheel isn't real.

The nen wheel is real.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's

real become animate and inanimate objects.

Maybe.

Oh, yeah.

And maybe the nin wheel is more real in terms of like the personality stuff than it is the like only a conjurer could do this kind of power.

I'll say I'll say this.

This is what so manipulator and conjurer, you know, he might conjure the rabbits, but he to move them, he has to manipulate them.

and i and it's it's a sort of i think it's a it's a uh

it's a coin flip like which one is his base and which one is his stretch you know what i mean sure yeah yeah yeah well and and like

we know karapika is a conjurer and like he conjures those chains but then his nin doesn't like manipulate his nin does manipulate the chain though

just a bit not a lot yeah i think like he's he is like throwing the chain like his physical movements Yeah, right.

The threat is that that Karapiga is conjuring a very powerful thing and then maybe slightly manipulating it versus the conjuring of the rabbits is the small thing and the actual like controlling a thousand rabbits is sure the big thing.

Yeah, Shanarch's a manipulator, which I guess is a way more like direct one-to-one of like the word.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do we know what Notero's position is on the wheel?

I won't tell you.

Yeah.

I don't think we have been explicitly told yet.

Yeah, we have no idea what it is.

Do you want to guess?

Jack, would you like to guess?

I think he is an enhancer.

Okay.

Although, I think it would actually be very chairman Notero-y to be showing off skills that seem like enhancer skills and then reveal that he actually has actually has something else.

Yeah.

Could be a specialist.

Could be a specialist.

It would be kind of a bummer if they just gave all their most special characters the specialists, you know?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

I've written down a note here.

There's some really arresting imagery in this episode.

I wrote down here, Pito sees the ants approaching like stars across the sky.

I have no idea what image I am talking about there.

Is there a shot of Pito?

I think you're thinking about the rabbits approaching.

Oh, I'm thinking about the rabbits.

Yes.

Yeah, I think you just wrote ants by accident.

And

they're like flying like geese in

a formation across the sky.

Really?

Oh, you are.

You you can tell they're not alive right yeah am i misremembering that okay yeah no yeah yeah yeah um and uh they're ready to

pito is ready to be like pito knows what nen is you know um

he says they're not alive but the implication is that he's thinking like that's nen you know we're being attacked yeah yeah

we meet a new character here How does this character actually get introduced?

What actually happens between Pito looking up and seeing the bunnies?

And then.

I can say if no one else has the words for this.

I don't remember the exact

very quick.

I don't remember the exact words that Pito's thinking, but I do remember how this happens, which is a very fruity voice replies to Pito's inner monologue.

And Pito's like, huh?

Was I speaking out loud?

And then he goes, no,

I just so happen to hear your thoughts.

And then we see a little fairy man.

Yeah.

This is like a

so many uses of the word fairy man.

I didn't mean it in.

I meant it in a literal way.

Sorry.

This is like a tall, beautiful butterfly wing sort of like Bishonen boy.

He has like loose blonde hair.

He's wearing like a suit, like a shirt, like a flowy shirt

and long pants.

And when we say he has beautiful butterfly wings, he sort of has like stained glass wings almost.

Yeah.

They're like psychedelic.

They like glow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He looks great.

And he introduces himself as Shia Poof.

Shia Poof.

Shall I say this guy's name?

Shawapoof.

Shower Poof.

Yeah.

Shower Poof.

Shawapoof and Nefropito.

Or

Poof and Pito.

Calling him Poof is the thing that feels the most Curio to me.

What is this Arrested Development we're watching all of a sudden?

A Curiolo?

And it's great that the second Royal Guard has showed up and is basically a

human who is a butterfly.

Yeah.

When the first Royal Guard was a human who is a cat.

And we've talked a lot about the way that they have so much fun with the ants.

I'm thinking especially of Flutter, who is Hagia's attendant, who I don't know what bug that is.

Flutter has big eyes.

Yeah, he's like a dragonfly with frizzy hair and a long collar and sleeves and a weird beak.

I feel like dragonfly is the best answer we can get there, but even then it's got a question mark.

Yeah,

yes.

Yeah.

But by the time we get to the royal guards, we have human butterfly, human cat.

Oh, okay.

And then we're going to get to kind of the third one, which I'm not terribly sure about.

We'll

see that soon.

But

are we just calling him Poof?

Is that what we're calling him?

Yeah, we're calling him Poof, yeah.

I mean,

you can say the full name if you feel like it.

Oh, yeah.

We're not going to write you a ticket.

Yeah.

Poof explicitly says the third royal guard is awakening soon and immediately gives his name.

Right.

The third royal guard is ooh dear.

Do you want to go for it?

I'm going to go for it and then you'll tell me how it's pronounced.

This is Methu-thuyupi.

Menthuthuyupi.

Yeah, Methupi Yupi.

Or Yupi we call you.

I always pronounce it with a hard T sound instead of the TH.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I think it's a double T H menthith or Yupi.

Okay.

Yeah, I think that's the piece.

I love the ant queen naming them.

The fact that the king is obvious.

It's so clear that someone else has named these characters.

It's just these like remarkable alien names that are like, they are like, they sound beautiful to say.

Something I think a lot about the queen is that so much of the imagery of her is her eating things, you know, her huge mouth, her savoring the taste of a thing and knowing how she's going to turn it to her advantage.

So I think that it's great that not only is it that she picks names that are very odd, but she picks names that are really fun to say, that have a great mouthfeel, that roll around in your mouth as you say them.

And I think that's really cool.

Every other character has either been named like Steven or Pig.

And here we have Menthuthu Yupi and Shower Poof and Nefa Pitu.

It's really, really good.

Okay, so yeah, Poof has arrived.

Yupi is coming soon.

Pito is not the only royal guard on the block.

More boys are coming.

And Pitu says, I haven't yet made a final decision about which ability to develop.

It's a crazy line.

I remember the first time I watching this sitting upright when I heard that.

Well, the thing is,

Gon and Killio have also chosen their abilities.

It's not like, and Karapaka also chose their abilities.

The telling thing here.

Yeah, definitely when it's a specialist.

The telling thing for me is less that they are choosing their ability, and more that they are doing so with such a kind of like teasing malevolence as

they turn towards the body of Kite and say, All I need to do is fix him.

I want to once again experience the dreamlike moment.

And then an awful, scratchy, gestural purple skull appears behind them.

This is similar to the skull that

Ramot saw the moment that Pito awoke.

And it is also very evocative of the way that, and now that I've seen Tagashi's manga panels, I know so clearly that this is like, this is like a style that he draws so well.

It reminds me a lot of when Melody told us about the devil's sonata and we saw that sort of like Francis Bacon image.

These sort of just like hellish with a capital H images.

Did you, you said the line, I'll be able to experience that dreamlike moment with you.

Did you say the first half of that line?

She says, All I need to do is fix him.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

I thought

words people have uttered many times before

really into that new Taylor switch.

If I fix him, I can experience the one magic moment again.

Yeah,

sure.

And this is basically the end of it.

Sylvie, I just left my day job.

Don't make me lift this.

Sorry.

Sorry.

I don't mean to diagnose the cat with BPD.

My bad.

The episode is now basically over.

You know, Pito turning their brain towards their awful nerd ability is the punchline that we end on.

But the note that I immediately took here was that, like, okay, so Gon and Killior are going to have to fight Kite, right?

That's where we're going.

If Pito's goal is to bring Kite back to life so that Pito can

fight him, I could very easily see, for example, Pito saying, well, I'm going to turn Kite against Gonan Kilior as a test of his abilities.

I suppose another way here is that we could play a really fun arc of like trying to break Kite out of Pito's conditioning, you know, where we say, Kite's still in there somewhere, and can we get him back?

But, you know, the train is now proceeding towards the fork in the path with the trolley problem, where on one side of it, it is Gonan Kilio have to fight Kite, and on the other side of it, it is they somehow break through or try to break through to Kite Kite and bring him back on side.

Because this is Shounen,

those two tracks might actually lead to the same destination.

I think about the way that, like, the way you, we've talked about it in the Dragon Ball episodes, it's like ideology combats, the Shounen ideology combat, where you, you know, you impress your ideology upon an opponent through fighting, and then by the end of it, Tian Shinhan is sort of transmuted alchemically.

into an ally.

So it could be that they fight, you know, Pito sends Kite after them, they fight Kite, They get Kite back on side.

I'm really just spread betting at this point because I feel like Tagashi could do any of these.

And I'm just putting down...

There's that great German stream where he tries to play roulette by putting $1 on every single like square on the roulette board to see what happens.

This is what I'm trying to do here.

I did wonder that if Pito's Pitu Pito's, they say Pito in the Japanese dub, but I keep wanting to say Pitu because of how it's written out.

If Pito's ability brings Kite back, does it also bring back his nen?

Are we going to get evil crazy slots?

Oh, man.

Normal slots.

I'm the great mad clown horrible slot.

I'm the very normal and kind of sad clown, bad slots.

So I don't know.

I don't know.

You know that when you're kind of a businessman, if you're not.

But doctor, I am the sad clown crazy sauce.

The other thing I just wanted to add on really quick when we were talking about like P2 and like P2's dialogue around like, oh, I haven't even thought of my own ability yet.

A lot of the times when we see like really strong Nin users, part of what makes them so strong and overwhelming is like how good their abilities are.

And here we have a person who,

at least so far that we have seen, is like the strongest Nin user we have ever seen on screen in action.

And he doesn't have a special ability yeah he's just that yeah strong and scary you know and i was thinking about it i totally agree dre and i was thinking about like what is um what is so sinister about this implication of like needing to pick an ability for uh pito

and

when gonan and kilua who also have to pick abilities uh like i think jack you were saying it like

Kilua was self-evident to him.

Like,

I know that I have this electricity inside me.

If I can learn to bring it out, then that will fit with my transmuter nature.

And Goan is like,

punch hard.

When Pito says it.

I'm 12 and I like games and outside.

When Pito says it, it feels like there's this implication that there's a buffet's worth of potential.

I have all of these things.

I have so much more at my disposal than Gona Nikilo could ever imagine even.

Yeah.

Where maybe it feels a little bit more like Karapika, who like had this idea in mind and needed to work hard to execute it,

but where instead of having one idea in mind, they have a hundred ideas.

I could do anything that I wanted to.

And

fictionally, that's true.

Like it, it really could be anything because it's fake.

Yeah.

and with karapica too we have seen someone who can like immensely boost their nin power very quickly but it's only through like super super dangerous like min maxing basically yeah yeah and and pito doesn't have to do any of that right and we and even if they did we don't have to worry about pito expending life energy to become way stronger because Pito is technically a bad guy.

Like we don't have to worry about them like we worry about Karapika.

Yeah, I know, for sure.

We're not friends with Peto.

No.

We're friends with Karapika.

Episode 87 begins, and the ant queen is very big.

Like, popular?

Even like

she's blowing up.

Yeah.

This lady's name is on everybody's lips.

Can't stop talking about the queen.

How many human meatballs a day does she have to eat, Jack?

Like 200 or something?

How many?

250 meatballs.

Yeah.

Human meatballs, please.

I've written here, the king is moving in her sack.

Yeah, it's not good, Icebro.

Ice bro.

It's not good.

Gon and Kelly are after a particularly tough bout of training under Biskey.

Remember that was happening?

We were in and hell in the episode for like the last 20 minutes.

And so you might have forgotten that we're also doing a training montage with the child nen master.

After a hard training session, Biskey says,

Vochild.

We are going out out right now.

You are going to go and fight him right now.

They are like dripping in sweat.

They're exhausted.

She's got her sexy magazines.

Yeah, she says, whether you win or lose isn't as important as you think.

Take their tiles at any cost.

If it looks like you're going to lose, run away and try again.

And I think this is the place in our episode to talk about what Biskey is actually trying to do here, because while it doesn't come across fully until later in the episode, I think that this is like a really nice moment to kind of like get it out in the open, which is is that Bisky, frankly, views this whole NGL thing and possibly even the Chimera Ant thing, definitely the assassin thing, as a small but useful step on Gonan Kiliwa's journey.

And she is prepared to burn Gonan Kilua's success here in favor of like a broader, more useful learning.

She is taking the long view of this.

And I think this is really smart teaching.

It is.

And it may, in fact, also be what Netero is doing.

Yes, it may also be what Netaro is doing.

I hadn't actually thought of that.

Netero might not actually have been trying to get them into the NGR.

Netero might have, because what Bisky says is, if he said it would take you a month to do this, it'd take you a year.

And so if that is true and that is how Netaro operates, then he probably doesn't have any real expectation that they can do this.

We get a good image of him like chuckling when she says that too.

Yeah.

In the background, which I really enjoy.

Like a sort of evil Netaro popping up.

He's a little goblin man.

And Bisky believes that they are going to lose this fight, but the loss is going to teach them what it is that they lack in their Nen training.

You know, Bisky has always been a Nen teacher that is really focused on the fundamentals and sort of like pulling out the

real utilities of the fundamentals.

I mean, I remember when she...

God, she explained like how enhancing worked or something from first principles and it blew my mind.

And I think that she is saying they are going to lose this fight, and they are going to, it is going to become clear to them and me where they need to improve, and that is extremely valuable.

Uh, you know what?

This reminded me of, I think about this sometimes because it's the only thing, it's only memory I have of my biology class from ninth grade.

Uh, but do you know about because in my and it wasn't actually biology, it's because I, my teacher, uh, who went on to become a comedian, shout out to Mr.

Dunn, uh,

uh,

he was a like um

it's like a fitness major or something he had like a degree in exercise or something whatever

yeah whatever the real version of that is that's what he did uh and uh he for some other reason was talking about vo2 max which is such a funny sounding it's just such a it's such a I don't know, something about the way that sounds, it always stuck in my brain, VO2 Max.

And that is like the like amount of, the smallest amount of oxygen you your body can consume before it collapses under the strain and it's like one of the ways you measure endurance is like eventually your ability to lift stuff or run for a really long time outstrips your oxygen's ability to deliver all of the oxygen that you need and you basically just collapse so you can measure your vo2 max by running on the treadmill until you physically fall uh that is how you measure VF2 max.

And I think about it every time I've seen these

training sessions of Biskey training them is like,

this is like weirdly, I mean, maybe not weirdly, it's Tagashi, but like, this really reminds me of a real thing.

Like she's trying to increase their endurance by just like pushing them to the limit literally every single day, like moving where their limit is because that's the only thing she's training them on.

Yeah, that's like how you build muscle too in a lot of ways, right?

Yeah.

Like you push to the limit.

I remember seeing a tick tock about this actually where like a guy was like hey if you're trying to learn to run and it sucks you should stop and you should do this very specific like kettlebell exercise because it'll raise your vo2 max and then running will be easy

yeah vo2 max funny words that stuck in my head for you know 15 years

i'm gonna hope that they have a way to measure your vo2 max that's not like have a bad accident on a trampoline or a uh

it'd be great if it was on a trampoline like a treadmill trampoline.

Yeah.

I believe you're supposed to be monitored and wearing a specific harness to measure your VHU.

Because you also have to be blowing into a thing that measures how much oxygen you've got in you.

Oh.

So you've got, because they have to, yeah, the whole point is like measuring your body.

Buy me dinner first, am I right?

Nothing?

All right, all right.

Gun and Killio emerge from the woods to fight Knuckles, who gently shoes the little dog away.

And he has additional dogs.

Just one dog?

There's now several dogs, but he is gently shooing away the one dog that we saw earlier.

He says, I can't believe this.

It's you two, really.

And he almost immediately starts coming apart.

First, he doesn't like being compared to a pair of snot-nosed kids and he starts sort of mocking them, to which Kiliwa really steely says, take this seriously.

And then Knuckles starts crying.

He says,

I'm not upset at all.

They're tears tears from laughing too much.

Don't tell anyone about this.

I'm not mad.

Don't write that I'm mad.

Yeah.

So we now know a handful of things about Knuckle Bine.

One, we know he's a dumbass who parades down the street shouting, I'm an assassin, I'm an assassin.

We know that he is well loved by dogs and is incapable of

not taking care of them.

He is sort of

even trying to convince the dog, I don't like you, stay away, and is not even convincing to the dog.

And he is a crybaby,

he's a huge crybaby, but he's kind of an endearing cry.

The taking care of the dog, etc., very, very sweet.

And then bursting into tears at the face of Gonukilua.

I'm really impressed by how, and you know, I feel like this is probably the hallmark of someone who cut their teeth on a really extensive tournament.

Is it the dark tournament in

the dark tournament in Europe?

Yeah, like something that makes a tournament arc sing is I need to

very quickly characterize opponents before during and after a fight and I need to give the audience something to chew on with them and dark tournament is so great at introducing five guys and within 15 seconds you know a ton about who they are and what their deal is yeah we get knuckles whole deal here it's it's fantastic gone has a little uh like an internal voice thing he says you idiot is what I want to say.

And

he holds himself back.

And then he sort of begins like a weird compromised Gohan's mistake.

He comes to the conclusion that they can't overcome everything with willpower, which is like, great, Goan, this is really valuable.

But he does decide to go ahead with the fight anyway.

He charges up.

Goan's punch, and we get some internal nen math from Knuckle.

You know, I can root my Ren to whatever.

And then Goan hits him so hard, I thought he'd killed him.

I wrote here the Ghan quote the fact is we can't overcome everything with willpower and I've labeled it the anti-Shonen statement.

Yeah, for real now This is this is like the exact opposite point that every other Shonen is trying to get you to buy into and not that not even to leave Hunter Hunter out of it hunter hunter is all also constantly cashing in on the idea that you can overcome anything with willpower.

We've seen it happen.

We've seen it happen in even more extreme ways than other shows.

Like you can get the shit beat out of you.

You can get your arms cut off.

You can pass out being tortured for hours and hours and hours.

But as long as you don't tap out, you can still win.

Yes.

Yeah.

And then and then we compromise it, right?

Because we saw, you know, we have this anti-shonen move, but then Gohan still launches the punch, beats Knuckle, and then, you know,

we know how this plays.

Gohan doesn't see this as a true victory.

Goan has essentially demonstrated his strength to Knuckle.

Knuckle, as he sort of passes out, says, I knew I could count on you and you didn't let me down.

This is the buy-in to the real fight.

Yeah, yeah, this is the buy-in.

And God, in the show about teachers and learning, I can't help but think of how like the first real encounter with this was

Can you land a punch on Hisuka?

You know, Hisuka saying I will start thinking of you as

like, I mean, Hiseka always thought of Goan as valuable, but, you know, you become real to me in a different way once you sort of just like put out a statement in a violent action you don't need to beat me in a fight you just need to land a punch on me and I can see that as we follow this through we get to like gone handily beating knuckle and then saying

that wasn't that wasn't the real fight right it was not it was not a fair set of rules

I wrote here gone's had enough taking tokens he doesn't feel like he's earned I love knuckle realizing the mistake that he's made but being unable to back out, deciding where to put his Nen so that he doesn't die trying to block this.

Because, you know, fundamentally, when you're dealing about Nen, you don't have to be.

You don't have to be way weaker than someone to be instantly killed by them.

You just have to make a bad decision about where your Nen should be.

Yeah.

He wakes up in a bed and goes to give them his tiles, his shogi tiles.

And of course, you know, we know how that goes.

We talked about that.

He got all his crying done out of the way earlier, right?

No, he does quite a bit of crying here, too, I think.

Especially when the knuckle buying crying?

Only when the little puppy climbs out of the blankets and Gona's like, oh, the puppy wouldn't leave you.

Good hunters are well looked after by animals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is when we get a bit of knuckle

backs or

ideology here.

Knuckle, quote, despises the blanket policy of getting rid of misfits.

If you've never seen something, then you don't have the right to pass judgment on it.

You've got to exchange a few blows.

Killiwa rolls his eyes, you know.

But Knuckle doesn't want to exterminate the ants.

It is worth saying that.

So we've had the government saying we want to do this as humanely as possible, which I don't buy.

I just simply don't believe that.

Or that

their version of as humanely as possible is very low on humanity.

yes, yeah, definitely.

Um, and then we have had Natero saying we're going to try and do this non-violently, but I don't really understand that, and that gets you know, sort of thrown out the window, thrown out of the window pretty quickly.

But I do think it's really telling this is our first sort of spoken moment of, hey, what if we don't kill the ants?

You know, what if there's a way out of this that isn't killing the ants?

Uh, Kiliwa rolling his eyes, you know, yeah, Palm, however, pulls out a knife and is desperate to kill.

But doesn't.

It is funny.

We've got one character who doesn't want to kill ants and one character who's like, I'm about to kill nine people.

I'll kill anybody.

I'll kill anybody.

Yeah.

Give me a reason.

Yeah.

Ants are walking through what initially seems to be the mist, but is in fact

go marching one by one around.

Like, literally.

Yeah, they really do.

And then suddenly, through the mist, they just start dropping through the floor into...

How do we want to describe it?

The least interesting and easiest way for me to describe this is it's like a test chamber from portal.

They go through a portal into a test chamber.

But in actuality, what it sort of is, is like a empty, clean, sterile white space marked with almost like wireframe drawings or, you know, wireframe squares on the walls.

It reminds me of like

a kill room from a movie where it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, you know, the mobsters are like, oh man, when you're brought back in there, like that room exists for one reason only, and that's to kill people in.

What was I think of it like the Street Fighter training room is what it looks like?

That too.

Oh, yeah.

What was that portal game, the

portal game, that like portal-like puzzle game that people kept describing as non-Euclidean from like 12 years ago?

What was that game called?

That game was called Anti-Chamber.

Anti-Chamber.

It looks like Anti-Chamber to me.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And of course, this isn't a kill room, is it?

Just Chairman Natera was just sitting there, presumably to talk with the ants.

Oh, yeah.

Interrogating.

Whether or not killing happens in the room has no bearing on whether or not it's a kill room.

No, we sure do.

We technically don't see the actual killing.

Yeah, maybe they just popped.

Maybe they just did that.

Yeah, their heads just did that.

Well, maybe he tried to talk to one of the ants, and then the other one was like, you can't talk to him.

and then they killed each other.

Yeah, maybe, maybe.

Maybe, definitely.

And Kite's still alive.

Oh, it's yeah.

Keith has just posted a panel from the manga of the exit route, exit door.

No, no, this is from antechamber.

Oh, that's from antechamber?

Yeah, that's it.

Can you see how I thought this was a Tagashi panel, though?

Like, putting the text in the doorway is really would be a Tagashi move.

It's a picture of the chamber with a big exit door, and then written in the black of the doorway is Life Isn't About Getting to the End, which I had thought was like a laser november.

Meanwhile, Colt, remember him?

Colt and Peggy are starting to get a little suspicious that ant commanders are getting picked off one by one.

They know that the humans are doing this.

This is kind of like...

The tables have been turned here because they know that they're facing a strong opponent.

They don't know where they are or what they're doing, but they know that squadrons squadrons are disappearing.

And Kite actually says, if the humans target us in a long hunt, it could mean trouble.

There's a crack in the ant's armor.

Yeah.

Yeah, they, and then they, they, they're worried about going to Nefer Pito.

They specifically are like, we really don't want to have to bring this to Nefer Peto.

And

it's not exactly clear why.

Maybe, like, I think the implication up front is like, they're worried that that, that Pito's going to be mean about it because Peto's maybe cruel because they're so strong.

But no, just because Peter doesn't care.

Peter doesn't care about the safety of

these ants.

Peto is creating a stitch-together Frankenstein kite.

Very happy.

Their concern is solely with the birth of the king.

I really like that.

It does not matter what happens to the guard ants.

The guard ants can be picked off until they're gone.

For all

they care.

Yeah, I just think it's like so much fun how we've already got...

Yep,

there's

bristling at the presence of the um

the royal guard now and then there's another thing

it's that uh

the the behavioral issues that seemed like they were going to get fixed they're not so fixed anymore because these yeah all yeah because the royal guard is like it's not that they've abdicated their duty it's just that their duty isn't exactly what it seemed like it was going to be and now you've got a bunch of squads that uh of like shitty ants that are in it for themselves who also have powerful men abilities now.

Ever since they discovered how to control nen, they've been become quite arrogant.

That's what they said.

Yeah, I really like the.

So Peggy and Cult are planning on bringing things back under control.

Nen has made the squadron leaders arrogant is the translation that I wrote down.

It's really fun.

So they do actually bring their concerns to Pito, and Pito says, look, I'll leave the outside to you.

Cult and Peggy have this great light as they're walking away where one says to the other, Well, this is better than getting erratic orders, you know?

Okay.

We are fully in middle management territory.

I was going to say, it is great how much they are just like, well, at least the

head office isn't bothering us right now.

It becomes clearer that Natero and the Extermination crew are working a plan.

The exact nature of the plan is not terribly clear to the viewer, but it relies on the portals, the kill room, the mist, and picking off the ants.

They call some ants bait and some ants traps.

And

Nove says, I suspect the organized and disorganized ants are going to start pairing off.

They are playing the ants against each other.

And I really do like that we have enough of the shape of this plan to kind of put together vaguely what's going on.

But they are still, you know, they had a conversation in a room somewhere before they showed up in the NGL of like, here is what I think we should do.

And I really love that not all of that is clear to us.

I've got, I love this.

This is still here.

Could you describe what's happening in the stills?

This is in one image the plan summed up of

a hole in the ground going to a

nose portal.

an ant that we've seen before, like the weird pale ladybug man ant, who is falling straight down into this hole, surrounded by mist, into the kill room.

Huge, like, looney tunes energy here.

It's really funny.

Yeah, this is Wiley Coyote realizing that, like, he ran off the cliff and is about to fall.

Yeah.

I also love this ant specifically because it's one of a category of ants that is like too bulky and insectoid to like put this anti-properly.

This is Austin's favorite ladybug ant.

Go back to the first Chimera ant episode.

You will hear Austin talking about a ladybug ant in

an assault on a village who is kind of just hanging out and then gets scared when people with guns show up.

I might be wrong, but I also think this is one of Keith's favorite chimera ants, the ant with the small draw straws box.

That one's like a grasshopper or something.

But it's the same kind of ant.

The one who's too bug-like to like really emote or anything.

Yeah, it's really funny.

Nova is very confident about this.

Nova's like, this is going great.

But Natero, wise, is not so sure.

The viewer has been primed after having seen Pito kill Kite in one second

to be

terrified of the ants, right?

The viewer is like, they are going to have to do a lot of work to get the viewer on board with things are going well in a fight with the ants.

And we can't even begin to make that

sort of

distinction until the king's born.

You know,

the humans are losing, and I don't believe any character who thinks that they are winning right now.

And we have like,

it's really Nove's word against Netaro, and the show

is not really

making any illusions that you should trust Nove over Netero.

Netero said, Pito is stronger than me.

And Nove said, that's impossible.

Yeah.

That cannot be.

And the question is, who do you trust?

And it's really not a question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

By now, we are starting to see ants obliterated inside the kill room.

Yeah.

This is from I po we skip over some stuff.

I did post this from a little bit further down.

I think.

Do we miss some fights?

No, I think it's just time for another fight with Knuckle.

This is the weak.

I mean, as far as the,

I don't dislike.

the moment-to-moment things that are happening.

It is a weak structure to me to have like all of this interesting forward movement on the NGL side and then having like this wall that the that Gonakilo can't climb that they just go back to and it's like, okay, third time go back to the wall.

Power treadmill.

Yeah, I think that's one of the complaints I've heard about this part is that this bit here kind of drains the momentum for people the first time watching it because of the jumping.

There's an obvious counterpoint to that, which is that this is a 65 long episode long arc and this part of it is three episodes.

oh for sure for sure yeah like we're at the in the next episode we're gonna very quickly like the this the dealing with knuckle part of the next set of episodes is is going to be very small yeah i think that um

i think that

the stuff outside the ngl as we are back on the shonen power treadmill push to open the uh Cuckaroo Mountain gates, etc.

Really does rely on Palm,

a unpleasant fly-in-the-ointment,

who,

through her sweaty,

nihilistic

threats of violence,

not nihilistic, actually, powered by a sort of very specific animus,

she makes this, you know, she is working as hard as she can to make this thing go, and she does a really good job.

But I do think it is the weaker chunk.

It is.

But I think your mileage is going to vary based on how delighted you are to see Palm doing her shtick.

There is something that we, I don't think, maybe I, maybe I've, I'm just already forgetting.

I don't think there's, that we've mentioned this.

There's one thing that Palm is doing that we haven't mentioned, and that's underneath all of this rage and fury and stabbing, she's cooking them these big, beautiful feasts.

Yes.

They're poisoned.

Like genuinely, they're just good food.

Yeah.

And also like didn't poison Knuckles food either.

Correct.

Yes.

Didn't poison Knuckles food.

And in the same way that lunch from Dragon Ball is kind of a play on the like

old,

warmed over, misogynistic works of like, this is a housewife who snaps

and will turn against

her lecherous husband or whatever.

You know, Knuckle,

not Knuckle, oh my God.

Good lunch is like, you know, makes meals, checks in, felt everyone's clothes, makes sure everyone's okay.

evil lunch unloads a you know an automatic weapon these are the two frames that a sort of like a a woman can fall into in a loving relationship in this sort of cosmology and i think you can see part of that being worked through with palm here her sort of like all-consuming uh vaguely infantilizing love infantilizing her as a character not the object of her affection yeah um and then her cooking them these big meals and then her also plotting with this with this knife i think that's all there i think the work that is being done not necessarily to resolve those character tensions but what sets them apart is that her physical demeanor and her affect is so um unusual and extraordinary she really is like what if those warmed over tropes of the housewife of the of the violent housewife were filtered through literally the girl from the ring right um and then that is like an aesthetic train crash that is entertaining to see it's entertaining and then and then again like uh like lunch,

underneath it all, she is a comedy character.

Like, she is the comic relief.

She is the, the, the, uh, the, the funny, light backbone of these episodes.

Uh, like, why?

The twist of she is like a malevolent supernatural murderer is what makes it go for me.

That's right.

Yes, yeah,

it makes it so absurd that, like, yeah, you can tell that this is not meant, like, these tropes are being put on display for a reason, not just like lazy writing or whatever.

Even if also, there is the

playing with playing on the same thing that lunch does.

Sure.

It's really lunch is not.

I love lunch, and

Palm is really funny.

So it's just like they're just having like a normal talk about training, and then like focus will shift, and you'll see Palm is in the kitchen in the background, like stabbing something repeatedly with a knife.

It's so just the amount of her glowering in the background every time.

There's this great animation loop she does where she like holds, she's got a big kitchen knife and she will hold the kitchen knife really close to her face as though she's focusing on it with the blade pointing away from her and will just vibrate like angrily.

Like it's barely contained within her, her killing, her killing urge.

And also she's warning them the whole time.

Be careful.

I don't want to kill you, but I'm going to fucking kill you.

I really am going to kill you.

Yeah.

I'm going to kill you.

And this time I'm going to do it.

Don't come to nunskull tomorrow.

This second fight with Knuckle does not go well, but it's a really beautifully animated shounen fight.

They are doing this for real this time.

He is blocking their blows.

They are leaping about.

Eventually, Gonan Kilua

don't beat him and back off.

They retreat.

This is a first, well, no, we did just see them do a mega retreat.

This is a first retreat in a fight where they wouldn't die if they didn't retreat.

I can't remember who says it.

I think it's Knuckle who says their bodies are tired out.

All that's moving them now is sheer willpower, which I picked out because of Gohan's line earlier about, like, we can't win purely on willpower.

It's, you know,

those are the words of someone who scrolled up inside the script document and went, oh.

It is funny.

This is the part where Knuckle is like becomes fully aware that

he is basically their teacher.

He is willingly training them at this point,

which is

Consensual scissors pervert.

Whereas the scissors pervert was thrown into the role of a teacher

unintentionally.

This guy is now.

Accepted it.

It's the consensual scissors pervert.

Oh my goodness.

As Gon and Killua start walking home, they're limping.

They're like holding themselves up on a big stick.

The other assassin, shoot, watches Knuckles, suspicious that he will reveal

this other assassin's identity.

And he says, my opportunity will be on their way home.

Hegemony of the Food Chain here.

Oh, really?

Hegemony of the Food Chain starts playing.

That's funny.

Yeah.

Why would you really do that?

I mean,

that's just a soundtrack joke, right?

You're not going to give that to Shoot.

They do.

They absolutely give it to Shoot.

At the very end of 87, before we learn about what happens at the beginning of 88, he's watching them menacingly and is like you know I can't trust knuckle because he'll just fall in love with these kids

but he probably won't give me away and I'm going I'm going to defeat them hegemony of the food chain

it's very funny considering what comes next yeah what does come next Absolutely beautiful opening line from the narrator here.

This is a mode that I don't think I've heard the narrator in, which is he's telling telling us a little story.

The narrator.

The narrator says, There is a man targeting Gonan Kiliwa, and his name is Shoot McMahon.

I would love to.

This is our first time hearing that name, right?

Yeah, yeah.

We've heard shoot, but he has not been called Shoot McMahon.

This happens.

I didn't realize that we had heard shoot.

Yeah, we have heard shoot.

Shoot McMahon.

Can you believe that?

His name is Shoot McMahon.

Knuckle and Shoot.

It's great.

Knuckle, Shoot, and Palm.

Yeah.

Yeah, Knuckle, Shoot, and Palm.

There's a naming convention here.

Yeah.

Dice games, right?

Are we talking?

They're like...

Not quite.

We talked actually a little bit about the thing they're named after

before the recording, and I'm not talking about Pygmy hippos.

They're pitches, right?

Oh, baseball pitches.

Yeah.

Knuckle Tyco.

Knuckleball.

Well, you can also, like, I think.

Like, Palm serve is like a volleyball serve.

Because my other trivia thing is that gyro is part of this naming convention, too.

Huh?

Oh, yeah.

It's all games.

Astronaut shooting other astronauts always has been.

Yeah.

I always thought that they were.

I just started.

Sorry, I was Googling Shoot McMahon to double check

this, and the first autocorrect was Shoot McMahon X-Reader.

Godspeed.

Yeah.

That name is a derivative from a commonly thrown baseball pitch known as the Shoot Ball.

Knuckle Palm and Gyro are all similarly known.

Oh, yeah.

I've never seen it called a shoot ball, though.

I've always seen it.

I totally forgot about the shootball.

The palm ball, which is funny because that's a pitch that I throw in the show.

Is that like a slider?

It is the show that Keith is talking about is Friends at the Table, which you can check out at friendsofthetable.net.

It's a change-up that breaks the other way, basically.

Oh, interesting.

It's called Shootball.

Anyway, I just thought that was a fun little thing to play.

That's pretty great.

Yeah.

We can just say Shoot's whole deal.

He is a coward.

The narrator says he is very faint of heart, and he really is just a punchline to a really great joke at this point.

The joke being that he sees Gon and Kilio coming by, and he's like, this is my moment, and he gets ready for the moment.

And then he just can't bring himself to.

He's literally quivering.

He's the cowardly lion.

Like, that's his whole deal.

Shoot McMahon is very faint of heart.

And now it starts to make sense why

this game exists at all.

Because Chairman Netero is seeing flaws in the plan to bring Knuckle and Shoot.

Knuckle, who is too kind to be an effective murderer of ants, and Shoot, who is too cowardly to be an effective murderer of ants.

And Palm, who is an effective murderer, but in the wrong direction of people and not of ants.

Yeah.

This is when we get a little bit more.

Hunter grads are not sending their best to this.

I can see Netaro, like, let's say, okay, Netero's hanging out with beans.

And they know that they're going to

go on this trip.

Green Green Jellybean Man.

On a Green, Green Jelly Bean Man.

They know that this trip is coming where Netero's going to go to the NGL.

It's on one of his stupid ass ships.

Yeah, and

they're deciding which two hunters to bring along to do this.

And Green, Green, Jelly Bean Man goes, well, what about Knuckle and Shoot?

They're really strong, and they have a great power that'll work, and you can sit in that room and kill them all day.

And Chairman Adderall goes, well, they've got those stupid fucking students that can't do shit.

That's clearly not what I want to do.

I want to bring someone else.

But is eventually convinced, no, I guess we can bring them, but I want a backup plan.

Give me two Shogi tiles.

Yeah.

Walden Beans is like, well, you know, we could check to see if there were any good

recruits from this year's Hunter exam.

And Netari says, what, you mean Killiwa Zaldic, the only person who got rid?

I already have him.

We have no new hunters.

We have no new hunters.

Usually we have at least a couple.

How many get out of there under the hunter exam?

Quite a few.

I think that they said four.

Usually it's like four.

I could be totally making that up, but that makes sense based on the one that we saw.

I love the hunter exam.

Yeah.

Hey, is Kiluwa the only Zaldic who's a hunter?

No, Ilumi made it.

Oh, you're right.

You're right.

You're right.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More importantly, Ilumi.

We don't know whether or not Zenno or Silva are or aren't.

Yeah, or any of Kiloa's...

Well, I guess not any of Kilio's Silings, but like Kiloa's other.

Right.

Yeah, Muluki, yeah.

Yeah.

Is Kilua's horrid brother the small, scary one?

Kaluto.

Kaluto, yeah, right.

It seems like Kluto is not.

Kluto is hanging around with his mom.

Kaluto is six.

Didn't we see Kaluto?

Yeah, we saw Kaluto.

No, not during Greed Island.

Oh, yes, during

the teamed up with the Spiders, briefly.

Yeah, right.

I meant that

until the team up with the spiders would have been too busy hanging around with his mom to go

become a hunter.

Yeah.

And then too busy hanging out with the hunter.

The spiders.

Those miscreants.

Yeah.

Those miscreants.

Yeah.

This is when we get

Bisky sort of like spelling out to the viewer viewer if not to go and kill you or what she's actually trying to do here.

We covered this earlier.

Bisky seeing this as a sort of broader holistic practice.

Fuck.

I forgot a song.

I forgot an important song.

Oh, no, no, we can go back.

Okay, okay.

Because it's got a companion song later, and they're two very important songs.

It's the theme song of

Shallapoof.

It's called

there's two.

There's one for,

I mean, I guess there it is two different sort of Royal Guard songs, is really what it is.

This first one is called In the Palace, Lamentoso.

These are interesting because they're like semi-diegetic.

Shaoapoof has a violin and is seen playing these songs.

Yeah.

These are, this is a massive, massively important track for the season.

Yeah.

And the next one, even more so.

Oh, when the second violin kicks in.

Oh, it's really good.

It's again, this like very capital Romantic sort of like violin technique.

Very showy.

Kind of mournful.

Showy.

Showy?

Showy.

Show a poof.

Anyway, yeah, so that that is what is playing when Poof first shows up.

And I should have played that.

Sorry, Jack, I interrupted you fully in the middle of some totally unrelated thing.

We were just talking about Biskey's philosophy, what we've talked through.

What I do actually want to highlight here is how Palm

works as a kind of lethal manifestation of the broader desperation.

You know, we talked about Palm as a...

as an effective joke character, you know, her desperation to get into the NGL.

And she adds this kind of like ticking clock, you know, she'll kill them all if they don't beat the assassins.

But she's also a really nice

manifestation of the like dread and anxiety in the room as the chimera ants continue to grow.

We don't even get a training sequence anymore without a horrifying

dread girl hanging out in the background with a knife.

Yeah.

You know, and also

Gohan's sort of suppressed anxiety about wanting, needing to go back to save Kite.

Like,

you know, the boy who's always smiling.

Yeah.

And, like, the thing that he's smiling about now is, oh, we've got to save our friend.

And that is not, that cannot be like an uncomplicated

emotion.

This is a

first time where Ghon's happiness feels like a front to something else.

And you literally put a specter in the room with them.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Oh, there's some good stuff.

We got to remember that for next time we're recording because there's some really crazy stuff with them.

Is this something to write down?

Yeah, yeah.

I'll put it in the scratch doc.

Although it'll be impossible to not see it as it's happening.

Yeah.

Palm decides to, you know, come clean to Biskey.

And she says, look,

the situation clearly hasn't improved at all.

You know, Gonan Killuar are not beating.

uh knuckle as it stands that they're not getting any better and she looks and says lately i find myself looking at my knife, which is

such a good line.

And then, in order to calm her down and say, you know, we're going to be able to do this, Goan does a pinky promise with

my God.

There's a sound effect when he reveals his pinky that made me laugh so hard I had to pause the episode because I was like crying.

It sounds like when you use the home run bat in Smash Brothers, like it is going,

oh, it sounds like a critical hit.

The Dragon Ball critical hit.

Yeah, it is so, like, it killed me.

Like, I can't even begin to describe.

Like,

it added another 10 minutes to my watch today, at least.

It just kept.

I don't know why.

This is our second pinky promise, the first pinky promise we saw way back in episode one

when Goan promised Aunt Mito.

that

he would what come back and see her.

And again, you know, we're tying together these sort of like the way the show is viewing housewives and housewives' anxiety or the anxiety of a particular kind of conception of a woman, right?

Where it's worth mentioning during this, they're also eating a meal that she cooked to better

like to reinforce the sort of housewife parallel thing.

Yeah, so we sort of kind of put in that role.

Yeah, we see the pinky promise as a vector for

making a vow with this sort of like pseudo-mother figure.

And I think that that is

interesting writing.

We talk a lot about

Goan being a 12-year-old, you know, and the ways that he's not a 12-year-old and the ways that he is.

And I do think it's interesting that we see rendered out on two separate occasions, like the relationship between a child and a sort of mother-like figure as being this like game-like contract that is drawn between one and the other.

We've seen contracts drawn in the show before very distinctively.

I'm thinking about Karapaka's nen contract in the heart, but I don't know.

There really is something about like

kids and pseudo-parents, and then Palm and Mito filling this role of like a troubled, anxious take on a series of old housewife tropes, and then a bond between those two characters being sold through this kind of like playful ritual act is notable that that's the occasion it happens twice.

This causes Palm to fall in love with gun.

Yes.

Can I try?

I'm going to try something.

I think that I've made it so that I could just play this VLC file and we can hear what Sylvie was talking about with the finger.

Oh, please.

I don't know that this will work for sure, but let's try.

We'll win.

Did you hear that?

No.

Oh, no.

I now heard it.

It was pretty intense.

Okay, well.

Somebody dead.

More and more ants are falling through Nov's portals in the fog.

The ants are trying to beat this.

Bital,

an ant who looks like...

This is a really unhelpful note.

I wrote down here, he looks like a sort of elf alien.

What does that mean?

Piccolo from the live ants.

My boy, he looks like the PVD.

He looks like the people that hang out in the home for infinite losers.

Keith, do you have a screen cap of Vital?

Because I've completely forgotten what this amp looks like.

I do.

Yeah, I do have that.

Let's see.

I have it right here.

Bital.

He appears in the depths of the Baital.

And Netero says, so you're next.

It's just...

It's scary.

There you go.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, he's the one on the left.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There he is.

Yeah, he really does look like a sort of elf alien.

He has a bald head.

He's almost like, what if like a classic gray alien was

15% more skull and 20% more elf?

Yeah.

He is joined by another senior ant who is just a chicken.

Yeah, really just a chicken man.

Like almost a wearing a turtleneck.

Almost like someone like

in a mascot costume for a restaurant.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's great.

Morel and Nova debated whether or not this is even fair.

Not just, not really fair to the ants, but fair to them.

They don't seem to be caring for the ants so much as their own internal structure.

They says, we find the enemies and the old man takes care of them.

They're not sure about how this split is happening, right?

Sorry, say again, Jack.

Morel and Nove are like...

They're not sure whether this is fair.

What is happening?

They say, we find the enemies and the old man takes care of them.

They are like, they want to be doing more.

Right.

I think.

Sure.

But he's getting his groove back.

He is getting his groove back.

And, you know, it's down there we see Natero surrounded by just, we have hinted at this, endless ant viscera.

He has been training there, right?

He has got a lot of stuff.

He's smelling really buggy.

Smell crazy.

Yeah, you ever kill one stink bug?

No, actually, no.

Oh, really?

Yeah, no, I'm a friend to animals.

Yeah, I don't kill bugs.

I think he spotted landscape.

Sometimes it still happens.

Maybe it's because I live in the woods.

I'm sort of

a knuckle in that way.

I think that we should be friendly with the...

Actually, if there are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of ants in my house, I will begin a program.

I will

engage with the ants.

Like an after-school poison.

Yeah.

But if I see an anti-juana, Mary Jane.

Actually, it might be.

I don't know what they use to get ants.

If I see an ant inside, I say, uh-oh, I better not see more of you or there's going to be trouble.

If I see an ant outside, I say, what a delight.

We're compatriots outside nature's realm.

If I see a spider inside my house, I say, kind, good-hearted soldier.

The anti-ant.

The anti-ant, the anti-fly, working hard.

If I see an ant spider outside, I think, what a delight.

Please make sure not to go to don't go to anti-ant pretzels.

They're not good.

Ant inside, run and hide.

yeah inside outside slide

weirdly enough though in the second one ant is spelled with the you that time yeah

centipede in

what a sin centipede out dance and shout

I'm trying to think if I have any other bug uh this is from our bug almanac the friends at the table bug almanac which you can buy at friends at the table shop along with our anniversary merch.

Yeah, it's called Can I Bug You for a Few Minutes?

And then in parentheses underneath, it says, the answer is different if you're inside or outside.

Let's see.

The ants, meanwhile, are...

Oh, actually,

I really loved a flip that has happened here, which is that the extermination team is now taking ant squadrons.

for the purposes of training Chairman Natero in the same way that the ants harvested villages for the purposes of of sustaining the queen.

I think that this is an obvious parallel that is delightful.

If, you know, if we've talked about the Chimera ants as basically just being an enjoyable and

sort of like morally rigorous breakdown of the differences and frank similarities between, you know, what is the difference between an ant and a human?

Answer, not all that much.

It stands to reason that we would also have one of these parallels of like harvesting the other team to bolster your leader

i like it a lot yeah dedero's the human king

i mean kinda

no no no no gone is the human no

oh well because like natero would be the analog for the queen natero would be the human queen right oh who is trying to like birth the king

you think

maybe ideologically maybe sort of like in his no maybe king already did that

If he's trying to birth something, it's a stronger version of himself.

Yeah.

Yeah, which, you know.

I think Jack's on the money.

Yeah.

I think Benjamin Franklin's on the money.

The ants are pretty confident that the king's birth is going to turn the tables.

They're like, we are losing, but...

I firmly don't think the ants are losing.

The ants are like, we're losing more than we were, but when the king comes, it's going to be a whole new deal.

And we can see the king now, the outline of the king, very firmly inside the egg sac.

He is the figure that we have seen in the past.

He has a very distinctive tail with like a.

It almost looks like a.

You know the way that Chimera ants have like a big arm with three fingers on the end?

This could be that his tail is an awful prehensile arm.

That's also a possibility, but that's what his tail looks like.

And he moves inside the egg sac as the queen says, Do you want to come out now?

Not yet.

It's still too early.

And then something does come out, right?

There's that

in a minute.

Yeah, pretty much.

I mean, Gon and Kilio show up for the fight with Knuckle in a shared cloud of Nen, and Knuckle says, you boys mean business tonight.

I think it's a really expeditious little arc they've had with Knuckle.

Similarly, they've been holding their

Wren out for three hours, and when Bisky tells them that they've done it, you know, previously they couldn't do it for 20 minutes or whatever, Gon and Kilo are say, that seemed fast.

You know, we've been on a really nice, truncated little training arc.

Yeah, their original, I think it was 54 minutes is when Kiloa's Nen gives out, and then Goans had, they imply it was like just before Killowa's.

And then now they're they got to three hours without breaking a sweat, basically.

She gives them half an hour to rest, and then they go try to fight Knuckle at full strength.

Yeah, they're ready to go.

But then violin music plays as the final royal guard is born uh poof is playing the violin with red sort of energy burning behind him yeah as like the collected ants listen and then in silhouette we see uh who i'm calling frankenstein kite uh fighting ants just tearing through them uh with a gigantic red nen puppeteer piloting him like a marionet.

It's awful.

Seems Seems bad.

This song, by the way, this one's called In the Palace Agitato.

Yeah, it is Ajitato.

Really fucking good.

This is a very important track.

And this is mixed like a live violin because it is, you know, we have the reverb of the Ant Castle playing around us.

Any,

you know, the dread promise of like, Peter is going to resurrect Kite has just just come true.

You know, we have moved into that space where Kite is back and he's bad news.

We're there now.

What weapon is he fighting with?

Is he fighting with the scythe?

He's not fighting with anything.

He's just tearing through them with his best hands.

Oh, fist fighting, yeah.

Oof.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I can't remember.

Did we decide that was good or bad?

This is not good.

And then the final royal guard is born.

This is Yupi, an immensely strong.

Why do you laugh when I say Yupi?

I just, it's, imagine waking up being this sort of like super yoked red man.

And the first thing anyone says to you is, Yupi, and that's your name.

Yes, Pito, I think it's Pito, just very brightly says, good morning, Yupie, as he shows up.

And he is like, who?

What?

Yupie.

Yeah, he arrives by like kicking his way through a wool or something.

Yeah.

I don't know what animal he is.

It might become clearer in a wide shot.

My guess is that he's like a devil.

He's like an ox or like a goat.

Is it obvious?

And I just haven't noticed it.

No, but you know, it's just that you're pretty much...

That's pretty much it.

That's the reality.

Yeah, I think he's like a

devil.

I wrote that he,

let's see, where did I write what he looks like?

Yubi is a giant red monster man that looks like if Frankenstein was a wealthy Yakuza

and instead of neck bolts, he has Frieza-style ear craters.

Yeah, he does.

Yeah.

I like him a lot.

The three royal guards being a violently malevolent cat girl, a Bishonen violin butterfly cat bae, sorry, and the strongest man you have ever seen in your life.

That's a good spread as far as I'm concerned.

It's fun.

You can have a he him cat girl.

This is true.

My bad.

I'm being regressive now.

Cat girls.

I wasn't going to say anything.

Yeah.

I'm just down here.

I'm going to leave the show now.

Problematic alarm.

Yeah.

The queer community is coming for me.

Oh, no.

The extermination team, however, not knowing this,

has locked themselves in place.

They're just going to keep training Notero.

They say, we don't move from here until we know how our pupils did.

I think this is really interesting.

They want to bring in the best of the best

before they make their second play.

There's a real sense of need to it, right?

Like, it is like if our

like we don't have the personnel for this, we need our pupils to get better.

But then Moral is what I like.

We don't actually need our pupils because they'll be a little help.

But if the other fucking ones show up, then the best they'll do is be a distraction.

Like, we'll just use them as bait.

Yep.

Moral doesn't seem like a nice guy.

I would get the world government to give me a huge amount of money, and I would go to Cookaroo Mountain.

I would bring in the best that the Zaldics have to offer.

I would then go and try and recruit Krolo, and then I would find that I couldn't.

And I would bring in as many,

how many spiders do I want?

Well, is it inside or outside?

I'd get Hisaker on board, probably.

I think Hisaker would probably be useful here.

I don't know.

I think that there's a really interesting thing happening with the Extermination team, which is that they're like, we want to bring in the next generation of hunters, which, you know, I can kind of see where they're...

The function of the hunter organization isn't just we need to win.

It's like, as grim as it sounds, we want to like foster new good hunters.

So I can understand why they're thinking that way.

But I think I'd just be like, get me Silver and Zeno and possibly Krollo if he can use his nan.

We'll sort this out by Tuesday.

Um, this is kind of I have a does anybody else have stuff on this?

Don't catch me power scaling, though, by the way.

That's not about

power scaling, uh, it's about efficiency.

I just have like a little thing that I wanted to mention that I completely forgot to.

Um, I think it's in the at the beginning of the second episode you watched this week, or even the first.

Um, they keep showing the Chimera ant like um

hive, I guess, nest

castle, citadel, yeah, castle might be more appropriate at this point.

And it looks like a hand reaching out of the ground up towards the sky, and it's a lot, it's an image that's a lot clearer in the manga up until they have that sort of like slow panning shot from the like ground up in the set of episodes.

And I think it's like really, like a really cool image and like really like ties into the

like horror nature of everything.

Like, you can It's like a hand reaching out of the grave like a zombie.

Yeah, definitely.

And they are zombies.

Yeah, if you think about it.

Damn, why are they zombies?

Because they have literal one-to-one human

consciousnesses inside them.

Eventually.

That's not quite what a zombie.

Well,

they are.

They are.

I mean,

we have that frog who had a recollection of his previous life.

We have Hagya who has...

Like, they are, you know, they are like the living dead in in a way.

They literally are living dead people.

Yeah, I guess they're more reincarnated than they are, like, undead, though.

I mean, sure, but that's what I mean, you know, metaphors are not

meant to be, you know what I mean?

But I feel like, yeah, but there's like a, like, zombie implies a lower, like, level of, like, intelligent functioning.

I feel like

hey, some of them are dumb.

That's some of the ants.

Yeah, you know, you're right.

Like that ant we saw falling through the portal.

Stupid ant.

Stupid ant.

I've never met a chimera ant.

No, that's not true.

I was about to say I've never met a chimera ant I don't like, but then I remembered Pike.

I think I like Pike in a sort of awful, grotesque way.

Junju.

Pike is

Junju.

Junju was fucking great.

He was terrifying.

Oh, but do you like him?

Well, I'm not talking about like

you like him.

No.

Okay, like like as a character in a piece of fiction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think all the Chimera ads are great.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, in the fight with Knuckle and Gone and Killure, if it sounds like these cuts are kind of clunky, I think in play,

you know, we've talked about how having to cut between these two things is kind of a weakness of this batch of episodes, but I actually think the editing itself feels pretty good.

I agree.

The weakness isn't the cutting.

It's in what one of the two halves is.

Yes, definitely.

I think that the way they've edited this is actually really nice.

We are left on either interesting cliffhangers that suspend us until we come back or a really nice little moment of rest at the end of one side before popping back to the other.

Just sounds like the ability to stitch these things together so coherently is really

ambitious editing, I think.

It's ambitious.

There's no, the funny thing is, like, why are you doing, There's no reason to do this.

Like, there's no, like, you're, like, it's like, Tagashi, you're making it too hard on yourself.

Why are you doing this?

And it's just like, because he's kind of a madman.

He's just like a weirdo.

Yeah.

I think also it's a real,

it takes a lot of skill in the editing room.

It takes a lot of skill in the script stage to get stuff like this feeling.

good and coherent, but I also think a lot of it does come down to the ambition of the idea of like, can we have something as compelling and high stakes as the Chimera and Arc?

And can we keep cutting away from it?

What does that look like?

And the answer might have been in early draft or in early edits.

You know, that actually doesn't work.

But I think that to have that ambitious idea and then put it through writing and editing that pulls it off is really commendable.

And we're just

four weirdos talking into a microphone

on the podcast, so it's a little clunky.

It's normal.

Yeah, normal

keith's actually not talking right yeah

actually

like way less normal because i'm not talking yeah this has all been psychic

yeah like like ant uh mind wave stuff and mind wave stuff yeah uh i this is where

And and

listeners who are viewers of the show

might

start feeling this way.

If you've never seen the the show before.

This is where a lot of people fall off of the show.

A lot of people

here?

What do you mean in Chimera Ant generally?

Like here.

Here in Chimera Ant.

Yes, both.

So like these episodes of Chimera Ant are, I think, where some people's willingness to follow like three separate storylines in two and a half separate locations.

with all of these characters, they just go like, where's going a kilo?

How come we haven't seen Karapaka?

I'm done.

I'm out.

I think that's really interesting.

And I think I can understand.

I suspect I will have more to say about that as we get further into this marathon arc.

But it is really interesting to me that a show that has on,

I think, two real occasions dropped the ball for me pacing-wise, and I have gone.

This feels like a slog.

The first of which being Heaven's Arena, and the second being some sort of like

circular thinking towards the end of Greed Island.

I think the show has tested,

in terms of its pacing, I think we're in a really interesting place right now.

You know, the stakes are so high with the ants that I'm sort of ready to go, okay, right, Sen, go and kill your back under the treadmill for a bit.

You know, but I understand that...

There is something happening where when the stakes inside the NGL are so high and there are so many moving pieces and the viewer is then forced to cut away to Vienna over and over again for a training sequence.

The beautiful Italian city.

The beautiful Italian city of Vienna.

When the stakes are so high, I think it would be so much easier, sort of, to go, all right, look, I don't have it in me here.

Either I'm going to come back in 10 episodes, or I'm just, I'm kind of done with this for now.

There's another.

As opposed to in Heaven's Arena or Greed Island, where it's like, well, this arc's going to wrap up soon.

And, you know, it's sort of just like...

shuddering along.

There's another part to this, though, too, which is like, for as much as I, it's a genre that I care about and have been watching since I was a very young kid, like, you know, six, seven years old.

Shonen is not a challenging genre.

And the ways that parts of Greed Island and the way that

the Heavens Arena are slow or are poorly paced or are not wildly engaging, they're very familiar and very consumable to the Shonen fan, to the, you know, the battle shonen fan these are oh they're like this is slow but this is

sort of what i mean about the show kind of just like puttering along and yeah in its usual shape it's the ex it's it is in in fact those

the those sections are largely still relatively um

you know they're like a c plus or b minus in like in shown in battle shonen scope terms like as far as what people are willing to put up with in that kind of show those things those bits barely even stand out.

Yeah.

People put up with a lot in their battle shonen that

is wild.

Right.

And so.

Sorry, could we really quickly talk about what we mean when we say battle shonen?

We've talked a lot about like tournament arc stuff.

Yeah, so I don't think we've broadly we've been saying shonen

most often to mean battle shonen because it's the most important section of the genre.

Shonen speci really is just like for boys.

And then battle Battle Shounen is the dragon ball genre of right, like, but when we do volleyball shounen, that's also shounen.

When we do chess tournament shounen, that's also shounen.

Right.

And in a lot of ways, also influenced by battle shounen.

And so, like, okay, like, okay, here's like Dr.

Slump is a shounen.

It's comedy.

And it's not really a battle shounen, even though there is fighting in it.

And so it's for kids.

It's mostly for boys, but it's a comedy and not a battle show about powering up.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

So the thing is that we're now in a part that

does have some like pacing.

It's not that it's bad pacing or slow pacing, but it is challenging pacing specifically to like the Shonen palette, which is sort of like the butter noodles and chicken nuggets of television.

Oh my God, you're so right.

And it is like...

It is

the dino nuggets.

It is like those horrible potato smiley face fries.

If you're thinking about this because that's what you ate while you were watching Shonan when you were sitting there, no, no, I've always been a big

bleach, right?

But it is, it's a genre of like, like, it's, it's an easy genre.

It's a junk food genre for that for people who like get upset.

I'm sorry to people who watch this stuff.

No, Ryan,

it's fun.

It's, you know, you're like, like, we're talking about

it's glass classhouses all the way down.

It's like, we're having grilled chicken for dinner, and you're like, but where's the chicken nuggets?

Where?

And it's like, it's chicken.

It's chicken.

Eat the chicken.

It's the same thing.

It's got like a sauce on it.

You know, it's got a sweet sauce.

It's like, it's barely any different.

And it's like, no, I, where's ketchup?

Where's the cat?

I want ketchup and I want dino nuggets.

What are you giving?

Or, or, you know, we want maybe spaghetti meatballs.

And it's like, no, I want buttered noodles.

It's like, no, it's, we made spaghetti and meatballs.

That is the,

and not that anybody's qualms with these episodes are like that, but that is the root to a lot of, I think, uh,

issues with

the Chimera Ants start here.

And it starts because it's, it's a, it's an unfamiliar way of presenting a show like this in a genre that is defined by not having anything unfamiliar in it.

Or at least shows that get to the success and mainstream like recognition of Hunter-Hunter

do not have that going on.

I was a little too mean there, but.

I also meant every word of it.

Yeah.

That's right.

Stand on your tree.

Let's see.

Okay.

In the fight with Knuckle, which by the time, you know, we reach this fight, we can tell that we're going to do, for the first time in a while, a Tagashi mo oh actually, sorry, this is not a Tagashi move.

This is a anime team move of cutting a fight midway through an episode.

They do this a lot.

They do this a lot in Heaven's Arena actually, where we would often, you know, begin a fight midway through an episode and then break halfway through and then come back again.

This also, this is a key part of the genre.

This is the half fight, or episode ends halfway through a fight, is

shown in his head.

You got yourself a pre-made cliffhanger ready to go.

Yeah, and so my first question here is, is Dawn visually getting stronger?

I don't know if he's been drawn to be more muscular

in these episodes.

Yeah, they both have.

I think that's really interesting.

You know, we know that they're training their nen, but nen is a sort of an expression of your body, and so your character is going to get drawn more sharply.

I like that a lot.

I think that that's nice, especially when

it is always.

I always like it when characters' models change beyond their clothes.

Biscuit losing one of her pigtails was really good.

I like it when you can see characters get older or characters develop muscles after training or something.

She comes back with a whole new outfit, which is great.

Yeah, I just think that so often, especially in animated shows,

the distinction between your character models across episodes is in their costuming.

And it's really cool when the model itself, you know, changes.

Hunter Hunter is so great with this because, I mean, Kilua, until this arc, is changing his clothes every four and a half scenes.

Karapika comes back with like

one really distinct outfit, comes back with a second of that version of that outfit, and then comes back like wearing a suit a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um,

Goan is taunted into using his rock ability here because Knuckle thinks that he can counter it.

He's figured out a way to counter it in a one-on-one fight.

And as Knuckle looks at the camera and says, your technique has two major flaws, which is perfect.

This is exactly what Biskey was hoping for, right?

Was like, don't just reveal a weakness, actually like enumerate it, you know, spell it out as clearly as possible, and then we can work on it.

Um,

their faces, whose faces is it?

As he says this, we cut to Chairman Natero, and then behind him, um, in sort of like the bright, uh, saturated color, sort of pop-up, sort of Roy Lichtenstein, sort of like the beginning of Cowboy Bebop, the faces of Goan, Killua, Shoot, Knuckle,

and Palm.

Is it them?

Yeah.

And maybe Moral.

Yeah.

Appear as Natero says for the first time, I'm not sure we're going to be able to complete this mission without sacrificing someone.

Premonition.

Yeah, although a fairly thin premonition at this point, because outside of Goan and Killiua, all of these are new characters.

And with the exception of Knuckle, very little attention has been paid to getting us on side with those characters.

In fact, often quite the well, maybe Palm, quite the opposite.

You know, if Morel and Nove bite this, I say that's hubris, you know?

Sure.

If Shoot bites it, I say, Shoot McMahon is a man with a faint heart.

Yeah.

Do we see this last dog

image

in the manga?

Let's see.

Oh, this is.

These beautifully drawn dogs make the goblin dog just seem so funny to me.

I know.

Well, that's the dog that's going to eat Killua.

It's a knuckle that's the goblin in this one.

Sorry, not the dog that's going to eat Kilua.

The dog that kills Killua.

Sorry, my bad.

My bad.

I got the name wrong.

He has a name.

I want to go back and look at the dog that kills Killua.

Sorry, did I take the wind out of the sails of us talking about this last frame here?

No, I don't think we have anything more there.

I think, I mean, other than it's a striking little piece of art, we haven't seen this look.

I nearly said it's a striking little piece of image.

It is 1026, and I am becoming sleepy.

I feel you.

But yeah,

and this is where we're at.

I am really looking forward to, if I'm being honest, I am looking forward to getting this business in Vienna done with as soon as possible so we can get back into the NGL.

I think we got our wee bit to go.

You know, I think that we have to have this fight with Knuckle.

We have to finish it.

We have to resolve something with Shoot and Palm.

And we have to have Biskey

kind of like teach the lesson.

You know, Biskey say, all right, here is how you can act on the lack.

Um, some reason you said that, and I, my brain went, Biskey needs to teach the controversy.

Biskey needs to teach the controversy that Don's punch, rock punch, is not actually as good as it seems.

If it, if it, I don't know if this is going to

affect how you feel about what's going to happen in the next set of episodes, uh, but uh, we have four episodes next time,

and Austin's gonna be back.

Oh.

Ooh.

I won't tell him that you said that.

That's so funny.

No, I just, that feels like

a portent.

It's like trying to melt.

Why is Austin coming back?

It's great because I meant it as a portent.

Yeah, I want to be that my

disconcerted and distasteful reaction was not at the thought of talking to my dear friend Austin, but at the dread that what Austin might bring with him.

Yes, and that is always the dread with Austin.

You're gonna read out the like what is coming in the next episodes, and it's gonna be like we're watching four and they're gonna be titled like

dog.

They're gonna be called like defeat and lesson.

The next one is gonna be called um like uh ambition and return.

The next one is going to be be called like

Skirmish and Test.

And then the next one's going to be called like Royal X Awakening.

Wow, you actually got it one for one.

That's exactly right.

That's unbelievable.

Whoa.

Does he know?

Oh my God.

Get Paul Danim in here right now.

Actually, they are called Compassion and Strength, Slow and Cursed, The Strong and the Weak, and One Wish and Two Promises.

Those are episodes 89 through 92.

I don't know if we're getting back.

We shall see.

Do we have anything else on these episodes before we end here?

I had a thought in the equivalent of like waking up in a cold sweat a couple of nights ago, where like I have been talking about, you know, like where is this going to break bad beyond the king showing up?

You you know the king showing up is going to be the moment that the pedal hits the floor I think and and and I don't know that it's gonna I don't know that we're gonna go down the full drop of the roller coaster at that point but I do think that we're gonna kind of come over the top and begin to see more of the shape of the roller coaster beneath us and be like oh god it goes into a cave at that point I don't know what's gonna happen over there but like we're dropping but I can't work out what

like latitude This arc is going to move on.

And it might be nothing, but I did suddenly remember that there was a lot of business at the beginning of this arc about how the NGL are manufacturing drugs.

They're manufacturing, and the drugs were named DD, and they have this kind of like operation that allows them to distribute drugs all around the world.

And initially,

it could be read as that is Tagashi just doing the sort of like the NGL was a criminal conspiracy masquerading as a country and that allowed the ants to take root.

But you could do that just as easily by saying they are like a technophobic luddite country and so the ants can't take root so there's got to be something there about like why was there a

criminal conspiracy masquerading as a government and why were they specifically drug dealers that had reach out into the rest of the world and i don't know where we're going here or even if this is relevant at all but part of my brain is like

is sort of like part of the ants spread or is part of the global politics going to like the large-scale global politics going to start getting worked through if the ants like corrupt the DD supply and like can start you know influencing people all around the world through a sort of like widespread

pizza we have to cook you know and that'd be fun to see the ants like hooking into a pre-existing evil infrastructure and starting to turn that against their enemy using the Mary Windows

bricks because she's pushing bricks

well this is Tagashi's trick of the like, I don't know if he's going to do something normal or something weird.

I don't know if he's going to like

do something, reference something from a little bit ago or from a lot a bit ago or just invent something new from whole cloth.

It's genuinely, I cannot tell whether we have seen the enormous stack of dynamite that is about to go off.

Like, I don't know if it has been shown to me on screen, and I haven't seen it yet.

So we'll see.

What has the wily coyote been up to?

What has the wily coyote been up to?

Oh, down there.

Do we have anything else before we

all have a little bit of business before we go?

Oh, okay.

Recently, we asked for some very specific iTunes reviews.

Or, sorry, Apple Podcasts.

I'm stuck in 2012.

Yeah, me too.

I can't stop saying iTunes.

It's fine.

We're of an age.

Yeah, but I do say x.com because it's funny.

Yeah, if Apple Podcasts wanted me to say the new thing, they should have made it funny.

Yeah, that's true.

Oh, what is the new thing for Apple Podcasts?

No, that is the new thing.

The old thing was iTunes.

Oh, okay, I see.

Yeah, sorry.

The fact that you didn't even change it again.

No, no.

See, that's how in the past me and Sylvie are is that to you, Apple Podcast is already the old thing.

Before I begin, would the I believe Keith and Jack, you set the parameters for you set the nen conditions for reviewers last time.

Yes.

The conditions were that if your name was Emily or you were born in January, you must leave a review.

Yes.

So we have here a five-star review titled, Hey, it's Emily.

I am.

And I'm here to get, and the text is, and I'm here to give this podcast the five-star rating it deserves.

Thank you, Emily.

Thank you, Emily.

Yeah, and we can verify this based on Emily's username, which does seem to imply that they're not just calling themselves Netflix.

No, it's Aaron Emily D.

Emily, because I keep saying Nen.

Nemily.

Nemily.

No, that's the sister from Code Geos.

Joke for nobody.

We also had

another parameter given.

Jack, I think you gave this parameter.

No, I think I said Emily.

Jack was Emily.

Did we mention January's already, though?

Yeah, I mentioned January.

Okay, my bad.

I was too busy reading.

That's okay.

Yeah, so we actually got a couple

January

reviews.

I am going to be reading one from Green Intern, January Ants, Five Stars.

As a January listener of the show, I have many feelings positive about the content contained within.

Or therein, my apologies.

Also, just like a Chimera Annie, sorry, Chimera Ant, that was not me, that was them.

You typoed, I'm trying to put you on glass.

It's one to one.

I did one.

We balanced it out, so I read this perfectly.

I've become aware of that.

I've been designed to make you seem insane.

I don't need help.

Also, just like a Chimera Ennie, I have become an all-consuming wave of terror and gore after listening to this podcast.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

Probably why they typo's.

Yeah.

Probably.

It's hard to hit the table.

It's hard to type when you're an all-consuming wave of terror and gore.

So I would like to say thank you to everybody who reviewed.

We got a few more, and I'll be reading more as we go on.

I'm going to, don't worry.

If you left a five-star review and I didn't read it, there's still a chance.

But hey, if you didn't leave a five-star review, if you write something funny enough, you'll jump the line.

yeah or if you're born in listen i'm i know me i'll read the stuff that's funny or if you're born in february it's now the february's turn we're going just straight to february we're not jumping around at all oh does that can i leave a review i was i was

i think that you're allowed to leave a review that's not insider trading i don't think that's against the law yeah i think it i think it makes sense because here's what will happen we will absolutely forget which month we're on and which month we've done so we should

then we'll get to the 13th episode of doing this and be like, oh, fuck.

Well, we'll get to the sixth episode, and it'll be the third time we've said March.

Well, Jack, you had a name before.

Do you have another name?

Does anybody have a name?

Because we're going to.

I do.

I do.

Okay.

Mitchell, listen up.

Okay.

Mitchell, I am talking to you.

Or if you go by Mitch.

Jack is not min-maxing names.

No.

Mitchell.

How about the Johns?

No, no, it's not fair.

Like, no, no.

Do not review.

Mitchell.

I mean, you can.

Just don't.

Oh, sorry.

Don't do it name-based.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's not this.

Do it because you feel like it.

I'll tell you, I'll hold on.

I'll.

Oh, there we go.

I don't even people know what I said.

So I'll just move that over.

Mitchell, today's the day.

Go to Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star review.

Mitchell.

Mitchell, I'm speaking to you inside your mind.

Go to Apple Podcasts right now and leave a five-star review of us.

And mention Bambi2 for the PS2.

Mitchell, this is your dad.

oh no don't do that we don't

leave

you must leave a five star review mitchell do not adjust your set or your ground

this is this is the man that you saw when you were five and no one believed you but it's me i'm here you know what you have to do mitchell this is the man you saw drown in the hills leave a five star review on apple podcast

Okay, Mitchell, listen carefully.

Despite what they said, do not change your rating.

No, give it five stars, even though we are haunting you.

Unless you got it.

You already reviewed and it was lower, then do change your rating to five.

So five stars.

Anything below five stars

will result in more complicated.

I'm going to start again.

Mitchell, are you listening to me?

This is your dad.

Wait, was that part of what was too complicated?

It's always too complicated when dads are around.

Okay.

I think that's it.

I think I'm there.

I think I've got it all.

Yeah.

I've said everything I need to say about Hunter Hunter in the podcast.

So it's funny forever.

It's funny that I ended up insulting people that

watched Shonen and didn't like this part of the Chimera ant.

I did genuinely mean to bring it up as a to talk about how weird this part is and why some people don't like it.

But in the middle of trying to genuinely explain it to like to make a more well-rounded show, I realized how insane that is.

What are you people talking about?

This is so good.

Yeah, also, my latent hater energy was too much.

I was going to jump on that, even if you were nice about it.

Don't worry, dude.

Like, no matter what happened, I was going to shit talk

like a lot of mainstream shounen.

I was trying to be even-handed.

Fair enough.

I'm never.

Yeah.

Listen, if someone has bad opinions about Hunter Hunter, they probably also like Fire Force, which means they don't get rights.

Oh, no.

So, not Firefox.

What's Force?

Is it called Fire Force?

Yeah, it is.

It is.

Fire Force is just a bad Fire.

Is it the one

little gay one?

It has such a cool premise, and they just immediately ruin it.

Firefox, I mostly just know because it's got a famous panel of just like epic child destroys woman feminists with facts and logic.

Oh, nice.

Actually, that was like my understanding of it.

It's basically like Firefighter Shonen.

What is the one?

Like, the fires are like demons or whatever?

Someone can write in and tell me what the fire anime with the little gay one is.

Is that Demon Slayer?

No, no, it's it's is that my hero academia?

No, fire.

There's firefighters.

Is fire in the name?

I don't know if it's in the name, but there's like a firefighter and it may be slightly futuristic-y.

Is it Promere?

Oh, it is.

It might be Promere.

It's Promere.

Promere is great.

Yeah.

I was about to say, it's been a while since I've seen Promere, but I remember liking it.

Responsible for one of my relationships.

We were just talking about firefighting anime, and that's the only one I know.

And the only thing I know about it is if there's a little gay one.

You should watch that.

That's a fun time.

It's a movie.

Yeah, Premiere's cool.

Sit down for like an hour and a half, two hours, and you got a good evening.

Okay.

Like by

Trigger, so it's well animated, even.

Yeah, it's like one of the few times where it's like Trigger's animation lives up to the content of the show.

Now the hit takes are getting too spicy.

We've come for Trigger now.

People are gonna gonna I don't even know who trigger is so

darling in the franks, right?

Darling and the franks.

Yeah, that's all you need to know.

That's kill a kill.

Oh, okay.

Kill a kill famously.

That's the one where the guy bounces the sniper rifle on the girl's boobs.

No, no, that's high school.

Yeah, no, you're thinking of high school of the dad.

Jack, I hope that you related as far as that.

I hope that this is helping you know how stupid Shonen is.

Because we've talked up Shonen a lot, and I really want you to know that actually Shonen also plumbs the absolute depths.

Yeah, what we're doing is like, we're like the people who are like

talking about how, like, we're not quite to the extent of people who are like the Marvel movies or cinema, but like, we're kind of doing that a little bit.

Oh, yeah, but we're also picking like the one Marvel movie that you could maybe argue is

right.

It's it is actually it is Sam Raimi Spider-Man, yeah, yeah.

Um, what's my hot take?

Um,

more piccolo.

Well, I think it's disgusting that you haven't shown me piccolo

again.

We have, he is just, we haven't shown you breathing piccolo, right?

I think Jack is saying something about when the when the body stops becoming itself.

Oh, when you're dead, that is meat.

That is the

how ant of you.

We got out those

off Jack Dakeet.

Okay,

it's the real Jack.

Can't you tell because of my accent?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hey, hey, hey, real Jack Dakeet, what's tomorrow?

What day of the week is it?

Or actually, no, what's today?

Sorry, not tomorrow.

Just today.

Tuesday.

Tuesday.

I don't know why I did that.

I don't even know what.

I don't even know what to

do.