It's A Punch Party - Hunter x Hunter ep. 83-85: Media Club Plus S01E26

I'm so fucking ready.

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

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

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me on x.com and co-host.org at Keith J.

Carberry.

And because I got bored last week, you can also find me on Blue Sky at Keith J.

Carberry, where I went and posted for a week.

If that's where you are on the internet, you can go there and

read what I'm posting.

I I have no opinion about Blue Sky.

Comma negative.

I think it's weird that I don't feel anything about that.

But I'm doing it anyway.

And with me, as always, is Jack DeKeith.

Jack, how's it going?

It's good, Keith.

I feel like Keith arriving on Blue Sky is a little bit like the Chimera Ants arriving in the NGL.

Did I kill everyone there?

A platform more

platform more ill-suited for someone ideologically like Keith?

I fucking hate Blue Sky.

I do have Blue Sky Thoughts comma negative.

Anyway, it's easy to just go on and I don't read anything.

I just like put what I'm thinking onto it and hit send and then go away.

Yeah, which is which is why that to this day, like,

Even though like theoretically I have all these negative thoughts about Twitter, I I just, my use for it, I don't, it doesn't feel any different to me than it did eight years ago.

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

And you can find me on co-host at JDQ.

Also with me is Andre Lee Swan.

Hey, I don't, I think I'm technically on Blue Sky, but I don't have any thoughts about it.

No, I was trying to think if I got anything else.

I don't have anything else.

No.

Twitter at Swan Derry3000.

There you go.

And Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

It's the same username across any platform I use.

You can also find us.

Various levels of activity.

You can also find us on Twitch and YouTube at Friends at the Table, where we stream a lot and we put those streams up on YouTube.

Of course, you should be listening to Friends at the Table.

And if you get a chance, why don't you review the show on itunes?

Uh-huh.

We're going to be talking about at least one review.

I've said this before, but now it's really true.

All of the people who are

like primed to review a thing when asked by the people making it, they've already done it.

So

if you're...

So now we're calling on you, the narcissists who want me to read their words on the air.

If you write something funny, I'll read it.

Yeah.

But it's on you to be funny.

And the non-narcissists.

It has to be five stars, too.

The non-narcissists who like me, when someone says, like, you should like and subscribe, in their head, they go, like, yeah, but not me.

Like,

that's for people who like and subscribe, and I'm not that.

Even though, as my job, I rely on the opposite kind of person.

If you're like me, and if somebody asks you to like and subscribe, you go like, yeah, but I am not part of that.

Put that part of yourself aside and just do it.

Yeah, just serve the greater purpose of the hive mind.

Yeah.

Speaking of...

Jimmy, the food chain.

Oh, well, I was just going to, let's just do these one by name, one at a time, one week.

Emily, if you're listening, Emily, go to iTunes Reviews

and write us a review.

We'll pick someone else next time.

Oh, my God.

All the Emily's.

Do you think it would be faster considering how many episodes we have left to go by month or something?

Oh, I see.

Right.

January.

If you're listening.

January's.

It's time to rate and review January's.

What are we doing this week?

Can you believe how fast the season goes?

It's crazy.

There was a point in episode 86.

We watched three episodes today, 83,

83, 84, 85.

So there was a point in 85 when

even primed for the pacing of how Chimera Ant works, I felt like everything sped up again,

which was startling.

Yeah.

They, they, like,

without really drastically changing course, there's this like moment that we'll get to where

all of this build up to this like kind of climax that they have been telegraphing since the ants first showed up gets kind of stomped down by a big event happening.

And there's just a very immediate like, okay, here's the new way of things.

And it's very cool.

Sometimes I don't like that in a show, but

this was really fun.

We'll talk about it.

I'll try to remember to point that out when I get there.

What do I have?

Like a recap or something to read?

Yeah, I do.

Yeah, usually.

That tends to be how these go.

Sometimes we get excited and talk about the whole thing first.

There's trouble brewing somewhere in the world, so you know a shady consortium of unnamed quote-unquote world leaders are on the case.

While Gone Killow and Kite are in the NGL wading through scores of of Chimera Ant officers, the Hunter Association has been given free reign to defeat the ants by any means necessary.

Nedero, chairman of the Hunter Association, understands that the hunters are being given permission to go all out so they can take the blame.

I guess if things don't go according to plan, what's the plan?

Well, aside from Kite, the plan is for a small crack squad of hunters to infiltrate the NGL and take out the ants.

While those three hunters are en route,

the ants are doing their best to learn about Nen after Remote had his aura nodes opened with his fight with the rare humans.

With his newfound power, Remote becomes the newest ant to have dreams of becoming his own king, like Hagia the Lion Man and Zazon the Scorpion Lady.

That is until the first of the royal guards are born.

Oh yeah, it's in the thing.

That's what I was talking about just a second ago.

They stopped Remote dead in his tracks, completely rewriting his personality to be loyal to the guards and future king.

Soon after, the royal guards set their sights on kite, goan, and kiloa.

Meanwhile, there's a truck heading into the NGL carrying two unfamiliar faces: a hunter named Nov in a black suit with neat black hair, and Moral, a huge man with messy white hair who carries a huge thing, something, club-looking thing.

And there's a third hunter there as well, Chairman Netaro.

Oh, these episodes are great.

Yeah.

These episodes were great.

I want to bring attention to something quickly that is that the end of the summary?

Yes, it is.

Okay, because there is one more thing in those episodes, but I guess we'll get to it.

Is it

bloody?

Yeah, we'll get to that.

I left that out on purpose.

Okay, I wasn't sure.

I was like, it was really confusing me.

Sorry.

Yeah, no, it's fine.

That's fine.

Did I, what happened?

Did I watch an extra episode?

Nope.

Nope.

I just left that out so that we could...

So that's why I'm emulating genera and pacing for the listener who isn't actually watching the show.

So when you hear

describe something and you go, oh, God, this is happening now?

You'll be like, yes, this is what it feels like.

I don't want to shoot the whole web, so to speak, for the non-watching audience.

Oh, I get it.

I get it.

It's a reference to last episode we recorded.

Talk about the fucking cartoon.

Hold on.

Okay, I I want to call attention to something at the very beginning

because

we do fade in onto Netaro talking with this

sort of like shady, like, like

G6 Summit Consortium looking thing.

This member for you, politician man, in a big, important politician suit.

Yeah.

So Netaro, when he's first introduced, is introduced as the chairman of the Hunter Selection Committee.

And because he's never actually specifically said to be the chairman of the hunter association for like a really long time, I don't remember exactly when that moment happens, but now it is 100% clear that he's not chairman of the hunter selection committee, he's chairman of the hunter association.

I expected that line to be there for us on this podcast, but I think Jack, you very quickly just started calling him chairman of the hunters.

I also might have let that slip a couple of times without realizing.

i don't think so i think jack just sort of translated chairman of the hunter maybe i'm wrong i could be wrong but i remember being like listen i'll skirt the blame i don't mind avoiding any responsibility so i i remember i'm pretty sure when i first watched this when it turned out that netaro was like the boss of all the hunters i had like two feelings which was like oh so there is a boss of all the hunters And then the second one was like, it's this guy, the guy who was like in charge of like the newbie hunters from before.

Yeah, that's so funny.

I thought it was very funny, but we don't have that moment because

we just sort of like,

it was difficult for the three of us, me, Dre, and Sylvie, to like...

Do you know what it was, Keith?

Yeah.

It was the Morphogenetic Field.

It was the Morphogenetic Field, yeah.

And so if you want to know about why that happened, go watch our 999

Let's Play on YouTube.

Yeah, we just incepted it into Jack's mind because the thought was so strong.

Oh, I see.

And I just figured it out.

Yeah, there is something.

I feel the same way as you, Keith, where it's like, oh, this guy's the boss.

But I think that it fits really well to have...

The impression that I get is like when the head of the university suddenly takes a personal interest in the new hirees to the faculty or whatever.

And you're like, oh, this is not this man's job.

And yet the fact that he's sort of taken it on,

you know, we know that the way Natero operates is that he's this

highly manipulative weirdo with assumptions about how power works inside the hunter organization so of course he'd show up there and be like and now I'm also going to run the the selection committee yeah

uh

I like it I I mean I love Netero as a character I think he's really fun and

he really fits as like the boss of the whole thing like the more we learned about hunters that this guy would be in charge of all of it makes a lot of sense i'm gonna invoke master roshi here it's kind of interesting because it makes sense that he'd be like, if he is the old sage who is super powerful,

if he didn't remove himself from society, he would end up in some very important position like this just through sheer might, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, totally.

I like, I, you know, we got to draw, we're trying to make this as partially drawing parallels to other shonen stuff, right?

Yeah, totally.

And we get a sort of a hint that there is some

interesting power dynamics at play between this UN-like organization and the hunters.

The UN organization wants the ants eradicated as swiftly and humanely as possible.

I thought that their use of the word humanely here was really

almost played as a joke, given that we know not only how complex things have gotten inside the NGL, but also like

we're beyond being like, we've got to do this humanely.

The ants have invented, I don't mean this that they should be inhumane to the ants, but even even the UN considering these things need to be eradicated swiftly and humanely is still thinking of them as, you know, like a bunch of insects rather than people who are inventing society from scratch.

Yeah, and it also, it, it,

to me, it feels like political, just like a thing that you say in order to not be accused of something.

Yeah.

And it's also a line I don't think is in the dub.

I think that they cut that word from the dub.

No, it's in there.

It is in there.

Okay.

Yeah.

It really feels like the way that governmental entities are depicted as talking to police forces in a lot of fiction, and probably based on some degree of real life, right?

Where it's like, oh, yeah, this order came down from the mayor or whatever.

We need to do such and such.

Doesn't care about like, and if it goes wrong, we get all the blame type attitude is sort of present.

Yeah, totally.

Notero explicitly says that, right?

He says,

this will leave the Hunter Association to take the blame for the fallout.

Yeah, and we've cast the Hunters as a policing organization multiple times with the way, like,

I mean, their use of

prisons in general, I feel like, is kind of the big thing here.

And I think this just puts that in, like,

more stark relief.

Like, the guys at the end very much feel like, oh, the SWAT team's here.

Yeah, they actually call them an eradication team.

Yeah.

Or an extermination team.

Yeah.

There's also this Jedi-like thing where, like,

there's a

there's this sense that the hunters are meant to be working together with the government, but also this underlying sense that the government really can't tell them what to do.

Yeah.

He says,

I wish I had the quote.

I thought that I did have it.

Basically, a Detero is like, and I can use like,

you know, as much force as I want to, right?

And the guy's like, well, I wouldn't presume how to tell the hunters like, what to do.

That's the wink in the edge, right?

It's just, it's a very, I feel like the I wouldn't presume to tell the hunters what to do line is

it's less like a

and screw these guys.

I wouldn't presume to tell you what to do.

I'm being sarcastic because I know you'll do it anyway.

And more the sort of like

the hunters are just a free agent, really.

Once we set them on a thing, they're just going to act.

We can't stop them.

We have no real power to stop them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I also like something that they're playing with in these first couple scenes is like trying to create

an underlying sense of unease with just kind of bugs being everywhere.

Every like this

flies buzzing around the flags.

And then there's

the ladybug in the glass.

And then there's later we get our first literal PowerPoint, I believe.

Yeah.

Literalize the PowerPoint.

Can we get a quick, just like a second of Chain Bastard in honor honor of the PowerPoint

Master?

Yes,

his music is playing.

Thank you, big dog.

We're singing to you.

Well, it's like the...

You can tell that they're playing a little with are these bugs everywhere Chimera ant spies, you know, but it could just I feel it's just as just as much them doing the whole hierarchy of the food chain thing, you know?

Oh, yeah.

We are showing

just regular small little bugs.

We are highlighting that the world around all of our characters is alive on these sort of various layers of, you know, we have the little bugs and then above them we have regular humans and then above them we have what, you know, the UN and then above them we have the hunters and then above them we have the pro hunters and then above them we have the chimera ants.

That's funny.

The thing that I picked up from it was

just like Everyone who's worried about the chimera ants, they're noticing bugs.

Like they can't stop like the bugs are just on their mind.

And so all of a sudden a world that's always been full of bugs is now obvious to them Yeah, it's a really good parallel to the way that we talked about how kite when killowa will say like the quiet part out loud about the risk of things will just sort of like zone out and like dissociate a little basically yeah and then also it kind of reminds me of the way that the i mean it's the hive mind stuff with the chimerant queen right she is literally in the back of their minds all the time and they it they don't like it Right.

Yeah.

Gives them a headache.

Yeah.

Uh, but this is our first, yeah, like you say, real PowerPoint here.

Uh, it's Lynn showing this PowerPoint on on a laptop, and it breaks down what I had sort of

guessed, but didn't realize why they were showing us this.

I thought they were just doing some exposition, making sure we understood how the Chimera ant hierarchy works.

Instead, they're setting up something, you know, that we're going to get to in the next episode.

But at the very top of the Chimera Ant hierarchy is the queen.

Then below the queen are the highest ranked people, the royal guards.

And at that point, I thought to myself, huh, like Cult.

Below the Royal Guards are squadron leaders, like

Colt.

Colt.

Like Colt.

Colt is actually a squadron leader, but also like Zazan is a squadron leader.

Hagia, who in previous episodes and my subtitles call Leol, and I'm not really sure what's going on there.

I know what's going on.

Hagia changes his name and

I got subtitles fucked us.

The subtitles fucked us and then also

I remembered the joke of how it happens backwards

because also because the wiki page calls him Leol and not Hagia.

And so

last episode, Sylvie was like, I thought they called him Hagia.

I'm pretty sure someone was right about that.

Yeah, Sylvie was right about that.

And I was like,

no, no,

he changes his name, which it will end end up being true.

That will end up being true.

This is a huge spoiler.

No, it's not a huge spoiler.

But yeah, I was very confused when people were talking about Hagia, especially because in line, the episode subtitles still call him Leol.

Yeah.

So I had to have several scenes where people, to his face, call him Lord Hagia.

This is the sort of big cat.

Infuriating, dude.

That might drive me crazy.

Yeah.

It's really weird because we've talked in the past about how the subtitles will reveal names early, and that's mostly fine sometimes it will reveal names early and in situations like this it's a bit more problematic what's very strange one of my favorite moments of the show which is learning leorio's last name leorio's last name at the at the 12th hour

yes and you know i don't really see this as like um immensely consequential but it would have been it would have been a fun moment but then sometimes you have stuff where um the royal guard who shows up um specifically isn't named until we hear the name in the episode.

So I have no idea what's going on there.

Someone is making executive decisions about how to do this.

The fact that that is that makes me a little less stressed about one important thing later.

Oh, yeah.

I have really

there's like one name-related thing that I'm really stressed about.

Where are you watching?

Oh, yeah, we should investigate this for Jack.

Oh, that's a great idea.

I am watching it on Netflix.

That's also where I'm watching.

So I can.

Yeah, if you could jump ahead and like.

Dre, I assume you 100% 100% know who we're talking about.

I am, but I'm gonna double-check.

Okay, yeah, I'll put it in the people ricks chat.

Yeah.

Yeah, so below the squadron leaders are the officers.

And then below them, presumably, are the, yes, are the who is the creepy Spider-Man.

And then below them are presumably just ants.

When the king is born, the royal guard switches over to him, and the queen takes over the like military leadership of the other squadron leaders and the soldiers below them.

The kings kind of go and mate with other organisms, new organisms, making a new queen.

And at this point, the PowerPoint just like zooming out in the path of exile tech tree or whatever just gets absolutely gigantic.

This...

was a and I keep getting these moments in the chimera ants every so every few episodes I'll go oh this could go even worse than I thought it was going to go.

Yeah, uh, and this, this demonstration of how the chimera ants spread, I hadn't really understood what was going to happen once the king was birthed in terms of the like broader ecosystem.

But being like, all right, we get a king, the king and another organism produce a queen, and then we just, it just keeps going exponentially.

That's that's bad.

Yeah, it's bad.

Uh, yeah, it zooms out into this like horrible snowflake of unique uh chimera ant

civilizations, basically.

Yeah.

This is when Spinner, who's the member of Kite's team who blows popcorn...

Popcorn, Jesus.

Bubblegum.

Bubblegum bubbles, notices a bug and picks it up.

There's very nice detail.

She has painted nails and they're drawn really nicely.

But yeah, that's just a little PowerPoint.

She sent me a call from the Extermination team saying they'll arrive in three days.

Spinner?

Spinner Cloud.

Spinner Cloud.

yeah

i love her yeah she's yeah she's great great name too yep and we're setting up nicely that there is there that there is a level above the squadron leaders the the ant queen had talked about this before really we'd seen a scene where she was like my royal guards uh and she said well when you're born i will name you after she learns about uh human names or you know a memory of hers is awakened about human names uh it's when all these ants together and asked for permission to name themselves yeah and she's like names huh And looks up at her royal guards.

Yeah.

It's like, I'm going to name them.

We've talked about it maybe a little in the past, but I want to draw special attention to how good Ramart's character design is.

He looks incredible.

He is a very strange-looking Chimera ant.

He's like a part bunny, part bug.

thing.

But I feel like not only is his character design really striking and distinctive, as he goes through these episodes and has to, you know uh emote really uh big he has to uh he has some dialogue that is interesting we get to see him go through various different um

uh uh

ideologies uh i think that his the versatility of his character design really lets Tagashi and the animation team convey this guy being frightening or this guy being kind of cowed or thinking something menacingly to himself he is really walking the line between silly looking like in the last episode we talked about him as the Joker.

But they'll do these great close-ups of, you know, his snarling teeth or his shoulders hunching over as he talks to Colt or something.

I think he's evil Roger Rabbit.

He's evil Roger Rabbit, yeah.

He does a little belly dance at some point.

He like ripples his belly muscles.

He does.

He is such a great

character to be our first known ant.

They do so much with him and his face.

Mostly they make him be crazy, but scream

his pupils sort of like boggle around

really well.

His VA is fantastic.

Oh, his voice actor is great.

Yeah.

Both of them.

Yeah, Colt has sort of figured out that Ramont probably had his nen pause blasted open by Ghone during the fight.

Without knowing any of those terms.

He did not watch Heaven's Arena.

No, he did not.

I love that.

At this point, you know, we talked about this last time.

They don't know the word for Nen.

They're going to learn.

But right now

they call Nen users rares, and they just call Nen like the energy or something.

Yeah, like magic occasionally.

They call it magic, which I love.

Yeah, magic, yeah.

Yeah, it's really, really good.

But it is a testament to Colt's kind of level-headedness and

adaptability that he's able to pretty much get it.

Straight out.

Yeah, speaking of level-headedness, how does he decide to test his theory?

He asks Ramot to punch him in the head.

This is such a nice

moment of, you know, having established that the ants are on really shaky terms in terms of their sort of rebelliousness or the ants that are going off-pisteed, but are also at the same time still undeniably part of this Chimera ant hierarchy.

Because it means that you can get so much in this great moment of Colts saying, all right, punch me in the head, and Ramot going, yeah, sure, absolutely.

While still also being like, and I'm I'm giving my boss power and I'm getting to punch him in the head.

It's really good.

So I don't know if Ramot really understands yet.

No, no.

There's such a blunt understanding of men that the Chimera ants are figuring their way through in the first part of this episode.

Again, it's about to change.

But I really love this sensation that they are hammering it together from first principles in the same way as they are hammering together almost everything from first principles, you know, books, names, guns, etc.,

and are

sort of walking towards weird shortcuts that we only know our shortcuts because we see other alternatives to it.

You know, contrast this with the way Wing teaches Goan and Killua the stuff.

Wing will still do the shortcut in like, we need to teach you this in one night, so I'm going to try and blast your nenpaws out.

But he's not.

He's not out here being like,

I'm going to punch you in the head.

No.

I mean, he sort of does, but to a greater or lesser extent.

But Ramot winds up a punch and knocks Colt flying.

Yeah.

Colt spends an episode and a half, like, nursing his head on the ground.

Yeah.

Uh, we get a new, we, this is a, this is a song light

set of episodes, uh, but this is our first new song of this.

It's the obvious difference in power is what it is, as uh, Colt is standing there, you know, technically Ramod's boss, but uh, Ramod is like exploding with Nen.

And just to be clear, clear, this is like Greed Island level Nen.

Like, this is the Ramot has gone from zero to last arc basically in one second.

Yeah.

And there's a great shot of like, from Peggy's perspective, of like Colt standing kind of small next to Ramot, who's huge and sort of glowing with Nen Aura, and they play this song.

I love that, like,

buzzsaw guitar.

It's so good.

That's a great one.

It's a Hirana with a Stratocaster or something, right?

In my mind, it is.

Yeah.

It's live guitars, right?

It's got to be.

I think so.

It could be.

It sounds like live guitars to me.

Yeah, there's enough processing on it that it fools my ear, but I get fooled by that a lot.

Not based on this specific track, but there's guitar stuff that sounds like it wouldn't be a computer.

Guitars are hard on a computer, especially, you know, 13 years ago.

Right.

Yeah.

But again, he's so good at his electric guitar parts.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Really, really cool.

There's a song later that is very funny.

It's like not as it's a fairly important scene.

I think it like doesn't play that often, but it only plays during a handful of important scenes.

And

it's sort of most famous for the next time, I think, that it plays.

Um, but at the beginning, it, I swear to God, it sounds like a song that would be used for a Hunter-Hunter AMV, which is very funny.

Actually, happening in Hunter-Hunter.

Yeah, it sounds, it ends up like turning into something else, but it sounds like the lead-in to a Lincoln Park song is what it sounds like.

Well, hell yeah, it's so funny.

The uh, meanwhile, Kite's team, Kite, Gone, and Killua, are being pursued through the forest, sort of being hunted by

Hagia and his Chimera ants.

Yeah, Hagia has a nasty little plan here.

Yeah,

you want to say what it is?

Yeah, so Hagia sends like a psychic message to all of the ants in the area, presumably mostly under his command,

and tells them where the rare humans are, tells them to like try and capture them.

And then he has this conversation with Flutter and Hina, his little toadies, who

are like, oh, you really think they can beat them?

And he's basically like, no, but they'll stall them until I get there.

And then we can eat the rare humans ourselves.

So he's just sacrificing his whole squad.

Yeah, I mean, he is demonstrated to not give a shit about

the project.

Yeah.

He's just here to hang out with his bestie, his boyfriend, and his girlfriend.

I actually think of them.

Yeah.

He's no, he's no Yunju, but still.

Yeah,

he's a little more on brand than Yunju, Rip.

Peace and piss.

Rest in piss, yeah.

I was going to say now.

Here in this, as this sort of entire squad of Chimera ants starts closing in on Gon and Kiliua, we are...

Takashi is having so much fun drawing ants, or the anime team is having so much fun drawing ants because most of them now are no longer just bug-like.

We can get really distinctive-looking Chimera ants that are lower down down the sort of the pyramid.

And they're just frog-wearing glasses.

Frog wearing glasses, rhino-man, armadillo-man,

boy band dog, like

pop, garage pop, shaggy-haired,

like furry OC dog.

Yeah.

And most of the time they look kind of silly, and I think that a lot of play is gotten from the Chimera ants, you know, like I talked about with Ramart earlier, of sort of like balancing their goofiness with how they are regularly pretty unsettling or saying pretty unsettling things.

But there are also lots of great shots here of indistinct chimera ants, you know, standing on a tree line or standing up on a ridge.

You can't really make out what they are.

They're just sort of menacing shapes with glowing red eyes.

I think that looks that looks really good.

One of my, I think, one of the funniest moments in all of Hunter Hunter happens here.

It's a, it's slightly subtle.

It's, I think, half of it is funny in its own right.

But when these guys all show up and

Toad goes and introduces these rules of like, here's what's going to happen.

You can run, fight.

Right, yeah.

So the first thing that they do is they poly briefly, right?

They don't go straight into a fight.

Yeah.

Sorry, carry on.

I just wanted to

make sure that we like.

So they're talking.

Toad is like...

Like, hidden in the smoke, being like, you can run, fight, and surrender.

Definitely you should fight.

Running is bad.

Surrendering is even worse.

It'll make us angry.

Kite is actually excited about this because he's like, oh, this is a great chance for you guys to fight these ants one-on-one, which is much easier than all of them attacking us together.

And he makes the note,

he says, quote, they're exhibiting human personality quirks at the expense of their characteristic ant teamwork.

I only hope we'll be able to take full advantage of that.

And then to prove his point exactly, it cuts to like a dog man in a hoodie like being like, all right, let's draw straws.

And he makes his little cricket friend

gently shake a box of straws.

And then like the number like six sticks out.

And he goes, all right, who's number six?

And then Armatilla's like, it's me.

It's me.

That little guy shaking the box of numbers is, I think, one of the funniest moments of the whole show.

It is hysterical.

Well, it's

I was just going to say, while we're on like Chimera ant design and stuff, I've linked one of the pages of what Hagia's crew just looks like in the manga.

Oh, yeah, let's see.

Because we talk about the design work here, and a lot of the more

background ants don't get filled in a ton.

And that's, I think,

design.

One, we can talk more about Tagashi's

usage of like prioritizing certain pages and where to put his energy

as things go on.

But

I just wanted to give a shout out to the adaptation team for sort of fleshing out what are essentially silhouettes.

And then also I wanted to link the little

image of the frog man because

I like that he has glasses and that also that his patterning makes it look like glasses too for his eyes.

These are just brilliant.

We'll share these design ideas in the post.

You know, we have a page here which is showing the frog sort of like, you know, spelling out his rules.

I really like that in the translation,

the that it's presented in a numbered list with each number with a tiny little bubble around it.

So it's, you know, it's really nicely formalized.

It says the queen's army presses on in the middle of the screen.

I really like that.

We've got a real sort of side-eye kite down at the bottom peeping out from under his cap.

But then the other page that you shared here, which is showing the chimera ants, is really stark and it's just fascinating.

You know, I haven't been reading the manga

in part because you know, the project is about

coming to the show for the first time

and seeing that as far as I'm concerned.

And I am so startled by the style that Tagashi is demonstrating here on this page.

It's just four rectangular panels filling out the whole page, and it is as stark as it can get.

The first is two sort of like wolf eyes almost

with gestural fur around them.

the second are two white silhouettes of of chimera ants with circles drawn where their eyes are little white glimmering eyes at the back the third is one two three four five six shaggy indistinct unpleasant looking uh black silhouettes of chimera ants and the last is just like a tongue licking some lips through some crooked broken teeth yeah it's Incredible.

Who's your favorite unsettling, indistinguishable silhouette?

Second from the right.

Seemingly like standing on one leg with one arm up and one arm.

Oh, yeah, mine too.

The one that gives me bat vibes.

Yeah, they just get bat vibes.

I believe.

To give context to this, I believe this is when Hagia's been giving orders to pursue the short.

So like all over the forest, these are the ants

taking their orders.

194.

I want to say chapter 194.

I'm going to try and be more on top of chapters if anybody else wants to read along.

I'm trying to keep up with the manga now.

Keith is as well.

These episodes are through 199.

Yes.

Just because

it's worth talking about how Chimera Ann is a is made at a point in time where Tagashi leaves a lot of blank space in his artwork and the anime team is given reign to both.

I mean, there's been some stuff that doesn't, that has already, we've talked about that isn't in the manga that

shows up now, such as the phone call Netaro gets.

But on top of just like pacing stuff, they get more artistic free reign.

Yeah.

And I think that's like, I don't know.

It's a cool part of the Chimera Ant arc.

Yeah.

Especially for more.

It's a huge thing.

Yeah.

It's almost like they're working off storyboards sometimes as opposed to a full-on comic.

And then sometimes you get pages like the one of the frogman.

Sorry, Frog Ant, my bad.

Frogman.

Frog Ant here.

Which more detailed.

Yeah, he's drawn the whole forest.

He's drawn the and like,

yeah, it's it's

it's interesting and also very sad to see because you know knowing the reason why he has to to pace himself so much um being poor health this this panel that takes up i would say 75 percent of the whole page is so good it's gorgeous he is a phenomenal artist that's another reason why i wanted to get back into the manga while we like to concurrently with what we're watching because,

like,

even when he's got

like more limited physical capabilities, like

keeping him from

doing fully detailed stuff, his design sensibility is so sharp.

And then, when he does let himself, or like when he's let himself, when he is feeling able to, and or like prioritizes the specific pages to put a ton of detail into, you get to see, like, oh, yeah, this guy is also just a master of his craft in the in the like most literal way as well yeah

definitely um

kite talks about how you know as keith said the ants are displaying human personality quirks at the expense of their characteristic ant teamwork yeah i think it's not just the human person in you know this is these are probably both symptoms of the same thing but something else that's notable that was happening here is uh

the ants going off-piste ideologically the ants saying you know we like to we love to hunt and kill humans for the fun of it,

has produced this kind of like, we'll fight you one-on-one philosophy, which is a huge weakness for the ants.

You know, if the Chimera ants were out here, you know, under cult leadership or something, all these officers would just rush, go and kill your own kite, and just take them out completely.

But now the ants have gotten it into their head that, like, there is something cool or something cathartic or something kind of like titillating about a one-on-one fight.

Hegemony of like a food chain or something.

You know,

the ants can't only have one of we want to hunt and kill humans and we're going to draw weird lots to, you know, figure out who's fighting whom.

It's like

they've committed so hard to the former that they're beginning to put infrastructure in place that will allow them to do it.

And it results in these weird situations where it gives their opponents a massive advantage.

Because in part, they believe that they can beat anything that they fight, which they are about to learn that they can't the thing that i love about it it's like this is a society of apex predators um that have also developed individualism like all of a sudden now they are like

well yeah we're the top of the food chain but who's the top of the top of the food chain damn

i i know right that's crazy

um

they start setting up some rules of engagement well actually go and sets i'd like to set some rules of engagement here right uh they say go and says well how will we know when the fight's done?

Yeah, the ants sort of look at each other and they're like, Well, when one of us is dead, it's going to be you.

And Goan's like, Oh, I don't like those rules.

I don't like those rules.

And he says, You can give up.

Yeah, you don't have to die if I beat you.

I'm not going to eat you.

This is inverse Goan's mistake.

He is now trying to force an honorable surrender.

It really is.

It's not Gon's mistake, though.

Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose.

It is.

It is.

Going thinks it is.

He's nothing if not consistent.

He is nothing if not consistent.

He offers them this is just so God Gohan has become at this point in the story a weird

side character with a hyper-detailed ideology that makes things difficult for everybody else.

Yeah.

He says

I'll offer you the possibility of surrender as long as you promise not to eat another human in your life.

It's cut to the moments later at the fight where the armadillo man he's fighting says things like, I love it when humans vomit their guts out.

I love to hear them go plop is what he says on the dub, I think.

Yeah, we're in a different world here, Ghana.

I love the sound it makes when you humans puke your guts at with a plop.

It's funny because it looks like a barf.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, 30 seconds earlier, Goat Freak saying, I'll let you surrender so long as you promise not to eat another human ever again.

This is a little bit like what I was talking about when earlier I said the fact that the UN guys were saying we need to exterminate these things humanely and quickly.

And it's like we have left that realm long behind us.

There's a couple interesting things about this.

I think that like the

service level thing is like,

you know, Ghon's being naive and it's, it's, it's dangerous.

Kite points this out, like, like Ghon being like this is dangerous to himself and to others.

Uh, because he really needs to be able to put aside this part of him that wants to like make sure things are fair

because they need to be saving the world.

Uh, and then the

other part of it is like um

uh

ghose sort of like recognizing their humane, like he doesn't see them as like well, they're ants who can't help themselves.

They're like monster creatures,

but which is true.

They, this is like a social convention that they've invented.

Like, yeah, that yeah, uh, uh, you know, maybe they still wouldn't agree to not eat another human as long as they're alive, but it's only like a social convention that they've constructed that's making them like

do blood sports.

Yeah, they've invented blood sports rather than you know, blood sports being an innate part of ant personhood.

In a less disastrous situation, like Ghoen would seem uh you know like decent and everyone else would seem like

homicidal sure yeah but the the situation does like sincerely feels like it does not call for this

yeah gone is is still the kid who is like sad that kite had to kill the it's not an owl bear but i forget fox bear fox bear fox

fox bear mom because it's gone's fault that the fox bear mom attacked him right right like gone is still in that kind of mindset, it feels like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Totally.

He's treating them like he ascribes all animals more humanity than most humans do.

And so I see that as the reason why he like does this to the ants, but I agree with you, Keith.

It's that he is not picking up on the context of how these creatures are different than like other animals

or other people.

These ants are no different than the fucking

shapeshifters that he met on his way to the hunter exam.

They're like, what's the practically, what's the difference?

Yeah.

But, you know, here we have Tagashi just clever, not so much foreshadowing, but Tagashi has always been saying this stuff, right?

Because remember the quote-unquote twist with the Kiriko was like, oh, the Kiriko are full people with their own, you know, Goan recognized that they had their own personhood or whatever.

Yeah.

That was one of the first, like, we've met.

uh quote-unquote creatures who are revealed to have a culture and an identity and you know uh an internal life and now here we are deep in the chimera Ant Arc, watching that get played out on every level.

And going like, we have to kill 100% of these guys.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, what they really want to do is kill the queen.

You know, that's going to be.

We're going to have to kill this guy.

Sure.

Damn.

Sam.

The shady

G6 Summit guy says,

exterminate everyone.

Yes, he does.

Yes.

And then very quickly, the Chimera and squadron leaders, or I guess officers actually,

begin to realize that they might not actually be at the top of the food chain, as all three fights, first with Goan versus an Armadillo Man, then Killua versus a Rhino Man, then Kite versus the Frog, and every single other person,

go very badly for the Chimera Ants.

Goan first catches the spinning Armadillo with Nen

and then crushes him to death.

It's

he does end up killing him.

It's rough.

He does kill him, yeah.

In the sound, obviously you can't do this in a manga, but in the sound design, the crushing of the armadillo was the same kind of barf-like squelch that the armadillo says that he enjoys when humans die.

Sure.

It's awful.

Now, maybe a more heavy-handed show would say, would have Goan recognizing in this moment, yes, I need to kill.

Surrender can't be offered.

But I really do appreciate how the moment is just played out straight in the verbs.

You know, the Goan kills this guy.

It goes unremarked on.

Whether there is going to be some sort of interrogation of that or whether there is going to be.

I think he says.

Yeah, there was a little bit after the fight, but there wasn't like that moment of like, I said I wouldn't kill him, but I've decided that I have to, you know?

Yeah.

I think he laughs to see.

Yeah, I think he did.

We see him lose his temple later.

Classic

razors.

Spikes.

This is nothing.

Killer is up fighting a Rhino-Man, and Kite is watching the kids fight, going, much like he watched them fight

Yunju and his squad.

And he's going, oh, these guys are pretty great.

This might not actually be so bad.

And then he sort of senses something.

We get these great images of like purple light washing over him.

if we want to go into it i think it's good i think it's it made me really glad watching it that we had gone into detail on kite sort of like staring out into space like not the show not really commenting on what kite was feeling but he's just like obviously feeling like shit about all of this uh and made me glad that we talked about that so much because he then just sort of verbalizes it uh watching them he says when they enter combat mode their aura becomes much stronger than usual they're suited for this gone start slow

Sorry, gone slow start does make me a bit anxious, but we can make it.

We'll reach the queen before she can give birth to the king.

But why?

I have a bad feeling.

It's like I'm missing something.

There's a gnawing anxiety that won't go away.

And while he's saying this, yeah, like Jack said, he's being swarmed with sort of

malevolent red nen.

Or at least what appears to be malevolent.

It's like that's the look of it.

We've talked in the past about how nen Nen is a really great way to

literalize into the world

sort of like internal thought or internal emotional shifts.

You know, obviously, emotional shifts and thoughts are literal.

They exist as really within the world as physical things.

But what I mean to say is, you know, we can see someone's Nen respond as a representation of their anxiety.

You know, we can see how that changes the powers that are available to them.

And I really like these shots of Kite feeling this malevolent Nen sort of pouring over him and it really just being a way to talk about his anxiety in this moment.

Yeah.

The source of that Nen ostensibly exists, but doesn't exist really yet.

It's him feeling a presage of, you know, of what is coming.

Let's talk about crazy slots again.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Fighting the Rhino real quick.

Yeah.

Killua just goes, Killua is not messing around.

Killure is

really going through some emotions, I think, in these episodes.

Yeah, Killua is being

hyper-professional.

He is afraid, he's anxious, but he's wanting to show Kite that he's capable.

Kite?

There is...

Yeah, Kite.

But there's not a lot of that actually happening in his dialogue.

So instead, when Killua speaks, he tends to output these sorts of themes that he's working through.

But most of the people we're seeing speaking are Chimera ants, if we're being honest.

So in these episodes, they are having a lot of fun showing off Killiua's professional, silent, sort of like

impassiveness in the combat.

His fight choreography is great.

He goes into this fight with the...

Rhino and immediately tries two classic Zeldic maneuvers, the shadow step and then the sort of like dagger hands thing that he does.

But the dagger hands just bounce off the bug's carapace in the bug

all this time, the evil bugs, capital E, evil, capital B bugs, are basically saying, well, we're going to kill you and eat you.

You can't beat us, etc.

Then Kilo shocks him a couple of times with electricity and then punches him straight through his chest in like a reference to the very first time we saw him do dagger hands on the airship.

I really like that it seems, you know, this is just a like clever little bit of flavor.

Instead of using his electricity to zap him what it seems like he's doing is specifically targeting the carapace that's over his heart to make it more brittle so that then he can break through it which is a very fun like just you know I don't think not just shocking him making hearts, but well

they definitely play it like it's gonna heart rhinos have hearts though.

Yeah, that's true.

Rhinos do have hearts.

There's a really good killer joke here.

Killier is such a little shit when he wants to be.

It's so funny.

And he often wants to be.

He does often want to be.

One of the bugs is like the bug he's fighting is like, I'm 10 times stronger than,

you know, the guy that Gohan just beats.

So, you know, you're not going to be able to beat me.

And the only thing Killiwa says after beating him is he turns to the frog and says, Is there anyone 10 times stronger than this guy?

Yeah.

He's also like, so that's nothing when the guy says, I'm 10 times stronger.

So you're not that strong then?

Fully dismissed already.

The Armadillo's name is Barrow, by the way.

The Rhino's name is Rhino.

Yeah, it's so funny when the show just doesn't name Chimera ants, and the subtitles are like Rhino Ant.

There's an ant later who's just called Pig Ant.

Yeah.

Oh,

the legend.

All right, let's talk about crazy slots.

Kite steps up, seemingly to fight.

Kite is in good spirits by his anxiety.

You get the impression that he feels this awful shuddering worry, but in this fight, he's sort of like, we've got this.

This fight, we're getting out of here, no problem.

He rolls crazy slots and crazy slots rolls two a huge scythe and of course uh what does kite say bad roll bad roll bad roll

bad roll everybody is immediately terrified of the scythe the frog is scared of the scythe the frog

gets a psychic memory of his old death

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Of being eaten by when he was a frog.

He remembers being a frog being eaten by the Chimera Ant Queen.

It's so funny.

These

not to go back to the manga, the pages for this are fucking incredible.

Yeah, the art is great for the anime as well.

There's a lot of room.

Yeah, they really adapt it well.

The way that, like, the name of the.

I guess go through what happens and then we can talk about the way they present it.

Also, notably, Goat and Killua see the scythe come out and go, that thing is bad news.

There is something,

there is something grim about this.

This weapon is called Grim Reaper's Dance Silent Waltz.

And God, how do I describe this?

It's a massive AoE that seems to be powered by the moon.

It is some of the most anime-ass bullshit anime we have ever seen in this show so far.

It rules, but it is like, oh, this is what Sephiroth does in like a Final Fantasy VII movie.

Yeah.

It kills the frog, right?

It kills everybody.

It kills all.

He has to warn.

He has to warn going and kill in three seconds.

It's so funny because there's no way to aim.

Kill get killed.

I like that it's the first time that we get like, oh, this is why it's a bad roll.

He says,

can I not have the...

He does it, I think.

Okay, okay.

He says,

My note says, this is the only technique that Kite can use with the scythe.

If he rolls a three, that's the only thing he can do.

Sorry, a two.

And it won't disappear until he uses it.

We gotta give a character on a season of Friends of the Table an ability like this.

He does a big sigh and then goes, it's such a drag.

And then Killoa, like, as an aside, goes, then why did you choose it?

It's great.

It's so good.

Every time.

Kite with two with the scythe.

There's a...

Actually, yeah, do we want to talk about the way this is shown in the manga Sylvie?

I mean, if we want to, yeah.

I just like sharing it with you guys because it's pretty.

It's

so good.

This

imagery of him with the scythe makes so much of Kite's character design kind of snap into place.

You know, in general, Crazy Slot's weapons have been sort of like long weapons.

He has that machine pistol thing.

Um, and then we have this scythe.

But as soon as he draws the scythe, and Tagashi draws these incredible panels of him wielding it.

All of Kite's like angular features, his long hair, his very, very long legs in black slacks.

It is of a piece with his weapon in a really cool way.

This panel is amazing.

It's the last one here.

It's actually two panels.

The frog's head has come off and popped through the middle panel into the upper panel.

Oh, it's great.

It's really, really, really good.

It's gone completely.

There are some moments here where tagashi is just drawing completely blank panels and you know as we talked about earlier um you know tagashi uh has a chronic illness chronic disability where um he has severe back and arm pain as a result of uh pushing himself or being pushed to draw you know, just so much.

And so when I see panels like this, I think

part of me is like, well, I can see that this is an artistic compromise for the conditions that the creator has to go through to make it.

You know, if you are in pain every time you are drawing, you're not going to be drawing hyper-detailed backgrounds.

But at the same time, it is such a demonstration of Togashi's willingness to draw in new or interesting or strange ways that he is making it,

he is making it work.

You know, we see

this panel in the bottom left, as the frog says, earlier, I have been overcome by this feeling earlier, and we're looking at his eyes and then to the left of that panel is just a single blank white square as the frog you know feels feels the horror of death approaching i believe these might have been sent out of order i believe this is that that page is the one that comes right before actually maybe i'm wrong i i think that page goes into the i remember it this is death page but i can double check that just a single blank panel as the frog feels feels death is so cool and then we have like like keith said this this panel where the frog's heads has kind of gone flying up the page.

And it's just this loose, awful, you know, like smear of a sketch in the top right.

Really, really, really cool.

And again, the cool thing that this does is it allows the animation and adaptation team to do a little more with the visual flare around this movement now.

Yeah.

Because you can't have a blank

page.

You can't have a blank.

You literally cannot have just a blank space when you're animating something.

People will get mad.

I mean, people are.

I mean, people got mad about this.

People

say,

you know, you can't put a blank panel in a comic.

This looks fucking incredible.

Yeah, that's great.

I have seen some dog shit takes about a hunter-hunter on the internet, Keith.

The audience is mid, you know?

Sure, I will never, I will, I will never underestimate.

You can't underestimate the like bottom floor of an audience for something.

Yeah, the control that he has over his line is remarkable.

And the way he is able to vary his line from these hyper-pristine, you know, super sharp

drawings.

I look at the way that Goan and Kiliua and Kite's faces are drawn, or even the precision on the frog's head when he's saying, well, then let's decide on the turns and rules for fighting, shall we?

And then he also will just get so loose and gestural.

There's that great panel of Goans standing over the body of the dead

Armadillo man.

And in the background, he's drawn this wonderful loose tree.

It's really impressive stuff.

This is the first time I've seen a lot of his pages

in a whole whack rather than individual sections.

It is all so impressive.

And his composition is amazing.

I'm looking at this.

This is the thing that always blows me away.

The way he composes his.

Yeah, like, again, I'm always really impressed when someone has a real mastery of the

form that they are using.

And I think that Tagashi is one of those people who just knows how to use comic paneling and comic composition in really interesting and effective ways.

Yeah.

This is amazing.

Yeah.

And I'm just scrolling between them.

Apologies.

I don't mean to just make this a manga-focused episode.

I just know

in a minute since we want to talk about this.

Yeah.

Even just in these, you can see Tagashi's fascinations that got carried through over into the anime.

The focus on people's eyes is everywhere here.

Oh,

I like that kite.

I noticed this in

the original stuff that you sent, Sylvie, but

a couple people sent me that page of Tagashi talking about

different inspirations for different characters and how

the inspiration was Kite, for Kite was

Snuffkin.

Yes, we were going to.

I wanted to make sure we talked about this on the air.

In the.

Who is Snuffkin, Keith?

In the from Snuffkin is a is a little wretch who roams around the

the moon and land and sort of kind of poo-poos everybody for

not really he's he's nice, he's nice, but uh he's moo-man's friend.

He's Moomin's friend, uh, but he's kind of like a like a

slightly sad Zach Forest weirdo.

Uh

uh and uh

Kite's design was was sort of was in part based off of him, uh, and it's much more obvious in the manga than it is in the show.

Yeah, in part because, you know, maybe I would feel differently if I had seen the Moomin TV shows or everything, but I've never heard Snuffkin speak.

And so hearing Kite speak invariably pushes him further away from my image of Snuffkin.

Whereas, you know,

looking at these panels, I'm like, yeah, that's Snuffkin with a scythe.

Usually Snuffkin usually has like a little knife that he uses to eat cheese or cut down the flowers.

Or like something.

Yeah.

Or fishing.

Oh, fishing.

Snuffkin is what if the Animal Crossing protagonist both really, really, really loved nature and always gave the impression of kind of being done with this shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The movements are great.

Tofi Janssen's movement series adapted into comics and TV shows and much

worldwide phenomenon.

Yeah.

Wallets.

Wallets.

Do I have...

I have a little plush movement, I think, but I don't know where he is right now.

He's not in my office.

Let's see.

Yeah.

Goan says.

I don't have any sympathy for guys like him pointing at the dead armadillo.

Or the rhino.

Who call each other trash.

You know, Gohan's real problem with the Chimera ants right now is that they don't like or respect each other.

They don't like each other.

It's the same thing with

the spiders, where he's like,

aren't you guys?

No, not with the spiders.

It was with the

who was it that he said, like, aren't you guys friends?

Like, why are you treating each other like this?

And then it's like, no, they're not friends.

What are you talking about?

I don't remember.

It could be some Greed Island plot.

You know, this is a big problem that he had in Greed Island where it's like, why aren't you cooperating?

But yeah, to your point about the spiders, Kite says, this is the problem.

He's thinking to himself.

He says, would would you act differently if one of these bugs cared for its friends?

And, you know, we saw this happen with the spiders.

When Goan asked Krolo, Goan was just, it caused Goan to completely come apart.

This idea that the spiders could love each other and could care for each other,

but still, you know, commit this violence.

This is when, it is when

Goan confronts Razor for killing Papobo.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

That's what it is.

Yeah.

It's interesting as well that, you know, Kite, ever the ill, eerily prescient understander of the Chimera ants, cursed with the gift of knowledge, he says, would you act differently if one of these bugs cared for its friends?

And, you know, we have spent the last X

episodes

watching the Chimera ants, you know, do this.

The Chimera ants are fighting internally, and a bunch of them are complaining.

But

as viewers, we understand the move Tagashi is doing, right?

Which is like drawing together, oh, these people have have internal relationships that are more complex than they seem, et cetera, et cetera.

It also reminds me a little bit of like after the bomber fight, where like one of the things that happens is we see the bomber be like, well, you don't have to give me the angel's breath, give it to my friend.

Oh, yeah.

And that seems to be part of like the softening of like, well, you know, we can't kill the bomber.

We just, listen, we all agreed to a fight and the fight is over.

And that makes us all even and good friends now.

Yeah.

Hey, Gorino, what's the difference between these guys?

Oh, well, I like you and I hate them.

Although,

what Biskey says during that exchange is that we stop being able to have control over our opponent's life and death after the fight ends.

So it is consistent with Biskey being like, during a fight, you can kill someone if those are the terms of the fight.

But after the fight is over, once someone has been declared the loser, killing them is murder is basically what Biskey tries to say.

Raises the question, who sets the terms?

We'll get kind of an answer for that.

We do get an answer for that.

There's actually, we're ringing the hunter bell a few times.

Actually, I want to retroactively ring it for when Netero's on the phone with the president of the world or whoever.

That's a little bit, what is a hunter?

Like, oh, a hunter's a guy who takes orders from a guy who takes orders from the president of the world.

Yeah.

And I was, I am right about to get wrong-footed by Tagashi in a big way.

And we'll talk about this as we we get through episode 4 and episode 84 and 5.

But between all of this,

we've got the terrible thing that Kite is sort of foreseeing.

He doesn't quite know what it is.

There's a gnawing anxiety.

We have the PowerPoint about how bad things go when the king is born.

At the end of episode 3, the narrator specifically says, you know, they have to go and kill the queen as quickly as possible to prevent the birth of the king.

And we see the

those distinctive purple eyes that we associate with the Chimera Ant King, and then cross-cut to Leol's Leol's eyes.

And I'm, and then episode 84 begins, and it's called something like a faintful birth.

That's the title card that you see at the beginning of every episode.

And I'm like, oh no, we are completely fucked because the king is about to be born.

You know, that's what's going to happen.

You're right.

Hey, first half of the statement, correct.

Well, so, so, you know, there's no, there's no, no need to sugarcoat it.

Uh, 84 and 85 are about the emergence of the first of the royal guards, a chimera ant so monumentally powerful that not only are they born immediately with Nen, their malevolent Ren per kiloa is more powerful than Illumi or who's the oh Hisaka?

And he wonders if Chairman Natero could even beat this person.

This person arrives and immediately changes Chimera Ant hierarchy.

And this is great because

if this was what we were presaging, how bad is the king going to be?

You know what I mean?

We spend all this long.

Welcome to Chimera Ant.

we spend all this long going

going

uh you know oh something truly terrible is coming something truly truly terrible is coming and uh the thing happens the terrible thing comes it is awful and it is the king's second in command you know yeah

real trouble We've talked about this arc as like techno thriller and like horror and stuff, but it like, I mean, this is a brain, a vein of horror, but it also, this is when it starts to take on the tone of like the ecological disaster movie to me.

Yeah.

Where it's like, oh, you know the storm is coming.

You know it's going to hit.

Roland Emmerich has enlisted all of his CGI team to create the most perfect apocalypse.

And all you can do is wait for it to bear down on you.

Yeah.

And that's how the king feels now.

Yeah, this is that great bit in.

Oh, God.

There is a film.

Let me just find the director actually.

It's going to take me one second.

It is a disaster film about a big shark from 2018 called The Meg.

It's directed by John Turtletaub.

It is not a great movie, but it is a great one of these.

You know, it's a really good time.

I believe it was.

It was meant to be one of those.

It is very much meant to be one of those.

It was meant to be a great movie.

Movie was making a lot of fun.

Lee Bing Bing.

If you're ever on a movie and you get the chance to watch The Meg, I super recommend it.

Bafflingly, the sequel to The Meg, which I think is called Like The Meg 2, someone killed me in the middle with it.

Is directed by the genuinely, really brilliant British director Ben Wheatley, who made the film Kill List.

He made the film A Field in England.

He made a really, really great film about two tourists who just start killing people called Sightseers.

And he made the Meg2 for some reason.

The trench.

Meg2, the trench.

Meg2, the trench.

Anyway, there's a great bit in the meg where they set up this awful, awful shark that is going to be a real problem.

And it is a huge problem.

It arrives, it kills one or two guys.

And then eventually they kill it and they capture it.

And as they've got it hanging off the back of their boat, the real Megalodon, a shark five times bigger than the first one, arrives and eats it.

Yeah.

And I feel like there's something going on here, except what if the first shark was actually, you know, world-endingly awful and the real one hadn't even showed up yet.

Yeah.

It's great.

It's also like the dune worm, right?

It's like, oh, the teeth, you just started seeing the teeth underneath you now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So 84 begins, and the writer, we see one of the awful chimera ants.

Oh, two things that, you know,

are very obvious to us having seen the thing, but I don't know if we've said explicitly on the show, but both of which really contribute to the feel of the chimera ants.

When they are growing, they are visible in these sort of glowing green egg sacs that hang from the ceiling, and you can kind of see these hints at chimera ant bodies like moving in the egg sacs.

We get shots of this every so often.

It's real techno-thriller sort of vibes of, you know, here is your body horror thing growing in a tank.

The other thing is, chimera ants bleed black, blue blood, and they do it profusely.

Whenever chimera ants get killed or shot, you know, you get the impression that because it's not the red blood of humans, this happens regularly.

You ever swaddled?

They're full of juice.

Yeah,

there is just, you know, black, blue goop shooting everywhere when the chimera ants are getting killed.

Were you going to say that it's because it's not red, it's easier for them to get away with it?

Did I cut you off in the middle of that?

Sorry.

No, no, no.

It's good.

There's one of my favorite films of last year is an Argentinian film called When Evil Lurks.

Yeah.

And

it features...

At one point, it features a kid absolutely covered in blood.

And the Argentinian law says that you can't put fake blood on childhood.

This blows my mind.

This still blows my mind.

And Sylvie and I watched this scene where this kid is covered in blood.

And we were like, how the fuck did they do that?

Is that a small adult?

Is this all CGI?

And the solution that Damian Rugner, the director, came up with in the end was that they covered the kid in blue liquid and then color-corrected it to reduce production.

Because they're like, it's not blood, you know, it's just it's just blue liquid.

It worked out really well, like it looked really good.

But yeah, there is an age-old tradition in film and in horror film of like trying to get a little room

and also getting a little more room from the sensors by saying, well, you know, know, it's not human red blood, so we can just splash a bunch of like, um, I think a lot about the way the androids in Alien bleed white, bleed that weird milky white substance.

Yeah.

Although Ridley Scott is clearly not afraid of also just killing those.

Yeah, he's also just being a little bit of a pervert.

This is also why in cartoons, characters are, you know, constantly saying that they'll like destroy you because they can say that, but they can't say like kill too often.

Is it regular show where it's like, yeah, you can you can't kill anybody unless you make them explode?

And so they just have

exploding all the time.

It's really funny.

But yeah,

the black blood of the ants and these green egg sacs are, I think, big ant images that keep coming up that we might not have mentioned.

And we begin 84 by seeing a body moving in one of these royal guard sacks.

As the narrator says, the first of the royal guards is about to awaken.

And I'm thinking to myself, right, because the king is coming in this episode, so his entourage

needs to show up.

Meanwhile, Hagia and his team are having, you know,

didn't go well with the frog.

So they are closing in on Goan, Kiliua, and Kite again.

I love these three weirdos, by the way.

Hagia's team is so fun.

It's Hagia, who is the sort of like

lion-y tiger we talked about.

That he's called Leol on previous episodes.

Yeah.

Then there's Flutter, who is this sort of like more insectoid guy who has got like

his like big sleeve, like bell sleeves with both hands hidden, like hands together.

And then Hina.

He's like huge eyes.

Yeah.

Like really big eyes.

Looks kind of like Crow from Mystery Science Cedar 3000 now that I think about it.

A little bit.

Oh, it's Exeter Leap.

And then there's Hina, who is like, I can only describe as like Hagia's cutesy girlfriend who has like,

she has like a pomp forin hat and she's like, I'm so excited to eat all these humans.

Have you seen her display any ant characteristics yet?

I'm trying to remember.

Does she fly?

I know, besides wanting to eat people.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Yeah, she hasn't really done much of anything.

She's the most human-looking person.

She's by far the most human.

And it's so funny because, like, Hagia is so like serious and schemy.

And like Flutter isn't nearly as

intense or aggressive as Hagia is.

And so, like, even they're kind of a funny pair.

He makes sense as like a lieutenant.

And it's like

Hita.

Why is Hita there?

It's so funny.

She's just like, doesn't feel.

That's obviously why she likes them.

They like her.

Yeah.

But does anyone besides Sylvie remember the fucking meme format that was going around where it was like a white dude being like, when I feel the beast coming out?

And then he like goes to throw a punch.

And then his girlfriend is there to catch the punch and like stop him from giving into his beast mode don't remember

okay it's very dumb and it was and mostly i saw people making fun of it but that like hagia and uh oh now i've already forgotten her name but they look like a couple who would make that kind of tick tock oh they do they they would yeah they do oh they actively do they do they actively do yeah they do look like that they are also the sort of rogue ants but uh unlike

You know, we talked about them in the previous episode as the sort of mid-tier of rogue ants.

They are not necessarily building a Junji Ito human torture factory like Yonju and his squad, but they're still out here being like, we love to kill and hunt humans.

But the three of them seem tight.

You know, they're looking out for each other.

There's some great, great stuff going on here where

Hagia is pretty confident about his chances because he says, I have the king of the jungle's blood flowing in my veins.

And later there's some talk with Hina when they're sort of like hiding out in the grass.

Where Hina sort of says, hang on, the king of the jungle should go and fight his enemies directly.

A king should face his his prey, not hide.

And Hagia sort of has to think to himself, well, this is actually how lions hunt.

And I really love that in addition to picking up names and in addition to picking up animal characteristics from their, you know, from their...

their original sources as, you know, a lion or whatever, the ants have also picked up like human cultural concepts of the animals, which is such an interesting wrinkle.

You know, you have Hagia saying

a lion does actually hide in the grass for his prey, which, you know, we know is true.

But then you also have him saying things like, the king of the jungle's blood flows in my veins, and you have Hina saying things like, the king should face his prey and not hide.

And it's some real like, you can't both have your cake and eat it

game being played with the ants, where they have these animal characters, they have genuine animal characteristics that have also been like muddied or compromised or at times like enhanced by human cultural ideas of how animals work.

It's so cool.

Yeah, as long as an animal, sorry, as long as one of the ants can speak English, it almost doesn't matter how much like an animal they look.

They're human.

They're like, they're just humans.

Right, because we are falling into this, we the viewer are falling into this trap as well.

You know, we are being told explicitly that they have animal, non-human, animal sources, but we're also seeing them hang out and talk and, you know, much is being made of their human characteristics.

And as viewers, we are constantly falling into the kind of like interpretive trap of like, what bit of them is ant-like?

What bit of it is my cultural understanding of how ants work or how um you know hive minds work?

What bit of it is actually really how animals work?

Um, I really love it.

We are also getting muddied by our own, you know, conceptions of this stuff.

It's impossible to overstate how much, just as an example of what Jack was just saying, it's impossible to overstate how much Hina is just like a side character from like a high school, like a girl at high school in some other anime.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and she's a Chimera ant officer, you know?

Hakey has got a plan which is to pursue

the crew with.

It was almost as though we're spending a lot of time talking about things from the ants' perspective.

This is no accident.

We spend most of these episodes with the ants.

And in fact, we cut to Kite's team usually for like consequential sequences, such as they are being chased by a group of ants, really cool, weird flying squadrons of like drone ants to be led into a trap.

This is what Flutter brings to the table, like high coordination aerial assault.

Yeah, really cool.

Anytime Tagashi draws, or rather, anytime the animation team draw a lot of ants on screen at once, they always look sick.

We had that image that we talked about a lot in the first Chimera Ant episode with them all flying, carrying the bodies.

And here we have this great image of like an attack wing of drone ants led by Flutter.

This maneuver is startlingly similar to the fight we've gentru, you know, lead them, run them on a chase and lead them into a place where you can fight them really efficiently.

In their case, it was above the pit trap, and in Hagia's case, it's in this field of tall grass.

But it doesn't go well for Hagia's crew.

No, do we want to finish this scene without cutting to the scene that intersects it?

Yes.

Wow.

Okay.

Sure.

Kai draws the scythe again.

He does.

He draws the scythe again.

It's so funny.

Have we seen him get it twice in a row before?

Yeah,

the gun.

Oh, you're right.

There's something really great about this unbelievably powerful attack rolling twice in a row as a way to

really zero in on, you know, Crazy Slots is playing his own game in there.

The random rolls are random.

You know, sometimes in XCOM, you see a 99% roll and you're like, this is going to hit.

And it doesn't.

This is what happens when, you know, Kite rolls the scythe twice in a row.

I definitely won't come back and bite him later.

He definitely wouldn't have been really happy to have rolled the scythe.

There's this amazing shot of like Hagya looking up and seeing the sort of debris from Kite's moon AoE, seeing the trees moving, and then like eight to ten drone ants come spiraling out of the forest like fighter planes in a tailspin.

They've got like smoke coming from behind them.

They like spiral to the ground and crash dead.

It's really cool.

Split in half, too.

They're half.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Did you say that?

Did I miss you saying that?

No, I didn't.

Hagia immediately surrenders.

Just straight away.

Yeah.

In the same way, though, as the frog died, he had a memory of,

you know, when he, as a frog, got eaten by the chimera and queen.

Hagia also experiences this, but from another position on the hegemony of the food chain type situation.

You know, he, he, he, as he retreats, he sort of spells out that he used to, that is to say, when he was a lion,

understand that his claws were kind of like the, they put him on the top of the food chain and nothing could beat him.

As soon as he unsheathed his claws, he could resolve any situation with violence.

You know, it was, it was, he was, he outclassed everything else.

And he realized in the moment of being got by the Chimera and Queen how

that wasn't true, you know, that there was something above him.

And in seeing Kite's power, he recognizes that this has happened again.

He says

earlier he realized that he didn't stand at the top of the food chain and this cost him his life, presumably as the ant.

And now he is making the smarter, quote-unquote, smarter decision to back away from Kite.

Kite can tell that he is the squadron leader because of this.

He says, you know, because he realized he was outclassed, he backed down calmly.

I can tell he is one of the squadron leaders.

There's some weird sort of like

Kite as the xenobiologist or like cultural anthropologist thing going on here.

Kite ascribing this sort of like calm, not surrender, but retreat as characteristic of like a higher-ranked being, I think, is really interesting, especially as we come to see Kite's team have to retreat towards the end of this block of episodes.

Let's talk about the Nen ants.

Nen ants.

Oh, Nen.

The Nen.

Yeah, thank you.

The ants would love some information about Nen, so they go down to the food chamber where the food chamber is prepped to see if they can find that one rare that they captured earlier, which we know is Pockle, but they know as

prisoner number something 43.

4933, 4-933.

It turns out that they've been meticulously cataloguing every single piece of food they bring in.

Yeah, um, which is a very, very human thing to do.

Um, we see this as well in terms of like uh great human uh genocidal operations are often meticulously calculated by the bureaucrats at the top of them as well.

And you know, even on a uh lower scale than genocide, but still the sort of um destructive project of the state, prisoners are afforded prisoner numbers, you know, all that sort of stuff.

So it doesn't surprise me at all that the ants, you know, when we talk about the ants picking up human characteristics, they also pick up these

human impulses to be like, we're going to get all our prisoners and we're going to categorize them.

The pig ant doesn't really care about any of this.

Nah, he's supposed to be on the like signboard for a barbecue restaurant somewhere.

Yeah, it's like he's.

It's exactly what he looks like.

Do you think that the pig ants on the barbecue signs,

do they know?

Me posting the meme, does he know?

Hold on, let me get it in there in the chat for you.

God, you saying that, Sylvie, just reminded me that he does look like just the pig from famous Dave's BBQ.

Yeah.

Wow, he really looks like that pig.

Do you think, because this is an important question when you see those signs, are the pigs in those signs evil pigs?

You know, that is to say, are they pigs who have switched over allegiances and they're like, I'm working with with the humans, perhaps to save my own skin, perhaps because I love killing other pigs, and I know full well that this is the flesh of my comrades.

Or are they misinformed?

Are they told, pig chef, here's a lovely bit of meat for you to you?

I've always wondered this, and I'm curious as to it sounds like you all thought that they are definitely evil, but it also sounds like you hadn't considered that they might be like

being played.

Well, to

be a chef, you've got to have some level of training or experience.

I think it would be very difficult to get from the novice position of

having to learn about food for the first time to being the face of a restaurant without learning the true nature.

So, if there is a pig that goes into being a pig chef of pig meat for humans that doesn't understand the nature, I think by the end

they do and have chosen a path of evil.

Or they've left,

they never make it.

Oh, yeah,

they get, well, they don't leave.

They're the ribs.

They become the ribs.

Yeah, this used to be too.

It used to be Famous Dave's plural.

That's the so many of the food channel.

That's actually the slogan of Famous Dave's.

That's pigs the ribs.

Oh, it says it as a baby.

Pigs the ribs.

And people think it's like, oh, it's like it's the bee's knees.

No.

No.

No, it's literal.

That pigs the ribs.

Pig Chef is great.

He's described in the subtitles as pig ant, and he is stressed because, as far as he's concerned, he, the ant queen, has been

eating so much in preparation for the birth of the king.

Me watching, of course, here comes the king.

You know, we know how this goes.

And in fact, his pile of corpses is actually pretty small right now.

He's got a huge pile of skulls under which which Pockle,

Nen

expert, has hidden.

He hid an antidote under his back tooth that has protected him, but he's managed to, he's still kind of weak and he's hiding underneath the skulls.

And he learns that the ants have figured out Nen, he hates this.

Pockle is having a no good, very bad day, and it will continue.

It's not the worst day of all time.

But I really do love that on the one side of it, we have Kite, the hunter who is possessed of this like awful, gnawing dread that he can't quite name that something bad is going on.

And then on the other side, we have Pockle, the hunter who knows exactly what is going on, but can't do anything about it, or is like desperately clawing to do something about it.

Yeah, I

love

because now we have three things.

We have the ants of learned nen.

Oh, what's the third thing?

I had three things when I started the budget.

Well, you got the tough.

We did one.

The ants of learned nen, the third thing was going to be that we know that a royal guard is about to be born.

And then

there was a thing in the middle that I had, but I have lost.

Is it that...

No?

I was going to say, is it that they're Awakening the Nen?

But that was number one.

That was number one.

Yeah.

I'm also...

I'm also.

Number two, you can surrender, but this will make us really, really angry.

And number three, you can run, but it won't go well for you.

Well, I guess the question I was going to ask is, or the thing I was going to say and then ask a question is that, like,

we lost a little bit of this because of kind of focusing in on one side versus the other, where the show is just, like, kind of cutting quickly in between the ants and Gonakilo and Kite.

But when

Kite is first talking about, like, what am I forgetting?

What am I forgetting?

It cuts to Ramote, like, learning Nen and being like, I think the suggestion of the cut is...

that ants can learn nen like people can because they're people.

And if a Nen was born with Nen, it would be really bad.

If Nen was born with Nen.

Yes.

Right.

But then the second part of it, the second part of what is Kite forgetting is

like he's so worried about the king, he hasn't mentioned the royal guards even once.

So I do like that there's a little bit of ambiguity in like

what is he forgetting?

He's not even really forgetting just one thing.

Like he's been so focused on getting there before the king that a lot of other important considerations have fallen by the wayside.

It's even, you know, it's foreshadowed as well in Kite saying, well, this squadron leader is possessed of a real, you know, acumen and, you know, understands when it is tactically safe to back down.

And then, you know, is there anything above squadron leaders, Kite?

No, we just have to prevent the king from being born.

And I can understand how he gets there, right?

Because...

The king being born is when this thing metastasizes, right?

You know, it's already metastasized way beyond, you know.

But if you could kill the queen before she births the king, in theory,

you know, it gets really, really bad if you can't, if if the king is born.

Um and we know the viewer that the king is going to be born because um he fucking shows up in the opening title sequence and in an episode later um they talk about the ant king and we see that figure in silhouette.

You know, we have seen this uh awful figure uh in the title sequence a couple of times.

Uh we also saw um his eyes appearing over the planet a couple of times.

You know, this is a figure that the viewer has seen a bunch, and we do get the confirmation that that is the king.

It's not even, maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe I'm misremembering what I saw

and filling in my mind, filling in the blanks.

It wasn't really even in silhouette.

It was like just kind of from a distance.

Yeah, he has like a striped tail or something.

He's like pumping.

Okay, I guess it's like, yeah, he's backlit so you can see some detail and not others.

I'm not going to include that in the screenshots.

So for anybody who's not watching the show, you're going to have to wait until there's a king screenshot.

But it's worth saying that even beyond like, oh, you know, we talked in the past about how I shouldn't watch the title sequences very closely because of hidden things, they are not being coy about this ant figure.

And then in these episodes, we get the confirmation or we get the strong implication that that's the king that they are talking about.

You know.

The viewer has seen that the king is coming, which lends this whole thing, again, this classic sort of disaster movie, you know,

and they can't stop it.

Meanwhile, Ramot is really, he's really starting to feel out his nen.

He is making his aura go into shapes.

You know, he's doing all the stuff that we saw Gonan Kilua spend a lot of time figuring out how to do.

Ants, Chimera ants, are, you know, sort of like predisposed to being...

especially adaptable and especially quick on their feet.

So it's no surprise that he is learning this thing, you know, really quickly.

And he has a great plan.

Once he gets his nen, he is going to become the king.

Yeah, there is something about Pig.

By the way, the pig chef's name is Pig.

There's something about Pig not being able to see

Ramot's Nen, which is established that a lot of the lower level ants can't see it by default.

Like Pike,

Peggy can, yeah.

Pike was the first character to be able to see it and was like, people said this is invisible.

What are they talking about?

But there's something about Pig not being able to see it that Rama like took as a sign that this is a special gift.

And

how long does that last for him?

It's this is wonderful.

You know, I sound like a broken record every time Takashi does one of these big pacing tricks where he suddenly not throws out what he's been doing, but reveals that he was actually talking about something else all along or was working in a completely different direction.

Midway through his speech, the first royal guard is born, and any ant hierarchy problems that we have been talking about in terms of like

ants are going off peace and are hunting humans for fun and are going to serve the queen or whatever are immediately flattened as our highest-ranking ant is born and completely changes the game.

If so,

a vision first of a horrible skull.

This is adapted straight out of the manga.

Yeah.

The the page the the the way that they have this skull just like hovering behind Ramot in this like again using the evil purple nun color

That we love so much just like

Through the tones that are and it also like immediately like

It also like stops you in your tracks in the same way it stops Ramot in his tracks.

Well, Well, it's great because it's intercut with us seeing this new ant for the first time.

And the ants, as usual, well, this is a fun confirmation.

Ants seem to come out of the sacs wearing clothes.

Yep.

Just straight up.

Yep.

That's part of this.

This is great because clothes are...

Culture, you know?

They are.

If the thing that the ants are assimilating is not just personhood, but are all the trappings of personhood, what do you wear?

How do you wear it?

I love the fact that they come out with a desire to have names and they come out wearing clothes.

They have their own personal style straight away.

It fits perfectly with what we were talking about in the last episode, I believe, about like what are the mechanics of how the queen

phagogenesizes, which is

like it's obviously not calorie-based.

Because,

you know, unless we believe that hunters are, or like, nen users are are are like more calorically dense essentially than regular people by like a factor of a thousand uh it has something to do with like the the the nen force itself or the spirit or the soul some kind of soul this is like a soul-based process really

and that because that's the only way that you can get

that that you can get clothes to be born on to an ant uh yeah and i mean you know it answers the question: do ants have souls?

With the answer, absolutely, of course, they do.

And also, that people do.

Yes, and simple times.

And people have souls.

Yeah, they all have souls.

And it also helps with like,

it makes that

if you eat a bunch of bad people, you get bad ants.

It makes that work in a way that for me, it doesn't work if what you're talking about is like

a non-spiritual, purely biological, caloric process of like gene splicing because being mean is not, that is not like genetic for like, like, or it's so much more than genetic.

Like, you can't just eat a thousand criminals and then have a thousand criminal ants.

It's not how it works.

Uh, but if it has to do with your soul.

1660s exploitation movies absolutely believe that.

Yeah, great.

Vincent Price is in them.

We're having a really good time.

But if you're, if you're taking the soul out of a human and using that to rewrite what a Chimera ant is, then yeah, make them evil, give them clothes, make them love games.

Yeah.

Well, and, you know, so this new ant is wearing brown vertically striped socks.

uh and sneakers and almost like bike shorts of the same uh brown vertically striped pattern.

They're wearing a blue coat with yellow pairs of buttons almost like a what's it called?

Like a frock coat?

No, not a frock.

Yeah, what's that?

It's like a double fastened.

A peacoat, maybe.

Yeah, peacoat, maybe.

They have big, wide eyes with circular pupils and rimmed with very short eyelashes.

And they have cat ears and a cat tail.

First royal guy.

And pronouns.

A cat girl.

Yeah, what pronouns is this?

Very well, Jack.

Yeah.

So,

I would say that the, I would say that

the easiest way to say is that this character is intentionally ambiguous.

Yeah.

Right.

Okay.

If you,

I can't remember the specifics of the

different ways that people talk about this character in Japanese, using Japanese pronouns.

I know that in the

English sub, they frequently refer

to this royal guard like without pronouns at all.

In the dub, they use mostly masculine pronouns.

They like,

they say, like, sir and stuff.

And that guy.

The way Nefropitu refers to themselves, and I'm, this is, again,

not a native speaker here, so I apologize if I get any of this messed up.

They use the pronoun boku, the like, uh, like, self-pronoun Boku, which is typically used by, like, young children and boys, um, which

has led to a lot of like,

is Neferpito a boy?

Is Neferpito a girl?

Blah, blah, blah.

Discourse.

I just kind of, I say, he the weird cat because I think that's kind of fun.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

In the book, The Hunter Association official issue Hunter's Guide, Nefer Pito is referred to with masculine pronouns.

All right.

But

if you can believe that.

If you look at Nefer Pito's wiki page, there is a whole section called gender ambiguity.

Yeah.

Don't look at that jack yeah don't i'm not on any wiki pages

um

which you know i bring this up not just because you know it is clear that they are playing with a kind of ambiguity on the podcast but i get the impression that this is going to be an important character and it would be good to get a sense of how we want to refer to them going forward i think the the he they cat weirdo is probably yeah probably fair do we say their name already do we just

uh we're pito this is pito bricks this is pito bricks now for people who uh not keeping up with the canon, recently on

Friends of the Table's Twitch account, which is just Friends of the Table,

we streamed a game called Dookupon Kingdom.

And I just read out someone in chat's name who was like number one Pito fan.

And then, of course, everybody thought that that was really funny.

And I don't know why

they were doing the classic...

Does he know meme again?

My face turned into Paul Dano's head.

Exactly.

And then, you know, Austin said, Pito is not the whole name.

Would you like to guess what the rest of the name is?

And I said, yes, because it's Tagashi.

it's something like Pito Bricks.

That is not their name.

Pito's full name is Nefer Pito.

I was trying to figure out if there's a pun going on here.

The closest that I can think of is this is like a Nefertiti, Queen Nefertiti reference, like an Egyptian, because it was all the cat imagery as well.

That is also something that

I've considered.

I have no idea.

But there's no clearer pun that I am

missing, I don't think.

Pito is named by the queen, which is interesting.

And And they make a big deal of like the queen named me herself.

Pito arrives and immediately upsets the hegemony of the food chain in a terrifying way.

Yeah.

Or un-upsets it in some ways.

Yes.

Ramot, who was mere seconds ago saying, I'm going to become the king, looks at him and sees a kind of like perfect golden light pouring off them.

You know,

where have we seen that before?

But also has these terrifying images of at one point,

because Peter basically says, oh, you were talking about a gift.

Tell me more.

And gently lays their hand on Ramot's head.

This is the best shot in these episodes.

Yeah, it's wonderful.

Fucking rule.

We get a wide shot of Ramot sort of like being

made to kneel by a gigantic clawed hand.

Yeah, we see the reality of their hand on his head, and then it cuts to a wider shot of like an intense nen pressure.

I mean, it's like three times bigger than him on his head.

It's crazy, it's so good.

Whenever Pito is on screen, the animation team is

much like the man in I Think You Should Leave playing the organ and like pulling out all the stops and throwing the plates on the floor and making the thing that goes wee!

They are using every method that they can to communicate menace, whether that is this awful purple wren that just pours off Peter at every opportunity.

Worse than Hisaka's, you know, when Hisaka kind of burns with the Purple Wren, we see it like rippling off him like a regular Nen aura.

With Peter, it is as though they are standing in the center of like a hurricane vortex or something.

It's circular.

It is all around them.

We are getting hyper-close-ups on their eyes.

We are getting characters sweating, shocked.

We're getting,

you know, Nen, other characters, Nen getting kind of cowed when they are in their presence.

And then at the same time, we are getting all the transformative imagery of like Goan burning with beautiful golden Nen at the same time, you know, to communicate as clearly as possible, as frankly, unsubtly as possible to the viewer.

This is a character who commands adoration and fear in equal measure.

People are acting around this character against their own interests.

It is not subtle at all, and it is an immediate barrage of of this is the most powerful, dangerous Chimera ant that we have made, and it is causing a lot of the ant

hierarchy to just snap straight back into place.

I mean, I'm on sad.

I love that they've

we've seen like episode after episode how like the ant society is like a victim of

being a society, and that the solution to this was like both instant and biological is so cool.

Yeah, it's it's it is amazing because we keep saying, you know, what bits of these people are ant, what bits of these people are human, and then as as viewers and as critics, we are constantly forced to evaluate, well, what do we actually mean when we say ant, or what do we actually mean when we say human?

Uh, and then we have a character who, at least ostensibly, is able to wield spectacular power via a sort of biological impulse.

You know, this is this is the highest ranking ranking ant.

This makes Colt look like, you know, like a foot soldier.

And then at the same time, I keep thinking about Jing.

You know, I keep thinking about the way people talk about Jing,

the way that he has a kind of magnetism that causes people to just act.

Jing can

biscuit Jing Peto?

Yeah, it might be.

Where, you know, one of the things that we saw Jing do,

a lot of it was made about it, is

he changed someone's name by Deepol.

You know, he could change, you know, if we are out here saying that something distinctive and singular about the ants is their desire for names and their desire for identification, then we also have to apply that to the way Jing is able to, or feels that he is able to, unilaterally change someone's name instantaneously.

And, you know, we have the burning in the golden light imagery.

You know, I think you're right, Keith, in the way that Pito shows up and the sort of the ant hierarchy, the biological ant hierarchy snaps right back into place.

But yet again, we are seeing, like you said, Bisky, Jing, Kite to a slightly lesser extent,

and then and then Pito here as well.

It's, it is, and it happens so fast.

Ramont says, it was a dream, a brief and foolish one at that.

They, talking about the, um, and uh, the royal guards, are on a completely they are on a whole different level, a predestined status that cannot be altered.

It's great.

Pockle looks at this from his position under the bones and has no idea what is going on.

But of course, it's short-lived.

Oh, yeah, go on.

One thing before we move on.

It's kind of implied that the ant hive mine goes so far that Pito could hear what Raymond was thinking, right?

Or am I completely off base with that?

No, I think you're right.

No, I'm right.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

I think Peter has access to all that stuff.

I'll say that.

Again, it becomes interesting given stuff that the ants learn later.

I wonder how that connection goes if Pito's able to transmit information as well, or if just able to receive from the ants below them.

Well,

all the ants can transmit psychically, right?

That's what

Flutter and Haggio have been doing.

God, the stuff that happens here.

I can't tell you how fast this has happened.

Pito arrives, and the show spends all of its energy immediately selling them to the viewer as a frightening, capable ant.

This is the ant that appears and makes you.

Terrifying.

We are done.

Have they,

I guess

this is an opinion-based thing.

Has Tagashi stacked the deck against himself or in his favor by making Pito a cat girl?

Oh, he stacked the deck in his favor.

You know, this is a...

This is an extremely compelling character design in the sense of everyone loves a cute cat girl.

And I think also, you know, we are firmly playing in the well-walked and frankly effective genre space of make someone who looks kind of weak and cute frightening.

This isn't new, and the show pulls a lot of legwork to like get that, get that set up really fast.

And then...

For all the effect that that is having on the viewer,

it has a thousand-time-fold effect on on the ants who just fall in line instantly behind Peter.

And I'm really curious to see how this is going to be problematized.

You know, we have spent a lot of time saying the ants are...

The ants, like humans, like everybody, have a tendency to start acting self-interestedly, have a tendency to start prioritizing their own goals over people's.

And something that I know Tagashi is really, really good at and loves to do over and over again is set a status quo, the ants are a hive mind, trouble it, the ants are going off piste and developing their own goals, and then seemingly bring it in line really hard before revealing that, you know,

actually something else was going on.

He is going to worm his way out of even that.

You know, I don't think this is going to be the last of internal ant bickering slash fomenting ant revolution slash working force selfish ant interests.

Sure.

But I do think that it is really interesting seeing how fast Pito was able to, you know, bring them in line.

And one of the the reasons that they bring them in line is that they are skilled in ways that the other ants are.

For example, they immediately notice Pockle hiding under the bunks.

It is a terrifying shot of

Pito.

It's one of my favorite in the anime.

Pito noticing.

Yeah.

Turning with the glowing eyes towards where Pockle has been like shaking with fear

from of

Ramote.

Shaking with fear of Ramote, basically.

You know, how did the ants learn Nen?

Like, what is happening?

How do I get out of here?

And then Pito shows up and then goes, like, why is there a live human underneath those bones?

It's great.

Because, you know, we, the viewer, they haven't said it explicitly in the show, but we, the viewer, are faced with an awful fact.

An ant has been born already knowing Nen.

You know, they kind of were doing that already.

You know, Peggy can see Nen, but Colt had to get hit by Ramot.

Ramot had to get hit by Gon.

We are in a new awful realm now that Pito has arrived, seemingly fully formed, knowing them.

So they hoik Pockle out.

And Pito says,

this is so grim.

But Pito learns from a book that memories are stored in the human brain.

And instead of beginning a standard interrogation, or even like an interrogation under torture, of

Pockle, she just opens up his brain and starts poking it with two sharp antenna from another ant, causing Hockle

to

tell her in this wonderful vocal performance, you know, this weird, dreamy, hypnotic, and at the same time kind of tortured and at the same time kind of scared, and at the same time just like, like the burden is coming off his shoulders, he's, you know, he's, he's speaking this out, just gives her, sorry, just gives them everything about Nen.

The works, the Nen wheel,

how Nen powers work.

He tells them about water divination, the the water divination ritual.

Yeah.

For how gross the brain poking is, I think it is underratedly sinister that Pito just walks up to that bug and plucks its antenna out.

Yeah, it's also really funny.

Like it's really funny.

It's really funny, yeah.

But it's also, yeah, it's it's like there's this like fun thing going on with Pito where there's always a little bit of like, oh yeah, that is kind of funny.

I like, I like the cat puns when they go Nyaruhodo or Meow I get

it.

Yeah.

I mean, I can see what they're doing, right?

Like, the cat puns absolutely are this, this genre space of, like, this character is kind of funny, but is also very sinister.

You know, he'll always say, like,

meow, I understand, like, still be said, which is, what are they translating?

Nyaruhodo?

I believe it is Nyaruhodo, yeah, which Naruhodo is.

I see, or I get it, I believe, in Japanese.

It's fine.

It's okay it doesn't super do it for me but yeah you're right that we are in this realm of like that's also just like that is how when a character in an anime has feline features they do that they make a cat pun and even when they're evil the swap that's evil is that pito is not just evil they are like astonishingly powerful yeah oh yeah that's yeah yeah

um

yeah this is we the viewer are now so

God.

I cannot believe

I want to go back and listen to the Heavens Arena arc where I am so mad about being taught Nen.

And the three of you have to be so careful because not only am I on the precipice of learning what Nen is, and you know, that just, that just, I hadn't yet really got that this show is about learning things, is about the process of learning and being taught.

And I also hadn't got that we were going to get this Nen

sequence again

in completely different contexts.

It plays off so many times in so many different ways.

And in no way, I think, better than the close-up of Ramot's hand around the water divination thing, like exactly like Gonan Killos were.

It's framed so identically.

Same with when they explain like the

like when Pito's like being like ah that means you're an enhancer it framed the way that wing explaining that stuff to um gone killua and zushi is like

yeah you know i see what you're doing i see what you're doing to gon zush where the show is functioning as a as a as a deconstruction right you know if we play the fairly standard shonen power explanation albeit you know even the first time i feel like based on what you've said part of the reason that the first nen explanation hits so hard is that he is going at it at 110 already whereas other shows would you know he has systematized it so um totally you know whereas other you know dragon ball is out here being like what do they call it your life life force your

g yeah

yeah um

but then by the time we are here you know there's a shot that i just

it it it makes me so excited about the way that you know um the way the stories work is we have this great wide shot of the ant citadel and then the dreamy

you know not even in pain just just

it's like it's being pulled out of him, but not like fingernails being pulled out, just like a thread being pulled out of a bobbin or something.

And you hear Pockle saying, you know, like, um, there are six different types of nen, you know, there are enhancers who do this, and he keeps stumbling over his words and having to start again, and you can hear the awful sound of Pito's needles.

Uh, just having a net the nen lesson played basically straight in this context, and then they do the water divination, uh, and you know, immediately they're using the language yeah we know that a ramot is an enhancer um

pitu tries it and is a specialist which of course shocker born a specialist

also hey we get to see what the specialist water divination is what does it do

it burns up it kills the leaf

yeah um cult having been walloped in the head by uh ramot uh his aura begins to burn around him as uh pockle dreamily says an individual's abilities are greatly influenced by his own idiosyncrasies.

My god.

An individual's abilities are greatly influenced by his own idiosyncrasies.

There's just so much weird multi-level play going on here as well, where like Colt is a really great example of how ants are influenced by their source's idiosyncrasies.

You know, Kurt was protective and was,

you know, steadfast and earnest for his little sister.

And then at the same time, you know, the implication is going to be that his nen is going to be influenced by his own idiosyncrasies as well.

Um,

yeah, and it's here after the after the um

water divination that Pitu says, uh, they keep calling them Commander, uh, and Pitu says, you know, no need, uh, my name is Nefa Pitu.

The name was given by the queen herself,

and then they gesture at Pockle's body and say, I don't need that anymore, feed it to the queen, and the episode ends.

It's

so good, yeah, it's

it's great.

I can, I mean,

this is the third time I've seen this, and

it's so intense how

much

everything feels totally different the second that, like, Pito drops from their weird ball of goose.

Yeah.

They drop midway through a line.

You know, you're right, it feels different, but it feels different immediately.

It's different immediately.

Yeah.

It really is very like, oh, hey, why'd, why'd the mute?

That sounds like a boss theme.

Why'd the music change?

Oh, geez.

I can't exit the area.

Oh, no.

By the way, when uh, when Pito is reading through the medical textbooks to learn how to poke someone's brain to make them divulge their secrets, yeah, uh, it's the second instance of Kingdom of Predators, the song that plays uh during um

uh gyro the gyro backstory.

That's a this one.

This one we don't have a Pito

Q yet, do we?

No.

No.

I don't think so.

It's interesting that, you know, in the last

that we heard that during the gyro backstory, and you know, I had been saying, is, are we going to see a gyro ant in the same way that we saw a Kurt ant?

And it could be that Pito is a gyro ant.

I, let's see.

The image that I associate most with gyro

was the

round, the bald head and the perfect round pupil.

And Pito definitely has a round, very distinctive round pupil.

For a cat girl, you know, I was expecting like a slip pupil, but there's his rounds.

That could be a gyro nod.

I don't see a ton of gyro yet, although we didn't get, you know, we got the world's weirdest, shortest backstory for gyro.

Yeah.

The jury is still out on whether we've got ourselves a gyro ant yet.

But yeah, great episode, and it's only going to get weirder.

Could we take five minutes?

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

Sylvie, did Jigsaw, was he a serial killer when he was a kid?

Like when he was a young man?

Or was it only when he got ill that he was a kid?

He was when he was learning either about, I think he was learning about when his nephew died here.

Oh, sure.

Is that what

he turned into a serial killer?

That's part of his origin story.

It's that, and then when he gets terminal cancer and it has to deal with the health insurance industry.

I mean, fair.

Yeah, that's when I

Yeah, that's when I

nobody talk about serial, how, whether or not you're doing serial killers

on recordings.

Wait, sorry.

Sorry.

I just got really inspired by jigsaw.

I hate when people are like jigsaws.

I can fix this.

I'll put this.

I'll put the

there.

We go.

I'll flip over.

Oh, I've been hanging out with the wrong people for too long because I thought you said, Keith, that you can fix him as a jigsaw.

No, I've never said a meme in my life.

You know, I would believe that.

I would say

it's not true.

It's not true, but I don't say I almost never do memes.

Yeah,

I don't believe it just because of the like the odds, you know, like the statistical probability, but like

if I was to believe in someone not doing it, Keith would be very high up that list.

Sure.

I have a huge, I have a meme resentment.

I have a huge chip on my shoulder about memes.

I think that probably has a healthy attitude towards it.

I think the rest of us are the ones who are wrong.

I agree.

Okay.

Anyway, you remember that meme where the guy's about to punch something and then his girlfriend stops him?

Still, never even heard of this.

During the break, I had to do some

research

because I

realized that we sort of of do have a Pito theme song.

Oh.

And so I put it on the board.

It's actually a song that's played already and was taken off the board.

And at the time, I was like, this is going to show up and be an important song in the next season.

And that's sort of why I forgot about it.

Are we back?

We're back.

Yeah.

Oh, we're so fucking back.

We're so back.

There we go.

I did a meme for you.

That's, of course, how you signal having done a meme.

You say, with a sort of tone of resentment in your voice, there you go.

I did a meme for you.

Here's your fucking slop.

Can you play

this theme?

I can, but it's going to come up if we want to play it when it comes up.

Oh, yeah.

Let's play it when it comes up.

85 begins with a wide shot of the ant citadel, which has got cool new spires on the top.

This thing is still growing.

Yeah.

In the whole class of ant that we like basically never see whose job is to like

barf out castle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're pooping it.

They're pooping it.

I was going to, actually, that was my first thought: are they barfing or pooping it?

But I decided not to ask that question, but thank you, Sylvie.

No, I'm going to be a stiggler about this because we've talked about it.

They live in a house made of poop.

Yeah.

They live in a house.

Don't think again, Sylvie is the poop stiggler.

Yes.

What they called me in high school.

Yeah.

Inside.

I watched you change in the house of the poop ants.

Yeah.

I don't know what that is.

That's a death zone.

That's a deaf sound song.

Baffled by deaf tones.

Don't worry, as long as we've got a new metal band referenced every week, my, my

quotas hit.

The quotas hit, yeah.

I don't have to do the 96 Quite Bitter Beings riff right now.

Ramote is holding what is called a confirmance ceremony.

I knew what this was going to be as soon as it was named the Conferment Ceremony, and I was right.

Ramote is punching all the parties to give them.

It's It's a punch party, classic punch party.

Oh, that's so good.

It's great the way that the ants.

The ants, like the ants are approaching everything, have sort of got a really wide palette of how you can learn about nen.

You can be like Peggy, who sits down and figures it out and kind of talks it through.

You can be, oh, and has some sort of innate nen ability, you know, can see the auras like Pike can as well.

You have ants like Ramot, who have their nen paws blasted open in a fight, almost like a nen initiate.

You have ants like Pito who arrive fully formed, you know,

a nen expert right off the bat.

You have people like Colt are like seeing evidence of Nen and sort of working out what's going on like in real time.

Yeah.

And I love the way that this confirmance ceremony sort of

blends between uh what Wing did to Gonan Killua and also what was done to the nen initiates in

the Hunter we have.

It's not quite as violent because they are showing up and kind of asking for it to happen deliberately rather than it just happened.

They had their first communion.

But it hasn't occurred to them to be gentle, to like do like Wing did and instead of punching them, just like send out a pulse of Nen.

Well, and I think they don't...

In their defense, they don't know that, right?

They're just working under the theory that like, well, Ramot got this when he got beat the fuck up.

And that's so cool.

Paco might have given them the information.

They're this food chain chain they're operating under the hegemony of

they are from now on just using nen language and it's fucking scary to hear the ants in the same way that the uh yeah that it was really scary to hear the ants uh talking about you know uh how names work and you know it was a delight to see that the ants just immediately start hanging out you could tell that they were like trying to play off this sort of thing of like wow the ants are getting more and more human it turns out it is just as unsettling to hear the ants be like all right you're an enhancer or like we can get this nen thing out here.

Yeah, they've adopted the jargon immediately.

They no longer, they're not, they don't come up with their own names for anything.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's, it's so cool.

A little bit later, uh, we'll probably talk about this more when it happens.

Um, Natero talks about the risk of sending hunters into the NGL because he's afraid of assimilation, you know, that the ants will just start

will just start getting hunter traits.

A, a little too late for that.

And B, it's really fun seeing the opposite of that as ant language starts falling out out of use and human terms for, you know,

for this power starts coming in.

Of course, at this point, a younger, more callo me might say some kind of tripe about demon world.

You know, and in the past.

But we're in the dick.

I've put such childish things in the past as we need to focus on ant hell that we have gotten ourselves out.

Yeah, the demon.

We've created a demon world here on Earth.

The very thought that there could be something going on other than ants is crazy to me.

And I don't mean this in the sense that the chimera and arc is like the only important bit of the show or it's the only bit that should be taken as canon.

I mean it in the sense of plot, where it's like we are having so much ant shit thrown at us so regularly that it feels wild to me to imagine that we were playing a video on game.

More ant shit thrown at us than the Queen's Tower.

Then the Queen's Tower is made away.

And we all clink our glasses together.

Peto, who is sometimes giving me Killiwa vibes in the sense that they are just like a little shit,

watches the confirmance ceremony going on and is like, wow, it would suck to have to learn things and not just be really good at them right off the bat.

Yeah.

And this kind of like little aside of

vindicating your own power feels very Killiwa to me.

But it's interesting that, you know, the ants talk so much about how they're

something that they are figuring out is extremely powerful for them is their ability to learn, is their ability to sort of synthesize ideas.

And to have Peter kind of repudiate that by saying, like, wow, it looks painful and time-consuming to have to learn this shit the hard way rather than just know it.

Must be tough to be ordinary.

Yeah, yeah.

Uh, can I take a quick uh detour to club before I close this webpage, an anagram maker of Greed Island, where I've replaced the D with the W for Dune.

Yeah.

I did this earlier when we were talking about Jing changing Dune's name.

I was like, I wonder if there was anything good in there.

Yeah, what could it have been called?

It could have been called Regaled Winds.

Okay.

It could have been called

Reading Slew.

It could have been called Girls Weaned.

It could have been called

eel drawings.

It could have been called eel drawings.

They should have.

It could have been called leering wads.

No,

absolutely not.

Jesus Christ.

Absolutely not.

That's so fucking funny.

It could have been called Grind Weasel.

Yes.

So back in the grind weasel arc.

And then finally, it could have been called Law Redesign.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Eagle droids, awesome.

Eagle droids.

Imagine List being like the reveal that it was the big twist reveal that it was a big acronym and the viewer being like, yeah, really?

You think?

Oh.

I could have seen that coming already.

Okay.

This confirmment ceremony, this giving the ants nen, could conceivably be a way for Cult, were he still running this ship, to get the ants in line.

You know, I could see this as being a way to.

And we sort of saw an attempt, a kind of successful attempt at first by Colt to do this with, like, yeah, we can have competition because it will let me like incentivize you to hunt well.

Yeah.

And sort of, sort of fell apart a bit.

But I could see them saying,

we can get renegade ants in line by giving them this power.

Now, of course, that could backfire really badly.

You're just arming your opponents.

No.

They do say that.

I can't remember who's giving this speech, but someone does says, in exchange for a little pain

and for obeying the queen, you can get a bunch of power.

Yeah, but I think the fact that Peter has shown up has, you know,

I don't know yet how much

the ant bickering has completely fallen apart.

I want to see Hagia's feelings about Peter, you know?

Yeah, and I'm sure I will.

But yes, my first thought was like, oh, this is a really effective control mechanism, but how much of a control mechanism do you need when you have Pito?

And there's two more Pitos coming.

It's fucking terrifying, Keith.

I kept meaning to say that, but forgot.

There are...

Is it two or is it three?

There's two.

There's three total.

So two more coming, not even counting the king.

Yeah, there's three if you count the king.

Oh, here is where we get.

This is how we get

ant bickering back on the table.

which is that the royal guards are going to have different ideas.

And then we're going to get three ant armies, basically each of which is well no because they report to the king and civil war sure and then we get the artist civil war if if pito is able to have an effect on anybody lower on the ant pyramid what is the king going to be able to do this is really part of why pito is so scary um and it's such a good move to make them so frightening because the the implication constantly is who is pito's boss Let me, let's imagine, let's imagine, so you're going to say, you're claim, or did you go back on this, that they're going to, the ant, the ant disagreements are going to be displaced from the squad leaders onto the royal guards.

Yeah, that's my theory, but if the royal guards are all reporting to the king, I'm not sure how that's going to be.

Squad leaders are reporting to the queen, and they bickered.

But the queen's no Never Peto.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think that the queen.

Yeah, I'm not sure.

I don't actually know what's going to happen because we know that this kind of move is going to take place.

I think we said that, right?

That the king takes on control of the royal guards, and then everything from squad leaders down kind of falls back to the queen again.

What's an example

of

an intra-royal guard disagreement that you could think of?

It could be about, it could be something as consequential as like interpreting the king's orders.

You know, the king wants to do X, and he has given the Royal Guards a degree of latitude in how to do this.

And then the royal guards have disagreements about that in much the same way that the queen gave the order to go get bodies.

And then it actually became about, like, well, do we actually want to eat some of them?

Or do we want to eat all of them?

Or do we want to give them over?

It's also Tagashi, so it could just as easily be something extremely small and petty that gets blown out to such wild proportions.

You know, it could be a disagreement about like

housing conditions, you know, or like

how the zoning laws.

Yeah, exactly.

Or like how the squads are organized or what they get to call each other or something like that.

I think that ant bickering has demonstrated itself to be really

responsive to being on a big or on a small scale.

But I think

I feel like that's the move, right?

The first twist is like, oh, all the,

you know,

inter-ant war falls by the wayside as soon as Pito shows up, and Pito gets to be the sort of king of the roost in lieu of the king.

And then another royal guard arrives and has different opinions about how that works.

I don't, I don't know.

A lot of this is going to depend on the king, depend on what the king is like, depends on whether or not Tagashi has plans for the king

beyond just making them the head of the chimera ants.

You know,

does the king get deposed by somebody really quickly?

You know,

does Pitu make a grab for power

when there's somebody above them?

I don't know.

I'm missing some of the picture.

And I had previously thought that the picture was going to snap into place when the king showed up, but then the king's frightening second-in-command showed up, and that also complicated things.

There is a lot of Gonenkilliua work being done in these episodes up to this point about how strong Kite is.

Kite is

so much stronger than Gonen Kiliwa.

And they talk about his

N.

That's the property that allows him, like Kotopi and Nobunaga can, to kind of like sense things from a distance.

They notice that Nen Masters can keep N out for like 50 meters, a radius of 50 meters around them.

And

Kite has been doing it for 45 for like

days and nights.

So they're like, you know, we spend a lot of time looking at Kite going, he is extremely powerful.

I was being led into a trap here a really obvious trap um which is you know the the way you make somebody scary is you set someone up as really really powerful and then you have them be defeated in a fight by someone more powerful than them it's kind of like a classic it's a tale as old as time but i was so lost seeing the wood for the trees that i thought that they were saying kite is is so extremely powerful as a way into talking about Gonan Kiliua's anxiety or their chip on their shoulder about about not being treated as children, you know, about how Jing's

sort of like chain of authorship has led Gonan Killiua to more and more powerful Nen masters.

I don't think any of that's untrue.

I think that's what's happening.

But it meant that I didn't see the pit until

I was falling into it.

This scene of them in the forest is kind of sad, I think, thinking about the

Nen teachers that they've had and Killowa saying.

saying, uh, we always meet people when we need them the most.

It's them, all these people we've met, they've made us stronger.

And on the one hand, it's like coming from Kilua, that is like, that's like such a like

an intact emotional statement from someone who's not usually like that, that it's like, wow, that's real progress coming from Kiloa, except for that, the thing that he's doing is

sort of mistaking this journey they've been on for a positive thing.

Yeah.

There is also like a line to be drawn with the way Chimera ants are, right?

Here, with the like, we needed to go through all these people to be like, it's similar to how Austin talked about the way Jing treats people

back when we had him on.

And it's like, I don't know.

I think that it's just like worth pointing out whenever they continue to

like

keep our protagonists and our chimera ant agonists.

Parallel.

Chimera antagonists.

Yeah, I'm going to go leave now.

I'm done for the rest of the episode.

I had a really great bug in my note-taking software earlier today where I typed Chimera Ant spelled correctly, C-H-I-M-E-R-A space A-N-T, and it said wrong.

Those are two real words.

Those are real.

Those are...

I feel like a trick is being played on me here.

Those are real words.

It's like it can tell it's from an anime, and so it says, no, this isn't a real word, forgetting that they actually are both real words.

Yeah.

I don't know what's happened.

But they sort of go back into this thing they've talked about a couple of times, about like

Jake must have done this on purpose, must have guided Goan to Greed Island and then to Kite.

And then Kite interrupts them.

It is one of two really long quotes I have for today, if you'll indulge me in this.

Yeah, of course.

I agree.

Like you mentioned, Jink probably had certain expectations when he sent you here to meet with me.

That being said, I have no intention of training the two of you during this journey.

We just don't have that kind of time.

I only brought you along because I thought you might be useful.

From here on, it all comes down to your resolve.

If you're strong, you'll develop your nen and improve through combat.

If it's weak, the ants will eat you and you will die.

But that's not a luxury we can afford.

We're professional hunters after all, and as you're aware, those who call themselves hunters must get their prey.

For those of our profession, that's the first commandment.

And we stay on the hunt no matter what.

A hunt involves both the hunter and the hunted.

It's a battle of resolve.

Emerging victorious from a battle of resolve is what makes a hunt successful.

The loser must follow the winner's rules and customs.

And this often means the loser's death.

If that result isn't desirable, then win.

I'm ringing the hunter bell.

I'm ringing the hunter bell, except I'm not ringing it positively.

I don't think he knows what a hunter is.

I mean, if

if this is what Kite,

you know, a full hunter believes being a hunter is, what, it's the first commandment.

For those in our profession, a hunt is a battle of resolve between the hunter and hunted.

This is very vague for something that has a full-scale hunter organization that is employed by the UN.

You know,

if Kite doesn't know what a hunter is, if those are the terms that Kite is able to talk about what a hunter is, fucking nobody can.

I'll say this, in Kite's defense, there is text on the screen when he says this that goes first commandment it says it's right there look it's uh the

this is clearly written down somewhere and he's repeating it yeah well when this first appeared i was like oh shit we're gonna get like a hunter a list of hunter commandments nope we get the first and that's and that's it that's about it yeah that's it yeah

I think that, you know, the loser must follow the winner's rules and customs, which often results in his death, is really interesting,

especially given the ways that we have seen

not just the

chimera ants do things like, I'm going to make you a human dog, or I'm going to feed you to the queen, but also the way we've seen humans say things like, we have to eliminate them all humanely.

There's a real sort of

nihilistic

sort of blunt expression of power going on here that's always so interesting for me to see in the Shounen context, right?

Where it's like there's a real might makes right vibe going on here, right, not necessarily morally right, but right in the sense of like right in the world, you know,

the loser, it's a battle of resolve.

Your resolve is tested.

The loser must follow the winner's rules and customs, which often results in his death.

There's a real like

Blood Meridian, War was always here, it was before you and it will be after you thing going on here in terms of like submitting yourself to another entity's

way the world works.

And I don't know if this is true.

True.

So it's coming from a character

of the world.

Of the world, of our world or their world.

Of their world.

I know it's not true in our world.

But, you know, this is a character saying this, right?

Rather than a rather than a narrator.

And of course, you know, if the narrator were saying it, it's not like I would be more likely to believe it.

But we've seen several several times characters in this show believe things that are just wrong.

And I think it's really interesting that in this moment, Kite dials into the purpose of a hunter is to enter into battles of resolve between you and your prey.

Someone is going to come out of that winning, and when they win, the loser will be subject to their rules.

It's really it's really interesting.

It's very hard-nosed.

It feels like one of those things that's true by default.

If you've if you've lost, then the winner does what they do.

Like, I think it's really, it's kind of fanciful to call it rules and customs.

And it's really just like the result of losing.

If someone wants to kill you and you've lost a fight with them, then they'll just kill you.

It's, I would not call that following their rules and customs.

Like how Gone followed his rules when he killed the Armadillo.

Right, but the fact that they are describing it as rules and customs is telling, right?

He's not presenting it as like,

I mean,

he's threading a really odd needle, right?

Where he's presenting it both as an objective fact about how hunting works in the world.

And also, he's using the language of rules and customs,

rather than, as you say, Keith, you know, just being subject to someone's will or to, you know.

Right.

And then Gohn sort of kind of compounds this and is like, kind of excitedly, oh, I figured it out.

This is why you hit me when I was a kid.

That was the, like, he went into the fox bear

nest, and we get to flash back again to kite, like, hitting him and yelling at him and explaining about the fox bears.

And Ghon's like, that was the rule of the forest.

Like, he's cracked some sort of code for why he got hit when he was a kid.

And this is very sad.

It's really sad.

Yeah, this is presented so sort of thinly and sadly that I...

This is what I mean, right, when I say, like, nobody really knows.

Kilua looks sad about it, too.

Killua did not look like.

Oh, yeah,

I think the show knows it's doing this.

But I think, you know, what we are seeing is

someone saying this is the truth of the world, outputting ideology as hard as possible, and another character saying, Yes, I understand, and describing their own, you know, slightly different ideology.

But then the flip side of this is like, this is a moment of bonding for Gonan and Kite.

Kite's like, hell yeah, kid, you got it.

That's right.

By the way, I have your dad's hunter's license.

You should take it.

This is crazy.

Oh, why?

Why?

Why?

Well, so so jing gave kite his hunter's license and you know in a again where have we seen this before i'm looking at hisaker and the badge once you've found literally hisuga in the badge yep give me this license back well it's not quite i mean it's it's literally in the setup it's great because goan says he didn't take it back and kite says actually i'd forgotten i had it yeah there was something about the hunt for Jing that was so compelling or was so total that even the, you know.

I also think the implication is that it took years, it took years, so you forgot.

Although,

go ahead, Sully.

I think the way Jack talks about it, though, lines up with Greed Island as a thing, though, right?

Where the point is the experience of it versus the actual completion of it, yeah, sure, yeah.

Um, yeah,

I just think that's another, like

that's a thing with Jing, right?

Um,

is the like

don't ever have a destination, just keep doing the the journey.

Yeah, and that the like fall the the fun of exploration and discovery and all that is the reward in itself.

Like that's why he's off doing his thing.

That's why he's off to get those cigarettes.

You don't discover the gold mines of Cordo Blada or whatever to then be, to then like live there and hang out by the gold mines.

You just go on to the next thing.

Yeah.

I mean, I was also going to say it, it very much, like, we've been told many times how valuable a hunter's license is.

Yeah.

And it holds no value for Gene whatsoever.

Yeah.

Oh, that's also what

Satot said.

Or maybe it wasn't Sato's, maybe it was beans.

Beans was like, oh, remember beans?

Yeah, remember beans?

Remember when beans was the weirdest guy?

Green, green, jelly bean, man.

Yeah.

My brain is now so completely mangled that I think back to beans in my head and I'm like, different show.

Looks like a chimera ant.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, not beans.

I've been here the whole time.

The queen ate a bean and had came green, green, green, jelly bean.

No, no, the chimera ant bean.

I'm going to give birth to the chimera ant thing.

During the like, to the little hunter's license lesson, that I think it was beans it was giving was like,

this is the most valuable thing that a hunter owns.

And to most, it's just a piece of paper.

That's, I think, is that what we were talking about?

Yeah, it's like a piece of cardboard or something.

Yeah.

Basically what you saw.

Yeah.

And so a real he doesn't need it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that Goan forgot his life.

Oh, actually, as we see this, this, so Kite hands the license to Goan with the sort of like, you find him, you give it back.

There's two things I want to talk about here.

The first is, I do just want to see if I can remember, or can someone tell me, how did the handover of Hisoka's badge happen?

How did that plotline get resolved?

It was during their Heaven's Arena fight.

Yeah.

After Gon punches him, the fight just sort of takes a break for a second where Gon walks over and hands it to him.

And then he just poofs it away.

Yeah.

The second thing is, as soon as Kite gave

Goan his badge, I was like, oh, he's doomed.

Right?

This is like a classic.

They're laughing and you, the viewer who have not been watching along, will understand why in a second.

This is a classic thing, right?

It's like, pass the torch of one quest from the older to the to the younger.

You know, I never gave it back to him.

I'm going to give it to you.

You give it to him.

You know, what this says isn't Kite is about to die right now, but what it says is Kite isn't going to be able to complete this journey.

Because, you know,

when you're writing that kind of a sequence and you're seeing the end of it playing out in front of you.

You go, well, we're doing this sort of in a memorial for Kite.

You know, Kite always wanted, or you know, I get to hand this over to you.

So I wrote that in my notes.

Why would it happen now and not after they've left the NGL?

Yeah, because I was like, oh, this is sad.

You know, Kite's gonna go, but Kite's gonna do this Chimera ant thing.

And then,

so then I thought to myself,

God, what if Takashi just kills Kite?

Just kills him, like

just head off, rips the rug out for head off, just rips the rug out from under us.

What if

the status quo change of Pito's arrival is is executed by Pito effortlessly killing Kite, and that happens immediately.

I was like, it was one of those shots where I called the shot one second before the wheels started turning.

And so it doesn't feel like a true triumph, but I was like, oh my god.

And then it happened.

At this point, they basically cut back to the punch party, and Pitu's like ears kind of flick.

And they go,

I've got to go test how strong I am.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Pito clinging, clinging onto the side of the

ant citadel.

You know, just like a tiny thing.

We get these, oh, these like nauseous, awful zooms into their face or like out of their face.

So are you talking about after the jump?

Yes, but like

Kite senses what he calls a monster as Pito's nen sort of becomes apparent on the outside of the citadel and he tells Gonan Killiua to run.

Yeah, and then what happens?

We get that shot of Pito up on.

First of all, I have to say,

they're like miles away from the, like, two miles, maybe five miles away from the thing.

The fact that Pito is able to sense Kite, Gon and Kiliwa is.

And then Kite senses Pito.

Although, I have to imagine that Pito's energy is like a nuclear bomb, you know?

Yes, yeah.

And then it's like, it has swelled up upon, you know,

about to be doing, like, we see them like latched onto the tower,

leaps this mile-wide sort of plane in one big jump.

And we get this awful hyper-close-up of

them zooming into the camera.

I had to freeze frame and like do like the next frame on

my media player to get this.

This face is only over three frames.

That's all that we get of this, but it's it's still like startling yeah it's crazy works so well it works so well

yeah because three frames is very visible it's just quick it's just very yeah it's quick we get like

three more frames or six more frames of of this face but further away but not as distorted um

but yeah

uh when we say that um Piso is a cat girl, we're not just talking about cat ears and tail.

They also have like a kitty cat killua mouth at all times.

Yeah.

But not cat eyes.

Does Kilua have like slit pupils all the time?

Sometimes, but I don't know.

Yeah, not all the time.

All the time.

I also really like how the jump here, like when they do the really tight zoom on Pito's freaky thighs.

Yeah.

It like highlights the more insectoid part of

the build.

Yeah, their legs are really carapace-y.

Like,

this cat got some bug in there.

There's still bug

in there, I'm saying latent

traits and stuff.

Before Peto

lands, they have cut off Kite's arm.

It's fucking great.

It is so cool.

It's great.

I couldn't stop taking screenshots of this scene.

This is shot...

You're usually so reserved.

This is shot like the xenomorph arriving to kill you, not like a shonen fight.

You know, we don't...

You could telegraph so well, like Peter winding up to shoot the, to slice off the arm, landing, slicing off the arm, Kite's reaction.

I can't tell you how fast this happens.

They jump, they land, there's like a red flash, and Kite's arm goes flying.

This is also just an evocation of the ant arm that kicked this all off.

We see Kite's arm like flopping on the ground.

All the kite poses are incredible.

He kind of staggers backwards, but is still sort of upright

and

clutching at where his arm used to be.

He summons Crazy Slots, who says, you're in for it now.

Talking to the viewer.

Yeah, Pito notices that Kite can, quote, do this stuff too.

They say, you can do this stuff too.

Seeing...

Kite's arm go flying, Goan immediately starts charging

rock, Goan's rock, burning with that gold Nen when he gets particularly agitated.

And how does Kiliwa respond to this?

Ponk knocks him the fuck out.

Double axe handle.

So hard.

Goan is unconscious for days.

Yeah, he's unconscious for days.

He didn't have time to hold back.

Yeah.

Goan, who, who, without knowing Nen, was up in

less than a day after being tortured for five hours by Hanzo.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

If Gon didn't know none, he'd be dead right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's, it's amazing.

Killiua hoists him on his back and runs.

Accidentally kills Gone here.

That would be amazing.

That would be like such an ambitious, weird move.

And then Kite wins his fight against Peter.

They're like, oh,

the changing of the status quo thing is that is not what you think it's going to be.

You know, Pitu beats Kite.

It's that Killiua accidentally

gone.

Yeah, so at this point, I was like, oh, Kite is dead.

Because Kite rolls for Crazy Slots and gets an awful little scepter.

We don't see what this thing does, and it doesn't matter because we cut hard from this fight to Goan and Killiua.

Killua with Goan

evacuating.

And Killiua is completely coming apart mentally as they run.

He talks about how complacent that they were.

He says,

we were both worth less than a one-armed kite.

Talking about Kite telling them to run.

That was his assessment.

And I think, you know, Killiua has gotten that wrong.

It was the opposite assessment.

You know, Kite assessed them as being so valuable for the fight that to stay, you know, Killiwa is thinking in the short term of like,

you know, if Kite told us to run because we were worth less than him, and he is neglecting, I think, in his fair anxiety, the long-term thing of like,

we, Kite knows that we are the ones who are going to sort this thing out, so he is telling us to get out of here.

So, I have a couple songs to play during this part,

and uh, I think one of them is so good that we should play a couple parts from it, even.

Yeah.

Before we took a five-minute break earlier, Jackie, you asked if Pito had a theme song, and or if we had a theme song for Pito yet, and we all said no, and then I was thinking about it.

And then, actually, a song that

we are introduced to towards the end of Greed Island during the Genthru fight called The Puppeteer

is actually very much a Pito song.

It's not exclusively a Pito song, although that's really the style of the soundtrack: to not give anyone a song that only happens for them except Hisuka.

But this song called The Puppeteer.

The sudden drop.

So this is what plays during the leap and during the like

the freak out of Kite trying to get them to run away.

Yeah.

and it builds in tension for

two full minutes.

This is a really long song, this is uncharacteristically long for the soundtrack.

Uh, I just want to play a little bit of the later stuff because it's so different.

Very interesting theme song for Pito, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah, really melancholy.

Yeah.

I guess cheating with what they bring with them, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's not purely melancholy either.

No.

No, there's a sort of like hopeful, weird sort of like, um, like dawning hopefulness to it.

It's odd.

Very excited to see how this is going to get used.

And then in the second half of this, when Kilo was running away with Goan,

we get another song.

This song, this is like one of the two big times that it's played, and then it's only played a couple other times, but it's a very notable

entry, I think, that a lot of people like this one.

It's called,

to give a Marionette Life is what it's called.

This is what plays when Killo is giving his sad speech about uh, oh, uh, we were too complacent and overconfident.

We were both worth less than a one-armed kite.

That was his assessment.

That was the reality.

If Kite had been alone, this probably wouldn't have happened.

Damn it, we were fools.

This little guitar.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's really good.

It's really good.

Why does Killua believe that this wouldn't have happened if Kite was alone?

My read on that has to do with Kite's like, if you can't keep up, I won't hesitate to leave you behind stuff.

But then in this instance, I wouldn't consider this kite leaving them behind.

There is stepping in to save them is a form of like

make taking care of them before taking care of the mission that he promised he wouldn't do initially.

Yes, I totally agree with that.

But I do think that the other part of it, there is some truth that like his arm gets

torn off.

His arm gets torn off while he's begging them to run.

And it's like,

literally, he has his arm stretched out being like, go, go.

And like, that's the arm that gets torn off.

So there is a sense of like, he was paying attention to them instead of paying attention to Pito.

Oh, for sure.

I think it's both.

I think I have to think of both.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm also just going to say Kilua's a traumatized child who grew up in a family that like told him he was worth not much.

The child assassin Kilua Zuldek.

Yeah.

I think you're right.

That's my read.

My note that I wrote here was, quote, this wouldn't have happened to Kite if he was alone, end quote.

Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark.

I think that along with Killiwa's misread of like, we were both worth worth less than the one I'm Kite, this was his assessment.

It's, it's probably also a misread here.

I was expecting them to like run into the forest, but Killiua, if Killiua has one good instinct, at least at this point, it's to know when to get out of a fight.

And he has a full evacuation out across the border through the

embassy gate.

The shift in the status quo is now so complete that the

first push of the ant operation has failed.

Kite is presumably dead.

There's a royal commander.

What are they called?

Royal Guard?

Royal Guard.

You know, out and about.

They have to get out of here.

He telephones Spin on his little bug phone.

The bug phones are back.

Bug phones are back, yeah.

We left that question unanswered when you asked it in York New City.

In a show

that was less

broad in terms of what it puts on screen, I'd be like, ah, the bug phones, clever foreshadowing of the Chimera ants.

Except Tagashi and Ko just draw such bullshit constantly that they did bug phones there because they were excited about bugs.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, I think Tagashi's also said, like, he...

He has things in mind, but he doesn't plan as far ahead as people think he does.

I mean, I disagree.

I think he has...

I think maybe people might be like, did you plan Peter showing up when you were doing Greed Island?

Of course not.

But like thematic stuff he has had in mind from the beginning.

From the beginning.

This is a show about like

family and learning and you know maybe during maybe it was during the

Q ⁇ A episode, but it was definitely somewhere around there that we did talk a lot about like

how much

does or doesn't Tagashi plan things out.

And we didn't have any real answers except for listing things that seem awfully like they were planned out,

which, if they weren't, is, I think, you know, a hallmark of someone who really knows what they're doing as they are working through a story.

Because, again, sort of like the teacher stuff, like that is something that can just emerge naturally over time.

I think that, you know, doing Friends of the Table, we know how it's really easy, not really easy, but it does happen in the moment where you're like, oh, this is something that's happening now that connects back to something I did.

And then you just do four of those storytelling right yeah yeah you do four of those and then all of a sudden it's a theme where it's like i just did this yeah i did bad teacher i don't do bad teacher again

yeah i mean i think to give ourselves some some credit um

there is a skill to painting the target around the arrow well

and i think that you know where tagashi

you know any fool can paint the target around the arrow with uh you know a very broad paintbrush But I think something that Tagashi is really is really good at, and something that I think we have gotten a lot of practice at doing of like semi-improvised serial storytelling over years is like figuring out which things you begin to pull on, being able to draw sort of abstract connections between one thread and another that don't immediately seem useful, but you can start working at later.

And a lot of it, and you've heard it over and over on friends at the table.

We discard, you know, we go actually I thought that was going to do something and it didn't.

But just as many times, hopefully, we go all right, hang on.

I can link together A and F to

make something else.

Oh, God.

So Killua calls Spin, who is initially furious that they abandoned Kite.

But I think something in Killiua's tone is like, this is how it had to go.

You know,

otherwise you wouldn't have heard from any of us.

The whole thing would have been a complete failure.

It's worth saying,

there is a real...

every team is now falling apart.

You know, we last saw Pockle saying, take it away.

You can feed it to the queen.

I'm done with it.

Kite has been abandoned fighting Pito.

It's probably not going to go well for him.

At this point, I think to myself, you know, we're going to get some sort of like

either Kite is going to be a prisoner and they're going to do an awful nan extraction type thing on Kite, or we're going to learn much later that he died.

But Spinner shows up because she and the team are bringing in the first group of the extermination team.

Member number one, Chairman Notero, has arrived himself.

Big guns.

Big guns.

And big

man.

Because next to Notero is a man called Mr.

Morrill, who has, you know, you described it in the recap as something.

He's holding like a huge club.

They call it a club or something.

It's gigantic.

He is wearing dark glasses.

He's an older man with like a shock of white hair.

And he is also joined by a man called Nove,

who I wrote down here.

Who I thought was Krolo.

Who I thought was Krollo.

So funny.

I saw a man in a suit.

And Crow doesn't wear a suit very often, but I saw a dark man in the middle of the city.

Nov is very patronizing.

We'll get into these men later, but this is the first thing in the team.

It's going to come up later, some Goan and Kilua stuff.

So I just want to make note of the Goan carrying, or say, Kilua carrying Goan out of the NGL and like laying him down under a tree, and then literally giving him the shirt off his back as a blanket, both as a sort of literal expression of like friendship and also a metaphor for their friendship.

Um,

uh, there's a lot of second cap you posted here

is so I'm about to kiss Sleeping Beauty.

Oh, wow, it super is.

It It literally is.

Holy fuck.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, this is not, this is the, like, they're, they're being so not subtle with Kilua and his feelings about going in these episodes that it's in this episode specifically, it's like,

you know, there was a moment,

there was a moment in Greed Island where it was like, oh, they've really like let the foot off the gas for this sort of thing.

And this is like a whole other letting the foot off the

some other gas.

Yeah.

To spell it out,

Killua has Gone's boyfriend.

Right.

We keep saying

he's in love with Gone.

I don't know if he's his boyfriend, but he's in love with them.

This is my position from a hundred episodes ago or whatever.

Yes, it was.

And I fully conform to your way of thinking.

In the

final lines of this episode, apologies.

No, no, no.

It's all good.

Killua immediately sort of spells out what I mentioned earlier, that Pito's aura was more malevolent than Ilumi's or Hisuka's, and he is worried that

he has this great line where he's like, When I last saw Notera, I didn't really know Nen.

Now I do.

I can see how, you know, spectacularly powerful you are, but I think that even you

couldn't take him, describing Pito.

Um,

oh, God, it's it's

uh are you talking about this thing from Moral?

Yeah, well, there's, there's two things that happen.

Yeah, the first is that,

Mr.

Morrell says, you got to say, I just

to be.

Morrell has a last name.

Nove is being weird calling him Mr.

Morrell.

Oh, really?

That's classic Nove based on what I've seen.

Okay.

Morrell says,

you got burned real bad because you thought this was going to be a game.

And, you know.

You know, I call them and I see them, and I've been calling them

game stuff.

Horns.

He's doing a lot of game stuff.

Yeah.

And not just doing a lot of game stuff it's like the the thing that moral is saying in this moment is like

you were beaten because you as a kid thought all this stuff was a game yeah you know we are as viewers being asked to reckon with like how much of the hunter game thinking is actually uh doing them a disservice of course we can tell we know what happened so we know that that uh marl is just being patronizing well there i i think that one of the things that i love about

this set of episodes and how it leads to this moment at the end is that there's a lot of things about Gonan Kilowa that we've sort of talked about as negatives, how they've been sort of led to this place to undervaluing their own safety, to overvaluing getting stronger really fast, like as part of this sort of abstract or semi-abstract journey that they're on.

And

I think that a lot of this stuff that feels unfair in these episodes, stuff from stuff from Kite, stuff from Moral and Nove, it like feels cruel because they're children and it is, but also is like true.

They weren't taking the threat of the Chimera ant seriously enough.

They have been taught not to.

It's not their fault, which Nove sort of condescendingly implies.

But like,

you know, these are two assholes kind of saying to their face what we've kind of been saying behind their back on the podcast.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

And in that way, it is kind of a repudiation of Hunter game logic.

Yeah.

I love that.

Sorry, Sylvie.

Well,

I mean, maybe we can.

I meant to bring this up a little earlier when you talked about how Killowa's

one of Killua's good talent is knowing when to get out of there.

And this is,

I think it's worth mentioning how that evokes Ilumi's don't fight an opponent, can't defeat thing from the hunter exam.

And then also Moral is directly challenging Killiwa's point of view on that.

He's like saying to him, you do not have the heart of a nen user or because you still think this way, you still think the way an assassin does is kind of a way to read that too.

Oh, yeah, that's the part where moral is insane, where he's like, you should have stayed and fought.

Like

that part he's wrong about so he's way

worth like I think it's still worth it going forward to point out that Killua's now had someone just in like verbally

say the opposite of that ideology to him in a point where he's probably listening, you know?

I think that there's also something interesting about

Killua not like talking back.

He has nothing.

He's no funny reply.

He has no bristling anger at this.

He's like feeling really bad.

And

these sort of insults are feeding in exactly to his own self-criticism.

It's one of the only times we see that happen.

And the other times we see this happen, it's around his family.

Yeah, yeah, Ilumi specifically.

Ilumi specifically.

Yeah.

Really, really interesting.

Same focus, you know, he's doing this all the time with all his characters, but the same focus the big, wide, sort of like, quote-unquote, mad eyes of Ilumi and Pito as well.

I love that

Nove steps in to this conversation and says, people overrate things they can't understand.

Perfectly natural.

In just like a very straightforward piece of being patronizing, to which Morel says, I just said that in different words.

Yeah.

Yeah, he really, really likes it.

I was mean instead of condescending.

Yeah.

And then, you know, you talked about Morel saying stay in fight.

You talked about Morel talking about, you know, you don't have the heart of a Nen master.

But he says something that I thought was really interesting for a couple of reasons.

He says that calculating odds in a Nen fight is missing the point.

I have this quote.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because this is the other time that we're ringing the hunter bell today, a bell, a dusty bell that we haven't looked at in a long time.

Look, kid, the minute you start calculating the odds of winning in NED combat, well, that just shows you're missing the whole point.

In most cases, you don't know what your opponent's abilities are.

And when you're in a fight like that, even the slightest hesitation can be a matter of life or death.

All of a sudden, having more or less aura than the other guy isn't really much of an excuse.

Plus, the battle can turn quickly at any time.

That's the essence of Nen combat.

Still, no matter what, always fight like you know you're going to win.

That's what it means to have the spirit of a Nen user.

You got disqualified the second you got scared of your opponent's Nen and ran.

You're a loser.

It reminds me so much of the fucking Scott Steiner math

promo.

Look at the low-tier God ram.

Oh, okay.

I don't know what either of these are.

One of them is a little more inflammatory than the other.

The

Scott Steiner one is just, Scott Steiner is just a belligerent wrestler yelling at a man.

Which I think also, this does have that vibe.

Moral also just kind of looks like he's a pro wrestler in human clothes.

Great, he does, yeah.

I think I might have missed.

I have this sense that maybe the words were, you're worse than a loser, is actually what it was written.

I think you're worse than a loser.

You're right.

But I just wrote down, you're a loser.

This is doing a couple of things.

First, it is,

you know, pushing back on the like all the time and energy we spent being like, I have to put 40% of my nen in my arm and then 60% of my nen in my leg.

And, you know, Moral is saying, look, you got to use the nen abilities.

You got to fight like you're going to win.

Don't spend time out here power scaling.

You know, don't spend time out here calculating your nen.

I think something else that it's cluing us in for is what the crowd has been stamping their feet and chanting as soon as we learned that the ants were getting nen, right?

Which is like weird nen powers, freaky nen abilities.

Because, you know, post-crazy slots, we are in a new realm of, you know, I cannot wait to see what the ants are going to do with Nen.

Um, and I can't help but

read what Morel is saying here as a kind of cue for the audience: like, okay, you spent a lot of time learning the Nen fundamentals, but ultimately, in a combat situation, it is going to come down to how fast you think and whether or not you are stronger than the other guy, and whether or not your abilities are, you know,

have the juice.

And we're about to see a bunch of them.

So interesting to compare this as well with Kite's

imposing will.

It's a battle of resolve, you know?

And Kite, who like told them to run also.

Moral is sort of shitting on Killua.

And even when Moral learns that Kilua knocked out Ghon to run out with him,

he goes like, oh, well, at least that one has some promise because he tried to stay in fight.

But this is like so.

Specifically, the direction of Kite was run, get out of here.

Yeah, this is so weird seeing these three arrive because based on what we just saw in this episode, they are dead men, you know?

Which,

you know, that's not the case.

You wouldn't introduce three new characters,

or you wouldn't introduce two new characters and Chairman Netero and send them into the NGL all to die.

Especially because we kind of got that out of the way for now with Kite.

So there must be something, you know, when I see Marl and Nov and Notero walking into the NGL, I think about Pito cutting off Kite's arm before they'd landed.

You know,

I don't know as a viewer whether or not we're supposed to be going,

these poor souls don't know what's waiting for them, or whether we're supposed to be going, thank God Chairman Natero is going into the arena.

We'll have to see.

I don't know.

We'll have to see.

But it's not totally over for Killoa here.

What sort of

maniac Chairman Notero has yet another

weird scheme of his

Chairman Notero clearly got

got got way too bored of being like, I'm coming in to be the serious political figure.

And he wanted to remind us, the viewer, that he was a man with no morals and a completely weird unit.

Wait.

He has got a...

He says, I've put two assassins in a nearby tower.

Once you have defeated them, you will be strong enough to fight with us in the war.

This isn't a game.

But this is a game.

Whether or not you want to fight them is up to you.

However, if you truly want to live as a hunter, take them down and come find us.

We don't need just any help, only the strong.

Worth noting that...

That Netero says like nothing in defense of Nove, Moral, or Kilua during this discussion.

He just lets them have their little thing and just stands there.

You know, he doesn't say, you know, calm down, Moral.

I know that Kiloa's got it, or

Moral's right.

You know, he has absolutely no voiced opinion on the interaction.

Well, that's because strong people just figure out who's right in the end.

Whoever passes the under exam is a good person.

Yeah.

We do get a new song during this.

This is going to be a wildly important song.

It is not like one of the most played songs during, although it's played, you know, 20-something times.

It's called Legend of the Martial Artist.

I won't tell you whose theme this ends up being because it's kind of funny.

But it's like one of the most obvious.

Like, you know, so, you know, you're watching a show.

And you can feel the music, but sometimes you don't think about the music.

You don't really pay attention to it.

It just sort of washes over you.

This is one of those songs that really hits what it's playing.

And I think a lot of people who watch this show who normally wouldn't be keeping an ear out for soundtrack stuff know this song and recognize what it is saying about what's about to happen.

Let's see: Legend of the Martial Artist.

It fucking goes a beggar.

Yeah, you will develop a Pavlovian response to this.

Yeah.

A little Koto playing in the background.

Yeah.

Over the strings.

It is some like film-ass film composing, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you're writing a

scene,

if you're writing a character queue where a character is going to go and act, that's how it sounds.

It's great.

It was mixed kind of weirdly, but I think it's probably because it was coming over Discord.

Yeah, it might have been a little loud coming through the mix because I think I had the set a little louder than I normally do.

Because I was paranoid about it not coming through loud enough for the Discord.

What does this play over in this episode?

This plays over

Netero explaining about the two assassins and what he can do to join them if he wants.

So Goan,

Kiliua thinking to himself, I'm no longer qualified.

Killua has completely come apart at this point.

Yeah.

Carries Goan to a city where Goan wakes up.

Well, he believes his brother's like prophecy has come true.

Yes, yeah.

When actually he's completely disproved it.

Yes.

This is this is, you know, the prophecy being like, you know, you can't stand up to any of this stuff.

You know, you don't, you don't have the heart or abilities to do any of this.

And when in fact he is demonstrating

that heart and those abilities.

Yeah.

um goan wakes up and immediately thanks

killua for stopping him from fighting pito uh which just is like the straw that breaks the camel's back for killua i don't think he starts crying but he he like just deflates um

because he feels that he has left kite back there to die and he is really caught between you know like i i took you out of there and it was the right thing to do probably but in doing so i have doomed this man who was you know not only

really important to our training, but

was a connection to your dad, you know?

Like,

that has also been lost.

But Goan is absolutely convinced that Kite is still alive and spins out a story about how Kite is injured but is hiding and is waiting for them to come back and says, now we are going to get strong and we're going to go and find him.

You know, this is again the like

Shonen shonen um

coming up against the zeldic family gate you know how how how strong can you be to push this gate now we have to be stronger to go back and rescue kite this is especially sad because you know any viewer who has seen the story knows that kite probably hasn't made it out of that fight and i think killiwa knows it too but is sort of like being being caught up in what Goan's saying.

But I can understand them saying we have to get stronger so we can go and help the war against the Chimera ants, but that's not what Goan is saying.

Goan is saying, we're going to get strong and we're going to rescue kite

um

and then

killua just has just the most killua is in love with gone dialogue that we have had so far i actually doubted is in love framing like yeah the the

show itself is also playing into this with the way it presents it like the soft light um there's a bird singing outside you know gone is like you this is fully killua's pov and the way Gone, like, the way the camera looks as, at Gone is like borderline angelic, you know?

He says, although there's, there's some really interesting, like, sort of conflicting visual imagery here of

the

Gone or Kilua seeing Goan, like, you know, in this glowing yellow light and sort of, sort of sketches him out as like a, in a portrait.

Watercolor.

Yeah, watercolor.

And then when it cuts back to the actual scene, it's actually Kilo that's in the light and Goan that's sitting in the shadow.

The episode title, by the way, is Light and Darkness.

It's great.

He says, Goan, or he thinks, Goan, you're light itself.

Sometimes you're so bright, I can't look at you, but still, can I stay by your side?

I think that the sometimes you're so bright, I can't look at you, but can I stay by your side is really, really great.

They're like, can I, not in the sense just of like, am i able to or or rather saying can i stay by your side carries both the meaning of am i able to continue to stand by your side and will you let me continue to stand by your side i think it's it's it's really lovely i have an apology to make to allie this is the line of the show that allie saw in a twitter post or something that made her want to read uh the manga

and uh was not able to be here today because i didn't know until last night that this is the episode that this happens in.

I thought it was a little later.

Oh, no, Allie.

I'm sorry, Allie.

But

it's okay.

She'll be on soon.

And she'll have read it and caught up

maybe a couple episodes from now.

This is

big.

You know, I keep coming back to what you said, Keith, about like Hunter-Hunter is a show about one boyfriend.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, this is Killua is in love and it is not being requited.

Not necessarily out of someone who doesn't want it, but who just doesn't even know that that's a thing.

You know,

doesn't even know that the world works in that way.

And it's also

Killiwa is the protagonist of Hunter Hunter.

Now, I think that it's probably going to get borne out that Killier is the protagonist of Hunter Hunter.

Right now, the protagonist of Hunter Hunter is 28 Ants.

Everybody else is a side character.

But I do think that

when the chips are down, it's probably going to be Killier's show.

But right now, it is ants.

And

there's one more sting in the tale.

You know, after having had that awful dawning thing of like, what if they kill Kite right now?

And then they move into it.

And after we had Ghon's sort of like doomed,

let's get strong and rescue Kite, I was like, oh, the sadness of this is going to be, you know, when they learn that

much further down the road, that they didn't need to.

But of course, we now cut back to Peto

and Colt says to the ants, you need to prepare a freezing chamber enough to store 100 humans or more.

And we pan over to Pito, who is sitting in like a shallow pond with Kite's decapitated head in their lap, saying, I think I'm pretty strong after all.

I would like to introduce the secret final screenshot that I almost

that I checked to see if it would be good enough to include too much to include.

Oh, that would absolutely.

Because as soon as Kai showed up, I'd have been like, that's fucking.

He wears a hat.

You can't tell that's Kite.

And also, it would have been

long-ass hair

splitting all over the place.

It would have been a full year, Keith.

But I looked at those screenshots so hard and then spent a year going, when are they going to show up?

So I would have said...

Oh, it would have been a good screenshot, though.

But I do think it would have been a spoiler.

I'd have been like, who's this pleasant cat girl holding a decapitated head um

i think the cat girl i feel like the fact that there's a head draws so much of the focus uh again we away from the cat girl no sorry away from the identity i think that the cat girl and the fact of the image draws away from like wondering who that is um because

now we need to we need to do a b test right so let's end the podcast and let's get another person who's never seen hunter hunter

do the exact same show.

This is the control test.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let's start again.

So now, you know, the implication here is that Pito is going to be collecting and storing trophy heads of people that they kill in nan battle.

Which

that can, you know, maybe they've got some other awful reason why they're freezing them.

Hmm.

I mean, they did talk about how, like, the queen goes on to, like, birth multiple ants, supposedly.

She wants them alive, too.

Yeah, maybe they're more nutritious when they're alive.

So, like, I think maybe, like, you can preserve them longer if they're frozen.

I don't know.

I mean, I also just in that important.

Yeah, I also read that as, like, oh, she, like, learned how to read people's brains.

And so you want to keep those brains nice and cold and fresh in order for her to go poking around in there.

What's that Pito theme called again?

The Puppeteer.

Don't feel so good about this.

The song right after that, I just should remind you, is called To Bring a Marionette to Life.

Yeah, I don't care for this.

I don't care for this.

God, there's more of this.

There's so much more to go.

There's so much more.

Can you believe how much more there is of this?

I have always said that I can't really predict Tagashi's pacing.

Are we going to get two Royal Guards soon?

Or are we just going to go on a little

side quest to kill two assassins?

I know both.

We've done a lot of cutting back and forth.

What are we watching next time?

Next time we're watching three episodes.

We're watching episodes 46, 47, and 48.

What?

Sorry.

What?

86, 87, and 88.

I did that

last time, too.

I just displaced the numbers.

What we'll be doing in episode 46.

We were.

Episode 46, York New.

I was about to say that had to be York New.

Yeah, my first note says, this has gone off the rails for Neon's gang in a big way.

And it did.

Yeah, it did.

Remember Neon's Gang?

I did.

Third episodes, by the way, Promise and Reunion, Duel and Escape, and Rock, Paper, Scissors, and Weakness.

Interesting.

Speaking of, there was a great moment of rock, paper, scissors in these episodes that we didn't call out.

I can't believe I missed this.

There's the, it's, it's when uh kite is like, hey, this is great.

We can fight those like ant

officers one-on-one.

And whoever's ready to fight can go.

And Kilo goes, me, and then Goan goes, no, me.

And they have like a slightly charged moment of competitiveness, and they cut straight to rock, paper, scissors, which, of course, Goan wins.

Yeah, because he's the rock, paper, scissors, but he's the rock, paper, scissors champ.

He follows in Liora's footsteps.

Ever won rock, paper, scissors?

My memory is that he does win one time.

Yes, he wins in Greed Island.

He wins the tournament in Greed Island.

Yes,

yes, yeah, yeah.

That's the only time that Goan loses.

I didn't know if it was a running gag, but Killiwa can't actually play Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Before we go,

because we're wrapping up, I would like to read a five-star review.

Yeah.

As I promised earlier.

This one is called Insight and Appreciation with the X's between the words.

Thank you, Geome, from Geome.

This is Bar None, my favorite podcast.

I've listened to each episode at least twice and I'm never disappointed.

I'll frequently call up one of my friends after each episode and talk about whatever that week's episode was about, which is so cute.

That's me editorializing.

The cast has insightful and hilarious analysis of the show that gives me a deeper and fuller appreciation for Hunter Hunter.

No one is doing it like them.

Two exclamation marks.

I wanted to share my favorite spoiler-free, at this point theory, which is that Gon doesn't actually have a mom.

Instead, Jing used a card from Greed Island to get M pregnant and become the world's most high-effort absentee dad, which I'm on board with.

I don't think Jing hung around for nine months for someone else to carry that baby.

It's a compelling theory.

What about if there was Nen magic that meant that you could have a baby quicker, though?

Maybe it wasn't.

I mean,

I believe he did that too.

I still think he gave birth to that kid himself.

I am on team.

Goan absolutely has a mom.

And Goan's mom's absence in the story is another

checkmark against the way Jing works.

Where it's like Jing is so violently charismatic that he is able to sort of

remove Goan's mother from the story completely.

My read on that is that it's misogyny.

Yeah, that is on Tagashi's part more than anything else, but we don't really have time for me to get that.

That's similar to my theory, which is that just the mother died like in childbirth or some other thing, and that there's no way that Vito would have ended up with this kid if it wasn't like a medical emergency.

I think that's probably the closest to the truth, and I also think it's like just never going to matter.

Yeah.

As far as we know,

hey, Gohan literally closes the book on it.

Yeah.

God, it's such a good scene.

Um, okay, well, the world has changed once again.

A new type of ant has arrived, and this ant isn't even at the top of the food chain.

Um, how bad can it be for our friends?

Probably, probably pretty bad.

That's our usual sign-off here on media.

Pretty bad.

Pretty bad.

The pig is the ribs.

The pig is the ribs.

That pig's the ribs.

Wait, no.

That's not how we end this.

No, yes.

That's it.

I had a horrible,

No, I won't even talk about it.

Forget I said anything.

Excellent.

I had a very funny joke idea

that I'm on the fence 20% that I would have talked about it.

I do want to talk about it, but in case I don't do it, I'm not going to talk about it.

We need to clap.

We do.

So, yeah, we'll clap.

We'll do just a 3-2-1.

Yeah, that's fine, too.

I thought you just needed it for levels.

No, it's not for levels.

It's just for a vague idea of where things line up.

Oh, then I've never understood.

Me neither.

Nope.

I thought it was just vibes-based clapping.

I'm still recording if you want to do a 3-2-1.

Let's do 3-2-1.

3, 2, 1.

Yeah, the idea is that the clap is a visual indicator of where the tracks line up.

But because I have the backup, I don't actually need them,

and I don't need them to be in time because I sync it to the to the backup.

I don't sync it to the claps.

So, the claps, the claps are incidental.

It's just if we do clap, it's a good starting point of like, well, this is at least where things should be.

Yeah, which is why it's funny to say just clap whenever because uh

uh it's it freaks us out and doesn't hurt you.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's like it's more work, but what is it, 30 seconds more work?

It's like really nothing.

Um, for it's much funnier than it is inconvenient.

Uh,

yeah, three episodes next time, that's fine.

Um,

uh