How Are You And I Different? - Hunter x Hunter ep. 79-82: Media Club Plus S01E25

The thing is

that

when things are changing, it gets worse and worse and worse with no sign of improvement.

And then all of a sudden things are good.

And that's how change happens.

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 is if you're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter, based on the manga by Yoshihiro Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on x.com and cohost.org at at Keith J Carberry.

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

Tons of good stuff over there.

You can find the four of us here and the rest of friends of the table at twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

And then the VODs of those streams over on youtube.com slash friends of the table.

With me, as always, is Jack Takeith.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

You can find me on cohost at JDQ, and you can buy any of the music featured on this show or Friends at the Table where I do most of my composing at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Jack's seasonal update this week is I went tubing down the Huron.

Down to the water down the wide.

The Huron.

The Microsoft.

Okay, okay, yes.

You went tubing?

I went tubing.

I went tubing.

And it was lovely.

I love this.

How fast was your tubing?

Was this like relaxing tubing or was this...

Because the first hour was exciting tubing.

Went down some little man-made rapids, you know, sort of just sort of like a theme park ride, you know, nothing particularly strenuous.

And then the next two hours was just a gentle float down the current of a river.

We saw swans.

It was great.

It was a combo.

One of the joys, this is not tubing, but one of the joys of my life is a lazy river at a water park.

See, I've never been on a lazy river before.

It is tubing adjacent.

It's tubing adjacent.

There's this fun little game because the river doesn't care what you do, but the guys who work at a water park do.

And so, like, you can get 60% of the fun from a lazy river by following the rules.

And then the 40%, you've got to, like, sneak in when nobody's looking.

What's the secret fun?

You're not really supposed to get out of your tube or go underwater or

splash or play.

Yeah, but it's fine because they get that their job is to stop people's natural, mostly totally safe impulses.

So they're not great watchmen.

But there is, it does introduce this subtle game of cat and mouse.

You get to become the Moriarty of

Lazy River, you are a little bit of a Jerry.

Who is Jerry?

Well, he's the friend of Tom.

He's the frenemy of Tom.

Yeah.

Is that so?

No, actually, no, I think he's the Dom.

I heard us say cat and mouse, and then I completely forgot that we were making a metaphor.

And when you said Jerry, I thought you were briefly talking about Jerry Seinfeld.

Oh, I thought my mind went to like, oh, we're talking about like Germans from World War II.

No.

What's the deal with this river?

It just goes round and round.

No one ripped the ocean.

I don't get it.

Oh, my God.

Who else is on this podcast?

Oh, Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at SwanDerry3000, where I'm about to post a short YouTube video of

tubing.

And Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

You can find my emo band on Instagram at XXEmo BoysKissing XX.

Also, just to direct you towards the YouTube and Twitch again, Keith and I are.

We thought we'd be done.

We really thought we'd be done.

There's a fun

look out for the stream that we thought was going to be two hours and ended up being five.

Because you can hear my mental state deteriorating the longer.

I was so upset by the end of that.

So here's the thing.

That was a really long stream.

That stream was longer than the amount of sleep I had the night before.

And I felt really bad afterwards for not ending it earlier before I got cranky.

But I think it's still probably a fun time.

The problem is that it was impossible to tell that we weren't butting up

the end at every moment.

Yeah.

And to the point where it would wouldn't even, it didn't even occur to us to check, like, hey, is there maybe like three hours left in this?

Yeah.

Because it felt like it was about to end.

Until it was too late.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we'll finish that soon.

But hey, one more episode.

That'll be nine total episodes of 999.

Exactly.

Because I'm splitting that one into two.

Yeah, you have to.

I have to.

You have to.

Never happened before.

I've never done that on the YouTube.

I've never taken a

I just did it for a Janine video because she played two different games.

She played

Life Makeover and then switched to a game called Go-Go Town.

Okay.

But different circumstance.

That was two, technically, two streams in one video.

I see.

I see.

Do we have anything?

Oh, Jack, we just did another Crusader Kings.

We should do more Crusader Kings.

That'll all be up.

Oh, did we mention the bonus stuff that we've done for this show?

No, and we should do that because

when this is out,

the previous week that's already up is Dragon Ball Z.

We watched Dragon Ball Z.

Dre hosted a Dragon Ball Z bonus episode, one of two to three Dragon Ball Z bonus episodes that we're going to do.

And Dre, correct me if I'm wrong, we did Dragon Ball Z Kai episodes 13, 14, 15, and 16.

That sounds right to me.

Yeah, so you should go watch those episodes, sign up at friendsofthetable.cash,

and then watch us talk about those episodes.

I cannot overhype the bonus episodes.

I think that they're great.

They're so much fun to make.

Especially the Dragon Ball stuff is just like a

torrent of Dragon Ball information, latent Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball facts exploding from our brains and into Jack, who,

you know, we mentioned on the Dragon Ball episodes, or maybe it was referencing the Dragon Ball episodes on the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure episodes, just like this energy of like

finally being able to unleash all the stuff that we have to say and not having to hold back like in Bar Funger.

So it's a great release, just personally, as a personal endeavor.

Yeah, it's cathartic to just be able to not censor for spoilers.

And there's so many, there's so many Dragon Ball Z facts that like, that I could just say a random thing that Jack has no idea about.

Like, Jack, do you know that there's fusion in Dragon Ball Z and the characters can merge together?

I did not.

Did you know there's actually multiple ways that they can do that?

Yeah.

And if Goku and Vegeta fuse one way, they're called Gogeta.

And if they fuse another way, they're called Vegeto.

And they have slightly different personalities.

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

And one of them involves earrings.

That's true.

One of them, what?

Involves earrings.

Yeah, one of them involves earrings.

They wear matching earrings and then become the same person.

It's very lesbian-coated, I've thought.

They do.

Well, the other one, they do a dance that then becomes.

So it's.

So Goku and Vegeta are very sapphic, is what we're saying.

Yeah.

They also love being merged together.

Vegeta hates the idea of it beforehand.

Once they're

kind of does too.

Yeah, Goku's more willing.

They don't like doing it.

But then

once it's happened, they're like, this is the best.

I'm Gogeta.

I fucking love being alive.

Yeah.

I've been birthed now.

Speaking of things getting birthed.

Yes.

Oh, there's a lot of it.

Okay.

Oh,

good segue.

Do we want to talk about this a little bit or do we want to go right into the intro?

Let's go right into the intro, I think.

Summary, yeah?

Yes.

Today, I have a very important question.

I want to ask you, what are the contents of a soul?

Something between nothing and everything.

As the ants continue to devour humans, they continue to change, or do they just continue?

Can a soul remember?

Can a soul remember, Reyna?

There's conflicts between ants, dutiful, loyal subjects of the queen, defending order of their nest against individualistic, bloodthirsty ants whose disdain for human leads to them killing for sport, leaving good nutrients for the queen out to rot in the sun.

Meanwhile, Pakal and Ponzu are exploring the forest of the NGL, hot on the trail of the ants, just as Kite and his team are crossing the border.

Pakle becomes the first known rare human brimming with life energy worth 1,000 humans alone, but also represents a new threat to the ants.

Kite, Goan, and Kilua encounter their first ants as well.

Ramot, a bizarre-looking rabbit bird man.

Oh my gosh.

Junju, a man-snake centaur.

That's horse on the bottom and man-snake on the top.

Just as we learn definitively that the ants are short work for Kite and his team, there's a new threat on the horizon.

I think the first thing I would like to say before we start going through this piece by piece is how impressed I am at.

Once again, I think that Tagashi and the adaptation team's pacing is really singular.

And I don't always mean that positively, but here I definitely do.

I mean, in the last run of episodes, it ended with the ants

starting to discuss names and the value of names and sort of beginning to hint that

the internal politics of the Chimera Ant sort of like

horde are getting muddied and complicated by the fact that humans have been introduced into the Chimera Ant line.

And I think a less interesting show would have worked through that really meticulously, sort of making sure that B followed A and C followed B.

But by the time episode 79 begins and we join the Chimera Ants, because of course Tagashi is making them protagonists now,

they've figured out a lot of this stuff already.

Or if not figured it out, they are well in the throes of a lot of the stuff that was only just beginning last time.

A bunch of them have names now.

Do we want to talk about the Chimera ants that we know that have names?

Who's your favorite?

Who is my favorite Chimera ants?

Yeah, that's actually, I just like named Chimera Ant.

Like, who stands out to you that you're like, oh my favorite character overall?

No, like, when they're on screen, you're like, oh, I want to see more of them.

That's a really good question.

I think that...

And we can can talk more about why later, I think that Leol and Zazan are really interesting Chimera Ants.

Leol is a big

cat boy, and Zazan is a scorpion lady.

And they both represent kind of like different versions of Chimera Ant Commanders.

With Colt, who is the...

The original Chimera Ant, the man whose name we bleeped in the last episode.

I describe Colt in my notes as

the last honest cop on the Force.

Like, that's really the role that he's playing in this show.

And maybe that's partially because I've been watching The Wire planted the drugs on that last direct.

For real, though.

Colt is actually true.

He has like a little...

He has a little sort of group of like non-fighter ants, like the logistics ants who are like in the background planning

peggy's mine by the way peggy's my favorite peggy is the penguin yeah peggy's great i really like peggy um i love koala i love meleoron yeah melee i got so excited when my boy showed up yeah yeah i really like cheetu really cool oh chitu's really fun i like that cheetu is like

like a dumbass Yeah, yeah,

he's great.

He is a dumbass.

He's just here for the vibes.

Yeah.

You also get the impression that, like, Carl kind of likes him.

They have these, like, really nice little moments of, like, this fucking guy bickering, whereas you get the impression Colt really does not, really resents and doesn't care for some of the other commanders.

Yeah, for sure.

You will have heard from us just going through a torrent of names.

By the time we pick up, the ants have names, and they also are starting to fracture internally into...

Various

and it's not just that they have different ideas about how best to serve the queen.

They have different ideas about like what it means to be alive and what's good.

Some ants just want to eat people and view working for the queen as being a sort of a nice way towards eating people.

Some ants like cult are like straight down the line, we have to birth the king.

This is our focus.

I'm going to serve the queen.

And then you have like a whole squad of ants that don't give a shit about being chimera ants, basically.

They're just like, we're out here in the world wreaking havoc.

And they are some of the scariest ants that we have met so far.

We will talk about them later.

The last episode we watched today was a real doozy for some frightening ants.

I wrote individualism is ruining the hive.

Individuality is

running among us much like four times.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

I like

there's kind of like this tension in

that where kite

and cult have like kind of different reads on what what's happening to the ants, which I think is kind of interesting.

Like, uh, two,

and it's interesting that I kind of think Kite is more right, even though everything he's saying is just a guess based on like observation.

Um, it's kind of funny that Colt can't really see what's going.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm exaggerating this tension, but it seems like Colt is kind of missing the forest for the trees, like being too close to the problem because he's like in the society.

But they see the ants as like becoming more individualistic because they're becoming more human.

Where Kite sees

they're not becoming more human, they're just eating worse humans.

Yeah, our diet's suffering.

Yeah, we're going to get to this and you know, we are sort of jumping ahead, but right off the bat, the fact that you are hearing us talk about the, you know, we are what

four episodes into the Chimera Ant talk and the ads have invented society.

Yeah.

And then we get a bunny bird man who's the Joker.

Yeah, we do get a bunny birdman.

He doesn't do the joker.

He reminds me of

the Grinch from the Jim Carrey live action, The Grinch.

Oh my gosh.

Somebody stop me from killing these children.

The little dog with the horns.

But we actually start

with

getting into the NGL.

We get horses in Hunter Hunter for the first time, I think.

We also get just straight up world map that shows us.

Isn't it in the first episode where it's like this is where the NGL is and it shows how close we are kind of shows it in relation to York New City?

York New City, yeah, which I think is like really helpful because going into this, I was like, fuck, I got to update the map from forever ago.

And then the show was like, no, no, no, no, Sylvie, we got you.

Actually, we'll just show you how far it is from York now.

If we can take a

like a 25-second pause, I can play a fun song and talk about it real quick.

Okay, hold on.

I'm going to pop out so I don't get Sylvie talking over it by mistake.

Which is fine.

I just didn't know that's how it would work last time with the big green.

Yeah, put me on blast.

It's cool.

Okay, so now Keith's gone, so I can just talk as much as I like.

Just as much as you like.

I'm not silencing women anymore.

Hey,

we weren't talking.

That's fine.

You can talk.

That's why I left, so you could talk.

No, we weren't talking.

Okay, quiet the entire time.

This is

some...

The song that plays when we're showing the map is great because it's one of those instances of like being able to dive deep into this catalog.

Like, obviously,

using, taking music that you've written and like reusing it thematically is like what a score is just the definition of a score.

But it's this really fun thing of what happens when you get 80-something episodes deep into a TV show and all of a sudden have this really huge bag of things to pull out.

This song, Morning Market, plays in like episodes one and three of season one, and then never again until this map shows up.

And it sort of becomes like the theme of the Metine Union

because

I think it's the, I think it originally plays when they stumble on that market in the first couple episodes.

And it's sort of like, I'm in a new exotic kind of place song.

And then they reuse it to for the meeting at Union being in a new exotic kind of place.

This is

oh, yeah,

yeah, yeah

Ren fair ass tune, it's super Ren Fair, yeah

But uh I was like I noticed it and I was like is that new?

What is this?

And I did a search through the website that I used to find all this and I was like, No, this played in episodes one and three.

Oh wow, yeah, that's great.

Yeah,

Yeah.

Pockle and Ponzu are slightly ahead of Kite and his team, and this is going to become important later.

They are more the tip of the spear than Kite's crew.

And they're riding in on horseback.

Nice way to

put them.

Yes.

They reveal that actually 10 other groups made it before Kite's team made it.

Yeah.

It's kind of a lot of everyone who says that, right?

Yeah, the Shaker is like, I drove a whole bunch of you crazy people over later.

I love how much he calls them weird.

He will not stop calling them total weirdos.

And none of them are picking up.

We can't actually contact any of those 10 other hunter teams, but it's probably fine.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, they're in the NGL.

They don't have phones.

They don't have phones.

Yeah.

I also have to...

Or bees.

Most of them don't have bees either.

Yeah.

Sorry, did you say beads?

Bees.

Beads?

Bees.

Beads.

Yeah, bees.

Yeah, they don't have beads.

I really liked this truck driver calling them all weirdos because it

revealed and this happens sometimes in the show when normal regular people get involved how bizarre and opaque the world of hunters and hunter pursuits must look to just a normal person.

You know, a person even more normal, for example, than the announcer at Heaven's Arena.

You know, this guy just drives trucks and is just driving like 10 trucks of absolute weirdos deep into the depths or to the to the border of the NGL and not really understanding why, but this sense that like something is moving out here beyond my ken.

And you know, what you gonna do?

That's all I'm saying.

It's turns out a bunch more people want to come here than usual.

There's a real like beginning of a horror movie vibe with this guy.

100% where it's like he's the local dude being like, I don't know why you guys are going up to that big creepy house on the hill.

Yeah, they say that hill's haunted.

Yeah, like for real though, right?

Like that is totally the

purpose he serves.

And it's like, it didn't really click until we got into the actual content of the episodes.

And it was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, there's a lot of.

Yeah, I think you're right.

I mean, there is some stuff towards the end that is almost explicitly horror writing.

But I think that

even prior to that point, as soon as we get into the NGL,

these episodes play out like a haunted house movie where the haunted house is an entire country.

They know that the ants are out here,

but they don't know where...

They suspect that the ants are attacking people, But they don't know that for sure until they find that out quickly and then they just we have scene after scene of our heroes stumbling into like a village just full of blood and there's nobody there and when the ants start showing up they show up like slasher movie villains or something where you know they will interrupt a scene midway through and appear seemingly out of nowhere and we'll have to deal with the ants.

There is a ton of like oh sorry Jack you can finish your point.

Well I was just I was gonna say that the like the physical space of the NGL at this point feels like creeping around a haunted house.

There's also kind of a tragedy to this bit where, um,

uh,

like,

kite had been so diligent in tracking the ants that then ends up being here way after a bunch of other hunters had, like, found that leaked recording and gotten here.

And, like, how much easier would this have been had they gotten here five days earlier or whatever?

Because the ants moved so quickly.

Sorry, Sylvie, were you going to say something?

I was just going to say that there's a lot of horror influence in this arc so far.

Yeah.

I think that, like, we get, um, there is a moment in the last episode we watched that's very reminiscent of zombie fiction.

There's a lot of this stuff that feels, I don't know necessarily if you'd consider Jurassic Park like a horror anymore, but there like a lot of the stuff where they're going through the forests in the NGL feels very much that sort of like

we're in the the wild unknown sort of thing that happens in some horror usually goes to some interesting and by interesting i mean racist places um

but

it's just interesting to note that i i wrote in my notes that like there's a moment in these episodes that i consider that where the the vibe shift in hunter hunter is complete where i stop considering it a children's television show.

The going through the checkpoint as well is like a classic, you know, in the last episode we were talking about this as like a techno thriller or as like a Michael Crichton-esque.

That's just Jurassic Park as well is going through the channel.

Absolutely.

And then we have like Jungie Ito references later in the way that characters' faces are drawn.

And we also have

there is very possibly a cannibal holocaust reference in one of these episodes, which is wild.

The show talks about shrikes, you know, the birds birds that hang their prey on.

That's literally what I was thinking of, Jim.

Bushes.

But I think it's also, you know, it could, in the genre space that we're in, it could very specifically be a reference to this, like,

quote-unquote, classic exploitation film of the 70s

called Cannibal Holocaust.

The aforementioned racist horror movie.

Oh, yeah.

They were making them all in the 70s, and then they never stopped making them.

They just moved them into different genres.

Oh, like Star Wars, like Star Wars, or like

Eli Roth is still working.

Eli Roth is still working, but he shouldn't be.

Has he ever made anything I like?

He's good in Inglorious Bastards.

He's a good performer.

Yeah, I don't mind him as an actor.

Okay, a bit of a hint here that Pockle and Ponzu are an item.

As they are riding on this horse, she kind of like rests her head on his back.

Big horse snuggles.

Although at the same time, I feel like horse snuggles is just a classic part of the way you shoot two characters on a horse.

It's

very deliberate.

She like leans in and closes her eyes.

Does a little snow?

We also get other alternative ways to shoot two people on a horse later.

Yeah, we do.

We get like a really good alternative way.

Yeah, how come Ponzu didn't just do this?

Oh, God.

Oh, yeah.

Why didn't Ponzu just fucking T-pose on top of the horse?

Yeah, um,

yeah, let's talk because then Kite's crew, let's actually do getting into the NGL all in one go.

Okay, they arrive and they arrive at this big this big tree which is described as both a checkpoint and a embassy

and it is notable as

I love this tree because it's such a fake out on like what the interior is gonna be like.

Oh, yeah.

Like they're like to anybody who doesn't have to cross this border this might as well be like the fucking Keebler elves.

Could you say more about what you mean?

Well, it's so the embassy is two big trees.

And they're like, yeah, the embassy's inside the trees.

And it's like, oh, yeah, because they're nature people, right?

And then you get inside and it's full of like

metal detectors and ultrasounds and x-ray machines.

Dudes on computers.

40 dudes on computers.

And everyone's like, what the fuck is going on?

Aren't you supposed to be the NGL?

And they're like, yeah, but to run a country these days, you kind of have to have a bunch of computers.

So these are both, you know, we're technically outside the border.

It's outside the border,

which is great.

And then they put everybody through this very rigorous

sort of testing process.

Did anybody catch what they said to Kite like when they first showed up?

Which I thought was really interesting.

No, go ahead.

Yeah.

The part about how they like they can't deny him entrance?

If you're pro-hunters, then you know we cannot deny you entry.

They're Jedi, huh?

Yeah, I actually call Pike Qui-Gon later on.

There's a very specific moment where he's Qui-Gon Jinn.

It's not just technology that they have to remove, you know, phones, cameras, all that sort of stuff.

It's things that have been produced by technology.

Now, if this is sounding vague to you,

yes,

that's fine.

But they have to produce, they have to, sorry, they have to remove

metals, petroleum-derived materials, no prosthetics or implants.

If you have

like

glasses, braces, fillings,

silicone implants, they'd pointedly say

the girl.

I was like, okay.

And if you're quite happy to say, all right, turn around, you can't come in.

You know, you wouldn't have to remove that stuff.

I was wondering whether there would be this awful thing of like, you can come in if you have your teeth taken out or something.

This is what it feels like going through the TSA as a transgender person.

This is the NGL TSA.

Yeah.

It didn't mean we also get the

right up there with shots I never expected to see, Ghone going inside an MRI machine.

Yeah.

That should have been a screenshot.

The thing is, I'd have just been like, I guess he's sick.

And then you would have said, he's actually in an embassy.

But then we would have spent this entire show with you being like, when's Ghan get cancer?

Why is Ghan going to go into the MRI?

One of the workers here at the embassy says people have smuggled guns by hiding the parts inside their bodies.

We often find cameras or cell phones inside their rectums.

People have even trained animals to carry laptops across the border when they when they themselves are inside.

Do you think that's what the monkey guy from the hunter exam did?

Do you think that they're talking about him?

Yeah,

Gorinu, maybe?

Served up as a rare human.

But also, this is, you know, this is exactly what

Ponzu is about to try and do.

Yes.

They just don't know that.

Refreshingly analog.

I do want to make a point here that we get some new outfits.

And my wife specifically said, wow, Kilua's new outfit kind of looks like that outfit that The Rock wore or that Steve Jobs wore.

It's true.

It looks just like that.

And it's great because Kilua has been so specific in his style to this point.

Fastidious, you might say, that the shot of him in his new clothes, well, everyone in their new clothes, he's like pulling at them like, what the fuck?

Yeah,

it's really cute.

I do love the sort of like Ryu and Ken alt palettes thing they have going on with Gon and Killua where they both are like, yeah, we're the Shodo characters of Under.

Because only five people have been able to get in.

Kite, Killiwa, Gone, Stick Dinner, and Padungo are the only people who get in.

Stick Dinner got let in is crazy.

Stick Dinner is fucking dressed up in like a fucking karate gi.

He doesn't even have to go slow down.

Oh, yeah.

I also like

Pacle didn't have to change his clothes at all.

He got to wear what he wore in.

He already was wearing natural clothes.

That's a really good detail.

I hadn't noticed that.

So did Ponzu, right?

Yeah, Ponzu, too, yeah.

More classic horror movie stuff, and also a war movie.

This is like a trope shared by both of them, is Kite says to the rest of his team team that he will be back in two weeks wait for me here and this is like right out of the playbook of you know i i'm just going out and i'll be back quickly or like the war will be over in x amount of time um and it's never never right

um

and as they enter kite says now the hunt begins uh there's a lot made of like hunting in uh in these episodes and right we'll talk more about that the different things hunting means the different things hunting the types of people who are excited about hunting.

Yeah, ringing the bell for the first time in a long time.

What is a hunter?

Yeah.

Who is a hunter?

Who is a hunter?

Or anti-horse, right?

We have to talk about the horse.

Do we want to jump back to, or do we want to keep going?

No, no, let's cut on them journeying in

that final shot of them sort of on horseback.

It's unbelievable.

Why?

Why is he doing this?

Why is he doing this?

What is Killiwa doing?

He is standing perfectly on the back of of a horse like a circus artist yeah that is being ridden i think by gone it's gone yeah it's gone yeah yeah yeah why is he doing this because he's gay he can't sit normal

it's it reminds him of skateboarding

oh

yeah why did killiwa sit like that on the back of the horse

i'm gonna be wondering that yeah welcome to the rest of your life

It's weird because Killiwa is not particularly showy except when he's just about to kill someone.

Yeah.

And in his fashion.

I was just going to say,

Killua is not particularly showy.

I mean, he's very.

He's ostentatious.

He's reserved.

And he's not.

Well, he's a bit ostentatious sometimes, but like,

you know, why is he there on the back of the horse doing that shit?

Maybe they could only get a certain number of horses.

No, you can also sit back there.

That's true.

We just saw it.

We just saw it.

We just saw two people sitting on a horse.

Very awesome.

You know, I think

the worst way to defend yourself from accusations of being in love with your best friend is to hold him while riding a horse.

You know, you're onto something there.

Nah, you should hug him.

Okay.

It's ant time.

We've sort of spoken a bit about what the ants are doing here, which is that they are inventing, quote-unquote, society with all the various things that that

they have sectors

yeah really quickly the ants have mapped the regions into sectors uh and the penguin whose name is peggy is a sort of operations manager peggy is rarely seen without his book he's just bopping around telling the ants where to go what to do

there's a lot made uh in these episodes of like the ants are becoming more human and more specifically they're becoming more evil they are taking on the traits of evil humans and this very like particular impulse to categorize and know and map, and how you can use a map to exert control feels very much like the instincts of humans bubbling up through the ants.

Colt is named very casually in conversation.

They're just throwing the names around now.

We sort of made reference to this in the last episode, but bleep the names out so you wouldn't have heard it.

But Colt's name is very, very similar to Kurt, the boy that he once was.

and that is no coincidence.

We're going to get back to that later.

There is perhaps more of Kurt left in Colt than he suspected.

They were already not subtle, and now they're just telling you this is Kurt.

Yes.

And let's just lay out the kind of the groups here.

Colt believes, oh, of course,

we're trying to feed humans to the ant queen so she can birth the ant king.

Colt says

the requested number of humans, no more, no less.

Some of the ants are like, well, if we give the requested number of humans, can we not just kill a bunch more humans for fun?

To which Colt says, well, no, you're just like taking out the future stock of humans.

And then a third group of ants says, fuck the quota.

Let's just go and start killing humans.

This isn't proper police procedure.

This isn't proper police procedure.

Colts banging on the desk.

He's going to take Ramit's badge.

And Peggy is kind of with him.

Colts and Peggy are worried about...

Well, so.

They're worried about guns, right?

Like, this is the thing.

Oh, am I still connected?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, okay, sorry.

Everything went quiet enough that I was like, huh.

Like, didn't...

Don't they also talk about how they've been losing soldiers in this scene, or is that later?

I feel like they have talked about humans fighting back here, but I might be right.

I think that that's later.

Okay, my bad.

But But they are worried about

they pin it on names.

They say, there is rising individuality within the ranks, and this is going to be a problem.

And we could maybe deal with this by getting more soldiers.

And I really like Colt's response to this, which is...

If we don't deal with the individuality problem, we're just going to get a bunch more soldiers that will then emerge as a bunch of individuals.

We need to nip this in the bud.

You know, sort out the inter-ant discipline before we start thinking about getting more soldiers.

Because some of the ants have not been appearing at meetings.

Oh, right.

They've also invented meetings.

Well, we're, you know, not to put too fine a point on it, invented is all is like the other side of remembering.

They remember about meetings from being alive.

Yes, yes.

And the ant queen is completely separate from all of this.

She is a sort of like perfect target for them in the sense of like we need to provide goods for the ant queen.

We need the king to be birthed, etc, etc.

She's like a like a saintly figure up there that is also kind of in the way that a lot of saints or oracles are rendered flat.

You know, she doesn't really involve herself.

She's just something that you strive towards.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, all the ants are like, we've got meetings, we've got plans, we've all given ourselves names now.

Colt has taken a name, which is interesting.

You know, there was a bit of me that was like, I suppose he's taken a name because he thinks it is useful,

not because he wants one.

I don't know.

It's hard to say.

I don't, I, this is the, again, this is for me a lot of the tension with the ants is like misinterpreting

their own

society by like

by being too close to it.

Like, I don't think that

Colt is necessarily like less individualistic because of being an earlier aunt or whatever.

I think that he's just as close to or closer to maybe even to his human because we've seen him.

He's the only aunt we've seen remember something, you know what I mean?

To his human side.

It's just his human side was particularly loyal and like

that's worth saying

in a moment of loyalty even.

And so it's very easy for him to say,

oh, well, we could just talk about it now.

Later on, he says, Essentially, I'll do anything for her.

You know, I'm going to, I'm going to

be queen, ostensibly.

Yes, I'm going to do anything for her.

I'll do anything for her.

Reina, which is, of course, the name of her sister.

And Peggy says, what did you say?

Who's Reyna?

And Colt turns around and says, What the fuck are you talking about?

It's like.

Oh, did we lose Dre?

Oh, no.

Okay.

We'll just wait for Dre's

internet to come back.

Do you want to see the art that the website uses?

The soundtrack website uses to categorize

miscellaneous and unreleased Hunter-Hunter tracks?

Yes, of course.

In case this makes this out to an episode,

it is still

Gohan, Kilua, Leorio, and Karapika in a karaoke room.

Goan is singing into the microphone.

Killua is like,

probably was singing, but has been interrupted by Leorio, who is saying, I'd like a turn now, and is turning and looking angrily at him.

And Karapaka is sipping some orange juice in the background.

It's great.

There's no way that's official art, right?

I don't know.

It looks official to me.

Those look like the way that those characters are drawn.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if this was a cover to some soundtrack.

We were talking about Reyna.

Yeah, Sylvie had something.

Oh, hey, who's that?

Hey, what's that translate to in English and Spanish?

I don't know.

It's queen.

Really?

Yes.

Wow.

These motherfuckers.

I thought you guys knew that.

You got me.

Yeah, Reina means queen in Spanish.

You know, I've often said that sometimes

the best weapon as far as subtlety is concerned is a hammer.

He's doing great.

I love Tagashi.

Yeah.

But yeah,

we're going to be going down here more and more

this line of like, you know,

this is why Colt's character is interesting.

I don't think that this is going to be the last we see of this.

I will say that Colt is a really

likable character, despite his like stickler,

inflexible,

hyper-focus.

There is something about the way he is played by his vocal performer and the way that he is animated where you get the impression that he's just like tired and grumpy and all these ants.

He ends up feeling more like a noble knight than like cranky wet blanket, which I think is like

a music.

Well, he's surrounded by lunatics.

Yes, exactly.

Because the weirdest guys.

The absolute chaos of the other ants just means like, oh, yeah,

Colt's the closest we got to regular guy.

Yeah.

It might be worth saying again.

Colt seems to be a cross between a bug, a human, and an eagle.

He has these big white angelic eagle wings.

He has a humanoid but like bug carapace body with two arms and two legs.

It's notable to count the arms legs because we will meet bugs who didn't, who don't.

And a notable human face, despite the bug bits.

Yeah, he has a beak, a sort of, but like a curved bird of prey's beak, not like a big pointy one.

I know it's not the same, but for some reason, whenever I think of him, he has Vegeta hair, but he doesn't really.

He's got like a weird like...

He does have like a widow's peak, though he has the vegeta hairline but not necessarily the cut you know i also think of it as like uh cindy lu who

dr zeus style

yeah yeah

we've got so many dr zeus characters we do

what if cindy lu who was the the commanding officer of the grinch

of the grinch uh and he's always posed um with his arms crossed over his chest and his wings folded up really tight behind him yeah you get the impression that his shoulders are like drawn up around his ears.

He's very tense and just like Keith says, dealing with the weirdest ants.

And two of, well, one of them appears out of nowhere.

Literally out of nowhere.

This ant is Meleron or Meleron,

who is a chameleon ant.

Really, sort of no better way to put it, right?

My dude.

My absolute dude.

I love this lad so much.

What would you say is his two most notable features, Jack?

He has perfect round golden eyes that

boggle around in his head.

Yeah.

And like the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland, you know, when the cat disappears but the smile remains.

Maleron's eyes are always the first to appear and the last to leave when he sort of phases in and out in this really nice, nice animation.

And then I'm trying to remember, he has a weird tail or he has weird hands?

What's oh, I was going to make fun of his dirtbag soul patch that he has.

I love him.

He does also also have a little dirtbag soul patch, doesn't he?

This dude is a member of the band Len.

He's about to play bass with Steal My Sunshine.

And the vibe that you get with Millioron is that he is an ant that is going off-pieced.

Maybe not quite as off-pieced as some of the others, but he can't be trusted.

And he is going to try and worm his way into the good graces of whoever he thinks is like.

Oh, sorry, go on.

Just whoever he thinks is, you know,

closest to him at that moment, right?

I think he immediately tips his hand as kind of like a coward.

Like, he's kind of very fine.

He doesn't want to be yelled at.

He gets in trouble for not being at the meeting, even though he's there.

Colt thinks maybe he is there, which is why he shows up because Colt like yells for him.

And he was just like there the whole time.

And he's like, please don't yell at me.

Everyone is always blaming me for everything.

Sure, I know where Yoonju went, but it wasn't my fault.

Just leave me alone.

Sure, I know everything.

You're mad at me for not telling you.

He wants to go down to the meatball room and just smoke a blunt, play some pinball.

But there's another scene later where he kind of reveals that he's also sort of a shrewd operator.

This is, yeah, this is what I mean.

He's like, he is, he is that character archetype who is a coward, who is also pretty good at clawing his way into, you know, positions of leverage or positions of power.

Work smarter, not harder, right?

Work smarter, not harder.

It is great to see these chimera ants showing up.

Every episode introduces a new fucked up weird chimera ant, and I don't think Takashi has any intent to stop.

He's just going to keep drawing them.

And he keeps giving them names and also voice actors.

These ants just, you know,

I wouldn't know if it was like a background ant.

But, you know, when each episode brings a new voiced named ant

one of the big surprises of the chimera ant arc i think is that

it has maybe

more talking than any other season

we

have so many characters and they don't shut up they just talk and talk and talk

and we keep we are spending so much time with the ants and To be specific, we're spending time with Colt trying to bring the ants in line.

The sort of second team of ants.

Those are represented by an ant called

Yazan, who is a sexy scorpion lady.

Yazan.

And Leol, who is a buff tiger.

Is that

a buff something?

Did you get that name from the subtitles, Jack?

No, they say it.

They say it in these.

Do they say Leol?

They do.

Jack, what are the first three letters in Leol

Leo?

Uh-huh.

What sort of big cat would you associate Leo with?

That's a good question.

I don't know, maybe a panther or something.

Oh, is this like a uniquely American panther?

I think Jack's messing with you.

No, I've been messing with him.

God damn it, Jack.

Is he a lion?

Yeah,

I think that's the vibe anyway.

Well, I mean, this is a joke from later.

Can I spoil it?

Yeah.

He's a tiger.

He calls himself Leo because he wants to be a lion.

He is a tiger.

Someone calls him out on it and he's like, shut the fuck up.

I just fell for his trick.

You fell for his name was Leoli.

Yeah, you fell for his trick.

Yeah.

And I thought I had briefly fallen for his trick, but I hadn't, but through ignorance.

Leol and Zazan are sort of of the approach where they can say to themselves, well, you know, killing humans is actually pretty good.

Leol has a really great line later where he says,

it's good humans can speak because you get to know exactly what they're thinking as they're dying.

And

that sounds pretty evil, but he is of the ant faction that, at least at this point, is still within, let's bring tribute to the queen.

Right.

I love this

position that the ants have immediately took of like humans are food, so they're nothing.

Like, it's a surprise when they can do anything.

Like, oh, they have guns.

That's crazy.

Oh, they can talk.

Like, oh, how lucky for us.

Which is so funny because, like, the humans like begot the talking ants.

They're so aware of, like, their descendancy from the humans, but not in a way.

Like, Peggy, I think, would obviously be like, of course they can talk.

We speak their language, but the rest of the ants are just kind of just a float through this.

like that kind of thinking.

They don't really.

They're unaware that they are picking up both the strategic

advances of humans and also the sort of like um

the worst aspects of humanity.

Um

yeah, uh, because there's this third faction of ants led by Yunjo, or Yunjo is one of them, who has run off to hunt humans by himself.

He was really

enraged by the attack by the white-clad machine gun wielding people, and he has headed off to hunt ants for himself.

As far as cult is concerned, this is bad for two reasons.

Reason number one,

hunted humans need to go to the queen.

And any humans we just hunt for ourselves are a waste.

Reason number two, why aren't the ants doing what I tell them to do?

The other thing that's funny is that Colt isn't their boss.

No, Colt.

Ostensibly, yeah, and they bicker about this constantly.

But Colt kind of is their boss because he is the first

Chimera ant.

And he's like the first squadron leader.

Is that why he's the first?

Yeah.

Yeah.

because the ants have also invented uh like military hierarchy yeah um

but yeah you're right uh they are um essentially all on the same level even the queen is the one who says squadron leader by the way which i think is really funny yeah that is odd i heard i actually wrote a note later about how i thought it was really notable that the ants are uh picking up humans desire and ability to categorize within organizations but that that note is kind of moot if If the queen, I think the ants are doing that, but if the queen gave them that, although the queen does say that maybe she had some human DNA in her, you know, I don't know.

Hegemony of the food chain.

Hegemony.

Two kinds of hegemony.

Um.

Okay, and now we are essentially caught back up to speed.

Uh, the hunters are in, the ants are bickering and destroying their own organization even as they're building it.

Um, and pretty quickly,

oh,

No, wait, hang on.

I want to see if...

Oh, just a little note here is that the NGL has sent people who they say are translators and intermediaries to follow Kite.

But they're actually spies.

I mean, I'm sure they would translate.

Does anybody know whether or not they would?

Anyone have the flashback that Kite gets talking to one of the border guards?

It's something they've touched on before, but I thought that it really encapsulated the larger issue here.

Kite's just sort of interrogating because Kite's being like, I never expected these people to be any help anyway.

And then flashes to interrogating one of the guards who says,

any sightings of giant insects?

I haven't heard of anything like that.

And even if there were any such creatures, I doubt the citizens of this country would make much of a fuss.

If any of us are attacked or killed by animals, we simply accept it as nature taking its course, nothing more.

And there is something weird going on with this that I would like to talk about a bit later when we learn a little more about the NGL organization and when we say things like it's just nature taking its course.

But let's put a pin in that and come back to that.

Because a pink koala ant in a business suit is threatening a human.

Unbelievable.

I genuinely don't know what to do with this.

Because here's what happens.

A human.

We've seen these scenes a few times, right?

Humans sort of like falling to the chimera ants and having a moment of

terror and fear and like wonder as they are killed.

This scene starts out looking like it's going to be that.

There's a bit of a wrinkle in it in that the chimera ant is a pink koala wearing a business suit and drinking from like a little gourd bottle.

With the voice of like a gangster.

Do you want to hear

some of the celebrities that this voice actor, Kenyu

Horiuchi, is the Japanese dub voice for.

Sure.

Yes.

Brad Pitt, Charlie Sheen, Ben Stiller, Ben Affleck, Ian's Earing, Brendan Frazier, and John Stamos.

Especially for Jesse Katzaboulos and the ABC sitcom Full House.

That's verbatim from Wikipedia.

Wow, wow, wow, wow.

Okay.

And I'm pretty used to seeing odd-looking chimera ants, but there's something about this combination of.

And this guy is drawn like a teddy bear.

He's

super cute, but in a business suit, like a black suit with the meanest look on his face.

And he has mafia baby, too.

Yeah, so I was going to say as well, this is very much like Krillin got eaten.

Also, I feel that like cute animal in a business suit is like a well-worn image

at this point in like children's cartoons or in like, I mean, this is also kind of the boss baby to a certain extent, right?

Like it's a little

reason this has come up before, but if anybody remembers the episode of the cartoon doug where doug keeps having nightmares and in one of his nightmares pork chop his dog is like evil yeah that fucked you up right it fucked me up for some reason and this koala is very much that evil fucking dog from uh doug's nightmares like flipping a corridor leaning against a wall in a leather jacket being like i'm gonna fucking get you

this is also um lotso hugging Bear from Toy Story.

And when we say he's pink, he is Chucky.

It's Chucky.

Yeah, it's Chucky too.

It's like bright magenta, yeah.

He is bright, bright pink.

And there is something about the

This show is a cartoon, but there is something so cartoonish about this ant's appearance, even among alligator ant in a boxing suit or Zazan or somebody like that.

He's uniquely strange even among these freaks.

And it completely wrong-footed me because we haven't seen him before anywhere.

His character design and his affect are so distinctive that you're like, well, this character is important, but he's introduced so suddenly.

And he,

the human sort of in his sphere stands up to him and, you know, is calling him a monster.

And the ants said, and I love this, I wrote this line down.

verbatim because it was the the way it is phrased is so good he says why don't you explain how you and i are different?

Which is sort of, I think, the thesis statement of where we are going, at least for the first chunk of the Chimera ant arc.

But having this business suit ant show up and immediately start interrogating the differences between humans and ants, and him not be part of the cult, Zazan, Yunju crew of main ants, very, very odd.

I don't know.

So he's drinking out of like a gourd.

He's maybe drinking sake out of a gourd.

Yeah, and then he kills this human by spitting.

Am I interpreting this right?

He like...

He spits a sake bullet or water bullet into his head.

And his like eyes and ears explode with water.

Explodes out of every hole in his face.

It's crazy.

It's nuts.

I don't.

This guy's going to come back.

I have to imagine.

You know, this is a character with a capital C.

But in our notes right now,

I just love this guy.

I remember.

I distinctly remember my first time watching

this

season.

Like, this guy shows up, and I just, like, lean forward, and I'm like, okay, I'm starting.

I think I'm maybe starting to get this.

It's great.

It's really, really good.

Colt catches up with the nuance.

Colt's sort of out on the prowl.

Oh, we should say, real quick that Melioron is here, sees the koala kill this guy.

And this is where he has this sort of shrewd talk with the koala being like, sorry, when you said don't move, you were telling me not to move.

Right, I believe it's what it is.

It really makes sense.

Don't move a muscle.

If you die, it won't be my fault.

Seeming like it's talking to this guy, like, don't resist and I won't kill you.

But no, he was going to kill this guy the whole time.

He just didn't want to accidentally kill Melioron,

who basically sort of half-heartedly tries to convince him, hey, you should really stop killing people because it'll get you in trouble and I won't be there to bail you out.

Yeah, to which the koala sort of

continues to stoke the rivalry within the ants, right?

He sort of says, you know, what's this guy doing?

Humans like that one irritate me.

They should be put in their place.

I much prefer to see them running, terrified for their lives.

And then Melieron said, Yesterday you shot a kid in the back while he ran away screaming.

The sub, by the way, says

you shot one, like shot a human, not kid.

They change it to kid for the dub, I guess, to give it a little more sting.

If you enjoy killing so much, you should volunteer as a feeder, which is a fun little dig.

Yeah.

Cult on the Prowl encounters a new ant.

This ant is called Ramot.

Uh, he is huge.

He has green hair.

He is a sort of bunny ant.

He's like a bunny bird.

He's sort of like a bunny bird.

He also, perhaps because of his long ears, sort of gives elf vibes.

He's very elfin.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

And Colt interrupts him taking a child, seemingly to eat.

And Colt can't really tell.

He describes taking children as as worthless, at least explicitly, because he's like,

you know,

they have very low nutritional value.

Yeah.

The nutritional value of humans becomes pretty important.

But it's very possible that he is saying this because,

you know, you know why he's saying this, listener.

Because of being Kurt.

Because he's Kurt.

Because he was a child and because he believes that Chimera Anne shouldn't be killing children.

I love

this play between

Kurt's identity as like a loyal protector, making him,

you know, an excellent worker for the queen, but this sort of like underlying humanity that stops him from killing people

for fun or sport, like seemingly every other Chimera ant, which just sort of kind of reinforces him as the queen's best little boy.

Yeah, it's brilliant.

I wrote down that he he can't really tell tell whether he's saving kids because of his nature or because it's inefficient to take them.

And he's not interrogating that.

No, I don't mean that in the sense that he can't tell because he's looking inside himself and he's like, oh, I don't know if it's this or that.

There's like a real like

textual like cognitive dissonance going on.

It's the um, it feels like it's like the ant brain and the human brain fighting each other in a lot of ways, right?

Yeah, but then compromising to like just create a personality that doesn't have to worry about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

It's so good to me.

I love it.

Oh.

Yeah.

When I say this, I also say it in the

I fucking adore it.

I think it's really deft writing how Takashi keeps weaving in the sort of like instinctual for the for the queen stuff that's going on there with the struggles of these personalities coming out the more and more humans they eat.

Yeah.

It's like because

you could write it like this and it would be so much worse.

You could say, you could do a sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing, right?

You could have Colt clawing at his head and saying, These thoughts, why do they bother me so?

You know, I have these awful guilty feelings.

And instead, he just folds his arms and looks at a Chimera ant carrying away a child and thinks to himself, that's probably inefficient.

And that's great.

My reasons for behaving this way are my own and entirely reasonable.

Pockle gets attacked by ants.

Pockle has a little crew of people.

They, one of them is called Balda.

One of them is called Pecuba or Pekuba.

They're not going to be around long.

One of them is around a little bit, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is our first official ant encounter with a person.

With like a cast member.

Right.

You know?

Yeah.

The ants, we've seen the ants.

I say a person.

God, that's

some narratology going on there.

You know what I mean?

The rest of them are just drawings.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But this is Pockle meeting an ant.

And it's also the first time the ants having covered a little thing called Nen.

And how do they fare against it?

Well, this is notable for two reasons.

One...

For most of these episodes, and in fact, for all of them until a really great moment at the end, the word Nen is never spoken.

This is really good.

We are so firmly in the ants POV here that Nen, this thing that we have been taught about ad nauseum, just gets, you know, the language falls away from us here.

There's even frames where, for the first time in forever, when a character is using Nen, but we can't, not every not every time, but they're using Nen and the camera can't see it because the ants can't see it.

Yeah, it's great.

Uh, Nen obliterates Chimera Ants.

Yeah, uh, Pockle uses his Nen arrows, uh, seven spectrum array

red arrow, which is like a fire arrow.

It looks cool.

It's a pillability.

I'm so excited to see how Pockle uses all the different colors in his quiver.

Well,

it's another systematized Nen power, right?

Takashi is now even doing this without drawing attention to it, that we have Pockle shooting these rainbow arrows.

Last time we heard, Pockle was struggling with Nen.

Do you remember the little,

like, how are the others doing?

Yeah.

He's really figured it out now.

Well, maybe not really figured it out.

Maybe not really.

Yeah,

he's doing a lot better than he was.

And Pockle also has a really good instinct, but maybe came just a smidge too late.

Listen, don't worry.

Pockle is going to survive for, well, maybe a good long time.

Pockle doesn't die in these episodes, as far as we know.

As far as we know.

But not in this scene.

Pockle wisely is like, oh shit, we got to call all the other pro-hunters.

This is serious.

And to your point earlier about Kite being late, Keith, this is Kite's nightmare, right?

It's like showing up and it's already horribly wrong and it's already happened.

And you get the sense that Pockle in this moment realizes it.

You know, like, even Pockle arrived too late.

This is all gone wrong.

We need to retreat and we need to get more hunters.

It was only a couple episodes ago where Kite was like, geez, these ants might even be like two feet long or two meters long.

Like, Kite was thinking of a hive full of things that looked like the very first ants that we saw, or maybe even more like the Chimera ant queen.

And he shows up, and it's like

they've got government.

They're essentially a country.

Yeah,

within another country.

Actually, this is a good idea.

They're country now.

Yeah, they're a country now.

Okay, I'm trying to figure out how best to ask this.

I don't think this is the question that has a spoiler.

I mean, it might have a spoiler answer in the sense of like, there's plot that will be recovered, but I don't think asking it.

Here is how I imagine it would usually go with chimera ants.

Chimera ants show up in a place, they are about

the length of a fingernail and they are still really dangerous.

They are a quarantine level A because they eat species to extinction.

So the chimera ants show up and they just wipe out all the ladybugs in a thing and then they wipe out all the aphids and then they wipe out all the butterflies and then maybe if you're unlucky, if you let it get really bad, they wipe out all the frogs.

And of course that's an ecological disaster in and of itself.

So in come the pro hunters like Kite and Kite's research team and they eradicate the Chimera ant infestations before they start getting really bad with the sort of horrified, unspoken knowledge.

Like, if we ever let this get really bad, theoretically, chimera ants could, you know, the narrator says if they ever ate humans, we'd be done for.

That's what's supposed to happen.

But what has gone wrong here somehow is that a chimera ant queen is two meters long, and we don't know yet why that is, right?

I haven't missed

the assumption that

somewhere there's some human in her.

Yes, yes, that we are actually seeing a little further down the chain.

She references that, right?

Like when they have the thing about names.

Yeah, yeah.

And that she was cast off, cast adrift, and now we're seeing her really digging her heels in to build the Chimera Ant Society.

But that's probably how it would go, right?

In the quote-unquote best possible circumstance.

It's just the ecological devastation of, you know,

insects and small mammals, and then the hunters come in.

It's just all gone pear-shaped because the queen is so big, and that has given them a real advantage.

Okay, time to meet the wild card ants.

These ants are amazing.

There are three of them.

Their names are

Yunju.

Yunji.

Sorry.

Yunji is a...

I think it is Yunju.

I've written in my notes, Yunju, and then I just looked at your thing and saw Yunju.

I think it it was just a typo.

It's Yunju.

Yes.

Yunju is, as Keith said earlier, a snake man centaur.

Right.

Snake man up top.

Horse.

Snake man up top.

He's got a great character design.

A lot of the Chimera ants following

the design of the queen have...

The queen has this very distinctive mark on her forehead, or I guess where her forehead would be if she had a...

human face.

And the ants all have like different variations of this mark.

Yonju has a horrible forked tongue, which he flicks around.

This guy is scary.

He is accompanied by Mosquito, a Chimera ant wearing a surgical mask.

Uh-huh.

And those are the only things about her.

We got to say, Tagashi,

some of these ants, man.

Yeah, make you wear horny.

Mosquito makes Zazan look like just a just a normal dressed lady.

I'm not even talking about mosquitoes.

I think, was it Yonju?

Is that the name of the center guy?

Yeah.

Yonju.

Yeah, horny as fuck.

That is.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He's doing a whole psychosexual thing with a couple of shit.

Especially the way he is sticking his tongue out all the time and licking his lips.

A bunch of the ants come out with slutty underwear, too.

Ramot's got his little fucking underwear that's always fallen.

Looks like it's fallen down.

So charming.

Chi-2 wears booty shorts.

Chi-2 wears booty shorts.

Yeah.

This is like the apotheosis of Tagashi's everybody's just hanging out philosophy.

Of like, all the ants are just kicking it in cool underwear all the time for no reason.

Yeah, Mosquito has a surgical mask.

I didn't know why until I did.

We'll get to that.

He's also accompanied by Centipede, one of my favorite Chimera ants so far.

Centipede is a humanoid man.

with the correct number of legs and then eight arms, but they are descending in size from the top.

So they sort of like fan out.

Yeah, they get slightly

bigger, smaller, smaller, they get slightly smaller as they go down.

Yeah, the vibe is he looks a bit like a sort of like a cobra, except it's just all hands.

And he is animated so well.

The animation team clearly looked at this guy and said, This is gonna be a real headache.

Let's go for it.

He's always like wringing his little hands.

He has a fight later.

He looks great.

Second, we're gonna meet another character with a lot of hand wringing.

Are we?

Yeah, spider.

Oh, oh, God.

There are so many ants, I've forgotten the ants that show up.

But yeah, Yunju's crew, who are the wildcard ants who want nothing more than to hunt and kill and slaughter,

have broken into a weird facility.

This is, well, turns out Kite was right, and that the NGL is in fact a cover for a drug manufacturing operation.

And not only has Yunju found their...

their

factory, he has also found the headquarters of their shadowy ruler, as the narrator comes in to tell us.

And we get a shot of the shadowy ruler.

He's just a figure in a black hood sitting at a chair that is definitely not yet shredded and covered in blood, but will be the next time we see it.

Hell yeah.

Mm-hmm.

And that's the last scene of, that's the last shot is on that chair.

Yeah, do we have anything in 79 before we move on?

I don't think so.

We get a couple new songs right as the next one starts.

Does anybody have...

I don't...

I jumped the gun.

Does anybody have anything?

What Jack has?

Tagashi.

Oh, sorry.

Nope.

No, we both said no.

You go ahead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tagashi is inventing a new thing to do with the camera at the beginning of episode 80, and I love it.

What is the thing?

What is the thing?

Oh, earlier in the show, we had talked about how I was talking about how much I loved the narrator.

And you said to me, there are going to be stretches of this show where the narrator just takes over and it becomes the narrator's show for a bit.

Not in the sense that it's about the character the narrator is, but in the sense that the narrator is just fully taking the reins of the story and guiding us through some stuff.

It's funny.

Yeah.

This isn't even what I was talking about.

No.

Watching this, though, which is the first five to six minutes of this episode.

Yeah.

Also, the narrator just tells us outright.

The shadowy Dawn of the NGL is a man called Gyro.

Or Giro.

I don't know how.

Gyro.

Jack's Gyro in voice acting.

And the narrator gives him like a six-minute narrated backstory.

This is shot in a different art style.

It is very distinctive.

It is a little blunt and

we've recently seen two exact things of this.

But I actually think this one works a bit better.

There is a little more time paid on it.

Characters actually act within this flashback rather than just sort of having like one single swing of a character output.

Yeah.

There is like a little bit of a story.

And I wondered if this is sort of like the first

rumblings in the show's storytelling structure of handing the reins to the narrator and seeing what he'll do with it.

It's it is

so

over the top

is my biggest issue with it.

Like yeah, it's like so what's happening here?

Let's let's let's talk through it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Just the melodrama.

Gyro spends his first eight years of life on a construction site learning to lay bricks and mix concrete before he could speak.

Couldn't speak till he was seven, correct?

He could barely speak before he was seven years old.

He has an extremely abusive father who

guides him not to speak, or rather enforces that he doesn't speak, and also enforces that he doesn't move in his bed so that the wood doesn't creak.

So he has learned to sleep without moving a muscle.

Yeah, when he

I rang the bell here for like Hunter-Hunter is so and I think Shonen is really interested in talking about like specific control of the body.

Um, you know, when do you cry out, when are you able to sleep, when do you move, etc.

Um, and the father says, Don't make trouble for others, you know, sort of teaches him this lesson.

Yeah, he says, uh, that was the one lesson his father taught him.

He never bought him anything, not even a toy, so this lesson was his only gift.

Hey,

does this remind you anybody?

You guys, not to be the boss baby guy about Deadbeat Dads, but does this remind you anybody?

Anyone ever get any?

I don't think it's one-to-one, but there were definitely times where it was like, oh, this is evil, Jing and Gone.

Yeah, yeah, it really is.

I don't know.

I think it's the opposite of Jing and Goan.

I guess it is the opposite because the dad stayed around.

The dad stayed around, and it's so much worse.

It's so much better to be a father who leaves.

and then even as a even as a an absentee father jing left gone many more uh gifts than uh you know telling him to shut up i think the thing that the the only thing that actually ties together with these two is more the

way that it the way that they talk about he how he felt about his dad after he gets his like fever that he cares for him yeah is very it's like oh yeah that's he talks about his dad the way gone would talk about jing except he gets immediately told, like, no, that was the neighbor.

It is another dysfunctional, corrupted father-son, uh, mentor, mentee

relationship.

It's also, uh, and we talked a little bit about this in

with the scissors pervert, uh, Binault, and there was another bizarre, I had a sad childhood flashback on it.

Oh, it was kite.

Yeah, it was kite.

Oh, yeah.

Um, and I think we've mentioned mentioned this a couple of times.

This is so firmly within the realm of melodrama.

And also, it keeps reminding me of like

high Dickensian melodrama to a certain extent as well, where it's like

the revelation here is, you know, he idolized his dad because he cared for him when he had a fever.

And you could absolutely see Charles Dickens getting really excited about, you know,

giving that to the audience in the first third of the book.

And then in the last third of the book, as our character is dying or our character's friend is dying, being being told that wasn't actually your dad that was the neighbor um

which is what happens which is which is what happens um

uh there's a couple songs so this the these two things back to back

um are a really funny kind of interesting musical thing these are the the for for how many new songs we got in the last episode these episodes don't have a ton sorry about last media club plus episode this media club plus episode doesn't have a ton of new stuff, but we do get some new stuff here.

And again, it's like, it's kind of a sick joke.

They play a horrible joke on Gyro here in the soundtrack.

Kingdom of Predators is what plays when they talk about the early years of Gyro's life before talking about why he idolized his father.

They say that to Gyro, his father was like a god, so he never misbehaved because of this memory that he had of him taking care of him when he was sick.

But it's called Kingdom of Predators.

That's where Hisaka's from?

Yes.

Thanks.

This is an ant cue through and through, right?

Like this is.

They do use this a lot, and there is some, you know, there's some narrative thread tying, like...

The sort of...

The horror of the ants to the horror of Gyro's early life and then the horror that he wants to inflict.

He also was sort of eaten and reborn as an evil thing in this flashback.

And speech was something that came to him or was gifted to him late.

And then when he's talking about, or when the narrator is explaining why, even though he was treated so horribly, abused and kicked and forced to stay in his bed anytime he wasn't working and then beaten for staying in his bed too loudly, they played the song understanding.

This is why.

This is why Gyro still loves his father.

It's very just slightly slow and sad.

Yeah.

To create just a tiny bit of pathos for this horrible man, then just to rip it away being like, it was a lie, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gyro kind of comes to realize,

you know,

the lesson that he takes from this is that the universe doesn't give a damn about him.

And the narrator is using I in this sequence.

And, you know, we are firmly in the realm of this sort of like very melodramatic here as the narrator begins to embody this character in the storytelling.

And, you know, Gyro sort of came to realize that his dad, what his dad was actually telling him was, don't make trouble for humans.

And so he came to the conclusion that he must not be a human.

The line here from the narrator, I think, is like the big standout for me in this section.

Like you said, he's sort of quoting Gyro's inner monologue.

If I live, I'll make more money.

If I die, I'll free up a little space.

That's all.

Yeah, I don't think any of this is particularly clever.

And I think it's actually,

perhaps the move that I think is really interesting is that we get all this backstory and then Gyro is presumably killed in favor of the queen.

You know, there's going to be a match cut in here.

What's the match cut for?

Oh, is it uh gyro kills his dad with a hammer?

That's something we should probably say.

Do we get like a load of uh his dad lying down in a pool of blood, and then we cut to gyro's bloody chair in the base?

Um, oh, I mean, that's not a match cut.

We did, but there's there's no, I'll, I'll, I'll give you the match cut.

This is when the bully who reveals the truth

to Gyro.

Um, this is the shot that we get.

Let's see.

Uh, it's a close-up of his eye, and and then the pupil of his eye becomes the earth the universe doesn't give a damn about me is what it says yeah it's great um i i actually really do like how hard we go into this backstory and then it is so cursory to just be like all right and now he's been captured or he's been killed and eaten by yunju

i will literally never show you him on screen outside of this like

this 10 minute like introduction about this very important person and he's dead Not even rendered as a person.

He is specifically rendered shadowy.

I think when his eyes open up in the flashback, it looks incredible.

I thought that I compared this tonally to if anyone's played Metal Gear Solid 4, the like sob stories about the beauty and the beast core that you get after each boss fight.

It really reminded me of that tonally.

Like I thought it was a little silly at times, but at the same time, it ends up being

like

put together visually so well like presented so well

that

it ended up winning me over you know it there is something there's something

interesting

and by interesting I maybe mean not interesting

about like the opposite of that

why is Tagashi like stuck on this thing of like showing a bad guy

or showing someone and then like revealing like that they've had this horrible you know beaten downtrodden childhood uh

like

it's so brief with uh they they compact so much character change into the uh uh

uh uh bin alt

thing

like they show you know a minute and a half of his backstory and then his life is changed when they go back to the future and then we learned about it with kite and how it was sort of kite's avenue avenue out of

that life was like

running into Jing, who happened to notice that all these animals liked him.

And then now this is like a very strange thing to now have happened three times in 15,

in like 25 episodes.

Yeah, I think I know what it's doing here, which is it's saying, this is what the ants are getting.

You know, this is what is going into ants.

Why this mode?

Why this mode of doing it?

Tagashi likes doing these short stories.

Like Tagashi, like

we got the little one,

we talked about how with what's his name, but it not was it Patera?

Who,

wait, who's the name of the rich man?

No, the rich man.

Oh, but it was Batera.

Yeah.

With him and the Benult also, this is very much a second run at the Benult stuff, it feels like.

I forget, yeah, Batera's a fourth one of these.

Yeah, Batera, we get the the little like story about him and his uh it's totally cool that i'm dating her guys don't worry about the age gap

isn't the isn't the the dub actor for buttera also the narrator didn't we learn that yes we did wow see i think so that's crazy that's really funny um i bet this works a lot better on paper

probably

i bet if i read this in the manga it would not feel so jarring and awful that's what we said about the paterra stuff too right we really did yeah um again i don't we i keep meaning to catch up on the manga and then not having the time to given our recording schedules and my life and such yeah i mean we barely had time to keep up with recording the episode yeah um i'm just so curious to see how this is paced to print because i wonder again if this is one of those an entire chapter condensed into five minutes i'm right on the verge of trying to catch up with the manga so we'll see maybe next time i won't be totally caught up but uh my my promise is by next time we record i will have read a chunk of manga.

Yeah.

I mean, my plan is to just pick up at Chimera and read the whole thing.

Damn creature.

I thought about this this might end up becoming a thing where because we've had to reschedule a couple times on episodes that Allie was going to be on, I thought that maybe we could have, as a, as a, as a last resort, we could have an episode of just manga catch up with Allie,

who's been pretty much reading the whole manga while we've been recording.

And

so I thought that that would be a good, either maybe a main feed bonus thing to do.

That's a good possibility.

I don't hate this.

I should say I don't hate this.

I like learning about Gyro.

I love the narrator.

It's just odd that it's happened four times recently, and

it's pretty over the top.

Yeah.

I like pairing it with Yanju.

as this ant that is that so it comes out of this we come out out of this explicitly saying that gyro quote wanted to spread evil through the world with DD, the drug that he makes with the NGL, being the first step in achieving that greater goal.

And we are told that he has been handed over to cult to be taken to the queen.

So all of that is going to be, I think all the time, Keith, about the way you describe Fortnite as paint thinner.

You say it's paint thinner.

Put it all in there and stir it all up.

And

it's a good expression of what I actually kind of find charming about Fortnite at the same time as I find it horrifying.

But

Gyro has been...

Gyro's in the pain thinner, in the and pain thinner.

Stir it all up.

And it just so happens that, you know, Tagashi has taken the time to tell us that what is in that mix is really unpleasant and is really sad and comes from a really painful place.

Just as Colt

died protecting his, sorry, Colt.

Kurt, died protecting his sister and has now been transmuted into this loyal,

haunted by something that he doesn't even begin to understand we can we it it's it's they do such a good job of showing like how bad things can get with the ants by showing you how good they can be with colt

like yes culture is an expression of his opposite yeah yeah you're right

And similarly, the, you know,

it's this thing that we keep coming back to of like, it's not that the ants are becoming more human-like, it's that they're eating evil humans.

Right.

Which is something Kite picks up on right away.

He's like actively worried about this.

We are now so far into the realm, and we're going to get even further into the realm of like, all right, okay, let's see where he's going with this.

That previously, earlier in Hunter Hunter, I would have written down a note, like, oh, good and evil is objective and can be rendered out through ants.

And at this point, I just sort of went, I have more concerning things to think about right now.

I'm just going to take this one as red.

We're going to move with it.

Can you believe how deep into ant shit we are this early on?

Like,

knowing that it's mid-60s episode length?

The thing is,

even taking into account where I think this is going to go long

doesn't even get me close to

it.

It's crazy how fast we got here with how much there is to go still.

Yeah, because I'm like, all right, it's the ant king is important, and nen, ants with nen is important, but that's not fucking 60 episodes.

Where are we going?

We'll see.

Um, Yanjo has taken the fortress, the factory, as his fortress.

He has now gone completely off-piste from the queen.

This is our

sort of like, yeah, he actually says that later.

This is our first official.

The ants have invented society.

The invention of the plane was also the invention of the plane crash.

The ants have also said, actually, fuck this.

What if Rome fell?

Hey, Rome?

Rome's great, but Rome can also fall, and that's even better.

Then a...

God, do we have a name for this ant?

Who?

There's a gun ant.

He's not even...

You haven't even put him in this dock.

He's not in the dock.

He doesn't matter.

Maybe it's Mantisface.

Maybe it's Mantis.

The guy who's just dual-wielding, right?

I'll send you a picture of Mantis, and you can tell me if that's who he is.

You can keep talking.

I'll find it.

Oh, so an ant has discovered guns and is picking up the guns and firing them.

Oh, and it's this guy, the fucking echidna guy.

Yeah, he fucking loves these guns.

He loves these guns, yeah.

And he is just cackling in the middle of the forest.

And there is an amazing shot of Pockle crouched on a ridge, listening to gunfire and cackling.

We get a lot of this, actually.

Lots of distant gunfire and screaming in these episodes.

and pockle uh sees ants flying holding people and he says what the hell is going on here because he doesn't really know the scale of the project you know by this point he knows the ants are dangerous but he has no idea you know this that they have developed an operation i have two uh i have two answers for you uh this character is unnamed in the anime uh the the wikipedia calls him gun toting ant

in the manga he is named his name is gyogon which means fish face or fisheye.

He's great.

Now we're back on the names, I cannot stop thinking that Reiner is

fancy the queen.

Yeah.

I have a quick question that just popped in my head.

I'm so glad.

And

I don't remember if this gets answered.

Is it ever explained how Kite knows so much more about the Chimera ants, whereas like other pro hunters like Pockle, like, who don't know anything?

Pockle is a new, is a new magical beast hunter.

Kite is specifically like a biologist yeah um yeah so it's just it's it's so far at least as far as we know it is just a reflection of kite being a much more accomplished better hunter than Ponko

is a park ranger and kite is a zoologist like like has it has a PhD I think even more specifically when we get to kite I think the implication is that he'd been already out there studying chimera ants for like a few weeks sure

yeah

the ants are clever

and they have they are really figuring out this like systematizing and organizational thing

I say clever there not

how to put this

There is a particular kind of human cleverness that the ants are picking up and one of it is like bring the bodies back and figure out what killed our ants they're doing autopsies yes

Yeah, and they find out that something is out there killing ants with a projectile weapon that is not a gun.

We know what it is and at this point

when Peggy says, if it's a human power, then I'm sure we can learn to use it.

Every single viewer goes, oh, God.

Oh, God.

This is going to be bad.

We get a new song here.

This is when

for,

yeah, Peggy's talking about

describing the soldier ants,

like...

uh describing what they saw which was a guy pretending to fire a gun and then all of a sudden everyone was dying i really like that line he he mimicked firing a gun yeah and uh uh

and then peggy sort of like cautioning colt uh saying the humans real strength is their ability to learn things if humans ever find out that the queen is where we're most vulnerable they'll do whatever it takes to kill her this is where colt says like i'll protect her i'll protect reina uh but while we are Hearing this, we're hearing a new song called Concentration.

This is one of the most important songs.

It's very subtle.

It's like a, it's sort of a, I almost didn't put it on here, but then I realized that it plays 43 times this season.

Oh, wow.

Called Concentration.

This is everywhere.

Yeah, I also noticed this track, this beautiful little piano, just this piano chime in the right hand.

And it's very, it's very much like this.

Actually, you know what?

Why don't we see if there's a...

if it changes further in.

Oh,

there's that.

That's what i was looking for tarano is really good

yeah

great stuff

you gotta write as little music as is necessary that's the goal as little sound as is important and you gotta know what

when you know uh like what

That could have been something more sinister and louder and in your face.

It could have been just as sparse, but more intense and worked not as well.

Yeah.

Really, really, really good composing.

But this is no surprise by this point.

I'm now just excited to see what new stuff

he's going to be writing.

That's the last new thing for these episodes, although I do have a couple other music notes later on.

Pockle, attempting to pull out and get reinforcements,

is attacked by ants.

One of his comrades gets his head punched off by an ant

sort of immediately.

you want to talk about how they shoot this, Sylvie?

Isn't it like

they do.

This isn't.

I might keep getting it mixed up later.

They love to do the POV camera trick thing.

I think

this one is just like a hard cut, though, isn't it?

When

it flies out of the ground, it swings, and then it is a hard cut.

Am I?

What happens?

Yeah, it's a hard cut, but

we're just on like a mid-shot of the guy, not the ant, and the ant's massive arm just comes into the frame and knocks the guy clean out of the frame.

It's really, really weird.

He pops out of the ground behind him.

He's like a wasp.

He's like one of those ground wasps.

Ugh.

Yeah, pops out of the ground behind him and just like kicks him straight out of the frame.

Knocks his head off.

Yeah.

And then he is a decapitated head watching his body die.

It's crazy.

And screaming, they're here or it's here.

I forget what's here.

Yeah, it's here.

Yeah.

Again, horror movie.

Yeah.

Yep.

And then this fight just,

you know, kicks into a high gear really quickly.

Pockle fires arrows, and then his arrows get caught by this pervert.

By this, by

this terrifying Spider-Man that sounds like Yoda and Grover mixed together in the English term.

He does sound like Grover.

Yeah, he sounds extremely Grover.

From Spider Sesame.

From Sesame Street.

Sesame Street.

Thank you.

The spider's name is Pike.

He has big pink eyes.

He has...

He sucks, dude.

He has a butthole that they keep showing the screen.

He has extremely high blushing cheekbones.

He is infatuated with

Zazan, who is his squad leader.

He's simple.

He is constantly crawling around and rubbing his horrible little hands together.

And he's also just catching Nen arrows out of the air.

Yeah, he just catches it and he's like, this is what they couldn't see.

This is the thing.

This is the invisible arrow that they were talking about.

I can see this.

I

also say.

No, I don't think so.

He caught my orange...

Spectrum arrow with the fastest of the arrows.

He puts up his death flag immediately.

He goes, wait, that was my best move.

It's at this point that I remembered that all humans have the capacity to have Nen.

Yeah.

You sure do.

Because I was like, how come the commanders can see Nen, but the grunts can't?

And then I remembered that all humans have Nen.

And so, you know, the ant commanders that have probably been given more human capabilities or more human...

I don't want to use the word DNA because we we are not in that world.

No, we're in the realm of spirit.

Yeah, we are also in the world of phagogenesis.

Yeah.

Sure.

Yes.

Phagogenesis, please.

No,

I listen to Linda.

He specifically calls it phagogenesis.

They all say no one ever says anything other than phagogenesis.

Yep.

I'm allowed.

Listen.

We've already said that.

But I'm extra allowed.

Yeah, and this is concerning.

Ants can see now, but luckily they don't have it yet.

Let's see.

Yes, Pike grabs a soldier and just bites his head off completely.

Yeah, and then he's like, oh, I took a bite by mistake.

He says, I wasn't thinking that I took a bite out of it.

She's going to be so mad of me.

It's a great moment where he's trying to...

She'll never show me her balls.

I'm not going to be a premium subscriber anymore.

They've decided straight away that Pike is going to be the dumbest ant that we've ever seen.

He's just, he's like the dumb, horny old man trope.

Sure, yeah.

Well, he picks up the ant and he's like, I'm going to make sure to take these to the queen.

I'm going to make sure to take these to the queen.

Thank you.

And then in the next frame, bites its head off and goes, oh, no.

My favorite Pike line so far is when he's trying to fight

Pockle and he apologizes because all his hands are full.

He's like, oh, my hands are full.

I can't fight you properly.

He's great.

And then Pockle is taken out by Zazan's tail.

My note here says, this doesn't bode well.

He is poisoned and dragged away.

Ponzu

flees

and manages to send a message out.

Yeah, she got away.

She got away.

And then the gun toting ends.

He shoots her in in the head and eats her.

And then shoots her a hundred more times.

This is the scene.

This is my the vibe shift is complete.

This is not shooting the dead body of it's the shot of

who I've been calling fish face

just emptying the clip into Pacle and like her body twitches.

It's the twitching.

Yeah, it's the twitching.

It's the close-up on the hand with the blood splatter on it.

It's like

yeah, that's not the vibe.

No, no, no.

Yeah, I'm doing a jig on Ponzu's body.

Fuck your brain.

It's really exciting, though.

I remember the first time I watched this scene getting, like, actually kind of upset.

Like, it was genuinely upsetting to me the first time it happened because I wasn't expecting it.

Is this our first, like,

main-ish character death?

No.

No.

We've had.

The troop are.

We've had.

We've had.

can I remember her name?

Pakanoda.

Yes, but they are the villains.

They're the villains.

But also, we had Squalla.

Oh, we did have Squalla.

I would consider the same tier of character as Ponzu.

They supporting slightly higher

and a few of the other.

She's the one we've been with the longest.

It's true.

I think she had a lot less screen time than Squalla.

Yes, but she was one of the first that we met.

I suppose it's true that I mean.

They share a death song.

Is this the same sort of like what you just played?

This sort of like it feels kind of 70s.

Yeah, yeah.

I played it and then didn't stop it.

I'm going to delete that and we'll just listen to it because

specifically Sylvie called it out as

a song that she likes.

This is

weirdly, the song it first plays when Squala dies.

It then plays several times throughout Green Island because it's called Who's the Bomber?

And then it plays now.

It's so nice.

Really interesting music supervising to be like, this is how we score her dying.

I love,

love that bit where it goes to down and back up.

Like that bit.

It's beautiful.

It's at the very end of the song, but I made sure to get that part specifically.

The cackling ant

eats her, saying, hunting is so much fun.

Yeah.

This is this sort of hammer subtlety that I took.

This man nipples.

I think he's an echidna.

Sure.

Whatever, man.

man.

Are echidnas?

We can't talk about this.

We got to keep going.

We got to keep going.

Good news.

Kite has got Ponzu's note.

Bad news.

It was much too late.

Yeah.

He sends Stick and Podungo to warn the hunters, and then Kite, Killiwa, and Gone run away so fast that they scare a horse.

Important line.

If you can't,

I'm not going to.

Isn't it like I'm not going to slow down if you can't keep up or something?

There's a lot of very important stuff, and and a huge difference between the sub and the dub here.

Huge.

In impact, not necessarily in like literal words.

Let me get the, okay.

So

in the

dub,

Kite says, it'll be risky.

Are you sure you want to come along?

But in the Japanese translation, he says, it'll be dangerous.

It'll be dangerous, but could you accompany me?

Oh, that is distant.

That is super difficult.

In the Japanese, he asks them to come with,

not offers to let them stay.

Wow.

And then, yes, if you can't keep up, I'll leave you behind, is what he says.

Yeah, there are also a lot of moments of like, we're professionals, not children.

That's not true.

Two things are true.

I can understand why they are working through this stuff, because it's like core to the way Gona and Kiliua see the world and see their relationship with adults, and the way that Gon and Kiliwa are on,

to put it tritely, a learning journey, is, you know, kind of right at the core of this show.

There is something about seeing Gon and Kiliwa working through their personal hang-ups vis-à-vis whether or not they are being taken seriously, that set against the background of the Chimera ants feels like this is not what we should be worrying about right now.

Yeah.

It reminded me of in the last set of episodes that we watched

talking about like

Jing and his plans and

how much of what has happened has been orchestrated in order to lead Goan to this place

to help him

become like a better hunter.

to help him on his journey to find his dad.

And the thing that I like about this and about the note, like, I was thinking about it when Kite is like looking at the note, the bloody note from Ponzu and being like, uh-oh, I'm pretty sure that these ants are killing Hunter level strong, which is really, really bad news.

And being like, and also thinking of the earlier times

when

I think it's Kite is narrating like the one in a million chance that an ant could become like a real human level threat, that it's like an eventuality, something they always knew could happen,

and that they'd all be unprepared to deal with it, especially that it would happen like in a secluded place like the NGL.

It's like this huge spoke in this idea that like Goan is supposed to be with Kite because this ant thing is not supposed to be what's happening.

Yep.

No one could have ever foreseen

this ant thing.

Well, you can, and that's why you put the quarantine thing on.

But it really is just this sort of perfect storm.

Right.

But it's like,

if Jing wanted Kite to train Goan,

the ants were not part of that plan.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes, I see what you mean.

Right.

No.

Or Jing is more powerful than we could possibly have imagined.

And so it feels like a failure in the moment.

Like, oh, I was supposed to be trained by Kite, and, like, I'm here saying I can't hack and I have to go home.

Like, that it is just a coincidence of the situation that that's maybe

the prudent course.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But no, they go.

They're not kids.

They're pro-hunters.

Yeah.

Kite correctly says it's possible that the rulers of the NGL have already been fed to the queen.

Yes.

Yep.

We see.

Correct.

It's so funny watching Kite like being one step behind at every point.

Not being able to do anything about it.

Anything about it.

This is why it's so important that we keep spending so much time with the ants.

Then when we get back to Kite, he's always like one or two steps behind the threat.

Yeah.

Really, really interesting.

Yeah.

The queen is sitting on a pile of skulls now.

She eats these sort of weird meatball things.

There was a reference to like eating meatballs earlier, and I thought that was a joke, but it turns out that they like process the humans into

so this is this is I think explained more later on.

There's two kinds of food for the queen.

There's like, oh, this guy died.

He's still fresh.

We'll process him into meatballs.

I think that the idea is that they should go alive into those big pods.

And they should be kept alive in the pods.

And then the queen can eat them alive.

Yes.

Otherwise, it's meatballs.

Otherwise, it's meatballs, right?

It was at this moment with

it's possible the rules have already been fed to the queen and then a cut to

cult that I realized that a cult ant also implies a gyro ant

as well.

You know, I think that, you know, in retrospect, that is pretty obvious.

That is where we're getting with the backstory, if not directly.

You know, we're saying the ants, you know, gyro is going into the pain thinner, et cetera, et cetera.

But, you know, we know that cult ants exist, if only one.

And here we have an ant, sorry, here we have a human with a really distinctive backstory that has been fed to the queen.

So, you know, if there's one, why aren't there more?

Yeah, there's not like 10 cult ants running around, or there's not 10 Kurt ants running around.

Kurt is one ant named Colt.

And so in theory, and, you know, we may or may not see this, we're going to get a gyro ant.

And that's going to be really scary because

we know what gyro's,

we know the crucible out of which gyro came, and we know the philosophy that he plans to turn on the world.

What if the Chimera Ant King is Gyro?

And it becomes

Colt

as the like.

Because then you could play a story of like Colt as the loyalist foot soldier

coming to realize that his leaders are evil and being challenged in his own loyalty in that moment.

And I think an efficient way to get there is make Colt the brave, sorry, turn Kurt into the like brave foot soldier type and make Gyro, the leader of the NGL, the Ant King.

We'll see.

Episode 81 begins and Kite and Killiwa are running in the same gate.

We have a couple of like Kite and Killiua are the same person, or you know, not literally maybe, but like Goan and Jing, you know, Kite and Killiua, and we see this right at the beginning of episode 81, where Goan is running with his arms by his sides, you know, he's doing that like Goan freaks jog, and Kite and Killiua are running with their arms behind them.

And I thought that was just a really nice scene.

Yeah, they're Naruto running.

They're Naruto running, but it hadn't been invented yet.

Back in those days, they called...

Naruto is post-Hunter Hunter, right?

Well,

it's post the and the manga but before the anime right so it shouldn't really be called kite and killua when they run to try and hunt the ants lots of this is a very anime way to run it's in a lot of stuff even song of the hedgehog runs this way oh i just liked that uh kite and killua were doing it yeah oh yeah i like that too

um

The ants, however, it's so funny how Tagashi keeps saying, no, no, no, but let's focus on the ants.

Yeah.

Well, we got we have rare humans to talk about.

oh we do oh oh right i see i thought you meant we have a rare sequence of talking about humans no we do have rare humans to talk about in the very at the very end of 80 uh zazon

feels pacel's nen and says uh uh that he has nutritional value

the uh hot scorpion lady yeah uh that that pacle has the the nutritional value of a thousand humans um and then they sort of expound on this the big most of the opener of the next episode is Zazan explaining about rare humans

because the queen has like asked them to double their quota.

I really like this because everyone is sort of mad about the queen saying, or not everyone, cult is fine, but a lot of the ants are kind of being like, oh, it was such a chore bringing in 50 ants a day.

50 humans.

50, sorry, 50 humans a day.

It was such a chore.

Now we have to double it.

Like, that's so many people.

It's a ton of work.

Meanwhile, we know that they're just like killing.

Well, we learn more later, but they're just killing humans for fun, not bringing them in and not kind of in towards the quota.

So basically, they're mad that like bringing in more humans is eating into their murdering humans time.

Son of the bar.

And then there's really Colt is the only sort of truth stickler.

Peggy is probably also one of them.

Bihorn.

Behind.

Oh, yeah.

Byhorn, who is a huge ox.

Just an ox, no other, just sort of like a minotaur, kind of.

It's really funny when the chimera ants seem to not really do the chimera stuff.

There's a chimera ant later who's just a blonde girl with sharp teeth.

And I kept waiting to be like, but what's her weird ant thing?

And it might be hidden under the hat, but for now, she's just a blonde girl.

It's so funny how it's a total crapshoot how much of anything any ant is going to be.

Sometimes you get a full koala.

Sometimes you get a full ant.

And anything in between.

A human bug ant snake with wings?

Sure.

We do one that's just a dog?

Conceivably.

Let's hope there's one that's just a dog.

Just like walking on all fours, like a golden retriever.

Care that's a golden retriever.

Yes.

We saw a different kind of dog.

It's true.

We saw two of them.

We saw two different kinds of dogs.

No.

No.

We saw Spot and Rover.

We saw Spot and Rover.

We'll get to Spot and Rover.

It is so funny to me and so

I think it is such a

enjoyable, imaginative thing to do with your magic systematizing like Nen to suddenly introduce a new group of people who think about it in a completely different way.

To my point, we have heard a lot about the Nen wheel.

We've heard a lot about your position on it.

We've heard about, you know, Karapaka's out here making nen contracts and everything.

The ants don't know anything about nen.

They don't even know that people have it.

They say that they call them rare humans or rares, and they understand nen only at this point as an expression of nutritional value.

Yep.

And that is, it's so cool to me.

I love that they call them rares like it's a trading card.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

They don't really know where they come from.

They just know that they don't.

One of the ants later is just like, well, we'll just get loads of rares and the queen will love that.

And everyone everyone has to be like, we've only met one rare than that.

But yeah, after all this business with Nen, it essentially getting broken down to the calorie count on the back of a packet of snacks, as far as the ants are concerned, right?

It's great.

And it says something mystifies it.

It says something about what.

I mean, I guess it could say one of two things.

One, that like somehow nen makes the meat of your body extremely calorically dense, which I don't think is true.

I don't think that's true.

Or It's a life energy.

Or that the chimera ants are like

eating life force, not necessarily the magic.

I think that's absolutely what's happening.

But it's great.

The ants are now getting very excited about rares.

Bihorn, who Pike calls Lord Baihorn, they are already getting like

honorifics.

I want to say real quick that the reason that most of them are excited is because they're like, oh, we can work for one day and then fuck around for 10 days.

Yep.

Invention of the plane, invention of the plane crash, the invention of working, also the invention of

slacking.

Yeah.

Fucking around.

Yeah, Colt is like, I'm excited to feed my queen.

Everyone else is like, I'm excited to have a week off.

Colt is so likable.

It's like you said, by making him like this sort of noble soldier, but also making his...

If they made him being like a workaholic stickler really sincere or no or really um

it could have been so much more annoying than it is instead his sincerity either comes across as noble or just kind of funny uh like he's the only one clinging on to this game uh long after everybody else has moved on to something else right um i think cult is great the extent to which the ants can be kept in line and fulfilling their quotas is basically the extent to to which they are intimidated by cult and find hunting humans fun, not necessarily killing them.

There's an amazing joke later that I didn't write down.

And I'm glad that I remembered it, otherwise, it would have completely disappeared.

The ants don't have time in their work schedules to organize like full team meetings, so cult has to go out and handle them all individually.

And I love that they've like their office is falling apart because they're not.

They've invented the middle manager.

Yes.

It's great.

Yeah.

Bihorn tries to strangle Pike, the creepy spider ant.

Generally, I feel like the names are pretty distinctive, but as these ants just keep getting more and more, you know, more and more ants keep getting introduced, I'm trying to remind the listener every time we keep coming back to them which ant that is.

Right.

Thankfully, a lot of them are named.

It's funny.

I think that some of them like heard that they're doing names, but they're not particularly attached to their human identity.

So they're like, I'm kind of a mosquito kind of looking thing.

So I guess my name's Mosquito.

But then some of them were like, I'm Peggy.

Yeah, I'm Ramot.

Pike escapes from Bihorn by shooting his horrible web out of his asshole.

And he kind of scuttles away across the sea.

Slows up on the Sphincter.

Yeah.

Like, I cannot emphasize enough that every time we get this cut,

for like two fucking frames, basically.

I've got to say it is a really funny sphincter, but it is not technically an asshole.

Yeah, that is that's why I switched up.

It's a

important to be correct.

Spinnerat.

No, the spinnerats are the little tiny little hats that they have, right?

I don't know.

I don't know enough about spiders.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah.

I think it's an asshole now.

There is something here that I actually really liked.

Oh, he's got that mark above his ass.

He's got the

little diamond things.

Oh, God, really?

Yeah.

We are never shown, really, where the main body of the ants sleep or where they hang out outside of the meeting rooms or where they eat.

And so it produces this effect where the ants just keep appearing and disappearing even to each other.

Over and over, we have these meetings where another ant will just like will, you know, the chameleon appeared on the wall or like Pike will not pike colt will just walk into Leol's, you know, meeting room or something.

It makes the ants feel like they are constantly popping up out of nowhere, even to themselves, even within their own organization.

There's like there's just like a camera in the office, and we're just watching the ants come in and out.

Colt's just doing Jim Halpert face at the camera every time he finds out somebody else has eaten a human.

That's very funny.

It's I meant office, not the TV show.

I will say,

I can't believe Melorion put Colt Stapler in jello

the way the ants are written and the way this sort of like

burgeoning organization inside the ant fortress is developing really makes a lot of the phantom troop stuff seem kind of rudimentary it's like a it's like a different they're doing a different thing you know the York New City is like a

revenge story and hostage situation much more than it is about the internal relationship of the Phantom Troop and in fact that is really really only what it becomes towards the end.

You know, for the majority of that, there's not much like we can tell the Phantom Troop care for each other.

We can tell that there's some weird internal politics, but that doesn't really become the focus of the thing until it does at the end there, you know?

Whereas these ants are just, there are all these weird little orbiting circles of resentment and obligation and work and interest

among just this crew of ants.

I just have to say for the record that Colt is not Jim.

Colt is Dwight.

Oh, you're right.

Yeah, yeah.

Colt is Dwight.

Didn't I say that Colt Stapler got put in?

No, you did.

You did.

I said Colt made Jin Halpert face.

I thought that that was both of you that said that.

No, no, no.

I would never.

I think Melorion is Jim because he's secretly a show.

Who is?

I said Melorion.

Maybe Leo.

Leo, yeah.

Melorion is a bit more like a million.

I'm doing an extended riff about a show I hate.

Is Ryan.

That's who Melorion is.

Is Ryan, which one?

Stanley.

Stanley is

let's see.

Stanley is

small bear.

Small bear.

Sure.

Sure.

Sazon is Pam.

Tina is Mindy Kaling.

Sure.

Koala's Creed.

Gyro is Ricky Gervais.

That's okay.

That's a pretty good one.

That's really funny.

Okay.

I've never seen The Office, so this is all

blessed.

Yeah, don't worry about it.

I've seen bits and pieces of it.

Yes, it is the most fine show ever.

I think

for the most part, it has aged from being

pretty good to being

fine/slash really annoying.

It's insufferable.

Fuck it.

I'll be the one who's a hater.

People who have watched The Office a million times are the people who are insufferable.

The show itself is fine.

I've tried going back.

I don't like it.

I stand by it.

I stand by memory.

Same.

I also don't know.

I haven't watched it in 20 years.

I only have my memory.

I have no strong feelings about The Office.

No, I don't have.

The thing that is insufferable that I have really negative feelings of is Parks and Reck.

That's the show that.

That one's even worse.

Yeah.

That show is insufferable.

That one's actively evil.

meanwhile ramot is eating horses um ramot remember him he is the bunny elfin uh tall you know that sounds like i'm describing a nice guy but he's actually pretty fucked up no he's the joker he's the joker he's the one who's tried to branch you tried to take that child and cult stopped him for reasons that he's not going to interrogate yeah don't worry about don't worry don't worry about that um ramot is growing to resent cult in a major way uh and it's just chowing down on horses he's He's eaten an entire stable.

He's meeting resentment with resentment because Colt is not happy with Ramart either.

Yeah, Colt is not happy with Ramart because, and this might not have come through, Ramart has sort of emerged as exemplifying the

ethos of hunting that Colt thinks is not only abhorrent but inefficient, which makes it even worse.

Right.

And he's also not got an outlet for that evil because Colt is the only squadron leader that doesn't tolerate any murder.

Yeah, all of them.

There's a great scene later where, and we can sort of we can talk about this scene now, when Colt goes to see Leol, the tiger or the lion,

and basically says, people on your squad are eating humans.

What are you going to do about it?

And they're like, everyone eats it.

Eat more humans.

Yeah, eat more humans.

This isn't a big deal.

This is when we get the, it's good humans can speak because you get to know exactly what they're thinking as they're dying.

Yeah.

It's uh

banger line.

Um, yeah, and and this is uh this is you know all ties into why cult is not happy with Ramart.

Ramot senses the nen of kite, killiur and gone arriving as they stumble upon first his trail of blood from horses and then three horses speared onto trees, uh, like uh shrikes, which are a type of bird that hang their prey on uh thorn

between that and the caloric intake thing with the nen users.

It you guys are are giving me a lot of just like Hannibal thoughts.

Yeah,

yeah, fair they call him the Minnesota Shrike.

It's a serial killer name.

I need to watch Hannibal.

Hey,

we should think about that

Yeah, this is great.

This is another one of these moments where the show from this for me was like a real there's this image of like the setting sun and then these three horses speared on the trees that was you know, it's striking.

This is not a kids' show.

It might still be being sold as a kids' show, but it ain't.

Yeah.

Again, just a reminder to people who are not super familiar with

Shonen or the way that these are

made and sold and bought and read.

This is a magazine that is like targeted from like 8 to 18 year olds.

So, and boys specifically is who talk about it.

Targeted, but consumed by consumed by even wider of an age range.

Yeah.

But like,

one of the reasons that Shonen can be so childish and then also graphic and violent is because they're like the sort of baked-in idea of the genre is that it's 8 to 18, which again is an outrageous age range.

It's like

almost nothing I can think of that's suitable both for a nine-year-old and an 18-year-old.

You know, there are instances of this happening elsewhere.

I think about

Poltergeist, which is directed by Toby Hooper, who is a really distinctive, well-regarded.

Is Toby Hooper still with us?

I don't think he is.

I'm not sure.

I don't think so, but horror director.

And he directed Poltergeist, which was like a ostensibly light-ish horror film that wasn't going to hit a hard R rating that families could come and see.

But, you know, they get a man who has a horror pedigree to design it.

Toby Hooper is, of course, design direct.

He is most famous for writing and directing the Texas Chainsaw Massacre back in the 70s.

And of course, what ends up happening as what is happening here is that Toby Hooper makes in Poltergeist a fucking scary movie.

When I watched Poltergeist, it was the last horror movie I watched for

I want to say 13 years.

Yeah, I feel like the thing people say about Poltergeist is always, I watched that when I was a child and it scared the shit out of me.

That's the one with the tree in it, right?

It does have a tree in it.

It has a horrible clown.

It has

the TV, the static on the TV there here.

Poltergeist is great, and I recommend going back to it.

They remade it recently, and I am fascinated by that.

I haven't seen it, and I'm sure it's probably not good, but I want to figure out why.

But yeah, you know,

trying to hit that age group of like, we want to make a horror movie that young people can see with their families, and the man we're going to get to do it is Toby Hooper.

They square off.

This is their first ant.

And almost immediately, Kite.

Oh, there is something important that we did not note here.

Oh.

Which is that

I'm forgetting his name already because I'm just thinking of him as Rabbit Man.

Ramot.

Ramot.

Ramot, yeah.

He can conceal his presence.

Yep.

Yep.

Hey, like, who grace do we conceal his presence?

Exactly.

Who do we know learned how to conceal their presence without knowing about Nin?

Yeah.

Gone.

That sure was our friend Gone Freaks, yeah.

It is.

Just want to point that out.

It was staring me in the face the whole time.

I was so worried, and if I'm honest, I am still worried about the ants, the ant queen eating people who have Nen.

But I had completely neglected the fact that Nen is just a property of everyone.

Yeah.

And the ants are everyone.

Do you remember what happened in the last episode we recorded where you had a guess that the ants were gonna learn nen and how they were gonna learn it yeah and your guess was that they were gonna eat people with nen and then birth nen ants yes and i think that that is still going to happen but i think that the much cleverer much scarier thing is it's just like it's the exact way that our best friends learned it they got punged with nen

yeah

It's just, it's just, it's just there.

So,

there's this great French horn cue that starts playing, sort of like a very stately cue as the crew stare down their first ant.

Uh, really good, weird-looking ant to be their first ant.

Two back-to-back uh York New City songs, uh, Those in the Next Midnight plays, and then uh, as for Those Outlaws, Unrivaled Strength plays.

Uh, and I have both not enough songs to start with as for a deal.

Uh, let's see, here we go.

Here's uh, Those in the Next Midnight.

I love this because it fits right in with the other sounds we've been hearing in this season.

It sounds sort of ethereal and spooky and horror and horror sci-fi kind of tinged.

Is this another like sound of the fucking season?

Of Yoknu?

No,

this is so deeply into Antarcticant for me.

Is this the horn you're talking about, Jack?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

That's enough of that.

We'll talk about the other one later in the fight.

Kite immediately steps down.

He says, first his nen burns purple, which was great.

He like...

He looks like he's going to go into a Zaldic shadow step here for one second, which I thought was really nice.

I'm always on the Kite and Killiua train of like the parallel there.

And as he like drops his hands very slowly to his sides and burns in purple Ren, I thought he's going to do a shadow step.

He is a very, he does have a very similar look to Illumi as well.

Oh, it's Gitterakla again.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck.

It's Illumi.

It's been Illumi this whole time.

And weirdly, he's nice now.

Do you remember how important Gitteracher was?

Man.

Oh, it's a good show.

But yeah, then he steps back.

He basically says, this is a weaker ant and hands it it over to Gonan Killior as a test.

And then there is an amazing cue that starts.

It's just this frenetic, intense,

chittering string cue as the fight begins.

So this is,

as for those Outlaws Unrivaled Strength, this has, I think, Jack's favorite Hirano thing, which is a ton of really good drums.

And then it goes into some other cool sounds.

How How about that, huh?

God, it's great.

It's like two or three different sets.

I was going to jump forward to more stuff.

Oh, maybe I don't have to.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's it.

It's like a cowbell plague.

It's so good.

This is so good.

The breadth of sound design in the show is

unbelievable.

The ways that the sound just leaps into all of these different genres and almost back to back.

One second ago, they were playing fucking John Carmen

84 music.

Yes.

Yeah.

It's great.

But, you know, you're right.

It is distinctive.

But I think that there are also hallmarks, really clearly identifiable hallmarks.

You know, Hirano is really good at writing drums.

Yes.

He really likes this like high-drive electric guitar part.

Well, he's a guy that goes back to the well, but he has like seven wells.

And he's really good at them, you know?

Yeah,

he's a great composer.

The shounen fighting here is kicked into a high gear when they are fighting the Chimera ants.

They're fighting someone bigger than them with a humanoid, but not fully human silhouette.

And so both here and in the fight in the next episode, it is really exaggerated.

Lots of like big leaps, lots of like, you know, the balletic fighting of the fight with Genthru that they were taught by Bisky sort of falls a little bit into the background as we see Gonan and Killua just, you know,

I was watching and I was like, Gon does fight like Pikachu.

He does.

They're also like in like using moves territory.

Yeah, Killiua has a ball of, conjuges a ball of lightning and then shoots a beam from his finger.

And then there's a really great, like,

second and a half, two seconds of another adult hunter being impressed and surprised at um a killer is nen

yeah uh also was it is it evil people shoot beams out of their fingers that's what we've learned

dragon balls it's mouse

yeah fingers is just a thing that i think you've forgotten that it was not that a few times wait no chaotsu shoots a beam out of his finger Chaotzu's not evil.

In Dragon Ball 1, it's a little bit evil, finger

like I'll give I'll give

finger in Dragon Ball is more evil than palm what the what finger in dragon ball is a little more evil than palm

yeah but mouth is the most evil right

yeah no that's true that's true and just before they can kill him they kick him into the sky with

guns rock uh and then cult snatches him out of the sky he gets goosed by his own boss yeah he got gooser

um

yeah he's very mad he is very mad but we have a brief reminder that we are and will always be on the shonen power treadmill as uh kite says you just need a bit more experience if you want to get stronger this is a perfect opportunity uh which is you know yep

yeah i really like they fail the challenge technically but kite says basically you pass your attack just now they weren't that bad

then he says from here on out in victory or defeat it'll be hell and this is again like hallmarks of war storytelling right you know like uh whether or not we win or lose this is going to be awful and we are descending into it now one of it's so important i think uh you know it's a little ham-fisted the the the line in episode 79 i think where kite is like like this is where the hunt begins or whatever is that he says.

But it is, this is like the first real hunt that they're on.

Like, Goan is on his own hunt, I guess, and Kropico is on a sort of a hunt.

But, like, this is a capital H Hunter Association hunt.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In a real way, this is like the most official answer to what is a hunter that we've got.

A hunter is someone that like

enters a country during an emergency, pulls you can't kick me out, hunter rank, and then tries to stop a disaster.

Yeah.

In a way that's very dangerous.

Ramoute is furious, and I want to give a huge shout out to Ramot's vocal performance here.

Really good.

He is spending this whole episode screaming,

screaming all his lines, sometimes just screaming wordlessly.

He's been really badly wounded by Gonan Kiliwa, not killed.

His video is good in both, by the way, way, if anybody.

Yeah, I'm listening to his Japanese video.

But this actor is not playing this one note for a character who has to be screaming all the time.

He is moving through these like

guttural, raspy, sort of like the sound is just burbling out through his throat.

He is bursting into coughing fits.

He is dragging words out.

He's juddering up and down in pitch for like a really demanding vocal performance.

And I think it works so well because Ramart is going through it.

I think later

Colt says that he is in critical condition,

which seems pretty accurate.

But now the word has gotten out that rares exist.

And the rival squads are also hunting them.

Colt hears about this and he takes his usual cult line.

This is wrong and it's inefficient.

So stop it.

Yeah.

Yeah, this is, I think we talked a little bit about this earlier with the conversation with Leo,

where Leo lies and says, yeah, yeah, yeah, I'll definitely not hunt any rares.

You can tell Ramot this, and maybe it'll stop him from being an asshole.

And then Colt walks away.

It's like, as if.

Yeah, Colt says...

to himself and to Chitu, who is sort of his weird friend, Cheetu is so strange.

He is like a cat ant, but he's also been sort of stapled onto the body of a stick bug.

So he has this cat face and sort of costuming.

But whenever you get him in a wide shot, he is just like spindly and gangly, and he has this really odd, like,

massive stride because his legs are too long.

He's like a really good example of the chimera bit of the chimera ant, where he is actually one kind of weird creature smashed into another weird creature.

And then Colt says, opinions aren't necessarily a bad thing, but too many of them are selfish.

I love this guy.

This is also kid logic.

I could so clearly hear Kurt saying this.

You know, like an adult has said to him, when you're a kid and you're figuring out, like, oh, adults keep saying to me that it's good for me to have my own opinion, but they also keep saying that I shouldn't be selfish and like, I can't be rude to my sister.

And I felt like there was a bit of that bubbling up here.

Yeah.

Um,

uh, Chi-Chu, another one who is actually maybe the closest.

A lot of the dub voices aren't like doing an approximation of the original Japanese VO.

Chi-Tu kind of is.

Like, Chi-Tu has, like, in both versions, a sort of like weird, bubbly,

like...

He's almost...

He just feels like...

If he wasn't in the NGL, he might have been in a boy band or something.

He's kind of a himbo.

He's kind of a himbo.

He's got like.

I stand by the Sonic the Hedgehog comparison.

He also sort of Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sonic is my dumber.

He's like a dumber Sonic the Hedgehog.

Yeah, he's a dumb.

He's like a.

He's Sonic from Sonic Underground.

He's like, what if Sonic had the personality?

What if Sonic and Knuckles have the same?

We're like, he's Archie Comic Sonic.

Oh, sure.

He's Archie Comic Sonic.

Whoa.

Archie Comics Chimera Antoq.

Media Club Plus Archie Comics Sonic.

It's not happening, but it's definitely huge.

No, we can't.

Oh, no.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We'd need a...

To get me to go back to that, we'd need Extreme Paycheck.

You don't want to

read about the guy who compares the Sonic comics to the Holocaust?

That's not what you're here for?

Who does it?

The writer of the Archie Sonic comics.

Ken Penders?

Yeah, Ken Penders.

Don't worry about it.

What about your bracelet that says do it for Princess Sally?

No, it says do it with Princess Sally.

That's what Sonic's next bracelet says.

Not mine.

Not mine.

Yeah, no, no, not mine.

No, no, no.

I gotta go.

At the beginning of the episode, you asked me which my favorite Chimera ants were.

And, you know, now we've kind of spelled out a bit about how the ant um faction structure is working i can say more explicitly that i think why zazan and leol are so interesting to me is that they are ants who are trying to in a very um

uh relatably human way split the difference between well yeah sure i mean we are working for the queen but a we would like some time off and b could we not just kill and eat humans in the meantime yeah and there's sort of like politicking yeah and that kind of like weird semi-justification that isn't quite the hard-nosed sticklering of cult or the complete off-piece, you know,

madness of

Junju and Ramot.

Junju.

And Ramot, yeah, I think makes them really fun characters.

As the episode ends, Goan has found the factory seized by the ants, which we know is now, we know is the headquarters of

Yunju.

And then the closing credits go la la la la la every time.

It's great.

The little song, it's really, really good.

I've been...

I love that song.

Is there a Hunterpedia version for Chimera Ant?

Or we just go straight into credits always?

There is not.

Yeah.

There's nothing like that.

There's nothing like it.

It's just from next time on.

Wow.

I asked because I didn't get Huntipedia's, or I didn't get the Greed Island Encyclopedia.

Yeah, sorry.

Chimera Ant is serious.

We don't have time for like jokey bullshit.

I would love it if we did, though.

Chimera edge is a little bit different.

I would actually love that.

And then you show me the end to the wrestling singlet.

I have a practical answer, which is that I think they just decided that they need every second.

That I think is true.

Yeah.

They need that time

to have more stuff.

And we actually see bits of it.

As we move into the next episode, there are some like slow horror beats that in a shorter time, you would cut or you would you'd um constrict them and they wouldn't hit as hard another thing we have shorter of it's you know it's minuscule it's it's seconds uh you know 10 seconds here 25 seconds here but for a for a 22 something minute long thing it's meaningful but the little recaps at the beginning are getting shorter as well oh interesting i don't watch those but that that would also make sense um i i've noticed it because i've just i skip over them and i can see on the bar how long i'm skipping

Can we take five minutes before we begin the next episode?

We totally can, yeah.

Episode 82.

Episode 82.

As Goan looks out over what the narrator calls the cliff with peculiar openings, I feel like, again, the particularly unsubtle, but fairly enjoyable.

thing that they've been working here comes into play where we have these structures that look like ant-like structures ant hills or termite mounds or things like that, but were actually built by humans.

What's the difference between humans and ants?

Who can say?

Not a lot.

Not a lot.

It's a short list.

It's not a lot.

Here's one

of the

weird little claws.

Yeah, and that the ants figured this out 46 minutes ago.

Whereas the humans have been like

figuring that stuff out for, you know, longer.

They enter this cliff with peculiar openings, and

this episode turns into um

uh what's that great Jojo episode that Sylvie, you had us watch where they go into that haunted house.

Oh, it's the Nijimuro brothers part three, right?

And if you would like to hear that, you can go to friendsatthetable.cash and support us on Patreon, where we talk about Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, we talk about Dragon Ball, we talk about Dragon Ball Z, and we also make a bunch of additional bonus content that you might be interested in.

But I do bring this point.

I can't emphasize enough how much you won't regret spending $5 there.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I bring this up not just as an ad, but to say this turns into

a horror movie.

We have a little bit of

sensing things in this abandoned base.

There's nobody there.

Well, abandoned.

Abandoned by the humans because they were all taken.

And then the confirmation that, you know, this is a drug operation.

They're making DD here.

And

Kite is almost a Karapaka-like figure in that he is able to say with some authority, here's what I think is going on here.

You know, he says, I suspect that the NGL leaders know about this

operation, know that it's all a front, but the followers do genuinely believe it.

And again, this is, you know, this is like internal faction stuff.

Who actually believes what they're doing and who is doing it cynically for

another purpose?

But then there is an awful dragging and moaning sound as we know some ants are going to emerge from the tunnels.

But before the ants emerge from the tunnels, something else emerges.

What emerges?

It is two men,

two naked men.

Oh, yeah, Spot Drover

all fours.

This is an image

that is as stark and unpleasant as any we have had in this show.

These are two older men naked with chains around their necks, begging for their lives and walking on all fours.

Tears streaming out of their eyes, snots streaming down their noses,

rolling, they're dripping.

They look like the fucking guy that got shot with the water from Koala.

Just exploding liquid everywhere.

Tagashi, horny as fuck, right in this shit.

Oh, yeah.

But this was also a big Jungie Ito moment for me of just just like something ito is really really good at and you can check out um austin cameron and michael on the show shelf by genre on the ranged touch network where they're talking about ito right now is he will pace his mangas

to guide you towards these like awful full panel revelations like grotesque revelations you'll turn the page and you'll be met with this just this massive awful image and this image shot from the ground looking up at yunju with these two men in front of him who he calls the dogs.

It was like this real Junji Ito ass.

Look at the gross thing that I've drawn for you.

Image.

One of them starts begging, and he says, You're a dog, remember?

And crushes his head with

his hoof.

Yes.

This is Tagashi and head trauma again.

Like straight up, like real

like curb stomp vibes to this.

It's really gnarly.

Yeah.

And then

the other guy begs for for his life.

And

Goan goes to save him, and Kite holds him back.

And to his credit, Goan stays back.

I don't...

What do you think is being made with this moment of Goan...

Because I could definitely see a version of Goan that would just leap forward and try and save that guy.

He did.

Oh, no, but then would leap forward following Kite's,

you know.

saying, stop, don't do that.

Oh, sure.

I think it says a lot about how he feels about Kite.

That Kite can override the Goan that we've seen a hundred times.

This is where I called him Qui-Gon Jin.

I say Qui-Gon Jin stops Goan from saving the human dogs.

He might also be afraid of

this ant.

And this is when we have Kite say the line, you know, consuming malicious humans has had an effect on these people.

They've always been aggressive, but consuming malicious humans had an effect on them, and it's made them even more evil.

If we don't deal with them here, there's no telling how many will be killed.

And this is Kite basically saying, don't get yourself killed now because you need to be able to kill ants before you die.

Yep.

Win or lose, this is going to be hell.

Yeah.

It was hell right away.

It was hell right away.

They split into three to fight.

Killua goes to fight

Mosquito.

Goan goes to fight Centipede, the man with the eight legs.

And Kite stays back to fight Zazan.

This is exciting.

You know, it's always fun.

And we've seen this in the show several times.

And we also saw this in

Dragon Ball, right?

The master figure finally, you know,

preparing for a fight.

And we're going to see the master fight.

Kite is fighting Junju.

Oh, sorry, I said Zazan.

Oh, yeah, no.

Kite is fighting Junju.

Opposite corny monster.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How do we want to talk through these fights?

Do you want to just start?

I think we should do it in the order that they do it and resolve them in the order they resolve them.

Okay.

Because the first fight that we get anything of is Goan's fight with

Centipede.

I'm pretty sure.

Yes.

Yeah.

He gets a couple blows in.

Goan gets a couple blows in.

There's like some classic shonen fighting, fists flying all over the place.

And I think Goan even lands a rock punch and it like really doesn't do anything.

And he says,

damn, these guys are tough.

They have hard shells of insects and the agility of humans, which is just a funny thing to say out loud to me.

It's like these guys are some sort of like chimera ants.

Oh, how strange.

Meanwhile, oh, the animation on this centipede, side to and if we thought his animation was good when he was just hanging around and waving his little arms around, in the fight, it's brilliant.

His arms are like rippling.

At one point, he's like, I'm going to do my 20 billion punch that no one can block.

And sure enough, Gohan has some trouble with it.

Well, he dodges it.

He dodges that one.

Oh, does he dodge it like that?

I think he can't block it, but I can dodge it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Killiwa, stepping in to kill Mosquito, says, it's been a while since I flipped my switch on.

And I thought to myself,

I was cheering.

I was popping so hard, man.

I was like standing up out of my chair.

This is Zelda Assassin shit, right?

This is a week.

Yeah, Assassin Kilua with his weird snake arms.

He says, I'm going to, as soon as I turn the switch, and then you see him like look down and look back up, and it's like evil killer Kilua.

He's going to that place.

He literally flips a switch like with his head and walks in.

Yeah.

Killua Zeldic AMV.

I bet I bet that that

space, that genre space, flourishes.

I bet if you've ever wanted to hurt some butt rock, I bet you could find some there.

This is what I'm saying.

I obviously can't look at them because it's going to be all of Killiwa's, all of Killiwa's moments, including when he gets killed by the Gruntler.

But

just take it out by the dog that eats Killiwa.

Oh my god, when they're on the

17-year-old Kiloa AMV, hold on.

Oh, shit.

You found it from 1999 AMA.

Oh, and I can see that one.

Yeah, this is peak.

This is peak.

Hold on.

Hold on.

Wait, vet it, vet it.

Make sure that I can see it.

It's well, if it's from the 1990s.

1999.

I didn't go past anything I've seen, Jack.

Yeah, but I want to make sure they haven't spliced something in from.

Oh, no, if it's that old, 17 years old, dude.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's impossible.

This has a Divix video.

Like, this is like, this is.

Oh, I found it.

Yeah.

Link, link.

It's link.

Wow.

Sorry, it's peem.

I forgot we're saying peem now.

What?

It's darker side set of peem.

It's fine.

Don't worry.

Why do we say what is?

Listen, I'm just going off what the zoomers tell me.

Peem.

If I've been led astray by my 23-year-old friends, it's fine.

Are you really into photo emission electron microscopy?

Yeah.

Okay.

This is fucking great.

This is exactly how I thought it would sound.

Say some shots of what we're seeing.

We are seeing.

Oh, Kiloa's design is

very slightly different here.

Killer's a market.

Killer on his skateboard.

Karapaka being punched and screaming.

I did, um,

while looking for, we had a little chat in our Discord chat about this.

I was looking for some Tagashi interviews just because I'm curious to get more of his process in mind while we do this.

And he does list a couple influences for Kiloa's design,

particularly the work of, I think it's Shotajima, who did MPD's Psycho, and

Atsushi Kamijo, is it the other artist?

Who I think like...

I haven't read any of his work, but a lot of pretty boys with white hair when I Google image search.

And I'm like, ah, yes, I understand this.

This is such a funny.

Yeah, while you guys are watching the Three Days greatest animal I have become anime.

Fucking skateboarding through the Zoldic dungeon is such a

such a beautiful image.

There's like this thing

that's really sad about anime maturing as a form that has like necessarily evolved out of some of its more ridiculous tendencies that I miss so much when I see something from the 90s and I'm like, hell yeah, this is ridiculous.

This is insane.

It's just like, this was the moment, you know, this is where it was really, really tickled.

There's like people operating on like a totally different threshold of cool and an even more different threshold of like slightly embarrassing.

Yes, yes, this is my idea of cool.

Like, um,

oh my god, Ash, Ketchum.

What?

Sorry, there's a shot of Killiba wearing a hunter-licensed hat, and he looks exactly like red from Pokemon.

Oh, whoa.

Hold on.

Who?

Red from Pokemon Red.

Is this woman in the 1999 anime not in the 2011 one?

Who?

The one that's like trying to kill Kilo looks like at the Hunter exam.

You have a timestamp.

Um, let's see.

Uh, she first shows up at like 1:34.

Oh, yeah.

I don't know who this is.

Let's see.

She has a badge on, so I'm going to look up her badge.

What?

Hanza.

I don't think I can link this, unfortunately, but someone did do a wet-ass pussy mashup with the Zoldic theme.

Okay.

I made an AMV.

Oh, my God.

But no, there's a lot of Chimera in here.

Yeah.

Yes, this person's name is Anita, and she's only in the 1999 anime.

Damn, filler she's not even in the manga killer got that shit on Keith what's that with a hat that looks great all right he looks like red yeah

um okay let's get back to it yeah the detour is undone my bad no you're all good uh Killer's Zelda technique here is serpent work these weird loose hands that you know he whips his arms around as though they have no bones in it looks like a lot of Zelda techniques both very silly and undeniably cool um

the ants are hollow inside you know in the the way that an exoskeleton is because he knocks off i think what does he knock off one of her arms

yes i'm not sure her arm yeah he she like goes in to grab him and he just sort of deletes half of one of her arms

um but then she um launches a stinger from her mouth and another from her tail uh poisoning kill you as she says a probutis and a probutscus.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's the technical term.

Kite's biology knowledge allows him to know this.

He says, she says, once I get him addicted, we'll have another human dog.

Oh, yeah, they're all taunting everyone at this point.

They're like, I'm going to get three dogs next.

But then Killua, she's looking at Killiua and the camera suddenly rotates upside down as Killiua breaks her neck and says, Poison doesn't work on me.

Sorry.

And she says,

Ah, I see.

It's so funny to do a fake out again.

Two rows in a row.

Fuck, where is that?

I was right.

Oh, she thinks poison's going to work on Killua Zaldic.

She doesn't know.

She doesn't know.

I'm making the Riddler face, but in a she doesn't know way.

She doesn't.

It's the fucking laxatives from the Hunter example over again.

You can't poison Killu.

That is one of

the poison.

And then he decapitates her with a red silhouette over his face.

Whenever a killer is in the middle of the moment, sorry, do I have to bleep that out?

Yeah, cut it out.

Because I think

we're good.

We haven't talked about how it works, right?

Just in case, just in case.

There we go.

Just like a new

gun.

chimera and king's name is

listener.

What you're about to hear was too rude for television.

The American Standards Agency.

I'm sorry.

I keep saying phagogenesis.

Phagogenesis.

Yeah!

Thank you.

Kuno, you've got to stop saying that.

Am I the Kuno of the show?

No, just Kuno would love to say Phagogenesis.

We don't have anyone.

Kilua Zoldic is the Kuno of

the show.

That's true.

At this point, we are really entering new We're Cooked Realms as Ramot, still furious, still injured, seemingly through sheer force of will, manifests a nen aura around his hand.

This is awful.

This is

bad news.

Meanwhile, the ants are still fighting.

And we actually, we are firmly in the ants' heads during this fight.

This is not a new Tagashi trick.

You know, we've seen it happen a lot in Shonen of, you know, the protagonist will be looking at the villain and saying, oh, he's going to do this.

I reckon he can do that.

And we even sometimes get the villain looking at the protagonist and saying, I think I can figure out what he's gonna do.

In this fight, it's all the ants looking at Goan and Killier and trying to figure out what to do.

So, we get a portion of Goan's fight, then we switch to Killua, who starts and finishes his fight in about a scene and a half.

Then, a Chimera ant discovers Nen, then a Chimera ant discovers Nen.

Then we jump back to the NGL factory,

and it's like a stalemate.

Goan is charging up

a rock punch and the centipede is like, oh brother, I don't know how to deal with this.

I got to do an interior PowerPoint analysis of this fight for about 30 seconds.

Does he use the word simulation?

He says he's similar to the simulation.

I'm going to run a little simulation.

I'm going to run a little simulation.

He goes gone with it.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

What are you thinking of that, Dre?

Just, just...

They're just really laying it on thick here.

Weird how the line between ant and human continuously gets blurred and the hunter or the hunted How does this fucking NGL idiot even know what a simulation is?

Oh, that's true

He was one of the people at the tree for a while.

Oh sure maybe he was one of the people

the tree guy

Or he was one of the one of the people the I just I just remembered that the NGL, they have guns.

He's just one of the two idiots.

I do think he's one of those.

Yeah.

He runs a little simulation, and he's got a great plaid and he is proud of it and he tells us about this plaid maybe three separate times.

Do you remember why he has to come up with a plan to take this punch?

It's very funny to me.

I don't.

I have to.

I don't want to fight this guy because he can kill me with this punch.

I can tell this punch is going to kill me.

I don't know why I can tell.

But if I don't fight him.

Junju's just going to kill me anyway.

So I might as well try and win.

It's great.

You know, we've talked about Tagashi Tagashi and the anime team's fast characterization.

Centipede is a real fun Chimera ant to show up.

His plan is this.

And it's actually weirdly similar to Genthru's You Have to Sacrifice Bits of Your Body to Fight Me, which I don't think is deliberate, but it is nice.

He is going to block with some of his arms.

Probably destroying them.

Then he's going to grab Goan with his other set and then bite him, injecting horrible poison into his body.

You know what?

This plan reminded me a lot of?

The bomber fight.

Show me.

I just said it.

Yeah.

Did you say that?

Sorry.

No, no, no, it's good.

I also missed it.

Sorry, Jack.

Yeah, okay, cool.

I'm so glad.

The two ADHD bitches, like,

three.

Three.

Sorry.

I'm trying to think of order that this is.

I didn't want to include you in forgetting, though, Dre.

Fair.

No, I forgot.

Do you know what this reminds me of?

The Gem Through Fight?

It's the Gem Through Fight, yeah.

Oh, that's funny because it does to me have echoes of the Gem through fight uh it kind of reminds me of the bomber fight though yeah

yeah it kind of reminds me of the fred from scooby-doo fight oh he is kind of fred from scooby-doo um

no that's that's steak dinner yeah

uh but am i gonna cut away again because here is some extremely cool fight choreography with a centaur What does a shounen fight look like if we have one tall angular human fighting a centaur?

Answer, pretty good.

I love the part where Kite, like, throws Junji onto the ground.

It's very, it looks great.

He does it a couple of times, right?

Yeah, the first time, though, looks, like, very fluid and cool.

But yeah, Kite is like, I'm trying to fucking watch Goan fight.

Can we hold on?

And Junju's like, no.

And it really is just Goan standing there and Centipede thinking how to not die.

And then anytime Yunju makes a move to fight Kite, he gets shot down immediately.

Kite is so clearly the more capable fighter here yeah but he doesn't want to leave anything to chance so he brings in the mad clown the mad clown what's his name what's his full name crazy slots mad clown crazy slots

oh it's a great mad clown crazy slot mad clown in case you have

kite he's not Crazy slots is Kite's nen power.

He is like personified.

He talks.

Kite hates him and he hates Kite.

he rolls a random number and that's the weapon that he gives kite crazy sluts is fucking funny and they basically play the end of crazy sluts in this sequence as a joke uh because it's great he arrives and immediately starts bickering with Kite.

He's angry that he only gets summoned when he's in trouble.

He rolls a four, which is a gun.

Kite says that's a bad spin and crazy sluts says, I don't have any bad spins, ungrateful bust.

I've got to talk about this gun.

This is a different game.

Is this the same gun?

This is a different gun.

This is a different gun.

This is a different gun.

So it's got like a

pistol, like a, if you think of like a World War I machine pistol.

Yeah, it is like a machine pistol.

But then instead of having a normal small stock that you'd have on a machine pistol, it has this giant tree trunk extending six feet back

and yeah terminating in crazy slots in in some call of duty multiplayer this gun had to be banned because it was like so fucking broken yes definitely and and he he he

i cannot emphasize how insanely huge the stock this gun is it's almost the size of kite himself the whole gun who looks huge uh the whole gun might be taller than kite i can't picture it because i can't picture it um but uh

he doesn't picturing it right now.

He fires it.

Fuck off.

He fires it like a pistol.

He doesn't like

and he fires it very cussarily.

Yes.

It's so cool.

The like

instant win kill that he gets

him immediately.

It feels like

it's like the samurai, like I was going to say, but with a gun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With a gun and a tail.

I take it back.

It's the same gun.

I thought so.

Yeah, it's the same gun.

It fires in a much different way instead of

being the same rapid fire.

This time it's just a one shot.

Yeah.

She's got that trigger discipline.

Back to Goan's fight.

The plan goes pretty much as expected if you count going as expected, not going the way you thought it was going to go at all.

Goan launches forward and, to the surprise of the viewer, as well as the centipede, casts scissors cutting the centipede in half.

First scissors.

First scissors, no build up, no.

Goan is trying a new tactic.

No hint.

It was lovely.

I'd been wondering what this little simulation was building up to because it was definitely building up to something.

And I thought the punchline was going to be, this motherfucker thinks he can block Goan's rock.

Yeah, like maybe the rock will just explode through his whole body or something.

But Goan suddenly pulling out a new ability I thought was really, really good.

Yeah.

Cuts him in half.

Although there's a weakness to cutting an ant in half.

Well, so it leads to maybe my favorite line in this group of episodes.

The ants are so funny.

I love the ants.

Yeah.

Half a centipede lying on the floor says the actual line, hold on a minute.

This could still work in my favor.

I'm not cooked yet.

It's just so good.

Well, I mean, this is a guy who truly understands that he has two options and one of them is dying.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

He's also an optimist, I think.

Yeah.

Because he probably

pre-COVID mentality.

He's not going to drop out for anything.

No, no reason at all.

Hold on a second.

What did he say?

Hold on a minute.

This could still work in my favor.

This is a callback to the head and the body surviving separately that we know the ants can do.

And he leaps to bite Goan and then is shot out of the air by crazy sluts.

The fight is over.

This was a fight with the ants that we're in a really interesting position here because the hunters can fight individual, like skilled hunters can fight individual ants pretty well.

Doesn't matter.

There are more ants, and if stuff starts slipping through the cracks, it's going to get real bad for the hunters really quickly.

You know, the hunters are now in a situation where they can't simply fight one big enemy to get their way out of the problem.

Because not only is there, you know, thousands of Chimera ants, they're also, you know, gaining and learning new hunter tricks.

It's really interesting.

We start to see paying off some of.

And he's not been on screen very much in these episodes, so we haven't had a big update on this, which is funny.

I mean, it's really like Kite, Gonan, and Kiloa are maybe 15% of these episodes.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably.

And but in the last set of episodes, we had a lot of kite and every single scene was this like looming dread of like feeling too late, feeling like there's nothing that he can do to get on time, get there on time, to stop things before they go out of control.

And we're sort of seeing that being paid off where it's this is just such a bad situation.

It's so bad.

Well, and it also is a sort of horrible vindication for him where it's like, I just won a fight against a Chimera ant in one second, and it's not enough.

We need to be able to move here on a scale that,

you know, a hunter individually can't really work at.

This has gone beyond our capabilities.

Gone freaks beyond.

Our capabilities.

Gone freaks.

Much like the viewer, Killiwa zones in really quickly.

Oh, they sort of come out of this fight sort of you get the impression that the

episode is moving towards an ending, and so they come out of the fight pretty quickly.

And Kiliwa zones straight in on crazy sluts talks.

And

Kite pitches Crazy Sluts, you know, the weapons can't be exchanged.

He says, it's incredibly annoying.

And Goan to himself says, okay, well, why did you make it that way?

And I think, you know, we know the answer to this.

It's not been said explicitly, but we know that it's like, it makes it more powerful.

It's so funny.

They're like,

it's like the, they have like no patience.

They're so confused by why did you make a like it's one thing that it gives him more power by not being able to choose it's another thing to like give it a horrible personality that you can't stand

yes

oh and it can't stand you either maybe you know this is like total

uh

you know assumption just like why would it be this way on the one hand it's just funny.

I think Tagashi is a funny person and does some stuff just because it's funny, but I think he's also someone who thinks a lot about the implications of what he's writing and does take those things seriously.

And the only thing that I can think of reasonably is that we've seen the extreme end of a nen contract with Karapika,

and maybe the very shallow end of a nen contract is like: if this thing is annoying, I get a little bit stronger.

If my, if I'm frustrated with my, even being frustrated with it is enough of a contract.

Like, maybe you only get, you know, I've played RPGs.

I know about what you'll do to get an extra 2% or 3% out of a weapon.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Definitely.

He's picked up the cursed item that gives him, you know,

a little more.

Yeah.

It's 5% stronger, but frustrating to talk to.

It's a bad conversationalist.

And it's going to be like

an antagonistic, like a gently antagonistic relationship non-stop.

Imagine having to use crazy slots in a situation where you're trying to be stealthy or quiet.

Yeah.

And also,

he has rolled it enough times that he probably has a favorite.

And anytime it doesn't come up, he's like, oh my God.

This motherfucker is playing Bellatro, you know, every time he uses his weapon.

Like banana disappeared again.

Exactly.

Yeah.

As we leave this episode

favorite that he wants all the time or that he has one in mind for the situation

each time.

I think it's both, right?

He has one in mind for the situation and then he's also like,

you know, I choose the instruments that I'm recording with based on what the track wants, but then I'm also like, oh, but it's really nice to play the piano.

And I hope that I get the piano.

But if this would be if instruments were selected for me randomly before I started composing, which would be fun, but you know.

Did we say Crazy Loth has nine different nine, yes?

Nine, yeah.

Interesting.

Leol and his team, having learned about the rares, promised to Colts that they're not going to hunt them.

uh have set off to to hunt them um

and they're going to go to the factory Yeah.

I missed, I didn't pick up on this.

Why did they know that the rares were out there?

Can they just feel them?

Like Colt could feel them?

I think it is ant communication.

Not like, I don't mean that necessarily in the sense of like, I didn't, no, I don't know if it's the telepathy.

I think it might just be office gossip.

You know, we know that Yonju is out there.

We know that maybe they can sense them, I think.

They said specifically something about that the rares were over there by Junju.

And I just just missed how they knew that.

I think it's because

they know the squad is basically

dead.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The squad that was over there is dead.

And so they're like, oh, I guess the rares are over there.

Yeah.

That might be it.

You know, something is taking out the taking out the ants.

But as we leave it, we leave it with the extremely bad news because Ramot is no longer

expressing Ren around his hand.

Instead, he has stood up in the middle of his sort of pain circle where he's been hanging out for most of the episode, and Ren burns around his whole body.

And the narrator says, with a real formality, and with that, a Chimera ant has become a Nen user.

I love the narrator.

Narrator rules.

I love that

Tagashi planted the seed of being attacked by Nen can release your Nen back in Heaven's Arena, and we get this

payoff for it now as it being kind of the

thing that sets off the powder keg.

Yeah.

Because

this is what happened to the Nen initiates, right?

Like, we get told that the reason

we're going to go and kill the crew.

Yeah, well, yeah, but not in the same way, right?

Like, it's not...

What you're exposed to is a safer version of the.

But it's a safer version of it.

It's the same process.

My point is more that it's

because they were exposed to none through violence and survived it as opposed to Gone Killowa just having their pores opened up.

Like,

we get some payoff for that after so long.

Yeah.

And I also think just kind of ties into a lot of the stuff going on with the ants, that it's like,

oh,

through humans,

some humans give it their best shot, use the, like, what they consider their ultimate weapons in a lot of ways.

This thing survives and becomes even more powerful because of it.

Yeah.

A little bit, cockroaches will survive nuclear weapon vibes too, but

slightly different.

Yeah.

I love, this is one of those things where

the

Heaven's Arena stuff like ages really well for me, like with how many times the stuff that we learned has been so useful.

And the way that we learned it is useful of like a character just saying out loud, this is how this stuff works it makes it really easy to draw straight lines from like we learned it and then we saw it and this is like what 70 episodes later 60 episodes later like we we learned about the pores opening up we learned about being punched and having the the shock of the nen awaken your uh you open your nodes and then now like for the first time since then since Gonan Kilowa had it happen to them, since the Nen Initiates had it happen to them, we're seeing it on screen.

And it's like, it just becomes a really useful resource for remembering how nen works yeah it's great um we also learned kite's net uh n is uh n radius is 45 meters um i had fun writing that down i i wrote kite's n is 45 meters and then was like i love this kind of note i love just the little bits of it

it's like when i have NEN stats to write down.

It's great.

And we've also seen like N radius being used as a...

Ooh, wow.

Look what they can do.

Yeah.

Not as good as Kotopis, though.

Not as good as

Zeno.

Yeah.

Less than a quarter.

Power scaling.

You know.

That's Zeno.

I'm just saying.

Kite.

What do you think Jinx is?

You know?

They got to bring in the Zaldic Assassins to deal with the Chimera ants.

Actually,

some of them are cool.

Some of the ants are cool?

Yeah.

They're going to recruit.

Oh, no.

Is there anything else that we want to talk about?

Not me.

Nope.

Not me.

I think I'm good.

I think I'm good.

What song would you use for Akiloa Zaldic AMV?

You guys, what would you use?

I mean my first my first go-to like gut answer is like very stereotypical, but I still think fitting

in the end by Lincoln Park.

Yeah, okay.

I do faint by Lincoln Park if I'm picking a Lincoln Park song.

Faint's one of my favorites.

I don't know if that was my pick, but if I'm picking Lincoln Park, it would be faint.

Because they're like, shoot up when I'm talking to you.

I'm going to find a deeper cut, though.

Hold on.

I think it's got to be.

Um,

what's the effanescence song where he sings uh wake me up inside?

Oh, that's that's bring me to life, bring me to life, yeah.

Uh, I'm gonna tack here and go a thousand miles by Vanessa Carlton.

Nice, I was gonna say small hands by La Dispute, but yours is funnier.

Oh,

trying to remember the name of this song.

Uh, The Crimson by Atrey You.

Fuck yeah.

Oh, wait.

No, it's.

Um,

fuck, is it 36 Quite Bitter Beings is the song?

Is that another Atreyu song?

No, it's a CKY song.

It's 96 Quite Bitter Beings, and I just think that every time Killowa showed up, the intro riff played, it would make sense to me.

Is that the

yeah?

I don't know any of these songs.

I don't know.

That's fine.

I don't know the Lincoln Park songs.

I don't know these songs.

I know.

Sorry.

I know the one that Dre said.

That's the one that I know from the radio.

I love butt rock.

Oh, wait, wait, wait.

What are we watching next time?

Oh, yeah, that's important.

Create note.

That's not important.

Who cares?

Next time.

Okay, so we have a couple.

The episodes are 83, 84, and 85.

Those are titled Inspiration to Evolve, A Faded Awakening, and Light and Darkness.

Don't feel good about a fated awakening.