What Is A Chimera Ant? - Hunter x Hunter ep. 76-78: Media Club Plus S01E24

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

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

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

My name is Keith Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

You can find the five of us here today

at friendsofthetable.cash.

That's our Patreon for the other show that we do, Friends of the Table.

And

that fifth person is our special guest today, Austin Walker.

Hi, Austin.

Hello.

Hi.

I'm here.

I'm here.

Hi.

Welcome.

Welcome.

What up?

I caught Austin.

I watched everything that I needed to watch.

Really?

Yeah.

Nice.

Wow.

Everything that you needed to watch.

Meaning.

I mean, I've watched the show before.

Yeah.

That's right.

I wasn't sure.

But the last time I watched Hunter Hunter was the last time I was on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so I had to watch all of the rest of

all of the rest of York New City.

And then all you did watch it.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

I needed to, I needed to feel, and I've been listening along without watching.

I've been doing that maneuver.

Right.

Yeah.

But it does mean that I've needed to like, I was like, I need to, I need to feel where we are in the story before we get to Chimera.

I just want to remember what that's like because it, it, it's kind of, you know, a good example of this is, I, if you would ask me what was the last thing that happened, I would have remembered meeting uh dune i wouldn't remember dune's name or that or that ging uh jing renamed him um uh and i would have remembered the dodgeball fight but i would not have remembered the fight with um

the with gent with gender the the mad bomber and i would not have remembered goan getting his arms blown up and then getting him healed which i think is like important broadly for all the reasons you all talked about important um so yeah i actually think it's going to end up meaning nothing.

I think that that's not even going to matter.

I don't think there's going to be anything going on this arc.

It's just really long.

Also with me is Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, what's up?

You can find me on Twitter at SwanJerry3000.

You know what?

You can follow my Instagram if you want to see pictures of my dog at Andrew Lee Swan on Instagram.

Wow.

Also here is Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And I'm also going to plug an Instagram.

Hell yeah.

If you go to XX Emo Boys Kissing XX, you can find my band's Instagram.

We're hoping I have some stuff out soon.

It's an emo band, if you couldn't tell.

Also, you should check out, Keith, did you mention the YouTube earlier?

I did not mention the YouTube.

You should check out the YouTube for Friends of the Table and also the Twitch for Friends of the Table.

Both Friends of the Table in the URL.

Because Keith and I are nearing the end of our 999 Let's

we've got I think one more session

we have more than one more session we it's true if we do that game has some buck wild pacing yeah

that's the other thing I've been watching lately I've been catching up on that I've probably watched I'd only watched the first episode of that and I've watched everything else since then basically so 999 is crazy yeah I think it is like in a weird way it is for hunter hunter likers but like not because it's similar no but it's like but it is like,

it does have a lot of the characteristics of the crazier bits of Hunter Hunter.

It's not quite a peanut butter and jelly combination, but you wouldn't also turn your nose up at the two ingredients

put together.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Like,

they're similar enough flavors, is what I'm saying.

And Jack to keep.

Hi, I'm Jack.

You can find me on co-host at JDQ, and you can get any of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Jack is now a Chimera ant knower.

Yeah.

God damn, am I a chimera ant knower?

Yeah.

I mean, we're going to get into this and you should do your little recap, but I would like to say right at the beginning, damn, let's do your little recap.

They really are chimera ants, huh?

Yeah, they really are.

That's what it says on the tin.

Yeah, it's nothing like camp tigers.

Yeah.

Camp tigers, yeah, also pretty literal.

It got to a point where I was like, I don't know what I would call these things other than chimera ants.

Right.

It's what they are.

All right.

Begin.

Okay, so

the aforementioned long period of speculation is over, and we are literally propelled into Chimera Ant territory.

Gone a Killow had just used a company to transport themselves from the exit of Greed Island

to Ngig, the anagram used by Jing to do the one thing he swore he would never do.

Help Gone.

This rings the voice to a mysterious clown clown gun having man named Kite, who turns out to be Jing's pupil, sort of like the son he never had.

Kite is a hunter super biologist, not what they call him, who's recently become concerned about chimera ant behavior.

He and his little crew of oddballs are trying to find the ant colony from which a massive antlim was found.

Seems like these ants may be bad news.

And actually, we see a lot of the ants being bad news.

We meet an ant queen who eats a lot of fish and bats to create an army led by squad tuna.

There's a whole walking, talking ant society whose rapid expansion in a diplomatically isolated part of the world threatens an entire island full of unsuspecting people.

Speaking of people, something very funny is happening with these ants.

Yeah, they're becoming funny.

I don't know.

We'll talk about it.

Okay.

So we do.

So

I got a couple messages

on Twitter and co-host about the anagram for Jing's name that we ended the last episode.

Yeah.

People saying, hey, it's, by the way, it's different in the manga.

It's it's a N gig instead of what it is.

What it is?

Yeah.

You want me to say it?

I like to say it.

So

Do you think he knew do you think he was like, yeah, that's like he was 16 years old and he chose that name on purpose, but not in a slur way, just in a listens to lots of hip-hop music way?

I could see it for him.

For

Jing.

Of all the characters in the show, I could see it the most for him, or maybe Leorio is absolutely.

Leorio for sure.

Leorio loves dipset.

I don't know why.

He's a big Cameron fan.

No idea why you make that change.

No idea why you're not going to change the change.

Sakashi gave it to you one way.

Still not great, but a hell of a lot better than what you changed it to.

I have no qualm with NGIG.

I wonder if it's one of the things.

We do get a little extra context in this episode.

About

it's not that Ging chose.

Maybe they've decided Ging was pulling a fast one on Kite.

And that this was a way of bullying his friend Kite.

Friends?

Friends?

We'll get into this.

Yeah, well.

Okay,

a friend is someone you bully, Jack.

Right, I see.

Into doing what you want.

Yeah, I'm doing

a lot about this to your entire life.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Well, they both got silver hair.

Before we even begin the episodes, we are given a new title sequence.

And these title sequences are always extremely fun for me because they are usually a cavalcade of stuff that I don't understand.

Do you recognize someone from this?

Yeah.

Did you recognize a fellow?

I mean.

Oh, yeah.

Do you mean Krolo is in this title sequence, right?

Yeah, yeah, no.

Yeah, that's who you're asking about.

That's who you are.

That's who.

Oh, do you mean the bizarre figure from the

from the thumbnail?

That is who I mean.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I wrote down him

this

who I suspect this is probably the ant king.

That's my guess as we're going forward, but we shall see.

This title sequence goes above and beyond in terms of showing me stuff that I haven't seen.

It's also worse.

You have no idea.

You have literally no idea.

Stuff you will not see in some cases.

It's

not remembering that, like, I going into this episode, I did not know what a chimera ant is.

The first thing we see is the moon, and then we see a gigantic bug with like a grinning mock skull face on its back.

We haven't even seen ants that look like that yet.

We have a ball of light in someone's men, right?

That's the queen.

Is that the queen?

I think that was the queen.

Oh, sure, right.

I think it's got that gnarly face.

Death's head moth or something, but no, that makes sense.

We have the tailed muscle figure.

We have them over a weird blue orb.

Gone and Kilua have weird bugs

playing with a sort of a massive centipede that squirts around.

Yeah, Kilua with the big centipede is like such a like

I don't know why it's like a comfort image of it for me.

Just like seeing that happen, I get so happy.

A figure shows up in a lot of art here with a blue sort of beret, a sharp nose and grey hair with a scythe with a toy on the top.

We soon learn that this is kite, but I had no idea who this was.

Krolo appears leading a group of figures, including a person with like Juan style hair falling down all over her face uh hundreds of marching humanoid ants appear uh new figures like make tons of new weird figures are dancing through the sky the terror shows up the weirdies have shown up yeah

a cat girl a butterfly boy and then finally the um eyes of the purple-eyed figure over a planet uh just their just their eyes i think blinking or are they just looking out over the planet uh this is a doomy

sequence Also,

he's the you can try.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Yeah,

he's the famous you can try, yeah.

Uh-huh.

Um, but we begin where we left off

as this tall blue figure, uh, blue, blue-coated, blue hat, uh, silver hair, turns round.

This is not Jing.

He knocks them back and immediately summons a bizarre clown who says, In my mouth is a roulette containing the numbers one through nine.

This is a nen power, presumably, right?

Well, do you have a name for this thing?

This is the great mad clown crazy slots.

I love crazy slots.

Crazy slots, yeah.

It turns out that kite can roll a dice to get a weapon via crazy slots.

And in fact, when he summons a machine gun, he says, this was a bad roll.

And the clown snaps at him.

It's like, be grateful, I gave you a weapon.

And, you know, setting aside the fact that this is very funny, I think this is the first time we have seen a nen that acts, if not antagonistically, but kind of

bickers with its user.

Have we seen this happen before?

Stands do this sometimes.

I have a lot of people.

This is such a stand, by the way.

Oh, it's just

pointing out this.

This is the first of many stand nen powers.

I have a sense that,

because I remember this happened and I was like, hey, hey, hey, I love it when people and their nen powers kind of like bicker and argue or when someone has a sort of antagonistic relationship to their power.

But maybe it hasn't happened before.

Maybe I'm thinking forward.

I can't name it on the top of my head.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don't think anyone has that.

It's also ring the bell that happens every time Yoshihiro Tagashi makes a sort of game system out of an element of his plotting.

This is not going to be the last time he does this in this chunk of episodes.

You could argue that the chimera ants are also this.

But Kite showing up and and his nen power being a game that he himself has to play is

it's from it's from Greed Island.

It is the fact that the nen exorcist's power creates a little

fucked up little demon guy who hangs not a demon, but a little weird worm gotta be very lizard thing.

Yeah, I'm gonna make it clear, not a demon.

And like that, I left.

And then he was like, oh, now I gotta take care of you.

Now I gotta fucking feed you, I guess.

I got to deal with you until I can go clear the original thing.

I hate when somebody leaves a water bottle on the plane next to me.

Exactly.

This has to tie into the nen like restrictions, right?

Like putting making your nen power a little harder to use means it's more powerful.

Yeah, that makes it a bad role.

Yeah, exactly.

And it's always a bad role in Kite's mind.

Right.

I mean, this is like a silenced

submachine pistol.

It's fucking high caliber, but it's high caliber, right?

Although he's shooting ants.

I think it's less that he doesn't feel like the salt guns.

It's not that he doesn't like the weapon, and more that he doesn't feel it's appropriate for this instance.

Yeah,

he's right.

Yeah, yeah.

Because it turns out that what he's doing is the classic, I wasn't aiming at you, I was aiming at, you know,

the thing that was going to

kill you, which is

no ordinary ant.

This is a chimera ant.

It looks like

an ant.

You know, it's

millimeters long.

It's no ordinary ant.

It looks like an ant.

It attacks Kilua, leaving a little sort of

wound, tiny ant.

I think you're underselling attacks, Kilua.

Because this ant has been shot in half and its head like flies off of its body to bite Kilua.

It is like dying and it does that.

Yeah, yeah.

That's true, yeah.

But it was good to...

Look, I'm no fool.

I know that you can't make an arc called the Chimera Ant Arc and the ants remain, you know, the size of regular ants for the whole thing.

There is something lovely about the first ant we meet just being, you know.

Yeah, this is what I was going to ask.

I was going to ask this and then the follow-up later, but like...

What were you thinking about the chimera ants when you first saw some chimera ants and they looked like slightly larger ants?

Oh, I was thinking here, we go, here, we fucking go.

You know, I mean, what this turns into pretty quickly, or might be heading towards, is

it's not quite solely a sort of like a disaster story or a monster story.

I think that Tagashi is perhaps working in a different direction, and we'll get to that.

But something that always works really well in the like Godzilla story, or the creature from the Black Lagoon, or any kind of story where, for example, like nuclear waste in the river causes one of the fish to go really evil.

I'm thinking of like Bongjunho as the host or whatever.

Oh, yeah.

Is that very often you get these great premonitions early on where it's like, oh, it's just a regular ant.

And everyone's already like, these ants are behaving a little strangely.

This for me is part and parcel of this kind of genre move.

So there wasn't a shred of like disappointment or anything when I saw one of these little aggressive ants.

In fact, I was really pleased that this ant shows up and already kite is saying, you know, this is an aggressive, carnivorous insect that has been designated quarantine level one.

And they will not stop reminding you about that designation.

We get some good, like, hunter, like,

we're not good, but we get some drops at like hunter structural stuff in these episodes.

We do.

Yeah, yeah, we do.

Before we move on from this scene, which is

to remind people from the last episode, this sort of weird, mysterious, foggy forest that also has this sort of cinematic cherry blossom tree, like

throwing petals all over the place.

It's so pretty.

It's very pretty.

But then the music is really a tapestry of what we're going to be getting in this arc.

It's a radical shift from, and we've had a, we've had, you know, pretty varied tones.

I think York New is the most different from any other season so far.

But we, this, the first half of this episode, 76, is front-loaded with...

the new sound of the season, I think.

The first song that plays when Crazy Slop

is In Front of the Old Mansion, which is

actually a song that played at the end of the last arc of Greed Island.

That's this one here.

But this is like, to me, very much a part of the season, this like kind of dark guitar than the bass.

I think, Jack, this is the thing that tipped you off on a

theory that maybe we're getting into some science fiction.

The like bass tones.

Weird sort of distorted bass tones and things like that.

I love this sound.

And you're right, you know, already three episodes in.

The tone shift that happens here across just these three episodes is remarkable.

The scale that the story is trying to operate in shifts into such a different gear.

And part of the way that I think that the show manages to get away with that is that it commits as hard to it as possible.

You know, as a viewer, you are like, all right, fine.

This is just the state of the world now.

There is no sort of equivocating about the scale that we are operating on there is no sort of fake out um this geopolitics start getting introduced well yeah that to me is the funny thing is like when i heard those those songs start to pop up at the end of last season uh the thing the place my mind went to was like military thriller which is adjacent to a certain sort of sci-fi horror story right um and i almost didn't want to say it because i didn't know how what we got in these episodes but we do straight up get

some

oh there are these countries there is you know global policy around them.

They execute people who show up.

We'll talk more about them later.

But

there's a real sort of like Cold War era.

You could put this stuff into Metal Gear Solid 3 or 5.

Or a fucking Tom Clancy.

I was actually going to say a Tom Clancy book first.

And I was like, let's go for our audience.

Let's say Metal Gear.

What's so interesting?

I had no idea that

even already the Chimera Ant Arc was going to explode the scale of the story to being like, now we're talking about different countries, we're traveling to different countries, the ants are able to move at a scale and pace that they are on a level with like global powers.

So we're going to be talking about those for the first time.

And so it makes sense to me that when I heard

those bass tones for the first time, I thought to myself, ah, creepy ants, and not what makes sense to you, which is like, oh, this is a military thriller, you know, as we move into armies moving and things like that.

This is the other.

Oh, sorry, keep going.

I think to your point, Keith, the other way that you get that tone shift to move as sort of

startlingly as you can is you throw in loads of new music, you know?

Yeah.

I don't want to keep hearing the same cues that we heard in Greed Island or in York New.

You know, the composer needs to come to the table with, what, nine or ten new tracks to get this thing feeling, you know, as different as as they can.

I think that viewers respond really quickly to this sounds new.

And if that just keeps happening over this run of episodes, the feeling is going to feel really different.

Especially, it's, it is,

it cannot be overstated how much of my music notes is in the first half of this one episode.

Uh, the song that plays right after

Infront of the Old Mansion is a new song called New Mutation.

I played a little bit of it while Jack was talking, and then it evolves into this very cool sort of synthy thing as well.

I'm going to play just a tiny bit of that.

This is so Metal Gear.

This is the track where I was like, oh, this is Metal Gear.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's interesting that we're talking about Metal Gear as well.

And I think that like

Tom Clancy is obviously a big inspiration on Metal Gear, but I think another really big inspiration is Michael Crichton and Techno Thrillers.

And

I'm thinking of who wrote Day of the Triffitts, John Wyndham,

where these books in the early and mid-20th century, and then Michael Crichton writing in the late 20th century, that are all these sort of like very slickly made, very high-paced

speculative science fiction about like what happens if science goes wrong, right?

What if a disease starts to spread?

What if

bad actors, you know, one tiny bad actor causes a chain of effects going on here.

And I think that this blending of

the isolated

technophobic community and possibly a drug cartel and ants that are mutating rapidly for reasons that are both within what we know about them and also like

this is happening more rapidly and more dangerously than it has ever happened before is right out of that like techno-thriller mall.

And the little gang of amateur scientists trying to piece it all together.

You just picture Laura Durham forensic thing.

Kaith grad students.

Yes.

Literally.

Yeah.

Which is the other thing that's interesting here, too, is

you talked about the scale getting bigger.

Well, yeah, Goan is a real hunter now.

Goan has

his hunter's license.

He has an N, which means he's a real hunter.

He's passed the second secret test, and he's passed the third test, his father's test.

And so now he can operate at the scale that his father operates, which is a global, you know,

shows up.

Three-hand hunter scale.

A three-star hunter scale.

Exactly.

Right.

So before we get too far out of this opening area, the next thing that happens is that

we actually have to go back to chapter one of the manga.

Yeah, we should finally finally.

Hey, Jesse.

Kite is in the first chapter of the manga.

He's actually a really big part of it.

Yeah.

Page 21 of Hunter-Hunter is when Kite shows up.

This is crazy.

He shows up in his full-time system design.

Yeah, hold up.

Do you have an image?

Yeah.

Yeah, I have the first two pages that Kite's in.

And he's a consistently drawn character.

He behaves in much the same way.

It is the flashback we see in the manga.

The flashback we see is from the beginning of the manga.

Kite tells Goan what a hunter is, tells him that his father is alive and is a hunter

and says he is the first hunter we see he's the first

on page two of the manga is they are called hunters and it's a picture of kite it is wild to me that they didn't include this yes that isn't it included in the i forget what year 1998 is 98 whatever it is yeah uh-huh yeah um so we've talked about this a few times there's there are bits of the of the early episodes where like i'm

you can hear me be kind of frustrated that I can't talk about this because it's it's a it's a well-known thing about the 2011 series, but I still felt like we couldn't tell you anything more than that there was a weird choice to cut

for time's sake a chunk out of the first bit of the manga in order to like facilitate getting into it quicker.

It is a cut with ramifications.

You know, I can at the most mercenary level of we are making the show, we need to get Gohan off Whale Island as quickly as possible.

I don't want to mess around.

Here we've got a lot to adapt.

I can understand cutting it.

But it produces a really weird effect.

The first is that we get this flashback and it feels like something that they think they have already told us because, you know, in the original thing, they have, but it feels so sort of cursory when it appears here.

You know, Gohan looks at him and he says, you know, this feels familiar to me.

And the first note I took was like, oh, is this, are we going to be, you know, you had talked about how Chimera Ant is

not just plot-wise weird, it is also kind of formally weird.

And so I was like, oh, are we doing like a time loop?

You know, Gohan's saying, this feels familiar, sitting by this fire with this man.

This is so funny.

But then as soon as we cut into the flashback, I was like, oh, right, I know exactly what has happened here.

Yes, you would put this on Whale Island at the beginning.

But putting meeting Kite and remembering Kite here, right right next to each other, is bizarre.

I would.

The first thing I think is, I would have found a place to put it earlier in the show.

I might not have put it at the beginning, but I would have had, you know, a lesson that Goan learned with that fox bear while he was tracking or something, such that, you know, in an arc earlier, Goan can call back to this, so that when we meet Kite, eventually we can say, oh my god, it's him.

Look out.

Because here it just comes straight out of the blue.

And it's especially odd because, and we can use this as a way to jump into talking about Kite just in general.

Kite is Jing's pupil.

Jing was Kite's master.

And as we have talked about ad nauseum on this show,

Hunter Hunter has some very interesting things to say about the relationships between teachers and pupils.

figures of authority, and it is not stopping that.

There is a lot of fascinating stuff already with Kite as a pupil of Jing's, not least of which that he looks at Goan and Kilua, he looks at Goan and he says, essentially,

I want to treat you well and treat you with respect because you're the son of my master, which is such an interesting

line to begin with.

But having

Kite be the man who tells Goan that hunters exist way back at the beginning of Whale Island or that your dad is real and everything, and then later we learn, you know, that this is one of Jing's pupils, it adds so much more depth to that kind of moment that is,

by dint of them moving it this far late, they sort of jettison all of the stuff that they could be doing with that, if that makes sense.

There's another moment, too, that it adds weight to,

which is

the very beginning of the story, Goan deciding to become a hunter and to put himself through this thing.

Him making that decision isn't something that we see in the 2011 adaptation.

We don't know why he wants to do this except for that he wants to find his father.

And I think it is like a much stronger case for why Goan is the way that he is, that he like is saved by a student of his father who says, by the way, your father's alive and he's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because Kite thinks that Jing is

great.

He is, he has a sort of.

It's hard to know whether or not what I'm reading is a frustration from Kite.

Jing, Kite sort of talked his way into being trained by Jing.

He says that, you know, Jing doesn't really like to do anything if it's a hassle for him, which is interesting.

You sort of get the impression that Kite sort of badgered his way into being taught.

And then he had to hunt for Jing in much the same way that Goan is hunting for Jing.

And I don't know, it's hard to read how Kite feels about this.

I think Kite, like Goan, thinks that Jing is the real deal, you know, is a real good sort.

But this is a figure who has already gone through the trial of find Jing once already.

And I get a little weariness from that.

I don't know if that's a misread.

I think that Kite is a weary character.

And I think that one of the interesting things about these episodes is that we see a lot of Kite

sort of

feeling the weight of the Chimera Ant business that he kind of he has a sort of like like latent feeling that things are worse than they seem.

And we sort of like watch other people like looking into clues and considering worst-case scenarios.

And Kite is like out in space.

Like, yeah.

And I think he's just got that.

I think he's impressed with Goan.

I think that's the Goan formula:

people like Goan.

I think that he reminds Kite of Jing.

Yeah.

Big time.

Yeah.

For better and worse.

I mean,

these episodes end with Kite looking at Goan and Killua talking and talking about whether or not they would run away if things go bad.

And it's so hard not to read into that

him and

younger

Jing talking at some point and like him thinking about their relationship.

They're like very efficient with the sort of like melancholy that comes along with Jing, who does not, like everybody else, does not get to, sorry, I said Jing.

The melancholy of Kite, who does, like everybody else, not get to be with Jing, but who has kind of reshaped his entire life around.

Yeah.

I was so impressed.

I mean, I'm regularly impressed by how fast on his feet Tagashi is for character writing in terms of, you know, we talked about this in previous episodes, getting us on side with Tezgera really quickly, giving Tezgera these little details.

You get the impression Kite is a much more important character than Tesgera, but by the end of, you know, almost episode one, he is a really sharply drawn, really interesting character that I want to see more of.

His art direction is great.

He doesn't really look like anybody else.

He has a very long, sort of narrow face, pale skin, dark lines around his eyes.

He's very lying.

He's nine feet tall.

Yeah, I don't really know why he has crazy slots, which doesn't seem both in line and

his aesthetics.

Also, the flashback reveals that

they say a couple of times in here.

Jing claims that every single hunter is well liked by animals,

which is a thing that comes up a few times.

And also, you know, hunters are very good at finding friends.

I don't know if that's true, but in the past, when we see Kite in the Past, he is hanging out with a sort of Disney princess-style gang of animals.

He has an Oliver Twist-style gang of animal thieves.

Including one full horse that lives in the sewers.

Yeah, I...

Okay, let's talk about these two flashbacks really quick.

I just want to, I don't think we actually said the specifics of the original flashback.

No, we didn't.

When a kite saves Goan, he's angry at being forced to take another life.

Goan,

in the dub, he says,

damn it, I've got this.

I've got another pointless kill to my credit.

That's what he says in the dub, which I think is a good line.

and then Gohan recognizes descendants from when he was a kid, someone saves him from a fox bear, this huge, uh, you know, sort of like hulking bear thing that Goan, as a like four-year-old kid, wanders into the den of.

In the, I don't know about the manga, in the 99 anime, uh, he hangs out with that fox cub for like the first three episodes, four episodes of the show.

Yeah, he raises that he raises the fox bearing.

He says goodbye to it on the way out, yeah, like when he goes to be a hunter, basically, yeah, which is loaded in any conversation with Goan, right?

You know, like taking care of somebody that is in your care, that is vulnerable to you, that you are sort of like guiding through the world.

I think stuff like that is always going to be important when Goan and Jing are, you know, are in this story.

And another fun music fact, this is something that Jack has talked about a lot on the show.

Melody's theme is what plays when thinking back about this.

A field and spring.

no a field and spring that's the real song wait which one's the real one the rites of spring is

okay a field and spring that is melody song uh and uh it's the only time that we've heard it played not during a scene with melody and instead it's during this like kind of dramatic nature-y scene well and sorry in this flashback we don't get kite

No, in the in this flashback explaining to young Gohan about his father, right?

No, it's very very cursory.

It's right.

And what we kind of get is all of that conversation.

So in the manga, he's like, oh, wait a second, are you Jing's kid?

Your dad's a great hunter.

I'm here.

You know, Jing's my teacher.

You know, to get his, his approval, I have to, I have to go do a big, a big test.

I have to, you know, da, da, da, da, da.

And like, he's so smart.

And, you know,

it's, it's maybe what your aunt hasn't told you about this.

He's how Go knows what a hunter is and that his father was a hunter to the degree that the end of the first chapter of the manga is

Amito being like, so you've known all this time what your dad does?

Did you know he like abandoned you here?

Like, and none of that gets transposed into the episode.

Yeah.

But it's like, Keith, the thing you've been saying is like, understanding the and I guess I should also say, it's not like,

I think that it's important that also ghon's love of animals and the wild and all that stuff therefore gets tied up into yeah here is this person who already does what i like right better and he knows my dad who's taught him how to do this stuff how could i not want to go do that the backbone of why he likes nature and why he's like a wild kid from the forest is only ever kind of implied by the setting

Right.

He's, he's, he is from a small island.

And in the anime, it's like, oh, what he does, what small kids from the from, or what kids from small islands do is like go fishing and go do nature stuff, right?

Yeah, instead of he had this life or death moment that reshaped him forever.

It is grim.

Um, the way that uh Jing, like a massive gravitational object, uh, is drawing everything into him, whether or not uh, you know, people want it to.

It's time to replay KOTOR 2.

I'm fucking telling you.

I think about it all the time.

I think about it.

I think about it all the time.

All the time.

Yeah.

As these episodes progress,

a frightening new idea about Jing begins to take shape, and actually begins to take shape as they talk around this bonfire with Kite, which is, hey, how much of this has Jing orchestrated?

Because we know Jing has the wherewithal and interest to orchestrate Greed Island, and it's said outright as an elaborate game to train Gone.

And if he can do that, you know, if he can bring in Razor, if he can bring in Dune and List,

if he can arrange it so that Goan can come and meet Kite here,

how much of this is actually being set up by Jing?

And everybody doesn't really have an answer to this at this point.

You know, Goan later begins to suggest that it might be a hell of a lot of it.

There's a lot of really great moments of like watching Killiwa's face as he watches

Gon talking to Kite, of this sort of like,

I'm not quite involved in this in the same way and yet at the same time i'm being dragged along with it um and as this question of like how much of this has jing authored keeps coming up again and again in just these first three episodes that expand into uh global geopolitics and a potentially uh lethal world-ending ant army uh i feel like the viewer is just constantly being asked to invite how much of this is uh is being invited to ask how much of this is jing's doing well and the funny funny thing is, we never get we, the Jing that we get, first of all, we get two Jings, right?

We get fuzzy hair Jing inside of the like turban, and like his hair is like messy and coming out of it.

And then we get like almost like a middle ground hair up like gones, you know, almost like a, I don't know, I'm guessing it's

bandana hair up Jing also.

Same voice actor, same, you know, more or less the same performance with those, but it feels like different stages of his life or something.

But we don't, we never get him as

we never see him

being a, you know, a master planner or manipulator.

We've heard that he made one phone call once to change Dune's legal name.

We never see him doing it.

And we don't see anything.

We don't see him doing anything except the type of stuff we see Goan doing, which is having a...

you know, a sort of innate charisma that others are drawn towards.

And then, and then doing stuff that I think we've seen the other teachers doing, which is like, be kind of a shithead to people.

There's a bit where after

Kite, so Kite is sent on a big hunt to find Jing.

It's at this point that I'm like, oh, this is why it's called Hunter, Hunter.

Kite is sent on a big hunt to find Jing, and he does it.

He finds him standing on this big cliff.

And

Jing, correct me if I'm wrong here, Jing essentially spells out that like, Goan is going to come looking for me.

And he like throws a punch and stops short from it connecting.

Just sort of like classic shithead Jing behavior, but it's very much Jing instrumentalizing another person in his life as a obstacle or guide on Goan's journey, right?

Yeah, yep, yeah, yeah, that's what friends are for.

Also,

what was it that He soaked that it was good to have friends as a hunter?

Yeah, yeah, it's good to have, oh, yeah, I wish I had the exact quote.

It's like important

as a hunter to develop friendships or something.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, and you see that on some level with him and Illumi, you know.

I can't believe that I didn't put together until you said earlier in the episode that Killiwa and Kite's color palette are

the same, and we have two K's, and we have Goan and Jing.

Really, really interesting.

And we have one watchful, pessimistic, faintly nihilistic character.

Yeah.

With a dark background.

You know, Kite also grew up in...

The scene where Kite does the artful Dodger, but it's all animals to just steal some bread is so funny.

At one point, two dogs tip buckets of trash onto the heads of the guys who are chasing him.

And the two guys just sit down like, yeah.

Yeah.

We got trashed by a dog.

These are, there's a great thing that they do with the music I didn't I didn't grab it, but uh when it goes from so the first thing that that happens when he's like sort of remembering his past and saying uh he said uh jing is the one who made me a first-class hunter He was my teacher and benefactor.

If I'd never met Jing, I'd be dead now in an alley in the back of a slong long ago.

When he's saying this, they're doing a sort of orchestration of uh reason from the last season.

Uh, it's like

very

ooey-gooey, yeah, um, and malty.

But then it cuts to, it goes right from that to the beginning of Whale Island, which for me is like a very pretty song, but the beginning of it is like almost like an orchestra tuning up, but like slightly detuned in this weird, ominous sort of way.

And then it never goes into the pretty part of Whale Island.

It cuts right from that weird atonal part into the

intense drum break from mono a mano, which is very cool.

It was just very funny to switch right from the sort of saccharine reason orchestration and into like weird atonal stuff and then drums.

Yeah, look, as the Chimera Ant Queen has already taught us, you make use of what you can get your hands on.

It's true.

Take the best bits.

That's good to point out.

During all of this, we are getting like quick cuts to what the Chimera Ant Queen is doing, which is like sitting in a cave, missing a leg, eating a bunch of fish, and being like, I need more food.

This is great because we had the little ant shot by kite at the beginning.

You know, we had a brief description of what the chimera ants are, and then we all just sit down around a fire and talk about Jing.

You know, it's like the ant briefly just falls out of the story, except for these very sudden cuts to the cave.

Uh, the chimera ant queen speaks, she has a sort of uh raspy uh voice and uh imperious delivery.

Um, she sounds like a witch, she does sound like like a witch.

She's got big mandibles, but also teeth.

Human teeth.

Human teeth.

That's, I think, how you can tell it's her in the opening, is you get the big smile.

Yeah.

And they are shooting her like a creature feature monster,

but they are not showing her directly.

You know, we'll just get an over-the-shoulder shot.

We'll get a shot of her horrible mandibles.

We'll get maybe like a full body shot in silhouette.

This is really funny because at about an episode and a half from now, Tagashi abandons all pretense with the camera

and is just like point the camera at them.

But having the queen here is really good and really scary.

We learn some more stuff that Jing has done.

Jing has his fingers in all sorts of hunter pies.

He is a triple.

Can I say real quick in the flashback of

Kaita's Yarfil Dodger?

And he's in the sewer and he shows up and Jing had been like watching him and is like down in the sewer waiting for him to come by.

This is, I think, the most likable

that Jing has come across so far, which is like hanging out with all the animals, saying, He says,

Hey, so do you live down here with these guys?

It looks fun.

It's so gone, too.

It's all there, right?

Yeah, it's gone.

Gone is here, and you get it for the first time, which I think is like one of the great struggles when writing a character who's supposed to be super charismatic, but the viewer is also supposed to be skeptical of them.

Is it's very easy to produce skepticism in the viewer.

It's very hard to make the viewer charmed once they're suspicious.

And I mean, later this episode, we get some of the worst stuff from Jing we've ever seen,

which I know, Dre, you're excited to talk about too.

But here, you're right, Keith.

I think that moment of,

hey, you know, you live down here with all these cool animals?

That sounds fun.

Like, oh yeah, we've been prepped for whatever, 76 episodes to respond positively to that cadence and that enthusiasm because it's gone's.

And if anything, what the thing that's happening here is the continuation of being like, hey, maybe you should be skeptical of that like all-in attitude that Goan always has.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

You could have threw yourself into someone else's life and decided this is what you're going to wear for the next six months.

And I feel like they introduced this in a way that makes me go like

they like, I think we've seen a lot of like, uh-oh, like, what's happening to Goan?

Like, what is Goan?

what are these choices that Goan's making, turning him into?

And I think the parallels with Jing do a really good job of being like,

like,

maybe those,

maybe that's been there for longer than we thought.

Like, going back towards the beginning, because especially, you know, we see the parallel between Kilua and Kite.

and

the way that Jing sort of sort of makes these these intense friends of people who care about him so deeply that he just leaves behind.

And it's kind of exactly what Goan's story would look like if he didn't meet Kilua.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He has done that.

He has done the same thing that Jing does to everyone he's met, except for the one guy who won't leave his side.

Right.

Right.

And at that point, it's like, yeah, Killua's the one who won't leave his side.

Right.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah.

Though he also goes and gets Killua after the hunter exam.

So, like, we've seen that work in both directions at this point, you know.

But I think that that was massive for Kiliwa, right?

Was having a friend come and get him out of the Zelda house.

Well, not get him out because he just left the Zelda house, he just walks out, but you know what I mean.

Well, yeah, it was Kiloa feeling like, oh, somebody sees me as worth coming to get out of the house,

which is a feeling that it seems like he has not really felt before.

Yeah,

well, is this show sad?

This show is deeply sad.

Yeah,

Yeah, dog.

But then it's also the same thing.

The kids are showing.

We don't know what you're talking about.

Doesn't everything about what we watched Scream Kids show?

No, the kids are sad, Sylvie.

No, I saw that guy and his little sister.

They seemed great.

They're little kids in the C's episode.

They knew great.

They were laughing.

Don't tell me what happened.

I haven't watched the last one yet.

I'm doing it right now.

Oh, geez.

But I think the thing that I think to kind of finish, I thought I had before, but didn't didn't properly finish.

What's interesting is we therefore see in Jing parts of what we know is true for Goan, which is

Jing throws himself, you know, happily into new things over and over again.

Yeah.

We finally get to see a little bit of that joy.

But we also know that Jing is a planner, or we've heard that Jing is a planner.

We know that Jing, at the very least, asks for favors from people to do stuff like, hey, my son is going to come find you one day.

Don't hold back.

Or basically the same thing.

He has basically kind of asked that of

what is his name from Greed Island.

Razor the murderer?

Razor.

Right, Razor.

Razor the murderer.

Exactly.

And then also, full name.

Thanks.

Thanks, Kite, for not holding back against Goan.

Yeah.

Thanks for clobbering my son is what he said.

Thanks for clobbering my son.

But we don't see fucking much.

Right now, we haven't seen Goan do that stuff.

We have not seen Goan is the opposite of a planner.

He's not someone, he in fact will disregard a plan and be quote unquote selfish instead.

Yeah.

And he isn't, we don't see him asking for favors so much because he so far really wants to win on his own or with just his close friends, right?

He's not like,

you know, I guess maybe asking Hysoka for help last season, but like, he's not doing the thing Jing is doing at this point.

There is one

thing.

This whole thing has been his plan.

Sure, but it's a different type of thing.

He's

orchestrating, right?

As far as we can see, right?

But I'm just trying to draw the line and think about these two characters.

At this point, I think he's he's letting himself be orchestrated.

He feels like being orchestrated is part of

finding Jing.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a really funny moment where,

and this can sort of get us into beginning to talk about

some awful Jing later, but we learn why they sort of found Kite, which is that Kite was brought into Greed Island by Jing a long time ago.

And Kite sort of barely remembers this.

You get the impression that his life with Jing was so varied and

high intensity that, like, you've entered a video game called Greed Island with Jing for a bit.

It's like, Jing is just having us do this stuff all the time.

And he probably got Kite to set up the nickname in that moment.

And Goan here, rather than going, my dad is a bizarre master manipulator on scales that I don't really understand yet, has a great like, oh, he got me good reaction.

He's delighted by this.

He's like, this is the game that I'm playing with my dad.

It's their first game of catch.

No, it's not.

No, it kind of is.

You're not wrong.

But God, that's depressing.

He's wrong.

about this actually because we learn in another flashback how it actually works oh yeah that's that a company brings.

Goan is wrong about this.

Goan thinks, oh, he gets a bunch of people.

It was always going to be kite.

It was always going to be kite.

Right.

Yes.

If he's going to use a company, it's going to be kite.

Right.

Why is that?

Does someone have the quote here?

Oh, it's, it's, if he uses a company, then he's too much of a coward to face me without his friends.

But if this is, uh, if he uses magnetic force to see me on his own, I'm willing to meet with him.

But I can't meet him if he's so gutless that he has to bring friends.

And I can't, I don't, they don't say which of the entrance or exit is.

Yeah, which of the twins this is.

Edda or

I can't remember the other one's name.

Let's just say that it's Edda.

She's like, this is so bad.

I feel sorry for Goan.

Subtitle Satanic, right?

Okay.

So

she accuses him of that more people would just make you self-conscious.

Yes.

He's so weird, shy, and stubborn.

I feel sorry for Goan.

And it's sort of an interesting twist on like the first impulse is like, take Jing at his word.

And then Elaine is like, no, he's making excuses for being anxious.

This is great.

It's a sort of first hint that we have that there is some sort of like roiling animus within Jing, other than I want to test my son.

You know, she describes Jing as very shy, right?

And, you know,

this is a character that has previously been a sort of like legendary figure on a pedestal, pursued through a variety of games and tasks.

And here in this moment, we get to see that we get to see

what might be motivating his selfishness.

We only really get a hint of it.

You know, why is Jing like this?

But I do think it was interesting that she specifically said, you would feel self-conscious if more people showed up.

But then it's also, it's impossible to see what we've seen of Jing and be like, that's that's a shy guy.

It's crazy.

I can see it.

Totally.

I can see it.

Jing longing onto Twitter and saying, hey, if you're left this space doesn't make me, if it makes me feel bad about abandoning my son, then it's not a safe space.

I see him as this like deeply charismatic, anxious figure who is throwing himself from task to task.

Let me just see here.

He discovered the Lurker ruins.

He discovered the Conga gold vein.

We keep seeing, and and again, we never actually see this happen.

Just people tell us about it.

Jing throwing himself into these tasks of like

he's a patron of a lot of important causes.

He's rebuilding things and handing them back over to the people whose civilizations they were a part of.

He's involved in philanthropic endeavors.

We don't actually see any of this stuff.

You know, all we ever see is him fleeing from his son over and over again.

And then seeing the people that have met him be like, oh, yeah, God, if you haven't met him, that sucks.

He's great to meet.

Or he's the worst guy I've ever met.

I hate him.

Yeah.

Truly.

And then the people saying he's great to me then give examples of him being the worst.

Truly on my worst days, I feel like Jake.

Like in the sense that, like, I am.

Put me in the right circumstance.

I can be incredibly charming.

People can want to hang out with me.

And then I will fucking disappear on you.

I will flake.

I will not find the time to hang out.

You will have a deeper connection with me than I do with you.

I actually already have a really full dance card, so to speak, and like have somehow didn't like broadcast that well enough.

And now,

you know, truly, I have made these mistakes.

I don't know that Jing is making mistakes.

I think Jing is making plans.

I think that's the difference.

And I think that it's important that we see him, you know, he gets a little bit of pushback here.

Elena is like, are you sure you want to do that?

And he goes like, never mind, just do it.

I'm having a little tantrum.

Do you think he changed that man's name?

Do you think Goan was a plan?

Well,

sorry, say that again.

Do you think Goan was a plan, not a mistake?

No, I think

we have no idea.

We have no idea.

Maybe.

I mean,

I don't know, man.

We're watching a season that's about

passing on genetic strength one generation to another and the sort of like undeniable biological urge to do that.

And he's, I don't know.

He's truly don't know.

He seems to have put a lot of work into not being, not doing the work of being a father.

No one has ever tried

hard to not raise a son.

And that was your point last season, right?

Was like,

if he really did build this whole game to train Goan indirectly, then that's an interesting.

It's not parenting, but it's not not parenting.

It's something, you know,

Keith and or Sylvie, I sent you all a thought in Discord.

Can you read it and see if you think it is like clear for me to say this?

I think that's

clear.

Yeah, I think that

that's fine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The thing I typed and that I believe is that Gene wants to put Goan through all of this because he thinks it's the only way to make Goan into a person that won't hate Gene for abandoning it.

You know what's the saddest thing about that is that he already didn't hate him from the very beginning.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

You ever notice how Jing, if there was an O in it, would be going and Goan, if there was an e in it would be gone yeah he named him he named his kid after what he is wow gone

so that he said remaining instead of that he was remaining here it's just easier to say gone you know so that he didn't have to stop going yeah this is also the thing that tagashi keeps coming back to again and again and again right which is that like um people are seeking games in order to render out some sort of meaning in their lives or in their relationships with other people.

So what method would Jing take to ensure that his son didn't love me?

I wasn't abandoning you.

I was setting up step one in a game that's going to cause you to become a better person.

I was making global mousetrap.

I mean, and that, by the way, that was the thing that I hadn't taken from Greed Island the first time through that I really did this time was,

you know, obviously going into it the second time, you know that it's something that Jing and all his friends built and you understand, you know, you have all this other context.

But the idea, and y'all hit on a lot of this throughout, was like, oh, Jing thought people would play it one way and they're playing it a different way and all the slippages between game and real.

The fact that there's like

the only person in the world who plays it right is Goan, right?

He built a thing that works for Goan, but nobody else.

And that sort of feels like the way he sees the world is that, oh, the world is a big game for me and I can make it a game for somebody else.

But he doesn't really understand the like osmosis and the corruption and the way that that game will have knock-on effects for the the way the real world works.

And also, the playing is peaceful.

Yes.

The cruelty of freezing a place in Amber until you're ready for it, also is like,

the only reason that Greed Island devolves into this horrible mess of murder and violence and backstabbing is because it wasn't winnable until Goan got there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Lex Luther once said to Superman, well, why don't you put the whole world in a bottle?

And I think about that a lot because Superman famously put the last remaining

part of Kryptonite's Krypton city into a bottle.

Or he didn't put it there, but he has it there.

And that's like the one remaining Kryptonian culture.

And

kind of targeting, this is from Red Sun, where Superman is the communist Superman.

The way that Lex Luther gets one over on him in the end is like as he slips towards a sort of like authoritarian, you know,

nothing happens without Superman's approval Is he says, Well, why don't you just go ahead and put the whole world in a bottle?

I feel like that is

fucking, yeah, that is Jing's whole thing, right?

It's like, ooh, I could, how do I fix the world such that it has the outcome I want?

And I hadn't really thought about Greed Island in that way before.

And it's interesting seeing it as it then spills out into all of Jing's interpersonal relationships going forward.

Another thing, another place where the world is in a bottle, the NGL.

Oh, sure and uh yeah and uh gordeau

well but it's not just that it's it's like greed greed island comes right before an arc that you know contains little sub-bottles but is about this massive explosion in scale you know if if if jing is out here being like i can predict how this is going to work and i'm going to seal it in amber and set it up for going to arrive and now we move into this like um exponential, chaotic, global disaster unfolding.

Sitting those next to each each other is meaningful, I think.

The lesson was he couldn't predict how it was going to go in Green Island, or he did and didn't care.

Right.

Right.

Like he made game systems that were immediately turned towards, maybe not immediately, but eventually turned on their heads because people realized it's better to be violent.

It's better to kill.

It's easier to steal than to play the quests, etc.

And,

you know, either he didn't anticipate that and his plan was bad, or he anticipated it and thought, okay, but it's still going to get my good outcome, which is my son is going to get trained up.

Right.

Or he thought, well, if they die in Greed Island, they should just have the common sense to not die in Greed Island.

Or, or they agreed to play, yeah, they agreed to play in Greed Island where they knew the cost could be death, which we know Goan has signed on entirely for.

I don't think we highlighted that, but that's me referencing the other part of him saying, Thanks for punching my kid, Kai, was him saying, I mean, it was common sense to not go in front of a fox bear when you're having four kids.

Yeah,

man, who could have taught Goan that if he didn't fucking disappear?

Very normal parenting.

Don't play in the road.

You know, if your ball rolls into the street, look both ways.

Don't go play in front of the fox bear.

What method would you like to use to accomplish this task, Jing?

Oh, elaborate world mousetrap game.

He does also have the foresight to make like the key to winning the game, having to like think about the NPCs that you met and how to help them late in the game.

Like, hey, remember those like computer programs?

Like, let's, maybe we can heat, maybe we can figure out a way to actually heal them.

Like, that's such an oddly specific kind of compassion to them.

We don't even, because that's the one card that's not.

No one knew where it was.

We don't even know if that was him is the thing, right?

10 people made Greed Island.

And so, one of the things I was thinking when you were talking about,

God, I forget the test at the end, the actual, like, the quiz.

It's so easy to imagine.

This is headcanon.

This is not.

It's so easy to imagine that, like, Jing was like, and then you get all the cards and you win.

And then someone in the 10-person group was like, wait a second, wait a second, wait a second.

We have to make sure that they played the game.

Like, what if there's a test at the end?

And Jing was like, I don't care.

I'm going to go deal with another crisis.

Sure.

Add the quiz at the end.

Okay, but if he does all this for Goan, it's got to be set up in a way to actually work.

Do you think Gene could pass the Greed Island quiz at the end?

Yes.

No.

I think he could get the rewards from it without needing to pass the quiz.

Yeah.

The way that the Phantom Troop probably could.

I think he could do that.

Yes.

Yeah.

You know?

Like, I think he could talk his way in and figure it out.

Yeah.

And that's all.

I just want to be super clear.

I'm not talking about future knowledge, Jing stuff.

Like, I'm just talking about what we know here.

Yeah.

And now about Jing.

I truly don't remember off the top of my head if I know any of Jing's Nen stuff at all.

So

it's interesting that we don't.

We have not been given access to this.

In a show, I mean, this is part of the game of the show is like restricting knowledge about whose Nen is what.

You know, you're sort of playing like a Find the Lady game with Nen at all times.

So I don't think it's unusual that

Jing's Nen has been hidden from us.

But he is this larger-than-life figure, and we know almost nothing about his Nen power.

I've always assumed that it is like he is a

Nen.

We talk about people like writing nen onto things, like giving giving things nen powers, like the cards, like the phone, like the game.

Yeah, imbuing nen inside things.

I think that that is Jing's sort of like main action, which also is consistent with the way that he treats humans.

It's one of the main things we've seen him do.

Yeah, except that again, we keep learning that he often gets other people to do things for him.

Yeah, and then it's also because we don't know a lot about Jing, the line on like what he does and what he commissions is very unclear.

That's what I mean.

Yeah, exactly.

Deep

idea guy vibes.

It's so...

He does a little bit.

There's so much meat on these bones.

Chimera Ant is so dense.

We have had all of this stuff to say.

We were about a third of the way through the first episode.

No, we're not.

No, we're the end of the day.

We're done with

the

stuff.

The last point I'd like to make about Jing, and then we should move on, is that this show has always had a really keen eye for the way that children think about things the way that children think about like fairness and unfairness the way they think about anxiety and friends and when we talk about like what is jing's nen power jing has uh relationships with people that he can call on for favors and i don't really know who they are there is this real like this is what adults are like there's that sort of inaccessibility when you're a child the inaccessibility of your own parents of like my parents have friends maybe i don't really know who they are they go off to work i don't really know what they do do.

Jing is sort of like this

absent inscrutable parent out there

that can only be understood in these sort of like broad, idealizing or anxious ways.

Right.

Also, it goes unsaid, but during all of this, Killer is looking at Goan as Goan hears and dreams about his father.

And he smiles at Goan.

Goan is so excited and happy.

And you have to know deep down inside, Killer is thinking about his own father and his own upbringing and his father who was very present in his life in a very different way you know literally who would you who would you rather the extremely present evil dad or uh the wildly amoral absent

the charismatic well-loved absentee dad yeah

well you know maybe maybe kiloa's dad can turn into the guy from minions oh maybe you know because he is an evil present dad that becomes a good guy yeah Yeah.

Did Grew become a good guy?

Grew Zold.

Grew is famously a good guy, Austin.

I don't know about the Minion.

Would the Minions keep working for him?

Because they're not the host to.

No, I think.

There's a

lot of two, but then all the other Minion movies, I don't think, really have Grew in them.

Oh, they got like freed like the genie at the end of Aladdin.

That's true.

Despicable me is Grew, not Minions.

Minions is just the Minions.

The plot of Despicable Me can't be aware of him.

He saves a bunch of children that he's grown to care for.

That's the plot of it.

And then do the minions abandon him because they have to work for an evil person.

No, I think the minions also then begin to be like, what if we can ask for better?

They've been around since the beginning of history, and this is the first time they had a second thought.

People can change, Austin, and sometimes those people are 500,000 small, like corals, bean-shaped people.

Short on the power of Steve Carell, anything is possible.

Okay, with the power of being locked in an ice cave

between 1949 and

I think that I have pretty much talked about everything I want to talk about in 76.

But Keith, you say you have more.

So basically what happened is I have what looks like a lot more notes because I wrote out the lyrics, the translated lyrics to the new ending song.

Ah, it's so good.

Because I think they're important.

Oh, one thing, one note that I had, just going through my notes that we didn't touch on.

Goan eventually is like, maybe meeting like Bisky and Tesgara are also part of Jing's plans.

I think that he's being very silly.

Uh, like, the idea, like, not only is this overarching plan,

uh, Jing's doing, but like, all of these little bits he somehow got everyone in the right place, like literally, like pieces on a chessboard, and not just kind of theoretically.

Is this where he's like, Kilo, but maybe you're part of my plan?

Yes,

and you know,

I don't know,

likely is what I agree.

Um,

uh, oh, uh, when

Kite says that

Jing isn't a three-star hunter, but qualifies because there's apparently it takes a little bit of time to fill out paperwork and apply and everything, and that's just not Jing's style.

He says that there is.

This is what I'm talking about.

Yeah.

You're telling me

that Jing has conducted, you know, worldwide mousetrap for his son, but he won't fill out a form or he doesn't have someone else who can fill out the form for him.

But one of them is his interest.

Right.

Yes, yes, that is actually very

gone, right?

Yeah, it is, right?

It is.

Uh, uh, just that I just wanted to note uh that Kaitis, there are fewer than 10 triple-star hunters in the world, so the there is we have now have like a number to back up how impressive people say that Jing is.

We got power levels, uh, yeah,

like if you think about it, it is just kind of a power level, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um,

the other thing here that I think is interesting too, uh, the to go back to the

um

Goan and Kite and Kiloa talking about Jing setting things up.

I think I was thinking about a lot during Green Island also was the sort of, you know, to make up Michael Let's maneuver here, the sort of

authorial, like the kind of meta position here, which is if all of Hunter Hunter is Jing setting up and pushing things into motion and doing mousetrap, then Jing isn't or if it's ambiguous what isn't isn't.

There's something fun being said about authorship there that Jing, yeah, Jing, you know, Goan is Jing's kid, and yeah, he set up some games for him to play through, but he doesn't necessarily know how it's going to come out.

Yes, he wants to push Goan into training into becoming a certain type of person.

How much of that is hands-on?

How much of that is hands-off?

Get it.

Was Kilo a part of his plan?

And there's like a really fun commentary on authorship there that I think is fascinating, you know?

We do see like the two sides of this from Jing.

Like every time it comes up, Jing will say, like, be careful, he's my son, like, he'll fucking get you.

Right, he's, he's the protagonist.

Understand, you up.

He's the special boy in the middle.

He's my son.

But then the flip side is, like, like, he tells Razor, yeah, kill my son.

You can kill him.

It's fine.

He, I think that he understands that.

That's not true.

That's not true.

What he says is, don't underestimate.

And Razor says, so I can kill him.

And then he says to Razor,

don't underestimate him.

Parentheses, he's the protagonist of this anime.

He'll beat your ass.

But it never it never feels like jing thinks that gone can't die

sure

i don't know i think they kind of time on it yeah uh the other the other corollary to this by the way was while i was watching greed island the thing i kept thinking about was um

uh biskey and uh hysoka as very harsh uh critique of the viewer

oh yeah oh you're so invested in these kids you so you can't wait to see them get their shit kicked in You can't wait to see them grow and get stronger.

And, like, yeah, some of you like that, want that in different ways than other versions of you.

But both of you are kind of fucking gross.

You know, there's like a real,

you know, obviously Biscuit, I think, comes out on the right side of that compared to Ahsoka.

But it's, there's like, I hadn't thought of it before, but there's a lot of attention spent on the attention that they are spending looking at those two boys as objects of not just like gross desire, but fundamental entertainment you know yeah that's interesting um

things to consider going forward continually the uh the

the last thing that happens in this episode is the announcer coming in and the chimera ant queen coming back in uh the announcer says kite student of jing his meeting with gonan kilua uh indicated a new adventure was beginning meanwhile on the southern shores of the balsa islands of the european continent a prologue to unparalleled fear was quietly unfolding.

And then we get the Chimera Ant Queen talking.

She says, I have a duty to fulfill.

I have to give birth to the king.

We got our good friend the narrator is going to

be talking to us a lot this season.

I love the narrator.

Yeah, I feel like this is the narrator is the secret, the secret protagonist of

yeah, I love the Ant Queen speaking because while I have no idea where we're going, and I think this is actually worth saying as we move into Chimera Ant, you know, at the end of the hunter exam, we had we have to get stronger.

Well, so first we have to go get Killier, so we know where we're going there, then we have to get stronger to beat Hiseker, then we have to go to York New City to meet

the Phantom Troop.

Well, that's not where we're going, but you know.

Then we have to go into Greed Island to find, then we have to go into Greed Island to find Jing.

We have,

We teleport to who we think is Jing, and we are in completely uncharted waters.

Not one shred of here is what you're doing next.

It's really important to consider as we go forward thinking about what Goan is looking for in terms of guidance and goal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, actually,

Kite offers him a little test, like a very classic Jing Freaks test of saying, basically, I know where your dad is.

Do you want me to tell you?

And of course, Gohan says, no, I'd rather find out myself.

And, you know, Kite smirks and it's like, he's his father's son.

You know, all of this is just this sort of like Jing maneuvering that we're now very used to by this point.

But I mentioned this about not really knowing where we're going because as soon as we have the

chimera ant queen in the cave eating the stuff and saying, you know, I have to be strong to give birth to the king.

I'm the ant queen.

While I couldn't predict quite how things were going to develop,

the next couple of episodes slotted into place for me.

Like, this is so firmly within a particular kind of creature feature, or in like a particular kind of monster movie, or again, like a techno-thriller mold, that having this, like, imperious, raspy queen, you know, saying, I have to be strong to birth the king,

I felt like we were moving into a genre space that I was fairly familiar with.

Togashi's style, I think that that is broadly still true, but he is definitely making some interesting swerves as we can begin to talk about.

Tagashi is allergic to creating any kind of character that he doesn't immediately show us just simply hanging out.

Yes.

We have like

Chimera.

We Chimera start just hanging out and chilling.

We go from

to mutant queen to dorm room in like

30 minutes.

That's just how people be.

That's kind of the thesis.

Everyone is kind of this, but like, it is so, it will never stop being charming to me.

The way that Tagashi is

probably,

you know, I jokingly say unable to, but probably uninterested in putting the scariest motherfuckers you have ever met on the screen and then immediately having them be like, hey, you got a headache today?

And they're like, yeah, I got a headache.

All right.

I wish the queen could just talk like a normal person.

Speaking of the scariest motherfuckers you ever met, it's hard to meet Kite's crew.

Oh my God, god, they're great.

Kite's crew,

Kite's crew are all protagonists from different mid-2000s indie games.

I do want to shout out the new outro song real quick.

Oh, yes, please do.

Oh, does someone know the name of this one?

It's called...

Oh, right.

We actually got an instrumental version of it in the last episode that we recorded.

It's

Nagaraboshi Karari is what it's called.

And it's, it's I love it.

I think it's great.

I think that the actual like outro is really fun.

Like the visuals of it.

The la la la

And I think

sorry, go ahead, go ahead.

Oh, it's it's just really funny to me that like at the Heaven's Arena arc, the closing sequence into York New City was like, we're gonna debut all of the Phantom Troop members in the closing sequence.

We're gonna show you the nen wheel.

And here as we move into Chimera Ant, the outro is this like fairly sedate music, and then Gonan and Kilua are throwing rocks into a starry, uh, reflected lake.

Yeah, good, Juxtavan.

I don't know if you noticed, Jack, the rocks turn into shooting stars.

They're not going into the lake, they're going into the sky.

Wow, yeah, uh, and and the lyrics reflect, I think, the visuals, uh, entrusting wishes to the sky, unanswered feelings, alone looking up at the sky beyond like this, believe in yourself, uh, believing that one day our hearts will become one.

Sparkle shooting star, I see you in my dreams as a guide towards a different tomorrow.

Convey those feelings in a single flash of light.

I'll find something to do for you.

Be it beyond the sky.

Let's go on a journey.

The ants are at least ostensibly not aliens.

But I will say, we don't know where the ants, the ant queen, has come from.

You know, there's some sort of mysterious hints as to her origins.

Whether or not they're aliens, probably not.

Constant shots of the moon, of stars, of like

we see like a blue globe planet in the opening.

You know, whether they are doing it to say these guys are aliens, we are being shown images of like celestial objects and celestial bodies all the time

from now on.

Yeah, I think a lot of this is the

multiple references to Ghone as light, as a sun, as a star, as shining, as being bright.

In positive ways and negative ways, like

having the same sort of charisma as Jing, but also

like,

I won't go into it.

I won't go into it.

It's fine.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

I know exactly what you mean.

And yes.

In comes Kite's team.

I mean, briefly, we get to see that Kite is a sort of a beast hunter, like a researcher, and he's found some tigers that have learned how to use fire.

Camp tigers.

Camp tigers.

They have horns.

They're the first mammal that prefers

cooked meat other than some, I believe he says magical beasts.

Yeah.

Yeah, we get to see a little shot of them doing it.

So why don't these count as magical beasts?

That's my question, too.

They're mundane.

They're literally unicorns.

They're mundane.

They're weak to.

What is mundane weak to?

No, right, sure, right.

Profane to elemental.

Or maybe it's profane.

Maybe it's

these.

These

lions.

God, I I would never besmirch a tiger by calling them a lion.

We gotta go back to playing the animal game before recording.

We gotta bone up on our animals.

These tigers are basically a side gag, but I do think are

pretty overt foreshadowing for wouldn't it be weird if animals could start learning how to do things?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I just thought of it.

Oh, go ahead.

No, you go ahead.

I just thought, like, this is just a thing I love about kite is seeing, like,

it's another example of, like, remember when we got, like, early on talking about

Mustache Man from the exam who talked about finding

talking about finding ruins and stuff.

And, like, this is kind of similar.

It's like, oh, this is the type of work hunters do.

It's also.

But also you get to see one being really passionate about it.

Like, the most kite talks is when Kite is talking about animals.

It's also a reflection of Karapiga's idea of what a hunter should be

In all his arguments that he has with Leorio about like hunters become hunters to become rich and powerful.

And Karapa would be like, no, they do it to become conservationists.

Well, here is our conservationist.

And of course, it reminded me of the bit at the beginning of Dragon Ball Superhero, the most recent Dragon Ball I've been to see.

Yeah, where Gohan is revealed to be an entomologist.

Oh, I know.

Do you remember what he's researching?

No,

no, I don't.

He's researched a new type of ant that called a Saiyant that can go Super Saiyan.

Say?

No.

100%.

I forgot.

So funny.

Say ant.

I think.

I think that's so, man.

Yeah, I'll show you the image.

I'll post the image.

Is it dinner?

We found a new act

that can go super saiyan.

It's like us two-thirds of the way through a Bluff City game.

100%.

We've turned over a card that we're excited about.

Wow, that ant is going Super Saiyan.

So funny.

Is the ant going super saiyan why orange piccolo exists

do they use no they're on the

transcript

and completely separated okay orange piccolo oh my god

i don't know about orange piccolo that's the new piccolo form from from dragon ball super yeah do you know about gohan watch this

show

do you know about what's which new form what about gohan's new form sylphie is it is it orange gohan no

Is it Super Saiyan 4?

Close the form.

Gohan Beast form?

Yes.

It's basically Gohan Blanco, TBH.

I know it is.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Anyway,

I think I've always thought that the Saiyan thing was a little chimera ant.

Oh, it's gotta be.

Yeah, it's gotta be.

Oh, my God.

In comes Kite's research team.

Now, let's not beat around the bush.

One of these people is a teddy bear man.

Very exciting.

We can talk more about him as we go.

But the crew is very excited to learn first that this is Jing Freaks' son.

There's another sort of like fun sort of daisy chain thing happening here where it's like

Kite affords Goan a certain type of respect because he's his master's son and the research team affords Goan a certain type of respect because of this relationship with Kite and Jing.

I think that that's really neat.

Then they point at Killiwer and say, Are you Jing's son too?

And he says, No, my name is Killiwa Zoldic.

And then everyone reacts like you would think.

And he says, I have left the business.

I've left the business.

It's so funny.

These are because he has

these, this crew, they have the most live at the table ass names.

Oh, yeah, going to be in full season, not going on the main feed names.

Yep.

Keith, you had a

run of names recently.

That's not even the one I was going to say.

The punchline of you at the end of Palisade, a show about us coming up with a lot of different names, revealing 14 names of the game.

That is the one I was going to say, Jack.

So funny.

But no, the one I was actually going to mention is that in the

game called

The Slow Knife game.

Eyes of a Killer.

Okay.

I want to shout out, I think Sanadyne Vug.

Yeah.

That is Keith's car,

Keith does some good name work.

True.

Okay.

I thought you were going to say

the anagram that we found.

That's what I thought.

That's what I also thought.

Yeah.

I don't know about the anagon.

Listen to find out.

$5.

It's the best anagram of all time.

Yep.

Okay, let's just go one at a time.

I'll start.

I would like to introduce Spinner Klow, or Khloe, who is a pink-haired woman, long pink hair.

She is constantly blowing white bubblegum.

She's a non-a character.

I don't know why.

She's a very seminal Shoujo series.

She is, I sort of get the impression the second in command

yeah i have that vibe yeah

or she does computers do you know what i mean

yeah she's the oracle of of kite's team yeah uh i got the next one here uh stick dinner who is patrick klepek my good friend i i was gonna say this too but you know him so it's probably

better stick dinner has two things what are stick dinner's two things

I can say one of it is his afro and the other one is his bad sense of humor.

He has a third thing, which is that he handles all the cooking.

He doesn't wait for him.

Well, his last thing is dinner, of course.

He is.

This is a show that is regularly very funny and knows that it's being very funny.

And so it is therefore clearly deliberate that Stick Dinner's jokes are barely funny and barely jokes.

Yes.

Khan laughs at all of them.

It is slightly.

It's hard for me to believe that it's not at least a little out of politeness.

No, I think Gohan's.

No, I think Gohan just thinks this is really, really funny.

Goham's like, why don't more people tell jokes like this guy?

Finally, I can get these jokes.

Yeah.

And Stick's just like, oh, finally, I've met someone with enough brain injuries to enjoy my humor.

And it's really sweet writing from whoever has been adapting

the manga into the screenplay here, where like...

Because the cast of the research team is kind of large and they're just bouncing around in conversation, it's not like we're being inundated by bad half-puns from stick, so much as whenever he speaks, which isn't very often, we just get a new one.

He's

in two episodes, he does like three or four.

Yeah,

it's wild.

It's

up to me.

They're so bad.

Um, all right, we have them on the sheet here.

I mean, I'd love to introduce Monte Uras, who is the big bear

ant.

I mean,

wow,

you might be thinking, listener, you might be thinking, aren't the ants bugs?

Well,

we'll talk about that.

But yes, he does look a bit like he could be a Chimera ant.

He looks...

I described him as a teddy bear earlier instead of like a bear because he sort of has like very fluffy side buns,

fluffy hair,

like a bear's snout.

He's the size of a bear, but he looks like he's made out of teddy bear.

He feels like, yeah, he feels like he should be a plush toy.

He has two big buns on his head that would be where bear ears are, but he also has human ears.

It's very cute.

It's a really good design.

He sort of looks a bit like he's wearing a Yushanka hat.

It does kind of look like a hat.

What if he took that off?

I would be obsessed.

I would not enjoy that.

He is such a good reminder of this kind of like...

I talked about really loving this in original Dragon Ball 2, the way Tariyama and Tagashi also will just draw background characters purely for the fun.

You know, not everybody here is a human.

A weird demon will show up, you know, at some point.

Or, like, this person is some sort of troll.

This person's a lizard man.

Sometimes you get a martial artist who's an action movie hero, and sometimes you have a martial artist who is a dinosaur.

Yeah, it's great.

So it was really nice to see Monte Guras, who is called Mon,

showing up.

You have a

short, pink haired girl.

Her name is Banana Cavarro.

Strongly suggested to be Spinner Klaus' girlfriend.

Yes, absolutely.

Thank you so much.

My description for Banana Cavarro is that she is the best friend tomboy character in like the 90s Disney Channel original movie that then also became a sexual and or gender identity awakening for a lot of people.

Yeah, again, not character for me, but I'm the Shojo head here.

I think I saw her in Whole Foods recently.

I'm pretty sure she also kind of looks like the main guy from Jiu-Jitsu Kai-san.

Oh, does kind of look like the main guy from Jujutsu Kai-san.

The one that blew my mind is she actually looks a lot like the protagonist of the recent indie game dungeons of hinterland

uh-huh

austin i would uh i would challenge your assertion i think she is more likely to be an employee at trader joe's i see yeah you know what you're right well that's the thing works at trader joe's shops at whole foods i was saying as a consumer not as an employee

and that austin of course accurately speaks to the fact that she has inherited wealth because trader joe's salary would not enable you to uh

she really thought for some reason jack you were gonna say and that implies that she has overalls because she does she does

have overalls i really liked how characters all these character designs are great

it's got such a sharp you know we see this all the time where he will introduce freaks and then get rid of them immediately and we're about to see hundreds more he can draw a figure uh so

quickly defined he has a gift for character design like he really and truly does.

And I think this arc in particular really showcases that.

Now I will say.

The next two members are Padungo and Lynn, who are two racial characters.

Two racial characters.

Yeah, that is,

I was talking and then I was like, oh no, wait, there's a truck coming right at me.

My first note here says Padungo and Lynn are also on the team, but not here right now.

Would that it could always have been so.

Yeah.

You know, what's wild to me is,

you know, if it was just Podungo, I would have been, I would be like, damn, I can't believe he did Black People So Dirty with Pedungo.

But because Lin is here, I have to be like, yo, let's start on this awful Chinese caricature.

We can take the Pedungo stuff.

We're used to that.

Have you seen Dragon Ball?

You know, Mr.

Paul,

still a threat, still a problem.

But Lin Koshi is...

It's mad.

It's so bad.

It's really bad.

All the ugliest visual stereotypes of, you know, racial stereotypes in throughout movies and illustration and history.

It's the worst.

I don't want to get too into it now because we will have more opportunities, but Tagashi does show his ass on a few things during this arc.

Uh-huh.

Interesting.

Yeah, I haven't.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I am.

We can talk about it more when the ants really start kicking in in the next couple of episodes.

But I am beginning to get some suspicions about what this arc is about.

And I am so curious to see if, A, that's true and B, how they go about it.

Oh I need to know what you think this arc is about Jack but if when it comes if you want to wait until we're further into these episodes I understand

we start talking about countries and yes okay cool.

Hey I just look at what Pedungo looks like in the market.

Oh no.

Oh no.

It's worse.

It's worse?

Because it highlights.

It really highlights.

Oh, it's worse.

It really

she has the thing that anime

does sometimes.

She already already has the thing in the anime.

She has a thing where the lips are just like big and a different color in a way that like calls to mind like minstrel show,

blackface makeup, right?

Or like, you know, you know, similar racial caricatures.

But in the manga, instead of just drawing her face, he's done like a crosshatching of her skin to suggest that it's black.

And that makes it read as blackface more.

And she has two little blush points on, which just make it look like blackface.

White round eyes

straight out of it looks like Mr.

Popo.

Yeah, it's bad.

Jack, have you met Mr.

Popo yet?

I have not yet met Mr.

Popo yet.

I don't think so.

Jack will meet Mr.

Popo.

Yeah, there's a chance that might have happened.

If we do sell, which we absolutely should.

Okay, sure.

Well, I'm going to prepare, Jack.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Yeah, it's bad.

It's really bad.

I've talked about this on Run Button before, but like not being like

in the early 2000s and late 90s,

being a white kid from a white town, not knowing the history of blackface or minstrel shows or anything, and Mr.

Pobo looking like that.

I didn't learn what this was about until I was like 15.

It's, it's so, that's how bad it is.

It's

is brutal is old.

I think maybe I should have picked up on it, but it like when I when someone told me for the first time like what the fuck is going on with Mr.

Popo, I was like, what the fuck?

Mr.

Popo, him?

Not Mr.

Popo.

My friend.

Okay.

He's just hanging out.

He's so face.

The Chimera Ant train now starts to pick up speed a little bit.

It will move faster.

Let's go

even faster than I have seen it.

But it turns out that sort of like a series of events have taken place that have caused Kite's team to get involved here.

Southern bees, remember them?

The auction house?

Yeah.

Have found an arm, a huge arm of a strange, unidentified creature.

And knowing that they can't sell it because it would get, or rather, knowing that they can't put it on open auction because it would, that's not allowed, and it would get confiscated by the government otherwise, they are looking to sell it to a a hunter.

This is right in the mold of the way these kinds of like techno-thrillers tend to go, right?

Which is like a government entity tries to a government entity or a private entity tries to cut a corner somewhere, or tries to slip something under the table, and that lets you into this conspiracy or exacerbates the conspiracy.

Kite and his team immediately recognize this as the huge claw of a chimera ant.

And they are very worried about this for a reason that is not exactly made clear yet.

But given that

we learn later what a chimera ant is, and presumably Kite and his team know this.

And so when they see a Chimera ant arm this big, they are like, all right,

we have to find this ant.

This is...

We got to figure this out.

We've got

a new track for this when Mon produces the Chimera Ant

Claw.

We get a track called Scariness.

Oh.

This will play a lot.

We will hear a lot of scariness.

Properly named.

And I also like the little

sort of implication of one of the uses of a hunter in this world.

Because

is it Juan that

explains, like, hey, we'd rather sell it to a hunter than list it on the open auction?

Because,

oh, yeah.

Southern Peace, or Southern Beast Reason require the stamp of it.

Okay, here, here it is, yeah.

So they'd rather sell it to a licensed hunter at a nice price than have it confiscated by some government agency.

And just this idea, like one of the good things about hunters, one of the useful things, you can sort of like launder gray market items through them.

Sure, yes.

Libertarians love them.

Also, he's not a government entity, as we learn now.

No, right,

famous NGO Hunter Association.

This made me say, oh, shit, Tagashi has remembered that governments exist, and a finger on the monkey's paw curled.

Speaking of Metal Gear, by the way.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, no, there is.

Listen, we saw him playing video games

in that picture

from last week.

Yeah.

Your last episode.

He's trying to make Outer Heaven.

Outer Heaven.

Yeah.

He's playing MDS3.

The research team heads down towards near the vicinity of York New City,

where the claw washed up on the shore.

They are trying to find the ant, presumably so they can sort of nip this in the bud.

And they get there by driving

in a big truck across the desert.

This was notable to me because we have mostly seen airship travel.

We've seen

what was I going to say?

We've seen like a traffic jam in the past as Gon and Kellywa were like running alongside a traffic jam at the end of the hunter exam.

But something about, you know, we now have travel montages, people in big trucks rumbling through the desert.

And then the last time we saw a car driving in the desert was

in the mafia showdown.

In the mafia showdown, or even yeah, was Kiloa having captured

Karapika having captured.

Sorry, I actually Kiloa.

Yeah, Karapika having captured, I guess, Uwegien in the back.

By the way, remember that show?

I know.

Yeah.

With three episodes.

Remember Leorio?

Sorry, Riolio?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, how can I forget Riolio?

Yeah.

That old man.

As we're traveling.

Speaking of propagands, PowerPoint time, baby.

Episode 776 was like one long conversation.

67, PowerPoint City.

Have you ever had a PowerPoint that shown to you makes you immediately go, oh no.

And also, this is about to be the whole thing.

This is an illustrative PowerPoint as we learn what a chimera ant is.

As I said at the beginning of this episode, it's exactly what it sounds like.

Chimera ants reproduce via something called phagogenesis.

That's not how it's pronounced in the dub.

That's not how it's pronounced in the dub.

I'm going to say how it's pronounced in the dub because I'm allowed.

It's phagogenesis.

When I was a kid, that was Adam.

Jesus.

And his friend Steve.

It's a sort of Kirby-based

system.

The ant queen.

You're not wrong.

They're playing Kirby Superstar, and all the ants are the queen's helper.

The ant queen eats prey, and she passes down traits from that prey, literally, to the next generation.

The next generation keeps reproducing, keeps gaining new traits, eventually birthing a new king.

Sorry, a new queen who births a new king.

And that's how each brood is sort of ruled.

Well, I guess here's, I have a question about how it works, which I think I know how it works, but I'm going to ask it.

So, the queen eats the image that they show us,

they show us an ant.

They show it us in a really nice little scale, too.

They're eating like a grasshopper, they're eating like a ladybug.

These ants are probably about the size of maybe a joint of your finger, right?

And so, the examples that they show us, it's an ant that just looks like an ant, like a regular ass ant.

And then it eats, the first thing that we see is it eats a praying mantis, right?

And then suddenly it has an egg.

And then that the egg pops out and it's an ant that has praying mantis limbs in the front, the kind of like scythe style, the scyther style limbs, front limbs.

I don't know if we'll see that literally today.

Maybe.

Then the regular ant again eats the praying mantis, a beetle, and a dragonfly, has an egg, and those three things blend into another insect-looking

thing, but that has the beetle-like

nose thing, the beetle-like extended thing, the dragonfly wings, and the praying mantis arms.

Do

is it your impression that the stuff that was most recently eaten by the queen goes into the next brood?

Or does she kind of like keep a lingering amount in there from so like we see her eat a crab, for instance, right?

Yeah.

Does she, if she, let's say she has the crab baby, right?

And then she wants to have a crab and frying mantis baby.

Does she does she just have to eat a praying mantis?

Or does she also now have to eat another crab?

Because she already used the crab energy.

This reminds me of Krolo.

It does.

Oh my God.

You're right.

But I'm just curious like I left these episodes, and I know where we're going, but I left these episodes being unclear as to,

you know, if she needs to, if she wants to put crab energy into something, does she have to keep eating crabs?

or does it just kind of stay in the human

an in then out system of genes interesting okay i think for the see the thing that makes me think i here's how i've always pictured it because i didn't see her eat some of the shit we see She's got like a

soldiering stomach and a king stomach.

You know what I mean?

Oh,

that's why that makes sense.

They're constantly talking about how the purpose of going out on these raids is to get her food to make the king, right?

Right.

And so like to me, this is always like playing X-Com with the Avatar Project or whatever it's called is going on in the background as the king.

And then she's able to like the higher quality stuff goes into the king dummy.

Right.

And then she even

gets the soldiers.

Right.

Like when we first see her in this episode with the eggs on the ceiling, they're just regular big ants up.

They're not regular ants.

They're gigantic.

But they're just ants up on the ceiling, presumably doing work for her at this point.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So she's able to keep making those as far as we can tell too.

Because immediately immediately killua says you know um

would suck if they ate a person wouldn't it

yeah

uh

killowa is voicing all of uh killow is voicing all of kite's concerns all of kite's inner monologue yeah killow is saying out loud and then making kite go even more into outer space

please stop making our guide dissociate

it's great and they're they're in this truck sort of bumping around on their way to yacht city it's also it's, of course, after this thing about

phagogenesis,

it's mentioned for the fourth time that chimera ants are under designated quarantine level one.

Complete extinction, right?

Right.

They will eat multiple.

I think they said hundreds of times their body weight in a single day.

Many times over, yeah.

And they will eat their preferred prey to extinction.

And something, so this is interesting to me because, and I don't know what this is about, and you know, I have to imagine that exploring this might be some of what we're doing here, but it appears to me that this has gone wrong beyond ordinary levels, because obviously it would suck if a chimera ant is out there doing the stuff it does.

It's sort of like a very dangerous invasive species.

But the fact that the chimera ant queen is already two meters long, later the narrator, no, someone says that if a chimera ant gets gets bigger than two meters, humanity is threatened.

Oh, yeah.

It was a combination of Kilua saying that arm suggests that this thing is over two meters long.

Oh, right.

And then Kite thinking about a

big, we'd be fucked.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a great standard chance.

Of Kite looking over as Kilua says that, and it's just like, the look he's giving him is almost like,

you weren't supposed to say that part out loud.

Yeah.

Like, I knew that.

But no one here is like up for that.

But now I have to just say, like, yeah, if that happened, it would be really bad.

You know?

It's stuff like this that I was talking about when I talked about the speed with which Tagashi and the adaptation team are able to get us on board with Kite.

These little moments of bubbling out the character interactions.

But yeah,

the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park are bad enough.

It is very dangerous to get eaten by a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Yeah, but when you get eaten by a T-Rex, it doesn't learn how to talk.

Yeah, what I was going to say was, the thing that does you in in Jurassic Park, right, is that Nedri is fucking around with the electric fences or something.

You know, even beyond the dangerous destructive power of the thing itself, something bigger has gone wrong.

And I feel like the fact that we have a huge Chimera ant queen already suggests that this is, you know,

this is the worst case scenario.

And Chimera ants don't generally work like this.

And we do get a lot of sort of like forensic investigation on what's happening and where the ants are and how to pin them down.

And this is sort of where that gets suggested that like

maybe the arm spent longer at sea than the ant did and the ant has already like gone and set up shop.

Or maybe that's that's in a little bit maybe is when we get a little bit of that but first we have to meet and you know this is just one sentence I can say this and then we can move on to the next bit two doomed children.

Oh yes what are you talking about Kurt and Reyna They got a long life ahead of them.

Oh these are children remember how the scissors pervert had a backstory that was dispensed with as quickly as possible just to get us onto this character?

And similarly, Batera's much younger lover, that whole story sort of worked through quickly.

Here are two of the most doomed children that have ever been introduced.

They say things like, I'll keep you safe.

That's what big brothers are for.

They go home to a house where the little kid has a cough and her brother Kurt is like, don't worry, I'll look after you.

It's great how many death flags there are.

So there's death flags.

It's just all of them.

Let's wake up early tomorrow morning and go fishing.

We'll

get married when we grow up.

Yeah.

She's like, four, and Kurt's nine.

And Kurt's like, yeah, yeah, it's fine.

We'll go fishing.

Anybody who has ever seen a story is like, these fuckers are dead.

You can watch, if you actually, if you turn the contrast up on your monitor, you can see their souls leaving their bodies during these scenes.

Things have escalated now so quickly.

We are, you know, in our second episode of the Chimera Ant Arc, and we have already begun to go down the first drop of the roller coaster, as the ant queen is now walking upright and is humanoid and has birthed, you know, a brood of extremely fucked up looking chimera ants.

I wrote down here.

They are a motley crew.

They,

I understand now what people mean when they say are chimera ants even ants and I will grow to understand that more over these episodes.

But is that one of the first

I'm you said that and it just reminded me of you saying it before.

Where did that come from?

Where did you see that?

I heard you and Austin talking once.

You managed not to spoil anything.

And it's great that I only but you know, it was as one of you was watching the arc for the first time.

It's probably Austin.

And you were seeing the two of you were like, you know, I don't even know if these things are ants.

And I had no idea what that meant.

And now I do.

Does this last crew?

Or do I?

First, we have like weird lobster men.

We have,

God, there's just a lot of things.

You can see that she's been eating from the river because they're fish, lobsters, turtles.

Crabs.

Crabs.

Yes.

Yes.

Oh.

I actually didn't catch that.

That's really well done.

And she says, I have a solemn duty to give birth to the king.

And she sends them out to hunt for food.

And the the chimera ants immediately start raiding these sort of local, what I believe to be just sort of like rural communities up in the mountains.

I don't think that you need to think that.

That's exactly what it's exactly.

Yes, but

it is notable that they are rural communities, and we can talk about that when we get to the NGL later.

I was going to say, this is before we know what the NGL is.

Yeah, I had thought it was just like, it's Whale Island.

Oh, Oh my God.

Could you imagine?

Oh my God.

They landed on Whale Island first.

Look, the Chimera ants are really going for it.

It's maybe only a matter of time.

At this point, I would like to propose a new segment.

Now, I didn't talk to you about this segment, so you don't have to become prepared.

But it's just something to keep in mind as we move through the Chimera ant arc.

I would like to

discuss our favorite background chimera ants

from these episodes.

We'll meet some ants later that talk and stuff.

These ants are automatically disqualified.

Oh shit, then I don't have an answer.

I would like to introduce this fella.

We see him in one frame.

Great.

He's like a tick with a...

By this point, most of these ants are humanoid.

He's got a reverse widow.

This is not.

He's a tick with a reverse widow's peak and eight legs of different sizes.

Like the spider.

Oh, a black widow's peak.

And he has a piece of peak.

He's just bumping around uselessly in a white domestic dinner.

Yep.

Here's mine.

It's the one that's a bug body with a cat or bat.

That's a bat.

I think it's a bat.

Yeah, because they had

cheating.

It's that bat.

And it has like...

It does.

You have to understand that these things, especially this first batch, look like, you know how there will be like a kid's book where there's like,

a page is cut in three and you can like flip through it to like make a face.

So like, here's the top of the face, here's the middle of the face.

It's that, but for, but for animal people, like, it did, the, it does not, it is not meant to match in some cases here.

It's great, it's wonderful.

Um, fish head on a big skeletal insect body in every in every Pokemon game, there's a uh, like a couple fossil Pokemons that you can get revived from fossils.

And in one of the recent Pokemon games, I think it was in Sword and Shield or, uh, uh, or maybe the one out, maybe it was Scarlet and Violet, but they introduced this sort of parody of paleontology where you didn't quite know how the fossils fit together, so you would bring fossil pieces

to get revived, and it would just like be a mishmash of three different things in whatever order you happened to bring them in.

And that's what these chimera ants look like.

They look like the made-up fossil joke Pokemon.

Yeah.

I love them.

And he's drawn, you know, maybe 30 of them just for this first episode.

My suspicion is that what's going to happen is that the soldier Chimera ants are going to get broadly standardized, and we are going to

have like, I mean, towards the end of this, the queen is talking about like elite commanders, and I think that that's where we're going to get the majority of our like diverse chimera ant design.

But these early stages are just joyful because every wide shot is like 25 new weird chimera ants.

Then the two doomed kids get killed and eaten by on screen.

Notably,

I feel like that's like a really important thing.

We talked about like a tonal shift in

Greed Island, and I feel like it gets cemented in that shot.

Like you see Kurt get hit by this giant orange chimera ant.

And then later, the ant queen is

we don't see her like eating them, but we do see their bloodied clothes on the floor.

She tosses down the bow and she says, she's basically like, oh, this is great.

She says, the best fodder.

I must consume more of this species.

Yeah, what was that thing about ants consuming their preferred food to almost to extinction?

I keep coming back to this because it is so delightful.

The

comfort and readiness with which Tagashi and the manga team.

are moving into like a disaster story or like a a creature feature.

You know, He's so good at accelerating.

It was only last episode where you were like, I don't know how we're getting from here to ants.

And the answer is just they go to them.

They go to where the ants are.

It takes

a scene.

He's so good at accelerating is that he doesn't give a shit about like an on-ramp.

You know,

he just turns the car, he strafes the car into the exit.

And this is Tagashi's trick.

The on-ramps for Greed Island and Yard New City were the whole show before they appeared.

Yeah.

So we it's you never know.

And it produces this really alienating effect where I am watching this and I don't know how fast the next move is going to be.

I'm like, by the, there's no spoiler to say that by the end of the next episode, the ants have built like a citadel.

Like this immense citadel.

Yeah.

And I'm like, there's going to be 60 episodes of this.

He's like a great pitcher who strikes people out just by by throwing the right order of like fast and slow pitches, and it's just so confusing.

Who knows how long anything is going to take, where he's going to go, and then all of a sudden there's a curveball, and you're like, what the fuck?

What is happening?

Yeah.

And it's, it's so aggressive.

He's, he is saying, this is happening on my terms.

You don't, you, you want an on-ramp?

No.

The answer here now.

Deal with it.

Having seen Yu Yu Haka Show many times,

you can tell that this is like a learned behavior.

Like,

it's something that Yu Yu Hakasho is not good at, and that Tagashi seems to suffer for, like, not being able to write at his own pace.

It's worth saying that the manga did not take a break here, right?

Like,

the last episode of Greed Island Chance Encounter was

out on June 9th, 2003.

Uh, and then the next episode or the next chapter was was out on June 23rd, two weeks later.

You didn't take a two-year break and then go like, what the fuck?

Correct.

That's

wild.

What was I up to?

How do I make this pivot?

No, you just, you, you, there's one week off, and then he comes back, and it's, there's a, there's a, there's a bug queen, and there's all these new weird freaks who work for this guy named Pike.

Like it has not been remotely telegraphed.

I mean, it has maybe been thematically telegraphed, but I would even argue that like whole swathes of this thing's thematic tone have not really true.

You know, the scale is just ramping up.

It's hard to separate how long you've known about the ants with how no one would have known for even one second about.

Yeah.

Keith, you said something in the recent episode that was about

something in Chimera Ant being teased in a previous set of episodes.

Do you remember what it was?

And is it a thing you can say yet?

No, I don't.

Okay, that's fine.

I'll do my best to remember, but

I'm really glad you said that, Keith, about the distance between not knowing what an ant is and now knowing what the ant is.

It's something that I've come back to, and it's like a weird side effect of this project where I don't know what's happening and you'll do, where like, I think I said it before Greed Island, where I was like, this is going to be the last episode where I don't know.

you know, where Greed Island could be anything, as it were.

You know, it is about to get solidified as one thing.

Part of what's so much fun about the chimera ants is that baked into the way they work is that they could be shifting under your feet the whole time, you know?

Like,

I understand roughly how the ants work now, but built into that, and this is something Tagashi loves to do, right?

Is like give himself the room to switch it up, to say, all right, now this ant breathes underwater.

Or, here's a more specific example: a new brood of ants has hatched after,

perhaps notably, after the ant queen has eaten eaten the two doomed children.

This ant has angel wings, he has a sort of bug-like, carapaced humanoid body, and a very strange, pointed, bug-like human face.

And he can speak.

Interestingly, he says that he can speak so that he may receive, understand, and execute your orders.

We'll talk about this a bit more in the next episode, but the ants are immediately getting right into, like, what does it mean to speak?

What does it mean to have a name?

What is the function of speech?

And it's lovely that this ant's first line is that I can speak so that I can receive, understand, and execute orders.

That's what I'm saying.

Where does that come from?

It seems to have a very like a for us, we named ants queens, ant queens queens, because of that we knew what queens were.

Right.

Very interesting that this ant seems to understand what a queen is based on that also.

That's why we call it money.

Yeah, that's why we call it money.

I think it is perhaps worth saying because there's really no way to get around it.

And it might be that this is not as consequential as it is.

This ant name has been provided for me in subtitles.

Oh, really?

Oh, yeah.

I forgot that this is.

This has happened before.

The Netflix ones do not do that, I think.

Because

ants, no episodes.

They do not have names until the end of the

start of the next set of episodes, actually.

So it's probably worth waiting to talk about this ant's name for when it is introduced.

But I think that there is maybe something with wait, where does it start doing it?

Because I think that's interesting.

Beginning of 78.

So it's not right away, because right away it's

Chimera Ant in the subtitle.

So something changes in.

But by 78, they have started.

And I watched the sub.

So, you know,

it was going to show up one way or another.

But yes, this ant is, and and it's such a weird effect, right?

As the like ants having names and talking about names becomes a plot point in the next episode.

There is something really like formally fun about the medium revealing this to me before the fact.

Yeah.

It is what it is.

We get some more

ant-based music.

This first will be quick.

This is a track.

This is a track called A Hopeless World.

Just a recording of millions of ants walking and buzzing around.

Yeah, it's actually what they played before they did World's Most Wanted song.

When I saw that live, they put the elephant stuff and then the ant buzzing.

The ant stuff.

No, this is

when the queen is demanding bigger prey before they have humans.

It's a track called Hopeless War.

Extremely moody, very just moody, sinister stuff.

It's just right out of the palette of like horror movie music, right?

They have this.

This

season is non-stop with the like trailing violin super high up on the neck.

Um,

and then uh when um

that first

uh

when they're when the the first humanoid ants are hatching, it's a song called uh hegemony of the food chain.

Oh my god,

Jesus, they're cooking.

It's so versatile, it's so good

Hegemony of the food chain fucking kicks ass for so many reasons because it's like the idea is

biology and the

kind of like dog eat dog survival of the fittest, you know, if that's true, if the food chain is real, then it produces hegemony in the world.

And I think that's going to be super interesting as we get into the queen stuff, but it's even interesting in reverse when you think of Netarow's uh hunt the hunter exam uh produces is only mostly solvable by good people uh by jinx jinx greed island greed island uh it's all hegemony of the food chain baby like it's all hey it's not you know right makes might or sorry the other way around it's it is

they believe that you know right will make you might yeah they really do believe that and and the other way to think about it is like when you think about greed island specifically there's like a real like

the belief that the system will stay contained in itself, you know?

Yeah.

And instead, you immediately have to start policing the borders.

You have to start putting up border.

I mean, this is the episode in this third episode we're going to talk about.

The ants start going, hey, listen, we should put up walls.

We got to get defenses going.

The system will not just naturally.

defend itself, right?

Society must defend itself, as Foucault would say.

I just learned to start on a society.

Yeah, I just learned from society.

Where are our guns?

We got to get guns so that no one fucks with our society.

Our perfect society, which will run itself adequately and good people will rise to the top.

It's fine.

We should build this castle and maybe we can write a doctrine about it.

Maybe we should exactly.

As 78 begins, our friend the narrator reminds us how chimera ants work over perhaps some of the most ominous photography we've had in the show yet.

As the narrator is describing what a chimera ant does, we just have shots of humans working in the fields that are interrupted by the first of what is going to become an image that we see over and over in this episode, which is a raid on a human village by Chimera ants.

It's so important that this happens on a farm.

Yeah.

Humans are also dedicated to finding food to live.

It has to be that they like the sweetness,

the sharpness of the place where they hit first is farms because they are looking for food

and they disrupt human food production is just so choice to me.

It's really well done.

And it's also

we also get the

metaphor sort of works both ways, right?

The ants are

learning that they're a society

at the same time as we see humans in their most like worker ant-like state.

Right, exactly.

Yep.

Yeah.

By the end of this episode, so at first they just start swooping down and grabbing people.

There are these wonderful wide shots.

There's one really distinctive wide shot of like 50 or 60 ants just carrying people.

But by the end of this episode, they are rounding people up in like a village square

before they take them.

Yeah.

Do you know why?

I realized why.

I was like, why is this happening?

That squadron leader can't fly.

Oh, that's funny.

Oh, that's funny.

Yeah, but he's turtles.

Oh, it's the turtle.

He has to come up with his own

either.

All the other ones can fly because they're more ant-like.

He's got to figure out his own thing.

Now, it's very odd that there are all these abductions because meanwhile, Kite's team are sort of expecting to see abductions, but aren't.

In fact, there's no signs of anybody going missing from the Chimera ants.

Can I read this slightly earlier?

I think it's right before that

carry-off scene.

Kite explains why it's so difficult to find the Chimera ants.

He says, a chimera ant queen stays on the move until she finds a site she likes.

And during her search, she'll produce more and more soldier ants, building her own personal army.

Once she's chosen a location, she produces a swarm of construction ants to build her castle with incredible speed.

She will remain within that fortress until her death.

And something I really like about this is how

when we talk about animals that like do things, like when they build stuff or like ants, which have a kind of social hierarchy, we do talk about them like they do this, they do that, as if they have like a real choice in the matter.

But he actually is talking about like.

You cut to the queen and go like, okay, it's time to build my army now, which is very funny to me.

Right, right.

Versus ants like the ones he is hunting at the beginning of the episode, which are just, we would never say that they make that, or we might use that terminology, but what we would be implying is they have a biological instinct to do these things.

Yeah.

Not something that we would, we would talk about insect culture.

Yeah.

I think people who've studied insects are probably shouting about how complex insect culture is.

But I think that

generally speaking, people think about insects as being driven not by complex decision-making, but by a scheme of

instinct and

built-in behaviors.

Well, and humans, of course, who are

it speaks to the complexity of an ant society that give them a voice and language and give them the technical ability to think and make decisions for themselves.

And the thing that they do is just fulfill the biological function anyway.

Yes.

Yeah.

By the way, ant experts and entomologists who are screaming at the podcast right now, get ready.

It's going to be a long year.

Scream at us.

In a five-star review on iTunes.

Yeah.

That's where you can scream about ants.

I think that the easiest way to talk about the next bit is just to, rather than sort of like follow Kite's research team's conclusions through, just sort of spell out the situation that they find themselves in, and then we can dig into it.

Because it turns out, and this was a real wrinkle that delighted me.

I really wasn't expecting this.

We start hearing about like hunter-hunter world geopolitics for the first time.

Really, yeah, really for the first time.

Because it turns out that the ant is inside something called the NGL Autonomous Region.

This is short for the Neo-Green Life Autonomous Region.

That in itself is part of a group of like a conglomerate called the Mitteen Union, I believe.

Yes.

The NGL is in.

Yeah, it is an island with like four small countries on it.

One of the Scorto, the Mitten Union, and the NGL.

And the NGL are sort of like

doctrinaire technophobic tech to wow technophobic.

Doctrinaire technophobic

people who

communicate mainly by mail, travel by horseback, and reject technology utterly, even going as far as to arrest and execute people who they find using technology inside the country.

This sort of gets mentioned several times.

There's been a TV crew

who a bunch of them got imprisoned and one of them got executed.

There was a plague that swept through there a while ago, but they didn't allow international help, instead preferring to let nature run its grisly course.

And so, this is such an

interesting way to trouble why haven't they heard about the ants and also give the ants a climate that they could

exploit very easily?

And also, put stakes in the way for our characters to get into this place and kind of figure out what's going on.

Well, that's the thing, right?

It's like, you know, they know about how Chimera ants work, right?

they, there is this quarantine on them.

They show up, they have to be dealt with.

There are policies and practices in place.

Kite seems like someone who could handle this if it happened in

a diplomatically friendly country.

And a diplomatically friendly country.

If it happened to someone who was inside of the established game of the Hunter Association, right?

Like,

we have rules for this.

We know how this works.

They would have reported it upwards.

You know, our locally embedded hunter would have gotten the news out.

whatever It's great because it's a little hand that reaches all the way back to like episode four where they're talking about the benefits of being a hunter and it's like yeah all the countries that participate

all the countries that participate give hunters all these benefits and it's like well what do countries that participate imply the ngl

yeah once again i'm ringing my michael crichton john windham bell here where another key part of this plot line is if it didn't happen there or like you know if it had only gone this way or whatever,

there is something about the ants taking a foothold in the NGL

that is, that is.

Interesting.

But it's, it's the sort of improbability, but also

the

inevitability.

Yeah.

Dread inevitability.

Right.

Like, of course it would eventually, the right circumstances, in the same way that the circumstances for the incredible impossibility of life occurring on Earth happened, so too would one day the Chimera ant step up on two legs, you know, in the right circumstances and grow to be two meters tall and eat hundreds of pounds of people a day.

Speaking of the ants, Tagashi's great impulse is now finally kicked in, and the ants are simply vibing.

They are now wearing clothes.

One of them is wearing an alligator ant is wearing like a wrestling single ant.

What is your favorite of these guys, Jack?

I really want to hear you say, percentage-wise, how much of an ant is this alligator ant?

Yeah, that's a great,

great question, Key.

Zero.

Zero percent.

A humanoid alligator wearing a wrestling sinklet.

And he is now in, you know, I was so delighted by the fact that when the Phantom Troops show up, they're just checking their watches, wondering who's late.

Tagashi's great impulse to be like, hey, everybody is a protagonist.

Nobody is.

When I say nobody is an unapproachable villain, you know, know, I could understand people thinking that I mean like in terms of their morality, you know, no one is too evil to explore their morality.

And Takashi is also doing that.

But I mean more that Takashi will put the camera as close as possible to any of his villains with no real worry that he's like weakening them or dulling their impact.

Once you've determined that someone is part human, they can't be evil 24-7.

It's just too much evil to have in one day.

The worst people in the world still need to have lunch.

Right.

The thing that, like, there's a version of this where the Chimera ants are,

they all talk about the queen constantly, and they're all like, what's your favorite thing about the queen?

They're always talking in like droning language, or they're all, you know, or droning tones, or they have a special,

you know, I think about Gene Wolf in the book of the New Sun.

There's a sort of collectivist enemy faction that shows up that only can speak in the sentences that are in a set of books that have already been approved.

And so they're always just repeating the same sentences over and over again that may mean something different in different contexts.

There's ways you could communicate, ooh, these folks are not like us.

Instead, we get a big alligator man in a gym onesie who is like, you want to have a game?

You want to do a game?

You want to do a game?

Hey, you want to go game?

I bet I could get more bodies for the queen to eat than you can.

We've been human for one minute.

We've been in on the screen in Hunter-Hunter even less time than that.

We should do a game.

It's about time we're doing a game.

Yeah.

Knowing that Tagashi loves to do this now, you know, having seen him do this over and over and over again.

Part and parcel with that knowledge is the delight that I feel whenever I can, you know, whenever something like the chimera ants are introduced, I don't know why I didn't think he'd do it here.

Of course he was going to do it.

You know, of course he's just interested in watching them all, you know, bop around and chat.

There's a really funny moment here where the oh, sorry, go on.

I was just saying, and I don't want to, you do your funny moment.

Let's come back.

Oh, the uh, the alligator ant says, you know, like, let's do a contest to uh, you know, I bet I'm better at killing and getting guys than you.

And call, sorry, the

anti-sort of like the we can edit that out.

We can bleep that.

It's uh, it's bleeping out Michael saying f.

Yeah, I'll drag this over.

Hold on.

Okay, I'll use that.

Nice.

We'll just call him.

No, well, no, hang on.

Now we need to bleep that for

Homestuck Made This World.

Okay.

I did want to bring up Homestuck Made This World when Austin mentioned Biskey and Hisuka's fan inserts.

I was like, that's a hand, Andrew Hussey thing right there.

That's my Michael Lutz moment.

Sorry, which, what is the, what is the thing, having a character in your, having an audience insert that you're there to bash?

I would highly recommend checking out the fantastic podcast, Homestuck Made Made This World,

which I re-listened to recently as just an interesting piece of both like

looking at fandom and then also sort of internet like history, I guess, in a way.

I don't know how else to put it.

That's right.

I think that's accurate.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's like a cross-section of a very particular kind of work and then also the internet at the time that that work was being made.

Yes.

I like it a ton.

Yeah, so

this alligator says to the leader, you know, let's do a game and I'll be better than you.

And the leader is like, I'm not really interested in playing games.

And then the alligator says, Well, when you think about it, it's really about who the who provides the most good stuff for the queen.

And the leader is like, oh, yeah, not that you put it like that way.

I guess games do have a sort of purpose within a suicide.

What's interesting I was going to say is like, it's not, just to be clear, it's not that they don't always talk about the queen.

It's not like they are just hanging out.

There is still a little friction that means they talk and hang out like us, but they are like oriented towards life in a different way than we are because they have our affect, but they don't have the like day-to-day life that we have.

Here's what I want to read the quote from the alligator.

This is the pit that finally gets the original squad leader

in on the game.

He goes, hey, I know.

I should get all the other squad leaders in on this.

Make it a group thing.

If we all compete against each other, we're bound to capture more prey.

Make it a

thing?

Man, it'll be like a group thing.

Yeah.

It's founded by this thing called capitalism and the idea of constant growth.

What do you guys think?

But also just like six friends going to a movie.

Yeah.

Well, you know, it's both.

So by now, the ants are completely out there.

Because as alligator out there in the sense of like Tagashi's character design is completely gone for it.

Because as the commander leaves, an alligator ant turns around, an ant is introduced who we'll see a lot more of later, who is just a tortoise.

One of them is now

just a tortoise, he's got long gray hair as well.

Yeah, he has got long gray hair.

One of them is just a penguin.

Yeah, I love that guy.

He's got a penguin to eat for the ocean.

Well, so that's part of what was said that we kind of moved past is we don't know where she her arm washed up in one place, but it was dragged there by luck through the currents, through unpredictable wild currents.

also critin-esque right and we don't know where she's been before she got to this island also a lot of places on that you would think are kind of warm because we think of them as being right like south of us are actually so far south that they get these are true penguins the uh the famous colonicus penguins are sure but the other thing is if you look closely at the thing that does look very much like a penguin it doesn't look that much like a penguin it could just be some other kind of bird yeah it's a penguin it is a penguin but it's a penguin.

I did.

I wrote a couple and two more squadron leaders, an old turtle man and a strange penguin-like bird.

Importantly,

the first squad leader we meet, you know, in terms of character design, could not be more different than them.

Is generally, is like thin and more human-shaped, more like traditionally human scale, has big white wings, has a bird

thing, has eagle wings, has kind of a bird beak, but like a human-colored face.

Instead of the alligator, it's like a big white albino alligator with like magenta hair on top.

Like this leader, you know, the character design is doing a lot in terms of who am I supposed to relate to here?

Who am I supposed to think is humanoid or human-ish?

And who feels more monstrous?

Meanwhile, that's the character who least wants to hang out and least wants to vibe like a person does and most wants to go do just the ant stuff.

It is interesting.

He does look the most like a human,

but also acts the most like an ant.

He says

after he's turning away,

just great fast characterization on the Chimera ants.

They're like, he's really earnest, isn't he?

You know, he's just like,

why do they say that maybe he's earnest?

What is their hypothesis?

Oh, that he doesn't want to play.

They say, I presume the human he was created from was also quite earnest.

That's right.

Which suggests something else.

It does suggest something else.

It's not all going in there as a goop.

And then the goop is commingling.

There's a more direct...

There could be, and maybe we get some more evidence of it in this episode.

In the next scene.

A more direct relationship between food in, baby ant out.

Yes, because in the next raid, the poor mother who has come completely apart after her two children were understandably sad.

She doesn't actually know that they've been taken by chimera ants, but she's about to learn that.

It's so sad because we saw her sort of like pretending to sleep, sweetly listening to her kids make plans for the next day, not picking up on any of the death flags.

Can we

highlight really quickly that when that very sad lady is like looking all sad and is stalking out into the woods, like bleary-eyed because she can't sleep because she's so worried about her kids, one of the people in the village goes, that's just what being a parent is.

You know, she'll never stop looking for those kids.

Sure.

Just an interesting contrast to some other parents.

Some other parents we've seen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, that's this whole, again, this whole season is about parents.

Yeah.

The note I took, I hadn't, this whole show

hadn't thought about Jing there, Drive, but I was thinking about the Chimera Ant Queen.

Talking about, you know, like, this is just what it's like to be a parent, is, you know, like looking for and preparing for and taking care of your children.

Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing, the Chimera Ant is what?

The Chimera Queen wants is what?

To make the strongest king possible.

Which is what Jing seems to want.

But in a much more hands-on way, it seems like.

It's almost as if you're a kid.

She's eating.

The hands are off.

Her hands are the ants going around doing the work

of shaping the king.

It just shaping it as a meal.

Yeah.

How many people has Jing ate?

I mean, like, to make that less of a joke, like, I mean, we've met a ton of the people that Jing has basically gone through

parts yeah how many how many people died in in greed island because they got eaten for the sake of

sure exactly just

from the that we saw on screen alone yeah right because like we get the the body count of the bomber and stuff and that's all if you really think about it jing is indirectly responsible for that over probably over 50 on-screen deaths in that in that season Easy.

We talk a lot about Tagashi's sort of like brutal pacing, not just in his own work and in the stuff that it has done to his body, but you know, we will joke about how Tagashi swings us towards one plot element, you know, very rapidly.

It is also becoming apparent the more of this that we watch and talk about, how elegant a plotter he is at points, right?

Where he's like, this is all here from this, you know.

Almost every main arc he is working through is coming back to the same two or three ideas.

It's clear that he has sat down to be like, this is what this story is, and here are the ways that I am going to start expressing that.

Can I say something?

This is a wild rewind, but it comes from a thing you just said, which is you're talking about the elegance of it, of the plotting.

And this is not Togashi plotting because it's anime plotting separate from book plotting.

I would try to turn over my head the kite stuff.

And what you just made me think about was, okay, what do we get by having kite left out until now?

And it lines up with another thing that y'all have been saying more and more on this show.

Does anybody know what I'm gesturing at?

What if Kiloa is the protagonist?

Oh, yeah.

And we learn about Kite when Kiloa learns about Kite.

You know, Austin?

Yeah.

I had not considered that.

I was always thinking about the Kite thing as an anime production thing.

Same, and that's probably right, right?

But I think there's a nice,

yeah, there's a nice side effect of that, which is like, oh, actually, if we start thinking about this as it's the show where Goan does the action, but Kilo is our perspective character.

This is a moment of real, I mean, that whole episode is Kilo looking at Goan as the conversation happens.

We are the watcher here, too.

And then now

let's put Goan in or Akilo in the mix of people watching the protagonist of an anime and how do they relate to that person and what's a healthy relationship look like and all,

right?

No, I think you're spot on.

God, I wonder if that would come back up.

I'm so curious.

I think that, like,

it fits with the way that people talk about Jing, or rather, it actually fits with the way that people talk about Gon and the way that they express their feeling about Jing, which is that he is this sort of like luminous figure that everybody has the best possible things to say about, but also we don't fully know what's going on in there.

You know, we actually, we only ever get to see the wrapping on the outside of the box, and everybody else seems to have some some insight.

And I think that's totally consistent with Killiwa learning.

Oh, why didn't he tell me this?

Why didn't Grant fucking tell me this?

Yeah.

And to bring it back to this, no one can call Jing right now.

No one, as far as we like, right now, like Kite's response to there are human-sized chimera ants isn't, I've got to get fucking Jing on the line.

Maybe he thinks that he can handle it himself, you know?

Yeah, they don't know how bad it's gotta be.

You're right.

They're not there yet.

Yeah.

They're still operating under the assumption they can get there in time to stop it.

And actually, maybe there's evidence in this scene that they could get there and stop it.

Yeah.

Because these dudes in white with submachine guns.

Oh, it rules.

Yeah.

Although, real quick, before we get to them, what happens

at Curtin Raina's home with the mom?

Oh, it's sad.

Doesn't she try to protect

a kid?

She throws herself in front of a kid to protect, and we just get the nice, you know, like those winged creatures, they must have been the ones that took your kids.

She throws herself over a kid to protect

the kid and the commander passes over her you know acknowledges her looks at her and the kid

and passes over her yeah um

this is the little boy you know this is there is no way to uh we are being invited to read this as kurt you know kurt's human dna went into

um

this is also like oh the beast stopped when it recognized its own humanity in its heart or whatever.

Part and parcel with this kind of storytelling.

Yeah.

Hey, it's interesting.

I presume the human he was created from was also quite Ernest.

Ernest and looked to camp.

No, it was Kurt.

His name was Kurt.

What?

Not Ernest.

No, he didn't go to camp?

Didn't go to camp.

Oh.

I love the way that they say that, by the way, where it's like, if he wasn't as Ernest, he wouldn't be as endearing or whatever the line is.

It's really funny.

I think it's the turtle being like, yeah, but that's why we love him.

I know Jack already said this.

It's crazy how fast they go.

Like, here's three different squadron leaders and their whole personalities.

Yeah.

You hit so fast.

You have

to have gym guy, smart bird, and like kind of slot old man.

Yeah.

I thought this stuff was like 12 episodes.

It's crazy how fast.

It's crazy.

That is the biggest thought I keep having as someone who's re-watching this show is that like, oh, I thought this didn't happen for you know, insert X amount of episodes.

Yeah, Tagashi and the anime team are quick on their feet.

Yeah, they are, you know,

they clearly have something to get to.

I would love to know how many chapters this was.

Actually, I can tell you, uh, the manga debut was

chapter 188.

And let's see, Chimera Ants,

uh,

manga.

Uh,

oh, oh my god, it's even faster.

What the queen is introduced in

chapter 186.

Yeah, it's like right away.

And then wow.

Hold on, hold on.

I gotta put another one in.

Yeah, I gotta put it here.

There we go.

I'll just drag that back.

Sweet bro and hella Jeff.

Try to worry about ant bros.

What is that?

How long is a manga chapter?

Like, 15 pages?

I don't know.

Longer than that, but not by much.

Yeah, 20-something.

Yeah, it's like right away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because the thing we've referenced before is that

Greed Island, at the point that it aired, was the most compressed from manga to anime.

And

Chimera Ant blows Greed Island out of the water.

In terms of compression.

In terms of compression.

In a lot of ways.

But this is part of what you need to do to get this tone, right?

It's like part of the horror of the ants as a plot device is, oh my God, they are more powerful than we thought.

They are quicker than we thought.

There are more of them.

They are more prepared.

They've been working away silently, you know.

I'm kind of curious how it will pace itself.

Obviously, I've seen it before and I love it,

but I watched it in a blur the first time.

In my mind, I have it sort of divided into subheadings that I won't say out loud.

Right.

In terms of like, here's the part where Bla, and then there's this, and then there's this, and then here's the last part.

The Kiluwa ant shows up, and you have to de-antify Kilua.

And I'm realizing that I think maybe

the first bit is like doesn't exist.

I was wrong about there being a first bit.

We're in the second bit

already.

Nope.

Or the first bit I mischaracterized in the second bit was

maybe I've forgotten about the second bit.

For me,

there's a one, there's a two A, and a two B.

That's how this is.

And that's it?

That's it.

I think there's a

I think that's four things, but we'll talk.

Okay.

All right.

Okay, so then a bunch of guys in very distinctive outfits.

They're wearing sort of like white singlets, white puffer jackets, white surgical masks, come out of the crowd and start machine gunning the ants.

Yeah, and this is.

in the words of Kendrick Lamar, sometimes you got to pop out and show niggas.

Like,

certified boogeyman, I'm the one that had to score with them.

So

they do.

They do.

This is Tiashi Pacific once again.

Because the ants just get obliterated.

It's so exciting.

Isn't this the country that doesn't allow any technology and they killed a guy for having a film camera?

What's very oh, how do you think they killed him?

What's wrong with these guys?

Guns aren't technology.

That's guns.

That's fair to see.

Eliminates eliminate the bugs that's gyro or gyro's direct order and the turtle ant says well who's gyro or what is gyro and they say well he's our king uh the dungeon i like this game gyro gyro gyro

they completely no sell the turtle ant is talking to me in fact they also no sell there's a turtle ant but i like that they have this brief little oh

i have a new favorite i have a new favorite background background one the big ladybug ant

uh

what about this mushroom mushroom one in the in the

mushroom one?

In the very bottom center, I'm gonna, I'm trying to, it's it's moving fast.

I gotta get a screenshot.

Okay, so there's a couple pictures here that I can get here.

Maybe I can just get, yeah, here's here we go.

There's ladybug ant

here.

Uh, I want to put that in the way wrong chat.

There we go, right there, hanging out with a whole ass ladybug shell.

Lettybug here, yeah, uh-huh.

And then in the on the front, from the front, oh, it's when like her whole crew gets got.

She looks up as people are getting shot.

I hope she got away.

This is the ladybug ant.

This is how good the character design is.

At times, I'm looking at you, Lynn, and whatever the

other one was called.

But, like, these ants are like kind of funny and kind of cute, and some of them are terrifying, and some of them are just like, for example, so this ladybug ant is looking up as they're getting gunned down.

The subtitle says gunfire, and then it says gasps, and standing to her her left is the most like off-brand chimera ant you have ever seen.

Yes, this guy looks like I drew him.

This is the we have chimera ant at home, and it's not just here at the bottom of the hierarchy.

There is absolutely nothing threatening about the turtle and the bird.

No, they are they are just kind of funny guys, they're the Poindexters.

Yeah,

yeah,

society has all kinds of people.

And then the crocodile's a crocodile, but he just seems more like a jock than a

animal crossing character.

There's a weird Animal Crossing vibe, Animal Crossing Villager vibes among a lot of the Canara ants, if I'm thinking of it.

Some houses were made out of ant poop.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was going to shout out you for saying Vector, Sylvie, but then you said house is made out of poop.

They make their house out of poop.

We see it happening.

Vector, the

crocodile, the alligator.

He wouldn't make his house out of poop.

No, but the chimera ants would.

He's just moonlighting as a chimera ant.

I don't know how many Sonic games they were making with him in at this time, so like he needed the work.

We get a short little

piece.

We get a fun little piece when

the machine gun guys show up called Shiver.

Oh.

And it's just like this for two minutes.

It's very cool.

Well, and here is another classic Tagasha maneuver.

Who do we associate with when the guys in white show up?

The ants.

Our new friends, our new best friends, the ants, who are like up against these faceless

assholes.

Who are these assholes?

Hey, they're not supposed to have those.

They're not supposed to have guns.

Those are my ants.

Those are my ants.

That's my own tour friend.

Leave me totally alone.

None of the farmer people are freaked out, seemingly, by the presence of these people with guns.

Well, that's so funny.

That's funny the way he does this.

The Chimera ants were just killing all of them.

Yeah, I feel like I wouldn't question it.

Yeah.

But yes, I get your point.

Yeah.

I'm not saying that they're not freaked out in general, but it seems like they are not shocked to see a gun.

Yes.

Part of the way that he makes this work, because he does this with the Phantom Troop, a group of genocidal murderers.

They have cool names, Jack.

Yes,

he does it, is he just sort of speaks it into the world.

He's like, you're with these guys now.

Deal with it.

You know, we're going to address the fact that they're.

Because whenever we cut back to kite, we're like, oh, God, the Chimera ants are fucking terrifying.

They're going to eat all the people.

And then when we cut back to the Chimera ants, we're like, you know, it was really sad when they all got machine guns, but it was still protecting the village.

This is why I like I'm talking about the meta-maneuver of, you know,

Jing pulling on the strings, but also just the author.

This is a show and a series that like it knows and is interested in, hey, how does the camera work?

How do I tell the reader or the viewer who to root for just by perspective, by color, by, you know, all these other things?

Who gets to gasp and who doesn't?

How do we show it when someone is scared?

It's, you know, it's not a mistake that there's a cute ladybug on screen when the white guys show up, the guys in all white show up and start shooting

when the white guys show up.

It's also, it's like, it's like, it's not, it's the opposite of Jaws, where like, right in Jaws, you have this, this, these horrible, this horrible monster who's like, as far as the camera is concerned, Jaws is evil.

Jaws is out to get you.

The sequels confirm this.

It's in the marketing material.

The shark is mad at you and wants to kill you for murder reasons.

And Hunter-Hunter is like, no, there should be watch.

We follow the shark go back underwater.

And the shark is like, I got to get food for my mom.

And then we see the shark, like, not eat someone because there's some sort of inherited memory of that person.

And then we see.

But then, what's really funny, though, is that then we see the shark go back up and just obliterate a bunch of beach goers.

Yeah.

While

the shark.

What's that guy called?

The sheriff.

No, the man in Jaws.

The man.

No, the good guy.

Oh, the good guy.

Richard Dreyfuss.

Richard Dreyfus.

Yeah.

No, he's Dreyfus.

not.

He's the main guy.

Yeah, the scientist.

He's not the shark guy.

What I mean to say is that

Tagashi won't just say, like, oh, but the shark has a family and he wants to feed the family.

He will then

send the shark back.

Roy Schneider.

He'll then send the shark back up to the beach community and be like, this shark's fucking terrifying.

Right, well, because

this is the power of the camera, right?

It's like,

you can, and the, this shark is terrifying, but it's not terrifying in the same way it was an episode ago, right?

You know, we, we, the first time they descend, they are shot like the shark, right?

When they show up in the sky at the beginning of this episode, uh, and they are like the huge wave of them is in the air, and they descend and start lifting people away, right?

But, but uh, by the time these guys in white show up, like they start being shot a little bit differently.

Not not unthreateningly still, you're right, but like, it's it's the camera can play in both positive and negative ways.

I don't mean

in both additive and subtractive ways.

You have to show that it's terrifying and that everyone is scared before you just normalize them as part of like a food chain.

And I think the thing that I'm

lifts this from just a thing that's happening to something that's interesting is

it feels like Togashi understands that this

would be happening naturally as part of telling a story anyway.

So how do we start playing with them?

By that, what I mean is because we spend so much time with them, unless they are constantly being shot like Jaws, they will become, people will become endeared to them over time in the way that you get endeared to villains and things all the time, right?

Like even before, you know, let's put Togashi's stuff to the side.

There's a reason why people liked vegeta in in dragon ball z in the sans

not later stuff even you know what i mean early right away you're like oh this motherfucker has it like there's fun he's funny he's weird he's he's like just fun to he's little he's a little guy um and and when you spend time with people when you put them on camera when you aestheticize them in that way there is an effect to that and like being thoughtful about how to deploy that and how to push and pull on that effect is what lifts something for me from it's telling a story that I really like to like, ooh, it's using the medium to do something in an interesting way.

Just like an ant has to

collect food for the for the for the nest and spit up mud to build their big weird castle, what else is the Prince of All Saiyans going to do?

That's right.

That's right.

I think you're absolutely right with all this stuff, Austin.

But the thing that I keep coming back to is the kind of like unshaking confidence with which they do it.

Yeah.

You know, um

to to to have the confidence and to have the skill both in the manga and in this adaptation, because you're, you're right, you know, a manga camera works differently.

You know, there are similarities, but it works differently than a, than a television camera, you know, than moving images.

Um, you can use montage differently.

Use color.

You can use color.

Yeah, absolutely.

But at the same time, I think that there is a lot of power in the way that Tagashi

just starts with, you know, he just acts.

You know, here are the Chimera ants, and they're saying, oh, he'd be endearing if he wasn't so earnest.

And you're like, oh, wow, we're here.

It's happening.

Who wants to talk to me about D Squared?

Oh, God.

Yeah, I was going to say, Tagashi puts a lot of stuff on the table now.

Yeah.

Very quickly.

And to my eyes.

This is almost like a repilot.

I can't get over how different the...

Gone and Kilo are barely in it.

Like, this is the ant show right now.

I think I said this last time.

Chimera Ant, I think you could make the case is its own anime.

Structurally, at the very least, this is the stuff I'm thinking about when we talked about the hot air balloon in

York New City, where it's just like, God, there's times it gets so far away from anything that it seemed like in the first 25, 35, 40 episodes.

They teleported it into a new show, you know?

Yeah.

The thing that Keith said was

when that camera follows the Phantom Troops hot air balloon up into the sky, the show is never coming back from that moment in the same way.

And I think you're right.

Okay, so there are two sort of things that happen

almost simultaneously.

The first is that Pockle and Ponzu show up.

And to Keith's point, they show up independently.

They are not showing up because Kite has called them.

They are not showing up because Gone and Killure have encountered them.

We have just cut to Pockle and Ponzu.

Yeah, Pockle is sort of the star of his own little magical beast hunter show right now.

Yeah.

Yeah, because he has also heard rumors of the ants, and via his own crew, he has managed to sort of like get out a recording from one of the journalists that was arrested, or maybe the one that was killed.

It's not clear.

And the recording is basically like, oh, the Camera ants.

They're coming and get me.

So being a magical beast hunter, he decides to go in.

Not clear why he's going in.

The impression is it's this very sort of like Pacle.

Well, I just, you know, I just want to be there and figure out how to do it.

He wants to be a hero.

He's a magical beast hunter.

This is his job.

And he is followed, following a little bit of protestation by Ponzu because she says that her bees can act as communication devices in the NGL, which again, to remind listeners who aren't watching this, is a

violently anti-technology sort of

country.

The second thing that happens is that,

and I don't know why they're telling us this now.

I mean, I know why, right?

You know, this is plot relevant.

to the guns.

Yes.

There is a drug, D-squared, going around.

It's propagating in, quote, urban areas.

And we see a shot of one of the white-clad men with the guns dealing it to some people in York New City.

We don't know what this drug does, but we know it is derived from the Bureau Tree, which is native to the Mittean Union.

Now, keen-eared listeners will go, the Mittean Union?

Isn't that where the NGL is?

And isn't the NGL where the Chimera ends are?

Especially because there is a nasty rumor that most of the Bira trees are in NGL territory.

And you're sort of left to draw your own conclusions at this point.

You know, they're keeping it up in the air whether the NGL is funding, you know, this drug scheme or whether a cartel is operating from within the NGL and smuggling stuff out.

You know, they're not really saying like, here's how it works, but there is something going on on vis-à-vis D-squared

and the beer trees in the Mitten union.

Which, again, is very Clancy-esque, right?

It is very Clancy-esque.

Down to the sort of like,

you know, let's see how it develops before I start throwing deeper reasons.

Sure, yeah.

There is now a huge body pit of food in the castle.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm calling it a castle.

That's right.

The Khmer Anne Queen has built this sort of like ragged...

No, she hasn't built.

She has commanded her drones to poop out

stuff to make this immense ragged fortress in the middle of a forest.

It looks like a termite mound, but like, you know,

a kilometer tall.

It's gigantic.

It's huge.

Yeah.

This is episode three of the Chimera Ant Ark, and they've already built a citadel.

And the penguin, who it turns, right, the Chimera Ants have a penguin, and it turns out the Penguin is their librarian.

The penguin is reading a lot of people.

Oh, I love the penguin.

It's this huge stack of books.

And he rapidly introduces Wise Turtle to first the concept of guns and the chimera ants are like,

interesting.

What these are objects known as guns.

Which is really funny.

He says, what you saw were probably things called guns.

And then he also pitches names,

the concept of names, which is not an idea that they're making use of.

And he also briefly pitches books.

He's like,

they're super used to take a look.

It has a lot of stuff about human society in there.

Hey, Penguin, how do you know how to read?

Don't worry about it.

They came out knowing.

They came out knowing.

They came out knowing how to read.

Came out knowing what a queen was, right?

Not what names were.

The queen's been reading.

I can understand.

This is a common misconception.

Yeah,

please let me know.

Penguins can read.

Oh,

yeah.

Well, also, the queen's been thinking to them telepathically in English for a long time.

Sure, sure.

Which is weird.

Oh,

we skipped just really quick

some sort of important stuff here of

Kite giving Gonan Kiliwa a second chance to back out before they head to the NGL.

This is the big.

He says this earlier.

Can we wait to this until we can talk about it all at once with the final shots of this episode?

Yeah, sure, sure.

Did I miss that?

No, no, no.

I'm just saying, like, let's bucket those two things together because it ends returning to that big idea.

And I don't want to talk about that without the follow-up conversation with Goan and Kiloa, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, it's worth saying that maybe post this D squared thing

and the NGL sort of being introduced, like this second Clancy-esque plot about this cartel,

and then the ants immediately being like, what you saw were probably things called guns.

Humans have things called names.

I am beginning to suspect that there is, that this is an arc about

guns.

To put it another another way, there is something here that I don't have enough to get a sense of yet, but I can feel moving like a dark shape sort of next to me in the show.

You know, the combination of the geopolitics, the armed units, be they the ants or these white-clad people or the hunters who are like, we don't have friendly relations with this.

There is something about growth of a population

between the NGL as like anti-tech and the ants, you know, growing and learning.

And then also control of a populace, the way that

populations are controlled.

There is something being worked here that I can't quite get into focus yet, but I think is like

sympathetic with a lot of the themes that are already being spun up.

And this is really interesting and potentially...

tricky waters to sail through because anytime you start comparing a populace to like these people breed like ants and they grow and

they're voracious and all-consuming.

You start getting into some really ugly language.

And that could be being deployed deliberately.

You know, that could be the road that we're going down.

It could be being deployed thoughtlessly.

I really have no idea where we're going here, but I can sort of feel these like these building blocks of like, what does it mean to see the ants developing society?

What does it mean that these ants are presented as a sort of apocalyptic inhuman threat, but at the same time by episode three three are already talking about the value of names.

What happens when we throw in this sort of like reclusive anti-tech country that is sort of bordered by these other things and then a drug cartel operating in and around it?

I don't know.

I mean I can sense that the flags are being put down and I am so curious to see the way the show starts to, you know, work those levers.

If I can problematize something too, you know, one of the things that I think is interesting is we've already started talking about like, oh, and yet Togashi shows them as being just like us, which is a classic way to

be able to have a sort of fictionalized and fantasy, you know, a fantasy other culture, right?

In this case, these ants.

And then you go, wait a second, like.

They're not a direct stand-in for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Look, they're not, or they're not monsters.

They're just like us.

This one wears a onesie.

Right, exactly.

This one reads books.

There's the, there is the

second step you have to then do as a reader and a critic, and also as a writer or as a storyteller, which is, okay, well, how are we showing that they're just like us?

Like, what are the behaviors that we are assuming are universal human behaviors that then we that are then indicate that they have some redeeming human human-y quality?

And what are the ones that we're saying are monstrous qualities?

Do you know what I mean?

So, like, um, uh, and what ones are being like treated as if they're not anything at all?

Um, uh, you know, so, so, you know, you'll commonly commonly have something where it's like, oh, here are, uh, here are orcs in Lord of the Rings.

Um, they, uh, they bang on drums, and that is monstrous, right?

And it's like, well, wait a second, that's a human-type quality, right?

And then you have something like, you know, when we make our orcs in Hiron, the first thing we do is like, oh, yeah, they like read books.

And it's like, okay, well, what am I saying?

Why is that the thing I go to to make them more traditionally?

This is me doing a little self-critique.

Why was that where we went to to be like, that proves that they're not monstrous, right?

The book is the site of a sort of like elevated find like a, yeah.

So I see what you're saying.

Like, in other words, yes, if, if you really go down this road, it becomes a bit of a minefield when you say there is this other species that's a stand-in that that's that you're deploying a lot of real life terminology.

They breed like insects.

They, you know, they are part of this, this backwards part of the world, blah, blah, blah, blah, quote unquote, you know part of the world blah blah blah blah blah and then setting it on like a geopolitical scale exactly right with like i i think i'm curious to see where you'll stand on it when it's all said and done um yeah because i do think even from this episode where i was was like okay togashi is going to tell a story about what it means to be human and what human society is and and less togashi has some ideas about the drug cartels, you know?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

But if there's one thing I know about Yoshihiro Tagashi, he will do something like getting really excited about art forgery for, you know, for three episodes, yes.

Yeah, because now the ants are learning about names.

They, they, um, our commander says, uh, humans can do more than cry and no, someone says, I think it's maybe the alligator.

Yeah.

It turns out that humans can do more than cry and run away.

And the commander says, this isn't a surprise.

Humans have unique traits.

Their blood, after all, flows through through our veins.

Yeah.

We get more of this new era of Chimera ant.

We get

lady with pink hair.

We get

a lady off the deep end.

We get

some sort of panda bear or something with like a do-rag and a gold chain.

Yeah, we get one like very pointy-nosed bug.

Like a sort of like

blood forwards.

Should I want to tell you what he is?

Yeah, what is he?

He's like a crayfish.

He's like a yeah, he's like a

he's a he's a so good.

He's some kind of shellfish.

Yeah, yeah.

I love the frog that you got here.

Yeah, the frog.

Yeah, the frog with the cheetah.

This guy

gets along with the bird.

The pink-haired lady looks like she could just be one of the spiders.

You know, she is a pink-haired human

character.

She is, yeah, yeah.

A big, big scorpion tail.

And that's it.

Otherwise, she's in like beach wings.

The sleeves on the panda bear are so good.

It has a cross on.

That's a cross necklace.

That's a cross.

What do we do with that cross?

They're Catholic.

They're Catholic.

I did not predict that I might be joining the Chimera Ant War on the side of the Chimera Ants.

It is an interesting thing.

It's adding wrinkle to the conversation that, Jack, that you and Asa were just having about what they're saying about the ants, that like the thing that makes them human isn't necessarily the qualities that they have, but that they literally received those qualities from an actual human.

From an actual human, right.

They have human blood, literally, right?

Yes.

Also, like, some of them wear clothes.

Some of them don't, right?

Which I think is actually a really smart way to circumvent some of the stuff I was just talking about.

They complain about having a headache when the queen talks to us.

She says, if only the queen could just talk like us.

But she doesn't talk.

No.

No, she speaks telepathically.

Yeah.

Okay.

Then there's a little sort of

the Dragon Age Inquisition sequence as the Chimera Ant Queen takes her throne and the various squadron leaders come before her with plans.

They ask if they can fortify the base and the leader is the queen is like, yep, of course.

And then they say,

we'd also like some names.

And the turtle describes the name as a label, my queen, that can be used to identify.

This just made me think of the way that the commander

described the value of speech as like speaking is for listening, receiving, and understanding orders.

And now Turtle is saying like a name is a label for identifying.

You know what I always get from that?

I get that he's kind of not telling the whole truth

on purpose.

He's like,

he knows his audience.

Yeah.

Oh, shit.

Should I reread The Island of Dr.

Moreau as we move into Caner and

there might be something here?

Watch the Marlon Brando movie.

Oh, God.

I've seen that multiple times for some reason.

I have the Queen's quote here that I think is interesting after they walk away.

She's like, fine, get names, do the defense stuff.

I'm busy with the the king.

And then she's just sort of thinking, curious creatures that desire things called names to be distinct.

I suppose I'm just as peculiar.

Perhaps I, too, have faint traces of human blood within me, which makes a lot of sense.

Scary.

She's talking about her.

Are they even ants?

Are they even ants?

She's talking to her unborn king.

She says, I promise you this, you will stand at the pinnacle of all species.

And then she sees her three

private eggs away from all the other eggs

and reveals that these are royal guards that she wants to name herself.

This idea of names had stuck hard.

Yeah.

What was it?

The hegemony of what?

The hegemony of the food chain.

Of the food chain.

Of the food chain.

I think the top of the hegemony.

Listen, some ideas rise to the top of the food chain.

Names.

Names.

I mean, this is good one.

This is a real Metal Gear that you haven't gotten to Metal Gear Solid V yet, right, Keith?

Language

is the one that I've played.

Okay, okay.

There's a whole bunch of shit in that game about language and language and virality and the power of a dominant language.

The queen has kind of a skull face.

She does.

It's true.

Just saying.

Here's a game pitch.

Ready?

I know we've talked in the past, like, there should be a Green Island game.

Here's what I want.

I want a game where you are, it's outer heaven, except it's the queen's castle, and you are playing a random chimera ant and you have to go recruit that is capture humans who turn into other chimera ants yeah fulton you're away yes and then like you call up the you call that the the penguin up on the codec and you're like what's this and he's like well that's called a gun and you're like a gun and and that's like you know he's your guy who tells you about the human world

Give me that but Melier Solid 5.

Thank you.

To your point about, you know, we're seeing this, we're seeing this happen live in front front of us as Tagashi and the crew are trying to do it as quickly and efficiently as possible in three episodes.

And it is a delight to behold.

In the same way that we're like, what side are we on when the white-clad people show up in the Chimera Ant Village?

When the squadron leaders are talking to the Ant Queen, what side are we on?

We are on the squadron leader side, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

We're like,

the ant queen is something different.

She is, you know,

and already a hierarchy, like a social hierarchy is emerging because she's got her little

elite royal guards kept away from the other people.

She's going to name them herself.

And they're kind of complaining about the queen.

Yeah.

I would put money that when those three eggs hatch, invariably in the next couple of episodes, they are going to be strange, frightening-looking chimera ants and not a pander in a durag, a woman with a scorpion tail, and a frog.

Interesting.

Put a mark on that prediction.

I'm just going to I am going to break one rule.

I'm not going to say anything spoilery, but I am going to say that when

they showed up, when the three royal guards showed up

in the eggs, I popped in a way that I did not expect.

Oh, interesting.

I'm also excited for in a little while to be able to reveal the secret hidden screenshot that was

too spoilery.

Oh, is this?

Yeah,

which you say, like, it's not.

What's that?

You say, like, it's not that spoilery.

Again, I always thought it was on the line, which is why I presented it as, what do we think about this?

Is it too on the line?

I'm glad you did.

And

it's not that I disagree with the conclusion that it was over the line.

I only disagree with how obvious everyone else thought it was that it was over the line.

I think it's wild to me that you didn't.

I don't remember what it is, so someone will have to resend it to me.

Yeah.

We have a lot of new music here before we close out.

Well, we should go back and talk about the scene that we skipped over.

Oh, sure, these are all ant songs, though.

So, now we can play them.

Let's work through the ants songs.

Let's hear the ant songs.

So, um, when the uh during um the

last

invasion of the ants onto uh one of the villages, we have a song called Nowhere to Escape.

Um, I really like this one.

Oh,

god, good good soundtrack in this part.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really hard to write like this.

This kind of like,

there's a great conversation

quote from

composer and musical writer Stephen Sondheim, where he remembers being a kid and asking his piano teacher, who was some, you know, legendary former composer, to teach him atonality.

And the piano teacher said, like, look, you haven't mastered tonality yet.

Talk to me when we're done with that.

And, you know, then we can start teaching you that.

And I think that, you know, definitely when I was younger, I was like, well, a tonality's got to be easier, right?

Because, you know, you're not following the same rules of how tone works.

And it's like, oh, dear, you've turned and opened a much more complicated, much more involved box of how you think about sounds, how you think about sounds into reacting.

I find it a real headache to write.

A couple times this has shown up now.

It is actually another one from the very end of the last episode of Greed Island had me saying like, it's crazy that this is here.

this is a a chimera amp song this is uh unasked advice

to me this is the chimera amp song it is i think we talked about it a little last episode such a lovely cue i find this

the tiny little um because like the bass and the hissing percussion are the really distinctive things But you can also hear the

harmony instruments playing these little third harmonies up on the strings behind it

that really give it this color I will be real I hear this and I think do you remember what day it is today Jack which is from Meligier Solid 2 not our friend Jack

because it is so big shell incident but it also like yeah it is one of those things where you get like kind of Pavlovianly trained to like oh this this music queue is happening time for something

time for some sinister business uh and then the last one here this is when um the queen is looking at her royal guards.

This is the ant hill.

Ditto, what key are we in?

You know, we're definitely in a key, but how are you going to sit down and start writing that?

It's great.

It's great.

I cannot believe that I had not considered for one moment that we would like the chimera ants.

I just.

Do you want to remind people what you what up until the very last minute you your guess was for the chimera ants because I thought it was really fun I thought we were basically going to play Cylon games you know I thought that a chimera ant was a shape-shifting ant which I was sort of right about um they're not quite shapeshifting in that way um

a shape-shifting ant

and we would go into a very large-scale complex plot of are you who I think you are or have you been replaced by a chimera ants the thing we're doing the thing with ants we're doing the thing with chimera ants you know, we're three episodes into a 60-episode arc, and so I want to be careful about saying something like, for example, the chimera ants are very simple.

But part of what is so interesting about this plot is that the thing that is driving them is a really straightforward narrative idea, right?

Which is that, like, the chimera ant queen consumes things, and then she produces

traits of the things she has consumed.

And you just spin that out into: here is an army of chimera ants.

Oh, whoops, we've we've accidentally created society.

And what does that mean?

It's such a simple pitch.

And I could see Tagashi coming up with it and going, oh boy,

I'm going to be here for a while.

These three episodes had nine new tracks, including one unreleased/slash unknown untitled song that I didn't play.

And

I can see here on on the site that I use, the

12011 OST list website, that there are one,

two,

and a half full CDs worth of new tracks for the season.

I counted it in the Dragon Ball Z episode.

There was 54 new tracks for this, I think.

That's...

Astonishing.

It's crazy.

And we heard nine of them

Can you think about how tiring that would be?

I know.

I know.

You know, you're making it over a long period of time, but at the same time,

you're being asked to write.

I mean, we're making it over a long period of time, but I don't know what the schedule was like for Hirano and his team, right?

In terms of like, when can you get the stuff that you can start composing to?

You are obviously doing a lot of pre-prep stuff, right?

You know, I imagine you would read the thing, you'd read Hunter Hunter, or you'd watch the 91 thing, and you'd be like, all right, I'm writing for Chimera Ants, you know, in probably this amount of time, so I'm going to start sketching for that.

But, you know, you're probably not getting the episodes or rough cuts of the episodes.

Sorry, to be clear with you, you wouldn't watch the 99 take on Chimera Ant because it didn't exist.

Yeah, we're out of it.

Couldn't have existed.

Yeah, we're out of that now, right?

Greed Island is a little bit different.

So

when does the 99?

It ends on

the end.

It ends before Greed Island.

Right.

It ends before Greed Island?

Greed Island.

Greed Island is where Greed Island starts.

I see.

I see.

I see.

I see.

And what's fun is that people who have read the manga are probably feeling the same way as we are,

as we are about the 91 thing going, where, you know, they learn that the Hunter-Hunter anime stops at a certain point.

And they're like, oh my God, but there's so much more.

Yeah.

So we're back on the airship.

Yes, let's go back to this conversation.

Austin, do you want to jump back further and kind of introduce

the scene you wanted to get into this?

Yeah, yeah, because Keith, you were going to go back to them waiting for the airship, where Kite says to them, you know, they're waiting, you know, everyone has their bags.

There's the sort of like departures sign, arrival and departure sign in the background.

And

Kite kind of walks up to them and says,

it might be a little late to ask you this, but are you sure you want to come along?

And basically explains like, you know, I have this whole team of people.

I have to keep them safe.

Like, I can't guarantee your safety.

I don't know what things are.

I don't know what's going on in the country.

You know, it could be, it could already be chaos, right?

It could already be.

The 99 anime does end after Greed Island.

I don't know why I thought that it didn't indeed.

I was pretty sure.

I was pretty sure that was the case.

Only because I was just looking at it.

But yeah, so

Kite

explains basically like, it could be really bad in there.

I can't, I might not be able to help you.

Are you sure you want to come along with me?

you're going to have to handle yourselves as hunters, right?

Because Kite can't handle his crew of non-amateur hunters, right?

Which we should have mentioned.

They do not have their hunters' licenses, right?

They do not, I don't know that they have nen.

Yeah, Kanju doesn't have hers either.

What?

Right, Kanzu doesn't have hers.

Amateur hunters

is

that they don't have a license, they're being trained by him, but they certainly haven't gone through the hunting hunters exam.

Yeah, I think probably the best way to take the hunter exam is to go in knowing it's a a lock.

That's how that's how Oscilla does it.

And Kite did it that way too, interestingly enough.

Yes, yeah, totally.

Yeah.

Yeah, we hear earlier that Kite basically was like, you know, Jing trained me and then I took the Hunter exam and it was fine.

Right.

So then here's the crux of this scene is

he says to them, like, you're going to be, you're going to have to protect yourselves.

They say, yeah, of course, of course, of course.

And then he says, you know, and listen, like, if something happens to me, if I'm the one who's in danger leave me there and get out if something and and Goan and Kilo are like taken aback by that the idea that he would even mention this right because he seems invincible to them presumably um and and he says as much too he's like do you think he was being serious what he said yeah a hundred percent

possible that jing would know someone that couldn't handle themselves and that that's the that's the final conversation that they have in this episode right yeah is is do you yeah do you think that that that's real?

And like, do you think we should escape if he's in danger?

And of course, Goan is like,

Absolutely not.

We never would give us a fun little new line here.

Sorry, somebody interrupted you.

You might be saying the line I was about to say, so go right ahead.

So, I mean,

I do really love that, yeah, to your point, uh, Austin and Keith.

The first thing Goan says is, I'm not sure Kite actually could get into danger, which is like, it's worth saying that this is the most obvious flag being planted for anybody who has ever seen a story.

You know, you're like, second most, Kurt.

Yeah, Kurt.

Sorry, Kurt.

Sorry, Kurt.

Rip, or maybe not.

Maybe a new kind of life.

Yeah.

No, Kurt is.

A new kind of life with a slightly different sounding name.

Yeah.

Yes.

Which we'll learn maybe one day.

Gone says,

you know, I'm going to help him if he does get in danger.

And you don't need to worry about it, Kilua, because I've like run a lot of simulations in my head to like, to like

figure it out.

Yeah.

Famous thinker, Don Fiery.

And it's so funny, because like

I don't, I believe that he thinks he has, but what he's actually done is he's like,

if Kite had a boulder fall on him, I'd save him.

If Kite was attacked by a bear, I'd save him, I'd save him.

Yeah, Kilua, when Goen is first like, no, I don't think we'll run away.

I've done a lot of thinking.

I think that we should save him.

Kilua goes, damn it, you had such a serious look on your face.

I was expecting something big.

If someone says you should abandon them, there's no way you'd ever do it.

It's just like, same old stuff.

This is just the same shit you're always doing.

And then this work gone's like, no, I really mean it.

I was thinking about this.

Yeah.

Well, and then go ahead.

Killiwa reveals that he hasn't actually decided what to do or what he would do in this situation.

Or he says he hasn't.

He says, you know, I haven't resolved to stay yet.

He says, look,

I don't really do these hypotheticals.

I never decide till it's time.

What did Kilo's father tell him?

Or not father, Illumi, Illumi, right?

When?

Forever ago.

Don't fight anyone who's stronger than you.

Don't fight anyone who you're trying to.

Was it that or was it directly don't fight anyone that you like aren't guaranteed to be confident you'll beat?

I think, yeah, that's the more specific reason.

He's kind of dismissive of that because it's who it was telling him that.

But like, I don't know that it is true that Kilo doesn't make hypotheticals.

I think he just is different about them than Ghoan is.

He's cautious about the ones that he's making.

Yeah.

Because we've also seen Kiliwa put that advice from his older brother, from his demonstrably capable, demonstrably evil older brother, into action over the entire York New City.

Kilwa was always the one saying,

don't threaten the spiders.

Part of what Lumi was saying wasn't just that don't do this, don't fight someone stronger than you.

He was also saying you won't fight someone stronger than you you won't stick your neck out for someone you will do the smart thing do the safe thing run away right you can't help your friend and that's why you can't have friends and that's why you can't have friends meanwhile gone kilo was saying of gone you would disregard someone telling you not to stay back and help them, even if it was someone you believed in and trusted and loved.

no one will ever convince you not to try to save them.

You will always try to save the person.

And it's not said in this language, but we're three episodes away from Goan being like, I'm sorry for being selfish, but

I want to beat Genthru by myself

in that legit way.

Right.

And there's all sorts of, we're pulling on all those three lines here as we start a new arc.

This is part of what I talk about in terms of Tagashi's skill at weaving this all together.

Keith talked about in the past, you know, Tagashi is constantly making use of stuff.

He's constantly planning.

He's putting stuff down.

You don't know when he's going to pick it back up again.

And often what that looks like in progress is this sort of scattershot, you know, what is on his desk?

Why has he chosen to put that there?

But over and over.

Yeah, I mean, to Austin's point about authors, right?

Over and over, he is constantly saying, you know,

I'm resurfacing the potatoes in this stew, or I'm resurfacing the meat or whatever.

And you're going, oh, I forgot this had meat.

And then adding to all this one more time is just, you know, would he say this?

Would he have, okay, I think Kilo was right.

He wouldn't run away no matter what.

Would he have put the thought he did in?

Because I take going at his word here.

I think, Keith, you were saying, you know, this was one of the new things we heard, is the idea that he ran a bunch of simulations in his head, right?

He started thinking through what the possibilities could be, right?

Maybe a little early Jing planning happening here, but much more time.

Probably not well, but

he's thinking through the scenarios and how to make them work in his favor.

Would he do that if it wasn't Kite, the guy who saved him on Whale Island, his first person who told him about his dad, the guy who

was his dad's disciple or his dad's trainee or whatever.

You're saying because Kite is the only reason he even considered running away.

No, no, no, yeah.

Or listening to the request, not running away.

Yeah, taking the request seriously.

Right.

If he wasn't kite, if he was just someone else, he wouldn't even question running back into the burning building.

Yes.

Also, Kite, who again has the same color palette as Kilua, who has a sort of mirroring of the Jing,

sorry, the mirroring of the Goan Kilua stuff.

Yeah.

Because I don't think he would.

I think if Bisky had said,

and make sure, and if it's me who goes, if it's something goes bad with me in this plan, you run away, he wouldn't have given a fucking second thought.

Wouldn't this be such a sad outcome for Kiliwa to be Gone's kite?

He would be so sad.

So, here's it, would be, and here's something that I don't know, we're going long, so I'm sorry for bringing this up now, but kite is kind of both of them, but right?

Like,

there's a lot of Gone in Kite too.

It's just he has a lot more Kilowa's mannerisms, but like, when you look at what Kite is doing and the way like the traits that Kite shares with Gon, there is the, like, we talked about it a little bit with the surrogate father stuff that Jing kind of ends up playing with the like, good with animals.

Um,

uh,

uh, the obviously adoration for Jing, but like

seems to be like an it was a natural talent with Nen or Seemingly like could infer that given the way that Jing talks about Kite being like, oh, yeah, you clearly have the potential to be a good hunter because animals like you.

Like, it's, I think it's like,

I don't know, just something to keep in mind that, like, this is this could be the grown-up version of either of them.

What that makes me think is that, like, uh, like, Goan and Jing are excited by lots of things in the world, and Kite has found the thing that excites him.

And Kilo has said multiple times, like, I'm still figuring out, like, what it is I want to do, so for now, I'll just kind of follow you around.

I do think the comparison between Kite and Kilo is a little stronger, but I just feel like if I didn't say that, I mean,

it's like if either Kite, sorry, if either Goan or Kiloa grew up to be Kite, that would be a really nice, happy ending for either of them.

But only Goan could grow up to become Jing.

Yes, yes, exactly.

Not that Kiloa couldn't grow up to be a terrible person, too, but a different person.

Kilo could grow up to be Silva.

Right, exactly.

I did say, I would say, I said earlier or a second ago that it would be sad if Killua grew up to be like kite specifically what I mean is if Killua grew up to like wish that he was just following Gone's trail around still but like if Goan had blew past him and sort of left Killua to like live in the wake right if Killua ended up being just the first of many temporary really high intensity friendships Gone would go on to have yeah, and then and then move past.

Yeah,

yeah.

Do we have anything else for this episode?

Oh, just

I think it's notable because so much of what we've talked about with Kite is him watching things, you know, reading his expression.

This scene ends just so simply with like the camera pulling out to show that Kite has been watching them.

This show's so good at that, at just like having people watching.

It's so bizarre.

Well, and it mirrors the previous campfire scene where it's Kite and Goan talking and killa is the one watching them and like trying to read what emotions are happening between the two of them well let's uh amazing episodes so far um yeah you're into the ants

yeah i'm into the ants i'm pro ants we'll see if they can hold about another 50 60 episodes yeah yeah what is going to i have no idea where we are going because here's the thing right Here's the thing.

We talked about, you know, at this point, Austin, you were thinking, you know, he's telling a story about people.

He's telling a story about like what it means to be a human.

You know, I think I'm there too.

I think we're working through that.

We have all this interesting stuff with the cartel.

We have interesting stuff with the NGL.

You could do this arc

in less than 60 episodes.

12 episodes.

Right.

Yep.

You know,

it's big stuff to talk about, but Tagashi has demonstrated that he can work through those ideas at almost any pace he wants, to greater or lesser success.

Put it this way, york new city was a extremely involved revenge story and cascading hostage situation and he you know moved through it fairly expeditiously i don't think there is anything about tell a story about a burgeoning ant society and discovery of you know the self uh set inside a unstable political region that requires it to be 60 episodes long.

So what is going to happen?

It makes me think of, again, going back to Yu Yuhaki Show, a series that has multiple great short arcs, the most famous of which,

the most famous arc, though, is the Dark Tournament arc right in the middle of the series,

which is 46 episodes long and comprises 41%

of the entire runtime of the show.

Wow.

Wow.

Jack, you said you couldn't predict what's going to happen.

Do you want to try, though?

Yeah, this is like, it's not your last shot, but it's the best shot.

You don't gotta.

But I figured I'd the closer we get from half court, the less satisfying the guess is gonna be.

Exactly.

It's the king.

The ant king is going to produce, is going to throw a wrench into the works one way or another.

Either initial ant

expansion is going to be so mind-bogglingly successful, so violently

consuming beyond their wildest dreams that the ants under the ant king start operating on a much bigger level, and this becomes a story about the full-scale fate of the world.

Again, I think you could do that in a shorter run of episodes.

My suspicion is that the chimera ants are both going to continue to grow and are going to start splintering in really odd ways.

You know, individual Chimera Ant factions are going to start.

But I don't know why it...

You know, something needs to happen that is like

afterburners fire, you know?

Yeah.

It's like.

What do you mean by afterburners fire?

Like, something needs to

fuel for that to happen.

Why do you keep talking about propulsion and throwing it?

I was asking questions.

I need to solve that.

The propel was just that they literally are thrown magically from Greed Island into your chimera.

That's an interesting wordplay.

I referenced it at the very beginning of this episode as well.

They are literally thrown into the Chimera.

Yeah, I don't know.

I feel like.

I feel like I am looking at two-thirds of an object right now.

And the one-third of it is going to...

And as soon as I see what that is, I'm going to be like, all right, here we go.

And I think it is something to do with the king.

You know, we are building up to the king's arrival.

I am almost certain that that's this figure that we've seen multiple times.

It's, it's, we see its eyes over the planet or over a planet.

That might be it.

We might be moving at a much, much higher scale.

Jack looking at an iceberg above the water, saying, I'm looking at two-thirds of an object right now.

Get him.

I'm thrilled.

I'm so excited.

You know, I said it before, but

at the end of every arc, I've had a sense of where we're going next, you know, in terms of plot.

And at the end of Greed Island, all I knew is Chimera ants are coming.

What does that mean?

I don't know.

Where is it going to take place?

I don't know.

What are the stakes?

I don't know.

It's 62 episodes of Gorilla.

It is 62 episodes of the Gorilla game, yeah.

Absolutely.

What if Gorinus should be?

What if Gorino should go

with like like would it make an would it make more like gorilla ants too?

Like could the could could the queen eat the gorillas?

I have a question.

Nobody has ever been more excited about anything in the world than Yoshihira Tagashi has been about Nen.

You know?

Yeah, sure.

It hasn't shown up much in these episodes.

But it is weird how Nen hasn't showed up much in these episodes.

It is weird.

So

the ants are going to get Nen and all hell is going to break loose?

I don't know.

How would the ants of Nen?

Well, because Nen is a thing that every that is like a to do it's like to do with yourself, right?

It's like a part of selfhood.

So

I was yeah, what happened?

Oh, all of a sudden Demon World theory is all selfhood comes from Demon World.

It's quiet about Demon World Theory now.

I don't know.

And then what's Krollo doing?

We see him in the title sequence with a bunch of that we've done.

Can I say that wasn't him?

Yeah, I don't know why you thought krolo was on the title sequence it's not my boyfriend what

it was very funny who you thought was krolo

yeah dude i've been sitting on that the entire episode being like i can't bring it up

well i was like this is crowlo plus some new spiders you know like buddy

he's got new spiders

that that your boy can't like it's fine

ironically there's a character who has a relationship with that guy that i have with krolo who the fuck is that i just saw a guy that I've never seen before.

He's like flying through the sky.

He's wearing like a purple jacket and it looks like his arms and legs and head are falling off.

You're weird.

What's up with that guy?

He's got like a lantern following him.

I got to tell you, Jack, if you thought you knew anything about what Nen could do,

buckle the fuck up.

I am so glad we watch JoJo before getting

it.

Yeah, I think Jojo and then eventually some of the Cell Saga stuff are going to be the two things Jack will have had to see by like the midpoint of this of this season.

I'm pushing hard for sell.

Speaking of that,

we did record the first Dragon Ball Z bonus.

That will probably be up the week after this is up.

We watched episodes.

Dre, was it 13, 14, 15, 16 of Dragon Ball Z Kai

covering

pretty much Goku's entire entire fight with Vegeta

from the Saiyan saga.

Pro Vegeta.

These motherfuckers won't show me any Piccolo.

Well, no, you saw Piccolo.

He was just in a stage that you weren't happy about.

Delaware.

He was dead.

It is so hard to.

Dre, you did a champion's job trying to identify episodes to watch because

I truly believe the thing you should do with Dragon Ball Z is watch it.

Yeah.

Watch it.

And I know that that's not how Jack you work I know that you're in the last episode I listened to you were talking about like not being able to like do the classic sit down and watch 10 episodes of a thing maneuver that that's like just not how you engage with media which I fully understand and and envy I envy I don't understand but I do envy itself all I want to do is finish is finish chimera ant now like I just want to watch the whole the whole of it which I'm not gonna do yeah um although you do have a few more episodes to watch I do that's true we all do yeah hey sorry I've just been going through the the title sequence.

Yeah.

As far as I feel, you know, they're showing me this thing.

We shouldn't have to

be a game title.

We shouldn't have.

I'm sorry.

I'm a little mad.

No, no, no, no, no.

No, it's fine because they're showing me this thing.

What the fuck is this?

That's a great question, Jack.

Why the fuck is that?

It's very funny.

Jack, I need to...

Jack, stop doing this right now.

I have to

stop doing this.

Okay.

Promise me, you don't do it again.

Don't do this.

Because there is this again.

I like dead ass.

There's fully

frame by framing.

This is dangerous.

It's dangerous.

This is something they've done before, and I didn't bring it up because I didn't want...

Now that we're here and giving the warning, I guess I can bring it up.

They've given away every arc in every intro.

Have they really?

Can you give me an example of that?

Genthru's entire shit, like Reed Eye's entirely in its entirety is basically in the intro.

I feel like Phantom Treat might have been a little less obvious, but

because it was

such a social conclusion.

Yes, and I think it's cool to have these big, cool intros.

And if you're watching it through in a week-by-week format where you're not then talking about it for three hours

and identifying key themes every week,

you might not identify some of what is going on in the intro and

recognize recognize certain visual elements, for instance, as I'm DMing stuff to the group, which Snowby just renamed to a thing that you said recently

on a Dokepon Kingdom stream.

On the Dunkapan Kingdom stream, you guessed the name of a character was Peto Bricks.

And so now our little private group chat is called Peto Bricks.

Hold on, who did you guess the name?

Oh, someone in the chat said somebody was

Peto.

Their username was number one Pito fan.

Number one.

Yeah.

This is what we were all referencing at the very beginning of joining the call, right?

We all saw this and thought about this.

Yeah.

Okay.

Saw what and thought about what?

The thing in our little chat.

Oh, the thing that you posted.

Yes, okay.

Absolutely.

How would I not?

Yeah.

Yeah, no.

I hear the request.

I appreciate that you have said it.

I'm a big believer in, you you know, they're showing me the thing, but at the same time, like you said, Austin, you're not going through it every,

you know, people are not watching the show in the same way that we are watching that show.

That's right.

I am making a vow on the podcast.

Oh,

like a nen vow?

Oh my god.

Yeah, whenever you're in the desert, you're just piercing his jacket.

Play the music.

Play Chain Bastard.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You got to make up excuses to play Chain Bastard during the season because I feel like we're going to need the pick-me-up now.

I had it right there, though.

I could have been on another page, but it was just right there.

No, I know.

Listen, you knew.

That was your nun power.

There's no anyone to play Chainbast.

By the way,

didn't press during the Dragon Ball Z thing.

Krillin.

Oh, yeah.

This is what needs to be done.

You have to keep that one on the show.

Yeah, hey,

can you hit the one button that you played a lot from that episode?

No, I got rid of it because of

because I was mumbling over it.

We can't make a new one before the next time we record.

That's fine.

It was a really good bit.

Enjoy.

Yeah.

So you should definitely watch those.

And

sorry, you should definitely watch those episodes of Dragon Ball Z that we talked about forever ago.

It hurt my head.

Did you say what they were again?

What were they?

13, 14, 15, 16 of Dragon Ball Z Kai.

It hurt my heart that we, there's just no way to watch enough Dragon Ball Z.

There's no way way to watch four episodes of Dragon Ball Z and have them mean something.

So we had to watch Kai.

It hurt me when I couldn't hear my normal Gohan and my normal Bulma.

It hurt me when I heard that fucking busted-ass opening theme.

What's the opening theme on Kai?

It's sad.

The dub version of the song is very bad.

It's a dub version of

Dragon Soul.

No, no, it's not a Dragon Soul.

That's all called Dragon Soul.

I don't, the sub version.

It's not Rock the Dragon.

Wait, did y'all talk about Rock the Dragon?

Oh, don't worry.

We talk about Rock the Dragon.

Very controversial opinions.

I would, we, we, we, we beat Keith to death with hammers over it.

Okay, okay.

Okay, okay.

I'll rock the dragon.

Rock this dragon.

Rock this dragon right now.

Rock the dragon, come get me.

Come get me.

What are we watching next time?

Uh, next time, we are watching episodes 79, 79,

80, and 81.

Those are titled No Good NGL,

Evil and Terrible, and

The Fight Begins.

And based on the pace of the last three Chimera Ant episodes, I'm sure we'll be in much the same place as we were by the end of that third episode.

I'm sorry.

There's one more.

We're actually also watching 82, Kite and Slots.

Oh.

Oh, crazy slots.

Crazy slots.

Well, yeah, I guess.

When you say that, I think about like inside the NBA for some reason.

Other than being like, what's it called, Ernie?

Crazy slots.

I can hit crazy slots all weekend.

Why is his power crazy slots?

His whole deal is like animals and shit.

Why has he got a clown roulette?

You get what you're doing.

Sometimes what do you want?

Maybe clowns are animals.

Maybe the fact that it's incongruous with his personality makes it it more powerful.

Yeah, so totally.

It definitely makes it funny.

That's a good point.

That's a good point.

You might have done.

Yeah.

Oh, you said it was a contract that you picked, and it was like a conditional conditional.

Oh, it's definitely a condition that it's more powerful that he doesn't get to pick, but then it's also

more powerful because it's annoying and he doesn't like it.

Right.

Sure.

Yeah.

And I'm sorry to coil him out every time.

He doesn't like crazy slots.

That's really funny.

Can't really.

I'm so excited.

I am so excited.

Do you have any...

Sorry, go ahead, Jack.

I was just going to say, you know, I didn't hate Greed Island, but you heard how I felt by the end of that season.

Yeah.

And, you know, there were some really high highs in Greed Island.

We had, you know, you listened to the

anti-penultimate episode of

that to hear Jack being like, wow, this is great.

I'm loving this.

And don't get me wrong, I am cognizant of what a 60-something episode run of a single arc might feel like by the end.

Yeah.

But I don't know anything about an arc getting out of hand and going longer than you intended it to do.

To go.

That's never happened to me.

What was the Pallet of Colors, what, Austin?

Political Colors 9?

I don't know.

I don't really think about it.

We just in different ways.

Just thinking wavelengths.

Yeah, that's right.

If you think about it, the digital route of 10 is 1.

So really, it was just one big episode.

Thank you.

Just like this is one big episode.

Do we have anything else to plug?

You should definitely go to friendsofthetable.cash to watch the Dragon Ball Z episode when that's out next week.

And the Dragon Ball episodes and the JoJo episodes that are really good and funny.

And yeah,

that's what I got.

We're hitting our stride, baby.

Yeah.

All hits.

No misses.

This is the perfect time to jump into watching the show

because you know for sure.

It's a more time to catch up.

For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, I will say, we've said it before in the past, but it's worth saying again, if you are in a Hunter-Hunter fan community, such as one of the Reddits that I can't go to because they'll tell me me about the Grundler,

why not let them know

about Media Club Plus?

I think we are making a really great show, and I know that the Chimera and Arc carries a certain weight with it.

So if you think they might be receptive to hearing, here are a bunch of weirdies embarking on the Chimera and Arc, now's the time.

Yeah.

This is a great podcast, and I think that people that don't know us but do like Hunter Hunter will like this show.

Agreed.

I don't normally plug stuff on this podcast because it feels rude.

However, I do think there's an overlap here that people might not know about over on Shelved by Genre, which I do with Aletzo was just talking about.

And

we are currently doing Juji Ito's oeuvre.

We've done Uzumaki.

We've recorded

the one after that, the name of which I forget.

We've done Tomiye.

Oh, Gyo.

Giyo is the next one, which is about

fucking wild.

I think Tomier is my favorite so far.

I've never read Tomi.

It's been a blast.

Tomiye has the first best chapter of anything I've ever read.

An all-timer, all-timer, all-timer.

Also posits, bravely, What if a girl was evil?

What if a girl was evil?

This is the origination of What If a Girl Was Evil?

That's right.

This is the first evil girl.

What if a girl was evil?

Yeah.

No one's ever considered that women caused issues before.

It's huge right now.

There's never been a better time for What If a Girl Was Evil.

Do any of you know what the pitch of tomier really like i don't actually know any junji i'll tell you after i don't want to spoil it here people should go read tomiye and then go listen to shelf by genres junji ito unit

um it's good and hey i i looked on libsyn and i saw that there's uh

thousands and thousands of downloads from apple podcasts it's far and away the biggest destination for people who listen to this show.

I believe that that includes like other podcast apps that like pull from iTunes.

But I'll tell you that we don't have thousands of thousands of ratings on iTunes.

So you should go to iTunes and rate the show five stars and write a little nice thing, and we will thank you for it.

Make like the ants and be lots of you, and you're all wonderful.

I'm trying to find out, I don't necessarily have a funny review, but I got a nice review.

Yeah, there's a lot of really nice reviews.

Yeah, so I'm going to read a nice review from Chicago Haze 8.

This was on July 14th.

Home run.

I am not into this type of show, but these people are amazing.

So good.

Is it the type of show that they're into Chicago baseball?

That's what it is.

That's what it seems like.

Either way,

we're amazing.

We're amazing.

Great review is, I hate this shit, but I love this one.

Yeah.

That means you're doing it right, you know?

That is, yeah.

That's exactly what it means.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Well,

good night, everybody.

Good night.

Good night to all the ants.

Tucking them into bed individually.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's normally what you say at the end of one of these is good night.

Good night.

Good morning.

Don't let the bed bugs bite.

What's it that?

Wow, especially when they're chimera ants.

Yeah.

Yeah, it hurts.

It hurt Kilua.

Don't steal your personality.

The little one hurt Kilua.

The little one is ultimate.

Yeah.

Kid who electrocutes himself on the reg.

That's a great point.

He's like, that really fucking hurt.

Before we go, I do have one thing to say.

I have not listened to the Dragon Ball Z episode yet.

Importantly, so I don't want to misrepresent anything here in terms of, you know, I don't want it to be.

How is it not going to let me do this?

Is it not letting me do this?

Oh, there we go.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

Here's the thing about Rock the Dragon.

Yeah.

This rips.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

It's great.

I think.

It's great.

The solo part is undefeated.

Sure, yeah.

I'm going to go learn how to play this the second we get off call.

All right, good.

Thank you.

Yeah, I like the dragon.

I like the solo part.

I also like the scream at the very beginning.

Wait, I'm sorry.

Is Keith's position that it's bad and everybody else is?

Yeah,

Keith doesn't like Rock the Dragon.

Yes, Keith is the one who doesn't like Rock the Dragon.

No, I love Rock the Dragon.

No.

Oh, we teamed up on Keith Austin on

the side of Good.

I apologize

to my good friends friends who I thought had betrayed.

I'm kind of hurt, but I'll forget Devil.

You thought Sylvie and I didn't like the new metal song that was DBZ?

That's my DVZ theme.

Yeah, I grew up with.

I was confused.

I know.

It's okay.

Forgive me.

Maybe if they had gotten Crush 40 to do it, I would have liked it.

Oh, my God.

I would have ascended.

Yeah, Crush 40 dragged me.

It would be too much.

It'd be too good.

No, it would be just enough.

Because, I mean, Vegeta is Shadow, and Sonic is Goku, and

you know.

When you said you would have ascended, you mean ascended Saiyan?

Yeah, I would have.

No, I meant super, I meant supersonic, actually.

Good night.

Good night.

Good night.

Good night.

Bye.