Gon Shows Rock - Hunter x Hunter ep. 72-75: Media Club Plus S01E23

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

As always, we are brought to you by Friends at 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 Twitter and co-host at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

You can find the bonus episodes to this podcast

at friendsatthetable.cash.

That's also where you can sign up

for free if you want for the screenshot episodes that go up with every episode where I take an increasingly ridiculous amount of screenshots and post them.

I'm trying my best to stay tame, but I think the last one was just shy of 200 for three episodes.

Tame makes it sound like.

Tame is not reserved might have been the word.

Tame makes it sound like you're like usually uploading real saucy pics of no, they're not saucy.

I just,

you know, there's I well, the opposite of tame is wild.

And I think it's wild to upload 200 screenshots for for 60 minutes of content.

And anyway, you should listen to the JoJo's

Bizarre Adventure episodes that we did because they're really good.

And if you haven't heard the Dragon Ball episodes we did, we are just about to record some Dragon Ball Z bonus stuff, which is going to be a great follow-up to that.

Let's see.

So exciting.

I don't know what we're doing for that yet.

I do.

I'm excited for it.

With me, as always, is the Dragon Ball Z episode picker themselves, Andre Lee Swan.

Oh, hey, that's me.

I need to pick those soon.

You can find me on Twitter at Swandery3000.

They're mostly picked.

They're mostly picked.

Yeah, it's more editing.

Jack DeKee?

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.

And Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere on the internet at Sylvie Bullet, Sylvie spelt without the E, Taking Back Sunday style.

And

check out the Friends of the Table YouTube.

Keith and I are playing 999 over there.

There's Crusader King stuff over there with Keith and Jack.

I know they're the archives of Mech Mondays that Dre used to do.

There's the Dokepon stuff that is

going to do more Dokupon, right?

Yeah, we got to schedule that.

Yeah, I got to win that game.

See you in three years.

Yeah.

I'll be ready.

For Hunter Hunter or for Dokopon?

Both.

Not

stay ready for Gon to get ready.

But for I'm doing the I'm doing some of the training that Gon does in these episodes for Dokupon Kingdom.

Sorry, I'm not ready for Dokupon because I'm busy playing Fortune Street.

Keith, I would play Fortune Street with you.

Fortune Street, do that right time?

Yeah, I love Fortune Street.

Yeah.

Let's do it.

We should do a Media Club Plus Fortune Street stream.

I hope you down.

Yeah, I've never played one of those.

We watched watched for these episodes, episodes 72, 73, 74, 75.

It's our first

four since I think the very beginning of Green Island.

We started with the four.

These episodes were intense.

This is some of the

biggest, baddest stuff in Hunter Hunter so far.

It's great.

It turns out if...

If Hunter Hunter wants to stick to a plan, they really can do it because it seemed like all of this work, all of this arc was was leading up to a confrontation with the bombers, and that's exactly what happened.

We get some last-minute training and plan making, and

we learned something that Goan can't do for once.

And then we just have three one-on-one fights.

Goan takes on Genthru.

Bisky takes on Barra and Killua takes on Sub.

These are rough.

These episodes have a much different take on violence than we're usually dealing with.

This is like a high-stakes real-world replay of the Hanzo fight from the Hunter exam.

And then afterwards, we see what happens when someone finally collects all 99 specified slot cards and what it really means to win Greed Island.

I started this run of episodes sitting down to watch them and thinking,

I'm kind of done with Greed Island at this point.

Hey, and the show again.

Yeah.

I wasn't sure going into it

what was going to be new in what I was watching.

You know, I knew that there was a standoff with the bomber coming,

with Sesgara's team try to hold him off for three weeks while Gon and Goad's team train.

We know by the end of the last episode that the spiders have found Apengane, the exorcist.

So I sort of went into this thinking.

Is it just going to be a lot of getting all this stuff out in the wash?

And to a certain extent, that is what happens.

Where I was pleasantly surprised is that the way it happens is in some of the most direct, sort of like classic shounen fight choreography we have seen so far.

You know, if we talked about Bisky's training in those early episodes where they were doing that great sort of like punch matching game

as already evoking, you know, Dragon Ball style shounen fights.

Now we're seeing that in practice.

They straight up pull moves from Dragon Ball Z and those.

Bisky in particular.

Yeah.

Oh, is that so?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have a note that she does like the instantaneous transmission that Goku's very famous for.

Yeah,

episodes where she like blinks behind

the guy she's fighting.

I can never keep these two straight.

Hold on.

I'm looking up at the document now.

Bara has the black hair.

Yeah, Bara's the guy that she fights.

Yeah, she does like when she does the big kick when they first start fighting.

Yeah, that's great.

But she doesn't do the cool thing where she puts her fingers to her head.

That's true.

true.

And she can't go to the moon with it.

We don't know that.

We don't know that.

I think I was a little disappointed by, and we spoke about this in the, not the last episode it released, but maybe the one before that, where we had this little run of episodes that was fairly weak.

Yeah.

And some of the frustration that we had was about the way that the show was struggling to depict the game

because it had gotten so into this sort of like

various mechanics of fairly tame trades.

You know, when we'd seen the bombers' teams confronting people without blowing them up, which was entertaining when they blow them all up.

But usually otherwise it's like you'd line up in a field and get out the binders and then say, we'll give you this and then I'll give you that.

And there was a bit of me that was worried that they would make Tesgera's team harassing the bomber to keep him off going.

Just a sort of replay of that.

But it doesn't turn out that way.

Almost every confrontation, whether or not that's this sort of one-on-one times three fight that we get towards the end, but also Tesgera's maneuverings at the beginning,

have some really fun ideas at the middle of them.

There's some really interesting use of cards.

It keeps the pace up.

In every single one of these episodes, they ended before I was ready for them to end, which was fun.

You know, I spent the first five minutes going, all right, let's sit down and watch Hunter Hunter.

Okay, let's see what's happening.

And then a sort of a moment came where I was like leaning forward and being like, oh, I guess I'm actually interested in what's going on.

And then I went, oh, it ended.

I think it's so funny that almost every week, Jack comes in and goes like, all right, time to watch Hunter-Hunter.

It's really funny, right?

Seemingly forgetting that every time you like it.

Yeah, you love this show so far.

Well, and then I have a really great time talking about it.

I suppose part of the problem is that I have never been someone who really enjoys watching lots of episodes of TV back to back.

I mean, I understand that's a way that a lot of people interact with TV based on the way that some of you have talked about watching Hunter Hunter.

That's a way that you also did it.

It's never really worked for me.

And so sometimes when I miss schedule my week and I have to watch four Hunter Hunter episodes back to back, I feel like that Greek guy who pushes the rock up the mountain.

Yeah,

because I feel the exact opposite.

If I have to watch these episodes not all in a row, it's because I've done something wrong somewhere.

That's so funny.

It's part of my setup.

That's also how I schedule my stuff.

Yeah.

But yes, then I'm fresh going in.

Dre and Sylvie, sorry, Keith and Sylvie, you watch them all in a whack.

And if you don't watch them all at once, you feel bad about it.

Dre, how do you watch them?

Mostly all at once, but honestly, it has less to do with my preference and more when my wife is available to watch them with me because she's watching them for the first time.

So usually that just means we pick an evening and that's hunter-hunter evening.

It is, it's especially tough to do them all in a row for the show because

I don't know for anyone else, but for me, I tend to, because of note-taking,

it takes about two to two and a half times as long to watch them.

So where it's not that big of an ask normally for me to like watch 60 or 80 minutes of television,

it does become like three, three and a half hours almost

because of the note-taking.

And if I was smarter, I'd probably try to do that on two days.

But my brain is just like, yeah, four episodes, let's just do it.

It's just how I'm wired too.

Yeah, I'm sorry.

Even if it does take longer, I just like set aside like three hours in the day, and it's like, there it is.

Yeah.

My dream is one a day, and then I record.

Yeah.

That's the true spirit of TV, honestly.

Like, that's like a way healthier than what I'm doing.

Yeah.

Like, but it does produce this.

It does produce this weird effect, yeah, where every time I sit down and I'm like, oh, hunter, hunter.

And then halfway through the episode, I'm like, hell yeah.

And I sort of feel a fatigue as we approach the end of every arc where I'm like, enough of this already.

And generally the show agrees.

Although, I'm curious to see whether or not that continues as we move into the next very, very long arc.

But yeah, let's...

Oh, go on.

I'm just thinking about like the composition of the next arc.

Oh, I had a funny question that I wanted to ask about the next arc.

And I want to ask it now because I might forget.

Jack, do you think that the ants are good guys or bad guys?

Bad guys, Keith.

You think they're bad guys?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

They're bad guys.

But I mean, it's hunter-hunter.

So, you know, invariably we're going to make some sort of alliances with the ants, maybe.

Or maybe the ants are sort of...

You know, I've gone on record several times as saying that I have an idea of what the ants are.

And as we get closer and closer, it's like the ape problem all over again.

I'm like,

you're about to learn how this is about to happen.

Yeah.

Well, I.

But they're bad guys.

They're absolutely bad guys.

I think that the Chimera ants are

like a world-threatening problem.

Yeah.

That are about to start showing up.

Okay.

Yeah.

We'll see.

Yeah, we shall see.

Do you remember what word you said that

I

just

to make you have to think about what was going on.

In the last episode, I was like, oh, interesting word choice

about

how we were going to get to the next arc.

No, I don't remember.

I remember having that conversation, but I don't remember what I said.

I think you said you don't know what is going to propel us into the next thing.

And I said that propel was an interesting word choice.

And I sort of forgot what I meant by that.

And then I watched these episodes.

Yeah.

Damn, you even gotcha yourself.

I know, I got you myself.

Wait, but is there already Chimera Ant stuff happening?

Has there been Chimera Ant setup happening?

I mean, Tagashi is all set up.

There's been some thematic stuff, probably, like, that I have

to say is set up.

I think Sylvie and Dre are we're gonna watch the next episode, and you're both gonna go, like, oh, that's what?

Yeah, probably.

Yeah, so

this starts actually not on Gonan Kilua or the bombers, but on the Phantom Troop

and a new song, actually.

But the Phantom Troop and Hisuka are like staking out the Nen Exorcist, Abengane.

It's Machi Nobunaga and Kaluto.

And Kilua, or sorry, not Kilua.

Jesus Christ.

Hiseka.

Hiseka is there sort of just openly taunting them about wanting to fight and kill the boss.

The grossest shit.

He's being

at the line.

Yeah.

to calm my arousal i wouldn't mind ravaging someone i don't know he's he's talking about kaluto killu

brother i mean we can really get like the full palette of uh hiseka grossness here not just with the um

uh

weird uh predatory arousal towards uh these these kids but also with the like i'm gonna kill krolo and there's nothing you can do about it well it's like he's working through a little phylofax or a rollodex of all the gross shit that he says.

And he's like, he's trying, because for him, and he's like goading them into a reaction that he knows they can't have because he's basically their one chance to get Krolo's powers back.

But the fact that they're like ready to hunt him down and kill him after he beats Krolo, if that happened,

that's just a bonus.

That's icing.

He's looking for that because he's the worst.

He's very happy with that.

It's great to see the mechanics of the spider kick in with Kaluto as our new member of the troop introduced with very little fanfare.

It's just a nice moment of, you know, like Hiseker wonders how they were able to track Abengane and the implication is that someone's nen power did it and then Kaluto sort of walks out of the shadows.

There's a couple of things going on here that I like.

First,

it's all the setup again.

You know, we know how the spiders work.

We saw a replacement take place.

We didn't see it take place, but we know Hiseka was new, so a replacement must have happened recently.

So, why wouldn't we see another replacement?

And while it is,

while it would maybe be more interesting for it to be a character we've never met before, just a new weird spider shows up, I think it is economical to get a character that we know of, but don't know much about, like Kaluto.

And questions about and have like a relationship to Via Kilua.

Yeah, this is the sort of question mark sibling.

I can't help but wonder if there was

There was a real sort of begrudging respect and interest between Krolo and the Zoldic assassins when they met in York New City where Krolo was like all right silver and and Zeno have come for me.

This is gonna be interesting

I wonder if there had been you know prior to Krolo's exile conversation among the spiders of like can we recruit a Zoldic

There's also like the existing relationship with Ilumi there too, right?

Because there's Ilumi like there I think it's like I like, I like the move to entangle the Zoldix and the Phantom Troop more and more.

I think that's like a really interesting, like, like two groups that can play on each other thematically.

Um,

I also just think, like, I love having a new character to be like, what's that little, what's that little freak do?

What's that little freak's power?

Yeah, we still haven't seen it.

Who do you think we had to find out first, Kaluto or Finks?

Kaluto.

Damn, would you answer because you don't remember?

I don't remember.

No, so this is something I have.

We're going to get into this probably next week, but I haven't really like

it's been ages since I've seen this, the Chimerian stuff.

So that's really,

it's a lot looser in there.

I'm sure it'll come back to me as we go.

I'll be like, oh shit, this is about to happen because that's how memory works.

But like, right now, I'm.

Wheelie is sort of tentatively coming to join me on the other side of the table.

Just for a little bit, bit, because soon I'll be like, oh, it's that guy.

We have a new song here while

he's scouting out

Abengane with the rest of the troop.

A song called Master of EI Plays.

This has to be a Nobunaga song, right?

Because that's like...

Isn't that the sorts style it says?

Also, confirm, Nobunaga is still alive or resurrected.

Yeah, didn't die in that movie.

I guess when it got blown up, he was using Ken.

Oh, well done to Mo Banaga.

He sort of sank.

He sank to the bottom of the sea.

The Ken kept him from having to breathe.

And eventually he swum his way back up.

He has a great time.

And then we sort of start getting into some cards conversation as Tezgera starts detailing the plan that he's going to use.

But he doesn't super get into the actual method that he uses.

Instead, we just get some nice UI on the screen telling us what cards each team needs yeah that was what we're told yeah that that uh uh gentra's team needs this tesgara's team needs that they don't bother showing us what guns team needs because again uh despite being the team most interested in playing the game and having a good time gun and killua have been too focused on uh being dragged into a death game to to accurately play but seeing this By the way, there is a little bit of stuff before they confront the bombers of Tesgara sort of revealing his kind of hedge in all of this?

If you left it at the end of the last episode, his pitch is that he's just trading time, buying time for Ghon's team to like work up a plan in order to beat the bombers.

But he kind of reveals to his team that he does not believe that that's going to happen.

He thinks that what's going to happen is that the bombers are going to win, but get hurt enough to have to use Angel's Breath.

And thus giving them the Angel's Breath card that they need.

Yes.

Which is a sort of more cynical take on what has been what was going on than it seemed during the dodgeball thing.

Like, he's got a version of this.

His best case scenario is not going winning.

Yeah, it's great.

Because the game is just getting corrupted, you know, on every level, where even a character like Tesgara is

playing a little more cynically than he might otherwise have.

spoken about.

But seeing these card UI elements on the screen sort of gave me a bit of a flash of how the arc could have gone differently.

I mean, the arc went the way it went for a reason.

You know, I don't think that I feel that there was a missed opportunity or that I would have preferred it to go a different way.

But if instead it had been about playing this game rather than exploiting the weird situation that has emerged in the game, which again I think is a really interesting plot point, you could see how they could draw some of this out with like on-screen UI elements saying who's got what card,

where people have been in the world.

There have been these great little moments where we've seen bits of the game, like when

Aster revealed those glitches earlier, that feel like little ghosts of what Greed Island could have been if it hadn't descended into a death game, the hunter's favorite method of interacting with the world.

Does anyone want to describe what this kind of confrontation looks like between the bomber and Sasgara?

Do you mean them like doing a company back and forth?

Yes, yes.

I think this is probably the weakest chain of events until they use leads.

This sucks.

This like is like kind of lame.

It's wheel spinning.

It's like really it is like we owe

the game economy needs to be taken care of so people don't come so we don't get complaints about how it becomes really structurally important how many accompany cards everyone has.

And so they need to like prove prove the show decides that it needs to prove how many of these cards they have by like I found this really charming.

I'm in the

I'm in the minority here.

There was something about like absolutely stripping bare how

transparently mechanical and mercenary the game had gotten at this point so late in play.

Any vestige of exploring the towns, completing quests, even hunting other players had just fallen, completely fallen by the wayside as these two teams just burned every card in their binders to capture.

You know what?

What it really is?

I think it's not silly looking.

It's not silly looking.

It's not the concept as much as it is

like

they had to have fucking 45 of these cards to burn.

Like there's just so many.

And like it could have been any number as long as it ended with like six and four.

Well, sorry, six for the bombers and four for

Ghan's team.

Yes, it was an artifice, and it got way better when we cut to the wide instead of just like having these little reds.

The wide

case, I actually really like it.

Every time these company, it reminds me of

Flying and Dragon Ball Z.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah, it looks like that.

That is absolutely the

visual paragraph.

But they had like 12 of the shots of landing and leaving of a company.

And

half of them or more, maybe eight out of the 12 were like tight shots on a small bit of forest, nothing's there.

And then all of a sudden they arrive.

And the star's crew, and then it's a full shot of them.

And then it starts, yeah, being like these big, wide landscape shots where they're leaving.

And then that was fun.

I like that.

I think it's one of those things that I enjoy, like,

I would enjoy if it was at like two times speed or something.

I don't know.

There's just something about it where I'm like, this eats up like five minutes of the episode, or at least feels like it does.

And, like, as much as I enjoy the bit, like, I'll.

I remembered.

This is one of the big memories I have of Greed Island: them using a company back and forth and being like, oh, they're griefing each other.

They are griefing each other.

They are.

No, it's like really good video game shit going on here, honestly.

But, um, there's something, but it is silly.

Yeah.

There's something about where, like, if they had decided to play Greed Island in a way where it was more about about cards and using cards and getting into like fucking Yu-Gi-Oh!

battles or whatever, where they're like actually like you, and there's some of this in Ghon's fight too, where they're like actually using cards in the fight and effectively.

If the season had become about that and the thing that they were doing wasn't just like they have a set amount of cards and they're running it down, then even the stuff in the background where Greyneu is like staking out the card shop to try and buy more cards and is getting blocked like even that is like a little more interesting

yeah while we're on sort of like because the the the body of this first episode is really divided into two chunks it's Tesgera versus the bomber and then it's gone training and and I think we can sort of package them together because they're they're intercut um but on the um sort of fighting the bomber stuff uh a really cool thing starts happening where the the bombers team starts figuring out that someone else is on tesgara's team they can sort of intuit that Gorenu is there because of how they're playing, but they can't, they don't know who he is.

And so they start...

He's the Phantom Menace.

Oh, he's the Phantom Menace.

Why?

He is.

That's amazing.

They start staking out Masadora.

The gorilla's name is Palpatine.

Oh, God.

They capture anybody who comes out of a card shop and then check their binder to see if they have interacted with Tesgara's team.

If they they have interacted with Tesgara's team, they kill them immediately.

And if they haven't, they plant a bomb on them and send them out into the world to sort of like act as a kind of like game thrall for them.

And in the same way that I found the

accompany battle, what they call in the what Genthru calls a game of tag we can't lose,

I did find this treatment of all the other players by this late in the game, there are three teams, really.

It's Genthru's team, it's Tesgera's team, and it's Ghoan's team.

And Genthru's team is just instrumentalizing every other player to his own ends.

And I thought that was really interesting.

I like that a lot.

Especially because they bring it back up later, making a real important point that as far as Genthru knows, no one knows what the rules of the bomber are.

Only...

Only during the fight with Ghon does it sort of get hinted to him that like

someone lived somewhere somehow and has spread how his thing works.

So he can constantly go up to anybody, touch them, and then turn them into a bomb and be like, you're already dead, listen to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's not good.

No, it's not good.

Meanwhile, Bisky is training Gone.

This is great.

She, she.

First, she does one of those quick, uh, sort of quick hand fight things that they do.

Yeah.

Um, and then I love how this comes back up later, visually.

Yeah.

She teaches Goan a new trick or tries to.

She does a one-handed handstand and then fires enough Nen out of the hand on the ground to shoot herself up in the sky.

This is a very silly trick.

I like that.

It's so funny when Gone does the noise it makes when Gone does it is so funny to me.

Because how good is Goan at this?

He's a quick learner, so surely he'll be fine, right?

No.

No.

Do you know what this made me think of?

It made me think of how kind of embarrassing it was that Tesgara jumped like 30 feet in the air as like the big proof of how awesome he was like biscuit can do half that just by like

thinking about getting high with her hand on the ground like all she has to do is go like be high and then it happens she doesn't go as high as he does but he jumped

that's true yeah no she she's doing like like she's doing like crazy one-hand like push-ups into the air.

This isn't like, yeah, it's something where like, you know, she goes goes down and then pushes up.

It's like if anybody's ever done the thing where someone's like, jump without bending your knees, it's like that.

She's jumping without bending her elbow.

She just sort of like pushes off the ground with energy.

Which is even more impressive when you think about it.

Jump without bending your elbow.

But as far as Goan is concerned, this is like, you ever learned to try to do a cartwheel and you can't do a cartwheel and you just sort of roll uselessly?

Sure, yeah.

Have you ever tried and do a magic eye and you can't get it?

And it's like, what are you supposed to do with your eye?

I don't understand.

What is even happening here uh yeah so goan can do a one-handed handstand that's amazing yeah makes imagine if you could do a one-handed handstand but yeah goan absolutely maybe someday i can only do a handstand in the pool

oh yeah i can i can do one hand in one pool whoa i think i could do a one-handed handstand in the pool yeah yeah can any of you do a cartwheel i can do no

Whoa, no.

I used to be able to do a round off.

No, it's a round off.

It's like a a cartwheel, but your legs are like bent over.

I think.

I think that's what it's like.

Oh, sure.

Okay.

I think I can picture that.

I used to be able to

spring.

Whoa.

Whoa.

I was about to say,

which one of us do you think is closest to being able to do a backflip?

And it's probably Keith.

I don't think I'm close right now to be able to do a backflip.

Yeah.

I think I could do it if I believed hard enough.

Yeah, I was going to say Sylvie.

I think Sylvie is the closest to being able to do a backflip.

If I was on a trampoline, I could do it.

If I was on a tramoff.

It was easy on a trampoline.

Easy peasy.

Yeah.

I used to do those all the time.

Well, because the nice thing about the trampoline besides the bounce was that it eliminates the fear.

Well,

well, if you cow off the trampoline, it is very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very bad.

Yeah, that did happen to my brother one time.

They all had a net on my head once, and it was not good.

Well, we didn't have the net on it.

When I was a kid,

I had a trampoline in class in my PE class.

And at the end of the year, my report from a teacher who had never bothered to talk to me or ask me how I was doing simply read jack seems to enjoy trampolining

that was

pretty good we have a couple things here killowa notices that this is a much harder exercise than what goan had just been doing and biskey's like yeah yeah yeah we skipped four steps uh it's really important that we teach him something that he can actually use in this fight um

it's a level five

level five yeah so we skipped two to level four

yeah i was curious about this she says level five as though there's like a nen rubric.

Well, she's a teacher, she's a known teacher.

She's accredited.

Yeah, she's got a part of the accreditation organization.

I took it like the way belts in like Taekwondo are karate work, right?

Sure.

It's like there's steps to getting the next one and stuff like that.

And it just seemed like the basic martial arts structure that I have in my head at least.

I sort of took it as like...

They've been on a lesson plan this whole time, and they mostly were teaching

uh what is the what's his amplification thing what is it what is he actually called uh

oh john kinpoe no no strong uh one of the one of the nen types his i just can't enhance enhancer right enhancer yeah yeah oh right

you said strong and i was like ah yes enhancer the strong boy strong style that's what gone uses yeah yeah he's throwing lariat so they they went from basics to uh enhancer techniques and i think this is they're just like oh yeah i just had a lesson plan ready to go for this And this is the, this was chapter five, but we really, really need to skip to chapter five.

Chapter one is Trap the Cerial, Killer in the Pit.

Uh, and Kill is kind of getting frustrated because Goan, because, first of all, he can't train because of his hands, and then second, because he can't help make a plan because he doesn't know what Biscuy's power is.

Um,

and

there's a really, really funny joke with the soundtrack here.

I don't know if anybody else caught this.

Oh, no, please don't let me.

But as she starts explaining her power and manifesting her nen

to show it, it's playing the soundtrack

auras, which is one of the nen music.

Yeah, it's one of the

creepy nen songs.

And then when she reveals what it is, it basic almost hard cuts to Let's Be Friends, the really funny one.

I cut this scene out because I thought it was so funny.

And if it doesn't play when I'm editing it, I'll trim it or cut it out.

But I'm going to press this button.

Yeah, but would you mind telling me what your ability is?

That'd make it a whole lot easier to plan it all out.

Allow me to introduce my ability,

Cookie, the magical Masseus.

Jar has a sweet picture

to the body.

I didn't hear this in the dub.

That's really great.

That's crazy.

Bisky's power is that she summons essentially like a nen summon.

Sort of like the Garainu's apes, except instead of what if it was an ape, it was a magical masseuse named Cookie.

Right.

Yeah.

In the dub, her name is Magical Masseuse Cookie.

In the sub, her name is

Magical Eesthetician Cookie.

Okay.

That kind of makes more sense, honestly, with all the services she offers.

Yeah, she can

chiropractic.

She will her weight constipation.

She will apply lotion.

Yeah, it's I literally wrote

if I could get a day where

I got to have a massage from Cookie and eat at Tony Otrendi's restaurant, I think it would be

completely.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

What did I write?

I wrote, um,

she's a sexy masse who does similar stuff to the Italian cook from Jojo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She can like cure your diseases.

She can like fix your cold and fevers.

The line that made me think of Ada was the constipation one because I remember how he fixed Okuyasu's poopy tummy.

It's also the funniest anyone's ever delivered

a cure for constipation.

Yeah.

Like, no one usually says constipation like that.

No, it's true.

I, um, and this is baffling, because Bisky is incredibly strong.

And I have to imagine that this is.

We know that she cares very deeply about her appearance.

And maybe it speaks to the fact that

she doesn't have to use her nen ability for her fighting.

You know, it is.

She is this strong without that ability.

Yeah.

The way I've always read this was it's like it's the way that like athletes go in ice baths after competing and stuff.

Like she uses, like, this is for after she fights because she fights like an enhancer, like, is the way we've seen it, right?

Like, she's really, like, martial arts-based.

And so, like, it kind of makes sense to me that if that's not her, like, school, the school of Nen that works for her, something that would help her with that would be, like, the thing she does.

I was, I was just, I was waiting for the joke twist, right?

Where, like, at the end, Cookie pulls out a pair of knives or something.

Nope.

Cookie has a gun.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, the joke.

So I was.

The joke at the end is that Killer was furious about this.

That's the thing.

Yes, Killer was like, how is this useful?

And I thought he'd get punched into the sky, but we really only have one more getting punched into the sky as a treat in the next few episodes.

It's really, it's really funny.

Yeah, it is a match cut.

It's really funny.

And then, you know, this is being interwoven.

Gunner is trying to do this thing.

He's failing.

He can only lift himself in the air.

He had less than a foot.

That's going to hurt your wrist so bad

to just like drop down onto it.

Well, nenrists.

Yeah, yeah, that's true.

Nenrists.

This is the part with the bomber is recruiting people, which we talked about a bit.

I don't know if there's anything else about that, but.

Oh, I did want to say briefly that I thought it was

fun to see Killiwa and Bisky talking together about Ghon's training.

It was sort of like a soft acknowledgement that Killiwa is on some level more technically capable than Goan, that the two of them were able to sort of sit back and look at Goan and go, oh, here's, you know, here's where he needs to improve.

Here's how he's working.

I thought that was fun.

The thing that I think is fun is Grey New sort of like watching the bombers with a little telescope from the trees, sort of hidden up in the trees.

Especially because Greyu's just like one of the more normal, talented hunters that we've seen just kind of like a guy with a vest yeah

every time he's on screen i'm like apes can i can i see the apes i know by the way may i see may i have some

dead

the one because there's nen i know but like i don't know yeah he should be able to re-summon it like theoretically i don't think if if cookie died biscuits like doesn't have a nen power anymore i think she just brings cookie back yeah it would make something like krolo's power power kind of dicey if that was the case, right?

Where it's like Krollo opens his book, produces something, that thing gets killed, and now he can never do that again.

Yeah.

Um,

well, he can always get,

I mean that more in terms of just like Gorenu specifically, not like

nen beasts generally.

Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know.

Uh, here I wrote down, I fear for Gorenu.

Um,

I can sort of sense that a knife was approaching him.

Uh, I fear for the lovely lovely gorilla man.

Listen to me.

May he return home safely?

No knife approaches him.

He refuses to fight the bomber, which is fair because the bomber is pretty good at fighting, it turns out.

But I was watching the fight later on and being like, Greinu's power would be perfect for this.

He could substitute one of his gorillas.

No, Keith, you don't understand.

They are dodgeball gorillas.

You know how...

How many do dodgeball?

Well, here's how it is.

You know, Krolo has conditions before you can steal someone's power.

The bomber has to...

You have to touch him and say i caught the bomber before his bombs disappear yeah garenu's gorillas can only just appear during a dodgeball match and he was like waiting he was so excited when the dodgeball match showed up so this is funny this part's funny because uh

uh the we're just like so deep in plan territory like everyone's like nine levels of plan in because we sort of watch the bombers collecting more and more accompany cards and it's like oh my god they're catching up and then it cuts to tesgara being like don't worry them getting more cards is part of our plan

because i it makes sense because their whole plan is to run down the clock and it's gonna take them like a week or two to get as many cards as they think is necessary i guess that's why they needed such a high number of cards

There's like a such a high percentage of people being like, don't worry, this is the plan.

Or I know this is the plan in these episodes.

Don't worry.

And it's still all part of the plan.

It works out great, but it's like, honestly, as a viewer, I don't know if they needed to signal it to me as much as they did.

There is a lot of classic voice in character's head.

He doesn't know that I know.

Or

I remember what someone said.

Or he's dodging towards me with his right hand.

Yeah.

Which is

a trope that...

Hunter Hunter does sometimes, but kind of tends to avoid in favor of either cutting forwards or backwards to people explicitly talking having people on the sidelines talking or having characters verbalizing it themselves out into the fight yeah there's a point where biskey says it three times and then goan has like two flashbacks about biskey saying it uh

and i think like two or three of those ones in the middle could have been cut.

I do think that it's to one, we have to take into consideration weekly broadcast scheduling stuff.

Sure, for children.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But like also just the

it's a way to keep the viewer reminded of that they did have a plan when Gone starts going off script.

Yeah.

Yes, that's true.

It will not surprise you, gentle listener, to know that Gone starts going off script.

And then there's a moment where he goes off script and then he goes even more off script later where it's like it gets revealed that he's going off script and then revealed that actually that was still like the worst case scenario part of the script and that now we're really going off script.

Oh, yeah.

I would find all this

planning and counter-planning so tiresome if it wasn't backed up by a really spectacular fight.

Yeah, and some anti-fighting part of the planning episodes.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, also when the planning doesn't really hit for me, I'm at the, I feel like I'm at the point in the series, and I was like this when I was watching it the first time, too.

It's like, I kind of just trust them when, like, I trust Tagashi when he's doing this now because,

like, I think I mentioned, I don't know if it was the the last episode or the episode before the sort of like mousetrap pacing that he likes to do where he like slowly builds up his little like Rupe Goldberg machine and then everything goes yeah yeah um and this is a really satisfying conclusion I think this is something that that I think I said like three or four episodes ago but the funny thing the thing is interesting about greed island structurally is that like uh normally Tagashi's building that

building the mouse trap, you know, himself and the characters are just the pieces.

And in this one, he's building the characters to build the mouse trap, which is kind of like, you know, like, it sort of like brings the structure more in fiction, you know, kind of a fun way because

they are in the game.

So, like, having them doing what he's doing,

like, fictionalizing the game that he's already playing out of fiction.

I just think it's fun.

Yeah, I agree.

What's going on now?

Where are we?

Zesgera actually.

We're all over the place.

Zasgara's team, we've actually, I think we've covered, um, oh, I suppose something that is worth saying here is that Bisky and Kilio find an absolutely gigantic boulder.

Uh, however big you think this boulder is, however flawlessly, beautifully round you think this boulder is, picture bigger and rounder.

I thought that they made the boulder.

Me too.

Me too.

I thought they implied that like Bisky made it.

Oh, maybe she did, but I...

Because she is a jewel lady.

No, we know that she didn't make it because

this boulder actually is a card.

Actually, it comes from a card.

So I think that they found it out in the world as part of a quest.

Can't you put most items into cards in Greed Island, though?

That's true.

Well, but it's already got to be a pre-item.

Yeah, it has to be.

Yeah.

But it's like all the rockets on the island card.

Vice versa.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What a stupid game.

Early in Greed Island,

maybe as we were approaching it, you know, when we were in the Phantom Troop Arc and we knew that a video game arc was coming, and I I said, did they ever make a Greed Island video game adaptation?

And the three of you knowing that in fact we were going to be getting 10% video game, 80% death game, 10% Weird Lady Training Gun and Killua,

you were like, well, you know.

I mean, they could have.

Like, they could have, but...

you know.

And they did.

They just all were fighting games and Game Boy Advanced games that only came out in Japan.

And Wonder Swan games, please.

And Wonderswan games.

Thank you.

Thank you again to Yokoi.

I'm looking up one the one.

Oh, you never heard of the Wonder Swan?

The Wonder Swan, it's like a

Japan-only game.

It was a nearly successful rival to the Game Boy.

Yes,

made by Gunpei Yokoi after he left Nintendo and after he made the Tamagotchi.

Oh, damn.

Okay.

Yeah, Gunpei Yokoi was a genius and made the Game Boy and

then, I think, died in a car accident.

Tragic.

Oh, that's

That's really sad.

Poor guy.

He was forced to rush the Virtual Boy to market and then it was a disaster.

And it was released in basically in to him an unreleasable form.

And then he it seemed, I think the wisdom, the commonly held belief is that he was kind of unwelcome at Nintendo.

because of this is the failure of the virtual boy so he resigned and then made the ton of

interesting

So they find out.

And then made the Tamagotchi and then had the biggest spring back.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, sorry, Jack, go ahead.

They find this beautiful boulder, and then Tezgera and his team, having sort of done all they can, leave the game.

This is interesting.

Because I had assumed that the bomber had already infiltrated the mansion because they arrive and there are no guards.

Yes, this is confusing, and I have a note on this, and I think I have an idea for what happened.

I think I know exactly what's happened.

Yeah, go ahead.

I think Jack might have...

It sounds like Jack's got a good reading on it.

Yeah, so at first I was like,

the bombers got here already, and this is going to be scary because they're stepping into a trap that's already been set up by the bomber.

But it turns out that the head guard was just asleep and everybody else had been dismissed because

Mr.

Batera, the man who, if you remember, had bought the game for billions and billions and billions of Jenny, has locked himself in his bedroom and is crying and has called the whole game off.

So the operation has been shuttered.

I had no idea what was going on here.

And in fact, what actually ends up happening, which is sort of like a little O.

Henry twist in

our Hunter, Hunter, Green Island arc.

I had thought...

I didn't know if there was something more sinister going on, right?

Whether there was that this is part of what was going to get us into the next arc.

Why has this man suddenly called off the game so suddenly?

And it turns out to be something a lot more mundane and sad.

But this was sort of my first moment of wondering whether the bridge to the next arc was beginning, even though it wasn't.

So, Jack, you sidestep it, but the confusing thing to me was that

Gethru's team also uses leave, and they kill a guard that was there, and they're like, it's fine to kill people here because they won't leave any cards.

they're again they're talking about the real world it's fine to kill people here because there's no consequences uh

and then i was like wait hold on but her

buttera's like crying in the other room and sasguera's like pounding on the door and genthu's team is there and then the next episode it starts and genthu's yeah team is waiting back at the starting point and then i was like oh there must have just been a weird cut where actually betera doesn't live in the place where the game is happening uh or where the consoles are, and they just must have cut through

Batera leaving where the games are to going to where Batera is.

That was the part that I found confusing about this.

Yes.

I think it was just sort of pretty expeditious cutting that could have been a little clearer.

Also, we are on Tagashi and the animation team's wild ride at this point.

Yeah.

And they are going to put the pieces where they want them to be.

It's also, again,

worth reminding people that, like, the episode to

the chapter to episode ratio in translating the manga to an anime has never been so strict.

There are

more chapters going into episodes than usual for this.

So like there's more cut content than another season to this point.

Yeah, yeah.

We had hoped to have Ali on today to talk about how the manga works, but it didn't pan out.

But we are excited to bring on our manga correspondent soon to

talk a bit more about where the show and the manga are similar and are different.

Yeah, maybe we'll do a manga catch-up episode.

Yeah.

And that's pretty much everything in 72.

Yeah, but really it ends with the

Batera crying and then the bombers showing up.

This is what was confusing.

The very last thing in that episode was

Genthru being like, we're back in the real world.

We can kill anyone we want.

And then cut to they're literally not in the the real world anymore.

It was very odd.

I think that this gets explained later on.

Sort of,

kind of.

Like, it does.

I'm making a couple leaps to get there, but I kind of like backfilled some stuff when we find out the situation with Batera.

Well, Sisgera kind of makes two has two versions of the plan.

One is where they don't follow them and they can just wait them out.

And the other is they do follow them and

the guards at the place will like help them defend against Genthru.

Not sure how that was going to happen.

They die so that he can go do stuff elsewhere, probably.

And it's funny because he was followed, but then they played it like he wasn't because

the mansion ends up being empty.

By the time 73 starts,

Genthru's team is spawn camping the entrance so that Cesgera's team can't get back in.

Now, there's a mechanic introduced here that I'm not sure if it was mentioned previously where if you are outside of the game for a certain period of time, it was mentioned previously.

In our first episode covering this, they talked about it.

Oh, yeah.

So it was one of those first three or four.

It was like early bomber stuff, right?

Like with, wasn't it with Kuhat?

Or am I misremembering?

Yeah, I think that you're right.

I think it was like

either the first or second episode.

Or something like that.

Yeah.

Yeah, because, you know, if you're out of the game for too long, all your cards sort of get get destroyed.

You know, you can save them in your binder.

You leave and you come back in and you've still got them.

But if you're out for too long, there they go.

And that ends up being what's happened.

You know,

all the cards are lost.

This is less of a problem than we think, because it turns out, in sort of our first...

He thought that I was doing this, but I was actually doing that twist.

Gorinu actually has been holding all the real cards and says Gera's team has mostly copies.

There are mechanics that would let you discover copied and faked cards.

Goan has one of them

in the Paladin's necklace.

But Genthro's team is more focused on playing the game like sharks to

try and rush to the wind.

Maybe like figuring out

whether or not these things are cards.

It does put a lot of risk on Garinu, I fear, for Garinu.

They two interesting things to sort of subvert the idea that Ganthru might figure this out.

The first is that Grenu goes, like, this is the biggest gamble of Sesgara's life.

And it's like, oh, okay, so this is a really big deal that he gave Greinu all his cards, which is pretty obvious.

Greenu could just choose to go try and win the game now.

Like, Goan,

theoretically, Goan could have...

given Garenu two cards and the game would have been over with no interaction with the bomber, right?

No, because the bombers have monopolized monopolized Angel's Breath.

Yeah.

Oh, they needed one.

Well, I thought that, uh, okay, you're right.

I thought that because that was the that was part, I don't remember if this is here, but that was part of the plan where it's like, we've got to beat up the bomber team's breath that they have to use an angel's breath, and then we can buy one at the store.

That was part of Scara's plan.

I thought that Ghon and Kiloa had their own Angel's Breath, but that's just because they take them at the end.

Yep.

Angel's Breath is a rare card that lets you heal injuries.

It's a full restore, restore, basically.

It's a full restore.

Yeah, it is.

That might be notable to have.

Oh, well, don't worry about it.

Hey, and you can't

get it in the real world, it seems like.

Isn't that crazy how all these cards can go into the real world?

Because it turns out that Batera's lover, and we really are, you know, earlier I described it as an O.

Henry twist.

O.

Henry was an American short story writer.

That's the twist.

Perhaps most famous for, whoa, perhaps most famous for

a short story called The Gift of the Magi and the Candy Bar.

The Gift of the Magi, I'm sure we've talked about it on this show before.

It's a kind of...

Well, this show being Friends of the Table, yes, absolutely.

This show being Media Club Plus, I don't think so.

It's a faintly mawkish short story that ends in a sort of grim Twilight Zone twist in which a man buys a

hair comb for his wife and the wife buys a watch strap for her husband.

But of course, we learn at the end that the man sold his watch to pay for the hair comb, and the woman sold her hair to pay for the watch strap.

This is the kind of thing that if it was 19 maybe 26 and you've read it for the first time, it's the coolest shit you've ever fucking mind.

He was cooking with this woman.

He was cooking with this woman.

She sold her hair.

It's also, it's, you know, this has been parodied and homaged to death a billion times over.

But yes, this is, it is sort of like that.

Yeah, so sort of what has ended up happening here is that Garenu has a lover who almost like age cap girlfriend.

Batera has a lover.

He's a very, very wealthy man.

She is not wealthy.

She has denied all sorts of fancy gifts that he's bought her so that people don't think that she's just in it for the money.

You know, Tagashi and Ko are just trying to sell us as quickly as we can on this nice, unfortunate lady.

45 seconds to convince everyone that she's not a gold digger.

Yeah.

But also that he's not a fucking creepo.

Yeah, this is the thing because it starts with, oh, is this your daughter?

It's like granddaughter.

Or granddaughter.

Yeah, it's like there's a lot of shout out to Bill Belichick.

He's like 74 and she's like a young woman.

It's impossible to know because it's a curse.

Shout out to Bill Belichick.

However, unfortunately, she has been mortally wounded in an accident and lies in a coma.

And he has been, he has set up this entire operation, you know, to try and gain the Angel's Breath card.

This whole thing was a means to get the Angel's Breath card to

bring his lover back to life.

And of course, she has finally passed away.

So this whole thing is,

you know, empty.

And, you know, this he said right at the beginning that he was doing it for love,

he did say it in like a televis television interview, right?

Why are you doing this?

Why are you spending half your fortune on this game?

And he said, For love.

I remembered this, and I was like, Man, it's gonna be so stupid when we get to that fucking thing.

Yeah, and it is, it is

so sudden and so like pathetic that it is almost funny.

Um, it is mawkishly sentimental, but also disposed of so quickly that I kind of can't be mad about it.

You can tell that they might have been batting around ideas where it's like the game corrupts its players, and then ultimately, all of this was for nothing.

You know, the whole purpose of the game for Jing's perspective was to test Gone.

The whole purpose of the game for the player's perspective was to get vast amounts of money.

The whole purpose of the game for Pateris' perspective was to bring his lover back to life or cure his lover.

And of course, it all comes to nothing in the end.

You know, he buys the haircomb by selling his watch strap.

And then the added thing is that the only reason the game didn't end sooner was because the bad guys had all the Angel's Breath, the exact cards that they needed to save this woman.

And the only cards that they needed to end the game was the ones that you needed like a shred of compassion and teamwork in order to get.

Yes.

There are thematic levers that you could work here that, at the best of times, would kind of be mawkishly sentimental.

The fact that Takashi and Crew decide to try and pull all these levers like an organist frantically trying to bring the organ up to volume before the choir comes in.

It's one of those things

it is delightful, and it's also kind of nothing.

I wonder if how much of this is a,

like Keith mentioned, a

casualty of the

pacing and the adaptation schedule if they're like packing a bunch of chapters in.

I can see the way that this ends up feeling like a short story Takashi's done in a couple chapters versus like

maybe a thing that takes a couple minutes in the beginning of an episode.

It does feel a little like thematically, and maybe thematically isn't the wrong word, but it feels kind of appropriate that at this point, no one gives a fuck about the like most people do not give a fuck about the game, especially Gon and Kilua.

I should say everyone gives a fuck about the game ex like for buttera's sake except for gon and kilua and so

yeah yeah and so it makes sense to me that like it's almost like this weird like yeah yeah yeah this doesn't really matter anymore like we are so far past dispense with it yeah we don't have to justify why people are in greed island anymore there's also like a top level cruelty to this where

like

who made the game jing why did he make the game as like this weird obsessive way to challenge his abandoned son to make sure that he's strong enough in the world, which means that like the game can't,

it has to be designed in a way that it can't end before Goan gets there.

And so, like, all of this stuff, like, all of people's like hopes that they're pinning on this game that really has nothing to do with them.

It's just sort of like a trap to keep them there as obstacles for Goan because Jing is like a weird house-style genius who like is like seeing the world and you know 40 chests and like I just need to make this game that lasts 15 years so that my son can get here and and become you know the strongest of all time Or so I can kill my son and I don't have to see him.

Or so my gym buddy can kill my son.

And there's also the level of cruelty too, where it's Patera just literally building like a house of corpses in order to try and revive one person.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Write that story.

No.

Instead, I'm going to spend loads and loads of episodes on just like, I don't know, fucking card trades.

This is such a thin arc.

There's so much good stuff in it.

And like a lot of these episodes really work, but ultimately, it really feels like, you know.

I think the thinness of it and the cruelty of it is like.

justified in all of these weird ways where like these are all just the machinations of a lunatic mixed with

like Batera trying to use it for his own advantage, mixed with like this weird reality where they're in this game, but it's actually in the real world.

Like, I think that the fact that it's in the real world is such an important part of it to me because it's sort of like

it brings into reality the thinness of the Veil.

Like, there actually isn't a Veil.

It just is the real world.

It's not even a game.

Like, it's just a town with weird rules.

You can't leave.

Right.

Yes.

Yes.

Yeah.

You know, I like it a lot.

I think it is such a compelling idea.

And I think that my problems with it come from

the ways it is dancing around that idea sometimes.

But yeah, this little Batera coda here, I thought it was really funny.

It's sad.

The one detail that they managed to hit that is so clangingly sentimental that it kind of ended up working for me was the

she loved this shoddy picture frame i made there was something about the idea of mr buttera like going to a michaelson putting together like a terrible little picture frame that was just a really nice fast uh stupid beat it cost you know

two sentences of characterization she returned every expensive gift i ever bought her but she loved this picture frame you know i can imagine that this man who for some reason you know has his uh you know 50s years 50 years younger smoking hot girlfriend that doesn't want his money.

And he's like, accept one gift of mine.

He's never had to make anything in his life because he's a billionaire.

And so he's just desperately trying to figure out what kind of gift she'll take.

It gave me such a different read on the whole thing, if I'm being honest.

It made me feel like the whole thing is like,

okay, so my stalker's paying for my medical bills, but I don't want any of the shit he keeps sending me.

I need to accept one, so he stops.

I'm going to take the.

But that can't be it because then you'd accept the nice one.

Yeah, it's definitely not.

Well, yeah, you accept the small one, so it's like, yeah, cool.

Now you can, like, now you don't have any, like, you have less ammunition to hold over.

I'm saying it right now.

If I'm getting stalked, I'm taking a car.

Okay, well.

That's fair.

Make it worth it.

Don't send me your talkers out there.

Get Keith a car.

Obviously, my read is super untrue and not what the show is going for, but it is how I'm choosing to think about it.

Oh, yeah, it's definitely before we get too deep into episode 73.

We do have a couple interesting songs going on in 72 that I

missed talking about.

So, one of them I didn't have, it's called Intermezzo, just as like the lead in to one of the other songs.

It's called Assassins in the Building, and then it goes right into another new song,

Unasked for Advice.

And this is

what happens when

the Sesgara team is like doing sort of hit and run tactics on the bombers to like rattle them so that they're kind of like

overthinking what the plan might be.

And these are important because these are going to end up showing up a lot in our next arc.

These are songs I primarily associate with future content.

Let's see.

Oh, that base.

It's a good base.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like I said, I'll cut these down to size because of the mixer issues.

So this one's like really dark and weird

and very cool.

I like this one a lot.

This one gets somewhere.

This one kind of builds into like a weird groove, right?

Like a base groove?

Or is that the other one uh let's see they they do play them sort of back to back let me just double check and uh

is this what you're thinking of

no let me see if i can find so it might be the next one unasked for advice

this one yeah

this is huge in the next season this is everywhere next next season.

This is this groove that I'm talking about.

This, like, the bass bending upwards with a little...

I'm going to be quiet so you can hear it, but the treadle part is playing a line over the top of it.

Why is the show starting to sound like this?

I don't know.

I don't know.

There's that picture of the fellow that I saw on my streaming platform who

looks very, very sinister.

Oh, the fellow.

And he has like an army of

red-eyed people below him.

That's that kind of music, right?

This is creeping music.

This is creeping music.

It is creeping music.

It is creeping music.

It's like rolling music.

Whoa, crooked.

Now, look, here's the thing.

I don't even know if these are going to be fucking ants.

That's what I mean.

Did you see any ants?

Did I see any ants?

I've never seen any ants.

No.

On the creepy image, there were a lot of like humanoid creatures with red eyes, but that's...

For the listener who isn't familiar, my theory of what a chimera ant is, is a sort of shape-shifting entity.

So they could be like...

They could be looking like people.

I don't know.

It's so interesting to me, Keith, that you say this is the sound of the next arc.

yeah you don't watch the next time on do you I do not watch the next time okay it's good that you didn't watch the last next time

yeah yeah

usually it's fine who cares but this one was a this one was a big one yeah anyway yeah those are those are really big really dark for the next and dark in a way we haven't really heard before.

Yeah, I know there is.

I don't know what Nine Inch Nails really is, but I listened to that and it sounded a lot like Nine Inch Nails to me.

Yeah, no, I think.

Yeah.

I'm definitely not like a nine-inch nails, like, you know, huge, like, fan.

But yeah, that sounds right.

That's like, like, there's some industrial stuff there, but it was also just an anvil, but there's nothing there.

It's more the way you said it than me, me.

That really got me.

I don't know what nine-inch nails is.

I don't really know what nine-inch nails is.

Or as David Lynch calls them, the nine-inch nails.

But no, it's really cool.

And

it's exciting to think of Hirano exploring new textures in his composing.

We have an old complex coming up, too.

It's a song that's played before, but only like once or twice that I thought it would be fun to include.

But yeah, a lot of new stuff and a lot of the very earliest sounds in these episodes.

What do you think, Katre?

I'm just, I'm looking at like the wiki page for episode 73, and I just forgot how much stuff is in this episode.

A ton of stuff in this episode.

Jam fucking hat.

We have spent like a lot of time talking about what is like the first

quarter of the episode.

Yeah.

There's just so much happening in this episode.

Okay, so we skip one thing we skipped.

Gohan's training his new thing.

He was supposed to get it under a minute, but hasn't.

What is that new thing?

We don't know.

They don't really say.

Right.

This is like Kilua is like, hey, no, it's supposed to be, you have to do it exactly at a minute.

Yeah, I don't really know what this is.

Yeah.

I don't know if this could be a good thing.

I'm stuck.

The 100, isn't it 100 seconds or is it a minute?

I think it's a minute.

It's a minute.

It's a minute.

Okay.

And then on the stopwatch, like when Goan is like, look, I did it.

It's like he's off by like a tenth of a second.

And Bisky and Killiwa are like, no, you didn't.

But they basically said, you're not getting this emission thing.

You failed in your task to learn this.

So you have to learn what you're doing.

Which is interesting.

Goan just going fails.

And actually, Killiwa is the one who delivers the news to him, you know, says, all right, this isn't working.

We need to try something new.

Maybe because Bisky and Killiwa were like, he'll only listen to me.

Oh, 100%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Maybe that's why Kilua has to be so involved with the training is because he'll accept the news if Kilua delivers it.

Yeah, well, I mean, it goes back to Goan only trust Kilua enough for certain things, right?

Only Kilua could hold the ball.

Only Kilua can tell Goan when this isn't going to work.

And I think Kilo has got a really good grasp on what Goan's actual limitations might be.

Like he nailed early, early, very early on, way before Bisky admitted that Ghan was not going to be able to get this.

The fact that it took five days and he made no progress, Killer was like, we should stop now.

And they wait another five days with no progress before

changing to the new thing.

But

Killer plays a very good Karapika, actually.

He does.

You know, early in the show, when he was sort of coming off the back of fleeing the Zaldix,

He was like

dangerous and had a bit of an impulsive streak, you know, less impulsive than Ghon,

but could definitely be a wild card.

But he is really maturing into a sort of war Karapica.

The war Karapica.

I'm pretty sure it's a Digimon.

Oh, wow.

Well,

Warapica Mon.

Let's see.

Ganthru starts now turning his attention to Goan's party.

Uh, hilariously, he briefly believes that he can just take their cards from them.

He says, assuming we need to resort to force, this is what we'll do.

He has no idea that they have been planning for three weeks to fight him.

Right.

I thought that was a nice detail.

It's a bit like when you are playing like an open-world survival game like Rust or something, and you come over the hill to find that your opponent has constructed a beautiful three-story base with a jacuzzi spa while you were still working on on your lean two against a tree.

Yeah.

Same thing with like StarCraft, where you build up your first little army and you're like, all right, I'm going to go on the attack.

And then you show up and their base is three times the size of yours.

Yeah.

So many pylons.

So many pylons.

Oh my God.

They already have these?

This is when, this is the first time I noticed that great cue with the rising baseline that Keith played earlier.

Yeah.

Immediately, there is a lot of fake maneuvering, and that maneuvering never stops.

As the team sort of pretends to be impulsive, pretends to sort of split up.

But what they're actually doing is, you know, getting ready to fight one-on-one.

Goan immediately gets a taste that Genthru might be even more dangerous than he thought, whereas Genthru

lunges towards Goan to put a bomb on him, and Goan leaps backwards, Genthru immediately figures out that he has somehow learned what his power is and sort of starts to reposition in the sense of, this is going to be a more serious fight than I thought it was.

And Ghon says, this is to himself, again, sort of shown on internal voices here, this is the difference in battle experience.

You know, Genthru is already starting to outclass me in how quickly he's able to think.

They do a really fun like play at having been surprised.

I really like this stuff.

They do cut in every line to be like, nice, this is working.

Uh, but I do like them all kind of pretending to be caught off guard.

It does work really well.

Yeah, it's a nice little throwback to when they did it earlier in the season.

Oh, for the scissors perfect.

Yeah, they scissors pervert, though.

They do, like, they really do.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's true.

It's true.

The nolts.

I remembered it.

Start to end, basically.

The whole arc.

They just stretch out that whole little bit into the bombers thing.

I also like Gentru.

When Genthru first shows up, he's like,

hey, it's fine.

We actually want to cut everyone in on the prize money.

We just decided that

we've gone straight.

It's so funny because it doesn't even feel like it's meant to be a convincing lie.

Like, he just likes lying.

He just likes that.

He's like,

it's almost just for no one's benefit but his own that he's like telling a bad lie in order to get caught or something.

I don't know.

It's very odd.

Yeah, I thought it was a really charming moment of just like the character

giving into one of their impulses.

Because Lord knows, we then see Goan begin to give into his impulses as the fight continues.

It is immediately clear that Gohan has learned from his teachings with Bisky in the way that the fight choreography goes here.

Despite him not getting even one hit in.

No, no.

But he is able to not just move quickly, but the camera looks at Goan with a kind of

or rather, Goan expresses a kind of balletic combat that we haven't really seen him done before.

You know, when I think of like early major Ghan fights, they were mostly defined in terms of the big moves by Goan doing things like leaping backwards suddenly or, you know, leaping out of a cloud of smoke and launching a punch.

You know, these sort of singular, unchained together,

violent motions.

There is some of this in his fight with Hisuka at the

at Heaven's Arena, where I described his fighting like Pikachu.

Oh, yes, yes, that's true.

But he's so much scrappier and on edge in that one, and is like doing so much more dodging, or like

there's like a franticness that's absent now

yeah yeah it's the difference between me in uh elden ring just rolling all the time and getting the shit kicked out of me and you know someone who actually knows what they're doing uh i also had this note um that this is our first time really seeing um genthru fight uh because his ability is so good genthru has a really powerful defensive and offensive ability he has two different major abilities and they've served him really well

That's kind of all we've seen him do.

And everyone treats him like he's like a really strong fighter, but we haven't had any sense of this.

And this is the moment where it goes, like, oh, Genthru is just as good, if not better, as a brawler

as he is impressive with his power.

He air juggles Gone.

Yes.

He does.

He air juggles Gone multiple times.

Yeah, and as this develops, we are here again.

This is one of Hunter Hunter's trademark Gone torture sequences.

They have almost exactly the Hanzo fight.

Yeah.

It is.

I wrote that down a couple times that he's using the Hanzo strategy.

It's also the other thing, it's the

maybe even more precisely, it's the

ball game with Netaro.

Trying to force him to use the power.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and I can...

We have talked about these sequences every time they have come up.

And I can understand what the show is doing with them.

I can understand how they move centrally alongside Gohan's, you know,

strengths and weaknesses.

The shine comes off them a little more with each one.

In the sense that I'm going, oh, are we doing this again?

In part because I know how they're going to end.

They end in very slightly different ways each time, but Goan usually,

Goan's obstinacy

and

violent impulsiveness almost always triumphs in greater or lesser scare quotes.

And we move out of the thing.

And two episodes from now, Goan will be feeling much better.

And I feel like the actual conclusion to this, this one I found particularly galling in terms of the consequences for Goan playing this sort of game

are literally hand-waved away at the end.

I will say that the fight itself is so well

shot and performed by everybody involved that I had a good time watching a cool fight between characters that I hadn't really had a chance to see fight before.

But

now that this is the third or fourth

game of this happening.

I am wondering, you know, how much water is left in the well

I think, uh, you know, one of the important things about Hunter Hunter that I think makes it

work so well when it does stuff like this, when it like reuses the same thing,

is that

I don't think there's been a time where we haven't seen Goan reusing these same tricks to pull out a win where the stakes haven't been higher and the consequences haven't been worse.

And then the thing about how, you know, they sort of hand wave it away is that this is a show about Ghone learning

and how to behave in a hunter world and learning from people who should not be teaching him how to behave in a hunter world and maybe learning bad lessons about how

to win.

and how to get ahead.

Yeah, like literally all of the way, like every time the way Gon learns or like the main like driving force in Gon's sort of growth as a hunter is being broken down in a lot of ways, right?

Like constantly put through the ringer physically, constantly getting the shit kicked out of him.

Like we obviously we got the Hiseka thing, but like, or not Hisaka, I was gonna say the Hanzo thing, but also we had the Hiseka fight.

We had the stuff with

spinning tops.

Yeah, Yeah, I was about to say the heavens are in the first fight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's always like, yeah, he gets hurt, but because of the way he bounces back, he never really learns his lesson.

Right.

But what does

accumulate are the

reinforcement of his bad

behavior, basically?

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's it's it's that he never learns his lesson, but unfortunately the lesson is that he can only learn through this way, it seems.

Huh.

Yeah.

This fight is great.

I

I wanted to bring it up because

the thing that it is is another one of these like Ghoan under immense violent stress sequences.

Yeah.

And I think it is worth flagging those when they come up.

Because yes, Goan is a character who acts with his head.

Sometimes literally.

Sometimes literally.

And then almost at like these little act breaks, he goes through one of these little transformative

torture sequences, which is, you know, it is what it is.

I'm interested to see

to see where it goes.

We have one of our big, this was the plan all-along things when he's getting the shit beat out of him by Genthru.

And goes like, actually, it was our plan to lull him into a false sense or lull him into a correct sense of security.

Like, show him how much weaker you are than him.

Get her, like, the flashback to Bisky is like, you're going to get hurt.

You're going to get really hurt by this.

It's going to be bad.

Straight-up says you might have to give up one of your hands, right?

Does Biskey say that?

I don't know.

Genthru definitely says that.

It might be Genthu says that.

What's the lowest

lie, right?

Because the show, the thing that these episodes don't ask, but they do, I think, suggest, is

why isn't Biskey fighting Genthru?

Yeah.

I am confident that Bisky would beat Genthru and probably could beat...

I think that Bisky could solo all three of these guys.

Oh, yeah.

Probably.

She, you know, she beats.

Especially when she's Big Ski.

Yeah, we're talking.

Oh, yeah.

I'm talking Big Ski here.

Oh, you mean when she turns into Ken Masters?

Oh, my God.

She does kind of turn into Ken.

That's Ken from Street Fighter.

Oh, okay.

I didn't, I've never knew his last name.

Listener who doesn't know what Big Ski is, we'll get there.

We'll get there.

We'll get there.

We'll get there.

It's kind of what the name suggests.

Yeah, it's kind of what the name suggests.

This is where

there's a part where

there's a part where Genthru goes like, this kid's insane, but he's like insane in a different way than me.

Not my kind of insane.

Not my kind of insane.

Which is funny because.

He's Batman crazy.

I'm the Joker crazy.

They do kind of like do this very funny seating for future bits of

like Genthru, kind of the most cartoon-ish villain that we've seen.

Like by far.

far i know that kizuka is literally dressed like a cartoon villain uh but he's not uh he's he's cartoonishly evil in a different way genthru is like a mustache twirling evildoer uh yeah and uh i you know

going slowly like scaring genthru that's so good yeah

so glad you also picked up on that because i also found the you're insane and i don't mean my kind of insane line to be up there with genthru's um

god he had that ridiculous line about insanity much earlier that just didn't it it felt cartoonish it felt mustache twirling it didn't really work for me but over the course of this fight poor genthru just gets increasingly baffled and wrong-footed by what god is doing such that by the end he's just like

why is any of this happening yeah by the end it's a horror movie it is like and goan is about the villain in the horror movie goon is the xenomorph like not to get too far ahead of ourselves but that's literally what i wrote uh Jing saw.

Before we cut to Bisky and Kilo and have Bisky and Kilo a time.

Oh, no, wait, sorry.

Just before that,

Gohan says, I don't want to be on the losing side forever.

After he hears Bisky's voice saying, you know, you're going to get really badly hurt.

He says, I'll make him use his power.

And then I'll carry out the plan.

Oh, great.

This is exactly where I was going.

Oh, okay, cool.

It's so...

This is where we start to go a little bit off script.

Yes, just to let off.

Remember, like, four episodes ago when we had that really tender moment where Tezgera was like, Goan, you have to stay in control because when you don't, it hurts you and the people around you.

And then he goes, damn, it hurts the people around me.

Fuck.

Yeah.

Well, no one's here right now, so it's fine.

I guess that's the difference.

Yeah, you're right.

He...

I don't understand why Goan...

Well, okay.

I don't understand if there is a reason why Goan wants to make him use his power other than uh to sort of feel like he is partaking in a real fight.

This is so shown in, I think.

Yeah, this is so shown in why this is so like, I know I can't beat you straight up, but I'm gonna earn your respect and make you use your ultimate attack against me.

Yeah, it's also like an established trait of Goans, right?

Like, like, well, this is the Notaro fight.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah, and with Razor, and like, it has to be like the right victory.

And I think that

like one of the skills of Tagashi in how Hunter Hunter is plotted out is how a lot of the

stakes

of the show come from what is set up in the early episodes as like these fun, cute, kind of moralistic quirks of Goan.

Yeah.

Like playful, all like the playfulness and the competitiveness and the like

sort of curiosity.

Like these all kind of show up as like shadow monsters later on.

Yes.

Yeah.

And yeah, I think that like

what is it exactly?

I don't know.

He's crazy.

That's what it is.

It's the same thing that made him want to do the netero ball thing when Killer was like, ah, we're never going to win.

I'm giving up.

And Gohan was like, no, I'm going to try longer.

He's in the middle of a battle for his life in the hunter exam.

It's the most dangerous thing he's ever done.

And he spends all of his time and energy trying to get this ball from this old man just to prove a point.

And they play it off like it's cute, but it was really dangerous then too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like not to like

Squash Dre's mentioning of it being a very shonen archetype thing, but I think that is like

we have to both look at it as Gone the character and also because of

Like because of the shounen stuff that's gonna make things that's like what Tagashi's working with thematically It's why this is like the deconstruction, right?

Yeah, um, and it's also like that turned up to 11, which I feel like is a lot of gone.

It's that looking at like what, like, okay, realistically, if these fights were happening and this was a 12-year-old kid doing it, how would this go?

Like, yeah, Goku is the super-powered 10-year-old, but he's also from a comedy series, right?

Like, when you really get down to original Dragon Ball.

Well, that's the, I think that's the very, very early on, maybe even as far back as the

screenshot stream, I describe Goan as like,

what if someone took like Goku's personality seriously?

Like, what, what are the real consequences of like a boy who won't give up?

Exactly.

What are the real consequences of a boy who's like

constantly willing to throw himself at a problem violently until a solution happens?

Yeah,

I also want to, you know, as as usual, this keeps happening again and again.

I want to fight you properly, so show me your power is a Hisuka maneuver as well.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, more of

getting his bad ideas reinforced by technical victories, the thing that he doesn't want.

He keeps winning, but his version of winning properly ends up a lot of the times being winning technically.

And he goes, like, nope, this is the real way to win.

I was taught by Hisuka and by Netero and by

Biskey

and Hanzo in a way.

Yeah, and Hanzo.

His greatest teacher, Hanzo, if you really think about it.

Like.

Yeah.

The two lines of my notes read, is Goan going off-pisteed?

Question mark?

Quote, I don't want to be on the losing side forever.

I'll make him use his power and then carry out the plan afterwards.

And quote, new line.

Goan getting the shit kicked out of him.

I will say, I forgot to bring it up originally.

The animation here is impeccable.

It's wonderful.

This whole fight is just gorgeous.

I have, like, there's a lot of really good Gone faces here.

Like, he, you can tell that they're like, okay, not only can we do we need to make the movements of the bodies very fluid here, we need to make sure that Gone is as expressive as Gone Freaks is supposed to be.

Yeah.

And so, like, when he's taking hits or when he's glaring at Genthru and stuff, it all works really well.

It's a very weighty fight.

People move really, really with real weight to them.

And it also,

it's like really well done at making the two.

It's back to the fight with His.

I think you mentioned this, Keith, earlier in the episode, the fight with Hiseka.

And if it wasn't you, or if I was a kid, don't worry.

Yeah, where he kind of fights like a little kitty cat almost.

And it's a very animalistic fighting style.

And they have, again, this sort of like,

instead of it being the controlled presence of Hisuka just standing there,

it's more of like, okay, now you have to see how gone, all instinct, all like this, like

finally, like more finely tuned, but still like a scrabbly little guy has to fight against an actual like like

murderer-ass murderer who's not gonna wait to kill him because Netaro is not gonna kill him.

Tronza could not kill him.

Hisuka's got a groom a more Hisaka would not kill him.

The point for all three of them, literally the point was to not kill him.

Yeah, and this is a life or death fight that, like, in the like Razor also had this too, but it's less, it feels more visceral here because it's a one-on-one fight, it's not dodgeball.

And dodgeball wasn't, yeah, like technically to death, it was just to win or gone wasn't the one at risk there.

Gon wasn't the one, sorry, and Gon wasn't the one at risk there, right?

That ended up being he got hurt a lot, but like, the, I think, like, the, the,

I always think about that arc as, like,

that ends up being more about

Killow and Gon's relationship being tested more than Killow and Gon being tested in terms of their, like, fighting prowess or resolve or being, like, beaten down in the way that

this is.

When Razor hits him that first time, he could have died.

That is true.

That is absolutely true.

But it's not played like that, right?

Like, it is, it, it's, that's, there's a different.

This is the sort of thing that I said I said in the intro that, like, they're doing violence in in a different way than they usually do and it sort of reminds me of I can't remember when we were talking about it I think it was in the JoJo's bonus episodes for anybody that wants to go to friendsofetable.cash and listen to those about how Shonen so often is

uh

full of violence and like violence is the way that the plot moves forward fights in different ways um but different shows treat it differently a lot of times violence is supposed to be like cool or funny in Shounen.

And the balance, it depends on the series.

Like Dragon Ball, the violence is supposed to be funny, like kind of a lot.

In Dragon Ball C, it's supposed to be cool a lot.

And when we were watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, what was interesting to me was how often the violence is supposed to be like disgusting and gory and awful to look at.

And that is what these episodes felt like to me, where instead of the cool violence from when, from Heaven's Arena or from the Dodgeball, this violence is sickening.

This is disgusting and you really feel the hits and the hurt.

Yeah.

Violence is sickening.

Violence is sickening.

Hey, kids.

Oh, no.

I meant it in the game where I was like, this is sickening.

Because I enjoyed it.

This is sickening to me.

I did enjoy it.

The problem is that violence can be sickening and also sometimes cool.

That is a problem that humans have been trying to wrap their heads around.

Nobody look at my letterbox.

The other fights are going pretty well.

We can knock out Bisky.

Well, yeah, we should explain Big Sky.

Yeah, we can knock out Big Sky.

It's not that social network that nobody really does.

We can knock out Big Sky by saying Big Ski knocks out Barra.

Yeah, Barra gets exactly one hit in on Bisky, who transforms into a gigantic, extremely ripped version of herself.

Yeah.

Saying, I usually let people get a hit in because I can't control myself when I turn.

And then she punches him so hard that she believes she has killed him and is in fact surprised when she learns that she hasn't.

Right.

He just passed out.

Yeah, that's it.

It's like a 35 second long encounter.

It's really short.

Like it mostly just serves to get the visual gag of Biscuit being really buff and then the explanation of, I don't do this because I don't like it.

It makes me feel not cute.

And I was like, wow, she's just like me when I miss my hormone shot.

Two brackets.

Two brackets.

This is how I feel.

Do you also do the two you don't want to show your hand in a fight?

Yeah, no, I did it.

Yeah, definitely.

Definitely.

That is the...

Don't let him know.

That's the reason why

the girls are transitioning.

It's to make people underestimate our extremely high nen levels.

I also believe, I should just say this because

this is like a hunter-hunter opinion that I've seen before.

I believe she could have beat him without transforming.

This is a time is of the essence kind of thing.

You know, at the very beginning of the fight, she hits him a bunch of times, including one really nice one to the back of the head, uh, big kick.

This is the uh, was it Dre, did you talk, or Sylvie?

What do you said incidentally?

Oh, this is me who brought up the rest of the time.

Yeah, she warps behind him and just like kicks him super hard in the head, and uh,

nothing personnel, yeah, yeah.

Um, and she talks about gender dysphoria, it's great.

She kind of um

she says the thing about letting him hit her and then transforms and gets him in, you know, literally down in one.

Uh

the the the

it's important that I say this because again, I really really believe that she could have beat Gen through and chose not to chose to have Goan fight Gen through instead.

Interesting.

It's interesting.

Uh, because as an irresponsible teacher, you'd at least try even if you couldn't, right?

You'd not give it to your obviously weaker student.

But has

specific beliefs about teachers, I think.

And I think this is a show that believes that

in much the same way that, you know,

it believes that, you know, Goan is expressing one thing one way or another.

I think it believes that teachers as a unit are kind of selfish, are kind of exploitative.

I think Bisky is like, well, this is a good learning opportunity for Goan.

If I could bring up a very analogous show,

like, whenever

does Kakashi in Naruto put Naruto up against the strongest ninja that they have to fight?

Oh, yeah, no, that is like a thing that they like frequently don't do.

Like, there's a lot of them.

They specifically do not do.

Yeah, they're always teaming up, you know,

where Kakashi takes the big one and everyone else goes and fights.

And those fights are great.

You don't need to make the kid fight the strongest guy in order to make the fight good.

It's a very, again, actually, it's another Shonen trope, if you think about it.

Goku, yeah.

Right?

Well,

like, that is the thing.

That is a good point.

Goku's never around a stronger person.

There's a very long history of the, like, doing the mentor fight because, one, it's cool, and two, because it's to show, like, this villain is on such a level that, like, even the person teaching you can't, like, handle them or whatever, right?

Yeah, like, that's typically how it's used.

Yeah.

It's, it's the, um, I feel like they've pulled this move like 15 times in Jujutsu Kaisen, but I'm not caught up on that because

I woke up.

I do have to say again,

legal disclaimer, Jiu-Jitsu Kaisen, it's fine.

You like the anime.

I've read the manga.

I know where it goes.

Yeah, me neither.

Have fun.

It's time for Killiwa's fight.

Killiwa, every single time Killiwa is hanging out with the crew, I'm like, what a nice boy.

I love this.

Killua seems great.

Every time Killua is in a one-on-one fight without people around, I'm like, frightening Terra.

He's just awesome.

It's a rules.

He's the best shit.

He gets into the...

A reminder that he does this fight with two unusable hands.

Yeah, his hands are bandaged up.

Like, we have that happening throughout all these episodes that his hands are covered in bandages,

which makes something that he does soon even cooler.

Yeah, like a low-key recurring motif that i really like is killua hasn't really prepared for the fights on screen but nevertheless does really well because he spent his entire life training in the assassin mines um he can just rock up and give it a go and he'll be fine uh he sees this as a perfect experiment uh fighting fighting his opponent uh he begins with the classic telea shadow step we haven't seen that for a while that was nice

i was so happy he has his first named move right yeah he has it's called lightning palm it's not very excitingly named, Kilua.

It is also, speaking of Naruto, like, there is so much Naruto in Kilua's fight here.

I'm like, Kishimoto probably read this in the manga and was like, man, man, I should make a character.

Whose whole thing is this?

What if I gave both of my main characters different parts of this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then he reveals a yo-yo.

He reveals a yo-yo, an armband yo-yo.

How much does the yo-yo weigh, Jack?

It's a custom alloy.

It weighs 50 kilograms.

Yeah, but his kilograms.

Yeah, it weighs 50 kilograms.

I can't believe I missed that.

That's really funny.

Yeah, this is like a Zelda device.

His brother made it.

For us Americans, that's 110 pounds.

Yeah.

Whoa.

Whoa.

This thing weighs as much as a fifth grader.

Is my yo-yo heavier than a fifth grader?

What?

Someone recut this so Killa was was flinging around fifth graders.

He looped that fifth grader around the tree.

He hasn't had any demonstration of this before.

Has he?

Have we seen him practicing with this before?

No.

Yo-Yo just comes out of fucking yo-hoo.

Yeah, it just comes out of nowhere.

Midway.

Okay, so

there have been yo-yos

in like

interstitial material and cover art.

Yeah, you're right.

He has some He's yo-yo's

in

Annie Johnston Glick's Amazing Media Club Plus cover.

Yes, that was a.

I wanted, I think I, I think that I could be misremembering.

I think either you or I

there either wasn't one and we asked,

or it was always there, and then we had to decide whether to include it just so that you would not look at it and be like, why is there a yo-yo?

Yeah, I don't remember, but it's great.

I know there was yo-yo chat, though.

Yeah, there is.

There was yo-yo chat.

The yo-yo also has has nen

is enriched with nen it hits a tree with such force that it bites a chunk out of the trunk and the tree falls down yeah it basically cuts the tree in half

um and then of course midway through a fight there's that's just a good you can't really outsmart killer zaldic thing um

uh

uh the the the combatant notices that Killiwa has a blind spot, so exploits it, at which point Killiwa reveals that he has a second yo-yo and exploits the guy's blind spot.

He says, did I forget to mention I have two yo-yos?

He fits a blind spot in order to get the guy to attack him in his blind spot so that he can hit him in the back of the head with the second yo-yo.

Fight over.

Oh, it's great.

Almost fight over.

He has a finishing move.

Oh, he

tases him.

He hits him with both yo-shoots.

He hits him in the head and then just electrocutes him in a wide shot that's really funny.

It seems like something he might have learned at Heaven's Arena.

Yes, Yes, after he got shot by a million vaults, and he says, it's not like I like it.

Two good lines.

Sub says, you set three traps during that brief exchange, and Killer says, three traps?

You must be joking.

Every move I made was a trap.

It's so funny.

Just accept the compliment, you dweeb.

It's some real, like, he's a 12-year-old Edgelord thing.

You know, one thing about Killier is that he really does want to get the last word in.

And it is made even funnier by the fact that he'll fight so beautifully and then still just like tumble over himself to have like a little witty rejoinder or something.

It's also like, can you like meaningfully describe

like more traps?

Like were there that many traps?

Like maybe there is.

You could count.

You could get like a four or five out of it.

It's probably about three.

It's probably

like

backup traps in like the little like huts and houses that were around there.

It's like when Greed Island starts and you know Pooh Hot like gives a really accurate monologue about what's happening and then Killiwa intentionally insults that guy to his face and then goes, he was right though.

It's really bad.

I love him.

He's

a well-drawn character.

I mean, I think Goan is a really well-drawn character, but part of what makes Goan interesting are the broad brushes that he's drawn with.

You know, Goan is a very stubborn, very obstinate character who will act sometimes unpredictably, sometimes gloriously predictably in a variety of situations.

I think that the writing on Killiwa is so sharp throughout

in terms of like giving him these little moments of overplaying his hand.

You know, he was right, but I'll insult him to his face.

You know, working through all this old shit with the Zeldax.

He's such a well-written character.

You know, we talked about it in maybe not the last episode, but maybe the episode before where I was like, is Killiwa becoming the protagonist?

And the three of you were like,

come on.

We've been saying this.

Yeah.

Yeah, Genthru, we are now deep in a torture Goan sequence.

Oh.

Genthru says, I must crush his spirit, otherwise he'll never admit defeat.

Let me show you that all your hard work and confidence mean nothing.

He's talking to the wrong idiot.

Yeah, he's totally right, but on the other hand, it's never been done.

I don't know if it could be done.

I think that Goan might literally die, just like he promised to at the beginning of the fight.

Oh, that's part of it is Goan was like, you're going to have to fucking kill me if you don't agree

to trade cards to the winner.

If you lose.

Because Goan would never agree to take the cards if Genthru didn't agree.

Crucially also says this is the only time I'm going to pull my book out.

I feel like I remember him saying that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's true.

That is true.

Which I think is funny.

It's funny because of what happens, you know, and it could be.

What have you done?

Oh, have you made it in a secret chat?

No, no, it's not.

Because taking taking out his book is actually part of his plan, part of the yeah, it's funny.

He's laying the trap for you, like he's making him think, yeah,

yeah, that is neat.

Um,

but yes, this plan, this plan, that is to say, I will crush his spirit, otherwise, he'll never let me defeat.

Let me show him that all his hard work and confidence means nothing.

Wrong guy, not gonna work, yeah, not gonna, not gonna work.

Good, good try, but you're wasting your breath at this point.

As soon as we saw how it went down with Hanzo, we know how this is going to go until it goes really

incredibly off-piece, which I wonder if Tagashi is going to...

I mean, you know, that is how you trouble this, right?

You, you show it working until it doesn't.

And I am curious to see when and how that is going to happen.

But until that day,

this is not a line of argument that works on Goat Freaks.

Before we get into 74, which is where we left off, we just talked about Kiloa stuff.

Did Did we mention?

I feel like this song has played before.

I think it even played

when Killowa first went.

Oh, electricity.

What if I use that?

Back in Heaven's Arena.

But Killowa has a real like Sonic the Hedgehog-ass song that plays during the day.

I can tell you exactly what that song is.

I don't have it, but it has played one other time on the show.

And

I don't remember when it was.

It's the Blue Blood.

It's called Tell Me, and it's his character song, the one that has lyrics and stuff.

Oh, shit.

That rule.

Yeah, you know what I'm talking about?

I don't.

I think I might.

I can link it.

Here we go.

But I can't read the comments to these YouTube videos because they're always things like, so sad when Killiwa died to the Grundler.

Not the Grundler.

I actually love when the Grundler shows up.

Grundler Ant is really good.

And kills three of the four main characters.

Yeah.

It's so fucked up what what he does to Leorio.

Oh, my God.

I didn't know the human body could do that.

Yeah.

No.

Wow.

And Leorio's the only one he doesn't kill, by the way.

Yeah, he survives, but they call him Inside Out Leorio.

Sorry.

Hold on.

It's Killo's voice actor who sings this?

Yep.

Whoa.

I love it.

They all have this.

All four of them have this.

And their performers sing their songs.

If I was one of these voice actors, that would be what I would demand.

Wow.

I'd say,

let me sing.

I would have a good time.

We have another new song coming up, by the way.

Yeah, that song's only played one other time.

I wish I could remember when it was, but it's fine.

As we head into 74, it was interesting to me, Keith, that you mentioned that, you know, Genthru's ability as a fighter had been sort of underplayed by his

use of the bombs.

Right.

Such that even, you know,

at this point in the fight, I wasn't finding Genthru Genthru particularly menacing.

You know, he has a large body count, and that was notable.

The scene when he blew up the

cave full of all the people.

Yeah, he's on screen killed scores of people.

You know, a lot of people.

70, 80, 50.

I think I found him particularly frightening in comparison to some of the other, you know, villains that Gon has squared off against.

I think part of that is the

cartoonishness, the way he is cartoonish.

And part of that is the way that, you know, we mostly see him using his bombs.

I don't think his character design is particularly menacing.

He sort of looks like a scientist.

He weirdly feels more like a bully than like

100%.

Yeah.

And I think having Sub and Barra as his sort of

goofy.

Little toadies, yeah.

Makes

you know, brings that out further.

This fight gets somewhere pretty menacing.

Genthru is briefly menacing, and then Ghon is very, very menacing.

Yeah.

But yeah, Goan's.

Bisky has been training Goan specifically to fight the bomber.

There are ways that she's been saying this explicitly.

And, you know, we hear her talking.

And there's also ways that she's been doing it subtly.

In the last episode, she was teaching Gon how to knock someone back.

a good distance um which was presumably a way to counter the little flower attack uh yeah it was the exact like animation thing happening the flurry of hands and then the grab of the wrists.

And then he's supposed to use Gyo.

And because I didn't remember the specifics of the fight, I saw it and I was like, oh, I wonder why he's using Gyo, and it's to block Little Flower.

Yeah, because a couple of times

Genthru will try and explode Goan's wrists, and his wrists start to get kind of wounded because he's able to block them, but only a bit.

And

there's sort of some fight mechanics going on here about not just the amount of Go that he's using to block, but also determining whether or not Genthru is launching a bluff.

You know, Goan can essentially sense whether this is an actual charged explosive attack or is just a bluff.

There's a great

parallel with Killow's fight.

They do almost the same trick, but Goan's is way more self-destructive.

Yeah.

Throughout this fight, we see Genthru's hands kind of wreathed in red Wren.

Have we seen red Ren before?

No.

No.

Interesting.

I like it.

I like using the color scheme to be like another, like, oh, this is a malicious, like, this is malicious nen.

This is an evil color scheme.

Very cool.

We have purple nen or pink men.

I think I'd hate pink.

Yeah, I also think it's sort of

pink.

But it's very much like, well, we can't do purple again because

purple and illuminate.

We don't want to draw that direct line, I guess.

Do we know?

Is Genthru a conjurer?

Oh, I got a good question.

That's a good question.

Ginthru might be a transmuter.

He is.

No, according to the wiki anyway, he is a conjurer.

And on our ninja, conjurer is red.

Whoa.

And then transmuter is purple.

Whoa.

I like this a lot as well because

when Nen was first introduced, we saw white.

Ren, or clear Ren, like Steam.

And then we saw

the purple malevolent Nen.

And then we saw Goan in the gold Nen.

Which is a hitter Nen, if we're doing this.

I don't know if this is a hitter Nenen.

And now we're seeing red.

And there's something about the...

It's as though the viewer's eye is getting tuned in to the Nen.

We have seen Goan with green Nen, though, right?

Have we?

I think we have.

Maybe it's just like in the ugly.

Yeah, because he's an enhancer.

Yeah.

But yeah, like I didn't.

Sorry.

Sorry, go ahead.

well he's his nen in these episodes is very yellow and orange which he has a lot of yeah it that that feels to me like less of they're trying to tie it to his class and more just like it's super it's like super saiyan nen yeah because it's so strong well it's it's it's um burning like the sun right it's like gold yeah i just realized this makes so much sense because i was like well he uses little little flower so he transforms his nen into explosive nen he must be a transmuter but little flower is his weak attack his strong attack is the conjurer one where he conjures a bomb see it all makes sense

um

yeah goan says um

i'm gonna be selfish here he apologizes to bisque and killer in his head and says i'm gonna be selfish here yeah there's something about the way that goan is

it's not just that goan is always selfish in the worst possible moment it's the way he's like the way he phrases it here it's like i've chosen this moment to be selfish and i'll try to to be less selfish in other moments.

Go and this is the crunch time.

This, you know, right.

You got to stay with it now.

Right, he picks the highest risk areas.

Yes, possibly little.

This, by the way, real quick, is right after Genthru has like a quick second appeal to like, hey, come on, don't make, like, it's kind of caught me off guard, Genthru being like, don't make me kill you.

You're very strong.

You should grow up and be a strong guy.

Just give me your fucking cards, you idiot.

at which point gone says all the more reason for me right exactly yeah

um

to which genthru has his kind of like uh classic hanzo i'm gonna break your legs moment yeah when the the the role of the gone torturer is sort of settled into by the character and they just the same conversation about like breaking his arms one by one turns into blowing up his arms one by one which it's it's creepy and it sets up what happens next i i don't think that this is particularly subtle or clever writing but sometimes you need to have a villain that kind of just moves with a hammer rather than a scalpel.

He says,

He likes to be a good idea.

Yeah, because of the way you are using Gyo to block me, you can only block one of my attacks.

So I'm going to blow up both of your arms, and you can choose which one to save, and then I'm going to blow up both of your legs, and then you can choose which one to save, etc., etc.

Use Gyo to protect the one you want to keep.

I think two things happened last spisky flashback where

she's like, by the way, if he's going to use both of his arms, that's the biggest red flag.

Definitely, definitely, definitely do the trap now.

Yes.

There is no easy way out of this, Goan, other than following the plan we prepared.

Genthru blows up both Goan's arms, seemingly with little effect, and then suddenly finds himself wounded.

Goan,

sort of stumbling,

launches the rock attack, and Genthru trips backwards over a stone.

Genthru is like visibly stunned.

Like, you can see his vision.

It cuts to like his perspective, and you can see Goan is kind of like fading a little bit.

Yeah.

And they really draw out the question of, like, well, what happened to Genthru?

Yeah.

And actually, what happened was very prosaic.

Although, before we learn that,

Goan's rock attack passes over Genthru's head in a really nice mirror of Goan passing out in the dodgeball match.

Yeah.

Here is what has happened.

Goan has chosen not to block either attack.

He has allowed both attacks to go through,

putting some force into his heels to keep him standing up and a little bit into his left hand and his right hand has been completely blown off.

I was really interested by this.

I was like, wow, serious physical consequence on Goan.

Goan is going to be a one-handed protagonist until he can either get a nen arm or he can get, you know, a prosthetic.

I was like, this is going to be a really interesting inflection point for this character, especially because this moment of violence came as a result of him choosing selfishness and he has to continue to fight.

You know, I wasn't like, is this going to be when Goan learns his lesson?

So much as I was like, this is a real test for Goan's lesson.

And to his credit, he keeps fighting.

In fact, he fought first by, after having his left arm blown off,

kicking Genthru clean in the chip.

Yeah.

They show this as happening essentially simultaneously with the bomb.

Like, right as the bomb goes off, he does this big kick.

And I really like how they choose this moment of Genthru, I think at this point, he's lying on the ground, like trying to figure out what happened to him.

Is this this where they they show the little graphic of uh like how genthru's uh nen moves through his body during the explosions yeah so such a funny time to cut to a graphic well the show loves powerpoints as much as its character

loves powerpoints

if you're not watching along when we call these things powerpoints um we're not doing that just because they're expository but because they frequently cut to like little slideshows of what's going on a lot of occasion graphics occasionally the character will show up in the image to point at the image and go, this is what's happening.

It's really charming.

I love it.

I love it.

Is this a hallmark of other shows, or is this something specific?

Like, the Hunter Hunter does with a particular verb.

Hunter Hunter really runs away with it.

I would not be surprised if this showed up in like Naruto or something.

But yeah,

I think it's a particular strength/slash compulsion of this show.

Yeah, I mean, I think there's a a lot of shown in End wherein like people do long-winded explanations of like how their special powers work.

But specifically, I can't think of anything else that does this much like graphic design as my passion in order to explain to you how my powers work.

Yeah.

It's really, really funny.

It's great.

Especially in such a like, you know, not at a, not, this is negative, but it's such an inappropriate time to start like imagining nen networks.

I think part of why I also find Hunter Hunter's compulsion towards PowerPoints charming is that some characters are better at it than others.

You know, there would be a way of doing this where the show's narrative voice takes on the PowerPoint or the narrator takes on the PowerPoint.

And they're all fairly consistent.

And it makes a lot of sense.

Like, can you imagine Goan delivering one of these ever?

He never does.

He never does.

But they're all different.

Shadow Marks feel different to Karapikas, feel different to Biscuy's, feel different to like a focus on the villain explaining how something works.

They're all really nice little touch.

They're always very grounded in what a character knows and would want to tell you.

Yes, deep in their soul, would want to tell you right now.

Yeah.

With pictures.

Goan in his head says, this hurts so much.

I feel like I'm going to die.

But I'm going to go for it.

That's right.

Having landed a hit at the cost of his hands, Gone Freaks is back on the plan.

Worth noting, this is his first hit.

He has not hit.

It cost him one and a half arms to land a single blow on the bomber.

Yep.

But he caught the bomber.

He caught the bomber, and

now he can go back on his plan.

I am sorry to do this.

I really want to talk about this more.

The way another show would do this would be to make sure that

there was a life or death reason why Goan would have to go this far.

Like,

to suggest, oh, wow, maybe he should give up.

Maybe a normal person would have given up by now.

But, like, I can't think of another show that wouldn't have had Goan with countdown on him, like, trying desperately to not be blown up.

And that's the real reason why he would go this far is because if he doesn't go this far, he's just going to get killed with countdown.

But that's not it.

He really has no reason to be doing this.

It only makes accomplishing the plan harder.

And is also

completely parallel to the plan.

It has no, he's not setting up.

The plan's already set up.

There's nothing.

He gains literally nothing from this.

Now,

we talk a lot about how much we dislike Jing, but this is Jing's fault.

This is...

Yeah.

Quite literally, this is Jing's fault.

Yeah.

This is.

The last fight that Goan came out of and won was with a man who said, I was a murderer, and your dad hired me to run this game as a test for you.

And I think he'd be really proud of you for how you beat me, you monster.

So of course he's like, well, you've got to get the hitter.

And just because he's going freaks, but also here he is on Greed Island, you know?

What better opportunity than this?

Two things.

The other thing is,

he's now

sort of like cosmically balanced the scales between him and Kiloa.

I don't really think this is true, like in a, you know, you look at, but like, I can see how, like, of course, I can sacrifice my hands.

I just made Kilua sacrifice his hands.

If I can't do this, then I had no business making Killiwa do it last week.

Yeah, but those are not the same thing.

No, they're not the same thing.

But I, but I, but I feel like that's definitely part of the

brew here.

And then

the other part of it is

that's...

Sorry, this isn't a component.

This is just something that's sad.

The characters that compliment Goan and encourage him have such varying levels of understanding of where he is.

Like when Razor tells him, hey, your dad would be proud.

He doesn't.

He didn't see Hanzo.

He didn't see what happened on the airship.

He hasn't seen gone getting the beat out of him by canary he doesn't know that he's about to go fight the bomber does razor even i mean i'm sure razor probably knows about the bomber but like this is all stuff this is like the fact that uh the that this stuff

is like

in ways hidden from view or uh

is uh you know he'suka knows hisuka's really weirdly the only one who knows how and kilowa how like bad this can go and then biscuit is probably number three uh but anyway just very sad like how

characters who have no clue how far gone is willing to take this give him a compliment in a way that will send him further down this horrible rabbit hole the tragedy of gone freaks

like this is what wing saw in gone's future when he's like this kid is scary

I think that's the like sad thing about Wing.

It is.

It totally is.

It totally is.

But then you have to go: do I believe him that it was safer to teach him the rules than to let him die?

Or let him maybe die?

And it's like, you can believe him about that or think that he was being

that he was forgiving himself in order to allow himself to do this.

And I think that I believe Wing that it was probably safest to teach him.

Where do you take a character like this?

I mean, you know,

what is the end of of the road for a character like this?

Either they

learn their lesson, okay,

and sort of turn synthesize, you know, synthesize the varied uh approaches into something less obstinate.

They realize that they, that they value something, they realize that they value something more than this uh this sort of like death drive,

um,

or they succumb to it.

And it gets them.

How do you get to the end of this show and say, Gona's learned nothing from this, but he's sort of continuing as he was?

I don't know.

What's the, how do you think Killua fits into that?

I mean, if you refocus the story on Killiua,

then it becomes a story about loss, right?

Where it's like Killiua recognizing the path that someone is going down and recognizing his culpability in putting him down that path and trying to pull him out of this tailspin that he is gleefully, you know,

Goan is like, well, I can make the plane go down in a spiral.

Killua's like, wait, no, no.

But that would require you to make Killiwa the protagonist, and it would require you to commit to making Goan's story a tragedy, which I don't know that this show is doing.

I think part of why it's fun is that we also like Goan a lot.

He's like a funny, weird, naive protagonist, which on the one hand makes turning that story into a tragedy all the sweeter.

But at the same time, yeah,

I don't know.

I feel like in this moment, I am kind of going through what I did midway through the Hunter exam, where I said, how do you, how do you trouble a character like Killiua, right?

How do you challenge Killiua?

And then the Zelda family was introduced.

And and it's like, oh, right, I see.

This is where we go.

But, and I think that this links to what I was talking about earlier with my increasing dissatisfaction with this like torture goan sequences, is it's like, where are we going?

What is this for?

And I don't mean this in the sense of,

I only want to see a torture goan sequence if it's relevant to the story or something.

So much as it is clear that there is a bee in Tagashi's bonnet.

about this and I want to know whether or not it's just going to hang out in there or if it's going to be joined by more bees or if the bonnet is going to be taken off, or you know.

Oh, so he's Ponzu.

Oh, it's Ponzu.

Thank you.

Yeah.

It's worth mentioning now that the

title episode of this one was Sane and Insane,

which is.

Oh, yeah.

Which is, it's very much trying to be like, it's actually Goan that's the insane one.

Getting through is the sane one here.

You know, the bomber.

The bomber.

It helps that Goan is, for the most part, intensely likable.

Yeah.

And I think that this is really one of the ways that Tagashi is working that muscle that you were describing, right?

Of like what would happen if people took Goku seriously.

Yeah.

You know, I saw, what, eight episodes of Goku kicking about, and I was like, this guy's great.

I died for Goku.

A little cool guy.

And, you know, Goan is really likable.

He is really funny.

Pinning this kind of character on someone that the audience wasn't ready to go on a ride with would be trickier.

Speaking of Goan being likable, even in his weirdest moments, we're about to get some real top-tier, frightening things.

By the way, he gets, he, after he misses that, uh, uh, that kick, he says, at least I gave him a pretty good scare.

Not worth it.

No.

Did we talk about the way that they reveal that like how it's not a kick like you don't know it's a kick at first like the yeah his vision blur his vision blurs and he stumbles back yeah and he falls and he's like what happened what happened he's got blood is falling from his face it's really cool i think they go like three full minutes before showing you what happened yeah it is great i it's after i think it's after the rev isn't it

It's after the reveal that Gon's lost a hand.

Am I right?

Or is it after?

Yes.

No, it is.

Yes.

Adre, what were you going to say?

I was just saying, I forgot that, like,

I remember this part about Goan, like, sacrificing one and a half hands, but I forgot, like, what they do to actually hit Ginthru.

And for a second, I was like, oh, this is like, this is where Goan gets the emitter technique down.

No, it's not.

No, it's not.

Nope.

Again, another show.

That's another show.

Yeah, no, totally.

100%.

I love it.

I love that it did that.

I love that they were like, no, he's not.

He does not have it.

He doesn't have it.

So

after this, Goan is like, hey, by the way, I have a card that could kill you.

I've won.

Goan loses an arm,

misses Genthru with the finishing blow, and then says, this is it, I've won.

And then Genthru sort of comes up with this plan to like pretend to surrender so that he can like break Goan's neck and crush his windpipe to keep him from like using cards, which is kind of counterproductive because he needs needs him to cast Book

of

Cards.

But he's got Angel's breath, right?

But he really did rattle him, I think.

Oh, yeah, no.

I mean, that's been the process of the fight, right?

Is Genfu getting slowly more and more rattled.

And at this point, Gentru has no idea what is happening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He crushes Goan's throat.

He chops him in the throat.

And from now until almost the end of the episode, Goan is supposed to be unable to speak but instead rasps out all his lines yeah um

it's it's a great performance um yeah shout out to gone's voice actor does a fucking a phenomenal job these episodes i don't i'm assuming the dub also had the wrath

yeah

yeah uh it's so it's really funny because gentry's big mistake here is that

He doesn't really know the rules of the game

because

he chopped his neck to keep him from speaking, from opening his book.

But Ghana had already taken out the card.

The card will become the item all on its own.

Yeah, that's true.

I think he was preventing Goan from casting a card, from casting a spell.

But this is the thing that we keep coming back to in Greed Island, right?

Which is like the most violent players haven't specced themselves

to play Greed Island well.

This is sort of like Jing's version of of

like the expression of Netaro's sort of wish that

by making the process really hard,

evil people won't be able to meet the mark, or at least not enough of them that the good people, because it takes dedication and dedication is a positive virtue.

Let's just check in with how the evil person's doing, killed 200 players in the game, cut off one of the cones.

Netaro's the guy who watched Whiplash and was like, you know, J.K.

Simmons, he's got some points.

But it is.

He's a good drummer.

It ends up being.

He's got results.

It ends up being like, again, the cost is so high, but there is like a shred of reality to like the evil people don't have what it takes because they lack, you know, the willingness to do things the right way.

Jing is allowed to, it works here because Jing is allowed to build the rules to this world.

Yeah.

And, and he has built in this sort of expression of like dedication to doing things the right way is how you succeed.

We actually see an even more obvious expression of this later.

Uh, but uh, yeah, the car,

that's what they're about.

It's very the freaks, the freaks, boys.

This is the this,

and yeah, it has somehow sort of like genetically or like osmosized itself into Goan, who's like, I got to do things the right way.

That's how my daddy does it.

And

this is the way, by the way, all of this stuff, all the stuff that Goan's been doing, that's the right way.

No compromise.

No compromise.

But yeah, so Goan says, this particular card here,

this is what will kill you.

And then,

but it and then so he chops his throat, but surprise, the thing turns turns into a jar of gasoline.

And

he throws the jar of gasoline on Genthru, eliminating Little Flower.

And

Genthru very confidently says, well, I can just use countdown.

It's better anyway.

And going punches the ground to reveal that they've been on a fucking pit this entire time.

They both fall into this pit.

A small, normal-sized pit?

I believe that it's small and normal-sized.

And definitely not the giganticest pit you've ever seen.

No, it's pretty regular.

Yeah, they, it is, look, I'm just throwing out numbers here, but it's like, probably got like a 75-yard diameter and is maybe like

bigger, maybe 75-yard.

It's the size of like a football field, I think.

Okay.

It's 60 feet deep.

It is at least 60 feet deep.

It may be deeper than it is wide.

I believe.

My guess is that it's twice as deep deep as it is wide.

That is my guess.

I would, yeah, I would.

It was so deep.

And

Gohn's like, hey, by the way, I also have this other card.

And he drops that big boulder.

And Skins are

at the time, he's like all excited.

Like, he fell down here with me.

He's a fucking idiot.

But no, he has this other boulder thing.

And there's one little escape.

That's so cool.

Goans already in the escape hatch.

Also, acting like a fucking creature, like really creature-yeah, how he's moving and like how he looks when he's like squatted down in the little escape tunnel.

He's like holding the cards.

Come in, my little hole.

I think he just goes, game.

Oh, it's great.

And yeah, so Skemthru has two choices.

Get smooshed by the boulder.

Yeah.

Or run into the hole with Goan, where Goan is waiting with a rock, a show-me-rock attack.

Yeah, a rasp to show me rock attack that hits Genthru so hard, I was absolutely convinced he had killed him.

It's so scary, and it's also, I'm not gonna lie, I did throw my hands up in the air because it was so cool.

It's like,

I gotta admit, it's pretty sick.

The look on Genthru's face is like

he's horrified.

Yeah, he's horrified.

Like, his glasses break.

Goan rasps out, us.

It's wonderful.

Now, quick recap here, Gun.

Just let Ganthru chase you until you reach the clearing.

Rock punch the floor.

Drop through the floor.

Drop the boulder on him.

Rock punch him.

That's it.

All of this fight.

All of this fight, except the very first

minute and a half of it, took place at the location of the trap.

Yeah, but that's not fun.

Ghan is spending out of his overdraft, and something is going to happen when the bank realizes.

Oh, now the game is over.

Or very close to it.

Sub Barra and get through her.

Wait, I have to post one more picture from the end of the fight.

That's the real, that's the cheer moment.

That's when you go like, okay, Ghon's crazy, but I am on his side, and this is sick.

And Goan's like a little necromorph at the end of a tour.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

Everybody's captured and tied up in that field where we sort of start, where we begin.

I'm just so depressed.

I'm so depressed.

They spend Sub-Baron Genthru spend this entire closing sequence lying motionless on the ground, first because they're wounded, and then once they're healed, just yeah, because they're sad, they're bummed out about this, they do not want to engage in all the fun that happens.

Um, Genthru is genuinely prepared to surrender and give up his cards in exchange for using Angel's Breath to heal Barra, but they were already planning on healing everyone.

They use Angel's Breath, and a beautiful angel appears.

A gigantic, beautiful angel appears.

A gigantic, beautiful, very naked angel.

Yeah, that's all angels.

That should be fantasy seven, like, summon-esque.

Yeah, honestly.

This angel, first they say, can you heal Goan's arm?

And then Killio pauses and says, actually, can you fix everything that's wrong with him?

Spoiler.

She doesn't.

She doesn't.

What she does do, however,

is his physical injuries.

She fixes his physical injuries so effortlessly.

And Goan then leaps up and down with such a wild abandon that, you know,

I see what you mean here, Keith.

I know what this is doing, right?

Which is that it's saying,

yep, he's learned the wrong lesson again.

You know, he's fine.

He gets healed immediately.

But I suppose where I thought that the Goan Freaks train was going to come entertainingly off the tracks and rumble through the swamp, it turns out instead that the people very quickly built new tracks in front of it.

And Gohan was like, Yeah, okay, right, fine.

I guess I can be healed.

He's like punching the air.

He's jumping up and down.

Later,

Bisky looks at Ghon and Killiwa doing this last little bit of the game and is like,

they must have been the only people who had a really good time with this game.

Seconds after

Goan had no arms.

Yep.

And it's true.

Yeah.

No, it's totally true.

That's the scary part of it.

Like, you know, Bisky has all her own issues

that don't get dealt with here, but

it is not misunderstanding how Gona Kill will feel.

No.

There's the thing is, just I know I've said this a hundred thousand times.

Just a reminder that Angel's Breath is like someone's nen.

This is just,

you know, put into this card and can be taken out into the real world.

This is, I think, we meet some people who it might be the nen of later.

This is maybe, Jack, I think one of the things about the hands that like never really got me about the like kind of pulling the punch is because when his hands got blown off, I like had already been thinking about Angel's Breath because of the Batera stuff.

I can't be 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that when his hands got blown off, I was like, oh God, they've got to do something to fix this.

There's no way that they're going to have the rest of this be going with no hands.

I'm pretty sure that I had the Angel's Breath thing pegged.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

It turns out that they can't quite use Angel's Breath to heal everybody because Garinu has one of the last ones and is not as psyched as they are about using it to heal the murderers.

Fairly.

And there is a...

Fairly.

There is a lot of, I would say, fairly trickly business here in that we sort of wade through it slowly and kind of saccharinely and don't really get anywhere new with any of these characters.

No.

As the three, the trio say, I quite like this line.

They were like, we agreed we were going to use our angel's breath to heal everybody at the end.

We don't really know why we agreed that, but we all did it.

And I sort of love the, we don't know why we agreed it as an expression of the effect that Goan has on people.

Right.

You know, we all just sort of agreed it.

There's, I also like that they each give their own answer.

Like, Killua says, I'm a killer too.

If you don't want to give them an angel's breath because they're killers, then you can't give me one either.

He's very faction logic about it because he's an edgelord.

Biskey says, we're out of the fight and we stop having the right to decide who lives and dies because we're no longer longer in combat.

These people have surrendered.

We can't kill them.

And then it's Goan who's like, I don't know why.

I just think we shouldn't.

There is something, there's something that Gorinu says that I kind of want to like

put out there for the rest of this show, which is like,

ooh, should I write it in our little box that I have?

Maybe.

It's just like something that I think about a lot in regards to media in general.

When Kilois says, I've killed more people than these guys, and Gorino's like, yeah, but you're nothing like them.

I like you and I hate these guys.

And it's like, well, that's the only difference.

And I think that's something to think about going forward.

Can we also say again, Sylvie?

Okay.

Gorinu says, after Kilois talks about, I've killed more people than these guys, he says, yeah, you're nothing like them.

I like, but...

but you're nothing like them.

I like you and I hate these guys.

Which I think is already something that we've kind of talked about a little bit with Biskey and Hisaka, because I do love Bisky, even though she's got some pointed-out thematic consistencies with what Hisaka wants from Goan.

Yeah.

And like,

yeah, I just think it's something that, like,

in general is worth thinking about when you watch stuff.

It is sort of like, yeah, why does Goan like Kiluwa but hate the Phantom Troop?

It's the Phantom Troop, too.

Yeah, it is actually.

Why do we like the Phantom Troop

but hate

Illumi?

Part of this is about the

thing that happens happens to you when you are a protagonist.

Yeah.

You know, but then Tagashi is like, well, I can make the Phantom Troop protagonists.

Yeah.

Well, that's like them now.

And we're like, yes.

In the last episode, I talked a little bit about like

Hunter Hunter, like

really punishing the people who give in to someone else's charisma.

It's really dangerous to associate

yourself with someone because you for some reason are like magnetized to them uh and like we've seen that jing has been like that in his travels gone is like that hisuka is like that krolo is like that there's a lot of people who

like

do a lot of harm by just having this wake of enthusiasm for that it's like it's something that feels innocent or even like a positive attribute that has this this like really dark side to it.

And that Hunter Hunter looks at that a lot.

Yeah.

So they wait for Killiwa's hands.

So Garion is like, all right, I'm not really budging.

And so Killiua's like, my hands will heal themselves generally.

I was really, you know.

Folding my arms here and saying, yeah, look whose hands aren't getting healed here.

Gohan's hands get healed just fine, but Killiua has to wait for them to heal naturally.

Yeah.

they heal

Genthru,

and then Garion is like, okay, fine.

I was going to give it to you anyway.

But I think it's notable that, you know, Killiwa is prepared and is asked by the situation to be the one to, you know,

to wait to be healed, quote-unquote, naturally.

Not by the nude angel.

I just had a bizarre sort of like

thought about asked by the situation, as in Mike the Situation from Jersey Shore.

And Mike, the situation, some I can't remember his last name, like Sorrentito or something, shows up and says, like, Kilua, come on, Jim Taylor Laundry.

Can't GTL if your hands are fucked up, Kilua.

Come on, bro.

Let's debate.

What's KGTL?

No,

GTL.

Oh, GTL.

You can't GTL.

Garsky and Snooky would get along.

Or hate each other.

One of the two.

One One of the two.

No in between.

They'd move through arcs, I think.

Yeah.

Garenu gives them all his cards, resigning from the game.

And also tells them that the game is sort of over.

You know, Batera has given up.

And he reveals that he was paid 4 billion jetty thanks to the broken contract.

And Bisky's reaction to this is so funny.

She's just like startled, offended, and delighted that this amount of money is on the table.

And then Gary New reveals that he will split that, you know, split that among the group since everybody

got there.

Guraynu is a stand-up guy.

He is.

He's very, very, very dull.

Except for one thing.

Oh, which is nice.

Yeah, except for two things, and they're large and hairy and his friends.

But, you know, we talked a bit about how Cesgera had that.

Oh, the moon is just visible outside my window.

How pretty.

It's a crescent moon moon when we're recording.

And if you understand moons, then you can kind of guess when we are recording this.

Wow.

Maybe.

Wow.

Yeah, there was that lovely little bit of characterization with Tesgara thinking about Go and realizing that he had neglected his fundamentals and everything.

And I don't think Garino is ever really given...

you know, just that tiny little hint of depth of character.

But he is given two summonable apes, which means that he's very likable.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's just a trustworthy guy that that showed up right in time for everyone to kind of need a guy to like do busy work.

He is Deus Ex Machiner, stand-up guy.

Yeah.

A classic.

So

they do the work to get all the cards, right?

And then we get a little announcement.

Yeah.

Well, so the only card that's left is card zero, which nobody knows anything about.

We are lovingly shown in one of Tagashi's just like gentle little,

completely inconsequential jokes that the final card put into the binder is Panda Maid.

Excellence at taking care of children.

The game is complete.

Yeah, there's going to be a quiz

because there's always another game at the end of the game.

There is always a little

sting in the tail.

Yeah.

100 total questions about slot cards.

Bisky realizes that this was probably incentivized to be weighted towards players who didn't just kill other players.

Too little, too late, Ching.

And as the episode ends, a lot of players kind of teleport in

uh yeah this is the other thing of like jing setting up this world to have people who did things the right way win

um

let's move through this stuff quite quickly because we are we are we are running long and we have we have one episode left um they play the quiz uh biscuit looks over at them being like

oh they're loving the game yeah um oh they also choose to do it separately to compete against each other instead of do what everyone else does and do it as a game.

Did we already say that?

No, no, we didn't.

Killer is completely stumped by it.

Genthru and co are lying motionless,

furious.

Abengane walks up to Genthru in a really nice moment and touches him and says, I caught the bomber.

It's crazy.

We see the bomb dissolve off him.

He just walks from out of nowhere, touches him, walks away, and Genthru's just got this fucking stupefied look on his face.

Yeah.

Goan, impressively, wins the quiz.

He is very bad at thinking and studying, but he is very good at thinking about his dad.

He played

Green Island the right way.

He got 87 out of 100.

The card, or rather, the thing that follows is delivered by an owl.

I really like this because it was another one of these little hints of what the game could have been like.

You know, owl messengers delivering cards to each other.

It's an invitation from the ruler of the island, and only Goan is able to go.

A couple of ghoul greens show up to be like, hey, somebody's got all the cards.

We're going to take them.

Cat Boy.

What's that?

It's the Cat Boy from when we first.

Oh, yeah.

He was one of the first people to show up.

The one that waited for his brother.

And it's very funny.

They obviously have no clue what's going on and they get beaten extremely, like off-screen, essentially.

They get knocked out.

Yes.

It's really funny.

Someone was like, oh my god, they beat the Pelham brothers.

I guess that's brothers.

These guys have enough of a reputation, but they just seem like nobodies.

Abengane watches everybody leave.

Oh, so basically, the card is an invitation to a castle on the hill to meet the ruler of Greed Island.

Abengane, as he sees them leave, says,

they're much stronger than

when I first met them, but they're still weaker than Genthru in raw power.

So realizes that they must have laid a plan to beat him, but then he says, ha, no matter.

I'm going to go back to the real world and make a fortune and on exorcism and walks into the sunset.

Yeah, you see a beautiful sunset with Hisakos there too.

Yeah, Abangane has like been increasingly becoming a kind of sinister character.

Initially, he was sort of quiet and I thought he was going to be like one of the Deus Ex Machina standby guys.

But as soon as that old god crawled out of the fire, it really set a different tone for him.

Yeah, he just seems like a mysterious and opportunistic loner.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We're moving to this really fast.

I just want to, for the listeners who maybe have, haven't seen this, this, this is really a wrap-up episode.

This is like, this stuff is going by just as fast as we're saying it, basically.

Yeah, genuinely.

A butler welcomes Goan into the castle as Bisky and Jin kind of...

Jin?

A butler, I say.

Yes, a butler, I say.

Bisky and Killiwa watch Goan leave, sort of wondering about how he's feeling.

Maybe perhaps meeting Jing for the first time.

Killiwa is smiling at him.

And there's a real pleasant little sting in the tale here at the end of Greed Island

where, you know, we have moved past the climax of the arc being this fight with Genthru and the kind of putting the final card into the book.

But there is still

really interesting little stuff to discover.

Tagashi, even this late in the game, is prepared to say, let's go to a new city.

Let's meet a new character.

You know, Greed is wrapping up.

They take like 90 full seconds to do like a little card juggling where it's like, okay, you have have to go to this use this card to go here and then come back and they'll both go.

It's very funny

at this late hour.

We're still kind of managing cards.

Yep.

Yeah.

Going is led into a room just absolutely full of trash where a man who is clearly not Jing is playing a games console who tosses Goan the card very cursorily revealing that it is like a ruler.

Card zero is like a ruler card.

It gives you ownership over the castle and the town and all the people.

You can go to town whenever you want and hang out in Greed Island.

Yeah, this is a real, like,

the center of the Apple is hollow moment.

You know, it's just a man in a room full of trash playing a video game being like, I have a really important image I need to show you guys.

Okay.

Please.

It's so- Do you want to know who that is?

Yep.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I also thought of this.

You want to talk about what this is?

That's a picture of Yoshihiro Tagashi in a messy fucking room

playing a video game.

I think that's a Super Nintendo.

Okay, okay, I would have to go.

Well, there's a couple Mario.

There's a couple of Mario.

Oh, you know what it is?

The dark bar in the middle is kind of squashed in a way that it looks like the Kingdom Hearts main menu font.

I can see it.

Yeah.

Anyway,

this is never really...

This is, I think, just someone found

it.

But this is a photo of Tagash.

No, no, no.

I mean, this man in the room might be Tagashi, the person at the very heart of the game.

It is definitely like an interesting way to picture yourself as this like messy dude who just like threw together all these like mechanics and things.

And who is fundamentally taunting because this guy is just like

he's actively taunting.

Jing too.

Yeah, he's saying, oh, you thought Jing would be here.

And Goan says, I thought this was really funny.

I never once thought that Jing would be here.

You know, because of the way Goan's brain works, he was like, multiple people have now told him that Jing isn't here.

Why would they be lying to me?

I'm not going to meet Jing here.

I was told there was no clues.

Why would Jing be here?

There's no clues.

My dad wouldn't lie.

He's never done that.

He gives Gohan a special case.

This is a really nice prop.

We see it a couple of times, and I think it's going to come up again.

That looks like a sort of plastic cigarette case version of the binder.

And he tells Gohan that he can take three cards

out of the game with him.

And this is something that we've known about for a while, right?

Were there rumors that you could take three items out of the game?

I think, I don't know if the number was ever explicit, but there was always the you can take actually, it might have been, it might have been take three cards out of the game because I know that that was always the plan for the bombers, too.

Was they wanted to bring stuff out of the game, but you can't bring doubles out.

My,

I sort of remember being surprised that you got three.

I thought that maybe they said that you you could take one, but that maybe people didn't know.

Yeah, I think it's also really funny that

it really throws into relief how good the Phantom Troop are at their job, where they immediately intuited

the prize for the game and were like, oh, no, no, no, we'll just take all of it.

We'll just get every item out.

And a thing that we learned later reveals that they could have done that had they not been caught by Razor.

There's not like a restriction on the card that would have prevented them from doing that.

Um, he asks Goan, this guy, uh,

whose name is Mr.

Dune.

Dune, Dune, Dune, it's Dune,

yeah.

Mr.

Dune, yeah.

I cannot wait to talk about Dune.

I cannot wait to talk about Dune.

After this thing

that you're about to say, Jack, I think.

There is one

really extremely funny sort of sequence, and then one hilariously misguided decision made by the show.

And these two things sitting back to back is fully the experience of watching.

Oh, I wonder which is the misguided decision.

Jing loves doing fun things with letters.

Yes.

Okay, so he uh Dune asks Goan if he wants the normal generic ending or the ending just for you.

And Goan considers it for a second and then decides,

I'll take the generic one because I didn't do this alone and my friends probably wouldn't be able to watch the ending that's just for me.

At which point the butler...

Oh, sorry, Sylvie.

I just want to.

Sorry to, I know we're trying to go quick, but with the Tagashi Dune parallel, I do need to bring up the fact that Tagashi did literally do this on a recent interview tour, being like, yeah, here's, I have a possible ending.

Yes, he did.

I have four possible endings for Hunter Hunter.

Here's one of them.

that

you want to know just in case.

Like, like, the, I didn't think about this parallel that much coming into this episode.

And now all of a sudden I'm like, oh, fuck, wait a minute.

minute this is him being like this is kind of how i feel making this he's also a really lovingly drawn character dune um in the way that he is he is animated very distinctively he he he moves in a way that is unlike the other characters he is constantly bopping around the frame he's he's like a cartoon ass cartoon character he's very like

um he's he's drawn like he's in a comedy show Yeah, and he does one really good comedy bit that we're going to get to.

He does a really good comedy bit.

His mannerisms are very funny, too.

I like how he moves.

Yeah.

The butler has to step in and clarify that he is just kidding.

There is no special ending, but there is a message that has been left for him.

At which point,

it's so funny you keep calling him the butler.

It's really funny that you keep calling him the butler.

Which at this point, these people reveal that, in fact, this butler person isn't actually a butler, and was instead just the person who opened the door?

The classic butler role in a castle.

These are Dune and List.

At which point we get into, I think, a completely unnecessary sequence, but I love it.

Is there a reason this is here?

Other than just...

Jing is a weirdo and is surrounded by weirdos?

I think it's two of us.

I think there's two things.

I think that Tagashi is very playful and wants to make, wants to just like tell you about, wants to set up that this guy's name is Dune.

And then the thing that happens with Dune, I think, is actually illustrative of...

Jing.

Jing is a character.

Yeah.

I think there's another thing, which is just that, like, like,

haha, you thought it was called Greed Island because of how the game is, but it's actually just a total coincidence.

It's so.

Yeah, why is Greed Island called Greed Island, Keith?

Greed Island has 10 letters in, huh?

Greed Island is called Greed Island because they took one letter from everybody's first name, with Jing being first because he was the main guy, and just spelled out the word Greed Island with those people.

It's even better because it's, well, Jing is the lead guy, so we needed a word that began with G.

So we went with greed.

Yeah, R is Razor, list is L.

They'll reveal that the twins were that those

are different entry and exit person, even though they're identical.

Those are twins, and also that they are humans are not like nen constructed.

Right, those are people.

These are all people.

Yeah, Aeta and Elena.

Dune is G, sorry, Dune is D, and then Dune gets really angry and interrupts, calling Jing a horrible jerk.

The short version of this is that his name is

pronounced

Dune, but it is, it has always been spelt, I believe, W-D-W-U-N-E.

He's really angry about this.

He spells it out with his fingers spelling out the letters.

We get the letters on screen, too.

He asked Goan, how do you think it's spelled?

And then Goan goes like, D?

And he's like, you too!

Yeah, you gotta be a little bit more.

It's crazy to think Dune begins with a D.

All his friends also consistently make this mistake, despite repeatedly getting told.

And so, as soon as Dune learned that they were going to be doing this

letter thing, he was like, All right, please remember that my name

begins with a W.

At which point, Jing said, Well, no, let's say it begins with the D, and then you can be the D in Greed Island.

And, you know, I think your name looks better that way.

See, reason.

We can't call it Grew Island.

That doesn't make any sense.

Call it

Gweed Island.

We also,

we had a bit of a litigation on how much Razor is or isn't a part of the game.

This is the sort of stuff I was thinking of when I was like, Razor built up the

second, he's the R in Greed Island.

He's not just some guy.

I mean, in a way, he is some guy, but aren't they all?

Jing then promptly changed his name.

Yes.

Sorry, Jing changed his own name?

Surely that's what you mean.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Changed Dune's name.

And List says this this in that same tone that some people talk about with Jing: of like, it's like you talked about earlier, Keith, of like the danger of someone so charismatic, you know?

Yeah.

List is sort of like, it's amazing.

He changed Dune's name immediately.

And Dune is, Dune is, Dune is midway through a like

Abbott Costello bit.

Yeah, a breakdown within an Abbott and Costello bit.

And seems to be the only person who is like, Jing is a kind of a piece of shit.

Yeah.

But he's been here for, what, 15 years, something like that.

So he, at the same time, he still has to have this.

There's something keeping him here.

Could he maybe be a death row prisoner like Bapobo?

No, I think he's just the smartest guy Jing ever met and was like, can you come please help me make this game?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Fireworks as the game ends.

There is a shot of the crowd in the street that is the largest crowd shot we have ever seen in Hunter Hunter.

There are like 1,000 people.

More than three community?

Yeah, almost certainly right.

Yeah, you're right.

It's a great shot.

I just want to say mafia community again.

It's been so long.

Yeah.

Shout out to the mafia community.

Yeah.

Shout out to whoever.

Oh my god.

Yeah.

Oh, it's been so long.

Shout outs to whoever put Bisky, Goan, and Killiwa on a fucking carnival float, put wreaths around their necks, and drove them through the

in like a ticket tape parade.

Do not drive past the book repository.

Gone.

And

this is like the NPCs in the town, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they say, like, in addition to the castle, you get a town with, is it 10,000 people?

Yep.

Yeah.

So you just get a fiefdom.

You do get a fiefdom.

You get a thiefdom, yeah.

Everybody changes.

Maybe a bad person didn't win the prize so that they could just make 10,000 people

do whatever terrible thing they wanted no Dre you don't understand good and evil is like a sort of meritocracy it'll work itself out and this protects the evil people it is simply by winning that you've proven that you're good

yeah you're right it's so funny that the show

is so dismissive of that as an ideology but keeps putting characters in positions of power who believe that it's it is it is funny every time um

they get to choose the cards they they're going to carry out.

Bisky chooses Blue Planet, this gem,

if you've been keeping up.

This is something that Bisky has been wanting since the start.

She's losing her damn mind.

Yes, she is so excited to get this out of here.

Killure hasn't decided yet.

And Goan has a clever plan to get a card out.

And Killure is like, oh yeah, that is a clever plan.

And it seems like Killier is actually going to throw away his card choice in favor of enabling Goan's plan.

Weird how that keeps happening, isn't it?

What do you mean?

They're friends.

Yeah, they're friends too.

They're friends.

This is when we have our final punch into the sky for fun, as Bisky is like, why won't you let me into the plan?

She punches both of them into the sky and we match cut to a firework.

It's so funny.

I love that these are her two reasons for punching.

It's one is being called a hag, and the other one is she gets frustrated at not being clued in on whatever Goan and Killer are talking about.

Yeah, she's just the teacher running up to the kids and being like, you better fucking tell me what skibbity means or I swear to god I really like this because this is both the expression of

an annoyed older an annoyed elder, you know, don't call me a hag and a frustrated little sister being like oh the older brothers aren't letting me into my plan that the duality of the duality of bisque

Expressed in a way that now that we know that Bisky is like

maybe the strongest martial artist we have ever seen the fact that her running goke joke is punching gonan killer into the sky is is even funnier yeah uh she just occasionally lets loose punches them into the sky it's a funny twist based on the common shonen um sort of like non-diegetic violence from women uh that happens where like you'll have a lot of get like bulma will punch goku into the sky sometimes or like clobber him on the head and leave a big bump and it's like she couldn't actually do that but for comedy they have her doing that all the time and then biscuit has the same sort of behavior that happened.

It shows up all the time.

But she really wants to kill it off.

She really could do that.

Yes.

The cards that they have chosen are Strip of Beach.

Ah, the picture.

Remember that?

Remember when that woman delivered a sorrowful monologue and then transformed into a card?

That's right.

The card art is her looking out of the window where she delivered said monologue before she disappeared.

Blue Planet and Paladin's Necklace.

That's

weird.

Yeah.

Why do they want Strip of Beach?

It's nothing.

What would even it turn into?

I was really excited.

I was like,

that nice lady.

We're going to get to see what Strip of Beach does.

You could buy a house anywhere and make it a beachfront.

Oh.

Everybody leaves.

And I think it's Kilua who says, we're back in the real world.

No, it's Ghana who says, we're back in the real world.

I can't tell.

And Kilua reminds him that it's real.

This is also the end of

David Cronenberg's excellent film Existence.

Also a film going into a weird game,

which also ends with the character saying, Hang on, are we in the game?

Are we in the real world?

I can't tell.

They also have a brief moment of seeing Elena as they leave and her being kind of happy that

Ghona remembered that she wasn't her sister.

That's really sweet.

Yeah.

Hey, before we talk about what these cards are,

would I be allowed to hit two song things that we missed that are kind of important?

Yeah.

Yeah, goan.

So during the explanation about

when to run from Genthru when he's got both of his arms ready to do leapfrog.

Oh, when Goan explicitly doesn't run?

Yeah,

and then that part where he lets himself get blown up and then kicked.

We have another song that gets played a lot in the next season, I believe.

It's called The Puppeteer, which I believe.

I can't tell if it's if the name is about

Genthu grabbing Goan's arms and like kind of controlling his body, or if it's about Goan sort of tricking tricking Genthru into

falling for his tricks, we've got this here.

Oh, yeah,

it's fucking heavy.

Is there gonna be any

pretty nice music in the next season?

Uh, yeah, yeah, actually, we get a little bit of that when they're all at the starting place.

Um, uh, when they're doing the quiz, we get an instrumental version of a future ending theme.

I don't remember the name, and also it's kind of a long name.

It's called Nagura Boshi Kirari, is what it's called.

Oh, yeah, I like this one.

I love this ending theme, by the way.

I think it's not very popular, but it really, really grew on me.

Keith, could you play that last one again, the scary heavy one?

Yeah.

And let it let it run for a little longer.

We have this orchestral cue.

And then we have this.

Okay, now can you play the um one with the groove with the bass groove?

Yes.

Hmm.

Yeah, I don't remember where I got this thought from.

Maybe it was just when I saw that first little teaser image that my streaming platform showed me.

Yeah.

Are we gonna get fucking aliens in this show?

We've been talking about aliens in that feel science fiction to you?

I guess I can see that.

It feels extremely sci-fi.

Yeah, I know.

That feels very sci-fi.

Yeah.

Yeah, I totally get it.

Jack, I have a question for you.

What's the difference between an alien and a demon?

What's the difference between an alien and a demon?

Oh, no, Jigsaw.

All your life you've spent your time wondering.

What is the difference between an alien and a demon?

This demonstration is being rigged with a ball.

Especially if said demons come from another world.

Whoa.

Oh, my God.

Chimera answer from demon world.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think it was a combination of

this is the nice.

This is the look, it's listen, it's whale.

It's a sound.

This is whale island.

This is beyond the seas.

We get this at the very end of 74.

I love this one, actually.

I love this.

I love this one.

This is a...

This rising Q here

is referencing a classical piece that I've been fucking trying to remember the name of

for the longest time.

It might be in the planets.

It might be one one of Holst's planets.

But just those three rising notes with the

pedal note as that moves between those three chords.

Oh,

yeah, I feel like that is.

I mean, I don't know nearly as much classical music, but I feel like that is also scratching something in my brain.

Yeah,

it's like a reference in the same way that a lot of the Spider stuff was referencing.

What did they play?

They played Beethoven or did they play mozart mozart's requiem at some point uh yeah yeah they played yeah they just play mozart's requiem yeah and then they played riot which is like very similar yeah yeah riot showed up again in 74.

is riot the one you're sick of keith uh no no uh well okay so there's all of the spider stuff kind of bleeds into each other there's uh those uh Those of the last midnight or some weird, I can't remember exactly what it's called.

Then there's Man of the Reverse Crossed, and then then there's requiem arena and then there's dirge from the dark side and they all kind of blend into each other and they have the same sort of palette they do it's very dark and dreary and there's a lot of core like a choral like chanting and it's not that i'm that i don't like them it's just that sonically it is the least diverse uh arc

But I do think I have a B in my bonnet about aliens because when we've been talking about doing more of this Dragon Ball Z stuff,

and you'll ask me what do you want to see?

And the thing that I said I wanted to see was aliens because aliens keep showing up in Dragon Ball, and I've not met a single one.

Well, you have, Goku.

I have, but yeah, I didn't know that when I

watched it.

Okay.

Oh, we also have.

So they're back in the real world.

Biscuit immediately uses the card to get Blue Planet, which is a sort of marble about the size of a small egg.

And she is delighted by this.

I was really worried, not really worried.

I thought that she would, I thought that the joke was going to be that she was disappointed by its size, you know, that she was going to, that she was expecting like a like a globe or something and seeing that it was here.

But no, she's just, I thought it was really sweet.

She's got what she wanted.

It delights her.

And then we learn, oh, as Gon and Killio sort of begin to reveal their plan, we get a new arrangement of Bisky's theme.

Or it's not really a new arrangement.

It's just the

accompaniment part of Biskey's theme without the kind of dueling violin melody line played over the top,

which was fun to hear.

Without that violin part, the theme is a little thin, but I was interested that they had chosen to deploy it that way, right?

To say, yeah, let's do it like this, but actually hold off the part that makes this theme distinctive.

Okay, here is what Gon has managed to do.

The only cards that you can bring out of Greed Island are the numbered cards.

You can't actually bring out any of the lower value

non-numbered cards.

But the card that Ghon has managed to bring out is a company disguised as Strip of Beach.

He used a card inside Greed Island to disguise a company as Strip of Beach and then used...

Paladin's necklace to reveal that sort of forgery, that fake disguise, once he was safely out.

And this has gotten the card out of Greed Island.

Because I think, you know, Greed Island is not infallible.

If you can make the cards look like one thing, it worked just as well in the game, and the game and real life are the same.

So, why wouldn't it work, you know, outside the island?

It was a nice little maneuver.

Yeah.

And then the like,

you know,

the sort of unsaid, like, well, what's the, what is this going to help you?

Not unsaid, uh, Biskey says it.

Uh, why do you want this?

That when Goan entered for the first time, he was the first person to enter the game.

But as soon as he entered the game, he noticed that there was a name in his binder.

Now, this name, which I'm not gonna repeat on the air, is an unfortunate anagram of Jing's name.

It's four letters.

You can go through all the different variations in your head, and you can figure out which one this group of four white people can't say.

Uh,

it's not good, um,

but this implies that he has actually met Jing in Greed Island.

Oh, this is right.

Sorry, I did write down.

Tagashi with a secret

true-to-life video game experience of the first person you meet in-game having a racial slur as their username.

He has intuited that he probably came to Greed Island with Jing as a baby, and this is true.

We get to see Jing and Goan,

Jing holding Goan in his arms, looking out over Greed Island,

presumably with the sort of like

a.

What's this?

That was the thing that the fucking Lion King

is yours, yeah.

Except everything you see before you is here to test you.

Yeah,

to fight and test you.

Everything the sun touches here can kill you.

Yeah, that's absolutely what it is.

But now he can use accompany on Jing

because he's got the accompany card out.

Why didn't he do this when he was in the game?

I don't know if the game...

I think within the parameters of the game, it only takes you to people who are inside of it at the time.

Oh, are in the game right now?

Yeah, that's at least how I interpret it.

But that's not figuring it out.

Because to leave, you have to use leave or the fairy.

But this is...

This is clever thinking from Goan and Kiliwa to figure this plan out.

Demonstrating once again that Goan is

steam comes out of Goan's ears when he's making complex plans, unless they're plans about his dad or things his dad might be interested in.

There's

no interest.

There's also like specific things that he, like, he's not good at like math or like

he's not good at concepts, but this is like, yeah, this is a car that takes you where you want to go.

I should just disguise the car.

Disguise the card, not disguise the car.

Well, no, it's a car.

Oh, I see.

Right.

Yes, it takes you where you want to go.

Yes, it takes you where you want to go.

I loved this.

And I thought,

I'm always...

I'm always wrong-footed by Yoshihiro Tagashi.

I thought to myself, surely they're not just going to use the card.

You know,

we got to have some kind of build-up.

This is like a really exciting little narrative beat here.

So we need to do some themes and variations around it.

We need to be prepared to go and meet Jing.

No, they're about to use the card.

Before they do,

they ask Goan why he's excited, what he's going to do when he meets Jing.

Oh my god.

And Goan is like, I'm going to introduce him to my best friend, Killua.

So cute.

This is very cute.

And Killua's like, shut up, you idiot.

Don't say that.

Yeah, Bisky's crying.

Yeah, Bisky says, if I stay any longer, I'll get attached to them, like a parent.

And then in parentheses, you know, the corollary to that is like, because my role is a teacher and I need to sharpen these gems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can't protect them or want to protect them.

Yeah.

Oh, by the way, I don't know if we said, but she named, maybe this is just in the dub is what I think I had, but she

names her jewel.

She's going through a bunch of names.

Oh, yeah.

But she said also Planet.

Yeah.

I didn't get all she says bluey.

Which is very funny.

Yeah.

In the Japanese, she does call it Plachama, which I thought was cute.

I didn't catch the other, the blue one, but it was variations on that, which if you remember, she wanted to be called Bisky Chama by the two of them forever ago.

Oh, she's really, really funny.

Yeah, they use a company to go and find Jing.

They go flying off.

Bisky watches them go.

This is, I mean, this is.

It's...

delightful every time Hunter Hunter ends an arc because it goes barreling into the next one at high speed.

And from the beginning of this this episode of recording, me going, like, I don't really know, you know, I don't know how they're going to make this interesting.

We're going to just go through themes and variations of fighting the bomber.

I was rewarded with a really great fight with Genthru.

And now I'm at the end of this episode, genuinely having no idea what is going to happen.

Because they fly over a misty forest, yeah, the likes of which we have not really seen before.

And they land on cobblestones in the forest, not a forest path, you know.

And they look up in shock to see someone with their back to them with a fishing rod out there in the mist and the episode ends that's great what a good cliffhanger yeah

yeah exactly gotta remember the wahoo

do i think this is jing

i don't know in any other show i would say

by the way the narrator comes in and goes like do you think this is jing

and i i have no idea right because in another show the answer is no this is a character that it like links us to jing in some way boosts us into the next arc.

But this is Hunter Hunter, and

I could very easily see them saying,

Goan's quest is to find his dad, you know?

So let's just resolve that now, make that more complicated.

What happens when Goan is without a quest to solve?

Probably

can't be good.

Yeah,

I think it's such a, you know, when you're looking at something like Hunter Hunter, that is a show, I think no one can deny

looks on its face like it's constantly setting stuff up and then throwing it out to like do something different.

And it's like the narrative utility of that is so clear once you have a lot of the show under your belt and you get to go like

it stops being, you know, sometimes they follow the beaten path and sometimes they swerve.

And when they swerve, it's like, how the fuck are they going to swerve?

And it really keeps you guessing to not ever really know, is this going to do the obvious thing or is it going to do the other thing?

Yeah.

Because with more Hunter Hunter, more than almost any other show that I can think of,

it's a real split.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm so excited.

What are we watching next time?

That's a great question.

This is when Teeth reveals, he says, all right, as we're entering Hunter Hunter's longest arc, it's time to begin six episode blocks.

Um, there was a time when I had that, I believe, we only have one

episode that's longer, that's that's longer than four.

That's my that's my memory.

Wow, maybe there's two, but um,

next one is brisk 66, 67, 68.

Wow, three, no, that's that's not right, Keith.

I said three 66, 67, 68, 60, sorry, 70.

76, 77, 78.

And just for fun, why don't I tell you what those are called?

Reunion and understanding.

Okay.

Ease and sighting.

And

very rapid reproduction.

Oh, boy.

Oh.

I have a review to read, too, a five-star podcast review.

Oh, great.

Hell yeah.

Because, hey, if you guys can go and give us five stars, I'm reading from the Apple podcast because that tends to be the one where the algorithm favors the five stars the most.

I might read it on the show.

I really like this one from Sunfish Die Often, I suppose.

Five stars as it should be.

I suppose that's who it's from, or that's part of the name.

That's the name.

That's the name.

Sunfish Die Often, I suppose, is the username.

Got it.

The title of this review is Demon World Podcast Review Format.

Before you set the podcast review, from its fierce jaws, it speaks a single sigil, a skull with 21 teeth, seven burning lights in one eye socket, sixteen in the other.

Throughout your years of podcast review dungeon delving, you recognize the meaning of this cursed language, its true intention decoded by listening to the words found at the seventh minute and sixteenth second of the 21st episode of the very podcast it describes.

Sometimes you wonder if podcast reviews could be stored as plain text instead of arcane, wordless riddles within haunted catacombs.

Thank you.

That's a great review.

I do know what that timestamp is, but maybe people should go listen to this.

Oh, I would love to know after this.

Yeah, it's

silly.

This has been a great block.

Yeah.

What do you think of Green Island?

Yeah, wait, really quick.

Did you like this arc as a whole?

Yeah,

I think it's the weakest one we've seen, and I think it is frustrated by being a

really good idea that is often uneven.

I think it is a

really fun concept of go into a broken game, but I think a combination of needing to crack along at a brisk pace and,

you know,

adapting a lot of chapters into a shorter chunk of the manga, and the fact that the thing that they are swerving away from is actually a really,

you know,

fun idea left me feeling not sour, but but there were bits of this arc where I was like, this isn't quite humming along in the way that I like Hunter Hunter to be humming along.

I think that the end that it got us to was great.

Do I think that this is the weakest arc compared to Heaven's Arena?

No, I liked Heaven's Arena less than I liked this.

Yeah, that's what I was surprised by.

Though Heaven's Arena benefits from being like 10 episodes or something.

Yeah, that's true.

Whereas I think that this could have been longer and with a slightly more sort of like

sharpened focus in what it wanted to be.

This is so similar, I think, to what we felt that the outcome of watching this was going to be.

It's how I feel about it.

It's got the highs are just as high as ever.

It's great to have Gonikilua back in the driver's seat.

There's not like a ton more lows, but the like low mids, the boring zone.

is bigger than usual.

Yeah.

We'll be talking about pacing more is

safe to say.

Wait, okay, actually, as we embark on it, how many episodes of Hunter Hunter was Greed Island?

Oh.

I can tell you.

I thought you were going to say three.

Three.

No, no.

I was just thinking of how many episodes we have.

17.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, 17.

How many episodes of Hunter Hunter is the Chimera end?

According to Wikipedia, something 61.

61.

Okay.

To put that in perspective, we have 77 episodes of Hunter Hunter left.

Also,

and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

I just think that I know this.

I'm not 100% sure.

I believe Chimera Ant is actually

more compressed than Greed Island versus probably.

We've talked about how long

Chimera Ant reign in the manga, right?

No.

It might have, I don't remember.

Like year-wise, because didn't it run for like almost a decade?

I think the production schedule because of I mean, Tagashi's health is going to come up as we

dive into this.

I think

I might try and read along with the manga, not committing to it just because it's a lot.

It's a lot to do.

But I'm really curious.

It is

episode 76 to 136 of the anime

manga chapters 186 to 318.

Yeah.

My gosh.

It is the middle, like, it is straight up.

Like,

not the majority of Hunter Hunter.

Like, it's not going to beat everything added together, but it kind of feels like it.

The first one was released in 2003.

The last one was released in 2011, the same year that this anime started.

We can talk about this next time.

But something I always did when I watched, like, something about how I always conceptualized Chimera Ant is that it's its own anime series.

Or it can feel like it's its own anime series.

Another way is

it kind of feels like two arcs to me.

There's kind of like you could make a case that there's two arcs in this arc.

I feel like we could probably make a case for more, even.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm like, there's one, to me, there's one very obvious line of demarcation.

Yeah.

Yes.

But that's it.

That's it.

We got nothing else to say, and we should go.

And

I have to go finish making dinner Oh, my God.

To eat dinner.

And

anything else at the very end here?

No.

I love making the show.

Yeah.

No.

Great time.

All right.

Bye.

We got to clap, though.

Bye.

Bye.

Just whenever.

Great.

Do we really not need to sync that up?

No, we don't.