Gon's Problem - Hunter x Hunter ep. 69-71: Media Club Plus S01E22

I heard about a really cool Tubi horror movie today that I'm excited to see, which is weird because Tubi usually only makes movies that feel like a human fever dream.

Yeah.

Is Tubi guys ever heard of Hunter Hunter?

I have.

Mala Session.

Is that what you're asking for?

You're asking for that?

Maybe a little.

It is 8 p.m.

Well, someone had cold chicken.

I was going to get my clarinet.

I was going to bring us in life.

The chicken was frozen.

It wasn't ready for me to cook until

I had to.

It just took longer than it took me some time to eat it.

Such bullshit to begin.

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

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

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

You find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com slash run button.

Very happy to be doing a lot of Metal Gear Solid 3 recently, a lot of Shenmue recently.

So you should go to youtube.com slash run button and subscribe.

Frankly, I don't care if you never intend to watch any of it, but you should try it.

Just Just subscribe.

Yeah, just subscribe, but you should try it at least once.

With me, as always, is Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere on the internet at Sylvie Bullet.

Sylvie spelled without the E, taking back Sunday style.

Also, go check out the Friends of the Table YouTube as well.

There's a lot of cool stuff up there.

Jack and Keith play Crusader Kings.

Keith and I play 999.

And also, there's a lot of farming games.

Janine and Keith recently.

Keith, you appeared on one of Janine's Life Makeover streams.

Yeah, I went to Life Makeover and I did the voice of

Anton the

pirate and also

Gerald the Duke.

So you want to go watch that for sure.

Like, well,

Run, Don't Walk.

Yeah, that game's crazy.

Yeah.

Put him on the plugs.

Also with me is Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at SwanDerry3000.

And I just want to commend Keith for being the most professional podcaster.

Thank you very much.

And also with me is Punish Jack DeGeet, who's going last because of behaving badly.

I didn't realize he was in putative podcasting.

He was in punitive podcasting.

Dre's always last because Dre's always behaving so bad.

Oh, that's true.

That is true.

I'm Jack.

You can find me on co-host at JDQ.

I fucked up my cooking plans plans this evening.

What else?

It's not as humid as it was last week, and I've been enjoying that.

I spent some time outside.

I sat in a park and listened to some live music.

It was great.

That's great.

Do we have any other plugs that we went out of order?

Did I throw anybody off and we missed something?

What's in front of the table?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Did we say friends of table cash?

Yeah.

Did we mention the Jojo episode?

Oh, right.

Yes.

That's a great point.

The part four of the JoJo's Bizarre, no, part two of our Jojo's Bazaar Adventure bonus, part four overall of the Media Club Plus associated bonus episodes is out on the Patreon, friends of the table.cash.

It's $5, get you all four, and then you can stay signed up and keep giving us money as a reward for doing such a good show.

We do have more planned.

We're going to do Dragon Ball Z soon.

Yeah, that's it.

My brain is so broken.

Can I take us on a ride really quick?

Yeah, sure.

I don't know if it was Sylvie or Keith, but one of you said part two, almost like part two, and that made me think about

the Mic Tua girl from TikTok.

Can I tell a story about that?

Where I, when I saw that trending, I was like, is this the name of a new wrestler?

Like, is this the unfortunate name of someone in WWE?

It's funny.

Yeah.

I'm confused.

You get this show on the road.

I'm confused why when I logged into Twitter, there were 150,000 tweets about Hakatua.

That's insane.

People love Blowjobs.

People love Blowjobs, but still, I mean, Blowjobs isn't ever trending.

No.

But we didn't celebrate when the brothers showed back up.

If you did, this is how you make it in America in 2024.

You be slightly funny about Blowjobs, and then you disappear.

Okay, so here's what we did.

Here's what we did in these episodes.

Let me ask you this: Is there anything sweeter than spending $100,000 on little bunny rabbit lollipops?

Yes, there is.

It's revenge.

It's revenge.

It's revenge.

And that's exactly what Killua gets when joining up with the only other viable team left on Greed Island, captained by Sasgara, the single star hunter.

Killua and Goan put them to the test to force him to to show them their wren to team up with them to beat Razor.

They do pass.

It's really funny.

We'll talk about that.

They show up to Razor's little gym and do so well that Razor calls off the whole thing and just skip right to the boss battle.

After some gratuitous violence to set the stakes and equip quick catch up for Gone, Kilua, and Bisky.

and Greinu that Greed Island is a real place.

It's time for Dodgeball, including not one, but two gorillas.

we did it we did it where we are now screen cap complete there's a long and complicated and very cool but also very rules based match of dodgeball followed by an immediate encounter with the bombers uh already on the back foot in multiple ways the eight of them after his leaves come up with a plan their plan to come up with a plan

Yeah, it's mostly dodgeball.

It really is mostly dodgeball.

It's really mostly dodgeball.

Remember when Takashi got really interested in art forgery and sort of like focused in really intently on art forgery?

He's sort of done the same for dodgeball here.

And

this doesn't really take me back to fourth grade.

Yeah, with the same sort of...

A thing Takashi does all the time that we talk about is that you can never predict when he's going to move on from something very, very quickly or when he's going to linger on it almost painfully.

And in this case, we have...

Am I misunderstanding this?

Do we almost have three episodes of Dodgeball?

We have almost three

episodes of Dodgeball.

Yeah, it's about two and a half episodes of Dodgeball.

I think you could really, you know, contain what counts as Dodgeball and call it two episodes.

Like, we've missed half of episode 69 and half of episode 72.

The fact he's not immediately back makes me think that it's either a power outage outage or he's been raptured.

He's back.

I'm back.

Okay, here we go.

What I went on to keep saying for a really long time, not knowing that you were gone, was that

I love this version of Dodgeball.

I don't know if this is a version that's played anywhere, but this reminds me of Super Dodgeball, the Super Dodgeball games for the NES and the Neo Geo.

I've never seen this outside players passing it around and throwing in anywhere else before.

Yeah, me neither.

But it's very fitting for Greed Island to have like the Neo Geo game.

Yes.

In there.

It's Wind Jammers.

It's Wind Jammers.

Yeah, Wind Jammers

is a lot like Frisbee Super Dodgeball.

Yeah.

It's also very economical where...

So much of the build-up to this has been like, we need to get 15 players, but what we're actually getting is sort of nine.

And we can stack the deck with some, you know, low-tier players.

They're extremely funny.

We'll talk about them later.

But it is elegant storytelling to have a version of dodgeball, whether it's a real-world version or not, that allows eliminated players or players outside to still be, you know, consequential parts of the game.

We can keep the camera on Gorenu or somebody, you know, after he's been eliminated, you know.

I've definitely played dodgeball like that before.

Is that

where there's not like jailball area?

Yeah, this is not any dodgeball role that I've seen outside of media.

I've seen like jail where like, you know, if you you like catch the ball, you can like pull somebody out of jail.

That's how I've done it.

I've never seen the outside players also be allowed to like pass the ball back and forth.

Oh, yeah.

No, that's, I remember doing that.

I know this, I know this only from Super Dodgeball.

I was also much more of a four-square kid than a dodgeball kid.

So we played dodgeball.

We played like big, like class-wide version games of dodgeball in gym class, like at least once a month for almost my entire elementary school.

It was great.

I loved it.

That sounds like a lot of fun.

Yeah.

Dodgeball, especially

the kind of kid that I was, there is

a real freesaw of danger with dodgeball that you don't get with other sports that PE teachers let you play most of the time.

No, there's not a lot of gladiatorial combat in gym class.

No, and I think that even if I wasn't able to articulate that, I was fascinated by it.

I was like, oh, whoa, this feels like there's actual stakes here.

It wasn't until high school gym class where they started making us play Ultimate Frisbee that I was allowed to hurt myself even more.

Before the dodgeball, though, we have what Keith sort of alluded to, which is that as they are sort of testing Tezgera and his team to see if they want to join, Killua says, Show us your wren.

We'll decide if we want you afterwards.

Which I think is the exact line that Tezgera gave.

And there's something so delightfully petty about this, which is that Killua is not really beefing with the official audition process, the one with the long line of people where they met Pooh Hat, etc.

He's beefing with that horrible little, what he perceived as the personal slight of show us the wren in the corridor outside the auction house.

Like, Kilua is not someone you ever want to have holding a grudge against you because he'll hold on to it for the rest of his fucking life.

I can just tell.

Yes.

Yeah.

Do you think he would still hold the grudge after he gets this sort of satisfaction here?

Do you think that frees him from it?

No, I think it's just Killer seems like the type to hold a grudge forever.

But once he gets one over on you regarding whatever the grudge was about, we'll probably give up on said grudge.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That seems right to me.

I really like the two different modes.

Goan was so mad at the moment and like storming out of the hallway and was like pacing back and forth.

And Killer was like, chill out.

He was right.

And then now things have circled back around.

It's the first time Killer was shown any animosity or even that he cared about this at all, you know, sort of relishing in the opportunity to kind of

embarrass Tezgara, which they do do.

They immediately, he shows off by jumping super high into the air.

And they immediately just break his record.

Yeah.

This is the closest thing we've seen to Nen flight so far, right?

It's very Dragon Ball.

It's very Dragon Ball.

It's very Dragon Ball.

Especially when they just hang up there for a while.

Yeah.

I don't remember how much of it was in what we watched in Dragon Ball.

But yeah, there's a lot of Dragon Ball, like early Dragon Ball before people had learned to fly, where they spend minutes fighting in midair just because they've jumped so high.

Oh, well, the end of the Tian Shinhan fight has that extremely cool idea.

Oh, yeah.

They're fighting in the sky and then they're falling.

And most of the episode is them falling through the sky.

The commentator gets in a little capsule court.

It's so good.

Oh, my God.

What is it?

It's like a little

plane or something.

Yeah, like a little sky scooter or something.

Yeah.

It's great.

Yeah.

Goat and Kiliua, you know, just do this kind of

Ren flight effortlessly.

And it really brought home to me that Goan and Kiliua are very capable, but they just don't know stuff.

You know, so often, once they are told about a thing, they just have a go at it and do very well.

And there's certain aspects of Biscuy's training that's like there is actual physical progress that needs to be made.

But we've seen on several occasions, Gon and Kili were learning about some sort of new nen technique that they hadn't even begun to conceive of.

And

immediately putting it into practice.

Just being like, oh, right, of course.

They really like kind of repeatedly show that their biggest impediment is their inexperience and not.

Yeah.

Like we don't spend a ton of time training.

And even the training that they've done is like, like, here's like

basic stuff plus stuff you've never heard of that you just need to now hear of.

Um,

and then once they've heard of it, yeah, they had never heard of using Nen to jump high, and then immediately, what did they jump like 45 feet in the air?

It was crazy.

It's great.

Um, uh,

someone said, I think Killiwa says to Goan, you won't stop until you win.

This is a piece of essentially textbook foreshadowing

as the dodgeball tournament begins to hover over the horizon.

Goan throws a little fit

because he lost by like a few feet to Kilo's jump.

And Gohan's like, let's keep going.

And Kilo's like, no, because I know you'll eventually beat me.

And I don't want that to happen.

But they silently, they never say it.

They never talk about that it's happening.

But in the background of Sesgar like thinking about all this stuff.

They do keep jumping.

I can't remember if Goan wins, but he does win.

It's so funny.

It's really.

He does win out at getting to keep trying.

I don't remember if he ever ever wins, though.

There have been a few moments where the show has really played with the depth of the frame.

It's not something that it does a lot of the time.

I think in part to sort of

keep a focused camera, keep focused storytelling on the small cast in a mid-shot.

But there have been a few instances of people doing things.

often out of focus in the background uh and it's it's really funny i say focus that um everything's all in focus because it's animated i mean uh like focus of the the scene, not camera focus.

Yeah.

I feel like they've, I can't remember a specific time, but I feel like they've done that with Leorio a few times, where like Leorio is in the background, like doing something goofy.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

He would.

Yep, there's up to 97 cards.

They're now only missing Strip of Beach and Wildluck Alexandrite, which is a reminder: is card number 75 that Gon and Kiloa got from helping the sick villagers be not sick villagers.

And then I think they sort of stuck in the good way.

Yeah, I I think they just sort of rush into this montage of the new team kind of winning at sports.

Well, so there are sports that they know about.

They are beach volleyball, wrestling, boxing, soccer, juggling, free throws, sumo, bowling, and ping-pong.

And they're like, but

there are going to be some others that we don't need.

Because we haven't spelled it out, I think it's worth saying.

The reason that they're looking for nine players is because they know that the amount of players who are kind of skilled at Greed Island are massively outnumbered by essentially jobbers.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, people who accidentally wound up at Greed Island without realizing how serious it is.

Or who were like good enough to pass the test.

No, no, I reckon these are people even pre-test.

These are people who are, yeah, who are just sort of stuck in the game.

But they need 15 players to...

sort of trigger the raid.

So they've sort of settled on this nine-player count as like, this is probably the

easiest number of skilled players we can get and we're just gonna fill in the rest of the crew and we see them it is so funny the way that tagashi draws these people because it's like a perfect inversion of his freaks these are all the most normie people he could draw and by dint of that kind of loop back around and become sort of magnificent again but you know the thing that's so funny about it is that he's sort of saying the same thing about them that he was saying in the hunter the first hunter exam but for the opposite reason like and so he's portrayed them oppositely where it's like these are all people who could have like just barely passed or not passed the hunter exam

and they wound up in here because they learned about nen but they could have just as easily been you know uh fighters in either the first or second hunter exam but like before

though that kind of person was scary and now they're like office nerds.

Like these are basically wearing, these are basically point dexters.

It's like, what if Nicholas passed the exam, right?

It's worse than Nicholas.

Nicholas knew how to use his computer.

I think it is worse than Nicholas.

I think it feels worse than Nicholas, but I think that Nicholas would lose in a fight to any of these guys.

Yeah.

Probably.

Unless he has a Nen robot.

Nicholas doesn't game.

I don't know what Nicholas's Nen power be.

If Nicholas had a Nen robot, he would would have used it to win the first trial instead of flunking out.

Well, no, I mean, assuming, you know, he passed the hunter and

okay.

Trey and I are working on our Nicholas as the main character AU.

Yeah.

It's a really odd AU.

It's really weird.

Nobody likes it.

We're constantly told to stop.

They focus a little bit in on the boxing.

They basically reveal that the boxer that beat their old friend wasn't shit, and there's like a special rune in the boxing ring.

This is making

Jack's take on about the sacred text or divine script, that's what it's called.

Yeah, it's baffling, isn't it?

Yeah, it really is just like a fun thing to just throw out there and not elaborate on at all.

So it's not quite a rune.

We actually get this extreme.

So, you know, we've seen previously that the ring has this sort of pattern drawn in the middle of it, just like a pattern in a boxing ring.

And we get an extreme close-up on it and see that it is just

like that,

like the monk in the Japanese horror film Kaidan, who gets the script written on his face.

This is just tiny cramped writing of Nen script that boosts the teleportation power.

So our

Barry,

Sasgara guy, I think his name actually is Barry.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Just sort of pummels him into the corner of the ring so he can't get the power of that.

The first guy was like, I'm an emitter too, so we're going to go blow for blow emitting.

This guy was like, fuck that.

I'm just going to be strong and and get it too close.

He's gonna stomach you.

Yeah.

It's uh, I don't know what to do with divine script.

Um, yeah, I was just wondering if you could think of a way it could fit into that.

Yeah, is there any sort of framework that you've come up with that maybe that can slot into?

I'm feeling explicit about this.

No, no.

You know,

this is like the opposite because it's divine, right?

Oh, oh.

But also, here's something that I do think is actually kind of maybe worth mentioning is if it's nen script on this, is it the first time we've had any sort of like divine meaning ascribed to Nen?

Um, it might,

or am I wrong?

It could just be a name.

Wing wrote Nen writing on the little bands, yeah.

Oh, no, uh, but he's still saying that, like, the use of the word divine, right?

Yes, yeah, that's more what I mean

for sure.

Yeah,

that's the thing that I kind of like was like, oh, huh, never really considered that.

Yeah, I, I,

I don't really know what to do with Nen's script, if I'm being honest.

It's something that's come up a few times, and it is so compelling

and inscrutable.

It's sort of like a slippery idea that

a lot of Nen, you know, is being utilized on a sort of case-by-case basis, you know, where it's like, well, it can do this and it enables us to do that.

But there's something so compelling about the idea of like writing out nen.

Now,

what is it that Bisky and Karapica both say about Nen?

They're like, well, of course you could do it like this.

You know, of course you can put Nen on a person.

So it would make absolute sense to write out Nen's script.

But it's not the same script that

the characters use, the hunter text.

No.

It's its own sort of cursive.

Very, very strange.

I would be so interested to see if the,

you know, roving spotlight of Tagashi's interest ever settles on Nen's script at some point, either in the anime or deeper into the manga.

You know, I don't think Tagashi is the sort to be like, unless he is.

Here is how Nenscript works, but I do wonder if he's ever going to zero in on it a bit more.

I mean, if he does, you can bet that there's going to be like four chapters on it.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

It will be a PowerPoint.

Yeah.

He'll teach you how to write it or some things.

Yeah.

So Barry wins boxing.

Rodriote wins bowling.

Kess wins basketball.

And this is where Razor is like, okay, I get it.

They pass.

He's smiling very placidly about this with a sort of like, yeah, okay.

It'll be, I'll I'll tell you this, it'll be really freaky if he ever decides to be a scary guy all of a sudden.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, so we twisted.

I find this next bit really funny because one of the pirates sort of suddenly remembers that he's supposed to be a pirate and not a gymnasium guy.

And it's like, I am launching a classical pirate mutiny.

He says, I'm sick of all these games.

It's like, you know, we'll get the boys who agree with me together.

We're all going to leave.

And then he just says, we can get on a boat and leave the island.

We can just sail out of here.

Razor takes this well, huh?

Yeah, this is Bopobo, the guy that Kilua set on fire.

The thing that makes him snap is the idea that he will not get a rematch with Kilua, who he is holding a grudge, a pretty well-earned grudge against, I think.

Kilua did on fire.

And, right, so

he does a couple of things.

So, first of all, he instigates a mutiny.

And then the second and maybe the worst thing, according to Razor, is that he kind of lets it slip that they're on an island and they could sail back to the real world.

He broke taboo.

Yes, he broke taboo.

Is that what they say?

Broke?

Yeah, that's what at least my.

Does anybody want to describe what happens if Razor catches you breaking taboo?

I would love to, but first, I actually want to point out another detail.

Prior to this, Razor says, sort of tauntingly, want to go back to jail, Bopobo?

Which immediately rang alarm bells for me, because this is not the first time we have seen hunters using prison labor.

There is more to it than that,

if there can be, but I was immediately reminded of the really blasé way the hunters will instrumentalize prisoners' bodies as part of hunter games.

Because it's not just, you know, we use prisoners for labor.

In both these cases, it is sort of manning prisoners as a fighting force where their lives are on the line.

So then,

sort of, without really stopping him in the sense of saying, stop talking, he just charges up in his hand, sort of like one of the bolts that he used earlier to destroy the Phantom Troops boat, rip Nobunaga.

Gannon.

Am I remembering this right?

He tosses it very slowly at him.

It kind of moves very slowly, and then it hits his head and blows the top corner of his head clean off.

We're back in Tagashi head trauma zone again.

We've got a couple moments of it.

Yeah, not just head trauma.

It's like

Tagashi will

remove parts of people's heads.

Yeah, no, no, this dude's head gets a blitter.

It's gone.

Yeah.

It is like he is fully decapitated is like

the way that he just he just keels over and of course all the useless idiots that um gone's team has acquired yeah they have you know just like bob and carl and mike are all just like oh we got to leave yeah we are getting my mom's calling jeff has to keep being reminded that like they don't have to fight

Actual mom calling or were you being one of the things that you're talking about?

No, no, that was a joke.

That was one of the calls.

Thank goodness.

Yeah, no, no, no.

They have to keep being reminded that they don't have to fight, that there's not like a that there's enough of them that they don't have to set foot.

Now, this does get complicated a little bit, and they I think they all just leave, right?

Eventually.

They all leave eventually, but they get talked down from leaving here

at first.

It really puts into, you know, it really shows the contrast here.

Like, these are all hunters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

Tesgara and these guys have the same job.

Yes.

We've talked about this in the past, though, actually,

in scenes where,

what was her name?

Beast?

Oh, oh, Beast?

Oh, yeah, yeah,

yeah.

We had a really good chat when she was around and Squala and kind of that and Basho, that crew, about how funny it is to see hunters interacting with normal people.

And I think that this is another really fun take on that, right?

Where it's like, it's what you say, Keith.

These people are also hunters, but ultimately,

any time that you can, yeah, anytime that you can play Gonzo Hunter stakes against civilians, it produces such a funny effect.

Um, it really is like watching people operating on different levels of reality, except one person's level of reality is extremely understandable, and one group of reality is just monumentally stupid.

The hunters are so dumb.

I like

Kilo steps in to do some rules lawyering, which I think is really funny because it ends up not mattering.

But Kilo realizes that Babubo has to lose sumo wrestling because he's dead now.

And since they technically didn't choose who was going to fight him,

they can just assign that win to one of the losers.

And Razor's like, yeah, whatever.

We're doing something else now.

We are playing dodgeball.

Killu is just sort of like, well, you can have the win and points at one of the useless guys with a stripey shirt.

And it's such good animation from the animation team.

They managed to convey both

these three things.

Horror that Killiwa has turned and pointed at him.

Fear.

And then number two, shock that he's been given the win.

And then number three, kind of delight that he's been given the win.

Really nuanced animation in just like a single moment.

It's great.

It did also make me think that if I was in a high-stakes situation and Killua Zelda turned and pointed at me, even if he was on my side, I would be afraid.

I'd be like, Yeah,

I just don't want that eye turned to me.

What if it's his kitty cat eye?

Kitty Cat Killer is mostly reserved for hunters, for other

comrades, I think.

Yeah, um, Razor says, It's time for an eight-on-eight game of dodgeball.

My note says, Where is the gorilla?

I mean, dodgeball is clearly about to happen.

Right behind me, isn't it?

Dodgepall is about to happen imminently, and there's still no gorilla.

Wouldn't it have been so funny if there was a second dodgeball in a later episode, and that's when the gorilla was there?

I hadn't thought of that.

I never even conceived of that as an option.

It's like what you said in the last episode, Keith.

The closer we get to gorilla arrival, the funnier the absence of the gorilla is.

And at this point, it is just a fever pitch, as far as I'm concerned.

Because

if you had never guessed what the nature of the gorilla is, then surely you're like, the speed at which gorilla must be introduced as a character, it must be a breakneck turn of events.

Like Kool-Aid Man style gorillas crashing through the wall and saying, we're here to play dodgeball.

Yes.

You called?

I had no idea.

I heard you needed two more for Dodgeball.

But we actually get, I got a really great screenshot answer sort of immediately, which is one of the first things that I noticed in that screenshot.

I hate to keep going back to this, but it is sort of a foundational document for this project, is the screenshot stream.

It's like a weird hooded figure.

And I asked about this hooded figure, and Keith and Sylvie said, Someone here has a power of sort of creating, I don't remember exactly what you say, but sort of like creating

entities, sort of puppets, puppet entities they call them nen beasts in the show yeah um and that and but you didn't say any more than that so i couldn't tell whether this hooded figure was one of them or was a way to counter that or something like that but it turns out that what what has actually happened is that razor's 14

devils are not actually the pirates they are his nen ability to summon yeah a group of numbered men.

And he starts by summoning seven.

But the fact that his net ability is called the 14 devils gives us a clue as to what might be happening.

These guys are great.

Does someone want to describe this character art?

Because it's so cool.

To me, they remind me of...

Remember when

Karapika was getting the

test done to see if he was like worthy...

Like the who's the worthy bodyguard test?

And they had the nen puppets there.

They kind of feel similar to those guys in a few ways to me personally.

Yeah.

They're a little more menacing.

Yeah.

They have big, sharp, interlocking teeth.

And that's like most of their face is teeth.

Yeah.

The rest of their, everything above their mouth is covered by their hat.

So it's like pulled down over where might be their eyes and nose.

Or might be more teeth.

Their bodies, they're all different shapes and sizes.

But they're wearing like white, like white pajama set

with numbers on the front and also on their blue hats there's a real thing one and thing two for the cat in the hat

happening here they're like murderous dodgeball thing one and thing two and then their hats have like motion moc balls on them corresponding to their number so that they're razor is very sure like that there's multiple ways for you to know which number guy this is

It's great.

And this ends up being relevant in a way that I wasn't predicting, which is really fun.

These guys are more than just, I mean, they're not much more than just some summon Nem beasts, but the way in which they are a bit more ends up being really entertaining.

Their number also, this is well, this is maybe something that gets revealed a little bit later on, but their number also seems to correspond to their strength or ability in some way,

or size, even.

Like, number two's the smallest one.

Yeah.

But number one is like, not, is like kind of in the middle.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hmm.

Gorianu does some more rules lawyering and they sort of determine that this game is going to be over.

This game is going to decide the whole thing because the elimination of a player counts as a win.

And with this many players on the field dodgeball court?

What do you call it?

I would say court.

Pitching in the diamond.

Pitching is what they're doing with the balls.

Right, right, right.

They pitch the dodgeball.

This is going to be over pretty quickly.

This is so funny.

They need two useless players and nobody wants to do it.

And I wrote down, it's his time.

By God, that's rude music.

But I still had no idea.

He needed someone.

He sounds kind of like Optimus Prime.

Well, Optimus Prime in Beast Wars, what is he?

Oh,

he's a gorilla.

And

Razor says, well, look, the ball that that we're using is just a regular dodge ball.

However, I am going to imbue it with Nen.

So it is just as strong as the projectile I launched earlier, which blew

that guy's head off.

And this is when they all pee.

They all pee their pants.

All the useless people.

Yeah.

Goan says, if our lives are on the line, we should only field willing players, which is some really nice, transparent Goan philosophy.

It's not the line he always takes, which is interesting.

Well, I don't know.

I think this is a line that he takes, and they show us the sort of dark mirror of this line in these episodes.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Yes, I suppose that's true.

But

I would just as easily have bought Goan as a weirdie saying, well, look, we're...

No, because they were actually signed up.

When they signed up, they were told that they wouldn't have to.

Right.

Yeah.

You know, that they could throw the ghost.

I think that's the crux of yeah right at least to me it was like gone doesn't want to go back on a deal or a promise he made to some people

reminds me of his arguments with crowlo and the and the spiders being like why do you why do you kill people why can't you like see how it painful it is for like people to die and i think he i think that he's pretty consistent on like not

wanting like

to kill random people which comes up actually just now because he then turns this like kind of not wanting people who weren't really involved,

not wanting those people to die, and he asks about Popobo.

He's like, Wasn't that your friend?

And

wasn't he your friend, this guy?

I don't know what vibe he was picking up that they were all friends, but I know.

Gone.

You're so naive.

They hang out.

That means they're friends.

Desguera has an interesting little button on this.

He says, The pirates are real death row criminals.

Yeah.

So his execution was fair.

Yeah, he says execution was warranted.

There's a whole thing.

There's a whole thing part of this where Razor's like, no, he was a murderer and worse, other stuff, lots of bad crimes.

He was on death row.

Tesgara's like, everyone's kind of confused because it seems like a lot of people thought maybe they were made of nen until this guy's head got blown off.

Tesgara also has to go, this is a real place.

Greed Island is real.

Everybody realizes.

It's great.

Everybody realizes, except for Hisuka, who's like, he's right.

He already knew, of course.

Because of course he knows.

Biscuit says it didn't even occur to me that that might be true.

And then Saskara says that Razor is a game master, one of the creators of the game.

And this is where Goan gets kind of a look in his eye because if he's

going to the game, he knows about Jing.

Oh my God.

Razor realizes that this is Goan and suddenly pauses with Evil Ren.

I mean, it's not Evil Ren.

You don't want to bustle Purple Nen.

You don't want to buy a newspaper.

When the Purple Nenger is bad news.

Yeah, that's what it is.

Our heroes have used Purple Nen in the past, but I really do mostly associate it with...

I've called it Malevolent Nen previously.

Have they?

And I suppose heroes can be malevolent.

Have they?

Gone and Kilua?

I'm sure we have seen that.

And I know that Wing has, because Wing is showing them Malevolent Nen.

We've also had some of that with

Ilumi and Hisuka, right?

Like, Ilumi and Hisuka definitely are purple.

Yeah, Hisuka was the first time we ever saw it.

Well, I was thinking of also Ilumi's stuff with Kilua in the Hunter exam.

That was all Purple Nan.

Like, purple is just the quick shorthand for this is kind of noxious energy.

Yeah,

for sure.

Yeah.

He says,

Your dad told me not to go easy on you when you get here.

Yeah.

And then Goan's shocked face turns into like a grin of resolution.

Yes.

Hey, you know when he made this face?

When he had to hunt Hithuka?

Yep.

Yeah.

Yep.

It's interesting that this is also sort of a stand-in for Jing in this moment.

I can't fight my dad,

but I can fight you.

God, I wish you could, Ghan.

I wish you could.

This is punching your uncle.

Yeah, but to be clear, when I say I can't fight my dad, I don't mean that in the sense that Gohan wants to exact revenge or something on his dad.

Goam, I think we'll just be delighted to get him.

Yeah, he wants to fight him for friendship.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh, Goan.

I just

a really great bit.

There's so much interesting Goan stuff happening in all of this.

Like,

this guy getting killed.

He didn't really do anything, but also he's a murderer.

So he kills people.

But also, even murderers shouldn't be killed, which is what he did with the spiders.

And also, his dad's involved because he made the game, and this guy made the game, and so they knew each other.

This guy, and like all these kind of like different angles of Goan stuff is kind of collapsing into

like potential energy for this fight.

It's great.

It's great.

You know, we talk almost incessantly about the way that Shonen stages fights as expressions of ideology.

But part of the supporting sort of scaffolding to make those things work is is that you need to surround the fights with these pressing questions, right?

With

give the characters levers to pull.

And you have to think about their levers to watch to see them pulling them.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I think that when I have seen

shonen fight ideology that hasn't hit as hard for me in stuff like early or inconsequential fights in Dragon Ball, it's because I haven't felt those sort of axes coming, axises coming into alignment, you know, to make the fight work.

But here, as we embark on three episodes of Dodgeball, there is so much work going into like what are the emotive, pressing, kind of animating stakes of this thing.

Speaking of, Gorinu says, I'll count as three and summons two gorillas.

It's almost unceremonious considering how the gorillas have been built up.

No, Keith, not how the gorillas have been built up.

How the gorilla has been built up.

Right, gorilla.

The funniest possible

punchline to this is that there are 100% more gorillas.

Yeah, there's a gorilla that you didn't know about.

I actually ran through this while I was watching.

I was like, now that we're here, is it going to be kind of shitty that the gorilla was just a magic trick the whole time?

And then I saw the two gorillas passing the ball back and forth.

And I was like, it helps that there's two.

Yeah, it really helps.

It's

funny.

They do.

And we'll get into them later.

These are some pretty cool gorillas.

Yeah.

I want to say as well about how

what a

what a treat.

What a lovely.

So much of that first stream was about the limitations and possibilities inherent in interpreting an image as opposed to interpreting a moving image, you know?

That whole game was about how much can you claw from an image without context.

And it is so joyful and such a lovely coder to that stream

that

there was something that I was missing because I was looking at a single image.

You know, I was not looking at a reverse shot.

I was not looking at a pan.

I was not looking at a tiny out-of-context clip.

There was information that I never could have gotten because a character was just off-screen.

And that is, there's something really playful and fun about that.

And it speaks to why making these kinds of projects with my friends is so enjoyable that after all this time, we can run into a twist ending that kind of came about because we were looking at images.

Yeah.

And this whole time, this whole time, I've been thinking about these gorillas.

Like, I know that you also have, but I was so excited to finally get here.

So excited to get here.

I will say, you know, not to, not to do some, some killer-style rules lawyering here, these are nen summons, not people, and nen summons don't tend to have names.

So the fact that this gorilla doesn't have a name is,

uh, makes more sense to me now that I know that this is a nen summon.

What I will say is that the uh nen

powers do have names.

This does not have a name

at least at least not here.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Gerenu never says the name of the of the power that he uses to to

with the gorillas.

Gorilla delight.

This is where we learn a lot about the rules.

This is where we learn a lot about the rules of dodgeball.

Do we care about this?

No.

Okay.

Yeah.

There's there's a terribly.

I don't think we need to.

There's like two minutes of specifics.

There's the

one thing is that to me in dodgeball, if you catch a dodgeball that's thrown, you're usually out.

That is not true here.

And then the other important thing is

ricochet.

The ricochet is count.

So if it bounces off of you and hits another person, you're both out.

But that person could also save you.

But also it's still, it can cross the line.

If it crosses the line, then that person is out.

as if you had thrown the ball.

That is essentially the two important.

Oh, and you can come back once.

One per there's one revive per team.

Those are the important things.

Yeah.

And now they're playing dodgeball.

Well, something's going on here that is going to pose not so much a challenge for us, because I think as this game progresses, the stuff that is going to be most interesting for us to talk about is what is going on sort of

on the other level of the game.

But a lot of this rule setup really is to enable Tagashi and the anime team to stage a pretty entertaining game of dodgeball.

The game works.

It's perhaps not entirely clear where all the players are at various moments, but I feel like a lot of this rules talk enables us to get to a place that is interesting to us as a viewer, but not terribly interesting as the project of Media Club Plus, which is what follows is just a a fairly exciting game of dodgeball.

The interesting thing about this to me, and this becomes even more intense

later on in the fight when Ghon starts doing his thing.

Oh, it's so cool.

This is

not just in pace, but in like

structure,

even down to the geography, the closest that we've seen to like

another like power battle shonen style fight.

Yeah, it's a dodgeball guy.

It's a guides with like uh you know usually there's an imaginary line they have made the line real that there that isn't you know crossed and they're kind of shouting ideas back and forth at each other and threats and tactics and then every once in a while lobbing a big attack

and i'm watching it i'm like this is like the closest that we've seen to maybe something from dragon ball z like where goes fighting frieza it's also very classic sports anime in a lot of ways Like just for sure.

Yeah.

Now what was the what was the I know that sports anime was big when

around the time when this was airing, but what was going on with sports anime back when this was being

released as a manga?

I don't really know.

I don't really know either, honestly.

For the listener who might not be super up on it, could someone give just like a one-sentence description of what sports anime is?

Oh, it's l it's just it what we're talking about is literally just taking the shounen tone and structure in a lot of ways and just applying it to sports.

High school, volleyball.

Yeah.

Haikyu is the best one.

Yep.

That's what I've heard.

Yeah.

They play volleyball in Haikyu.

Oh my god.

Maybe we should watch some Haikyu.

I would absolutely watch some Haikyu.

Yeah.

Do they have two gorillas?

That's actually a deal breaker for me if they don't have gorillas.

But they have a little guy who can jump really high.

Oh, great.

Yeah, that helps.

Yeah, so, I mean, I asked that because on the one hand, sports anime sort of explains what it is in the title.

But I thank you also, Sylvie, for like tying that together with Shounen.

Because I think sort of characteristic to it for me is the way it is turning a lot of shounen aesthetics towards sports.

Well, yeah, it's one of those things where it's like

sports anime is like sports series are popular both like with the in the shounen and shoujo publications.

They just kind of have different tones, but like this very very much is the tone of something like a HaiQ or a, like, um,

what's one that's popular?

Blue, is Blue Shift the soccer one that's popular right now?

Um, where it's like, there's the talking about, I actually haven't seen it, so I don't know if this happens in that other one.

I just was like, what's a touchstone?

Anyway, they did the like planning on the field and like.

Oh, it sure is nice of everyone to let the game pause while they figure out their plans.

Right.

It happens a lot, you know?

That's how football looks.

Yeah.

I mean, I guess that is like the thing that keeps it so in touch with Shounen as a genre is like the commitment to treating time

super valuably.

Yeah.

It's what you need it to be in whatever moment you're in.

That's kind of how it's treated.

As the game begins, the referee introduces himself.

He is number zero of the 14 Devils.

This is a very polite man.

Throughout the entire course of this game, even as almost lethal dodgeball is being played and people are getting put out, the ref shows no bias towards Razor.

There's no twist that the ref is sort of working against them.

The ref will arbitrate on rules in favor of the players or in favor of Razor, depending on how the rules go.

Yes, he's very impartial.

Yeah, which makes sense.

Razor just killed a guy for not playing the game right.

It's so funny.

He's also got this big, you know, big toothed,

sort of like a saw-tooth smile.

He's wearing blue.

The others are all wearing white.

He's also the only one that speaks.

He's the only one that speaks, and his spoken affect is so sort of like gentle and

calming.

Yes.

Killiwa will ask him for rules clarifications and he'll be like, okay, right.

Rule, you know, we're going to do this.

Very sweet.

Here to do a job.

I do want to mention the little

PowerPoint presentation that Razor gives on how the rules has this very cute little art style, these like little chibi versions of the field.

That is very funny.

I just shared a picture of that.

That'll be in with the screenshots.

I love these.

These are so fun.

Razor is very, very, very, very, very, very good at dodgeball.

It becomes clear

immediately that their main...

Avenue for success is deny Razor possession.

Yes.

Because when he's got the ball,

it's real bad for you.

There are very few characters that we have met who could survive a dodgeball thrown by Razor.

Including Gorinu.

Gorinu takes the brunt of the first throw, and he has such a good line as it comes towards him.

He says, Can I dodge it?

Can I catch it and live?

No.

Death and the kanji for death appears on screen.

Oh, good.

So, what does he do in order to not die?

He shouts, white Gorinu.

And we learn the power of the white gorilla, which is that it swaps places with Gorinu, and I think gets a hole blown clean through its body by the dodgeball.

It explodes his head.

He gets the same exact wound that Bopobo does.

Yep, and that's the end of him.

It's so funny when the gorilla gets hit, by the way.

Like, sorry to PETA or whatever, but like, it's so freaking funny.

Sylvia, I do want to say that the gorilla was never real.

No, I know.

people, I don't think it's a problem.

I just said it's funny.

But someone might get upset with someone who's not listening.

I like haven't seen that this gorilla has a human face and a beard.

Yeah, he does have a human face and a manicured beard.

Yeah, a very well-groomed beard.

Yeah.

To your point, Keith, about this gorilla not being real, I do think it's notable that we get a pretty lovingly animated.

Oh, right.

There's two ways that he's not real.

He's not real, as in he's not in real life, and he's also not a real gorilla in the world

yes yes he is but he is a fake gorilla even by their terms he fades away yoda style the way we've seen nen summons kind of kind of disappear and i think that that is really deliberate given the pool of blood we saw spreading underneath poor popobo um

a lot of business was made in the early part of this episode about like wait a second these guys are real they are not nen constructs and i feel that that is hammered home by seeing the gorilla you know, fade away in

the blue and white light.

But the whole time that this is happening, Popobo is just like dead and in a pool of blood somewhere

in the gym.

Yeah, if you guys carry him out

early on, we see them

carrying him away.

There is extremely fast square passing here.

The 14 devils, or the seven devils, I guess, start passing the ball, which is

glowing with purple, malevolent, Ren.

I do like

the thing that immediately precedes this is

they get a couple of the devils out, and Razor just goes like, okay.

And Grady's like, what?

Okay, what?

He's like, okay, time for me to win.

Time for you to lose this.

He says, oh, here it is.

I'm prepared to defeat you now is what he says.

Oh, it's

chilling.

Me and my stupid watermelon shoes.

Says Gara gets absolutely.

his shoes suck.

And at the end, they're coming apart.

His design is so good, except for his stupid shoes.

His shoes, whack.

His smile, whack.

The way he looks at the Dodgeball,

really good.

Me, I'm dope as fuck.

Port Sesgera gets walloped by a dodgeball and goes down hard.

He is not dead, but it is not good.

Two pirates as doctors come rushing in with a little doctor's bag, and says Gara's like, no, no, I'll be fine.

I love the irony here.

He's looking at Greynu like after having watched, you know, his life flash before his eyes and just barely escaped with his head.

And Sesgara is like, he's done.

He's too emotionally damaged to be of any use now.

He's broken.

And then Sesgara immediately gets literally broken by, you know,

by not even like a charged up ball.

Razor just throws it.

And it hits him like in the spine.

Well, so we do get, there's I noticed this during the shot.

If you look at Cesgaro when he's getting hit, you can kind of see his Nen

on his back there.

And it's like a really nice little detail that it's like, oh, he tried to stop it, and it still fucked him up.

He did, yeah.

They say Razor's like, use just enough protective Nen to avoid a fatal blow.

Yeah.

Which he does seem almost dead.

Razor's out here trying to just kill him straight up.

Yeah, for real.

Look,

they tell you when you go into Greed Island that you will die in here.

Hey, Razor, buddy, my kid's gonna come through here at some point yeah kill him this is a game for people who take care of it for me this is a game for people who want to play a game that can kill you for real this is a game where you can die in the game well but that's the 100 level class for hunters they're useless

people don't know that no people do know Do they know that?

Okay.

Yeah, everybody knows going in.

Yeah.

They talk about it at like the auction specifically.

Right.

They do say if you die in the game, you die in real life.

Maybe I'm sure there's some people who got in there the first time and maybe didn't know that.

My memory is that this is it's even some of the like free information that they got off the hunter website, like not even the stuff they had to pay for, that they were like, Yeah, you die in the game, you die in real life.

Hey, but one side.

Oh, sorry.

Do we know what the origin point for if you die in the game, you die in real life is as like a cultural phrase?

Oh, uh, is it existence?

Wait, I think it's I always thought it was a uh like play on if you die in the matrix, you die.

In the matrix, yeah, that's what I think,

but like

I'm googling.

I feel like I was just thinking about this a couple months ago, and I don't remember anymore.

The 1976 science fiction novel Dream Park by Larry Niven.

Wait, please give me the one-sentence synopsis of Dream Park because it sounds to me like it's a theme park where if you die in the theme park, you die in real life.

Do you, uh, I have a one-sentence synopsis from Reddit.

Hit it.

In the novel, a group of gamers participate in a live-action role-playing game called Dream Park, where they enter virtual reality scenarios that can result in real harm or death if they fail.

What year is this?

76.

Neuromancer is 1984.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

Whoa.

I want to read.

I want to read

Dream Park.

I bet the cover's fucking sick.

When I look this up on Wikipedia, it says 81 instead of 76.

Oh, I mean, that was just a comment on Reddit.

So

they're allowed to get the year wrong.

That's fine.

Yeah.

Still three years before.

Okay, so I will say this.

The modern cover of Dream Park is not very good.

It's,

I'm pasting it here.

It's two people kind of in uniform standing in front of a silver dragon with a sort of city in the background.

However, yeah, I was about to say, you got that old cover?

Because it bangs.

I got a new old covers.

Look at this shit.

Oh, yeah, no, this is the shit I'm here for.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, what I would like is to...

I would like for the covers to be highlighting the park a little more.

What, you sure you don't mean this gigantic baboon, Keith?

Yeah, wow.

They got gorillas in Dream park yeah look these are the two gorillas

oh this one is beautiful this is a really odd cover it's like a blue sunny day and it's all building and a hand reaching out

this is my favorite i like that one the best I do like all the and Stephen Barnes.

I know.

And Stephen Barnes.

And Stephen Barnes.

There's a really nice Tesgara moment here when he realizes that he has neglected basic training.

In a really sort of simple, fundamental way, he's like, I haven't actually worked on the fundamentals for a long time.

Which is notable given Biscuit's insistence on focusing on the fundamentals in Greed Island and Sezgera's sort of gentle plotline about

the experience difference between him and the kids.

I think it's notable that here, as he sort of lies wounded, he's like, I was missing out on the very thing that these kids have been being trained in.

You know, that

I lack that proximity to learning that these kids are in right now.

And in that way, they get a big advantage over me, even though I am technically a more experienced fighter.

And all of this kind of endeared me to Tezgera.

He's a character that has sort of snuck up on me.

He doesn't have a, he doesn't, frankly, have a lot of character.

He doesn't have a lot of development.

He's introduced, and you're never quite sure whether or not he's going to be a villain inside the game, you know, working against Gun and Killier.

But by this point, I'm like, this dude's all right.

It's just really...

It's just really well-done shift that

they're able to do in Hunter Hunter

where a character can change from being...

like a plot obstacle, someone that's there to like cause,

you know, different kinds of tension in the story and shift them from being an obstacle to a character, like really gently.

And it's like, oh, all of a sudden, like I've been hearing what Tesgara thinks about all this stuff.

He's been commenting on stuff.

He has opinions about Gonen Kilawa.

He has like regrets.

Like this happens.

He goes from being an obstacle to a character in half of an episode.

And most of that is like three minutes of this episode.

Like it's kind of wild.

And this is not the first time that this happens in Hunter Hunter.

Just really

elegant writing yeah it's a notable example of it though like it is it is really worth pointing out especially like

i think moving forward because like we've had a little bit of the whole like meeting gone inspiring people stuff right and like i think the most recent is like zapile being like oh maybe i should be a hunter um

right yeah like and like i I think this is another good like reinforcement of that.

The whole like, these kids are inspiring me to get back to the basics type.

He's impressed by their nen.

He's like, he's looking at them without really having seen them do a whole lot.

And he's like, I can tell that they're better than me in really important ways.

And that is like embarrassing for me.

I think part of what impresses me the most about it is its brevity or is its cleanliness.

You know, we're not talking about like a...

a really well-drawn or a really detailedly drawn character here.

You know,

what we're getting is quite thin, but it's like Tagashi and Ko have figured out how little they need to move to make this thing work and make it evocative.

And that's really impressive.

What you can do is put like googly eyes on a rock and all of a sudden

it's true.

All of a sudden, you know, it's Hank and he's your friend.

Yeah.

It's it's it's it's Gary white Gari Inu.

Quick related question.

I can't remember.

Am I the only one who is watching this with the English dub?

I did not watch it.

I was back and forth.

Yeah, I watch, yeah, I watch it a lot.

About half and half.

Do you have any thoughts on the actor who does Tescara's English dub voice?

He's a little flat, but I think he seems nice.

Yeah,

I don't think he's bad by any means, but it's kind of more just a reflection on how good the English dub is that I noticed Tescara's dub for English being just a little not as consistently good.

I wonder how much of that has to do.

I don't know why I'm jumping in here when I haven't heard it as much, but I wonder how much of that has to do with him being kind of a one-note character.

Yeah, I mean, it definitely is some of that.

Like, a lot of it is him kind of being like, it was sort of Vegeta-esque, where it's like whenever Vegeta realizes that somebody is better than him,

he's like, What the fuck?

He's so excited to be Vegeta.

It's just like, yeah, I think Keith saying flat is good.

Yeah, because it is just a little, it's a little

the emotion isn't as strongly there.

These kids, I can't believe they're doing this.

Yeah, that's a very good grip.

It's time for a new tactic from everyone's favorite pervert clown.

And by a new tactic, I mean his number one tactic deployed here extremely effectively for a dodgeball.

There is a button that I have never pressed.

Oh, shit.

Oh.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, fuck.

We've never heard this on the show.

It's notable because...

On the media club, you mean?

Right.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, okay.

Just to be clear.

They can...

Hisuka can use his bungee gum so as not to give the ball back.

He can essentially

snap the ball back towards him on some bungee gum.

Kiriwa hopes that he'll do this, and he does.

And it works really well as his theme plays.

Hisuka's theme is one of my favorite character themes in

the show.

Okay, so I have two things about two things.

The first thing, Jack, what you just said, I love the point that you've made a lot of times in Hunter Hunter when it's relevant about how useful it can be to not have a character theme that is tied too closely to a character to be able to

use things for feelings and moments instead of just like, this is what plays when this character shows up.

But then holding Hisuka's in reserve.

Yeah.

Is so good.

This only ever plays for Hisuka, and it makes it that much more his.

And it only plays rarely.

I mean, it played quite a lot in the early days when the composers wanted to establish that this was his cue very clearly.

But we've had a lot of Hisuka in the last, you know, we had him appearing for the first time in a while, and his theme didn't play.

I think his theme played very, very rarely in York New City.

Maybe not at all, I think.

Maybe not at all.

Because it's really just like an engaged song.

Like, when Hisuka turns on and he's like,

not like that.

Because that's always true.

Yeah, we do get a lot of it.

We get a lot of it.

We get a lot of little moments of it.

Where like you could, it's usually Hisuka is like, you know, dial turned to 10 on that stuff.

It's right on the front page.

These episodes have a lot of like, if you're not looking at Hisuka while Gon and Kilo are talking, you might miss him being gross and weird.

Yeah.

But anyway, when he's like ready to fight, like this is his like battle music almost more than his

careful.

It's such a versatile theme because,

and this is such smart, you know, composing a cue for a character where you could play the

syncopated clapping.

part that is the very distinctive percussion and it would be enough to evoke Izeka's theme.

You could play the strummed intro on the guitar and it would be enough.

You could play the melody played up in the top part of the guitar.

You know, you can mix and match all these little elements that are on their own so distinctive that give you this real palette of how far do we want to go with this guy's theme in this moment so that we can save the bigger versions for more distinctive, you know, instances.

I think it's notable that there is a full arrangement of Hiseka's theme that we heard when he was fighting in Heaven's Arena, and that doesn't show up here.

That's a really remarkable theme where the orchestra gets given this track.

You know, it's really hard to pick out

until you're putting it on a soundboard is how good the fucking solo bit is.

It's really good.

Oh, with just the melody itself on the guitar.

It's so good.

That it's so good.

It bangs.

It's clear they've got a player who is who knows how to play that style of guitar.

Absolutely.

My guitar teacher was a flamenco guitarist.

I've heard a lot of it.

And yeah, no, that's some good shit.

It's great.

It's also

not tremendously menacing.

It's menacing in its arrival because it heralds Hiseker arriving.

But as a piece of music itself, it is more playful or it's more mysterious.

It's got a kind of...

It's works so well.

Yeah, it's got a kind of beauty to it.

Hisuka is a song in a lot of ways.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, it becomes menacing when we let it be colored by Hisuka.

Once we make the association of this means Hisuka is here and about to do shit.

Yeah.

Yeah, Hisaka is so repulsive in so many ways that it is on some level very savvy composing to give him a theme that is playful and enjoyable to listen to.

You know, if you could compose for this guy, and Hirano is definitely capable of it, we've heard him do it.

You could make his soundscape so violently oppressive that it would, it would make Hiseka extremely sour.

But you know whose theme is scary?

The Illumi, the spiders.

Their themes are scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Hiseka is scary, but

in order to make the show work, he needs to be on screen and making moves and making

tentative alliances with our characters.

Yeah, that's a heavy lift.

So give him a theme that can do some of that work for you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The theme is as malleable as the character is.

Yeah.

Smart, smart, smart composer.

I'm happy that we have to play it because it's never come up on the show since we started with buttons.

It's also like just a great example of how much restraint the production team has not to use that outside of.

Oh my god.

The temptation when you have a great theme is just to play it as often as you can.

And that's wrong.

You need to avoid that.

I actually did it correctly here.

I've seen this, I've seen Hunter Hunter all the way through now, three and a half times, I think,

and I've never gotten sick of that song.

It's so good.

I don't think I've ever gotten sick of anything except maybe the spider stuff a little bit.

Oh, the what is Reclaim Aranea?

Yeah, it's Recomme Aranea is for the spiders, and then there's the

and then there's the riot stuff, and then there's the other spider song.

There's actually two.

There's three spider songs that all really sound similar.

And they also sort of sound like the Zoldic songs.

And they kind of bleed into each other.

And that's the only music that I've ever kind of been like, okay, enough with the chanting.

You can't write.

I'm ready to leave church.

Can we

move on here?

You couldn't really write cues for every member of the Phantom Troop because it would be such a burden on your composer, right?

To be like,

and it works thematically because the spider is sort of seen as a.

Does Krollo have a theme?

Or do they just play spiders?

Krillo has the man with the

man of the cross or what is it called?

The man with the inverted cross.

The man with the inverted cross, yeah.

There are a lot of different spider themes that kind of reference each other and sound similar.

I think it's all using the same thing as a bass.

That would be the way I would do it, right?

Would be I would write a core soundscape and then

Dirge from the Dark Side, and

Riot are the three main ones.

I think there's one more, too.

They also use like just some actual fucking like

that.

Oh, and Requiem RNA.

Did I say that that was for the Zoldix earlier?

That's wrong.

I was being dumb.

No, I thought you were just including it with the Zoldix theme when you mentioned that.

Okay,

let's wrap up 69, our first episode.

These will move faster as we get into it.

We had a lot of setup to do.

Because we can talk about the Dodgeball game as a whole once we go.

There are moments that we need to hit, but we can't beat by beat go through the dodgeball game.

It wouldn't even make sense.

Has Hisaka always had these spiked fingernails that we see him having here, or is this a new part of the costume?

He has.

Okay, cool.

He has sharpened nails, but very distinctively.

Unlike Killiua's sort of sharpened nails, which are like claws, Hisaka's almost like these needle points on the end of each finger.

Really, really creepy.

Hisaka launches a bungee gum, and devil six and devil seven merge together to make 13.

Oh, it's so cool.

It's so cool.

Who's just a huge guy who breaks Hisuka's bungee gum.

Is that allowed?

says Killiwa, turning to the ref, and the ref's like, Yep.

It is, you know, we gave the ref a lot of credit for being

impartial.

This is kind of a dirty trick.

Yeah, that's not so impartial.

Nen's allowed to be used.

You're allowed to be using as much men as you are.

That's true.

Yeah, but

you're not going to be able to do that.

David Moreno does something of like a similar ilk later.

Yeah, you're right.

So they are consistent with it, but but uh, but Razor gets the upper hand by knowing first that this is a possibility.

Uh, and um,

you know, it's just like uh, they made so much about there has to be eight people that like your eight people don't always have to be eight people is kind of shady.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

You're right.

It's great.

It's such a nice moment.

It's such a nice moment to watch Nen, uh,

you know,

silly Nen games is when the show is at its most entertaining for me.

He

Razor charges up a ball and specifically aims it at Gone.

And that's sort of like the first test.

The image here is unbelievable.

This is, I feel like, where they really pay off his like kind of creepy smiling face.

Oh my god, they do.

They make all the angles so much sharper in some of these shots.

They turn him horrifying.

Yeah.

The animation also

looks really good no he turned horrifying

some of these god some of these look at the look at the way they've drawn him oh my god he's a hundred feet long in this one oh my god

i interrupted you sylvie what were you gonna say about that

he is

It's just, it's really, there's some moments that have just some incredible flourish to them, like, especially in the, the, towards the end of the Dodgeball game, but like,

um,

I thought that, like, this throw

was well done, done and like

there's there's a really good like dodge sequence later that I'm sure we're gonna mention that I was the highlight of the animation for me during these episodes.

Look at the attention to detail.

They've puffed out his cheeks for with the effort here.

Yeah.

That's great.

Yeah, no, like he's doing like he's doing like powerlifter face.

Oh, yeah.

This is happening so fast that it's hard to notice these little details, but I feel like part of the

game that the production team are playing here, part of the sort of coup de tech, coup de teatre of the thing, is like, if we're going to do what is essentially a huge shounen fight, we're going to do it with 16 people simultaneously, and we're going to pack it with these tiny details on these characters' faces.

It's wild.

This is very, very, very dense, even if a lot of what's happening is dodgeball, and we don't really need to go into.

There is an immense explosion as Gon deflects the ball his shoes go flying off it's so good or there's also another moment when

he goes flying off his shoes stay right where they were yeah the way that looks is so good

so well done so he he kind of does and i love how the the nen school pays off in moments like this where you can see him getting his um

Ken ready and Razor delivers is like, huh, Ken.

Yeah, right.

That's not going to be enough.

And right at the last minute, he shifts his Ken into a Ko to block the ball, using his neck and forehead to like brace against

so that he the most he stops with his wrists and his head and neck and

uses Ko at the last second to like act to save himself to save his head.

Everyone else that this has happened to had their head blown off.

Fully blown off.

Yeah.

And I'm telling God Freaks to use his head.

He looked at another condition.

He used his head, yes.

But he didn't have enough traction in his feet to stay planted.

So he just flew out of his shoes and back against the wall.

Bisky and Kiliua run over to him, and Gohan stands up, blood running down his face, like in the fight with, I think, Canary.

We have that very distinctive image of Gohan with a line of blood down his face.

Where did that show up?

Yeah, Canary.

Yeah, that sounds great.

There's also, I think, also, didn't we get a little bit of that in the Hanzo fight when his cutter low on his forehead?

Oh, yes, that's what it was.

It was the cut on his forehead.

Goan says, I'm totally fine.

And Kilo says, the hell you are.

And the narrator says, Goan is fired up.

Yeah, he's got a big smile on his face.

He's got the same sort of determined look that he had

when

Razor says that his dad said not to go easy on him.

He's like, he's following through.

He's not going easy on me.

70 begins with a lot of dodgeball.

Some small things to note here.

At one point, Garainu saying that he is the type that tends to hold grudges, reveals what his other gorilla does.

That swaps with other people.

The gorilla tech is crazy.

He swaps Razor into the path of a dodgeball

and you know he gets hit.

Put him in the fighting game, because that would go nuts, honestly.

Put Gorinu in the fighting game.

Oh, yeah.

Devil 13 flings Devil 2, a really tiny devil, to catch a ball.

Gorinu gets knocked out and both the gorillas disappear.

Oh, wait.

A note from the End of 69 that I wrote was, I love that it's just the main cast and also one gorilla.

Once there have been a few eliminations, we get to this extremely funny point where it is Killua, Bisky, Gone,

Hisaka, and one nameless gorilla.

Yeah, that's the

main cast from.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But yeah, this is great.

This is a great moment of like, they almost got him like he could have used his back but that's important it's important to make him use his back uh his

his one get out of jail free card not his spine yeah it does end up being a good move for the team overall from gorino it's his like little little movement it's a great move it doesn't work because of the of 13 and two uh but it was really really close so close so close and uh you know razor is totally caught off guard and it's really fun because it's kind of the first chip in the armor.

You know, like,

Greenu couldn't get it, but someone

could.

Yeah.

There's some just lovely shots of a game of dodgeball itself.

There's a great shot of Hiseker bending over backwards so that the ball passes over his head.

That sequences the...

That's when he curves the shot, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, Razor curves the shot on a right angle.

Some of the best animation in the show, I think.

It's really quick, but

Hiseka

when

Kilua dodges out of the way and then realizes Razor's trying to get all three of them with the curve.

So he's going for Biskey and Hiseka, and they both dodge, but Hiseka does this like matrix dodge.

And then after doing that, I can't remember which number it is, but one of the numbers has number five, yeah.

Yeah.

And goes for another throw.

And it's just like this really like fluidly well-done action sequence that I like remember really wanting to shout out when I saw.

It's great.

And they do a great job of like having this really impressive

set of things happen where one, we learn that

he can curve the ball in this kind of bizarre 90 degree angle thing using his nen.

And then we also get Biskey out.

We also like damage Hisuka's hands.

We learn, we like set up this thing for later where Kilua almost dies and this like makes Goan really angry.

And

then we also, what was the last thing?

There was like one of the things.

We learned the clothes count as part of your body.

Oh, we learned the clothes count as part of your body.

Biscui gets out without having done anything, unfortunately.

Her skirt gets hit, which is bullshit.

Yeah, her gigantic skirt gets hit.

Yeah,

Hisuka's hand is really fucked up, and he sets two of his fingers in one scene.

This is also foreshadowing.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

Yes.

Absolutely.

That bungee gun can hurt your hands.

It's foreshadowing

that all great foreshadowing, you know, only becomes more interesting in retrospect.

Killua's hands are about to get really fucked up.

Where it's interesting to me is less that, oh, you know, Hisaka's hands get fucked up and Kilua's hands then get fucked up, but more that we keep coming back to this thing of like characters are weaving in and out of similarities and differences with Hisuka.

And there is something about the wound to the hand, the wound to Hiseker's hand, presaging the wounds to Kilua's hand, as being like, you know, in the last episode, we've described everybody in an awful web with Hiseka feeling a kind of similarity and a kind of difference.

And I love that, you know, moments before Killua's hands really get fucked up, Hisuka's hands get fucked up, which I think is, it's just interesting.

Interesting TV.

It's a good way of just making the viewer know, like, oh, it's going to come down to Gon and raise it.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Biskey, as Gon comes in, Bisky sort of begins her spiel first by saying, Listen to me, do not overdo it.

And Gon's just like, Yep.

Yep.

And she realizes that Gohan is sort of saying, Yep.

She asks him like a math problem, and Gohan says,

and he goes, Yeah.

I wrote, my note is, Gone is the most concussed he's been all series.

Really?

And then she realizes what's happening.

Oh, good.

She realizes what's happening in Switch's tactics and says, beat him even if it kills you, which seems irresponsible.

What did she say to that, though?

Oh,

yeah.

So

he wasn't not listening.

He was just being an asshole.

Yeah.

Damn, I'm gone, freaks, being an asshole.

Listen, they tried to kill his boyfriend.

Yeah, so here's the thing: you will have seen this constant viewer coming from the beginning, which is that we are moving into Ghon's problem, Gohan's mistake.

We have now seen this thing that is about to happen happen maybe three times already, each time resulting in severe physical damage.

Increasingly severe.

Yeah.

That is to say, to spell it out, Goan refuses to win on

terms that aren't his own or terms that haven't been previously set.

He won't win on a technicality.

Another way that

I was trying to figure out kind of like where he draws the line, he also doesn't like winning via inaction.

He really likes winning having taken action or having had action taken on him.

Yeah, he doesn't want it to be because of his opponent's mistake.

He wants it to be because of something he did.

Yes.

That's kind of the vibe I got.

This is...

Maybe he was the wrong kind of person to teach about going through mountains.

Weird, maybe.

Who can say?

Certainly not Bisc.

No, no, I learned we don't go around these.

We just march through them.

Just go through the stone.

Gohan is a little guy that has like, all the great characters, a sort of small palette of flaws that he can work with that are, you know, distinct from each other, that share some similarities, but are distinct from each other.

I would say that this one, Goan's problem,

is the big one, as far as he's concerned.

Absolutely.

There is stuff going on with his relationship with his dad.

There's stuff going on with his

bizarre desire to fight Hisaka.

Obviously, these things are related to Goan's problem, but Gohan's problem is the beautiful sun that shines through all these candles.

And it is interesting that it's something that

is sort of born from Ghan's mistake, which has worked out so well in the past.

Yeah, I mean,

he keeps learning all the wrong lessons from this, which is that it does work.

Hansel says this when he's like, when he

when he sort of beats Gohan in that fight.

Within an inch of his life.

Within an inch of his life.

He says, he turns basically to the rest of the contestants and says, look, he's going to keep doing this.

And he does.

But there's a bit of a twist on it this time, because

when he beats Goan, he does not beat Goan, crucially.

Right, sorry.

He beats him in a literal sense, but not in a victory sense.

He resigns.

He resigns.

It starts to happen a little differently this time, which is that Goan is trying to pull Killiwa into this plan of like, we have to beat Razor absolutely.

Whereas Killiu is very much of the opinion, you know,

get the W.

And then Gohan says, you could have died.

He's trying to pull Killiwa into the sort of

animated fury that powers Gohan's problem, the righteousness.

And he does this by sort of saying, by demonstrating his care for Killiua in this moment.

You know, look at what he did.

He could have killed you,

and also working into that Killiua's, you know,

fear of being bested, right?

He nearly took you out.

And this moment as Ghon succeeds in dragging Killiua into this plan is both really fun to watch and is central to what is going to happen with Killiua over the back half of this.

I think another crucial aspect to this that gets sort of highlighted later is

kilua's sort of um

the way that gone's demonstration of like caring about kilua kind of leads kilua into

agreeing with gone's sort of plans like he's put so much faith in gone

uh

and when gone is like willing to not not that gone's usually unwilling that's that's why they keep ending up situations like this gone is always like like i'm doing this for you killua like we're you know this is, we've got, we've got to do it because you're my friend.

And then Kilua's like, okay.

I don't know about that.

We're going to, we'll do it.

We'll do it your way.

Yeah, I think it's also interesting that we, we so often see Killiua valuing his own life only in the sense of a Zelda assassin, right?

Where it's like, I am a valuable entity.

Killiwa is very often acting in self-preservation.

You know, we spent a lot of York New Arc watching Killiwa not not

act for self-preservation.

That was a major part of when they got kidnapped, yeah, absolutely.

But I think there's a really meaningful difference between the I am uh I know my limits and I'm a powerful sort of uh blade and the blade should not get destroyed to this moment when we see in the screenshot that Keith posted Kilua's eyes going wide as he sort of realizes that his life might have value intrinsically because you know people care about him and he might be able to care about himself.

This like you could have died and Killio going like oh shit.

Yeah.

That actually means something when there are people around me who care for me, like Gone does.

Yeah.

Um,

sad.

A slightly, this is not a different read, just like a more, like a second layer on top of this.

Because Kilo already had this realization that he could have died.

He's already freaked out over this.

I really do think specifically this is like, oh, Gohan noticed.

And that's why he's mad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think you're right.

And so Gohan Goan develops a tactic.

The tactic is this.

It's a Kamehameha meh.

It is a Kamehameha.

Killiwa holds the ball like a golf tee.

Well, sort of.

He holds it in his hands like he's preparing it.

And not a lot is made of this.

You know, just hold the ball.

He says, bend your knees.

But

we've talked about Kiliwa's hands getting really fucked up.

You can see where this is going.

It's so well done.

It's so well done.

The flow roll is so well done.

The show is so stealthy about this moment.

Not a lot of weight is paid to kill you or you hold the ball.

And then Goan blasts it with his rock.

He says,

Show me rock is what he says first to power up.

And then he says, Jan Ken rock.

And Jan Ken is not translated in the subtitles.

What's going on there?

What is it?

Jan Ken is just, to my understanding, and this is mostly through movies and anime.

So if I'm wrong, please correct me.

He's calling out.

Instead of saying rock, paper, scissors, you say John Ken Hoy or John Ken, whatever.

And so I think that's just to keep that going.

So he's playing the rock, paper, scissors game as his nan

at least using the rhythm of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm guessing

it's the sun emitter.

Or no, the scissors is the

paper's emitter.

Scissors is

the other one.

Yeah.

I was going to say, it's so neat.

I don't know whether or not we're going to do this, but Takashi's given himself the runway, right?

Where it's like Goan is using rock here, so why not teach him new nen applications for paper and scissors as the show continues?

You know,

it is a nen power that contains within it the clear direction that it could go if you were interested, which is fun.

Um, this is phenomenally powerful.

Uh, Big 13 catches it, but is knocked out of the ring in a lovely slow-motion tumble.

None of this stuff is easy to animate.

No.

Not just the way that these bodies are flying around, but the way you're cutting through the action, the way you're cutting from shot to shot so that it's transparent.

But then you do sometimes just get very beautiful little shots like 13 tumbling backwards in slow-mo.

It's really, really neat.

Tesgera's team outside the ring are encountering Goan's power firsthand.

And one of them turns to the other and says, he's got high standards.

Yeah,

they do such a good job of making this the most impressive thing by far that Gohan's ever done.

And then it succeeds, and then it cuts back to Goan, and he's mad because he knows it's not going to be a good thing.

He needs more power.

Yeah.

He meditates and produces a huge aura.

His aura looks.

Oh, we've never seen an aura look like this.

He looks like he's sitting in a raindrop.

Or in a can of flame.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's very gentle at first before it explodes into that thing.

It's smooth, perfect.

Biscuit, just getting her little dagger in, turns to Razor and says, you may have chosen the wrong sport.

I love how much of a little shit she is.

Yeah.

And then all the lights burst in the arena as Goan produces this like gold burning Wren around him.

It's super saiyan.

It's also characteristically the opposite of the purple wren.

And it is also, and when I realized this, I was like, oh, right, yeah, scripts are written in order so that they can speak forwards to events that are going to happen later.

Remember how everybody described Goan as like shining so brightly you couldn't look at him?

And now here we have that literalized Goan standing in the middle of this gold aura shining like the sun.

It is...

amazing to see, and it's such a great way that Nen has always been used since its introduction, right?

Which is to literalize and make clear emotional relationships,

emotional stakes, the way characters feel about each other.

You know, we can have so early in the show characters looking at Goan and saying, you know, he's burning like the sun.

He's so hard to look at.

It's so wonderful.

And then finally later, as he does this phenomenal demonstration of Nen, as all the lights burst in the room,

we finally see Goan standing in this golden glow.

It's great.

Really good stuff.

Yeah, fantastically done, honestly.

And it's a great mirror of the exact last thing that happens, where Razor is able to take this ball, bump it up to the ceiling, absorbing all of the impact in his arms and legs.

And unlike Goan, who shot the ball straight up into the roof and got out, he ended up using back on himself.

We skipped over it.

Razor is able to shoot it right up.

into the into the air and then it sort of gently falls back to the ground.

Well, I think Hisuka uses, Well, we'll talk about that in a sec.

Gohan is amazed by this.

Gohan actually really loves it.

Goan loves it.

He felt it.

Everyone else is it.

And he loves it.

He had Jeff succeeded and hated it.

Oh, my God.

He just

uses rubber, rubber, and the guns.

Hisuka catches the ball with the bungee gun.

This is great.

We keep possession because, again, like I said earlier, if Razor's got the ball, it's real bad.

Hisuk says, you have to catch the ball, you know.

Again, it's Biskey and Hiseker doing these little barbed

comments to razor.

It's maybe worth saying that that moment where Bungie Gum and Hiseker's Bungee Gum catchphrase was set up and the joke was driven home was at a point when,

right around the moment that the show was interested in

building some more facets onto Hiseka.

Than he's the frightening clown, right?

We got a lot of Hiseka nen power.

We got Hiseka chatting with Machi, we got Hiseka talking about snacks he used to love, and so I think it makes sense that they would also give him a joke, like give him a

setup and punchline that they can do in that moment.

But it coming back here after so long was so funny.

Yeah, it's really great when you can call back to something from what 40 episodes ago, 45, something like that.

Yeah,

yeah.

Um,

Tisgara

notices that everybody is starting to get really wounded.

His team is like, wow, Gunn's team's doing great.

And he's like, actually,

he gets three versus two.

What could go wrong?

Hisuka's hand is very badly wounded.

I think he broke two or three of his fingers and he set them on screen.

It was two fingers.

Oh, it was when he was doing, like, it broke when he was doing...

Pungey gum, wasn't it?

He caught

the bio.

Yeah, after dodging the L-shaped curveball.

And he didn't have time to protect himself, so

broke two fingers.

Yeah, I was thinking of something else.

Tesgara has noticed that Killua is extremely wounded.

He's walking with his hands in his pockets, which is such a nice play on the classic Killiwa nonchalant posture.

But of course, here he's doing it to hide his hands.

It's such a sad moment, knowing, you know, maybe especially knowing where it goes and how he's hurt, but where where he's where he's like,

you know, kill or gone's exhausted from having done his two, you know, power moves.

He's just got two broken fingers.

And then his group's like, well, we've got Killua still right.

And he's like, wrong.

Killu is more hurt than anybody.

And then it just like shows him standing there calmly with his hands in his pockets.

And I remember going like, it must be his hands.

But I can't be for real.

I realized that it was his hands.

Because what has happened is that Killua has realized that to protect his hands with Nen as Goan uses his power would severely weaken the power.

So he has only been putting a tiny bit into his hands, and his hands have been getting obliterated by Goan's Nen.

This is perhaps the least subtle metaphor that the show could be working at this point.

It is both going to get less subtle and hit harder as these episodes continue.

We'll talk more about sort of like the way that this metaphor ends up playing out here, but Tezgera offers to be the T outside

Outside the court because that's both allowed.

And Tesguera knows a sort of way he can move Nen to make it worth better, work better.

But Goan says, we can't do that.

It would be a cop-out.

And Kilua says,

oh, is it Kilua who says that?

Kilua says it first.

He's the first one to decline.

He says, I'm not hurting as much as you think, which is just tragic.

Kilua, you know.

There's a lot of.

I rang the alarm of the, hey, Killua's hurting himself again.

Yep.

Yeah.

The big thing I thought of with

his determination to be like, like, put himself through this stuff for God's sake is the, like...

Do you remember when

he was getting tortured by Milloki?

I do.

Like, forever ago?

And, like, he was like, yeah, I just figured if you did this, you'd feel better afterwards.

I feel like you can draw a line between Killua's

gut instinct of how to make people happy is putting himself in harm's way or sacrificing himself.

Absolutely.

It's just, it feels less shitty in the moment because it's like, well, yeah, he's doing this for someone he cares about and who cares about him.

Yeah.

It's especially sad that, you know, Gona is asking him to do this.

Yeah.

And like his reaction when later on they have the conversation where it's like, I need Killiwa to be the one doing it, is like, oh yeah, this really got him in the heart.

This actually happens now.

Goan

always knew that this was hurting Killiwa's hands.

Yep.

That is gruesome.

That is gruesome to me, yeah.

It is gruesome, and it is also...

It is working into the text something that we keep sort of orbiting around with Goan, right?

Which is like,

what are the consequences of there being a person like this?

And what are the consequences of knowing them?

And making it so that Goan always knew.

He says, I need Killiua to hold the ball.

He's the only one who can do it.

And the thing that this made me think of, the note that I wrote, is that this is Killiua as an anvil for Goan's hammer.

Yep.

You know?

Killiua is positioning himself as the anvil.

And Ghon's power is the one that is sort of getting expressed through the surety and the strength and the steadfastness of Killua.

And this really moves Killiua when he hears he's the only one who can do it.

Tesgera has a really sad line just before this actually,

when he sees how ruined Killua's hands are, they're all swollen up.

He says, I bet he can't feel anything but pain.

And we are just so firmly in the realm of working the metaphor here

that having these characters say this outright is

we're in a space where part of the way this is working stylistically is that the metaphor is just being placed front and center to the point where we have

says Gara speak out into the world one of the core anxieties surrounding Kellywa, right?

Which is like he can't feel anything but pain.

What's in these relationships for him?

There's so many important things here.

The first thing is like, this is the mirror of the stuff that happened earlier with

Goan wanted to make sure that everybody who was playing was committed because

to Goan, like signing up, being like, yes, I want to participate means like you're allowed to get your hands blown off.

You're not allowed to blow off someone's hands.

unless they agree to let you blow off their hands.

But then after that, those are the rules of the game.

We're all trying to win.

Kilua said he wants to help me find my dad.

This is part of that.

He knows that.

And it is the sad thing is that they are both down to do this.

Like, Kilua, you know, for barely one moment, and it's at the very beginning of this, where when Goan first won't accept the

technical victory, where he's like, wait, no, we should really just win as fast as possible.

From that moment forward, he's he's on board.

And especially so after Goan is like kind of leveraging Kilo's feelings about him in order to make this happen.

The second thing is

Bisky's their teacher.

Where is she?

Silently standing beside Jessica, watching this happen.

Watching,

go kill him in

watching Tesgara like be

like

empathetic and concerned and kind and protective of these two kids that like are literally you know in her charge uh you know this show has a low view of teachers it has a really low view of teachers it has a really low view of teachers um

maybe that's why they had to have wing

you know uh menacingly smile two times with no real context is they've got to give you so they can't get they can't let a teacher get away without you going

what's going on there

You know, I've said in the show before in Media Club Plus that I suspect that as I watch more of this, it will come into focus more and more that this is a show about learning things, about having a passion, about having a skill, about developing a skill, about developing a skill that you're not very good at, about developing a skill that you're extremely good at.

You know, this is a show that is constantly talking about learning.

And it is interesting that the teachers in this, or the capital T teachers in this, are often so strange, and then the show

has such a low view of them.

The third thing that I was thinking when I was watching this is like,

what

is

different about Ghan than other hunters?

You know, like, we want him, you know, they show us how bad the hunters are, and then they show Goan and Kilo sort of engaging in that world and how readily Goan goes, you know, deeply into it and participates in some of its

kind of

darkest corners.

And

it feels like because it's a show that he should be seeing what we're seeing on the camera about the hunters.

But it feels like he just doesn't, he just doesn't see it.

Like the thing that makes Goan special is that he's strong, not that he's, you know, an opinionable solvent.

Yeah.

Well, and I think it seems to also be implied that he is strong because where most people see we're going to play murder dodgeball and they go, I'm getting the fuck out of this gymnasium.

Gone says, yeah, no, that makes sense.

That makes sense to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tough stuff.

This is

only going to keep getting sadder, right?

Probably.

Well, no, they win dodgeball.

Yeah, what do you think?

Yeah, no, yeah, you're right.

Yeah, they win.

Gone comes up with an an idea.

And Kilo says, Gon always comes up with the craziest ideas.

This is an extent to which this is still very much like a buddy comedy of two 12-year-olds.

I feel like the always comes up with the craziest ideas right after my friend has obliterated my hands and I'm fine with it

is really funny.

He's also come up with an idea that makes Hisuka get all grossly excited.

Yeah.

Again, this is something that this is like part of that thing.

We haven't talked a lot about specific moments, but this is the kind of general trend of what's been going on of like Hisuka in the background being like, look at me getting to play with Gonenkillo some more.

He's so excited to see that Nen.

This is also,

I think when we first saw Hiseker in the opening title sequence for Greed Island, I was like, so much of Greed Island speaks to stuff that fascinates Hiseka, right?

Like, it's 8v8 in a deathmatch dodgeball game.

This is, you know,

that's why I love the joke of him showing up to the

dating sim world and like knowing all the answers to the quests.

Yeah.

It's like, of course, Ishuka knows how to

speak this weird language.

As the episode comes to an end, the narrator says, Gona and Kilyua share a strong bond of trust.

Yeah.

Whose hands are getting obliterated in the process?

And who is having a jolly time searching for his dad?

Yeah, weird.

We said, Jack, I think it was you that said that this isn't subtle, but,

you know, it's

which it's not, but

it's shocking to me every time I encounter it how

much heavy-handed imagery can be missed by

very passionate fans of a specific show or whatever.

What could you be talking about?

Oh, nothing.

Oh, nothing.

People are reading things differently.

I mean, I think this is what the show is about.

But, you know.

Also,

there is a power in putting it straight in front of the camera.

I think, especially when you're playing in a genre like Shonen, where you are, everything is heightened so often.

Right.

And there's so much subtle work that is being done in this show.

You know, there are ways in which this show is subtle and really interesting, but there's something very powerful about just delivering it straight down

the lens.

Um, okay.

71.

In a little bit of sort of story sleight of hand, Razor empowers his aura by removing the nen beasts.

We have now seen Ghon blast the ball at him with increasing power three times,

twice, twice,

to the point where if he just keeps doing this, he will beat Razor and it'll be a done thing.

So we have to empower Razor such that this final episode is interesting.

And I think that this is quite an elegant way of doing it.

Just being like, we know that Nen takes effort to maintain.

But it mostly feels like a mechanical thing so that they can make this.

feel like it still has stakes.

I could not give you a timeline on this, on what is establishing what here, but like

using clones to copy yourself and then losing some of your power because of that is like a pretty established thing in

Shonen that has clones, which is a lot of them.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Look, clones are fun.

This happens to TN.

This happens that we, you know, in the Dragon Ball that we watch, TN literally does this, becomes one-fourth the strength in order to create three copies.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's true.

So I lied.

I can give you a timeline because it's Dragon Ball.

As

Razor, Razor has the ball now.

And as Razor shoots the ball across the thing, every time Razor...

I want to talk about this ball, actually.

The ball has been animated so well throughout this whole thing.

It is warping.

Its shape warps when it gets hit really hard.

It is wobbling erratically as though there is sort of like...

Yeah, as though there's violent nen energies kind of pulling at it.

It is constantly burning with different colours of Ren.

It is, um, it weighs the same as a bowling ball when Hiseka picks it up at one point.

I'd love this focus on what Nen does to a normal object.

You know, this is introduced as a normal bowling ball.

It's not had Nen, it's not been witched with Nen.

It's not been spelled.

I love this thing of like...

This poor ball has just had, you know, Nen masters working on it.

And the focus on the way that that changes its shape and its movement throughout is so good.

Razor just blasts it at

our team.

And what happens then?

It's really interesting.

Does someone want to describe the configuration?

Oh,

their little team move.

Yeah, their little team move.

When they merge.

Yes, they have all they have all.

They turned to do that, yeah.

That's funny.

Yeah, so

the way that they prepare to grab this is you got Gone in front, both hands at the ready,

Killua in the middle, like sort of like leaning on his back, and then also Hiseka's behind Killua.

And they're all

of their hands are kind of in the same

area where the ball is going to land.

Killua is less so because they're fucked up, but like he's still bracing there if you look closely.

He's described as both a brace and a cushion, and like is the thing that keeps this whole

idea like feasible.

The fact that he is there.

Like he has to.

I can't remember the specifics of how Sascara describes it.

What he says about Kilo.

You're talking about Kilo in the center.

Yes, Kilo in the center.

Right.

He's got between Goan and Hisaka.

Yeah, it's basically that if he uses too much force, it'll like break Goan's hands by like not, you know, absorbing enough of the force into himself.

But if he doesn't use enough force, then they'll fly away.

They'll get like knocked

off balance.

Yeah.

Razor says, or maybe it's Tesgera saying it.

Yeah, he says, he, Killua, was stuck between them, Goan and Hisaka, acting as both a cushion and a brace.

And this is great because the

stakes or sort of the emotional content of the dodgeball game as a way of expressing Goan's mistake and as a way of expressing Gohan's relationship with Killiua and the ways that that is maybe asymmetrical suddenly, sort of effortlessly, gets expanded out into a conversation about Goan, Killiua, and Hisaka, just by the way that they have put their bodies in the arrangement.

You know, setting aside the gross implications of this predatory character being so physically close to these two people, which I think is, you know, has to be deliberate.

We see, you know,

Hisaka, sorry, Killiua is now stuck between Ghon and Hiseker, quote, acting as both a cushion and a brace.

I think it is so interesting that they have

literalized this in this really distinctive shot.

We get shown it several times, sort of the way that they are posed,

and then we get shown it later as they sort of get broken apart.

We see what would happen if Killiua's sort of application of Nen was wrong.

They'd all sort of go tumbling.

There's these beautiful shots that I'm sure Keith is going to include of like just this arrangement of the three of them against a black screen.

None of this is subtle.

It is the most literal way you can arrange characters' bodies on screen to say something about their interrelationships.

But it's so cleverly done.

This is the...

Sorry, go ahead.

Oh, no, no, no.

Go ahead.

I think I wanted to talk about sort of a point coming off this, but just that the, like, this, to your, to your point about it not being subtle and like, like, okay, it's not subtle.

Maybe it doesn't have to be subtle because it's shown in.

But, like, why is it so impressive?

Why is something that's like so heavy-handed not subtle?

I think it's because they keep, like, Tagashi keeps coming up with really surprising

ways to like capitalize on these ideas that he's had where it's like, it's not subtle, but the fact that he chose to go in this direction is still,

if not surprising, then at least like really interesting and fun.

It's such a strong image as well.

It really is, yeah.

There is so much talk here, and Keith alluded to it when he was talking about the way that Kiliua had to sort of balance his aura.

There is so much talk about the precise application of the aura, you know,

but not much about the

either the symbolic position that Killua is in or the position of being relied upon, you know?

Almost nobody is saying things like, um, none of this works without Kilua.

Or Killioa.

Except Gone, yeah.

Except Gone.

And I wonder why

the other characters are talking about it through the language of Nen.

Is that because Nen

sort of supersedes it?

Nen is a way into talking about these

emotional relationships or these symbolic positions?

I don't know.

Maybe it's that other characters don't have the context, and so they're allowed to use sort of like

on-the-face explanations of the Nen

that emerge because of their relationship to then sort of de facto describe the relationship.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, I think that's possibly it.

Also, people who aren't Goan and Killua historically are very bad at reading Goan and Kilua.

Oh, yeah.

That's true.

Even Malik.

And

I wonder if there's something there.

I really don't know.

It was at about this point, seeing Killiua physically putting his body between Goan and

Hisuka after Goan had just ruined his hands that I was like,

these

last 40 or 50 minutes have really been working towards some pretty nuanced images of Killua, as opposed to Goan.

Where are we going with this?

This has become, in my notes, I wrote, this is very pro-Killua.

That's a bit reductive, but you know what I mean.

Like, we have turned suddenly towards the ways in which Killua is being acted upon by, you know, even by people like Goan.

And that's sort of crept up on me.

You know, I think I was maybe caught up in the like, I'm looking for Goan's dad game.

Right.

Even though we're all here saying killer is the main character.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But it's hard to know how literal that is until you see it being literal.

That's exactly, that is exactly what I mean.

Goan is so much a capital P protagonist, you know, capital letters in all of those things, that when you start to realize that the actual protagonist is standing next to him, you go, oh.

Big Trouble in Little China.

I still need to watch Big Trouble and Little China.

I've seen it, but I saw it as a kid.

I need to go back to it.

Spilling me, I haven't seen that.

Too death.

I haven't seen it either.

Oh, you haven't seen it actually?

I haven't seen it either.

I haven't seen it.

Oh, wow.

We should maybe watch Big Trouble in Little China.

I'd like to.

Yeah, let's do that.

Bonus episode, Big Trouble and Little China.

I mean, it is, it's a stretch, but it is kind of a relevant thing.

I'm such a John Carpenter fan.

I can't believe it.

I will always go to bat for that old wi.

Keith, I have seen it.

Sorry.

Sorry.

You haven't remembered.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I saw two Carpenter movies when I was a kid, and neither of them really worked for me.

Neither of them spoke to me.

I saw Big Trouble in Little China, and then I saw Escape from New York, both of which I know are primo carpenter movies.

And

they're almost like necessarily connected to.

Yes.

Like Big Trouble Little China is like the 10 to Escape from New York's is seven.

I thought you were going to say to Escape from New York's is Wren.

Well, I guess that they are kind of Escape from New York is 10 and Big Trouble Little China is Ren.

John Carpenter would hate Nen.

He'd say, what's this crap?

John Carpenter has interesting tastes.

He does.

He's really enjoying Fallout 76.

Sure.

Hey, but plenty are.

Yeah.

It's great.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Killua is.

Yeah.

Lots of focus on Killua.

Where are we going with this?

It is so.

It's such like.

These episodes have been so good with layering different character interactions and character beats on top of each other.

Like, we just got through the fucking Siko Hisuka stuff that is like underlying this whole thing.

It's like Hisuka at his grossest is now like here with them,

you know, underlying everything.

All of the stuff with like Goan and Kilua that is like at the same time kind of sweet and also sad and kind of cruel.

Um,

like,

and you know, touching on Ghosn's like different relationships with like death and killing and violence, all of this stuff kind of hitting in these episodes all at once.

It's just a really, really well done confluence of beats.

It's wild that we spent the last episode of Media Club Plus saying, this isn't really working.

This is vague.

It's not focused.

And all that stuff is true.

You know, I stand by that.

I think it wasn't wasn't working.

It was vague.

It was rushed.

It had neglected bits of its own storytelling and so had to sort of scramble to catch them up.

And then suddenly we're here in these three, and it's like, oh, we're going to explore this in an extremely focused way.

And then some just lovely, lovely, lovely stuff happens.

Razor says, Razor, seeing God's crazy nan says, he's a monster.

This is interesting to me.

Oh, sorry.

He said,

I want to connect these two lines.

He said, he's a monster.

Jing would be proud.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So good.

I think that's real important.

It's really important.

I don't know if

it was a difference in the translation, but he doesn't actually say Jing would be proud.

It's some more specific.

He says, he's a monster.

Jing, you should be proud.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

I was this kid

is indeed your son.

Yeah, I've got that right here.

Need a new shit.

Oh, it's a good show

he it's a good cave him out of course you did something

that's true yeah no he abandoned him as a child and that's why gone is strong you're right yeah

um oh i mean okay i would say it's good but i'm i i also won't say that that's incorrect

sure yeah

Like, is there a world where Jing was, you know, a different person and Goan ends up this way?

I don't know.

No, right.

No.

Yeah.

What's the tweet we've referenced before where it's like Hunter-Hunter is a show about a kid whose dad goes out for cigarettes and he wants to go find out why cigarettes are so cool?

Yeah.

This is now Goan like getting the whole pack of cigarettes and somebody being like, well, now you have to smoke them all at once and you'll learn your lesson.

And he's like, oh, it's fucking rules.

This is so good.

I love smoking.

Tisiga gives him cigarettes.

Netero gives him cigarettes.

Wing gives him Eve a cigarette.

Biskey gives him a pack of cigarettes.

Krola won't give him any cigarettes, and that makes him violently angry.

No Bunaga's like, hey, we should get these kids over here to smoke cigarettes.

These kids look like they could chase kids.

Machi's like, these are kids.

They don't have, they don't, we should give kids cigarettes.

That's a head cannon.

Sorry.

Krapaker is like...

Forever have those.

Too late.

Krapaker is like, a cigarette contains nicotine, an addictive.

Cigarettes are often made with a filter component in the

menthols.

Razor just blasts the ball at Goan, saying he won't dodge it.

That isn't how he wants to win.

Except Goan does dodge it accidentally by passing out.

Do we skip over

the third punch?

Oh, yeah, yes.

This is the third punch.

Kilo says, I'm going all out.

Sorry, Gohan says, Kiloa, I'm going all out.

Kilo says, you'd better, or you're going to hear it from me.

He fills the gymnasium with his

yellow and orange wren, punches the ball, and Razor tries to bump it back

and

does.

He's worried about how he's going to possibly escape this.

And he's like, oh, I could just bump it right back towards them as like a volley.

It launches like a cannon

back at Ghone,

who, and that this, yeah, this is where Razor goes, like, he won't allow himself to win like this.

But he just passes out and it misses him.

This is so good.

This is such a great, like, double twist because I think

the first twist for me is Goan passing out.

Because the first thing I think is

I'm kind of sick of Gohan's problem

and I want to see them do something other than Goan just butting his head through this.

So his body physically giving out, him physically being unable to play Goan's game

is great.

Goan just keels over and dodges perfectly.

It's a lovely mirror.

Weird how these mirrors keep happening of Hiseka bending over backwards to dodge the

dodge the ball.

Dodge the ball and what else?

Well, so Hiseker.

It's so good.

While everyone is cheering that they've won because Goan accidentally missed the ball.

Yep.

Which would have counted as a, you know, that would have knocked out Razor.

Hiseka promptly catches the ball and shoots it back towards

Razor, saying.

He says, like, that won't do, Gone, will it?

He says, says, only a flawless victory will do, right, Goan?

It's beautiful.

It's great because it is Hiseker playing into Goan's worst tendencies.

It is Hiseker trapping Goan in another sort of cycle of gratitude and

obligation.

And it is Hiseker saying,

I feel this way too.

You know, because this is something Hiseka also believes.

Hiseka also doesn't want a technical victory.

Yeah.

And

we keep saying in the show things like, for example, oh, Goan and Hisaka are similar in this way.

They both believe this.

But actually physicalizing it, you know, actually making it so that they both,

to the horror of everybody around them,

give in to this impulse together is great.

Yeah.

And so now we have Kilua has his hands blown to shit.

Goan has

exercised his life force to exhaustion and has passed out in the middle of the game.

Hisuka has caught the ball and has all of his fingers mangled by the force of

the

dodgeball against his bungee gum.

You know, they're all totally wiped out.

Sends it it back at Razor, who's just like, We're going to volley now.

I could win this.

I could win a volley.

And he goes to volley, but he can't.

Because Razor doesn't know that Bungee Gum possesses the properties of both rubber and gum.

Let's go.

Only time I'll ever pop for Isaka.

It's, well, it's his funniest.

It's his funniest joke.

It's his best, the best thing he's ever.

It's a truly joke.

You know what?

Yeah.

I think that time that he

destroyed that guy's arms business.

By destroyed that guy's arms, you mean...

Oh, he did also destroy his own arm.

That was quite clear.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a pretty good joke.

I love the...

Hang on.

Wait.

I can find it.

Maybe I can't.

Let's see.

I believe in you.

Oh.

I love that so much is, you know, his name is sneaky.

You know,

so much of Hisaka is played up as him being a trickster or something and i really do like the moments where instead of uh predatory grossness we do just get a hiseka trick front and center and i do think that um

less less the bungee gum which is more just sort of like a classic hiseka play but hiseker keeping the game going felt like he'd he'd pull one over on the audience i i really like that moment and i thought it was really sort of joyful hiseka characterization there is something really slick though about how he uses uses the bungee gum.

Like, Texture Surprise obviously can be manipulated to do a bunch of kind of bizarre things, but like the play of using like rubber, then rubber, then rubber, then rubber, and then all of a sudden it's gum.

Like, it kind of puts you in this false sense of security of

like knowing what Hisuka is going to do, which is the exact thing that he loves to cultivate in people is this idea that you can guess his next trick.

But his most recent trick was getting you to guess wrong what his trick was going to be.

And then they play that out in a minute when Hisuga leaves.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

Oh, yeah.

They like, he does the social version of the same thing.

He does glue when he's been doing rubber, rubber, rubber.

It's so good.

I've just written down.

So they win.

Razor sort of admits defeat.

Yeah, he's just a total defeat.

Total defeat.

I've written down two quotes here.

Someone says it was a team victory.

And someone says, that doesn't sound like you at all.

Hisuka attributes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hisuka says that was a total team victory.

It's like, that doesn't sound like you.

I have the whole quote here.

Goan wakes up and is like, what happened?

And they explain, and he's like, so Hisuka clinched it for us.

And then Akilo says, or he stole our glory, depends on how you look at it.

And then that's where Hisuka comes in and saying, we won because we all worked together.

That makes us a team victory.

Well, it kind of mirrors one of the first things that he says to Goan

in the Hunter show.

And he tells, I can't remember the exact quote, but he like tells him to make sure he has good friends.

Oh, he does.

And,

you know,

it's so.

I can't put my finger on exactly what this part of Hisuka's character is.

Like, it feels like, because this is what friends are for, you need someone to hold the ball sometimes.

And it feels so out of character for him, like Goan says, but Hisuka does have a Lumi.

He has one green line.

He does.

Damn, he does.

He has one green line.

So it's like hard to say that it's totally

self-serving.

Another way you could view it is that Hisuka sees Killua as instrumental in his cultivation of Gone.

Oh, I think that's true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hisuka can't get Goan where he wants Goan to be without Killua.

Right.

Well, but he also, you know, he likes both of them.

He's not like in there for Goan at the expense of Killua.

He likes Goan a lot more than Killiwa, though.

That's true.

When they're walking away, they both feel him looking at their butts and make him walk in front of them.

I think that what happens is

that Hisuka sees how how strong Kilua is first and then realizes that they're

more on the same level and then his hooks work on Goan in a way that they don't work on Kilua.

And also he knows Ilumi and that is like kind of makes Kilua a more dangerous issue.

Yes.

Yes, it really does.

So it feels like his attention is on Goan, and I think it's just kind of a coincidence that that's true.

But,

you know,

maybe the deal is, obviously, he has all of this is like,

all of this is wrapped up in, you know, the different ways that he's, you know, evil and dangerous and self-serving

and violent.

But on the other hand,

we have that episode where he has an apartment.

He has a shower.

He has a favorite candy.

He has a childhood.

He has a friend.

Maybe he just thinks having a friend is good.

He tries to make friends with Machi, you know, he tries to be closer to Machi.

Well, that's the thing Jack said when we learned about the favorite candy and stuff, that it makes Hisuka kind of chilling when you realize he's an actual just a guy.

Yeah, and I think that maybe like having a sort of even partially genuine

pro-friends attitude

makes him feel even weirder and grosser and worse.

Yeah, I agree.

It doesn't have to be like a trick that he's playing.

It could be a trick that Tagashi is playing.

Friends are important because who else will you find to murder you in a death match at the end?

Well, it's time for everybody to shout at Jing now because Razer tells Goan that Jing isn't here and he doesn't know where he is.

There's a fun joke right before this.

I'm sorry to interrupt you with a joke, but

there's a really funny moment where Razor's like, all right, just like we agreed, we'll all leave town.

And everyone goes like, oh yeah, I guess that was what this was about.

Like they had kind of all forgotten forgotten and they never really cared and it's funny on its own, but then the second layer of like kind of dark comedy underneath that is like

he killed Popobo because

theoretically everyone cares about pretending that it's a game, but no one no one here cares.

Not by now, no.

No.

Also, it's another check market, the fact that the Phantom Troop just moved different, where like the Phantom Troop figured this out instantly.

And, you know.

Right.

Yes.

Yeah.

yeah.

Way before all of this business, they were just like, oh, I don't think this is real.

Um,

maybe because they grew up in Meteor City and nowhere feels real.

Yeah.

Shumlark, just a smart guy, I think.

Like, maybe Shamlark is also would have been like, I bet this is a real place.

If you've got that haircut, you're smart.

If you're a little Dragon Quest boy, yeah.

It doesn't even matter how long it is in the back.

If you've got the, if you've got it, it makes you smart.

So, Goan, Razor tells Goan that Jing isn't here and he doesn't know where he is.

And Goan, to his credit, and the vocal performer really sells this.

He's like, I sort of expected that.

Razor starts by saying that he'll tell Goan some old stories and then immediately reveals that he is also a death row convict.

He's murdered a lot of people.

I've got this quote, if I can read it here.

Yeah.

He says, I.

You maybe know?

No, it's it's it's I don't really know what to do with this.

Um I have I I have something about it.

There's a few different things here.

We can pause in between the bits that I have if we want to narrow in on anything.

He says, I too was a convict on death row.

I was a murderer, caught and incarcerated.

I was sentenced to death.

Then Jing hired me to come here.

He taught me something important, that if one person in this entire world believes in you, just one, you can be redeemed.

Pause.

Pause.

Bro, bro.

He did not believe in you or give you a way to redeem yourself.

He put you in a Pokemon gym where you're allowed to murder people with dodgeballs.

Yeah, okay.

So you're allowed to murder people just like you who I guess you didn't decide it was important to believe in or give a chance to.

Look,

let's keep reading and we'll talk about that.

I jump in that.

Yeah, go ahead.

It cuts flashback to Jing and a slightly worse looking razor

saying,

Jing says, my son will come here one day.

Is it the first time we've seen Jing speak?

We've heard him speak.

It is.

It is.

It's creepy.

My son will come here one day.

When that happens, give him a good beating.

And they talk crazy.

They talk crazy.

And then he puts his hand on Razor's shoulder.

He says, Thanks.

I'm counting on you, Razor.

And then it cuts back to the present.

And Razor says, It felt like no one had ever called me by my name before.

Because

being near

Jing and Gon has an effect.

Yeah.

There's something about.

Is this also where we get the flashback thing from Razor?

Which flashback thing?

It's it's a he has like a flashback to like I think when he's a kid and it's basically somebody like calling him like shitty and it's just

like right after this.

Yeah, and it's it's a

this is the second time we're getting this, right?

Where we're seeing a

person who is led into a life of violence because they are treated poorly as a kid.

Yeah.

Because it's also, oh, I forget his name, but the scissor, the scissors,

the nolts.

Yeah,

yeah.

And I guess, again, it's saying that, like, well, the only reason Razor didn't end up like this is because Gene believed in him.

Except, like Sylvie said, he is murdering people with dodgepuls.

Yeah, that's inside.

This is also the troop.

I want to say,

if you look at the EULA for Greed Island, you sign up and you give consent to be killed in Dodge Pulse.

I want to say unequivocally

that

Razor should not have blown Bobapo's head off with an energy ball.

It's brave of you to say.

I think that is 100% true that he should not have done that.

The question is, I guess, why was he there?

Who picked him?

Like, he clearly was not of the same mind as the other 13 fake devils.

Oh, Bobapo?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

But it seems like the game's been going on for a really long time.

I would imagine that makes you kind of stir crazy.

I wouldn't say that

I wouldn't say that

no one believed in

that Razor didn't pass on the same thing.

Maybe he tried and Bobapo just keeps trying to fucking kill people.

He certainly didn't seem very nice.

Our first impression of it was like he's torturing that guy.

so but yeah, I think there's something about there's something about

charisma that is

in

not just in Hunter Hunter, but in Hunter Hunter, it is like dangerous to be charismatic.

The way that you can get people

on your team by like having this sort of ineffable quality that makes people be like, there's something about that guy that is

shown to be wrong in,

I think, the text.

The tech is always like, all of those people, there's something off happening there.

There's something like not natural about the way that they're interacting with people, about the way that people gather around them.

You know, and like,

you know,

what is it?

What does that mean?

It felt like no one had ever called me by my name before.

Like, how can you read that without it being like chilling that

Razor is and sad that Razor is here years later

happily killing for the his brief memory of Jing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I say, I shouldn't say brief.

He did mention spending hours with Jing, talking all about his game.

You know, Razor helped build the game.

Razor is not just a guy that he broke out of jail to kill people in the Dodgeball.

Hang on.

Do we know that?

Because you said that they spent hours talking about the game.

They spent hours talking about the game.

The kind of horrifying read that I get on this, this is a great line.

Past murderer Razor says, can I kill him?

Of Goan.

And Jing says, don't underestimate him.

Razor says no.

Razor says.

He always thought Jing was crazy.

He was so excited, like a little kid, about the game.

And then he hired, quote, me, a condemned man, to fight his son.

It felt like no one had ever called me my name before.

Jing believed in your strength, so he left you to me.

And I believed in your strength, which is why I didn't hold back.

I think he has been put, I think his job is fight Gun.

Well, we, we, so I think that that is his job.

I think that's totally true because it's the only...

That's why he was hired.

He's the only

real person that we've seen interacting with everyone that's like their job was to be an obstacle.

Gun was supposed to play play the game and get through, and this is the only like real person who was an obstacle in this way.

So I think it's totally true.

But the other thing we know is that he's a game master, he has like special game master abilities, he polices the perimeter, he's in charge of all this emitter stuff.

You know, this is the stuff that we got from the scene with the spiders when he sends them on their way.

You know, I don't know how much

Razor built this game, but they do act like he's one of the creators.

I guess they also never really say

when he learned Nin or if he's even a hunter.

I'm just now realizing.

No, they don't think they say that.

No.

And now they wrap the game up.

The woman who told them to go and...

Oh, well, so actually.

Goan says he couldn't have won without everybody else, and Razor tells him to go find Jing.

And this is like, this is the victory as far as Goan is concerned.

The thing inside, you know, he went into the game sort of hoping that there would be a clue.

This is as close as he can get to it, right?

It's like the person who's he has passed the test.

Yeah.

The person his dad put there is saying, continue with your search.

And it does feel like a specific and intentional test by Jing.

Razor says, Jing believed in your strength.

That's why he left you to me.

I believed in your strength too, which is why I didn't hold back.

Goan kind of introduces the idea that everyone helps him with this air of like, maybe I didn't beat you.

And

until then Razor reassures him and he goes, like, yeah, that was good.

And he was like, okay, yeah, that was good.

Check.

God, Gohan.

What a guy.

The woman who hired them to do this reveals a light pointing out to a cave in the ocean, but she says that there is no treasure there.

It's a sacred ground.

And she tells this very short, sort of like moving story about how the fishermen would never defile it.

And so that's why they kind of kept it secret, even as they were tortured and killed for it by Razor and his men.

So, Dragon Quest.

As the sun comes up through a window, she's like, this is the real treasure.

You know, I can see the sun come up and I can imagine the fishermen coming back.

The perform, this is hackneyed, but the performer is doing a really good job.

Yeah.

And Killer says, whispers to someone, don't forget that this is a story within the game, okay?

And then she finishes her story with a puff of smoke, disappears into the card strip of beach.

Oh, funny side quest.

And

Goad is like, Yeah, we got Strip of Beach.

This is where he's leaves.

He's like, I've had enough fun.

They invite him to be like a permanent ally, and he's like, No, thanks.

Yeah, Tilla invites because he's curious about the troop.

Yeah.

And

it's so funny.

He leaves.

He's like, Yeah, it's fine.

If you need me, you can find me with

I can't even remember the

card combination.

And this is his intentional reveal that he was lying the whole time about not knowing the game.

It's like magnetic field or something.

Yeah, magnetic field.

And the one who knows exactly how to play the game.

Yeah, he knows all about the cards.

He knows how to play the game.

He was just fucking with them.

And then Biskey says...

Yeah.

Sorry, you can read it.

Biskey says, there are people who tell lies

in order to get their goals.

And then there are liars who also lie without reason.

You and I, Killur and Bisky, are the former, and he is the latter.

Yeah, there's no use fretting about it, she says.

He's Hisaker.

He's going to be doing this.

He's apparently famous for it.

And then, final business with Genthru.

So Tesguera is contacted by the bomber, Aster and Co., all of the previous, you know,

Kasul and Co, the implication is that they've all been killed by the bomber.

And the bomber asks them to hand over the card.

Goan, furious that Aster has been killed, Aster and Co have been killed, basically says, I'm going to fuck you up.

And

Ganthrow has a great light.

He says, who the hell are you?

Hearing Goan down the phone for the first time.

Because he's just been working with Sazgera.

Meanwhile, Finks contacts Hiseker as he leaves since they have found the Exorcist.

Yep, great little note stuck in there.

It was nice to hear from Finx.

It was nice to hear from Finx.

Still no idea what his power is.

And then as we go.

It's not getting yelled at on the phone.

He's so bad at this.

Finally.

Oh, yeah.

He finally has a successful telephone call.

Yeah, just a normal phone call.

Red.

Red W from Finx on the telephone.

This is just like a fun little thing.

We finally have some material,

you know, like plot scaffolding from the error of assuming that children are children or normal children.

Like

it's always worked out in their favor that they're underestimated.

But finally, some plot happens because of it.

Genthru assumes that Segara has the original strip of beach card and not the clone.

And

they made some copies.

Also assume that Ghon's team will be easier to beat.

So they basically decide together to go after Tesgara's troop while they're weak and to take his legitimate strip of beach card.

Meanwhile, that is the best case scenario for them because Tesgara is like, look, I can't beat Genthru.

You might be able to if

we play a cat and mouse game with them while you recover and train.

How long do they say they can distract them for?

One to three weeks.

It was kind of.

Yeah, first they say one week, but then as the plan develops, and I think as Tesgara sort of begins to have a little more faith that Gohan's team is going to do it, and is going to give them the Alexandrite at the end,

which is a nice moment of like, Gohan's team is never interested in beating the game.

They're happy to hand over the Alexandrite to, you know, a team that they like that isn't Genthru.

He sort of upset it to like, we will try our best to keep Genthru off your back for three weeks.

But Genthru is a really

capable

opponent, so you are going to need to formulate a plan.

And this is kind of where we leave Bisky, Goan, and Killiwa having successfully

detached themselves from Hiseker,

getting ready to figure out how to beat the bomber.

Something I want to point out is that after Ghoun sort of blows up on the phone to Genthru, Sezgera scolds him, saying that he was selfish and foolish to antagonize Genthru like that.

Yeah, he says...

Not just because it would put you in danger, but because it would put Killiwa in danger.

You know, it says Gera has identified that this is a source of tension.

And

Goan is moved by this.

Yeah, he seems to have a genuine little apology moment.

Although he apologizes to Sasgara not to Kilua.

He does.

Yes, he does.

Wait, he does apologize to Kilua?

No, no, no.

I'm agreeing with you.

It's notable that he, yeah.

And that's, I think, where we leave it.

Yeah, that's it.

Any

big notes for this one?

Any overall things?

Anything that we missed?

This was great.

Tagashi.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead, Sylvie.

I just have one little thing.

There's a really good.

I don't know if it's in 70 or 71.

There's a really good just electric guitar rendition of the ending theme.

Oh, yes, there is.

I really liked it.

I meant to talk about both of the new songs from 70

and forgot to do either.

So you're welcome.

You can hear this, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is very Final Fantasy sort of.

Oh, it's also very near automata.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

So there is another new song.

It's got a very...

So that was just called Reason Instrumental.

There's another new one that plays during Goan's power-up moment

when he's getting ready to launch his final attack on

in episode 70.

So I I think it's that's the second

of his big punches.

And that one is weirdly called the Emperor's Time.

Oh, huh.

Yeah, which that's weird, right?

So,

right?

What's that?

Yeah, that's Sorcerer's Time.

Right, yeah, Sorcerer Time.

Yeah, they get it wrong in the show all the time because it's actually called Sorcerer Time.

Uh, but it's a really fun fight song.

I feel like

Hirano.

Hirano is like so good at stretching into genres, but something that he is great at every time is electric guitars and drums.

This is wild.

It was

really great.

Highly recommend people go listen to the Emperor's Time.

Sorcerer's time.

That's right.

Yes.

You won't find it because, again, they got it wrong in the show.

I love these these episodes they were great tagashi did something that he doesn't often do which is that you know tagashi loves to set up one sort of genre move and then pivot away from it he genuinely both managed to do an exciting shounen dodgeball fight and like a sudden unveiling of a lot of uh character dynamics

at the same time it's so funny that that's that is like the reputation that Tagashi has based on Hunter Hunter when like I first and longest knew him as the Yu Yu Haka Show guy, where the main thing about that show is like

setting up to something and committing to it for an extremely long time.

I wonder if that's gonna happen in this show.

Oh, gee, I wonder.

Well, you'll learn about that not next time, but maybe the time after.

Something I am curious about is: um,

York New City

began quite gently.

Do you remember that there's that

thing The Simpsons?

Yeah, the thing The Simpsons does all the time is like begin an episode in one way and you're never sure kind of like what this episode is going to be about.

Right, they'll introduce the a plot of the of a as a consequence of like the first eight minutes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I am so curious about whether or not the thing that Chimera Ant is about, the thing, whatever it is that is going to propel us through, you know, almost as much of the show as we have already watched,

um,

is going to be apparent quickly, or if it's going to be like boiling the frog by degrees, and we're only going to realize we're in it, you know,

when it's already here.

Propel is an interesting word.

Hmm.

Okay.

Yeah.

I don't know.

Oh no, Evil Keith is here.

Evil Keith.

I have had so much fun with this show in its various configurations that there's not a single bit of me that's like, and now the real Hunter-Hunter begins with the Chimera Ant arc.

Instead, I think the thing that I'm feeling is just the

excitement that my curiosity is about to get rewarded.

Yeah.

I, you know, it's always like...

It's never a sure thing.

Like, I don't know that liking...

I'm kind of shocked that the Chimera Ant Arc has the reputation that it has

because

it is it is structurally difficult yeah

um it's not the thing that like is so obvious that will gel with people uh and I think that it it is it's due to the strength of a lot of its component parts that someone is like even works at all yeah or that or not that it works but that like that people are willing to go along with the ride i think that like if it were weaker it might have a worse reputation without actually being worse interesting yeah

i'm excited i'm excited um let's see hunter hunter has 140 episodes

uh 144 something like that we are at episode 68.

chimera ant is probably going to be starting around

72 73.

And Chimera Ant is 60-something episodes long.

Okay, so there will be some Hunter-Hunter after Chimera Ant.

Yep.

We're not going into the final extremely long.

No, no.

Well, it is the final arc that's extremely long.

Right.

Yes.

Yes, sir.

Okay, I didn't, because that's some context that I'm glad that we sort of did the math there.

I didn't know whether or not we were...

You know, the rest of the road was very long, but it was one stretch of road.

Right.

It's like a stretch of road and a driveway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You got to, you got to pull into your driveway at the end of the journey.

Do we want to hear about the next episodes that we're watching?

I would love to.

Yes.

We're watching episodes 72, Chase and Chance.

73, Insanity and Sanity.

Episode

74, Victor and Loser.

And episode 75,

Jing's friends and true friends.

Swear to God, I thought you were going to make say Jing's mistake.

Four apps,

Jing's mistake.

Four apps.

Four apps.

Okay.

Four apps.

Four apps.

And four apps to you.

And a four apps for you.

And I'm also with you.