Path To Gorilla - Hunter x Hunter ep. 66-68: Media Club Plus S01E21

Hey everybody, sorry this episode is a little late.

We only recorded it the other day and I thought I was gonna have to delay it a week but was able to get it out today instead.

Plus there is a bonus.

If you go to friendsatthetable.cash, the friends at the table Patreon, part four of Media Club Plus bonus episodes is out now.

It's the second episode covering JoJo's bizarre adventure where we watch episodes 10, 21 and 22 of Diamond is Unbreakable.

It was really good.

Sylvie does a great job taking us through an absolutely uh bizarre adventure sorry

gotta turn the heat up talk about talk about this fire show

friends of the table talk cash

friends of the table talk cash

uh that's this is this is what happens when our budget means that we no longer have the soundboard

Yeah, we don't have the soundboard anymore.

What?

We have to do it all manually.

Yeah, so I'm gonna

hold on.

You can make any sound.

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

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

This season, we are watching 2011's Hunter Hunter, based on the manga by Yoshi here at Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

If you're a fan of the Shenmue Let's Plays that we've been doing for years, we stepped back into doing Shenmue 3.

We took a long break because of Kyle's busy work schedule and also Kyle's busy hating to play Shenmue's schedule that takes him almost all of their time.

So if you're a member of our Patreon at contentburger.biz, you can go watch some of that.

Or

the first series of Shenmue 1 is for free on our YouTube.

It's probably the best thing that we ever did.

With me as always is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

As this show has gone on, you've heard me bemoaning winter, delighted that spring has come, beginning to venture out into summer, and now I can say with certainty that it has gotten too humid.

Well, a very narrow window of good weather there.

That's my update.

Yeah.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me across whatever social media slop you use at at Sylvie Bullet without the E, taking back Sunday style.

That's how you spell Sylvie, I mean.

Also, check out the YouTube, youtube.com slash friends of the table.

Keith and I have been playing 999,

and most of those archives are up.

It's been really fun.

It's true.

That's been really fun.

Also, the most recent Crusader Kings episode is up.

We should do more of both of those soon.

Yeah.

Did I have another plug?

I had another thing to say about the YouTube, but I forgot it.

So, Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at SwanTerry3000.

I attempted to make a Hunter-Hunter post today.

So, I hope you guys.

Oh, nice.

Do you want to give a hint?

Yeah, I'm just laying the groundwork for my Karapika Leorio AMV set to Charlie XEX's.

Great.

I'm sure that everyone who knows what that's about will love that.

Yeah, I got it.

There's a few, there's a few different places.

We watched three episodes today.

We watched episodes 66,

scheme, something scheme, strategy and scheme, 67, 15, 15, and 68, pirates and the guesses.

We

also saw Kilua take the hunter exam again.

Last episode, Killua left in the middle of playing

Green Island to take the hunter exam.

Left, finished the hunter exam.

We'll talk more about that.

It took place beneath a store called Dick Sakura.

There were four times as many hopefuls this year as last year.

Like 1,500 people, basically.

And the first task was to knock out five other contestants.

We'll talk about how that ends up, but Killow does go back to the game.

They learned that Krolo is in the game, but then the

other spiders go, that's not Krolo.

Hiseka shows up.

It's Hisuka.

Hisuka's there using Krillo's name.

He also wants to help the spider boss, Krillo Lusilfer, get his nen powers back for selfish reasons.

He wants to fight him really badly.

They sort of warily accept his presence while Goan, Kilo, and Bisky start trying to win the game.

There's a lot of like game-winning, card-collecting stuff, montage-y kind of stuff.

The two big contenders, Sesgara's team and the bombers, are hard at work filling in their specified slot cards.

And an evil, luck-based die becomes very important.

There's a die that if you roll it, there's a one out of 20 chance that you get inflicted with all of the good luck that it has gifted its rollers.

All the other 19 slots give you good luck, which is, I think, a sort of

Nen,

an ability that Nen has that I think is pretty concerning, actually, that Nen, there's an item made of Nen or infused with Nen that can affect your luck, which is bizarre in a kind of unbiguous and vague way.

Unless it's exploding you.

That's not very ambiguous.

Right, yeah, sure.

Yes.

It's storing.

It's sort sort of like the bide the pokemon move bide uh it it waits until oh yeah yeah it waits until it waits until you're done having good luck and then it throws all of that good luck back at you in a bomb that explodes you uh and that becomes really really important for like an episode and a half uh they get used to trick uh tasgara and other things and then we also set ourselves up for a perfect dodgeball session next session um i hope i'm not telling tales out of school.

Jack, I don't know if you saw the like next time on, but they explicitly show dodgeball.

We got Razor and his 14 mean pirate friends.

They're playing evil gym class.

It's so funny.

It's so funny.

Yeah, it is so funny.

The thin veil of piracy overlaying what is literally just gym class.

Yeah.

And

Killow decides on the fly that they can't win with the team that they've got.

So they throw the games and then go and search for more powerful allies.

The first of whom is, well, I guess the first of whom technically is Grey New, who we met briefly

trying to get into the Hunter Exan, or into Greed Island like five episodes ago,

who stuck around from the last game.

But then they go and figure out who Krolo is, which we already know is Hisuka.

And that's a whole mess.

That's a mess.

That's an insane mess.

Fucking, oh my God.

We're going to talk about the absolute disaster that is Krolo showing up.

Or is Hisuka showing up?

I wish it was Krolo.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Yeah,

it's

when we say a complete mess, we don't mean that it goes badly, although it's sort of

really well.

It goes exactly as planned.

But it's sort of like

every bizarro cylinder that the show chooses to fire on when Hisaker is concerned fires simultaneously, and it results in a tonally

astonishing sequence.

Not that I don't necessarily mean that positively.

It's interesting.

We'll get there.

The big question is going to be

why?

Why are they doing this?

Why is this something they chose to do with their time?

And,

you know,

drawing tablets or whatever they use to make the show.

Any early thoughts on this?

On just everything?

Just everything.

It's very odd.

While I was watching these episodes, with the exception of the third one of 68, which I thought was pretty great.

I mean, 68 is so weird, such an odd episode that I was kind of compelled by it.

I wasn't terribly impressed with the first two as the limitations of Greed Island sort of started to come into focus for me.

I think that they are caught between two really interesting problems, which is that Greed Island,

as far as Togashi and the anime team are concerned, seems to be about kind of two things.

The first is

a test bed to train nen with biscuit in the ongoing hunt for Jing Freaks.

You know, it's another heavens arena type situation where, you know, what sets out as being thing A actually reveals itself to be thing B, a nen training ground.

And then at the same time, it wants to be this sort of

propulsive mystery game story about trying to

complete the card booklet before the bomber can.

And, you know, this sort of develops as the thrust of these episodes, right?

Which is that Genthru, the bomber, and his team are getting really very close to winning the game.

They have something like 96 cards out of 100.

Yes, I think so.

They're really getting there.

And the stuff that they have left to get is actually genuinely difficult for them to get.

We'll talk about that more in a bit.

But I say this for context that Genthru is really getting close.

Sasgara and his squad had 95 before they had a bunch of stuff stolen from them.

Yeah.

And then,

which who knows how many they leased them with because they did have duplicates of things.

I'm pretty sure that Genthru said that they they had 92, but there was a lot of throwing numbers out that are essentially meaningless, the specifics of it.

Yeah, and so I think what ends up happening is that the show really wants to do the nen training ground stuff, so it spends a lot of time on that, and then

realizes that it doesn't quite have a long enough railroad track or a long enough runway to land playing the game.

And so moves through it really expeditiously.

There are some lovely.

Sorry, go ahead, Jackie.

There are some lovely montages that we get later of the crew collecting cards, and there are a few really wonderful, almost background jokes about how bits of the game work.

They go to this town later on that is essentially entirely composed of meat-cutes in

the dating sim town is so fucking funny.

It's so funny, but it does mean that, like, like Keith says, when we actually want to get down to the mechanical nitty-gritty of the game, it means that we have to move so fast so we throw out a lot of numbers we see a lot of there's this great um uh i say great there's this sort of a lot of time is spent on this moment where genthru and his two weirdo uh comrades use a kind of card synergy and the risky dice to steal a bunch of cards from tesgara but it's all moved through with a kind of briskness and a kind of um

almost cursory nature now

i I can see that to a certain extent, this is deliberate, right?

Part of the thing of Greed Island is it has been exploited by greedy players.

It has been turned against, or, you know, whether or not Jing always intended it to be like this or whatever,

something has gone wrong in the game, which means that

it's not quite

always helpful to them.

Remind me to talk more about this when we talk about card number 75.

Yeah.

Which I think is a really interesting, like,

example for how the way the culture of the game has developed

actively hinders the players from being able to win.

Yeah.

Could I?

Yeah, 100%.

I do have one high-level thought that I think I'm going to keep coming back to.

And I think it's not a direct homage or anything, but there's a lot of death note in this set of episodes with Gemfru and Sasgara and stuff and all the

machinations of

a character saying one thing and then we get the internal monologue of them explaining how they're going to double cross this person doing this stuff and like yada yada yada say a bit about why that is specifically death note for people like me who might not be familiar with death note yeah death note's very famous for having characters sitting

like

like next to each other while

and like having a casual conversation and then it'll cut to the inner monologue of light the main character being like i had to react like this, because if I didn't react this way, he would think that I'm Kira, the owner of the death note who's killing everybody.

Jack, we'll find you some L thinks I'm Kira memes.

Yeah,

because they are everywhere.

He is Kira, but he's trying to hide that he's Kira.

Right.

That's the rubber.

He is in close proximity with the genius detective that is trying to uncover his identity because his father is the chief of the police.

Right.

Yeah.

Anyway, so

I think one of the things that makes Green Island kind of weird is that

Tagashi's arcs are getting longer and longer, but the

seasons of the anime are getting shorter and shorter.

Oh, interesting.

York New City is already the most compressed arc

compared to its manga length.

And then Greed Island is even longer in the manga than York New City is, but it's even shorter in the anime than the York New City anime is.

So there ends up being a lot of squashing of

this stuff that, like,

would, would it benefit from being four or five episodes longer in the end?

I don't know.

Uh, but there is some stuff where it's like, oh, they really kind of, you know, they really did three episodes in a row of training and then three episodes in a row of like card getting.

And then we only have one more episode to cover after that.

Like, Like, we have four more episodes, but like, next episode's our last Green Island episode.

He's run into a problem that he,

for me, that he didn't have with Heaven's Arena, which is that part of the joy of Heaven's Arena setting itself up as a tournament arc and then revealing itself to be Nen's school.

And, you know, I have feelings about Heaven's Arena.

I'm not trying to defend Heaven's Arena here.

Sorry, sorry.

There's two more episodes left.

I just got mixed up.

Yeah, so you had a three and then a four.

I am so much more interested in mechanically broken psychedelic dream game than I am in a tournament arc.

So when I see Tagashi swerve from a tournament arc to do nen training, I'm sort of like, okay, fine, neither of these, you know, this is.

But when we're in Greed Island, swerving into nen training, I'm so much more interested in Greed Island.

And so I do sort of feel a bit like that, that bit,

it's the John Mulaney skid about writing happy birthday really big and starting out really huge, right?

And then by the end, you're writing the letters just extremely tiny because you fucked it up.

That's how I feel about

Greed Island.

I will say, though, that the third episode here, when bits of Greed Island really start kicking in, whether that's the Pirates or the Dating Sim Town or the Evil Gym class or just the colossal shit show that develops with Hiseka, yeah um all that stuff was was really fun to watch and i thought that the third episode here was great uh okay let's get let's uh let's okay rewind back to episode 66.

i forgot to put this on my soundboard but he but kilowish shows up to uh the hunter exam and the music that plays is the jaunty

uh take a walk song it's literally called take a walk i just linked it so that you can hear it now this song is so cute and funny, and it is such a tonal shift from the last time we were at the Hunter exam, where it was like big and mysterious and bombastic.

And now, I mean, it is literally, this is a walk in the park.

This is this Hunter exam is an insult.

It's my favorite.

It's one of my favorite bits in the entire show.

It's really funny.

I felt bad for some of our friends.

Yeah, so who do we meet?

Well, first off, we see, I think, Ponzu we see in the background.

We see Ponzu, who we last saw

in

the Bud Cave.

Oh, yeah, in the Snake Cave.

The B-Lady cave.

Is that Ponzu?

Which is also the Snake Cave, like, seeing all of our old hunter exam friends made me realize, like, oh, man, more examples of where we saw Nin in the show before we knew it.

Totally funny.

Yeah.

Because, like, the snake charmer snakes is like a hundred.

That's got to be the nin living on after death.

Yeah.

Yeah.

yes or

can you do the hunter exam and know about nen that must happen somehow i mean

yeah killer gone uh

yes killer this second time yeah yeah using the lightning he's using lightning nen in the this first round here who else do we see we see tonpa who is walking around trying to do his usual game with the laxative juice he is scared to seek

and kind of turns his back i think pride to the blowjob

happy pride to the Blowjob brothers.

The Blowjob brothers have returned and they're very cute this time.

They're like, our teamwork is perfect now and we're no longer fighting each other as brothers.

And to their credit, that's sort of true.

Sure, they didn't have a lot of time for the teamwork to break down.

No, because the examiner shows up.

Oh, Zepppile's there.

Oh, yeah, Zeppelin.

I feel like that's important.

Zeppile is here.

There were definitely moments of them berating the youngest brother in the

exam.

There absolutely were.

Jack, I think you've got buzzing from your XLR coming in.

Yeah, I'm hearing it too.

How about now?

Is it better now?

Seems better now.

Yeah, it seems better now.

Okay, in comes our new examiner.

And this is a lot of fun because part of the joy of going back to the Hunter exam is seeing people we're familiar with.

You know, here is the Blowjo brothers, here is Tonpa, etc.

But also part of the fun is like, who are the new examiners going to be?

And we get to see exactly one of them This is a guy in a purple shirt with text written all over it and he is phoning it in

This guy I described as

What if Seto Kaiba was a Jojo character, but also Hulk Hogan?

Yeah, he looks like he's fallen on bad times.

He's got a terrible bleach job, but his goatee is still still black

I don't know what's going on with his belt situation or his shitty, like, Versace shirt.

It's a missing.

But I hate this guy.

His shirt is insane.

His shirt is insane.

Yeah, he seems like a sleaze bag.

Our first.

Yeah, he looks like a teacher that would date a student.

Bad

vibes.

How'd you guys meet?

Oh, well, she passed the hunter exam.

One of the

first examiner we met last time was Satots, and this guy is.

No, Satots is so dignified and

like

mysterious.

And he doesn't have a mouth or something.

What facial feature is that outs missing?

It's his mouth.

Yeah, he's no mouth.

Yeah.

How do they animate him speaking?

I think he has

a big mustache.

They make a joke about how you can't see his mouth because he's like eating food, but you never see him take a bite, but the food slowly disappears.

Yeah.

That's my memory of it.

Maybe I'm a good hunter.

That's a good joke.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good joke.

This guy

believes that the

every hunter phase of the hunter exam should be like this, which is just knock out five other people and take their badges.

this is sort of a bit like what if we made zevil island the phase of the hunter exam where they played uh battle royale against each other uh just in a room extremely straightforward and boring he says every phase should be like this you have to be strong to be a hunter now yeah

sorry just my i can't remember if i was i was switching back and forth because i'm i'm always doing that uh between the sub and the dub i do remember him saying the first phase of the hunter exam should always be like this

But maybe there's a different version where he says

every stage should be like this.

Yes, in his he is a sort of death game minimalist where he's like, we just want to make this as simple as possible.

Noise of fighting from the other room.

This is where we see Zepile.

And I have two notes here back to back that I thought were just the most clean depiction of the way Tagashi's pacing works in my notes so far.

I said, Zepile is here.

Such a nice follow-up to I'm going to become a hunter.

It's sometimes hard to tell with Tagashi when things like that are throwaway lines.

That is to say, he just disappears into the sunset and we never see him again, or when they'll actually be returned to.

And I wrote that note and then I said, well, Kilua has promptly eliminated him mid-sentence.

Yeah.

After like big smile, like, so happy to see Zepile,

and then jabs him in the gut.

And he's out easily.

Yeah, Killiwa says at this point that he will be the only one to pass this year.

It's a mirror of the last years.

Yeah, where he was the only one of this group to fail.

And

after a while, so the Blood Drop Brothers get knocked out and they concede it'll be their last year trying.

They are clearly not cut out to be hunters.

And Killiwa comes through the door to this terrible hunter examiner and says, okay, it's done.

And the examiner's like, okay, the first one's through.

And Killiwa's like, nope, I'm the only one.

And he drags in like a Dr.

Zeus ass bag of.

It's one of the funniest images in the show.

It just took me a while to gather them.

Really good wise.

Getting the badges.

Yeah, I like the image of in order to do this bit, Kilo has to just sort of like

diligently pick up 1400 badges off the ground.

It's really funny.

And there's some weird stuff going on here where I could see how if you were entertained by power scaling, you could start getting into some really dangerous waters here, right?

Because

part of what they're showing off.

Power scaling, not even once.

I hate power scaling.

Part of what they're showing off here is that Kiliwa's training with Wing and then with Bisky and then with, you know, the School of Hard Knocks has he is now so much better than any other hunter hoped for.

And that's all very well, but Hisuka was in the exam last year, and Hisuka was functionally a hunt, like a pro hunter already.

I think he's 100% right, Jack.

I think that the actual secret thing about this that, like, they don't really say, is that Kilua probably could have done this

last year too if the first trial had been this, and Huzuka and Illumi had not been there.

Yeah, that's actually

true.

Because maybe Hanzo, Kiloa rated Hanzo above him

then.

I don't know that that's true.

I think that Kilo is maybe like being cautious and weird like he does.

I don't know.

I don't know.

There's no

power scaling.

Yeah,

he climbed Heaven's Arena when he was six.

Like that guy, even pre-Hunter exam, that guy is so capable.

And in fact, something that I I said in the Hunter exam back when I was still meeting this weirdo was,

is there anything that can stop Killiwa, right?

This was before I knew about the Zaldic family.

Yeah.

And Kiliwa's sort of whole deal.

But I think it's interesting that, you know, even back then, Tagashi was kind of playing with, like, is this guy maybe unbelievably powerful?

And here we just get to see it happen.

1,500 people taken out off-screen by Killiua.

And I think that's basically plausible.

I think that unless you've got someone like Hisaka or you've got someone like Illumi as part of the recruits this year,

I could see how Hisaka could do that.

Do we think there's a reason why there are more Hunter recruits this year?

Do you think it's just a big crop?

A lot of people were going to Dick Sakura's

just by chance.

What do you think they sell there?

What do you think Kilua bought in his little bag?

It's seemed like a department store?

Yeah, I think it's a department store.

So he bought fancy clothes.

He bought a huge amount of clothes.

Yeah, he he bought like a nice shirt.

The bag was so small, though.

Do you think they just shipped it home?

Nen, it's nanny.

I think he bought like a perfume and a nice shirt.

Oh.

I went candy.

At this point.

Yeah, I was going to say he just bought checkout aisle candy.

Sorry, checkout.

At this point, the awful examiner calls Chairman Netero, who is absolutely delighted by this and is basically like,

he doesn't need to do the other rounds.

Just pass him.

Yeah.

He calls him Kiliwa Inhabitant of the Shadows, which is cool.

We haven't heard that before, and probably won't again.

Yeah, in mine, I think he called him

Denizen of Darkness.

Oh,

Kingdom Hearts.

He also said Kingdom Hearts.

The Denizen of Darkness boss fight was so fucking annoying.

God damn.

Just more like weird Netaro stuff.

I love that he's like,

you know,

he has all that talk about how what he wants to do is

like not allow psychos through.

But he's like so happy about Killiwa that

denizen of darkness.

He's a big smile on his face when he calls him a denizen of darkness.

Well, that's because that's one of his psychos.

He had picked that one.

Also, I don't think he believes in anything.

I think that there is a kind of like bubbling, gleeful playground nihilism to Natero, where it's like, well, it's all just, you know, I'll say that I don't want to create any psychos, but you you could just as easily catch me saying, you know, the hunter exam is an arbitrator of like, if they manage to rise to the top, then that shows that they have the power in the world.

You know, I don't think that he, I don't really think Netero has like a constant set of beliefs other than like to play violently is fun.

Or is like, that's the way you exist in the world.

He's great.

Notero is just like, what if

Master Roshi was the government?

It was less horny.

What if Master Roshi was the government?

The less slightly less horny government.

He is kind of horny, but he's less horny than Roshi.

Master was one of the horniest guys I've ever seen.

Yeah, horniest of all time.

He did get that scene where he was just staring at that.

Yeah,

that's breakfast for Roshi.

It's just, yeah,

Roshi would have would have like been like,

like he would have like lost it instead of just yeah, you would have had the nosebleed, the awuga, yeah.

And then these, the amazing Dragon Ball sensors would have come in and and like bootlegged a 45 second sequence about how like pigs yeah they would have changed

they would have changed the interesting textile on your shirt there young lady sleeping on her shirt

It's so funny.

Check out our...

If you want to support us on Patreon at friendsofthetable.cash, you can hear us talking about Dragon Ball.

We have an extremely good time.

We talk for Dragon Ball.

We talk about Dragon Ball for like nine hours.

It's great.

Including a real deep dive into

weird censorship decisions and what that does to the tone of things.

There's some Dragon Ball Z bonus coming up.

I'm very excited.

Yeah.

Well, Killu is back in the game.

That was nice and easy.

Go on, Kilio.

Say, yay.

Yep.

This is like maybe one of the most concentrated Tagashi's trick of all time.

You know, send Kilu away at the end of

halfway through the last episode, and then he's back at the beginning of this episode.

I think I predicted this exactly, right?

Wasn't this one of my predictions?

I think it was, yeah.

Probably.

Just long enough to make friends with the Kirikos, basically.

He was gone.

Yeah, my three options were,

I think,

the Hunter exam is done completely cursorily.

The Hunter exam spirals into a big thing that we start spending a lot of time with, or something absolutely weird happens.

Like the whole exam breaks or something, which sort of happens.

It sort of did.

It just sort of did break.

Yeah.

Anyway, Kilo is back, and this is where we start like strategizing and talking a lot about cards and stuff.

Their plan, which is really just a way to

describe how contact works, is to sell one of their expensive cards.

They don't really explain why they want to sell the cards, but really they just need to take contact out so that they can look at like the list of people and find out that for some reason, Goan has met Krolo in the game.

They've been in close enough proximity for the contact card to work, and they start kind of spiraling out about what this could mean and if Krolo got his nen back or what's going on.

Kilua leaves the game again to call Karapaka on the phone to be like, Hey, did you know that Krolo's back?

And then Karapaka's like, No,

if Krolo got his Nen back, I would know.

And then we get to Shellmark and the rest of the Greed Island troop kind of meeting up with Hisuka by chance because they also found out that that

Crollo Lucilifer was supposedly in the game, which would be impossible.

And does someone want to talk about

what Greed Island is east from?

It sure is directly east from York New City, Keith.

Yeah, nice.

Interesting.

And

Crollo.

It was kind of unclear.

Shellmark thought that maybe Krolo hired someone to go into the game.

I couldn't tell if Hisuka had had contact with Crollo and that was part of it or if

it's kind of left ambiguous.

It is one of those things where it's like, well, because we know it's safe for Krolo to talk to Hisuka because he's not a real spider, that like it's conceivable that this could have happened, but you are kind of just going off people's word.

So Krolo either.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead, Dre.

Oh, I was just going to say, also, like, Hisuka is just like lying the whole time.

We'll talk more about that.

Yeah, Hisuka is lying a lot.

He's lying in his very particular Hisuka way.

Right.

I think what is happening.

Not to the spiders, though, right?

He tells them the whole truth.

No, no, he does tell them the truth.

I think that Krolo probably hired Hiseka.

The bit that Hiseka says was his idea was using Krolo's name, which is such a great, like, low-key piece of slimy Hiseka behavior to be like, all Hiseka wants is for Krolo to get his name back so that he can fight and kill him or be killed by him.

It's not terribly clear.

But there is something about like

trying on that persona that feels very Hisuka, right?

Where it's like, I can move under the name Krolo.

Needless to say, he's obsessed.

He's absolutely obsessed with him.

He's obsessed with Krolo.

He says that he used the name

to draw the spider's attention.

He was like, Well, if I use Crowlo's name, you would obviously come and find me and I would be able to, you know, talk with you and also get my usual Hisuka perverse delight in letting people into my evil plan and knowing that there's not really anything they can do about it.

But I think he also chose the name because he got some pleasure out of being like, I am on some level puppeteering or masquerading the name Crollo.

Something that is interesting, there are two tiny little bits just before this sort of like spiders and hisaker scene that I want to dig into,

especially regarding Crollo's name.

Biscuit doesn't recognize Crollo's name, which is really interesting because, you know, one of the first notable things that

we spotted about Biscuit was that she knew who Wing was, and she knew who Chairman Natero was.

And then we learned who else does she know?

She knows who Isuka is.

Oh,

she does know.

Yeah, she says, of course I know who this is.

Oh, okay.

We'll talk about that, I think, when we get into the clusterfuck Isuka disaster towards the end of this.

But she also doesn't know Karapika's name.

That's a little more understandable to me.

That's so funny.

And this is the first double punch into the sky.

Both Goan and Killiua get punched into the sky.

Notably, the first time they were punched, not for calling her a hag.

This is just she was feeling jealous about not knowing, not knowing who any of these people were, feeling left.

There's a really, really wonderful double joke of like

really casual information giving here.

So as sort of Bisquit begins to learn about this, she says, well, of course you can exercise Nen from someone's body.

You know, if you can put Nen on someone, it stands to reason that you couldn't exercise it.

And this kind of comes as a surprise to Gaun and Killiua, who are in this moment, again, rendered students in front of a Nen teacher, right?

You know, there is just, there's sort of fundamentals of how Nen works that they...

They didn't really know.

You can just exercise someone's Nen.

And then later, when Killua calls Karapika and they have that conversation about like, oh, I would know if Krolo had removed his Nen, Karapika says basically word for word exactly what Biscuit said.

He says, you know, like, of course you could remove someone's nen.

And there's there's a great reaction on Killier of like

being frustrated by these two people around him who know better than him, who have been withholding that information.

Who he for so long was like,

you know, felt so superior to.

He just wants to scoop them so bad, and he's not able to.

Yeah, it's great.

Tiny note about Leit Nostrad.

Poor Leit Nostrad.

Oh my gosh, completely come apart.

This is going to ruin the world tour.

I don't sympathize, but I do

empathize.

I think it's funny as hell.

It's like a classic.

The face is unbelievable.

It's so funny.

Oh, yeah.

He's going through it.

He's going through it.

Yeah, yeah.

Because Neon's fortunes have stopped working.

And we see Nostrad surrounded by, you know, crumpled up pieces of paper.

I can't tell whether or not he was trying to write fortunes or he was trying to get Neon to write fortunes that don't work.

this is really interesting i don't know whether or not i think these are newspaper horoscopes that's my oh that's a really

good read

um i don't know whether or not neon's power has stopped working because

krolo took it or because krolo took it and then had his nen shut off by crappy i never interpreted that way it's always been yes krolo stole it to me so my memory is that

and you wouldn't know this unless you watched the Hunterpedia on it.

In the Hunterpedia, it is revealed that when Crolo takes your power, you do not have access to it.

Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Cool.

That's sick as hell.

He is explicitly a thief.

You know, he's not like duplicating the power.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

That's interesting.

And that is, I think, something really interesting that it is left ambiguous in the show.

It's something you might not even consider because I think that they describe what he does as copying someone's powers a couple of times.

I think that's where I got confused.

And so if you didn't watch the Hunterpedia, you would maybe not even think about Neon not having her power until this scene and then sort of be hit with like, oh my God, he has this book full of people who he's taken these powers from.

Again, makes it even wilder that he was going to try and do that to the Zoltex.

I know.

Oh, yeah.

Luckily, I think they've got a few tricks up their sleeves.

Yeah, no,

they're pretty solid.

That he was.

Or he wanted to, I guess.

I guess he didn't really try to.

He made a comment about it's a shame that I can't pick their

abilities.

Yeah.

Why couldn't he take their abilities?

Oh, they were too skilled a fighter for him to have his book open.

Yeah, he couldn't fulfill all the conditions.

Fulfilling the conditions.

I do happen to know what the conditions are.

Fulfilling the conditions are like it's a really interesting list of things.

Will we get told what they are?

No, I just know this because I read it one time on like a wiki page.

I don't know when it gets revealed.

I mean, if you don't,

I guess I wouldn't want to spoil people listening if they revealed it.

We'll talk about it as and when.

I mean, something that is notable, I think, is worth saying here.

The dramatic tension of Crollo's Nen being gone has almost entirely been dispensed with.

And I think that is notable.

It's now just a case of when, not if, Crollo gets his Nen back, I think.

But, you know, we had sort of maybe four episodes of Krolo Lusilpha, a guy with an unbelievably cool Nen power, has had it set up that if, you know, if he uses his Nen, he dies

before the show introduced the Nen Exorcists.

And, you know, I'm sure there are going to be some wrinkles in getting those exorcists or getting Abengane and Krolo to sort of get the, you know, get the thing out of him.

But

it's very Tagashi to be like, well, of course Krolo's going to get his Nen back.

He's too cool.

He is simply too cool.

But we made so much hay about that restriction, right?

You know, that was kind of

the heart of that hostage situation actually was the relationship between Pakinoda and Krolo and Gunkilua and Karapika.

But there was a lot of business about like, I'm going to, you know,

condition and what's the other one?

Contract and condition?

What do they call them?

We had an episode episode named like that.

I think that the episode was called Condition and Condition.

Oh, yeah, that might have been it.

But now, really, we're going to be able to do it.

Because it was gone on two different definitions of condition.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We just need to get Abengane and Krolo, or some combination, or some other exorcist.

You know, the plot is just waiting until we can get Krolo's power back.

I'm so curious if...

I wonder if Krolo is the sort of person who's interested in revenge.

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know.

But also, if they go and

I was about to say,

if they exorcise him, he hasn't really been terribly inconvenienced.

And then I did remember that Pakinoda got killed, as did Uvo.

You know, despite his...

There's more active revenge to be done than, you know, someone took my name.

It's time for item.

I'm getting montage.

Oh.

Yeah.

I was just going to say, despite on the face having a sort of anti-revenge set of rules, they do seem pretty pro-revenge anyway.

Nobunaga is immensely pro-revenge.

Yeah.

Shout out to Nobunaga.

He hasn't appeared.

He's off doing his own thing.

I think he's not interested in

mourning his husband.

I'm busy mourning my husband.

Doing two things that I love to do.

Three things.

Sorry.

One, mourn my husband.

Two, get stuck inside a car.

That's actually, he's been stuck inside in a car.

Oh, wait, no.

We established that he was on the boat that exploded.

He's dead.

Yeah, he died in the boat.

Yeah.

Three.

I think we should make Gon and Kiliwa members of the Phantom Troop.

Everyone's like, boo, shut up.

Okay, it's time for Gon and Kiliwa to get some items.

They punch a huge tree to shake a beetle out and shake out 100 beetles.

It's really, really good.

It's really good.

They find a girl hidden in a mansion called the girl who sheds gold dust.

Yeah.

Kiliwa punches a guy into the sky, showing that he is learning.

He's learning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gone finds a necklace that can reflect all attack spells and detect transformed or fake items.

Thank you, Goan.

Now, this is a fun one because they've introduced gain like way back.

And Paladin's necklace is the first time that anyone really gets any use out of gain, turning one of the cards into an item and then using it.

Go just has this...

this weird necklace now

yeah it's great it's this weird seemingly very powerful yeah very very powerful

yeah and it's drawn you know it's drawn right onto his model they've like you know it's it's it's in the intro yeah it's a big

intro yeah i say this because it's like um it's not something that they've just moved over i mean they move over it you know fairly briefly in the episode itself but it's clearly significant enough that they will draw it on gone you know in the intro and in all his scenes yeah um it's a i mean jack touching on a point you made earlier i feel like the paladin's necklace is also just another example of like this is a really strong item that is relatively easy to get and a lot of people could have it if all the other people playing the game weren't like uh tournaments that's for idiots don't waste your time with

it's so easy that they got it in a montage it was like they didn't even show like the beetle they showed them punching the tree the paladin's necklace they just showed up somewhere and it was like you've won paladin's necklace it was really funny um

uh they get something called memory Helmet.

They get something called Witch's Love Potion.

They get something called Risky Dice.

Moved over very quickly in a montage.

That's Tagashi's trick sneaking up as it becomes critically important later.

They get the King Great Beetle.

The kids are like, this is piss easy.

And Bisky's like,

only because of my training.

You've been level grinding and you didn't even notice.

Yeah, she's watching them having fun.

It's kind of nice.

It is kind of nice.

When we get into

the real business of Greed Island, hey, can you remember those episodes a little bit?

Well, first, we got to do some card trading.

I kind of love this.

There's a little bit of this sort of like anxious.

They get contacted by a guy called, I wrote it down, Kazuel.

These faces are all in our working talk.

Yes.

He showed up earlier, the guy that robbed them.

Yeah.

Kazuel robbed them.

It was very funny.

He's the Leopard Prince Santa.

He is Leopard Prince Santa, yeah.

What if

he looks great?

He really does look like he got all his armor pieces from a different place.

Uh-huh.

Um, let's see.

Uh, did they, I like how they, so they, they, uh, they talk about contact like very early in the episode.

It's not a card that we've like heard a lot about.

And they explain how it works, and they explain how you could use it to contact people to trade.

And then we get an episode and a half from there, and they're finally like, Okay, hey, remember, contact?

This whole episode is about contact.

Uh, first, they set up the Kazool thing, and then, like, it almost doesn't matter, it just sort of introduces him to Kazoo, who they'll end up teaming up with later.

We get two cool card names: we get The Witch's Diet Pill and Book of VIP passes,

and then it's the real.

I just, I think these episodes, even though these are, I think, some of the weakest weakest episodes that we've watched

for this season, uh,

I do think they do such a good job of like the sort of set him up, knock them down thing that Tagashi likes of like introducing you to a thing that you'll need after the next thing.

And so it's just like constant rotation of like learning something and then capitalizing on something from like way before

and then capitalizing on the thing that you just learned and then repeat like kind of over and over again.

Yeah.

And like to a certain extent, this is how plot works.

Yes.

right yes like yeah but i think i think to your point keith why it is notable is that tagashi has got a conveyor belt feeding those things towards you at such a wild regularity yeah um you really are just getting stuff turned over so so quickly yeah and at wildly varying importances too so like you'll you know this is how it feeds into the tagashi's trick thing where you can you'll you'll see something and and you're like, that's going to be important.

And then it's either going to be so much more important or so much less important than you thought.

Risky Dice is such a good example of this.

So...

Okay.

So let's talk about what it's called?

Dorias,

the city of gambling?

Yeah.

So firstly,

there are only some

good teams left in the game.

You know, they sort of figure this out later.

They really are in the latter latter stages of like a Fortnite or a PUBG match, where there are really only like six powerful entities.

And because the cards are now getting increasingly hard to get, everybody's sort of locked up into this either outright sudden violence or trading games.

So you get Genthru and Tesgera sort of setting up for a trade.

But Gona and Killua are gambling to try and get

valuable cards inside a casino.

And while they are gambling, they sort of discover that they can use this card called Risky Dice.

Yeah, so Risky Dice, as we talked about, it's got 19 lucky sides, and then one side, which is in, I can't remember, I think in the dub is called

worst luck.

In the sub is called bad luck.

And Killer is like rolling it at a

slot machine and like winning jackpots.

And then is like, I'm on the addict.

I'm going to keep doing this forever.

And then immediately there's an explosion from three, you know, slot machines down.

And they're like, oh my God,

he was rolling some sort of weird die.

What he just blew up.

It's so

fucking hysterical.

Like the comedic timing is so well done.

And then it's immediately they flip it in the next scene to like

fucking Gunthru and his goons have three guys like tied up and making them

rolling a dice in the song for them.

Yeah, this is a great example of how

um and who you know who knows but it feels like like the evil within the hearts of men corrupting Jing's sort of silly game uh where or like maybe sort of like Netero's game at the end of um at the end of the hunter exam right where he sets up this game and everyone else, he's got a big smile on his face.

He's like, this will be fun.

And everyone's else, this guy's fucking twisted.

Like, this guy is sick as hell.

He's so evil.

Part of that is both Netaro and Jing's inability to see where this is going to go.

Who knows?

Or not caring.

Yeah, or, you know, I don't think that Jing made those dice being like, and if someone really wants to, they could hold someone at gunpoint and force them to roll the die.

And if they die, who cares?

Because who cares?

Maybe that much thought did go into it.

Maybe there is

something where it's like, well, if it happens, it happens.

I just make the game.

Don't, don't, you know, don't come crying.

This is my theory.

Yeah.

That is also my theory.

But even the, you know, I think it, I think there's a, I think there's a, maybe some truth to that.

But, but,

but I think this, like, sort of, God, god i can't remember i referenced it i referenced it a couple episodes ago like a clockwork god thing like the christianity like i just set up the world now i'm out of here and then it just sort of slowly corrupts itself over time and this is one of those corruptions to like forcing these people at gunpoint to roll this die over it's wonderful horrifying it's wonderful it's like crazy It's like, what if Anton Sugar's coin in No Country for Old Men actually made Sugar very lucky every time he had someone else flip it, but one in ten times he would explode.

So he gets another guy to flip it for him instead of just being about, I think, the nihilistic heart of the universe.

It's great.

I love this scene so much.

Although we really are kind of wheel spinning here, we're wheel spinning towards, you know, all this mechanics is to like...

We're trying to complete the game, but ultimately, it's not terribly interesting.

This is one of the things that, and I don't mean this in a negative way, but this is something that reminds me of the Death Note stuff.

Not necessarily in that I consider I it is wheel spinning in a way.

This is the facts and logic arc of Hunter Hunter, and

that is very Death Note, like smart people trying to think everything out.

So what I've noticed Takashi really likes doing this, and it's something that

Oba and Obata, the creators behind, the artists behind

Death Note, do, which is they really like setting up these sort of, I think of it like the game mousetrap, where it's just

they take a bunch of time to like put all the pieces in place, and then it just goes right in an instant.

It's like all this buildup for something that takes like five minutes, usually.

And I think that a lot of this is

Tegashi doing that for the Sesgera Genthru meetup because by doing that and then by doing the stuff with the Alexandrite, it's twofold.

It's one, it's made Genthru winning the game way more of a likely threat.

And I'm sorry that I'm jumping ahead a little here, but it's also

when later on, when Gone and Kiloa get the Alexandrite themselves, it makes us, the viewer, be like, okay, so they're on a collision course now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do like it, it is interesting, though, how we take like a, we take a little step away from the normal way that Tagashi's telling the story to make, to like do the mousetrap thing because like it kind of is like uh taking like paint thinner and like washing away the varnish on a painting like this like sort of like layer on top of how hunter hunter already works to reveal like this is sort of what Tagashi's been doing the whole time like yeah I can imagine that like writing this arc is how it feels to like have to think through writing all the other arcs

does that make any sense?

Yeah,

I mean, I think in a way, it's kind of what Tagashi's doing with

Shounen as a genre is peeling away at those layers, right?

Yeah, there's just some stretching

on top of the like the machinations.

Yeah, yeah.

It's it's we are seeing the mechanics of the game.

Yeah, um, in the thing about the game, we're seeing the mechanics of the game, and then seeing the mechanics about how writing the mechanics is a game.

Oh, my God.

Oh my god.

It's fucking games all the way down.

And it continues to be.

We haven't even gotten yet to it really starting to be a game.

Episode 67 begins with another getting things montage.

These are my favorite cards that we've seen so far.

We have a card that is like a judging scepter.

And if you use it, the person between you and the person you use it on, who is more evil, gets punished.

This is really good.

I didn't read that one.

Oh my god.

That one's great.

Then we have pills that make you grow once them to be to taller.

Yeah.

And then, and this one's a doozy, we have an egg that if you treat this egg well,

when it hatches, you will turn into a CEO.

Would you believe that?

Would you believe that this is part of a series?

So

I recently came into, I'm a bit of a pro gamer, so I recently came into a, I finished my own personal collection of Greed Island cards.

I got them all.

Wow, congratulations, Sylvie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I can let you know that in addition to there being

fledgling CEO, there's fledgling politician, which is the same thing, but it's a politician.

And also, there's a fake white Obama on the card.

What?

Yeah, hold on.

I'm sending it.

My favorite thing is that it's not that the CEO hatches.

Oh, that is a fake white Obama.

There's musician, pilot,

athlete, artist.

That's a white Obama.

Gambler.

Yeah.

It's not that the egg hatches into the politician.

It's the

you will become a politician when the egg hatches.

You just have to warm the egg in your hand for one to 10 years

for three hours a day.

We passed over the specifics of the Genthru.

Tesgara deal,

which I think we should touch on a little bit.

But I do want to say that one of the cards cards that Sasgara is going to give to Genthru is the card that I would take if I won Green Island.

It's called a Palm Top Dragon.

It's a little purple fire-breathing dragon that is kind of like spiky looking and grumpy.

And the tech says, as the name implies, this dragon fits on your palm, willingly obeys its master.

If raised lovingly, it can learn to speak.

That's what I'm taking.

I'm taking that.

I want that guy.

Yeah.

So the details of this deal, real quick, before we go back for it, I don't think it's massively important, but Sesgara needs two cards.

And Genthru does not want to trade with Sesgara because he knows that right now Sesgara is ahead.

Sesgara says, okay, just give me one of the two cards I need, and I will give you three cards.

And this is how the dice, the risky dice sort of plan hatches, because they're like, okay, we'll, we'll do the deal as written, but then we will use like thief cards to steal

more cards from them and then run away.

And we will all roll the kill yourself die

in order to make our chances of getting

their best cards higher.

And so this is like one of those

Gethru like sees himself as an insane person, like really shines through.

When Sub and Barra watch him roll the dice, they are not happy, they are scared, and they're like, We're gonna have to fucking do that shit, but they do, they do end up doing it.

Um, well, I guess we'll get to that.

I think that that's is that up later, or do they does that happen?

That happens a little bit later, although uh, um, I think we can probably just dispense with it now by saying that their plan works, they already

do that, yeah.

I have a list of all the cards, I would love to,

if you want to know what they are, please.

Okay,

so I wrote them down in the orders they were mentioned, so this isn't in numerical order.

First of all, number 80, levitation stone, a stone about one carat in size that levitates.

It can levitate one person and receives energy from sunlight.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

Pretty good.

65, which is rejuvenation potion, which I'll put in the chat because I like the art on this one in a minute.

Each pill makes you physically younger by one year, and you will retain all your knowledge and memories.

Beware, as you will die if you take more than your age.

One vial contains 100 pills.

That's crazy.

Nen can do that.

That's real.

You can take that into the world and it's real um 42 i've already actually sent it's fledgling novelist um

which is you know uh we've we've covered the fledgling series of cards um

number they also got 53 which is the king white stag beetle which we saw um

do you want me to read that one too Yeah, I don't know what that one does.

It uses special pheromones to learn other insects to build a huge colony.

It leaves the colony once a day for an evening stroll.

It's mostly a collectible.

I like this stroll.

Yeah, me too.

This next one I really like.

Pre-order vouchers.

Write the name of any commercially available product on a voucher, and you'll be guaranteed to get it, regardless of its scarcity.

You still have to pay.

A buck of a thousand, so you get a thousand pre-order vouchers.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah, the consumer card.

Next up is my actual favorite.

Number 24, mostly for the name.

Hypothetical TV.

Input a hypothetical situation with the included remote, and this TV will show you a 30-hour documentary of the possibilities.

You are also able to record.

Oh, it's AI.

Oh, it's not.

No, but it works.

Oh, yeah, it does.

Ven-based AI is still AI.

That's true.

Yeah, we're seeing a lot of it in these non-player characters.

Oh, I see they are AI.

Yeah, if you think about it.

And then the last one is...

Oh, fuck.

I just closed it by accident.

Oh, no, I know.

Hold on.

Hold on.

Oh, no.

Sacrifice armor renders ineffective any attack by a weapon reverted from a card.

Beware, as it will randomly break sometime within the first hundred attacks.

Oh, that's great.

But I mean, okay.

We are now in Nen Heaven.

Firmly.

We have transcended the boundaries, right?

Because like you said, Keith,

these pills are real.

You can take Nen pills and become younger.

Taller and younger.

And at first I thought, okay, what's the big deal with that?

And then I remembered the way Nen was introduced, which is it's sort of like a spirit energy that all humans have.

And it's like, how do we get from point A to point, I don't know, L, where we're at now, where just like Nen can make you younger if you eat these pills.

That's point W.

Well, Nen is your life force.

And if you're really strong at amplifying your life force with red then you can concentrate that into a pill that translates the like sort of like key based energy into

life energy to extend your life

such garbage i love it so much

um

why would you make a magic system that wasn't this

It is great.

I just love all of this.

Every time I read a card, I'm like, this is real.

This hat can exist.

This

leads me to introduce a segment we could do if you guys want, which is

give me a number and I'll tell you what card it is.

As long as it's not plot relevant.

And if it's plot relevant, I've got some miscellaneous outside of the hundred that I can pull from.

Can we each one of our favorite numbers?

Yeah, yeah.

Can I go first?

Sylvie.

Yeah.

Hey, what's card 69?

Yeah, I already had that one pulled up because I knew it was about to happen.

Doyenne's hair restorer.

Luxurious hair will grow wherever it is applied.

Use gloves or hair will grow on fingers and palms.

One vial contains 200 milliliters.

Brackets enough to cover 10 heads.

Enough to cover 10 heads.

It's so funny.

Okay, I would like card number eight.

Number eight.

Okay.

Oh.

Jack, you're a little staticky again.

Oh, yeah, that's just on my game.

Jack, this is a great one for you.

Number eight, mystery pond.

Release one fish into this pond, and there will be one more fish of that type the next day.

You can keep any combination of fish in this pond, even saltwater and freshwater fish together.

The 15 minutes card is real.

15 minutes card.

Oh, my God.

That's great.

Wow.

All right.

I'll pick number 19.

Number 19.

Good number.

Oh, this is actually one I was curious about.

Poltergeist pillow.

Sleep on this pillow and your astral astral form will be able to wander at will.

But if you but you turn to a real ghost if you do not return to your body within 24 hours.

Oh, wow.

I haven't

seen the ghostly realm that prevents me from coming home.

That feels like

it would be a really good short story.

In the collection Night Shift.

Yeah, no, no, no, for sure.

Or one of a Jungi Ito anthology.

One of the two.

Oh, yeah, but in Jungi Ito, the ghost is like really fucked up.

Now, you might be thinking, listener, this all sounds like a lot of business just to show a trade where a guy steals a bunch of cards from another guy.

Yes.

It is.

It is.

It is.

It's too much business.

And it's business.

It's energy spent on not terribly interesting parts of the game.

Yeah, just a lot of detail.

There's like so much stuff.

Also, the art for the cards is great.

It's really fun.

I believe the art that I'm sending is

I think it's colorized from the manga.

Okay.

So we did look this up and with a couple exceptions it looks like the art is pretty much the same except for colors between all three versions.

So one of the cards that Tezgera and the bomber are both looking to get is a card called Strip of Beach, which is proving difficult to get and it's in a town called Sufrabi lots of translations for this by the way which is really funny

the Wikipedia or so the hunterpedia

like wiki says that it's called plot of beach it's also called plot of shore it's also called area of the coastline but the dub does call it strip of beach which is the best version i think i do like it i like the idea of a card that is a place i think that's really cool yeah um and it's just pulled the pond so i That's true.

I did pull the pond.

So I got one of those.

We've got just like a classic nice piece of

there is a card that everybody wants.

And so everybody's going to get drawn together.

You sort of mentioned this a bit earlier, Sylvie, of just like getting the pieces in the row to pull everybody into conflict with each other is really nice.

There's a nice bit of pacing that happens as Gon and Killiua are...

realize that they can trade leave cards for valuable other cards, which is that Gon and Killiwa and Bisky are really excited that they have about 55 cards

at this point.

And I think there's a really nice

sort of balancing of tension happening where we are excited and curious about Genthru and Sasguera having a card count way up in the 90s, but we're also cheering for Gone and Killiua, who are, you know, only about halfway completely.

I think that's interesting.

Just Gar's been in here for two years.

Well, they're Gone and Killiwa.

Yeah.

And it's not a linear progression for most people.

You know,

you get all the easy cards, you can fill half your slots.

A bunch of the cards that they got that they can't fit into the binders or that they have reached the card cap on and so can't turn into cards just turned into this little pile of crap that they have in front of them.

It's great.

They have, I've wrote down the notes here: a cat, a monkey, a cola bottle, a bag, a cell phone, a weird toy, some sneakers, a bottle of wine, and non-specific non-specific colorful dots.

Biscuit at this point reveals that she thinks spell cards are too confusing.

She's old.

She doesn't know how these newfangled video games work.

I feel you, Biscuit.

I'm too dumb to play deck builders, so I'm with Biscuit on this one.

Is this why she's been in the game for so long?

Just that she is not engaging with this.

No, she came in with them.

Yeah, yes, you're right.

She did come in with them.

I don't know why I thought that she'd been in the game for so long.

This is me whenever I play a

from software game where I'm like, this is so annoying and difficult and I can't figure it out and it's like Jack would you like to engage with some of the more complex mechanics that would make your life easy for you and I'm like absolutely not.

What the fuck is faith?

Get that out of here.

Get that out of here.

I'm here to hit stuff with the sword.

I'm playing an astrologer this time around and it is so much easier than what I tried to do the first time.

Actually paying attention to my build, it turns out.

Yeah, this is also the game

at this point.

Goan remembers the ill villagers, and he remembers that his necklace could cure curses.

Oh,

he's just been thinking about them.

Killer goes, What

sick bandits?

So does Biscuit, right?

Yeah, they don't remember.

Um,

uh, and Gohan's like, okay, fine.

Um,

uh,

the villagers say that they will try.

This is such a good job.

It's so funny.

It's so funny.

There's just that like constant sort of grumbling, low-key quality of the visual imagination of the anime team and of Tagashi is so good.

Even when they are just like throwing away little background moments, the little moments themselves are just joyful.

So the villagers say they will trust them with their lives.

Then they all turn into sick villager cards.

It's so cute.

It's so cute.

Yeah, they just move into cards.

Yeah.

And then the sick villager cards all turn into healthy villager cards.

And they're all cheering.

They're like, the little card is cheering.

Yeah, so then they pop back into reality and they're like, okay, so as a thank you for this, we give you this, you know, this

jewel that's been in our family or in our village.

And it's the wild luck Alexandrite card number 75 that Genthru has been looking for.

A card that multiple people have been like, oh, that's a really hard card to get.

And that is why no one's playing this game right.

Everyone's playing this game wrong.

You sound like Goan.

Get through is holding people at gunpoint rolling evil dice to either blow them up until they win a wild like Alexandrite.

And you could have just gotten a D-ranked card in one minute from a game.

And then

use that item to go help the villagers.

But because you didn't play the game, no one fucking knows how to get the card.

Because they're not real gamers.

Goan figured it out because he's nice.

It's great.

A little thing that underscores this a bit is the villagers thank Goan and Killua for...

They say something like, you gave us everything without us asking for it.

Which is different to the way that Bisky and Killua characterize it, which is that they stole everything from them.

And there's this thing of like, oh, my God says you gave us everything you had with no expectation of reward.

Oh, with no expectation of reward, yeah.

Which is also not exactly true because Killer did complain about not getting a reward.

Yeah, that's killer.

But I do sort of like the idea that Jing sets the game up to have these sort of like altruistic, you know, and expectation of altruism in the villagers.

But the players are like, they fucking stole all our shit.

And it's only kind-hearted going.

He's going kind-hearted.

He's weird.

He's he's, I don't know if he's...

He's very pure-hearted.

He's pure-hearted.

Pure-hearted, yes.

Yeah, pure-hearted Pure-hearted is different than kind-hearted.

I think that's true.

That's a great moment.

Fundamentally,

that's that's I mean, we spent a lot of time in the first couple episodes talking about.

Sorry, what was that, Trey?

I was just gonna say, I think I think he's both.

I think he's kind-hearted and probably a little naive.

Yeah,

I mean, more than a little bit of

a streak to him.

There's there's

something a little bit twisted about those guys.

Uh, I should read.

Uh, let's just go back.

It's been a while since I read this.

Goan's great, isn't he?

I feel like it would be exhausting, but extremely valuable to have a gone in your life.

So that's what we think about Goan.

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Feel free by it, Jack?

I think so.

Hey, here's another one.

This is funny.

I think this is also from Jack.

The relationships we have with the people closest to us are our greatest strength and greatest weakness.

I think that's the thesis of the show.

I think that that might be, I've talked about this before, but I do think that that's also what the show is saying.

Plus, games.

Plus, games.

Plus games.

Yeah, I mean, like Karapika explicitly says that, right?

When we have the scene where

she's telling Goan, like, how her powers work.

And then, you know, Leorio and Kilawell like pop up behind the couch.

And they're like, yeah, no, you got to put your, your Nin chain around our heart.

Got it.

That's fine.

And Karapika says the thing, like, you know, I've been blessed by oh, yeah, I've been blessed by having yeah.

Um, at this point, Kazuel brings together everybody to try and uh beat the bomber and also probably Tezgera, but he's really focused on the bomber.

Um, this is like a loose allegiance among uh the remaining powerful teams, and it falls apart sort of immediately.

Um, a red-haired woman called Asta is extremely um doesn't like the idea of taking orders from Gon and Killiwa.

Is there anything else noticeable about her, Jack?

Tagashi's horny.

Tagoshi got horny for Asta suddenly.

She's

so horny.

Yeah, she's very jiggly.

Hunter Hunter doesn't really like do this a lot.

Like, it doesn't

lose too many of the horny shonen trope things, but when they're there, they're so obvious.

They're so there.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's really weird how this sort of like horny locus has been developed suddenly in Aster.

It's like

horny locuses next season.

Yeah, that's one of the many ants.

I don't know why here.

I don't know why now.

I don't know why this character design.

It's very odd.

I should say, you know,

you can't jiggle in a manga.

Yeah, that's true.

I was actually just thinking about that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Outside of like her, her character design is not particularly sexualized.

It's the way she's animated, which is

odd.

I don't really know what's happening there.

But as a character, Aster is primarily defined by the fact that she thinks that Gun and Kilua are rank amateurs.

They don't know how to use something called the trade shop.

There's lots of just sort of like good background Greed Island stuff here.

At one point, she's kind of embodying the they're just kids, how could they be any good ethos late in the game of Greed Island, which is especially insane.

It's so

Yeah, there's a theory that the card zero, which is the card that Genthury doesn't have, will appear in an event after you've got the other 99.

There are just these nice little moments where we get bits of how Greed Island should be working and a bit more of that soon.

That I just wish we got more of.

This whole thing really felt like Tagashi being like, I've been on message boards.

Let me write a little message board interaction out of this.

Like for real, though, right?

Like, especially when they start exchanging tips and stuff.

And like, oh, did you know that you can um uh keep is it contact you can like use it more than once if you don't hit the button um

when you keep it in your your binder to see the list of names

yeah like they're sharing exploits they're sharing like info on i mean like genthru i don't think i would consider a boss character since he wasn't meant to be there but they are like sharing information on that type of thing yeah like and they're bickering and they're you know um

trying to de trying to um de-escalate a fight and then actually you know uh actually having the fight

it's great uh we introduce a new character here gorenu uh he's a friendly looking guy um

he was named earlier at some point because he has been in the the little thing this whole time the uh the picture

zone

The what?

Oh, you mean in the drive?

Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He also

was there when

Sasgero was testing people, right?

Like, that's the first time we saw him was in the

little assembly room that Tagashi loves having characters go into.

Yes.

That man loves assembly rooms.

He loves them.

He keeps.

Well, it's because Tagashi loves putting the freaks.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And an assembly room really lets him get as many freaks as possible on screen at once.

If Tagashi was dealing with a 4-3 aspect ratio, he would be severely, you know, let down by the amount of freaks he would be.

Or he'd just pack him in, you know, or he'd just cram him in.

He's killed him out.

He'll freak him out.

They sort of work through a plan, which is that they are, and, you know, there's so much talking through here.

What is a fundamentally extremely simple plan, you know?

Genthru needs to get the card, so we will monopolize a card that he needs to get, so he can't get it.

We need to monopolize Strip of Beach.

And they figure out that Strip of Beach is probably in this town called Sufrabi, And they arrive.

At which point they learn that.

There is a very cute moment when they're like figuring that out, where they're all like, oh,

they're all using their spells to get the information together.

Like one of Asta's team is the girl who's like, this is in Sufrabi.

And then someone else is like, oh, and I have a company card.

What's her name?

Amana.

Asta's team is her, Amana, and Mannheim.

I would hang out with them because they look like a new metal band, kind of.

They do look like a new metal metal band.

kind of.

Um,

in this weird town, this weird town is basically under the thumb of some pirates, and the pirates are called Razor and his 14 Devils.

Yeah, we get a classic Tagashi Freaks in Silhouette shot.

Um, this is almost immediately swerved on because these are very normal-looking guys, they just wear sort of jesters' hats, weird little piratical jesters' hats.

Yeah, uh, and this is the same Razor that the troop met.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

This is not an NPC.

This is a human who runs the game and who has kind of taken on the role of this boss character.

Because

the team sort of realizes that this event would only trigger if 15 players show up in town and start asking about the pirates and the card, which I think is really great.

Yeah, it's a raid.

Oh my god, it's a raid.

Literally.

But like, was this written at a time where raids were like a thing?

Because remember, this was written in like

99, 2000, wasn't it?

I mean, that's EverQuest was then.

Were there raids in EverQuest?

I don't know enough about EverQuest to like know.

Yeah, I never played EverQuest, but I distinctly remember learning.

One, there were raids, and I think there were even raids where it was like a boss would like spawn somewhere randomly in the world or something like that.

Oh, cool.

People were like fighting to track it down.

Huh.

Which kind of like Greed Island then leaned into people playing the game in a way it wasn't intended to be played to try and min-max it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And they'll give them information on what they know about Strip of Beach if they get rid of the pirates.

It's classic.

And everyone arrives at the pirates' base as the episode ends to see them doing, you know, classic pirate stuff.

They've got a bar, they're drinking around,

they're lounging, they're laughing, they've got whiskey.

Now, of course, these pirates are about to reveal themselves to be be something completely different, so we should all just relish this nice moment of some pirates being pirates.

You know?

Um, could we take five minutes?

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Okay, I will be right back.

Hello.

Hello.

Hello.

Who is Radgetts?

Do you want to guess?

Do you want to guess what anime he's from?

Or should we tell you that and then you can guess what type of character he is?

Tell me that.

It's Dragon Ball Z.

He's a fucking alien, isn't he?

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's an alien.

Not incorrect.

No.

There's a bit more going on there.

Yeah, do you want to guess who he is?

Why he's relevant?

He's.

He's Vegeta's dad.

Oh, you're so close in like a really weird way.

Because he is related to a main character.

He's Goan's dad.

He's

Goan's.

He's Jing Freaks.

Oh, he's freaking freaking freaking.

Raditz is Jing Freaks.

That's why he had to leave Goan as a kid.

He had to go into Dragon Ball Z.

What's the guy in Dragon Ball Col?

Goku.

Goku.

What's the guy in Dragon Ball Colf?

What's the first letter of the alphabet again?

That rules, Jack.

Thinking really hard for 10 minutes.

Hey.

We ready to come back?

Yeah, he's Goku's brother.

He's Goku's brother.

Oh, bro.

He's Goku's evil brother who's come to Earth to say, I'm evil, and you're evil too.

And you're an alien.

What a great thing to be told.

Oh, wow.

Like, basically, he shows up and does the whole lore dump explaining what a Saiyan is.

It's in, like, the first two episodes.

Yeah.

Literally in Kai, that arc is like three episodes.

Yeah.

It makes sense when you...

Know that the manga does not differentiate between Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.

Yeah.

Oh, that's really interesting.

Yeah, I didn't know that.

Huh?

It just flows from one to the other.

Oh, I did not know that either.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's just Dragon Ball.

That is straight up why I always thought, like, oh, yeah, Dragon Ball Z was just like an anime, and then Dragon Ball is the manga.

I do think that they delineate Super, though.

Like, I think the manga for Super is called Dragon Zone.

They do, they do, yeah.

Because it ends up being a marketing error that

Dragon Ball Z, Z in the if you want to go read it, it's just called Dragon Ball like 130, whatever.

Or whatever it is.

Is this new art from Tagashi?

Yeah.

Yep.

That's so good.

Look at him.

Yeah.

He posted it yesterday.

Or 10 hours ago.

Love.

This morning.

Fucking Twitter username.

It's so great.

It's so funny.

It does make it hard to search for him.

It does.

You know what?

That's just good info sec.

In case this makes it onto the podcast, this is

art from Tagashi from from his desk.

He's drawn Goan in a kind of white suit, sort of like doing a jumping jack in the air.

He's smiling, he's grinning, and then there's a little Goan above him riding a hoverboard by the looks of things.

Like a

candy bubblegum colored hoverboard.

It's got the Shonen Jump logo pirate guy on it.

Oh.

Oh, yeah.

I love this alt costume for Goan, the white on green or the green on white.

Is that a costume that's going to show up, or do you think he's destroyed him like that for a whole month or something?

I've never seen that.

Yeah,

is this Scary Leorio?

Who the fuck is this?

No, that's Genthru.

That's that's Tartha.

Oh, that is Gentru.

Look at that.

That's a really creepy Gentru.

It's a super creepy Gentrule.

This is a very creepy Genthru.

Okay.

Sorry, that's a very creepy Genthru.

I needed to put us on Tall Sage.

Oh my god.

I'm just saying.

He's posted like

maybe he's heard the chimes this week.

Yeah, I know.

Yoshihira Tagashi, if you're listening,

thank you so much.

What you've made rules.

Yeah.

Please look after yourself.

Take your time.

Yes, 100%.

Oh my god.

I would rather you live a very long life and never another episode of Hunter Hunter come out.

This

one that he's just done in like Posca Pens or something of the four of them is so good.

I hadn't seen that.

It's just this really scratchy marker drawing of Leorio, Kilua, Karapika, and Gunn.

And, you know, seeing them rendered out this simplistically really speaks to the clarity of the character design, right?

Especially Karapika, you can just draw so straightforwardly like that.

The use of like negative, like the white negative space on the paper here to be the detail is so cool.

God, I mean, the dread side effects of being a mangaka as prolific as he is is not only that you, you know, slowly slowly destroy your body in service of the work that you've been asked to do, but also that you are constantly drawing.

You know, you are practicing constantly.

You know, if you were drawing thousands of pictures non-stop,

the way that those people are able to think about lines must just be completely alien to the way that I think about how to draw a line.

I can't even draw a line.

I'm sure you can draw a line, Keith.

Comes up like a circle.

Oh, no.

The infinite line.

He's great with sounds, not so great with drawing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a weird and in power that you can't draw a straight line, but you always draw a perfect circle.

Beautiful circle.

The pirate, the pirate sort of crony says, all right, let's play a game.

And he draws a circle of fire in the ground with like a hard liquor of some kind, you know, a fire-causing liquor.

And he says, if you can move me from this ring,

you can come and see the boss, because it's games all the way down, and we haven't even reached the basement floor yet.

He immediately handily takes out the first guy who tries.

Kilea notices how long it took the first contender to produce Ren and is like, this guy's useless.

Yeah, scrub.

There's a lot of that going around.

Yeah.

And then

the guy sort of surrenders, but continues to get choked out by the big pirate, which causes Goan to sort of kick him.

Yeah.

Pulled his feet over the flame.

Yeah, what's interesting is that Goan says

he said he lost.

You know,

you should let him go.

He's admitted defeat.

Play fair.

Yeah, and this is such an interesting Goan moment for me, right?

Where it's like Goan is intervening, not because he thinks what is happening is cruel, even though it is visibly cruel.

He's intervening because the rules were set out one way, and you are not following them.

And that's not fair.

It's cruel to do it when you shouldn't.

It would have been fine to do it to make him give up.

But once he's given up.

Let me tell you about this time, me and this guy, Hanzo.

I was going to say, we have this.

This is text in the show.

We know that Goan will not only tolerate.

intense cruelty, but will sort of see it as part of the game.

Yeah, ask for it.

Yeah.

He's a really strange character.

He's a very strange little

freak.

He's a weird little dude.

But there's a really sweet moment as, you know, the rule is actually that, you know, you can strike, but you mustn't leave the circle until you are sort of thrown out of it.

So Goan launching the kick and jumping out has actually meant that he's lost, to which Goan says, oh, shoot, let me have another go.

It's just a very Gohan's mistake, right?

Of just like opening up the frustration or opening up the kind of childishness in the like, oh, shoot, if only I'd known, let me go again.

He acted too fast, he made a mistake, and then he gets kind of upset.

But Kilua will take care of it.

Kilua, that's the story of this whole show.

He acted too fast, didn't really think about it, and Kilua will fix it.

Killua starts this fight by breaking a bottle of whiskey or something,

pouring it on this guy's head.

This is his first step into the ring.

Uses his

fingers like an arc lighter to ignite the whiskey.

This guy is set aflame.

His head is on fire.

Crashes to the ground, rolls, crashes into a wall.

And Killua wins without really even throwing a punch.

This guy's mad.

Oh, this guy's name is Bopopo.

Good name for a pirate.

Yeah.

He's mad.

He charges at Kilua being like, I'm going to fucking kill for doing that to me.

And one of his pirate buddies kicks him in the head and is like,

you set up the rules and you lost.

Get over it, basically.

Yeah, he said, you made up the rules.

Don't get upset.

And I thought that was really interesting in line with the sort of broader conversations we've been having about Jing setting the game up and then leaving, and then Goan's frustration that people aren't playing the game right.

Yeah.

You know, aren't following his dad's game and to the letter.

The micro, like, he's upset about about this too.

They're like, he also feels the same way as this intruder pirate.

I don't have his name.

We have now, we've been seeing Kiliwa doing this kind of like very, very sudden, very, very effective violence for a while.

And it has sort of become, I mean, you know, that was how we were introduced to him when he sharpened his nails and killed that dude on the airship.

But there was a long period where Kiliwa was like, I'm not going to follow in my assassin family's footsteps.

And then he does kind of like genuinely begin to work through that through the Zelda cork.

But now we're back to Killier is a kind of lethal force of nature, but sort of separate from the assassin family.

Yeah.

Which is interesting.

Maybe there's something to like, he's not using it to kill.

He's using it to like quickly neutralize.

By setting a man's head on fire.

But yeah, but I think that there's some mixed, like

vigilante justice thing happening too, where it's like, this guy deserves to have happened to him what he did to this guy.

That's true.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a weird sort of combination.

He definitely is not just like he could have pushed this guy out of the ring, no problem, and just won like that.

He thinks he might be an NPC as well, right?

When in fact, he probably isn't, based on something we learned.

Yeah, maybe.

Although that didn't stop Kilo during the Hunter exam.

Fucking sure didn't.

Decking Zapile.

It It was great.

The Pirates Base is in a sort of blocky cliffside mansion.

There's some really nice architecture throughout this show.

This is a show that doesn't spend a lot of time on establishing shots because there could be time you could be spending introducing freaks.

All the cities have cool different feels.

They do all have really cool feels, but we essentially get like one establishing shot on the way into a thing.

In fact, the back half of York New was sort of defined by opening that up a bit more and the feel of the city a little longer.

But for a show that mostly will sort of power up to an establishing shot, fire it, and then move on, I'm always really impressed by the way they make buildings look in this game.

What are the pirates doing inside their pirate base?

It's worth saying, because as soon as we say this, it's going to be all we talk about until we get onto the Pisaka disaster.

I want to make it clear.

When they first go into the pirate base, this is exactly what I was going to say.

Yeah,

it is a dingy, almost like old west looking bar.

It looks like, it looks like the,

I can't, like the, it looks like a galley in a ship, or it looks like, you know, like a pirate ship or a weird Wild West bar.

Like, it's a dingy, dark wooden place.

And then when they go up into where Razor is, it is just

a gym class.

Squeaking shoes,

telefits, boxing razors.

It's so funny.

Oh, it's great.

I don't know why we do this.

And the more I watched, the more I sort of figured out why, right?

Which is that like Razor is a game buster.

And so it would make sense to me that there would be a sort of like quote-unquote pure game happening here.

Sports is like the most straightforward expression of a game within a game.

But then why pirate?

I think there's something else too, because I think that what he what he has to do is like

follow the vibe of the game for the pirate but then he's a real guy he just has to live there it's almost like a prison for him like he has a 24 7 job of living on this island and i think he's just like i'm a gym i just love gym class and so if i'm gonna be here to run this game i'm gonna like

live my life here

and have the gym class like how I like he is a gym like he is the most gym teacher teacher-coated character we've gotten before.

Yes, he is dressed just like a gym teacher, yeah.

But, like, if a gym teacher was ripped, yeah, it's worth saying, we're not, we are here using the word gym to mean like a gymnasium, but there's also big Pokemon gym vibes going on here.

Here is one building that you go into in otherwise a perfectly normal town, and it's all like waterfall-themed for some reason.

Like, this is like, oh, we went into what we thought was a pirate base, and it's all like gymnasium-themed.

Um, it's about at this point that I'm like,

he's coming.

The gorilla.

Do you have do you have anything to say about the gorilla at this point?

I do, Keith.

Thank you for asking.

This is so funny because it has made, you know, we've talked about how the mystery of the gorilla.

The gorilla appeared in a screenshot, in the screenshot stream early here.

It was revealed to me that this gorilla was not only a background character.

He also didn't have a name.

And we've talked a bit about how the gorilla adds a sort of sub-dimension to this watching project because we're just sort of waiting for the gorilla to show up.

And I can tell you that it is only funnier now we are much closer to the gorilla showing up.

Because

can I guess what you're about to say?

Is that you don't see an obvious path to gorilla yet?

See an obvious one to the gorilla.

Because the gorilla isn't a member of our team.

The gorilla clearly isn't a member of the pirates, otherwise, he would have previously been introduced.

My note here says, this is so funny because I know the gorilla is coming, but I don't know how.

Me watching Godzilla versus King Kong.

It's

absolute delight.

It's so, it's so great.

I can feel him sort of waiting in the wings.

I can hear the gorilla's music burbling up.

I can feel it in the cosmos.

Cosmos, the gorilla is coming.

Oh my god, is that the gorillas music?

Steve Austin's music played on like the Donkey Kongo drums.

This is Requiem Aranea.

No, this is Riot.

That's Riot.

That was Riot.

That's the gorilla's music.

I decided.

It's so funny.

There's new music for this scene, by the way.

Is that?

I'd say there is music for the gorillas.

After we get this, like...

gratuitous shot of every part of Razor's body, including a close-up on his ass from under the corner.

Yeah, there's some weird ass close-ups.

These episodes are horny.

You might be wondering, is it going to get horny in a really sort of cataclysmic way later?

Yes.

Yes, it is.

Oh my God.

Before we move on to these games themselves, I would like to introduce everybody to the 1970-something book, children's book, written by Russell Hoburn and illustrated by Quinton Blake called How Tom Beat Captain Nayorg and His Hired Sportsman.

I'm just going to post the cover in here.

Excuse me?

Oh, these are Waldos.

These are the Waldos.

This is how they get Waldo on every page, is they actually have to hire a bunch of people.

This book is about a boy who...

It's such a great book.

It's about a boy who is constantly fooling around rather than doing his chores.

He is playing silly games, basically.

He's playing, you know, games in the mud.

He's basically being what I imagine Keith was as a kid.

You know,

in the river.

And his aunt, who's this awful woman who wears an iron hat, is like, I'm going to have to bring in Captain Nayork and his hired sportsmen, who are like four,

they're these gym guys, basically, from

their Razors

14 devils, who show up to like instruct children in like proper good ways to play.

And of course, what ends up happening invariably is that Tom, you know,

introduces them to his own bullshit games,

none of which they can play.

I'm just gonna paste this here, and we've got some excellent Quinton Blake drawings of these weird hired sportsmen being completely unable to

play any of these stupid games that he has come up with.

But the idea of like, here are a bunch of hired sportsmen whose whole job is like playing the platonic ideal of games,

getting messed with by a bunch of weird nen children

is very very much the first thing that I thought of when I saw Razor and his 14 devils revealed to be

sports gym people.

That's what I was thinking about when I wasn't thinking about the gorilla, which I was thinking about most of the time.

And just how it is.

I'll make sure to include these.

By the way,

if you don't know about this,

Every episode that we post, I put a public post on the Patreon at friendsofthetable.cash.

It's in the description.

If you've been missing these, you should go look at those.

I think it's a great way to listen along whether or not you've seen the show.

These photos that Jack has shared will all be in there.

Okay, so the first game is Boxing.

This is interesting.

You can use Nen here.

They've been told.

Now, of course.

And this is where we get the new song.

Oh, yeah.

During the boxing.

It's called You Can Be Strong.

It's a new fight song.

This is Pokemon Jim.

Yeah, it is kind of a Pokemon gym.

It's a great theme.

It's a lot of fun.

The boxing turns into basically just like a perfect shonen moment, actually.

It is so Dragon Balls-y.

Yeah, do you want to talk about this?

It's just like, it's the blur of movement stuff.

So basically, the way the fight goes is,

I believe it's revealed revealed that both the boxers are emitters, right?

Like, pretty much right out of the box.

They do like a sort of rock, paper, scissors thing with Nen powers where it's like, I bet you didn't think I was an emitter too, and I'm a good emitter.

Which means that one of these pirates, at least one of them, is a human, not an NPC.

Because the NPCs can't wield Nen, I don't think.

Yeah,

well, I think that's a good thing of Nen, right?

So maybe they can.

I don't know.

In any case, I don't know if we've gotten that explicitly said or not.

Sorry, I interrupted you, Sylvie.

Carry on.

I'm just trying to remember the beat-by-beat of the fight.

What's the name of the...

Let me tab over to this document.

Is this guy here?

Montreux.

Montreux.

Montreau, yeah.

He...

It looks like he's got the upper hand on

the clown he's fighting, the jester he's fighting.

There's a big, like, Flurry and

Mannheim from Asta's team, the Fred Durst looking guy, is like

wide Fred Durst.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like, oh, there's no way he's dodging that.

We got him for sure.

And it's like, no, all of a sudden, Montreux just falls over, knocked out.

And everyone's like, what happened?

And it's like, Killa was like.

Chumps.

Chumps.

It was so fast.

I saw it.

Idiots.

You absolute morons.

Look what I know.

So we get to see it.

The pirate got, didn't have any visible shots on it.

He was on the defensive the entire time.

But what Killow explains is that he used teleportation to teleport his fist to get a counter-uppercut on this guy.

It's so cool.

Just his fist.

Just his fist.

Was it it was right?

It was just his fist.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To get a simultaneous

but the pirate gets up in a second, and

Montro is out.

This worries Killiwa.

Yeah, in fact, everything starts going.

And Razor notices that it worries Killiwa.

Yeah, things start going wrong as Killiwa realizes that they're not going to be able to win with this team.

So they just start losing fights.

One of us couldn't even beat Bopobo.

Yeah.

We got to get good.

Yeah.

uh

at this point I say

everybody deliberately loses and they leave.

Am I going to be cheated out of my gorilla this episode?

Next note, hope swelling.

No, they have to get the gorilla.

I think this is where our gorilla shows up.

We're going to find him.

Yeah.

He's going to be part of our strong team.

I don't know why a gorilla is on Creed Island.

I don't.

You could say

we'll approach that when we get there.

At this point, a lot of people leave to the point where all that's left is Garinu.

I like that when they get out of there, I think it's

Kazoo, but maybe it's Garinu that's like, you lost on purpose because you knew that we couldn't win, right?

And they're like, yeah, no one has hard feelings about this, which is nice.

Oh, they're all pretty chill.

Yeah, they all just go like, okay, I guess we'll all leave.

And then Greynu stays, I guess, because he thinks that he can hang.

And this is where they start.

I put some respect on my man's name.

This is because he knows he can hang.

Thank you.

And this is where they start brainstorming strong players.

Who do they think of first?

Well, so if Krolo is on the island, which they think he probably isn't,

even the person using his name is probably going to be strong.

And it's probably going to be a member of the Phantom Troop.

And Gohan says, well, we'll just ask them to help us.

We'll just ask the Phantom Troop to help us.

And Kilua says, no, you idiot.

The Phantom Troop aren't going to help us.

Goan and Kilio have a really great sort of like bickering fight here about like, well, I just want to know why they're on the island then.

I think, what does Kilua say?

Goan says, yeah, I'm an idiot.

I know I'm an idiot, so I'm still going to ask.

I love, this is not the first time Goan has used the, you're right, I'm an idiot, so I'm going to go do stupid stuff defense.

It's great.

Yeah,

it is, to me, a classic part of Goan's mistake, brackets positive.

I need to keep this.

Well, you can't, it's sort of, it's a bit like the, I'm just a little birthday boy.

You wouldn't hurt a little birthday boy approach, but a lot more charming.

So they all just do contact a company, which is a card that they all get to teleport together, and they teleport to Hiseker.

Hiseker is bathing nude in a lake.

Now,

at this point, all hell breaks loose because it is clear immediately that, and you know, we talked a lot about the last time we saw Hiseker kind of with his hair down, as it were, when he was taking a shower in his apartment.

And part of that was a really interesting horror beat.

You know, we talked a lot about it then

of how it humanized Hiseka.

It made him less of this sort of frightening

sort of

inhuman character by saying, this is a guy who has an apartment.

He's also talking about how that humanization was its own sort of like eerie reminder.

Like, how could this person be like this?

Yeah, it's in the same scene that Hiseker made a reference to like his favorite candy when he was a child.

You know, there was a lot of stuff.

and you know, the fact that he wasn't wearing any clothes.

The camera was a little, a little lascivious to Hisaka in that sequence, but it was very much like he's out of his costume.

You know,

we're seeing Hisaka kind of removed from a lot of the signified.

Hisaka Hisaka, and this is like a 10.

Yeah.

What makes this scene so weird is that the camera is lingering on ripped nude Hiseka bathing in the middle.

And also lingering on a group of people, including Gonen Kilua, watching him

being naked.

Yeah, there's one person who's really interested in him being naked.

Gurani.

And it's

it's Bisky.

Well, Bisky and Hisaker in this scene is really odd, and I'm interested to talk more about it.

But you're right.

Biskey is briefly caught kind of like leering at Hiseka.

I think it is very odd that you know, Hiseka is primarily like a sexualizing entity.

He is someone who sexualizes others through his gaze.

And it is notable here that in this moment, the camera spent so long being like, isn't Hisuka kind of sexy?

Which is gross.

It produces a weird feeling.

Yeah.

Important to note, I think,

just to like

make sure that we're all working from the same information.

A lot of fucking people that watch Hunter Hunter go, yeah, of course Hisuka is sexy.

This is a massively popular idea.

Hmm.

People want to fuck the evil clown.

People want to fuck the evil clown.

I mean, look, I'm not going to.

That's weird.

It is.

Go for it.

I would say that from my read of the visual information that is being deployed to me, I do not want to fuck the evil clown.

No.

He is not evil in a way that is fun.

No.

He's evil in a way that is is fun for a story.

I've said before, and I will say over and over again, that

the things that Hisuka does to the plot are interesting to me.

Yes.

I don't know that I would say fun.

It's definitely interesting what Hisuka adds to the story.

The magic show that he does with Castro was a really fun Hisuka moment.

I had a great Hisuka

delight.

There's definitely some parts to Hisuka.

Yes.

Yeah.

But no, no, that's

interesting context there, right, Keith?

That like Hisuka is a character who is sexualized by a portion of the viewership.

Yeah.

Probably the biggest portion.

Probably a huge, like, you know, Hisuka is consistently a fan-favorite character.

Yeah.

It's intensely popular.

Yeah.

I think when we first met Hisuka and like everybody in the Hunter exam, I posted a Reddit thread where people were earnestly arguing whether Leorio or Hiseka was like a better quote-unquote dad figure.

I mean, that's crazy.

Oh, it's crazy.

It's crazy.

That's almost something completely different.

I also want to briefly touch on, and I don't feel like I have enough experience within the genre space or within the fandom communities to speak to this, but there's like a long history of fandom engagement and reworking and talking through of quote-unquote bad characters in

fandom spaces.

I don't think it's particularly unusual, and I think that there's probably been a lot of really generative fandom work talking through that stuff, just as there has almost certainly been some extremely misguided fandom work talking through that.

I just want to make sure that I'm not being like, um, it's so unusual that people find this evil character attractive, because I think that that's part and parcel of it.

It's not that it's unusual.

I do, I, it is, I think, uh,

the thing that's important about it is like,

what is the motivation

for having a scene where like Hisuka is naked and ripped and sexy or being portrayed that way?

And people are watching him and reacting different ways.

And the scene is like, it's not just for the characters that he's this way.

It's also for the camera.

And like,

you know, who is that for and what is it doing?

And a lot of the obvious answer is like, well, it's for the people who want to see that.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

And it's such a wild way into this scene that only kind of keeps getting stranger.

Two notes as well.

Hiseka is not wearing his face paint and his hair is down.

If you had asked me how Hiseker wears his hair prior to this point, I would not have been able to tell you, but I can tell you that in this scene, it's just sort of like loose.

you wouldn't have been able to say how Hiseka wears his hair.

No, in the same way that when we learned that we didn't actually know what was on Hiseka's doublet, uh, I could tell you the color of Hiseka's hair, and I could tell you that he had distinctive hair, but

weird duck butt hair is, I think, a very distinctive part of his hair.

It's like spiky, yeah, it's sort of like um, like a flame almost, but yeah, coming backwards off his head, yeah.

Um, there's a great moment here, which is um, first, uh, Hiseka, still nude in the middle of the lake, says, you've you've matured quite a lot, haven't you?

He can immediately sense that

Biscuit's training has gone, and it is perhaps the most explicit

gross grooming reference that we have had straight out of Hisaka's mouth.

You know, he has talked so often about like the fruit or whatever, but I feel that Hisaka nude in the middle of the lake saying, you've matured quite a lot, haven't you, is just ideology, you know,

coming straight out.

And then, Garenu says, who is this Purvy freak?

Yeah.

Which is interesting because I think this might be the first in-text acknowledgement of Hiseker as a weird pervert.

We've had stuff like Schwing.

You know, we've had,

you know, the show has been clear that Hisaker is a weird pervert.

But I don't know if we've had characters within the show say that.

Don Akilua also say it for the first time.

What do they say?

He's walking behind them and staring at them.

Oh, yes, and then he is.

And I feel him watching them, and they go, walk in front of us.

This is like worse in the manga, too, is my recollection.

It is way more like he is ogling their fucking asses.

Oh, there's definitely a frame of there's a frame of it, but it's like even more so.

If I'm remembering correctly, someone feel free to tell me I'm wrong.

But

last time I was free, I was trying to do something.

Yeah, I don't know.

Defend your clown.

No.

Don't ask for that.

I don't want that.

Listen.

I don't.

I've hitched my wagon to the villain already.

You guys know where I stand on things.

You can't compare them.

No, you can't.

No.

Well, yes.

Sylvie has chosen the villain that doesn't care about these two kids.

I've picked the genocider, not the pedophile.

There's a difference.

Yeah.

And I think the show knows there's a difference.

Well, it's weird, right?

Because, like, it's bad.

it's messy.

On the one hand,

naming this, even obliquely within the show, as like, who is this Pervy freak?

Yeah.

Opens the show up, in theory, to addressing this more directly.

Yeah.

However.

Do we want the show to address this more directly?

To be more specific, do we think the show is capable of talking this stuff through in the way that it thinks that it is?

Yeah, I think the cynical way to look at it is that this is like lampshading, where it's like, like, we know we have this pervert character who is like oggling these kids and is like interested, is like sexualizing them and is interested in like

killing them, like very interested in like fighting them to the death.

And that like by lampshading and by having Gonakilua react uncomfortably to it and having this character be like, this guy's a pervert is like

just kind of going like, well, we've acknowledged it.

We've acknowledged it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Rather than beginning to open the language to,

you know, working through this stuff.

It's not like it's subtle.

Like, Hiseka is, is almost daring people to have a problem with him.

Yeah, I mean, I feel like some of the first stuff that we talk about Hiseker on this show is me saying things like, are they really doing this?

And you saying, yes.

Yes.

I think this is

a buckle up.

Yeah.

This is where I think it's at its almost most explicit.

It is.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

I do not believe that it gets worse than this.

It's wild.

It's wild to put this in your show.

I mean, and I say wild to put this in your show, not in the sense of like, this isn't something you should put in a show, but in the sense of like, in the show that Hunter Hunter is, you know, where we have,

we've been playing elaborate card mechanics.

We're in the gym.

And then in the middle of it, you throw this deeply upsetting, deeply malevolent predatory character it's

on one level it is an interesting storytelling experiment on another level it produces sequences like this where we come into the episode going what the hell happened at the end of 68 yeah i think the big problem with it for me is like what does this do to like alter

what Hisuka has already been doing in the show.

It doesn't really do anything to change anyone's opinion of Hisuka.

He doesn't do anything new here.

It just like sort of takes what was already in the show and makes it more disgusting.

And then the thing that you that like I think like, okay, well, maybe they're doing it to like reintroduce the comparison between Bisky and Hiseka, like we were talking about in the last episode.

But then they take Bisky and like make her literally drooling over him.

Well, there is also a bit of an implication that it's an act.

I think it's really interesting.

Yeah, do you want to talk a bit about that, Sylvie?

Well, like, so we do get, like,

Hisuka tries to explain why he's there.

And isn't it that he's looking for Krolo?

Or looking for a single

real Hisuka lie.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And by a Hisuka lie, I mean he kind of makes things a little harder for himself

in the pursuit of telling exactly half the truth.

Yes.

He knows that letting them know about the exorciser, Abengane, possibly,

would actually make his desire to fight Krolo, it could be a setback.

And so he tells them instead that he is going to find Krolo.

Why?

He is honest that his motivations are to

like

what is...

No, he doesn't say that.

He specifically holds back.

He thinks that they don't know about Net Exorcism.

And so he is, he says that he's looking for the phantom troop because he knows that they would be looking for a net exorcist.

Right.

Not giving up that he's already helping them do that.

Yes.

Yeah.

The problem is that his, the biscuity is drooling over him before any real words have been exchanged about this guy.

Yeah, that's what makes it harder for me to argue that it's an act.

Aside from the bit later

when they're walking and she's like think, I can't remember what specifically she's thinking about him, but then he turns back to look at her

and she immediately goes back into like fawning.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's um

it's it's I do enjoy the fact that it is not terribly clear whether she is genuinely fawning over him or whether she

is is working an act to try and find an extremely strong person or whether her own weird impulses as a teacher are like, this is a powerful person that I'm interested in.

I think it's really interesting.

My belief

is that she's just

into him because she invites him to the group before he's explained who he is and why he's there.

And he's like, actually, we're looking for people who are really strong.

And then Goan and Kilo are like, what?

Do you know who this is?

And she's like, of course I know who this is.

Yeah.

And then he tells his lie and that's when she's like, he's lying.

Yeah, so

we get two fun little art moments.

Goan uh just reveals a bunch of information to Hisuka, uh, without uh um

caveats, you know, it's like a classic Goan just giving information, and we get everybody drawn in this like really sort of like picture book childish style as Goan reveals the information.

And then we have uh Bisky wanting to recruit Hisuka because she is fascinated by him for some reason, and we get what I wrote as Bisky's I Love Hisuka screen, which is just like uh, you know, hearts, roses,

beautiful, intricate border.

I just realized Tagashi's Twitter profile dog is there.

Oh, yeah.

The little dog.

A bone.

Yeah, next to Hisuka.

Oh, my God.

This is such a great frame.

This frame is Gone

with his blank face being like, I just gave up information.

Killiwa with his head hanging down.

Like, I can't believe this fucking guy.

Even Krillo.

Krolo.

Sorry, Sylvie.

Hiseker with the sweat drop and the little dog just being like, what the fuck is with this kid?

Great.

It's really good.

And then Bisky turns around and using her.

So they say, why are you recruiting him?

And she says,

I feel a kinship with Hiseker.

We'll put a pin in that.

And then she spells out, he's lying with her go text in her hands.

It's a really nice, creepy moment of like this little Bisky is seeing through something here, even though she might be falling in love with this guy.

She also really,

we have no practical use for

the

Gyo thing.

This is like our first, like, we've been talking about Gyo and learning to use Gyo whenever anything is suspicious for so many episodes.

And then they produce like a practical effect from that with this, telling them a secret message using it.

Yeah, which is really funny.

It's really good.

Yeah, Biscuit says she feels a kinship to Hisaka.

Now,

the immediate thing is that she's a kid.

She feels a

kinship with Hiseka.

All the other hunters we've met.

Almost everybody in a terrible, awful web.

Including Satots, the nicest guy that we can say was a hunter.

And part of this is what we talked about in the previous episode, you know, of the similarities between Hiseka and

Bisky.

I do briefly want to bring in something that Austin mentioned in our chat, which I think is a really interesting note to add to this, which is that, you know, Austin pointed out that

the key difference in the metaphor between Bisky's, you know, sharpening

or cutting away at precious stones and Hiseka's fruit is that fruit is made to be eaten.

There is something explicitly like consuming about Hiseka's whole sort of worldview here, whereas, you know, whether Biscuit is doing it selfishly or to put the gems on display or to put them in a crown or something, there is ultimately something, you know, and I use ultimately in the sense of like finally there, there is something destructive at the end of Hisuka's path.

The fruit is grown to be eaten.

The gem is made to be, you know, looked at.

And Keith, you pointed out that gems are also a process of cutting away at something, you know,

of destroying it.

Yeah, you have to destroy the rock to turn it into a diamond.

You do.

But ultimately, you have kept something in the middle of the rock.

Right.

Whereas you grow the apple or you

farm the pigs

to eat them.

Although,

you saying it this way made me realize that like, you know, the person who decides what is kept is the cutter, not the diamond.

Yes.

Oh, yes.

You're absolutely right.

It's like, I mean, the eye of the beholder, what gets produced from that.

Yeah.

It's kind of a mirror image, you know, destroying at the beginning to shape something versus like destroying at the end after it's shaped itself.

But if we had any questions about, and I mean, obviously you knew this was coming.

If we had any questions about, like, does the show know that Biscuit and Hiseker are kind of the same?

Yeah.

Biscuit explicitly saying,

I feel a kinship with him.

Right.

But then turning around and spelling out he's lying.

And also producing a sort of, you know, Hiseka-like

obsession over his body, the way that Hisuka is doing the same thing to other characters.

Yeah, what did I write down here?

Oh, yeah.

The thing I wrote down was like, is Biscuit tried to cultivate Hiseka?

You know,

is this just the thing that happens in every Star Wars where one small fish gets eaten by a bigger fish, gets eaten by a bigger fish?

I also like Hiseka's like extremely

subdued reaction to Biscuit.

Like, literally, I cannot, if you haven't seen the screenshot, literally, drool coming out of her mouth.

You know, no, no eyes.

You know, she has stopped having a human face in this frame

and then like doing a kind of sort of like princess postcard thing, asking him to join because he's really strong.

And then Hisuka just goes, like, um, sure.

It's great.

The way that Hisaka is drawn and his his voice actor's performance is so singular.

And I think it speaks to the skill of his performer and Krolo's performer that they are able to make these kind of like very low affect

voices.

Yeah.

Although the double listing is very high affect.

Is that so?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And he's great.

He's really great.

I think he's bad.

He's very fruity.

Yes.

Is that so?

Yeah.

But I feel like the.

Oh, my God.

Sorry.

You said gotta listen, and I remembered that I got a snippet of the show from earlier, a really funny moment that we didn't talk about.

We'll finish the Hizuka thing and we'll double back, because it's worth pressing.

Sorry, Jack, I cut you off.

Oh, just

in scenes where, you know, having had characters like Biskey, who are so animated,

or, you know, even Gon and Kiliwa, who are just, like, ping-ponging around all the time, bringing Hisuka back in and having him still have a very distinctive affect, but like, even even just the way he's drawn, that shot of him looking, giving a side eye to Bisky in the background, the extremely straight, extremely simple lines, and then this very quiet, very sinister delivery in the vocal performance,

putting Hiseka in a scene with very active characters always has a really good effect, I think.

And

I don't want to bury the lead here.

Like, this whole thing, this whole process is

allying Gon and Kilua with Hisuka for the first time.

They are allies now.

They're on the same side.

They're walking together through the forest after this.

Yeah, I mean, they're kind of tentative allies, but they are allies.

They're still aligned, which is like, you know,

this is typically kind of how it goes in Shounen 2 when the bad guy starts teaming up.

Like, it is definitely done reticently at first.

There's usually not like a full frontal exposing of that.

Piccolo didn't reveal himself in that way to the Z Fighters.

Not then, anyway.

No, not then.

No, if you want full frontal, you got to watch Gundam.

Boo.

Just before we move on, I have to quickly take a photograph of a shopping list to send it to Kat, who is at the supermarket.

So

I cannot believe that I had gotten this.

And we talked about the risky dice stuff for so long and I forgot about it.

But just as like very, there's this thing, it doesn't happen all the time, but it's one of my favorite things in anime when they dub it, is that sometimes they're just something that would never happen in an American cartoon, and you have to

make it happen in a dub.

I happen to be watching the dub for this part, and I'm so happy that I was.

There's a part where they're forcing these poor people that were captured by Genthru and the bombers to roll the risky dice, where they sing them a little song to encourage them to keep rolling.

And this is the

sub, it's so natural, but in the dub, you're like, you it just really calls

uh

it

really reveals that this is just like not a typical thing that would happen in an American cartoon.

This would never get written.

I have the audio from the show, never before seen.

We've never done this.

I put, I just recorded it straight from my computer onto a pad here.

Right, one more roll one more time, one more time.

Time to see what Motorique's got.

It's time to shine just one more time.

Oh my god.

So funny.

It's time to shine just one more time.

It's so great.

That is not the decision.

God, if I had to localize that, I would do it as like a awful, like drunken drinking game sort of vibe, right?

Where they're like egging him on, sort of like hazing style.

Yeah.

I'm thinking about the way that the like the war boys will sing to each other in the Fury Road and Furiosa to like, you know, goad them into acting, but instead they're just like, off we go.

One, two, three.

What do you think?

It is like tonally similar to the Japanese.

Like, not 100%, but it is similar.

And so I see how they got there, but it just like isn't.

It just doesn't come across normally.

It just feels so out of place.

Especially because Sub and Barra have been like so subdued to that point.

They've like not done a lot.

Oh, yeah, that's true.

So, to like all of a sudden, have them be like cheering on the murder dice.

It was very funny.

Anyway, uh, I was reminded of that because Jack said the words listening to, and I was like, I, I was listening to.

You were listening to something.

I had a house-style,

you know, A to D connect the dots moment.

I've played pinball.

Therefore, he must have the weird pinball disease

i loved house i loved house when i was a kid i gotta watch house okay so uh this kid says house this kid says after lying for 50 years i can recognize a fellow liar she describes this as a hunch and of course every time people describe things as a hunch i think about uh matchy's hunches and the way that like uh There might be something extra to Nen working out there in the world that's sort of guiding guiding people.

And then she has an absolutely incredible laugh.

she finds this joke so funny that she has made that she just cracks up laughing for a full five seconds um

killua is starting to figure out the plan drawing on you know information like yisuka barely understands how the game works so if he was really here looking for someone surely he would you know um

have more of an understanding of how to play the thing.

Yeah.

They all head to the town of Ayai, which is the lovers town.

It's so funny.

The town yells its own name.

I don't know if it has to be.

Out of a heart.

Yeah, there's a little heart above the town shouting, Aye Ai, Ai Aye.

It's really, really good.

And I, for some reason, thought that was just the people in the town.

No, it was like the town had like a non-stop

love alarm.

And most of what's happening in this town is either classic meet-cutes, you know, someone bumps into you and runs away, or situations that brave men can rescue girls from being assaulted in.

Yeah, it is very much romantic men showing up to Bisky and being like, you're so beautiful.

It is

really playing off a bunch of like tropes within romance anime.

There's the like.

There's a girl crunching on toast who bumps into the guy and is like, oh,

why would you do that?

And it's like, oh, you're supposed to argue argue with her.

And then

he tells Gurin to fucking nag people.

Yeah, there's this.

So the really funny joke with Hisuga here is that Hisuka knows the right thing to do for all of these situations is like, why aren't you engaging with these?

It's very funny.

Yeah,

it's because

he's the gross pervert himself doing his own.

Why aren't people playing Jing's game properly?

For the talent.

It's really, really funny.

It is very funny thinking of, like, you know,

Jing making this sort of romance trope town, being like, one day my kid's going to show up here.

It's great.

But Kiliwa sort of figures out that Hisaker is here because he's bored.

And if he is bored, it's probably because he is waiting for...

The exorcist.

Oh, no, wait.

What if he has met.

What if he knows already?

You know, what if he's looking for

a knowledge already?

Hasn't he been doing that?

And he's a good...

Sorry, Kiliwa basically just figures out almost the entire plan.

He doesn't know the identity of the Exorcist, but he's pretty much got it sorted.

And then, doesn't Kiliwa know the...

Because, I mean, Gon and Bisky do, so they may have said who it is.

They don't know that he's an exorcist.

Do they?

Oh, yeah, okay.

I don't think they know.

Yeah.

Kiliwa wisely decides not to tell this to Gone because Gon will just immediately tell Hiseka.

Yeah.

And then Hiseka will run away.

And then, in this kind of like fun, pragmatic Hiseka's actually our ally, they're like, Well, we kind of do want him on our side to go into the gymnasium with Captain Nayork's hired sportsman.

Um,

uh,

he's sort of using Goan's lack of knowledge as a plausible deniability type thing going on here because Goan starts interrogating Hiseka, and Kilua's like, if I was doing this, he'd know I was onto him.

Yeah, but Goan doesn't know fucking shit.

But what Kilua doesn't know is that he's suspicious of everybody, so he sets up a scenario specifically to throw uh uh suspicion off himself.

He he lands into Kilua's trap, but just uses texture surprise to get out of it.

It's always texture surprise, always texture surprise.

What happens is like oh, they they contrive to look inside Hiseka's binder to be like, if we could see the names of the Phantom Troop members in here, we would know.

And of course, they look, and the Phantom Troop are not in there, but he is just texture surprised.

The book, it's always texture surprise.

Yeah, as the man, as the singing man comes in for the outro, the narrator says, Is Hisuka a friend or a foe?

I know the answer to this.

He's a foe.

He's evil.

Definitely.

Well, he's in some sort of like threatening super position.

Yes, that's true.

He's dangerous as a friend or a foe.

Unless you're Illumi.

because

because green line

because because green line thank you what is

thank you from the from the the the q a episode the the chart the chart that

because green line because green line

absolutely yeah i mean in wrapping up i thought these episodes were sort of fine.

I really wasn't vibing too much with the first two.

The third one with the introduction of the gymnasium pirates and then just this just disaster of

sequences with Hiseka

was entertaining enough for me that I was like,

even though it's perplexing and upsetting.

Yes, yes, absolutely.

I mean, sometimes it really is interesting to watch the washing machine with the brick thrown into it start shaking off all the paddles of the washing machine, even though you're like, this is not washing the clothes.

Yeah.

It is weird.

You know, even though I liked a lot of the stuff in here, I liked the pirates, I liked the gym class, the hesuka stuff is insane, which has its own value, I guess.

I do love the card mechanics and seeing the cars and just like reading all the different stuff.

But

I think probably these are the worst episodes that we've seen in the show.

I don't know if I have the long enough view to be able to say that.

I will say that like the problems that I have with it that I spelled out at the beginning of the episode of this thing trying to balance a lot of different stuff and kind of falling apart, I think is the biggest problem I have with it.

I talked in a previous episode about how one of my favorite storytelling sort of impulses is the game that was set up one way and has gone wrong that no one can leave.

I think it's worth saying if it hasn't become clear, you know, from listening to me talk about media, that maybe my overriding impulse is I love watching a thing and going, why did they do it like that?

Why is this happening?

That is one of my most, and I say that not in the sense of like, how did they do that, that majestic thing?

How did they make this all go together?

I love sitting in a cinema and watching the train crash.

It's one of my favorite cinema experiences.

And so, stuff like the back half of this episode, where things go really entertainingly wrong, is kind of a joyful experience of watching the show.

The stuff that's so much less interesting to me is just working through the themes and variations of the cards in not particularly interesting ways.

Yeah.

I wish they had time, more time to do stuff with the cards

and like play with the

like the card, the transformation gain, and I can't remember the opposite of gain when you turn it back into a card.

Store.

No, I don't know what it's called, but it's something like that.

You know what?

I have it here.

If I go gain, oh, no.

Sorry, just the times that I said the word gain in my

notes.

yeah it just says gain um

anyway yeah so using gain to like actually use the items and see what they do and uh right play the game more like gone is so about play the game but the actual show hunter hunter is not about play the game in the same way that gone is which is kind of funny yeah and i'm preempting the the criticism of like but that's on purpose that's what greed island is about to which i say yeah it is.

Yeah.

You know, this is clearly about a game that has gone wrong and about Tagashi pulling his trick in one genre space while actually doing something else.

I think the problem is that Greed Island itself is such a compelling idea that I want to see more of that thing firing.

Yeah.

And it's a shame that we get to see it in montage.

Like, we see them defeating the monsters in montage.

We see them, you know, getting the cards in montage.

But what we get excruciatingly played out is like the

mental like game theory game of

I'll trade you this if you choose to.

And it's not even a terribly interesting mental game.

You know,

they're mostly just working through traits.

I like the character clashing part of that, but I don't really care about the trading card game part of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, interesting stuff.

And we were we were rewarded with a complete clusterfuck at the end.

As far as the worst three episodes out of 68 episodes go, these were fine.

These are fine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I think calling them the worst is more of a reflection on how good the show is.

Yeah, I just think it's worth, you know, for

a show that I talk about all the time, like, oh my God, these episodes were so good.

You know, I say that a lot.

I think it's worth saying that these episodes were not worth me saying that.

I would not say that about these episodes.

What are we watching next?

Next episode, we are watching watching

69,

70, and 71.

Okay.

I'll get the names of those.

Oh, yeah.

I love hearing the names on the recording before.

It's going to be called Meet

Gorilla.

Meet the Gorilla Part 2 and Meet the Gorilla Part 3.

69, a Heated Showdown.

70, Guts and Courage.

And 71, 71 Bargain and Deal.

Okay, pretty standard Hunter Hunter episode names.

Yep, and those are

Pen Ultimate are Pen Ultimate Greed Island episodes.

Crazy.

God,

it's gonna be Chimera Ants.

It's gonna be Chimera Ant.

We're breathing down its neck, we're breathing down its abdomen.

It's character

about

exorcism.

Why?

How How do we get to Chimera Ants?

I'm like, what is the.

So once we wrap up Greed Island,

you know, what is the remaining plot threads that are sort of like...

But this isn't how Takashi works.

Takashi will just get very excited about something.

But like, you know, are we going to get is Krola going to be exorcised by the end of this arc, and then he's going to be off doing his own stuff and get woven back into Chimera Ants?

Or are the Chimera Ants going to be the knock-on

of Exorcism in some way?

I don't know.

Would you like a structural...

This is not a hint.

This is not a spoiler.

But

this might be a structural reminder of the reality of Hunter Hunter that might help you think about

this.

Absolutely.

The anime is an artificial end point because there is not any more Hunter Hunter to make.

And there's a ton more Hunter Hunter that happens after the anime ends.

Right.

Yes.

Like almost 50% of it, right?

At this point, Sylvie Dino,

I don't know.

I don't know the specifics.

I don't know the specifics, but it's a lot.

My memory is that there's like 230-something manga chapters in the anime, and that there's like we're in the 400s or something for the manga at this point.

I don't know

how many manga chapters

again.

This is just a cruel reminder that y'all can Google basically anything you want about Hunt.

Yep, 400.

Oh, chapters yet, not in, yeah.

We're at, we, the most recent chapter is chapter 400.

So it's like almost 50% of Hunter Hunter is not a cartoon.

Is that true?

No, that's not true.

It's not true.

The last arc that's in the anime ends in chapter 339.

Oh, 339.

I thought it was 239.

So that, yeah, that's my, I just got, I just shit.

That's like a quarter almost.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh, but still, the, the, the ending of the, of the anime is sort of an artificial place to stop.

Right.

Um, and so, like, I would, I would not think of like plot beats in terms of what

will or won't be resolved by the end of Hunter Hunter because the end of the anime isn't the end of Hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Well, thank you for listening.

We invite you to go to friendsetable.cash if you like what you have heard and support us on Patreon, where you can unlock bonus episodes, including us discussing Dragon Ball and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure.

Yeah, and shortly,

Dragon Ball Z.

Dragon Ball Z.

Very excited for Dragon Ball Z.

I don't know that we'll do them all together the way that we've done

the other, like JoJo's and Dragon Ball, but I'm desperate to have a third set of Dragon Ball Z episodes because

there's a lot of different parts of Dragon Ball Z that are relevant to Hunter Hunter.

Is there anything else we want to hit before we say goodnight to everybody?

Before we say good night, good night.

Good night.

You're only listening to this at nighttime.

Sorry.

I would say thanks to everyone who's left reviews.

A lot of the reviews have been incredibly kind.

A lot of the reviews have been really nice.

Yeah.

And if you haven't, please leave one because that's one of the best ways to help us be heard by more people.

Oh, and here's, here's a, this is, this is actually, yes, right.

Thank you for reminding me about reviews.

Someone left a very nice little message on the

Hunter Hunter subreddit.

And anybody that wants to go add to that or go make your own post about that, I think that would be a great way to

let people who already like Hunter Hunter know that there's a really good show about Hunter Hunter that they can be listening to.

Yeah.

Wow, they hate that.

Sorry, I was looking at reviews.

I was trying to find a good five-star review to say.

And

listen, you got ADHD.

You know how that works.

I can't open iTunes, or I would help.

Sometimes I can't open iTunes until I restart Windows.

Wow.

Yeah.

It's a good one.

We're back.

I think it's a problem.

I think I need to reinstall Windows because I have a lot of reinstall Windows issues, and I think iTunes might not be able to launch properly because of that.

I got a cute little five-star review that's actually from like three days ago.

Oh, nice.

Oh, it's recent.

From Frantic Bindings,

the

subject is holds up finger to emphasize point and then begins with, you use gyo and see a ghostly five out of five floating in the air Everything about this is great, but especially the talk about the music I can never really pay attention to the music in the moment So it's nice to get commentary that highlights when themes show up and how they're used.

Thank you.

Thank you for watching

me.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I really appreciate it.

Um, it's there was a there was a piece of new music in here, I think, or it was a bit of music that we hadn't heard presented like this before.

Um, I think it appeared when uh they begin to discuss the trade between Sesgara and

that's holding a card file.

You ready?

That sounds like Biskey's theme.

Kinda, yeah.

It does a little bit, but nope, that's holding a card file.

That wasn't the one that I was thinking of, actually.

The one I was thinking of has this really sort of like gentle swirling string opening, almost like an orchestra warming up.

The fact that it's not showing up on your list makes me think of it.

That was

the one that I played was when they were doing the says gara trade not when they were discussing it so that might be why it's not the right one i think it might have been if we can't find it we can't find it that's fine yeah um but i think it might be as the trade begins as they meet in that kind of grassy field

no that's the same thing

uh yeah i don't know that's the this is the

Nope, I think we've heard that cue before, though, right?

Have we heard holding a card?

We have this cue

a couple times.

It plays for the first time when um

when the the spiders kill the dog guy in um

oh please do you mean squala squala yes thank you squala and then uh and then it it's mostly you can tell from the name it is mostly a green island song so it played in in episode 63

It played in episode 60.

It plays 13 times in the season.

Wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

Damn.

It's a good, it's a great track.

It is a great track.

Oh, it also, it closes out episode 68.

And now you're about to hear a great track written by Hirana and arranged by me.

Did anybody hear the ending of the last episode that went out?

It's so good.

You nailed it.

Oh, no.

No, I need to.

Okay, well, I remember why.

Does everybody remember why?

No.

I remember why, because I've heard it.

Don't remind me.

Don't remind me.

I want to listen and laugh.

Okay.

Okay.

It's great.

Do you need to get a clap or anything?

No, no, we don't need a clap.