Biscuit Krueger, Nen Master - Hunter x Hunter ep. 63-65: Media Club Plus S01E20

I still don't know if we're supposed to talk to her.

You can, but I'll cut it out.

Okay.

You should keep that in.

Hey, 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're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on the manka by Yojihiro Tagashi.

My name is Keith Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

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With me, as always, is Jack DeKeith.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

I am so tired.

I feel like the space behind my eyes has just been removed, and there's sort of like

soft

fluff in there instead.

I'm doing a cotton candy brain, Jack.

I was doing bullshit with the soundboard.

Who did that?

Yeah, I don't know.

Who did that?

You can find me on co-host at JBQ.

And you can get any of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Keith saw me saying I'm exhausted and was like, I'm going to break their mental state.

Keith is your biscuit.

Also, I don't think the people are going to know about Evil Keith when this drops.

I think that's going to be later.

It's going to be close because this will be like three weeks from now.

Okay.

Yeah, we've got an episode coming out on Tuesday, and then two more Tuesdays after that will be this.

You should listen to Friends of the Table.

You should listen to Friends of the Table, learn about Evil Keith, which is me now.

Ha ha ha ha.

Also with me is Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

That's Sylvie spelt without the E, Taking Back Sunday style.

Also, check out the...

Did you mention the YouTube?

You mentioned the YouTube already.

I don't want anything else to plug then.

All right.

And Andre Swan.

I can't believe you just made that.

Reference, Sylvie.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at Swanjerry3000.

If you want to be super refreshed like me drinking out of this beautiful, beautiful cup, you can buy one at friendsatthetable.shop.

The cup's great.

I got two of them and I drank out of it for the first time a couple days ago, and I loved it.

I'm just tasting it.

He still hasn't ordered one.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, I've already got all my stuff.

My candle came in.

My shirt came in my tote bag came in all secondly that's the day you know i could turn off my lights and i could just record by candlelight with my official friends at the table candle we don't need to be mean about it i would

just like jack i'm also tired if i was just doing this by candlelight uh all right since everybody is tired today let's get on with the episode we had three for today

and uh remind me did i say we went back to school last time did i say that i think you might have said that we were going back

okay well we are back to school we are fully back to school we learn where wing gets his teaching style from uh

or it's at least some parts of his teaching style uh we learn about ko ken shu and ryu we'll get into what those are uh we get some uh some jing lore uh we learn a little bit about this knockoff hisuka uh binult the scissors pervert but really there's two big things that happened in these episodes first kayla leaves the island in the middle middle of training to retake the hunter exam.

Something that every time it happens, I'm like, oh, yeah, I forgot Kilo wants to retake the hunter exam.

And the bomber shows up.

The bomber reveals his evil plan,

which is essentially to steal all the cards from like the good guy team that Gona Kilo declined to be part of.

It's bad.

The bomber's an evil guy.

He's very evil, and he's having a blast being evil.

Oh,

We have to stop that.

I'm having a blast.

There you go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I didn't say this last time we recorded, but I only think of Ginthru, aka the bomber, as Walmart brand Vash the Stampede.

Oh, he's Fred from Scooby-Doo to me.

Oh, he's okay.

He's like both.

He's

Kabuto from Naruto to me, because I think they maybe even share the...

Oh, yeah.

Well, they share a sort of.

Getting Through has a mini plot arc that is very similar to Kabuto.

And then

I think that they might share a voice actor in the dub, but I'm not 100% sure on that.

Dre, did you just tip your friends at the table mug directly over your desk?

Shut up, Jack.

We're going to ruin the sales.

Well, Jack's N felt it happening.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that's a very sharp N.

It goes fine.

I got a towel.

everything's okay.

Okay, good.

We can take a moment if you want.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, that's fine.

That's fine.

I don't need this keyboard.

So this is

a short little run of episodes.

And as usual, when Tagashi begins a little run, I wasn't terribly impressed with the first episode here as things were spinning up, especially because

we learned that Biscuit...

is a former teacher of Mr.

Wing, whom she refers to as a little boy with messy hair and glasses.

Yeah, who never tucks in his shirt.

Who never tucks in his shirt.

And like Keith said, Biscuit then just begins essentially like, and it gets a little more intense as the episodes go on, but we're straight back to Heaven's Arena Nen school to a certain extent.

There's a point towards the end of this little group of episodes where she is throwing new nen terms at us with such regularity that I was just sort of rolling my eyes and writing them down.

But her opening salvo

with

Binoltz, the scissors pervert, who we'll talk about more detail in a second, is actually a really nice twist on Wings, kind of like, well, let me just draw on a blackboard and explain it all to you.

Because

she sort of intuits that

first she intuits that if the people in the game are weak to nen attacks, having gotten so used to playing the card game, Gonan and Killia are weak to the card game because they've gotten used-ish to Nen, but then she turns that even further on its head and says, you basically don't really understand Nen at all.

You got the opening section, and she starts to use, in the same way that Wing used

Heaven's Arena as a way into teaching the kids Nen fundamentals, Biscuit starts using Greed Island as a way into teaching the kids sort of intermediate Nen.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I think that's that's true.

Sort of introduces a world of nen

like via the example of Benult who will introduce in a second as like, look, if this guy can kill you and he could, then you have no real shot in an actual nen fight,

which is a very interesting concept and kind of

something we've hinted at a little bit

that we've noticed that they haven't really been in a real nen fight

no not really at least the kind of the kind of nen fights that we saw well sort of no they've been in one-sided nen fights you know guido versus gone or something but we've never really seen anything like hisoka versus castro or um

uh zeno and uh silver versus krolo you know it's like a full-scale nen fight although krolo did very little nen in that fight mostly just evaded a lot of nen from the zeldix

Although, the sort of implication of what we learn about

Ken and Ryu is that probably those are the things that they were using that whole fight.

We just didn't know what to call them.

Right, yes.

Or how significant they were.

And we'll talk about those a bit later, but what Biscuit is essentially building towards is really interesting here, which is that

by the end of this, the kids are fighting using Nen so quickly and so precisely that it looks less like Shonen fight choreography and more like the martial arts of like a John Wick movie or like a Bourne movie, you know?

Not a lot of leaping around, just lots of extremely precise, fast, hand-to-hand combat.

Yeah.

It looks a little bit like a toned-down version of what they'll do in Dragon Ball Z when they like make it more blur fight-y.

It was like,

yeah.

It's at a speed that you can actually like witness the combat, though.

Yeah.

Which I think is like a really really distinct choice.

But we actually start

by underplaying the nen pretty quickly.

Biscuit

sort of senses and all three of them sense

this is just this great insert shot of like a pair of scissors closing and they sense that they're being stalked by this other hunter.

And

the kids wonder why they were able to see this hunter and Biscuit says,

he let a tiny bit of his bloodlust leak out.

And there's Nen language for this.

You know, she could have said, like, I sensed his wren or something.

But I love that at the beginning of this extended

Nen school run of episodes, she actually starts from like talking about it in its most basic terms.

He let a bit of his bloodlust, you know, leak out.

And I think that's really interesting.

She immediately does a ruse that I think Gun and Killio have used before, right?

Which is like a fake fight or a fake disagreement.

Yes.

Yeah.

They kind of with without

without foregrounding this to them at all, Bisky just starts kind of screaming at Gun and Kilua.

So funny.

And then slaps Kilo.

He slaps Kilo pretty hard, which I thought was funny.

And then like Killu is still off board of the whole Bisky idea.

He's like not into her being their teacher, is not into her being around.

That does change soon after this, but

this is where he goes, that woman's pretty amazing.

I was on high alert, so I'd be ready for anything, even though, even so, I didn't realize what she'd done until my cheek was already stinging.

And this is just part of a ploy to get Binault to follow her so that they could double back and basically watch her beat the shit out of him.

Yeah, Binault sort of creeps up and he cuts off one of Biscuit's little

sort of ponytail things.

This is really creepy.

He is really, really creepy.

So creepy.

And then he just eats it for like, yeah, he eats the hair.

He puts the hair.

He eats the hair.

One of his powers is that he can eat someone's hair and learn basically everything about them.

This guy feels like

not to be like, oh my god, a JoJo reference, but this guy does feel like a part one JoJo character to me.

There's actually two JoJo characters in this little run of episodes.

Yes, I think different bummers are also a Jojo character.

He's really the bomber.

Oh, yes, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He's really, he's animated really well.

He has this kind of like sharp teeth, sharp

silhouette.

He has a load of

scissors in like a holster on his waist.

There is something like leering and creepy about him that is only accentuated by this kind of like gross deployment of language with the fact that he thinks this is a kid.

Yeah.

He says, Yeah, I mean, you've said, was it Keith who said knockoff Hisuka earlier?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's definitely, hey, in multiple ways.

Yeah, he, he, he, he eats the hare to, quote, learn things about the owner's body that they don't even know about themselves, um, which is just gross as shit.

Yeah, and then he immediately learns that Biskey is not a child, she's like, what, 56 years old?

57 years old, 57 years old, yeah.

Um, and and then realizes how strong she is, and then his whole demeanor changes.

It's really funny, too.

Yes, so funny.

Oh, go ahead, there's a really neat little play that happens briefly here in the way that nobody in this world

is prepared for these extremely powerful children that keep showing up, but at the same time, they're very blasé about it, right?

You know, it's like this little boy has gotten to floor whatever of Heaven's Arena.

You know, we've talked in the past before about if we if we met a child as powerful as, you know, Kilua or Gone, they would be the most famous child in the world.

Right.

But again, these are children that got into Greed Island.

So they're not.

Yeah, yeah.

I wrote here, yeah, Scissors Maniac not threatened by children, parentheses, hunter's mistake.

Yeah, it is a hunter's mistake because then there's the inversion of it, right?

Which is that, like, this extremely powerful person isn't actually a child.

Right.

And I feel like then not only can a child be extremely powerful, but a not child can look like a child.

And this is a standard.

She'd just be like, can she tell you?

She would tell you.

But she looked like a deeply value.

I think that she is a crazy girl.

She does tell you.

She does tell you.

Trust me, I remember.

We'll get there.

She tells you.

But yeah, Biscuit kicks the absolute shit out of him, using a very similar sort of fighting style as Natero.

This very acrobatic, but very precise.

I keep thinking about the way Natero...

Did he fight with one hand behind his back?

Or did he, he didn't, he never moved off one foot or something?

It was a bit of both, I think, wasn't it?

Oh, no, it was Hisaka who didn't move from a spot, and then it was...

It was...

Keith, I don't know what you're referring to in our group chat.

The guy.

Which guy?

You have it.

It's the only thing you posted that.

Oh, my fucking God.

I'm dumb as fuck.

Sorry.

I didn't know.

I thought you were talking about the image up above that I did post earlier.

We're all tired.

We talked about this.

I'm fine.

I'm doing great.

But yeah, she fights him in a traditional way.

She doesn't use nen.

In fact, she says, I would have killed you if this had been a battle of Nen.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's pretty obvious.

I mean, the Gone and Killer are back already.

They wanted to watch the fight.

And they get there in time to see Bisky sort of flip Binult upside down and then jab him in the back and send him flying.

And their first thought was,

she made him look weak, but we can tell he's not.

Yeah.

He's strong.

She's just way stronger.

The thing that Bisky said about him that like stood out to me, which seemed very different to how, I mean, these three episodes are especially like, okay, Biscuit's original character is very different from who she actually is.

But like when the guy, when Renault asked her, like, hey, can we spar?

She goes, okay, you're not total trash.

And at first I read that as like, oh, you're not like a trash like person.

Like, you're not just this, like, serial killer.

But I'm wondering, based on further stuff in this episode and later episodes, is she also saying like, oh, you're not trash as in like, you have potential or, oh, you could be useful.

There's that mention of Benault's potential.

Yeah, she does mention that he has much lower potential than Gonankilua.

I did read it as that, oh, he's not just like a murderous freak, he's like willing to put his murderous freakness on hold in order to have a respectable bout.

Uh, does anybody did we catch the name of his uh his special move, by the way?

Uh oh, did I write it?

I just wrote down scissor hands, but I think it's it's it's longer than that.

Scissor hands, barber, slasher.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And very, very, and it cuts to him doing like a very phallic thing with the scissors.

Yeah, of course it does.

Tagoshi's a little pervert.

Just can we lay that out there?

Tagoshi's a little pervert.

Oh, yeah.

Well, he's creating a pervert.

Unnoticed.

Yeah, sure.

He has a really great look.

When the character is like, in the language of the show, becoming insane with his bloodlust or whatever, his face is drawn in a different way.

He has these very round eyes all of a sudden.

Yeah.

And it is interesting.

It reminds me of how rarely

Hiseker is actually drawn in a mode similar than that.

Hiseker is usually keeping all of this malice and all of this

vile sexual energy bubbling under the surface.

So we can only sometimes

where he charges the camera towards the end of the hunter exam

when he kills that lady,

the old Ghibli lady.

That's that great shot where his eyes are like bloodshot.

But yeah,

compared to Binault, Hisaker is usually, he's not doing a very good job at keeping it sort of like on the down low, but he can sort of glide through menacingly, whereas Binault is just going to charge you with scissors and be creepy.

I read down here that Killua gets punched into the sky for a second time.

I don't remember why.

Calls her hag.

Yep, calls her a hag.

Okay.

I think it's Baba in the original.

Right, so in the dub, what what happens is uh

uh

he she says that she doesn't want to be called uh Miss Bisky, but it's okay if you don't want to call her biscuity, you can call her Lady Bisky.

And then Kilo says, I'd rather call you hag, and then he gets punched again.

And in the uh Japanese, I think she's like, don't call me call me biscuit chama or something like that, which is like a much more cutesy honorific, is my understanding.

I do love lady biscuit as just a title, yeah, And then Goan calling her.

Gone Bisky.

So this is where she reveals a couple things.

She's here to win the game, but she's also here to get what she has called Blue Planet, which is a card that is basically a giant blue gemstone, like a spherical diamond thing.

Because she's like a jewel hunter, right?

Like, that's been the implication.

Yeah, she's out for treasure.

She likes treasure.

Sure, like, she's a pirate.

She,

yeah, and lots of jewel imagery throughout.

She repeatedly refers to Gon and Kiliua as like precious stones that need to be polished.

And she gives them their own precious stones.

We'll talk about this in a little bit.

But I also think about the way that Tagashi talks about.

And I think that this is probably just the language of.

He has drawn a world that is full of treasures, like often literal treasures.

And as such, he's fascinated with things that are very beautiful colours.

You know, we talk about the red of the kurta eyes.

All the stuff with,

oh, what was that fellow called?

The auction man.

Zachariah.

Yeah, about like appraising beauty and things like that.

And then over and over in these episodes, Biscuit is not only looking for the blue planet, but she is like...

Gone is a diamond and Killer is a sapphire.

Yeah.

It's like a hallmark of Takashi writing this series so far, I think.

It does not reflect well on her in those moments.

Let's talk about this now.

Okay.

Yes.

She is in a kind of astonishing way objectifying God and Kilua as like literally gemstones that she wants to temper and cut.

And like.

Does this remind you of anybody, Keith?

Yeah, this is such a Hisuka moment from her.

It's like she is 90% of the way to Hiseka.

She says, why does my heart skip a beat whenever I see something waiting to be polished?

And I've used the dub language here because I think it's more illustrative of how weird of a comment this is.

I'm going to train them so hard.

Yeah,

I

but I like I think that's not just Hisuka.

I feel like that is like every adult mentor that these kids meet go, wow, these kids are really fucking strong.

That's scary and probably means they're super traumatized.

I've got to do more.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like their lust for power and creating more powerful people

overrides overrides their humanity.

Yeah, I don't think this is why I think it's very interesting that she reveals that she was Wing's teacher because I don't, I don't see Wing as Wing is the closest we've got to not doing that, but like Wing is definitely still did do all that stuff and then was like, oh man, I don't know if I should have done that.

I might have, I might have, I might have put some bad things in motion.

The truth is that Wing doesn't do, and his actions aren't any different than like Viskey's actions here, but he is the whole time at least framing it as: if I don't have these kids, they're going to get themselves fucking killed.

Biskey's, I, Biskey's, I, Biskey, does have a little bit of that.

Like, everything out here can kill you right now.

You can't even beat these level D things, and there's way more strong things out here than level D.

Yeah, like they would have been killed by Benult if she wasn't there, is kind of her point.

But she's so much more focused on, I want to make them stronger.

I want to, she basically tortures them in these

not just them.

Sure, not just them tortures Bernalt too.

The shit that happens to Bernal is upsetting to me.

Yeah, I think

this bisquey stuff about the gems really snapped into place a lot of what you were talking about, Sylvie, as soon as Wing arrived.

And you sort of started to lay out when I planted my seeds of deception to get to this conversation months later.

Right.

I did the same thing, but from the other side.

It's almost as if the three of you have seen this show before.

Yeah, it's shocking.

Sometimes twice.

Sorry.

Go ahead, Jack.

It's really, you know, I think you're right in that, like, this is a way the show talks about teachers and often talks about sort of adults generally.

But I think that biscuit is the furthest that we have seen them push it towards.

It's not necessarily saying, like, Now, it's not that Takashi is saying, now, listen, biscuit is evil, but sometimes you have to work with evil people.

It's more that he's saying there is a kind of lens that certain teachers put their pupils under.

And biscuit is the closest we have seen to someone like Hisuka.

Let me read some more biscuit quotes here.

She says

Gun is a gem in the rough.

If properly cut through training, he can be completely transformed.

This is basically a direct quote from Hisuka about the current current.

No, he uses the unripe fruit metaphor a lot.

He uses plant language a lot with Gun, which is remarkable.

I think there's something really interesting about Hiseka and Biscuit saying basically the same thing, but different

using different metaphors.

We get this beautiful photography of cutting through gems.

slicing, I mean, like a camera, cutting through an image of a gem to the character's eyes, the sapphire and Kiluwa's blue eyes.

She says, Kiliwa may look unstable, but apply the right amount of heat and he can achieve permanent strength.

And then towards the end of the episode,

talking about Goan, she says, not to him.

I think she's just thinking this.

She says, you are a flawless specimen, but that purity could make it a delicate balancing act.

It's really, really interesting.

And like...

You said,

this is not just a sort of mental stuff, because at this point, with Binault unconscious on the floor, I thought he was dead for a bit, but he was not dead.

Biscuit reveals what her first sort of training game is.

Does anyone want to talk about this?

Is it the...

Wait.

This is the game with Binault.

Oh, this is the pit.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She puts all three of them in a pit.

Yeah, what's the rules of the pit?

And then she says, hey, in this pit, all you can do is crowd kill.

That's it.

Yeah.

uh

no she says what she puts him in the pit she says you're gonna be in here for two weeks and banal if you can kill these kids then you can leave yeah um if you try to leave before that i'll kill you i'll kill you and if you two gone and killer will leave you'll be punished sorry or if or if you can't beat him within the two weeks right it seems to be implied that she's saying i want you to kill him within these two weeks Yeah, she says he has to evade their attacks for two weeks.

If he falls unconscious, Biscuit will kill him.

You are not allowed to leave this crater.

And in a very sort of Shalnark move, she just sits down on the edge of the crater.

Who is the real serial killer here?

This is what I'm asking.

It does feel like the scene where all

the Phantom Troopers playing go fish, watching Uvo kill scores of

the mafia community.

To me, it feels like the Saw franchise of films.

And she is jigsaw.

There's a real, I mean, this is one of the ways that she is demonstrating the like Nen Master

sort of classical depiction, right?

Where it's like Nenmasters, when they are in training mode, seem to have limitless patience on their terms.

They're very impatient when things aren't going their way.

But, you know, she just sits down for two weeks and she's like, this will take as long as it takes.

I am very calm here.

I'm not fighting.

I'm just going to, I'm just going to watch.

Real quick, the thing we just to hit this before we go deeper into her training, this is where she reveals that she taught Jing, or sorry, that she taught Wing, and then where Goan says, I'm here to find my dad.

His name is Jing, he made this game, and she says,

Oh, Jing, I know him, he's famous.

Chairman Edero once said he was one of the top five nen users in the world.

Yeah, I hate those motherfuckers so much.

Get it, Lass.

I hate them.

And so Bisky officially becomes their teacher through the transitive property of I taught wing, so I teach you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is that how it works generally in Shonen?

Yep.

No.

Oh, in Shounen?

Ah!

It's not that it doesn't work that way.

It's just a very unique situation.

Well, doesn't that happen in Naruto?

Does that happen in Naruto?

Isn't Jiraiah?

Jiraiya.

It sort of happens with Jiraiah.

I felt like there is a Naruto connection like that.

Yeah, I think it does happen in Naruto.

Jiraiya taught Kakashi, right?

And I guess I'm pretty sure.

Yeah.

In Dragon Ball, at least in Z,

it's not so much that you go from like the teacher to the teacher's teacher, but it's like, oh, I learned this from this god.

Oh, wait, there's a more stronger god somewhere?

Okay, I guess I'll go learn from that god.

Yeah.

And it just kind of keeps going.

Yeah.

There is definitely Biscuit kind of power scales a little bit, both herself and the two of them during this episode.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they're in the pit, says Kilua.

Gone, let's make this a battle of attrition.

Killua's proposal is just to throw rocks at this guy.

The show knows exactly how weird and cruel this is, and it underscores it by the fact that Binol, we haven't really talked about this, is like visibly suffering.

Biscuit fucked him up during

a few ribs, right?

Maybe his leg.

He's like not moving from the center of the pit.

I think he's like, his leg hurts or something.

Yeah,

but Goan, of course,

deliberately misinterprets Kiliwa's rock throwing, uses his Ghan's punch to explode a huge rock and kind of darts closer using the rock as a shield.

This is a callback to the floor tiles in Heaven's Arena, which I really love because those fights with the Nen initiates in Heaven's Arena were the sort of initial whetstone for Goan and Kiliua to test their like proto-Nen abilities.

Yeah, also

first of many Gone throwing rocks moments.

Yeah, Goan spends most of these episodes throwing rocks.

These are very rock rocks, Pokemon-focused episodes.

And I was a little disappointed that we're in Greed Island.

This is Tagashi doing a trick again, right?

Because it's like, oh, we're in Heaven's Arena, so I'm excited to see some tournaments.

No.

Oh, we're in Greed Island.

I'm excited to see some weird gameplay.

No.

They say, no, we're not doing the game.

We're deliberately ignoring the game.

Rock fights.

It's so funny.

The rest of Hunter-Hunter is already a game.

It's almost like that's what everyone inside of Greed Island is doing too.

And that's why Greed Island is bad.

Damn, they're ignoring the game.

They're ignoring the game.

Then eventually they sort of get very close to beating him.

Bisky is really surprised.

She's like, they're going to do this in one night.

I thought it was going to take them two weeks.

And then it essentially happens in real time.

They beat him like in 15 minutes.

Yeah.

But Goan sort of calls off the practice and he says, look, stopping now would be a waste.

He's going torture him more.

He says says to Binault, wait, you should get some rest.

Yes, heal back up so that we can beat the shit out of you again.

Yeah, Goan says, Goan stops Kiluwa from basically killing Binault

with a big punch to the head and is like, no, no, no, let's train until we could both beat him individually.

And also, we should let him heal up so that he's harder.

There's a great moment where you can already see their sort of their gyo.

That's the Nen power of looking, sharpening as they're all sort of sleeping.

And Binault lifts his head up, sort of wakes up, beginning to like try and attack the two of them.

And Gon and Kellyua both just like turn and look at him.

You know, they sense that that was coming.

We get little flashbacks throughout these episodes.

Sort of

Tagashi wants to put Binault on a really truncated arc.

It's really super quick.

It's made so funny by the fact that his beginning point, he's a serial killer who's going to murder them.

And he's excited especially that they're children.

Yeah, and his end point,

they have forgiven him and sent him off on a path to like atone for his sins.

I'm about to go to prison.

Goan heals Binalt's trauma by thanking him for helping them train.

He then decides to turn himself into the authorities.

Yeah, so the beginning and end point of this are like,

you know, that's the natural beginning and end point for this kind of arc if that's what you want to do.

Where where it's extremely funny is that Tagashi fills the entire midpoint of that arc, everything between those two points, with either extended torture of him in the present, or he's a poor little orphan in the past.

And that's it.

Those are the only two.

These faces that the people pull in as flashback are so funny, though.

The flashback is so funny.

It is like an episode-long arc that they stuff into about four and a half minutes.

And so we get a flashback.

Basically, the flashback is he's a little, he's a little poor orphan who's on the street.

Someone drops their wallets.

He selflessly returns the wallet.

And the rich people who dropped the wallet are disgusted by him and beat him into an inch of his life because they're like, I don't know if they think that he was running a scam where, you know, you steal a wallet, then you return it for a reward, or if they were just evil people.

I don't think they're 100% clear on that.

But there's just, there just happens to be broken scissors on the ground.

I think the implication is that he killed those people with the scissors, right?

Yeah, so he's like, Yeah, so he turns into a murderer, um,

and uh, and then he wakes up, gets the shit beat out of him more, and then Goan says thank you like the rich man didn't and fixes his trauma, right?

Right.

Uh,

he's so he's going to ask Gohan to kill him.

Uh, oh, he does ask Goan to kill him.

He does, yeah, yeah.

Um, and Goan refuses.

He says, We improved a lot with your help, even though he was a spectacular antagonist.

This is just, this is extremely funny.

The pace that this is all moving is so funny.

But it did make me think a lot of some of the ways that Gohan talks about Hiseker.

Goan has a little bit more of like, hey, I felt weird and bad when I was interacting with Hiseka, but he also regularly, remember when Gohan will just like vibrate with excitement at the chance to fight and probably lose to Hiseker?

Goan definitely has this sensation of like, I need to be grateful to even my enemies because they have sharpened me.

Yeah.

It's easy to take this like little section and throw it out as just like kind of a weak bit

of writing and that is an inconsequential way to get them a little bit stronger.

But it does speak a lot actually to Gon's character here.

There's a lot, like

this training arc, I think, is like a really good insight into both Gon and Killua.

Yeah.

Do you think this is an example of Biscuit saying that like Gone's purity could be a problem?

I think it happens right after this.

Yeah, I think that that was her response to that.

That's absolutely.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

You're right.

I forgot the order that that happened in.

Yeah.

So they go to Massadora, which is the main city.

God.

Massadora looks normal, right?

Cool as fuck.

Yeah, no, it looks like a normal ass city.

Yeah.

Okay.

This looks like Toronto to me.

That is going to be be tricky to describe because it looks nothing like we have seen in the show before.

And frankly, can I tell you right now, I forget, fully forget what Masadora looks like.

I'm gonna, I'm opening the show so that I can see it again.

It, it, it, it is singular looking so far.

It is, bear with me here.

What did I write down?

It is an incredibly colorful series of globes, orbs, marbles, candy canes, and lollipops, sort of floating and orbiting and tied to the ground.

It is shiny and colorful, but not in a

sci-fi way.

Instead, in like a bizarre candy shop way.

Yeah, it's like a candy cane jellyfish floating in the sky.

There's some specific stuff in Dragon Ball Z this really reminds me of some like spirit world stuff.

I don't know if anybody is familiar

with the Janemba stuff.

Fuck yeah, I am dog.

Wait,

which stuff?

Janemba.

Janemba.

I mostly know it from the fighting games, but

there was a movie.

That's where Gogeta comes from.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But there's a lot of this sort of like weird, like, to me, it always looked like jelly beans.

Yeah, it really does look like jelly beans.

Yeah, I think this is like a decent screenshot to sort of see where I'm coming from.

Just like this sort of like floating, colorful, bright Easter egg color palette orbs and stuff.

There's this great moment when we get into Masadora a little bit later.

And you can see that the buildings are like shaped like weird teddy bear heads or like

bunny heads.

One of the buildings looks like the bunny lollipop that Kill was always eating.

It's great.

It's such a nice piece of art direction that I was not expecting remotely.

I totally forgot about this.

I think in my notes, I wrote down that it looks like Candyland threw up on a Dragon Quest town.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, there's also this like, oh, this like establishing shot of it here has,

I'm going to say like two or three dozen buildings that are all like big candy buildings.

And then it has one building that looks like a capsule corp building.

It looks just like a regularly Dragon Ball Z building.

Yeah, it's just come from York New City or something.

It's really weird.

But of course, they've gone to Massadora actually just so that Bisky can buy four or five cards that she needs for the next training.

And then they have to run all the way back.

Oh, yeah, this next training is so funny.

The punchline to like

Biscuit doggedly running after Goan and Killiua and Killiua saying, ah, she'll get tired when the bandits attack is now just great, as Biscuit is making them run all over Greed Island.

She's not breaking a sweat.

Over the course of this arc, Goan and Killiua, who, again, lost their clothes in the sequence with the bandit last time, so are just wearing like white

chests.

Yeah, exactly.

They are just constantly getting like grubbier and grubbier and more of their clothes are getting more and more torn.

They're getting like scratches and stains on.

they end up looking like Batman at the end of an Arkham Asylum game, just like completely shredded.

And Biscuit, oh, throughout all of this, Biscuit still has one of her little ponytails missing, and she hasn't restyled her hair to account for it.

So she's like asymmetrical for this whole thing.

Something about her really grates on me.

Do you just want to character this game?

No, I'm lucky.

It doesn't affect me in terms of like how I feel about Biscuit as a character.

I think she's really interesting and really fun.

But just looking at her, I'm like, like, that's wrong.

You need to think about it.

It looks like shit.

It's strange.

I'll say it is strange that she let it go undone for so long, knowing

how she creates her look.

I can't judge, because I've done this too, where

you've had part of your experience.

Well, when I was training two kids in the video game island, someone.

You were like a kind of like faintly malevolent teacher.

Yeah, faintly.

I mean, yeah.

Yeah, it was sometime around when I was I was gonna show them like Ken and Ryu and stuff but then some freak with some some garden shears showed up it was a whole ordeal way way way more intense than this whole thing we've watched so the real thing that's happening in this video is or in this uh in this video

sorry i'm looking at the little bit of content in the lc file of the episode right now the real thing that's happening in this training with the going to massador and then back is uh the next part of the training is to go to massadora again but this time through the series of mountains.

It's so funny.

Using the cars,

which are actually like shovels and

like wagons

to like move dirt out of these

mountains.

It's so funny.

It's so fucked up.

She teaches them how to put their nen aura into

the shovels.

Or crucially waits for them to figure it out on their own.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to talk more about like the actual actual sort of like Nen mechanics that's happening here a little bit later when what they are doing kind of dawns on me because she really is teaching them fundamentals in a really cool way.

There's a moment later in these episodes where I realized what she was teaching them to do.

And that was really neat.

But yeah, they put Nen into these shovels and start digging.

She calls this a new application of 10.

It's called Shu,

which translates to Infold.

Now, by this point, I am mostly lost in Nen language.

And I, you know, what is 10?

10.

That is manifesting your aura.

It is the first step to Ren, which is then amplifying your aura.

Yeah, it's the one that, like,

it's the one that Leorio knows.

When Gone stopped using Ten, the spinning tops hurt him more is a good way to remember it.

Yeah.

It's like the defensive one is kind of how it is in my mind.

I have like sort of like a Disco Elysium stat sheet in my head for Gone and Kilua with their nen.

I have the Disco Elysium voices that just remind me.

Each one of them says, by the way, I'm the one that

Killua would be the Kuno.

Yes, yes.

I'm going to fuck you up, says Kiliwa.

Yeah, so

I can't imagine him with that accent.

So they reached his harder rock, and this is where Ghon has the idea to invent Shu without having heard of it before.

But right before this this happens is

what I'll call the like legitimate argument for torture section.

This is sort of the apotheosis or maybe the nadir of biscuits training.

How do I explain this?

She teaches them, or rather enforces a new way that they have to sleep.

Her actual words are, you must always sleep in this position.

So she has them like sitting up, not leaning against a thing.

I think they are actually sitting.

And they are holding a rope that is connected to a pulley that is connected to a rock above their head so that if they sort of like let go of the the rope the rock will fall on their head and wake them back up and in a really quick montage we see the kids um start to fail at this pretty quickly then killua is is kind of chill the whole time he has a really chilling line he says my dad put me through this kind of training

yeah

But Gohan just gets these really grotesque bruises all over his head, which are gone by the next episode.

But it's grody.

She's essentially made of liquidity.

she's inflicting like hyper vigilance onto them.

She's like giving them PTSD, it's fucked,

it's insane.

Yeah, it's crazy.

It is, it is now.

This is the thing about how Biscuit is a Hisuka type,

and what I think specifically it means that that's true, which is Hisuka is so

evil and horrible and

so

unashamed of being a murderous pervert that

going and killua know to stay clear of him,

Biskey is like sort of the worst-case scenario of like a Hisuka that is that is nice enough and not so evil that they're like, wow, we should stay away from Biskey.

Biskey's crazy, but they should stay away from her.

She literally pulled the, oh, yeah, I know that adult you trust, but don't, don't, you didn't check.

You just believe, they just believed her.

And it's like, it's true, but it is true.

Right.

They do see, she does stranger danger the shit out of them.

Yes.

Well, as they were digging through the thing back to Masadora, I wrote, you know,

the sheer absurdity of what was happening really started to dawn on me.

Is this Tagashi

deconstructing a shounen master or are shounen masters kind of just like this?

This is almost exactly the training that Master Roshi puts Goku and Krillin in in the first season of

Dragon Ball.

Huh.

Does that show

play up the fact that this is bizarro torture in the way that this show does?

No, it plays it off as funny because Master Roshi is getting paid to clear these fields and then is making Gonan Kilowa or not Gonan Killawa.

Jeez, making Goku and Krillin do it for him.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know about like the you can't sleep or you'll get a rock dropped on your head, but very much the

like ridiculous manual labor as substitute for training is definitely a big issue.

It is the turtle style of training.

It's the karate kill.

You basically do manual labor while wearing a weighted vest, essentially.

That's what.

Right, but they're not doing manual labor while wearing a weighted vest.

She's having them dig as the crow flies, like 90 kilometers through a mountain, and she's making them, they can't sleep without a rock.

Her first test, the first line in these episodes that I wrote wrote down um literally the first line in 63 it says she says you can call me biscuit but you must obey every word i say um and i that was that's biscuit through and through right is it's like you can call me an informal nickname but don't mistake what is happening here this is your your manager at work that pretends to be your best friend so that they can dump all their bullshit on you, but you have to treat them like a boss still.

And don't get me wrong, this is extremely funny.

But part of the reason that it is extremely funny is that the show is not messing about in terms of saying, like, hey, this sucks.

This woman, this is a crazy woman.

Why is she doing this to these children?

Because, yeah, like, Roshi wasn't.

Because she likes to.

That's why.

And she's doing it for the love of the game.

She really likes to do this sort of thing.

It's a throwaway line earlier where she says, she says, this makes me miss being a hunter examiner.

It's such a funny insight into a character where it's like, she used to, she must have been fired or something, right?

Like, I can't imagine a situation where like Biskey willingly left the Hunter exam.

They rotate every year.

Yes, they rotate every year.

They pick randomly from all the hunters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it's like Joey Lenny.

She would fit in so perfectly in the death games.

If we think, just think of how we've spent this whole time like talking about and thinking about the hunter exam and how like brutal and cruel it was and then we meet bisky cute little bisky who's having a good time making friends with the boy she wants to destroy and is like looking back fondly on the hunter exam like that is she's like truly maniacal

i remember when i send people to die by being eaten by dinosaurs this is uh this is old days this is older

it's older jigsaw looking back on the murder games fondly like i remember when i used to hide keys and dead bodies and make people chew their own arms off.

The shotgun caller was a really good one.

There's a really funny bit at the beginning of Saw 10 where Jigsaw sees a guy who is essentially just doing like a small,

he's like doing a petty crime or something.

Yeah.

He's like a janitor.

Jigsaw's just hanging out.

And Jigsaw

visibly ideates a saw trap that he put this man in.

And that is bisque through and through and just like looking at the world.

He like straight up sketches it right and then he like throws it away yeah he's like the movie is so funny because they're like hey jigsaw's the hero that's right

so yeah but i mean i think that if they are not it sounds like what you're saying is that they're not really it's not tagashi is not really

uh taking apart the shonen master trope so

or if he is he's doing it as part of a much larger project like

isaka and netaro and biskey might be him trying to do that i think that like the the I think that the like shonen deconstruction stuff that happens on Hunter Hunter is real and is like a really important part of it.

But I think that one of the important things about Hunter Hunter is that it is just as often honestly engaging with or earnestly building upon shonen tropes as it is also deconstructing them.

So like

Like not so like everything isn't just one thing, but it's also not always

everything altogether And one of the fun things about watching the show is thinking through like, like, how this stuff is related to particular shoun things that I've seen before and

what it feels like to watch it in the context of Hunter Hunter, where it's like, do I think that Bisky is like an intentional analog to Hisuka, like the tolerable Hisuka, the Hizuka that we invite into our home,

the vampire who like we open the door for.

Yeah.

Which is what she feels like when I watch the show.

Or is she just like a funny little psycho?

Or

what?

Like I don't like I haven't heard Torah.

Like I've seen this show like multiple times and I still haven't been able to quite land on it, you know?

And I think that that's one of the powers of the show is like how it can it sort of lives in this like quantum state of engaging with and deconstructing different bits of shounen sometimes simultaneously sometimes really siloed sometimes and i think that i also think that like yuhagasho it's um an impulse that gets stronger as the show goes on and as tagashi gets like less and less interested in his original ideas and starts being like well what if we like really change things up and i think that biscuit is

is

the obvious result of someone being like looking at someone like Wing or like Master Roshi and being like, what if we put a little bit of a spin on this ball?

And I think that she, I can't read her as you, you described Bisky as the vampire, the vampire that we invite in, and the stuff with the gems, the way she speaks about the gems, I,

you know, she is, she's using a different metaphor, and that's that's not nothing.

I think that, you know, use of metaphor there is, is using a like a slightly less obviously sexual metaphor, too.

I don't think that that is something that you can just be like, well, well, I'm not going to pay any attention to that.

But I do think that the parallel is so

front and center.

Yeah, it really is.

I do think that if they are not...

If Tagashi is not taking apart...

The Shinun Master, I do think he is absolutely taking a real deconstructive swing at the character, you know, who appears in all sorts of genres of fiction, which is the cute little girl who reveals herself to be kind of malicious.

Because

he gets the base level of that out of his system really quickly.

All the great stuff in Bisky's first episode with burning fire, and she says, Yeah, you know,

I could wipe the floor with you.

She's not like Elmira from Tiny Tombs.

I haven't seen Tiny Tombs.

Do we all know Elmira from Tiny Tombs?

I don't know Elmira from Tiny Tombs.

I know Elmira from Tiny Tombs.

She's the little girl who

sees the bunnies and she wants to, they're so cute that she wants to hug them and squeeze them until they die.

But, you know, Tagashi takes that initial joke, which is a stock character, and then just spins it right out into like,

this woman has extremely, an extremely straightforward and fairly violent ideology about how to make her charges improve.

Yeah.

Who gets the privilege of being her charges?

She decides.

She decides, yeah.

Seemingly at random, this was truly a whim.

whim she had she just got like a fucking wild hair to follow these boys and then

and and judge them again much in the way that hiesuka judges people until she eventually determines them to be strong enough to be worth helping instead of hurting because that was the alternative the if she didn't train them she was going to fuck with them ruin their friendship she was going to ruin their friendship can we is it a wild hair or is this another example of like nin users attract each other and congregate to each other?

Or is it?

That's true, but everyone here is a nin user.

But the line is like nen students are drawn to nen teachers.

That's the other way around.

I think that's absolutely happening.

Can we do a bit of power scaling, please?

Sure.

Can we have a little power scaling moment?

Yeah.

Would love to.

Could Bisky beat Hiseker in a fight?

Probably.

I refuse to answer the question.

Okay.

Okay.

I think I'm Team Keith with this one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I have a strong impulse, but I decline to reveal.

Okay.

Yeah.

Sounds good.

Then we shall.

You know what?

No, I'm going to answer.

I think the clown might take it.

Wow.

I genuinely don't know.

I think the clown takes it.

And it's worth saying that throughout all of this, and this is fun because Bisky is teaching fundamentals,

we haven't actually seen her really do any nen fighting um at all uh and this is a little bit like your French teacher patiently teaching you how to say like je mapel jacques and then one day you hear the french teacher speaking fluent french and you're like holy shit wow they can do that

um 64 they dig all the way through to massadora only for biscuit to send them straight back again

Yeah, oh yeah, they do it like three times, right?

It's so good.

Yeah, so it's crazy.

It's really funny.

Gun and kill you are essentially, they're grinding at this point in the language of video games, except not quite, because what they're doing is they're explicitly working on like strategy.

And, you know, when you grind in a video game, you're not being like, you know, I really need to learn how to fight the demon lord.

better so i'm gonna like practice my demon lord moves you're just trying to get your xp up or whatever they sort of they're sort of doing a combination of like they they transition from grinding into like like

unlocking their first few skills on the tree, on the skill tree.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Basically, let's slip that the game is programmed so that the player is, quote, guaranteed to get stronger as they progress.

I don't think anybody in this goddamn game has thought for one second about like

culpability and mechanics or like how ideology comes through in mechanics.

I don't know if the game has been built

so that the player is guaranteed to get stronger.

Hold well.

I mean, can I read that whole quote?

Please do.

Go ahead.

So we're in 64.

We get that bit.

They dig through five kilometers of mountains in one day.

And

how many kilometers is it from where they start to Massadora?

380 or something?

Something like that.

Yes, a lot.

So we're watching a montage of them beating up the monsters that they couldn't beat up pre-Bisky.

And Bisky delivers this monologue.

All things considered, the game's creators were actually pretty smart.

The game is programmed so that the player is guaranteed to get stronger as they progress, and most likely, it's all for the purpose of making that child stronger.

Looking at Go.

One must battle a wide variety of enemies in end combat.

The most critical of all battle skills is the ability to think quickly.

You have to get used to thinking constantly until your thoughts are tied to your reflexes.

This game is a training regimen to help you achieve that.

It is a pretty just,

you know, flat-out statement

of what is happening, I think.

Yeah, she, she, she straight up says

Greed Island might have been built to train Gone, which is this is something

I referenced in the last episode.

I hate this motherfucker.

This is something I referenced in the last episode when we're talking about Jing.

Um, and

and we conferred and I decided to hold off, which is, yes, this idea that Greed Island was built for Gone

and that the the greed island you know supposedly does not contain a clue of where to find jing but what it does do is make sure that gone is not like a little nen baby

people are dying jing

sure sure but that wasn't him he just built the game and left he's a he's a uh well this is actually built a game that could kill his son to prove that his son is worthy to pun him

what i was gonna say

I don't want to because I was tabbed out.

What I was going to say is that, sorry, Sylvie, you're kind of going in and out, so I keep talking in that way.

Go ahead,

what is it?

God, I can't remember

what they call it in like Christianity when you believe that

God built the whole universe and then fucked off.

What is that called?

Oh.

Oh.

Catholicism?

No.

No, it's like absent something.

Yeah, yeah, something like that.

But

I was going to say that Jing is like that.

Jing, like, built the thing and then said, like, I abandoned thee.

Like, um.

And the universe was a human child.

Which is how Jing approaches, yeah, everything.

He, you know, he'll found a museum and then he fucks off.

He meets someone and becomes like really important to them and then fucks off.

He

has a son and then fucks off.

He builds avoidant attachment style.

He does have an attachment.

He's an avoidant attachment style.

He builds the whole game and then fucks off.

But that's not exactly true because we meet a character here who claims to be one of the creators of the game.

And I think he, at least in the dub, he calls himself a game master.

He does call himself a game master, yeah.

My beloved freaks.

Require and Ferrarina plays in the background.

My beloved freaks are going to involve themselves in a bit, but we...

If we stop talking about the Phantom Troop, we'll just be talking about the Phantom Troop.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that's usually how it goes.

Biscuit thinks.

This isn't Require Marina, is it?

No, that was Riot, but it's just another one of their songs.

It's another good song.

It does play it a key moment earlier.

Or later.

Biscuit thinks that...

I'm sorry.

We do have...

We have a new song.

We have a kind of a new song.

From at the very end of the last episode,

we get

a song

when we check in briefly on...

Oh, what is happening during this?

I'm now not because I was gonna say when we check in very briefly on like the good guy squad do we check in on them during 63

which one's the good guy squad no NYX's team Nix's team yeah okay um uh so I don't remember what exactly is happening but at towards the end of 63 we get a song that for some reason also briefly plays uh at the um towards the end of

York New City called who's the bomber which is the like the bomber song.

You the bomber,

not to be confused with the Unibomber instead of Uta Bomber, sort of like fun,

yeah.

This is sort of like a 70s spy, sort of like mystery thing, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's very, yeah, it's a very 70s, like, mystery kind of song.

Greed Island continues to have pretty just banger tracks

introduced to the soundtrack.

While we're on music quickly, we get a lot of Biskey's theme played here.

Um, Biskey's theme is played on what we previously talked in the past episode about the kind of like the fiddle melody, but it's actually two fiddles played in stereo, one pretty hard in the left channel and one pretty hard in the right channel.

So it's like something is dueting, which I really like.

I think Hirano also

is so good at writing drums and has kind of demonstrated how good he is at writing drums.

I feel like the sort of like the

bongo, like the rippling bongo licks that appear all over this show are like really lovely Hirano drum parts.

But Bisky's theme begins with this really great, extremely loose snare drum.

So you can really hear the like the little chords, the little springs that make a snare drum have the sound that it does, like rattling away underneath the snare.

Can I get that?

Can I get that?

You might be able to.

God, yeah, really good.

The drums are so good in this show.

Yeah.

It's not a track that you would think would have drums that sound like that.

No, but it really works.

I have found the humble snare drum to be so joyful to play

and almost always a benefit to anything I put it against, even when I'm like, I don't think this thing needs a snare.

Very excited for

I'm learning.

I'm learning the drums finally after 20 years of wanting to learn the drums.

Are you learning on like a real kit?

Are you doing an E-kit?

Well,

I got a multi-pad.

I got a Korg multi-pad.

So it's 12

little pads that you can hit.

And

I've I

so I bought that a couple months ago.

And then this month I got the final essential pieces, which are a virtual like hi-hat pedal and a bass pedal so that I can

assign those to play those and keep the drums on the actual pad.

Very cool.

Please let us know how it goes.

Keith is learning the drums segment that that shows up every so often.

Yeah.

But yeah, I think Basic's theme is really good.

It's also immediately, very, very catchy.

And, you know, writing a catchy theme isn't the be-all and end-all of music.

And I think that some of the most striking tracks in this show have been ones that weren't immediately catchy to me.

It's kind of astonishing

how it never was released on the soundtrack and it went unnamed because of.

I feel like they use it so much that it almost feels like the Green Island theme, which is, it's not, of course, the Greed Island theme is this one.

I love the stupid theme.

That's a great, it's a great theme, but the, but Bisky's theme feels so much a part of Greed Island to me.

Yeah, I wonder why they didn't release it.

Yeah.

Is it tough of time?

I don't know.

They released four separate soundtracks.

There's four CDs full of soundtrack songs.

So it's not like they it's not like they didn't release a bunch of songs.

And there's great music right through to the end of this thing.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, my God.

Some of the best stuff are 50 episodes away from.

I'm so excited.

I think the soundtrack has just been so much fun.

But let's see.

Where are we?

Biscuit thinks that Kilua's analysis and physical strength is stronger.

Yep, she's right.

Yep, she's right.

Goan makes up for it with concentration and recovery speed.

She says they make a perfect team.

I would describe Gohan's concentration as obstinacy.

I mean that when Gohan tries to concentrate, there's that like drum sound and steam comes out of his ears.

Right.

But he is very, very obstinate.

Concentration is not exactly the right word.

I agree.

He is persistent, I guess, more than anything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he is definitely, he does have a good recovery speed.

And he's a very, very fast learner.

And then we just really start digging into like hand-to-hand nen combat.

There's a lot of mechanics here, but in brief, Biscuit sort of identifies Goan's punch as a thing called Ko,

which is a combination of all the nen techniques, and then teaches.

This is what Wing sort of gave him a hint on when they went to go

try out for the for Greed Island is like combine everything you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And she teaches them how they can sort of like flood Ko into their whole body using a technique called Ken, which is a really strong whole body shield that they can use to sort of like block a co-punch.

They can like

they can shift uh you know like in in ftl where you you know shift out of your engines and put it into your shields or shift out of your guns to put it into your engines you can essentially like meter ken through your body and into your limbs to like block right and that's called reu

there's an extremely cool moment uh where biscuit throws a really slow punch so good at so funny gone uh teaching him how to block it and the punch connects and gone just goes flying backwards.

It's like wing and the wall.

And then, you know, she starts Goan and Killio starts teaching Goan and Kiliua to fight this way and has them fight really slowly as well.

This reminded me a lot of that great bit that you showed us in Dragon Ball, Keith, where Roshi and Krillin are fighting, but they fight so fast that they have to like walk everybody back through the...

Yeah, they do like a they do a like a pantomime of there, of the fight that they just had to show everybody what happened in it.

There's something about how stagey and fun that is from like an animation perspective, of like staging a really pantomime fight.

And you can tell that the animators are having fun staging like a slow fight as Gonan Kilua do this, do this thing.

So, can I really quickly say why I think that these three new things are so interesting?

Yeah, of course.

Please.

So, I think it's funny because we just came off a series of episodes where we complimented it for being able to more naturally lay in a bunch of new knowledge into the narrative.

And that's not what they do here.

We are in school.

We are saying, this is Ko, this is what Ko is, this is Ken.

But the thing that I love about it is how it changes what it means to know Ten Zetsu Renon Hatsu.

Because

in order to

make Ko happen, you have to apply Zetsu to a specific part of your body in order to to like

keep Nen from leaking in there to get your really strong punch.

And then you've you learn that 10 and Ren are different, but then in Ken,

you learn to basically Ken is like the using Ten on your Ren.

Instead of just like throwing your Ren out, you then have to keep it out and hold it, like flexing a new muscle.

And the way that the thing that makes that so interesting is then once they describe what Ryu is, which is then to use Gyo on Ken to shift the balance.

I know

it sounds insane.

To shift the balance.

This is like, okay, in order to not die when you get punched in Ko, that's what Ken is.

So if you get, if you're using Ko on your fist to punch, and then you get punched, you'll die.

So you need to use Ken to like

add a buffer, but then your punches are weak again.

So you have to use Ryu

to

you have to use Ryu to move most of the power into your fist while keeping enough to keep you from dying if you get punched.

And the thing that is so spectacular about this to me is that it's essentially the exact same thing as the problem that Goan learned Ko to solve, which was having Nen that was leaking out of his punches into the rest of his body.

And so you need to apply Zetsu to your

10 Ren Hatsu-Gyo combination in in order to get rid of that leaking Nen.

And then Ryu is like, no, no, we actually sometimes need that leaking Nen.

And instead of going 90, 10, you really need to be going like 70, 30.

So like, it's reapplying this thing that we learned about as a weakness as actually like the most important one of all of these new techniques.

When I learned Nen, I said, this is what the world must sound like to dogs.

And I just want to say that I feel that I do feel the same way still.

I don't, I think the world might be easier to keep up with for dogs than for me to keep up with all of the nin techniques.

Did I explain that?

Did I explain why that's cool?

Yeah,

totally.

Okay.

Yeah.

Here's.

No, it's just that I turn into gone when we talk about technical nin stuff for too long.

Sure.

That's not your fault.

I feel like a lot of this is just like to lay out the visual language of like the way shirts are going to work.

I don't know how many of these terms get used later on

They use them they do use them

occasionally

Okay, I have

much rarer than stuff like Ten and Gyo and N

I had this same thought Sylvie the last time I was re-watching and then as we moved into the later things I was like oh they're they're throwing out Ryu like all the time or can every time

so so definitely at least more than I thought they were going to let me use dragon punch let me just add a metaphor to this Damnerwood Court to be is like,

yeah,

my copies count as my ends so that I know

where

I can put a barrier up of the fake city and then know if anybody shows up.

And then they reuse that like 10 minutes later to be like, and that means that I can also know where the Trump Scarlet eyes are.

And that is like the same sort of maneuver here where we learned six episodes ago about this leaking then

problem that

Guillaugh has and then like recontextualize it as its own technique.

That's what I think is cool.

Yeah, no, I think you're right.

And I think that this is a nice exploration of what it is like to learn things as well.

And, you know, so often when you are learning a thing, you suddenly find that

what you thought was the flat fundamental is actually a core part of the process of the thing that you're working on next.

So that's why they call them fundamentals.

It's just, it's just like in middle school when I failed one math class, and that meant that I failed math for the rest of my life.

Well, I didn't actually fail, but

that is where math turned for me.

I did fail, and that is also where math turned for me.

So they introduced this slow-mo fighting thing.

And this does, this is two things.

First of all, it's Bisky being like, you now need to, we're doing a Ken endurance training.

You need to maintain your Ken, which is 10 and Ren together, for 30 minutes minimum.

Because if you're going to be in a Nen fight, you need to be able to have this going for a half hour or you're going to die.

Very practical.

Totally makes sense to me.

I'm with you, Biskey.

They do this, and then they're like, okay, now it's time for you to do this during a real fight.

And so Gona Kilwa have to do the slow-mo fight that Biskey demonstrated.

And so they're doing, it's like, they're throwing, when I say slow-mo, they're fighting, they're throwing like one punch every 15 seconds.

It's so funny.

And you get to hear inside Gunn's head, and he's like, okay, punch is coming in.

I got to block with my left hand.

I got to put 30% into the rest of my body, but then 70% into my arm.

Okay, let's go.

And then it hits.

It's, I think it's hilarious.

I think it's very funny.

It's also especially funny where if you have ever been in a situation as a musician or an actor or a performer and the director has said to you, yeah, but could you do it 30% more?

You know how bananas a piece of advice that is.

And you're like,

really?

I thought you were going the other way, which is like the part of learning something, like, especially, you know, learning the guitar, a huge part of learning the guitar is taking a piece of music and playing it at 10% speed.

Oh, all the shows.

And so you're just like, okay, I'm playing at 10%, now I'm playing it at 15%, and then later on I can play it at 50%, and then it's two hours later, and I'm playing it at like 85%.

The only way to learn how to play quickly is to play extremely slowly.

And

I'm so bad at this because there actually is another way and it's to play it quickly.

And if you make one mistake, start over full speed.

Never slow down.

I can't do it slow.

I get so like bored.

I have to go.

I had to only go fast.

You got to go fast.

I think it's a worse way to learn.

For sure.

You're like the guy trying to learn hurdles, but he hasn't figured out what jumping is.

So he just runs at the hurdles until he sort of accidentally falls over one of them and then he's like oh there might be yeah something yeah and then i go back to the beginning and yeah

um

and then biscuit is like okay fine now i need you in the same way that you sort of put the nen in the uh uh

in the shovel i need you to start putting nen into rocks and breaking rocks with other rocks break 1000 rocks with one rock.

And she specifically calls this enhancer training.

And here's my notes as I had a breakthrough.

I said, how is this rock breaking thing enhancer training?

Oh, it's so this is great.

Isn't it just use of the co-punch?

Extended, they're just doing the co-punch extended out through the rock like they did with the shovel.

And then I wrote down, oh shit, that's enhancing.

Yeah.

This is, we've just been taught what Nen, like, you know.

Remember Remember what Wing said?

What did Wing say?

Wing said enhancers don't need a special move.

Their special move is being strong at Nen fundamentals.

God, it's so cool because, you know, we'd been shown the Nen wheel from really early on.

And we'd been told, like, there are types of people called emitters and they use Nen like this, or there are enhancers and they use Nen like this.

But we never really got a lot of focus in on like what that actually meant in terms of the application of the Nen.

It was more talking about like, oh, how it outputs.

And so watching Biscuit work them through very slowly the discovery of how Nen enhancers work was really, really cool.

And it sort of sold what the show and what Biscuit and Nen are trying to say, right?

Which is that thing that teachers always say and they're right and it's so irritating, which is that the meat of the thing is in the fundamentals.

You know, if you want to learn how to do this thing, you have to learn it at its smallest possible unit, and then I'm I'm going to show you how that small unit, you know,

spins out into the actual thing.

It's such a frustrating thing that is totally true about the world.

It's so annoying.

It's so annoying to be told,

especially, you know, if you,

I think a lot of people go through adolescence and are like, don't consider themselves a smart person.

I went through adolescence considering myself a smart person.

And I was like, I'm smart.

People are telling me, trust me, I know what I'm talking about.

When you're older, you'll look back and go, wow, this person was an adult and they knew what they were talking about, even if you think it's stupid now.

And I went, there's no way.

There's no way.

And

I think to the credit of people who have those thoughts when they're teenagers, you will find that a lot of the times you are still right.

And that is the frustrating point that you will never, you will never know in the moment who is giving you good advice and who is a piece of shit.

Hey, do you think that this is maybe a show about learning things?

Do you think that that might be a core thing that this show is about?

Yes.

Fuck.

You'll never know in the moment who's wing and who's biscuit.

You will never know.

What would a guy like Tagashi have to say about the extreme pursuits of your craft and the effects they'd have on you?

I just don't understand.

I understand.

Probably looking too much into it.

Yeah, don't worry.

Don't worry your pretty little head about it.

It is interesting, actually, to like dial the.

No, I do not want to update my browser right now.

I'm recording a podcast.

Stampede, you'll shark and you'll need it.

It was the right thing to do to update your browser.

You should have updated.

No, this one's one of the stupid ones.

This is one of the ones where I'm like, I don't think that's true.

Biscuit is tying together two pretty core themes here, right?

Which is that, like, Goan and Kiliua's friendship and love for one another is um liberatory and restorative and generative of good things, and there is a real power in these these kids learning Nen.

Biscuit kind of ties them together and and she's like, they make a perfect team.

Yeah.

Which is a which is very different than uh the sort of the interpretation that we tend to do when we read Gonan Kiliwa's relationship, right?

Which is that like these two people are freeing each other from the worst aspects of themselves, or in some cases, uh, giving into the worst aspects of each other.

Biscuit is like, ah, my gems.

My gems, they look so great on the same ring.

Yeah, exactly.

She alludes to some mysterious final phase

that's two weeks away

as they work up to full speed here.

But then she gives a full-on PowerPoint about the supposed origins of rock, paper, scissors.

Oh, right before that, though.

Oh, my God.

I forgot.

This whole time, they've been playing the Geo game where she holds up a finger, and they've been slowly transitioning from one person doesn't get it, and one person gets it, and that person is punished and has to do a bunch of push-ups.

And then now they're at the point where they get it every time, and they always tie.

They're always getting it right and tying.

It's very funny.

Yeah.

It's really

good.

Eventually they don't like that, so they start playing rock, paper, scissors, and the loser has to do push-ups.

Yeah.

Go and win.

Yes.

Yeah.

Because he's good at rock, paper, scissors.

Okay, Jack, tell me about Evil Fist.

Yeah, please tell me about Evil Fist.

PowerPoint

is very thin.

She is no PowerPoint master, Karapaka.

No, no, PowerPoint.

Essentially, it says this.

Did you know rock, paper, scissors is actually an ancient sort of expression of martial arts?

Because long ago, martial arts was seen as profane and was suppressed.

And so the martial artists invented a game that they could play to sort of like hide the fact that they were actually doing fighting um which is similar to the development of capoeira the brazilian dance martial arts technique um among enslaved people it's also the same story as like a jesus fish

Is that I don't know what you're talking about.

The fish just became like a Jesus symbol when that was.

Oh, right, right.

As the hidden symbol of worship, right?

But I don't think this is true about rock, paper, scissors.

I genuinely don't know.

I've never looked it up.

It just doesn't feel like a true story because it's not a a very good story.

Yeah.

Then Killer gets punched into the sky again.

Did we write down why he gets punched this time?

Called her head, called her old.

Okay.

Okay.

Sure.

There's a theme.

There's a theme with that.

I will say, I find this running joke charming.

Every time it happens, I'm like, he got punched into the sky again.

It's really funny.

It happens in the Greed Island tutorial, too, and it's really funny.

Does it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, I have not been watching these Greed Island tutorials.

You should, Jack.

They're really cute.

They're really good.

Yeah, they're where the Hunter Pedia was.

It's the same art style.

It's essentially Hunterpedia.

It's Greed Islandpedia.

Yeah,

it's the same comedy style, too.

Maybe where I am streaming these has cut them.

That would be crazy.

There's some really weird editing happening.

For example, after the title sequence, there's always a single loose frame from later in the episode that hangs out for two seconds before we cut titles.

That's weird.

No, I think that's.

Does it play music while that happens, though?

No.

Okay, because they do do that where it plays the.

I don't know if it's a panel from the panel.

A screen from the next episode of the one that just played.

For me, it's the episode I'm about to go into.

We get a shot from the episode.

It's weird.

Yeah, you know, I'll figure it out.

But Goan, having learned about the sort of the fist attack, the rock,

looks at his hands and with the tone of a man who has just seen God says, Evil Fist.

Yes, Goan has been inspired by rock, paper, scissors.

Is Goan Freaks's one of Goan Freaks?

Goan is about to get very interested in rock, paper, scissors, that's what's saying.

Is one of Goan's major, Goan Freaks' major powers going to be called Evil Fist?

Is that really what we're doing here?

I think that I'm happy to say this because they do say it in the episode.

It is not called Evil.

He doesn't call it Evil Fist.

He just calls it Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Yeah.

It's okay.

It's just gone.

Or John, John Kim Poe.

Yeah.

Am I pronouncing that right?

Okay.

I think so.

There's.

I guess I should wait till we talk a little bit about the bomber.

Yeah.

Before I talk about this.

Meanwhile,

the episode is about to take a tongue.

This is the bomber.

This is the bomber part.

Yeah, no, no.

It was like, I should wait until we literally have a lot of money.

I have one last important note to make.

This was pointed out to me by my wonderful wife.

When Kilua was fighting Renault, she said, Oh, Kilo is kind of fighting like Orange Cassidy because he's just running around with his hands in his little pockets.

He's a wrestler whose character is that he's a slacker, so much so that, like, sometimes when he wrestles, he doesn't pull his hands out of his pockets.

That's too funny.

That takes too much energy, I think.

Orange Cassidy is great.

I think of the wrestlers that's a key wrestler.

Oh, yeah.

Killua Hands in Pockets is one of my three favourite Kilua pose silhouettes that he's drawn in sometimes, and they don't overuse these.

It's Kilua Hands in Pockets, is funny every time.

Then there's Killiua running with his hands in his pockets, which is great, because he sort of bends back at his waist.

So he's like leaning back with his hands in his pockets.

And then the third is the like classic anime hands up behind his head.

But Kilua will often like run like that or like get into scraps with that.

he um in the original title sequence he roundhouse kicks a guy with his hands in his pockets which is great

meanwhile in nix's base remember this is the team who has figured out a way to clear the game this plan is not gonna work for them this thing is really funny to me this is such a tagashi swerve because he sets up the like nyx's team's plan with such detail.

It is so clever and you're like, oh, right,

this is going to be an interesting plot to see worked through.

You know what I mean?

Like, to see them execute this.

And then stuff starts happening.

So they need it.

They have about 10 more cards to get.

They're a little worried about Tesgera's group.

Tesgera, if you don't remember, was Batera's sort of man.

Yes, he's the goal hunter hunter.

Yes.

He is like a very professional.

We get shots of him.

Him and his team are sort of wearing camo.

You know, you know, Batera has also.

Oh, go ahead.

Oh, go ahead.

I was going to say an easy way for the audience to remember him is he's the guy who did the interviews that led to Gon and Kiliba being here.

Right.

Um, um, and you get the impression that Batera is smart enough to have his own man in the game as well.

To be like,

you know,

yes, he's hired him.

You gotta do it yourself.

They don't say this specifically, but it just sort of feels like he's on retainer.

He's getting paid a salary to play the game.

And

it's because, like, Batera's put his money on this guy being the one to beat the game.

Right.

The professor-looking figure, whose name is

begins with a G.

Get in through?

Getting through.

Get in through.

Yeah, Getting Through.

We might not have talked about him in the previous episodes, and U3 did a really good job at not drawing attention to him.

He kind of does nothing.

He's just a guy.

He has a couple things.

He talks about how worried he is about the bomber.

For instance.

Yes, he does.

And then he has, he, you know, he, I think he briefly talks about, like, not wanting to, like, kill anyone in order to get the cards.

It's so funny.

I call him the professor because he looks a bit like a Pokemon professor.

He looks kind of like Mac Tonight.

Yeah, no, he does.

He does.

I don't know who that is.

Hold on.

Oh, he sort of does.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

I don't know who Mac Tonight is.

Mac Tonight.

Oh, I know who Mac Tonight is.

I could do

two hours on Mac Tonight and a weird fucking Mac Tonight fan project I found once where he's a post-apocalyptic bounty hunter.

Oh, my God.

Who was the one who did the really famous broadcast signal intrusion?

Similarly creepy

character.

Max Headram.

Max Headroom, yeah.

I fucking love that weird thing.

Okay, he has thin little glasses.

He wears a white coat with these sort of like two distinctive fastenings on the front.

Otherwise, he's very tall.

He's very lanky.

Otherwise, he's broadly unremarkable.

You get the impression that he's one of the sort of like leadership group of the clear team.

And he stands up and he says, You know, we've been in the game for a long time, and I guess I've got to tell you that I'm the bomber.

And then all hell breaks loose in these episodes.

Tagashi just like suddenly turns the car around and reveals that we're going to Disneyland.

He has planted bombs on the entire group and horrifyingly wounds one of them, the sort of spiky-haired young sort of young guy, who tries to intervene.

Jisper.

He burns his face with a sort of ball of plasma in his hand that he calls handful of gunpowder little flower.

At this point, he reveals himself to be a full-on Jojo villain.

So it's interesting.

The interesting thing about calling him a Jojo villain is the so there's the obvious connection to

Kira,

the Jojo episodes we watched, who also can blow people out.

I'm going to briefly say that if you are interested in hearing us talk for maybe

eight hours,

almost eight hours, yeah.

Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and having a really incredible time, you can support us at friendsatthetable.cash to get access to the bonus episode.

By the time this is out,

either both episodes will be released of that or it'll be out next week.

Right, right, right.

So you're either going to wait a week or a third.

Which makes the total count of released

bonus episodes at four, which I think is well worth the price of friends of the table.cash.

Yeah.

Yoshikage Kira is a

fairly major villain in season three.

Yeah, he's the main antagonist for the season.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Season three or part four.

I just say part four.

Season three.

Part four, yeah.

Oh, sure.

Okay.

And he, among other things, has an extremely violent and unsettling power where he can cause things to explode by touching them.

The other thing that's interesting about Kira and Genthru is that

they can both do the exploding thing, but Kira ends up like amassing a bizarrely high collection of different powers that his stand can use by the end.

And Genthru is kind of like that.

Genthru has like kind of three separate powers that he uses, which he illustrates as little flower, which we see used to burn Jispa's face.

And then his like main bomb attack, which I don't remember what it's called, where he can put a secret bomb on you using a code, which is what he touches you and says, the bomber.

Which is very funny.

When this was, he says, he says, I set the bomb by touching the place I want to set the bomb and saying a keyword.

bomber.

And at first, I thought it was really funny that he had this like pregnant pause before revealing that his keyword was his name, but then it's revealed why he does that because we get a really great montage of him setting the bombs.

He sets a bomb on Poohat,

he sets a bomb on the man in the stripes doublet, the blue doublet with the white piping on it.

Did we learn that guy's name in the last episode?

Oh, the blue doublet.

He's about to become more important.

Abengani.

Yeah.

Arbenghani.

Okay, cool.

I've been calling him doublet in my notes.

Yeah, we get this great little montage.

And then he has another power where to disarm the bombs, you have to touch him and say, I caught the bomber.

I think that's very cute.

We are back in a game within a game again.

This is tack.

This is like a playground game

of like, I can put the charm on you by touching you and saying the thing, and you can only rid yourself off the charm by touching me and saying another thing.

This is kind of just the way hunters think about the world.

It's great.

The bombs now all appear visible on the players, and they start counting down.

And a detail that I only really put together literally as we're talking about it now, all the people have bombs in different places because that's where where Gentry touched them to save the bomb.

It's great.

Nick's bomb is on his back, so it's not clear whether he has been targeted.

Puhat's bomb is on the stomach.

He's on his back.

They show, God,

they show

all of the five factors so sad.

He's like, sort of like gently ribbing Puhat in the stomach, being like, hey, watch out for that bomber, huh?

It's so

fucked up.

And

this is when he explains, oh, sorry, Jack, were you done with that bit?

Oh, and then he says, I wrote down here.

Why is this happening now?

And I think the main reason why this is happening now is that the story moves Tagashi's pace.

He decides when events happen.

Also, they have pretty much all the cards.

I think the key turning point is that they have most of the spell cards.

Sorry, there is one other thing that

I know, and I don't know if I know it because it's something that Amagane says later, or if it's some, it's not super important, so I don't mind saying it now.

Or if it's something that I know because they just have more content in the manga for this, uh, but Amigan is like, yeah, it happened now because everyone was together, they were having like a big meeting, so right, okay, um, yeah,

I think he does say that, okay, okay, uh, he also has to tell them about the bombs to arm them, right?

Which is his third ability, countdown, uh-huh, which is triggered when you explain the other two powers, and that is that is really seals the Kira thing, I think.

I that that does, and I, I think the so the thing I really want to get into on top of this is the way you can disable it, which is you have to put your hand on him and say, I've caught the bomber.

Didn't you mention that?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But in order to do that, you've got to contend with the fact that his hands are bombs.

Yeah, it's great.

It's a game.

It's a game of tags, right?

And so, like, that's, we've got Greed Island now, which is, presents itself as a game and then is actually this kind of like

very dangerous, sinister

nen training program, program, you know, at least in the way that like Bisky talks about it, you know?

Yeah.

We got the stuff with the Evil Fist and Jonken, the Jaken Jong-Ken thing.

Yeah.

Of

literally, like, she gives us a good explanation of how each part of the game represents this way of maiming your opponent.

And then we get this, which is another thing of Tagashi being like, what if games were evil and fucked up?

What if tag blew you up?

Or if you didn't, weren't good enough at tag, you exploded.

And I think I really like how he is

because this is a show about two kids, right?

Like using a lot of stuff that is related to childishness and childhood and then turning it into

pretty upsetting things or like threatening things.

Yeah.

But meanwhile, Gona Killer just like excited the way.

Yeah.

There's five of them.

Well, there's a couple of other things here as well, right?

Which is first, you know, I keep coming back to the fact that this is a show for kids.

And, you know, we talked in the Dragon ball thing about how when you're a kid keith you sort of pretty much had dedicated time for thinking about dragon ball um and going out into the woods and thinking about dragon ball uh throwing a thing making the

yeah throwing rocks and trees like it's a key blast you know yeah exactly and and so i think that you know as we just keep going further and further into these weird convoluted expressions of games in the show it is on some level speaking to the kids who are playing uh hunter hunter you know it's like oh i'll be i want to be killer or whatever it's also sort of like abstract

like um sort of like uh heightening of the actual danger of going outside and playing as a kid like i went into the woods there's snakes out there there was you know there's coyotes um

uh there's occasionally uh wolves where i grew up you know poisonous snakes again occasionally um and i'm just like out in the woods doing my thing throwing stuff knocking knocking rotten trees over finding axes in the barn and just like hitting stuff with axes,

occasionally,

I wouldn't want to say stealing, but using the like ride-on-lawn mowers that I'm not supposed to use.

And not for law-knowing purposes.

Riding those Fisher Price cars down.

driveway hills.

Oh, yeah, we've talked about that.

We've talked at length about the Fisher Price.

I was doing some genuinely dangerous stuff as like a 12-year-old outside unsupervised in the woods.

And it's not the same kind of danger,

but there is like a connect.

Like there is like this way way that

this show is like amplifying, exaggerating,

taking that sort of like

innocent childhood danger and making it like extreme,

but like, but not really changing the attitudes of the children.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it is, you know.

It's worth going back to the root of it, right?

Which is like, the way that

the

show allows its characters to enter into this world where everything is a game, is they have to play a death game to start.

You are living your own comfortable life.

Then, if you win a death game, the truth of the world is revealed to you, which is it is a series of nesting games.

Yeah.

It's great.

Finishing the hunter exam being like,

at least we're done with the death game.

At least the death game part of our story is over.

Oh, death game's all the way down.

Getting up at 2 a.m.

from what Death Game?

So this whole thing, I don't know if we said it plainly, but

Genthru is blackmailing everyone for their cards, and he's going to blow you up if you don't give over all the specified slot cards.

This is a ploy to turn the number of winners down from a couple dozen to, we learn in a second, is three.

Because Pooh Hot shows up, Genthru leaves, uses the leave card to go to Patera's mansion.

Puhat is supposed to show up with all the cards, instead shows up to kind of do a bargain, say, Hey, they don't want to give you the cards because they want to use the big important card they have to save Jispa, who's still alive.

I can sort of be your man on the inside.

And get through essentially immediately blows his throat up.

Yeah, he just kills Puhat.

He says

when you negotiate with someone, and this is a very interesting way of seeing the world.

I don't know what Art of the Deal fucking book he wrote

or he read, but

he says when you negotiate with someone, you have to demonstrate just how calm and insane you are.

It's such a good Sagashi line.

It is sorts of meaningless, but it's a really fun thing to have a couple of things.

It kind of calls back to it again later, too.

So Sub and Barra are there.

Those are the other two bombers.

Those are crazy names.

Those are crazy names.

But

Sub calls, or sorry, it's Barra.

Barra calls himself the um the bomb they're the bomber wingmen.

We're just the other two bombers.

He needs us to like trigger the main bomb.

Um, and so they all have to be together.

And uh

they have they have cool looks.

Uh, they have marks on their foreheads like Crowlo does.

Uh, not the same and they also have them on their t-shirts.

But they also have matching marks on their t-shirts.

It's so cool.

I mean, I wonder whether or not this speaks to some kind of a subculture that Crowler was part of at some point in his life.

When we saw him in that flashback as a kid, did he have the tattoo or the mark on his forehead?

Sorry, who?

Crowler.

Crowler.

Oh, um,

I don't know.

I think so.

No, I think he had it when he fight in the flashback where he's fighting Silva, though?

Silver.

Yes.

I do want to briefly say.

Oh, so there's a little bit of a mechanics refresher on Greed Island here.

When you leave the game, which you can only do in two ways, you can use a leave card or something else that we'll learn about later.

You lose all your unnumbered cards, but your numbered cards are saved in your ring.

This is what Genthru and his cronies are after.

They're not really interested in the unnumbered cards.

So Pooh Hat can come out of the game, and in fact, they take his ring before they kill him.

Putting on a ring over your existing ring overwrites what you have with the other ring.

I do just want to briefly say that, do you remember back when they used that computer and they went in the computer to learn about Greed Island?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So a detail that I remembered during that is that

it costs a lot of money to get information about Greed Island, and the bartender in that claims that you can only leave Greed Island, God, what does he say?

If you reach save points, which is wrong.

Yeah,

that is just not

how it works at all.

I had thought he said if you find a special item, which I was like, yeah, that's probably right.

You know, you could use the leaf item to describe the leaf cards.

But the bartender, with the information that they paid for, says you can only leave the game at certain save points.

And I just, I love that they're wrong about that.

And it costs them a lot of money to get it.

There is, if you want to be a little bit generous, he is half right.

To leave...

Green Island without the leaf card, Kilua does have to go to the port.

And you could be like, okay, port is maybe that's a like, you could call that a save point or

Yeah, I suppose.

Yeah.

Pooh Hat's head gets delivered to the main team, to Nyx's team in a bag.

It's great.

It's a nice little bit of Tagashi gore.

We've talked in the past about how it's a 7-Eleven bag, too.

I know it really is.

Dumped there.

This guy hates heads on necks.

He sure does.

Tagashi really underplays the violence or the on-screen violence.

It's a very violent show, but it's very rarely gory, except for when it is and he really goes for it.

People getting their faces bitten off is a Tagashi hallmark by this point between one of the unfortunate shadow beasts and the nen fish eating that guy alive.

And this is a head in a bag.

There's another really cool on-screen Tagashi going for it moment a bit later.

But

on a boat

outside Rocky Cliffs, the Phantom Troop arrive at the outside of Greed Island.

They just found it.

More than half of the remaining troop are here.

Yeah,

it is Finx, Shalnark, Feytan, Shizuku, Franklin, and Kotopi.

They found it really quickly.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's real.

Greed Island is in the real world.

It's just a place you can go to on a boat, but there is someone who has something to say about that.

In the next episode, I guess.

Yeah,

before that, I would like to say briefly that a new guy has showed up on the thumbnail on the streaming platform that I'm using to watch.

Yeah, this is notable to me because the guy showing up on the thumbnail was my first introduction to Hisuka.

I don't know if you remember, way back when, way before I met Hisuka, I saw him in an image in a thumbnail, and I was like, Who is that?

Is that just going to be like a small-scale villain, or is that going to be the show's main villain or whatever?

So, it's notable to me that a new character has appeared on the thumbnail.

He looks a bit like an alien, he has purple eyes, he has a pale, maybe pointed face, and he's wearing what looks like a big purple headpiece or hat or something like curving above his head.

Do you have a screenshot of this?

Yeah, I genuinely don't know who you're talking about.

I am also confused.

And if you send the screenshot and I know who it is, I'm still, I'm not going to say shit, but

I'm just...

From the description, I'm not 100% sure who you mean, which I think is funny.

Oh my god, I've just noticed something else in this thumbnail.

I don't really consider this a spoiler because I would see it anyway, and it's not like I'm getting useful information from it.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay.

The other detail that I understand now.

The other detail that I literally just noticed is that below this figure are maybe 100 shadowed people with glowing red eyes.

Sure.

Yep.

Where did you say you're seeing this?

This is the thumbnail for the show on my streaming platform.

Now, I know why this is happening.

It's because of something that we referenced in the last episode.

Oh, I know why this is happening too.

Yes.

And it has to do with the way that TVDB understands anime seasons, which is incorrectly.

Oh, shit.

Now, this, this, do I hear the tiny insectile drum beats of the ants' little feet approaching, I wonder?

I think I might do.

I think I might do.

I thought that was worth mentioning in the sense that this is ultimately, not ultimately, this is partly a project about the experience of watching a thing for the first time and, you know, encountering all the ephemera of the thing, of the show as you're watching it.

And yeah, because the last one was Hisaka, was the new character for me.

A man burning with Ren, wearing weird green shoes, emerges from the beach and calls the Phantom Troop uninvited guests.

This is one of the creators of the game.

His name is Razor.

I don't like looking at him.

Why do you like looking at him?

I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it.

I think he seems like such a nice guy.

He makes me uncomfortable.

His face is kind of weird.

He has like a Tentin face.

When he smiles, he has this great big smile that is simultaneously,

it feels very.

It feels kind and also like he will kill you.

It's a very odd mix of genuine and threatening.

That is like really impressive.

It is such a well-done

image.

I don't really

understand

why I feel the way I do when he smiles like that.

Hey, I just pulled up a picture of Razor since we're talking about how he looks.

Why is he wearing Yeezys?

Yeah, I did.

I think he has like watermelon shoes on.

Yeah.

Very, very strange-looking guy.

He's

massive.

He's like, interesting feller.

He's like, what if your...

What if your gym teacher had been taking steroids for 15 years?

Many touch points.

He says that they can't have found the island accidentally because currents

prevent

people from washing up on the island.

You know, you essentially have to have found it if you're going to.

He gives them a brief opportunity to claim that they're castaways.

Castaways.

This, to me, just speaks more to the scale of the death game that Jing and Razor and some other people have created.

You know, they have ocean currents pushing people away from the shores.

And then I remember.

Are they natural currents or nen currents?

I think they're nen currents.

It was in the last recording when I sort of started to...

say what if this place actually is real what if shanak is right and you said well how do you think the game works then and i offered two solutions the first is like

i offered three actually the solution one magic is real and is different from nen solution two it's like showmanship it's all like special effects it's sort of like Truman show bullshit option three there is a lot of hyper specific nen being worked on the cards that lets them like lets other people use the nen embedded in the cards and we sort of get a clue that that might be what is happening because razor says that he he is uh he's one of the creators he handles emitter spells including all movement and dealing with external threats Which kind of implies to me that part of the way greed island works is that you have nen masters in specialist sort of like positions on the nen wheel who are running the game like a GM

Yeah, does he yeah He calls himself a game master.

Yeah.

Yeah, he says that he has special cards that only game masters can use.

This card is called eliminate.

Yeah, this card is so cool.

He holds it up and just like, you know, we talked about this last time, every time someone uses a card, you get like a little full-screen shot of the card with the art on it.

Razor's card has the word ruler only written where the art would be, because, of course, you wouldn't need to commission art for the Game Masters cards.

So, what does the card do?

Do you remember?

It sends all the trespassers on the eye.

It sends the trespassers you cast it on to a random place.

This is essentially just...

Sort of like a minor setback for the Phantom Troop.

I don't think that this guy...

As they, as...

So he teleports the the Phantom Troop away all to different places.

My translation says it teleports him to a random place on the Asian continent.

Yes, that's what mine says as well.

Oh, Asia is called A-Z-I-A-N here.

Oh,

in keeping with the slightly askew geographical names for things in Hunter Hunter.

I didn't, I did not get that at all.

It said a random place.

I had assumed it was a card that sent you somewhere on Greed Island.

That's what I know.

They have gone to a random place in Hunter Hunters, Asia.

Well, that's kind of where Krolo is going, too.

So that's fine.

Well,

looking at the map, I don't think we know for sure that Asia is in the east here.

Krolo's going east.

That's true.

I thought that way because of where Asia is relative to North America.

Well, sort of.

You could also go west and find it, but it would be a different...

It would be kind of a weird way of doing it.

The Earth is round.

We talk about it like it's East.

We say East.

Our Earth is round, yeah.

Our Earth is round.

Our Earth is round.

There's an item that you can get for fighting Razor.

There's a sort of like a Lord British type situation going on here where the Game Masters are also like part of the game.

Lord British, it was a Richard Garriott, a game designer

who sort of did pioneering work in

space.

MMOs.

He also was the first of it.

He's phenomenally wealthy and therefore he's a complete spectacular weirdo.

But part of the way he made his money was by

he invented the Ultima Ultima Online series of MMOs along with the rest of his team.

And he had a character.

His character was called Lord British in the game.

And in one of them,

I think it was Ultima Online.

During a parade when Lord British was set to walk, the developers had set the game flags incorrectly, and Lord British was immediately assassinated by one of the players.

One of the coolest things that ever happened in games.

That and Corrupted Blood, like some of my favorite MMO, actually started producing really interesting emergent play

is great.

So this is kind of what's going on here with Razor.

You can get an item by fighting him.

And then

he spikes a huge volleyball of light.

So good.

Massive explosion.

Explodes it.

It blows up their

good camera.

It's like Nobunaga in the process.

Yeah, this is one of the most impressive Nen attacks that we've seen in Hunter Hunter.

It's real cool looking.

It's real cool.

It's Dragon Ball Z-esque.

It's approaching

the dragon.

Zeno's dragon.

It's also kind of dodgeball.

It's also kind of dodgeball.

It's also very similar to the thing that Goan is doing.

Is it this episode or next episode where Guns start doing this?

Yeah, where he starts throwing in energy from his fingertip.

But yeah, you know,

I can now say with confidence that Biscuit is visible in the back of the gorilla playing uh dodgeball screenshot.

Oh, do you have that screenshot?

Can I see it?

No, I don't know.

The gorilla lives rent-free in your mind.

I'm so proud of myself.

It's the final piece.

No, I know, but still, it's like been so hard to put together.

It was so funny the way that the gorilla was such an immediate...

It's like I stepped up to the plate and you threw a curveball immediately.

Was this mine?

It was mine.

It was mine, right?

I can't remember.

It's maybe the one I thought about the game.

No, it was Keith.

Sylvie, you picked the troop, right?

Did I pick the troop?

I thought I picked Gorilla.

Maybe I picked the troop.

I can't remember anymore.

I can't remember.

They've all beat the troops.

We'll check the tape, but I feel like

I thought I picked the gorilla, but maybe I'm wrong.

What was the first one that we...

The gorilla.

No, sorry.

I mean, what was the chronologically the first?

Oh, the troop.

Okay.

Troop and then arm wrestling.

And then arm wrestling.

Arm wrestling was your one, wasn't it?

Actually, technically, I think

Austin is calling me.

I think I've been the one, which was the water.

From Hunter's Arena.

Me, confidently.

They're doing a spell.

Kind of.

This is episode zero in this feed.

If you want to see me try and learn what Hunter Hunter is from First Principles.

The stream is on our YouTube as well, if you don't want to check the description for your images, but you should just listen.

It's a good time.

Goan is developing a rock, paper, scissors, nen technique.

So far, he can only do rock.

This is very, uh, Leorio has only learned 10.

Um, and he's using different sort of aspects of the Nen wheel.

He, the rock is an enhancer technique, the paper is an emitter technique, and scissors is a transmuter technique.

Um, Biscuit thinks this technique is sound.

She's like, yeah, this is pretty good, but she does think it's childish.

It's childish.

Biscuit,

I have some news for you.

Yeah.

Not everyone that looks like a child is 57 years old.

Yeah.

I'm saying that to anime Twitter.

No, that's for parts of anime Twitter, that's more like a thousand-year-old.

There's a regardless

that is part of the stock character that Biscuit is, though, right?

That's what I'm saying, right?

Like, Biscuit is absolutely part of the anime stock character of, like, this person looks like a little girl, but they're actually X many years old.

Yeah.

With all the kind of gross shit that that can often spill out into.

But here it is, we got a little bit of that with

Binault sort of eating her hair and realizing

that she's actually 57.

But here it's mostly that she's like a pint-sized psychopath with 57 years of Nen training.

Actually, she says she's been studying Nen for 40 years.

40 years.

So she started when she was 17.

Oh, wow.

She

looking at Gonan Killua, she came to Nen late.

Yeah.

She's putting them in AAU for Nen.

I have a question.

Do we think that Goan's rock, paper, scissors move is an example of a nin power with conditions?

Like when my hand is the rock, I do this move.

When it's the scissors, I do this.

Or is that just like, you know, Goan just moves differently to do different things?

I think he's just styling with it.

Yeah, that's what I think too, but I don't remember if we ever get this actually answered or not.

Yeah, it would be really funny if Goan gave a very feels about nen conditions once and starts accidentally applying them.

That's a very Goan thing to do.

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, she says

Goan is sort of like, well, I just like rock, paper, scissors.

And she says something that I thought was really interesting, which was like, that's fine.

You know, it's good to just kind of have that.

She says, gut feelings play a role in Nen techniques that involve different Nen disciplines.

Your power should feel right to you, is the line she says.

And then it's followed by by killua being like hey check this out yeah which is hey here's this thing that hurts me every time i use it and is a symbol of the fucking arduous torture my family put me through i should say what was that you just said about abilities feeling right i should say we don't i think that we just suppose that it might hurt him i don't think that that is either true or false but like every the way everyone talks about it with the nen it's like the only way you can withstand turning your nen into electricity is if you've can withstand the electricity.

Yeah, I always thought it was because it's like the image training that Karapika did with the change, where in order to do it, you have to understand electricity so much, and the only way to understand electricity that much is to have experienced a lot of it, and Kiloa is a kid, a pre-teen.

And so it just, it always struck me as like it, it something because we get the line of like, just because

the line from Heaven's Arena, the just because it like

looks like it doesn't hurt me doesn't mean it it is.

Yeah, I don't want to, I'm not trying to say that it definitely doesn't hurt him or it definitely, I just also don't want to say that it definitely does because they don't have to.

Sure, I mean, I'm not really talking about canonicity here.

I'm just talking about my read.

Yeah.

Because it's, which, like, is a lot of Kilo's stuff comes back to, like,

re

like

trying to, like, recontextualize a lot of traumas and, like, a lot of the suffering that he's been through, and it's really self-destructive.

My impulse is just that it feels like it's maybe different when it's your own Nen.

In the same way that Ren doesn't hurt.

But I don't know.

I genuinely don't know.

Maybe this is answered somewhere.

But yeah, I'm just, it could go either way to me.

Biscuit is now the second adult that is afraid of his power.

Yeah.

She calls this.

We actually get a lot of like Biscuit internal monologue through these episodes.

She says that his power is tragic and says that his childhood must have been a living hell.

Yeah.

It's a miracle that he can smile now.

And she looks up and we get Killua smiling, looking at Gon and Gon smiling, looking at Killiua, and then back to Biscuit as she puts that together and she says

I know.

Well, it's so funny, but like, Biscuit, you just said that his childhood must have been a living hell.

Do you want to re-evaluate the last, you know, month?

No, I don't think that's a good thing.

No.

I don't think we need to do that.

He's 12 now.

He's an adult.

And then Gone calls Kilua an electric eel, and Kilua is like, that's a bad comparison.

It's adorable.

Listen, if Biscuit wasn't going to train Kilua, then all of that childhood trauma would be for nothing.

Oh, sure.

Part Maker Worth want a rough gem.

I do quickly want to dial into the

gut feelings play a role in Nen techniques that involve different Nen disciplines and talk about maybe the big gut feeling that we've seen on the show, which is Machi's hunches.

I wonder if Tagashi is saying something about Machi's.

The Phantom Troop are too good at Nen to really think of themselves on the Nen wheel beyond just being like, oh, I guess he must be a conjurer or whatever.

But I wonder if Machi is doing some of that sort of like Nen spread betting, as it were.

And that is what's bubbling up in Hunches.

Yeah, maybe the threads are not strictly as metaphorical as

we said that they might be.

Let's see.

Oh, extremely funny sidebar now.

Uh, as they all suddenly realize that the deadline for the hunter exam is coming.

Oh, right.

So, Biskey's like, is starting to feel, so I do want to, Biskey is starting to feel bad about how hard they've worked after thinking about all this stuff about Kilo and is like, I want to throw them a party because it's New Year's.

And this is when they all realize, oh, fuck, I have to go take the Hunter exam.

It's, I haven't really brought this up, but I've been waiting all year to take the Hunter exam.

It's so funny.

And Bisky is so excited to party that the more they talk about this, we get some of these great background shots of her that we got in the early episodes where she's visibly mad.

Yeah, because she wants to have a tea party and Ghon's like, no, we have no time.

We have to go.

Yeah,

you can also leave the island by defeating or bribing a harbormaster at the island's only port.

Lightning explodes from the harbor master's shack.

Yes, Kilwa.

cursorily defeats the Harbor Master.

Kilwa beats the Harbor Master in one second.

Yeah.

He says, well, I'll go ace the exam and come right back.

And Goan tells him about the Kiriko.

This is just so joyful to me.

I can't tell which we're going to get, because Tagashi would do either.

Either we're going to get a completely off-screen hunter exam and Kilua returns with his Hunter license, or we're going to get an extremely truncated hunter exam montage, which is going to be really funny, or something way more like

the hunter exam becomes a problem and we dial into it but I think it's going to be one of the first two options and either is going to be so funny hold on we have to type to each other

I made the face so

it's funny because we can say that but Jack still doesn't know which way we mean Yep.

No, no.

Because they gave us options.

Right.

Well, I just know that I, you know, blessed with the gift of prophecy and I see all the acolytes down on the other end of the temple going, gosh,

it's so cute.

There's a lot of us just going warmer.

It's so cute with the Kiriko.

I'm very excited.

And we do get a second of that later, and it's even cuter.

I love those dudes.

But the thing that happens in between there is we get Abengane finds Gonan Biski to tell them about the bomber.

Oh, briefly, Bisky is teaching Gonha to do the Gyo trick with the numbers.

Bisky produces a perfect five above her finger and produces like this extremely wobbly six.

And this is this is what is this?

Do you think this is an emitter lesson?

This is an emitter lesson.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, so he's he's trying to perfect his emission.

So let's give you my

reduces carbon footprint.

So yeah, during this, oh, Goan smashes into a tree because they're running and he's concentrating too hard.

And then Abergani finds them to tell them all about the bomber.

He catches them all up on what's happening.

He shows up.

He has the visible, horrible bomb on his shoulder i think yeah it's on his shoulder and he basically goes i don't believe that the bomber is gonna not kill us so i'm trying to warn everybody about the bomber um we can't fight because we're just too weak jispa was already our strongest fighter and he died in one second um

He asks Gonabiski to spread the word about the bomber and to avenge them if they all die to not let the bomber win.

And he's basically like, you're the only people I could trust.

But then he leaves and goes, heha, you're actually the only people I could find, which is really funny.

He says, even a pig can climb a tree if you give it enough praise, saying like, I was just buttering them up.

Of course, Goan actually is the most trustworthy person on Green Island.

He didn't have to lie to them at all.

That's because Goan trusts everybody.

This little abengane sequence is a real,

you know, we see a lot of nen in this show, but sometimes Tagashi really dims the lights, you know, and comes out on stage with his little lectern and says, and now, some serious Nen, and the curtains open and he shows us a new kind of freak.

This is so fucked up.

Avangane implies, he says, any thousandth of a percent counts when it comes to deactivating someone's nen.

Deactivating Nen, huh?

Deactivating Nen, huh?

Before all of the stuff that happens, happens, I was like, ah, this is how they're going to do it.

This is how we get Kruller back on screen.

We have met someone who can remove, or seems to be able to remove Nen.

I wonder how he's going to do this.

Well, he starts

chanting

over a wooden doll that he holds.

And he's specifically calling on the spirits of the forest to remove unclean Nen.

I wrote down, is he a Nen shaman?

He's...

It's weird, right?

You know, first that you're calling on spirits.

This isn't Demon World, but it's sort of adjacent.

I wrote down, oh, Demon World Theory tonight, Queen, in my notes when this started happening.

I forgot to think about Demon World Theory when this happened, but surely

it's very witchy.

And then he throws it into the fire, and like an old god emerges from the fire.

Like this sort of terrible, twisted, small worm.

It's like bulging

small.

It's like a

six feet long and it's like if

a centipede was made out of like a human fetus yeah like wood and flesh it's like moaning it has this awful like square mouth but it's like

smacking his lips oh

grody yeah it's really

climbs up oh it looks kind of like the flatworm monster from uh x-files

it also looks like something from jojo this is like an iraqi Iraqi-ass creature.

It climbs up Abengane and starts eating the bomb off his shoulder.

And it's well-timed because at that point, the Nyx's team sort of like hands over the cards that they've got.

And the bomber does exactly what you think he's going to do, which is, you know, I said I would release you from your sorry lives.

And he blows them all up.

In the dub, he says, you're all losers, and I don't keep promises to losers.

Oh, yeah, mine says that, but scum.

You're all scum.

Sorry, Jack, what did your say?

Oh,

the same thing.

I was paraphrasing.

Yeah, it's everybody in the cave dies.

Nyx dies.

Basically, the entire clear team is killed, except Abengane,

who is stuck with the worm until either the bomber dies or reverses his nen ability.

This worm is sort of just like clinging to him, making awful sounds.

And so he covers himself up in a yellow poncho and a big wide hat to

hide the worm.

This is a costume change from one kind of distinctive costume, this blue doublet with the white piping on it, to another very distinctive costume, neither of which are related.

I thought that was really interesting.

I have a question.

Yeah.

So do you guys think that this creature is...

And maybe this is said and I missed it, and apologies if so.

Do you think this weird critter is visible to the naked eye, or do you have to use Gyo to see it?

I believe it's visible to the naked eye.

I also do.

Yeah, me too.

I think so, too.

I think if you...

If you...

If you're putting the poncho on, you know?

Yeah.

You're anticipating that someone's probably going to see it.

Oh, Keith, get that out of here.

It really is the Flukeman, though.

It really is the Flukeman from X-Files.

This motherfucker posted the flukeman.

I'll delete it.

I'll delete it.

Was the flukeman there?

By the way, in that flukeman costume is Darren Morgan, writer of some of the best episodes of X-Files.

Oh, fuck.

That doesn't look like it would be a fun costume to wear.

I mean, it'd be fun for 10 seconds to be like,

his brother wrote a ton of episodes of the X-Files, got him the job, and then got him in the writer's room.

Oh, that's cool.

Wrote the best episodes.

Killu is off hanging out with the Kiriko.

They're having tea and chatting.

And the Kiriko are like, yeah, sure, you smell like Goan.

We'll take you to the.

There's an implication that the Kiriko are blind here?

No, they're just sniffing because they're animals.

Yeah, because they're animals.

I thought they said, I wish we could see.

I thought one of the things they were doing.

No, I wish we could see Goan.

They want to see Goan.

Oh, oh, they miss Goan.

They want to see him again.

Right, right, right.

Sorry, this is not important.

Glenn Morgan.

That's the brother.

Glenn Morgan and James Wong, underrated because of how popular the Darren Morgan episodes are.

Glenn Morgan really does

episodes, great episodes of the X-Files.

Meanwhile, Biscuit hopes that Gohan will have got his technique, his rock, paper, scissors technique sorted by the time Killiwa comes back.

Great job.

Right here.

How does it play?

Oh, so he's trying to hit the rock with his emitter technique.

This is where Gohan's like, how long will it take?

How long will it take?

And it's like, I bet you can hit the rock by the end of the day.

And he goes, yes.

And then he shoots it and he hits it next try.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Classic.

I wrote down: um, Goan plays his usual game of learning something instantly that people think will take a while.

Yeah.

Um, oh, a massive shipment of spell cards has arrived in Masadura.

This is the game balancing itself.

These are all the spell cards owned by the players that got killed by the bomber.

Yeah.

Right place, right time, huh?

Yeah, yep.

This is also what I talked about in the

last episode about, like, this is the kind of the unintended loophole of greed island that has been producing all this killing is you know this is it's one of the reasons you know it's it's keeping down the card conversion limit the cap uh and it's also you know producing new spell cards not not new types of spell cards but it's producing fresh spell cards for the surviving players

um

i've lost my let me see i've lost my notes notepage um okay biscuit and goan get some cards they got prison which is the card that we talked about last time protects a sheet of cards that's probably going to be useful.

Biscuit has cast a spell called Blackout Curtain, which is going to block one sort of attempt to scry by the opponents.

Right.

Something that we had earlier that I forgot because I thought it was

later in my notes.

Ah, shit.

Did I write this note and forget about it?

It was between the gut feelings scene and like it's important to

do what feels right when you're learning.

There's a bit where she says

something like, This might take you a while to learn, don't worry about trying it all at once.

There are these moments where Biscuit is very occasionally like a kind of patient teacher, and it's always a really funny contrast for me that she like stumbles into being patient or like thoughtful in her teaching, and then is also like, fight to the death in the pit.

Hey, well, a well-rounded educator.

And then I think that's

about it.

Yeah, that's about it for now.

We end with Killur off at the hunter exam, going training with biscuits.

The phantom troop have been teleported to Asia.

That's a really funny way to put it.

Oh, did we say what Razor says about them

right before he destroys their ship?

Oh, he's like,

they're serious business.

He doesn't think he knows that they're the phantom troop.

He goes, huh, that's one intimidating group of people.

I can tell you that.

It's crazy.

It's so funny.

Right after he's been like, he kind of like happily encourages them to return the right way and then to challenge him.

He's like...

Yeah, it is funny how the Phantom Troop get in the game.

Shalnark gets in the game, figures out its secret, leaves, and then brings his entire party who immediately get IP banned.

Yeah, just come back through the front door and then we can fight.

It'll be fun.

Yeah.

Go buy a new Xbox for Walmart and then you can get back on Xbox Live.

They got to get the multi-blade.

They've got the multi-tap.

They already have the multi-tap.

Yeah, yeah, no.

They're good to go.

Yeah, they're prepared.

It's just that the Phantom Troop were like, well,

we just want to rob you.

So, you know.

Well,

they have their motives to be there.

Sort of.

I don't know.

As far as I know, their motives to be there are to steal everything they can.

I feel like they've said why they're there, but I'm.

No, I don't.

I don't quite remember if if it came up with the Shallow

scene.

Yeah, I don't know.

Okay, we should.

We'll be careful then and not mention that.

Yeah, my note says

Yeah, my note.

Oh, here's what my note says.

Um

the troop is trying to rob the game.

The troop is going to try and rob the game without completing it.

They want a card called Eye of God, which lets them have information about cards at any time.

I think that's all we have so far.

Yeah, okay, okay, cool.

Yeah.

So, yeah, we do not know why they're.

There's been an implication, I think, so far, but I won't break it.

This is one of those cases where they have shown all the puzzle pieces, and because the three of us know how the puzzle pieces fit together.

Yeah.

But also, they haven't shown

the one piece that goes right in the center of everything, so we should probably keep it down.

Yeah.

Anything else about these episodes before we close it out?

The Greed Island tutorial for this this last one is adorable.

It's about the

spell that hides the binder from people, like keeps them from looking in your binder.

And that's where I posted a screenshot earlier of Gone blushing at Killua.

Yeah.

Because he says, you can look at my binder anytime you want, Kiloa.

And then Kiloa goes, ha, and his head gets really big and he's blushing.

So it's really funny.

And I know, Jack, you've appreciated that energy in the Hunterpedia before.

So that's great.

There's another one

the last episode that's really funny.

I forgot to bring it up at the end of 64.

But Ghon is like having withdrawals from

being in the game for too long.

He's like on the floor rocking back and forth.

And Kilu is like, if you leave, I'll take all your cards.

And then Goan calls him a stupid onliner.

Oh, I'm stealing that one.

Oh, my God.

That's great.

Fucking touch grass, Kilua.

Yeah.

As we get a bit of biscuit saying

the

she says something like the love between two young boys is a wonderful thing.

I can't wait to ruin it earlier in the thing.

I can't help but remembering, Keith, much earlier in the project, you described Hunter Hunter as a show about a boyfriend and another person, a boyfriend and a friend or something.

And I just, I wanted to bring that up so that it fixed itself in my mind as a thing to keep watching for.

I think the last episode is big on that energy.

Yeah.

Sorry,

our last set of episodes had a lot of that, yeah.

I think, like,

the case that Kiloa Zelda is falling in love with Gone Freaks is being presented.

I mean, being presented.

It's ironclad.

It's iron fucking clad.

At this point, it's ironclad.

I mean,

you take

the Illumi stuff from the end of the Hunter exam, take the trip back to Whale Island where

and then this the stuff from the last set of episodes it's essentially inarguable i just

i just i want to say that i'm right for having brought it up during the hunter exam

and they are boyfriends we'll probably see more of this but the argument that you're making essentially is that killuwa is like do you love me and go is like of course i love you i love the trees i love the birds i love the person over there that i just met i love the seals that i see in the water by the you know

i love leorio i love Karapika

Kello was showing you a picture like we look like such a couple here and gone going a couple of besties

Jack do you happen to remember what Allie said about why she became interested in Hunter Hunter no no I have a like a vague memory here well then I don't remember then I won't tell you okay

exciting yeah um but I just think that you know as we're getting further into this and Gon and Kilo's relationship is sort of being drawn more with more and more detail it is worth kind of returning to this topic every so often.

Yeah.

It's a good show.

I didn't like this first episode very much, but

that was one around.

It's a fun show to watch.

The thing is, Hunter Hunter is a really fun show to watch, which is.

Look, sometimes you've got...

Between every time you bowl a strike, the machine has to pick the pins back up.

Yes, yes, it's true.

It is true.

And you look over at the other side of the bowling alley, and Takashi is coming in through the door with like 28 absolute weirdos that you've never seen before.

One of them eats a bowling ball.

You know, it's the price of doing the don't mess with the Jesus ball cleaning thing.

It's the price of every time the show sets up something that feels like it's so obviously going to happen that you don't even question it.

And then, like, literally, it doesn't just take a left turn.

You're like, oh, we're on a different street than I thought we were on.

To roll with the bowling metaphor, it's like if he's going to roll a strike and then it jumps over to the lane next to it and rolls a strike in the other lane.

And that is the cost of that, is that you have episodes that are

learning episodes.

Yeah.

That's a good way to put it, Keith.

I like that metaphor a lot.

Thank you.

Yeah.

I mean, just the bummer is a really good example of this, right?

You know, we start going one way and then

the bummer shows up

with his

wrenching his whole thing.

Singing McDonald's songs.

It really does look like that, although it's what I'm saying.

It's Mac Tonight.

Mac Tonight's head is a crescent moon, and the bomber's head is just a man's head.

No,

it is a crescent moon.

It is a crescent moon.

I really hope someone was listening to this, just being like,

this is really rude to whatever guy they're talking about.

I mean, you can't, I cannot overstate how much Genthru's chin looks like Mac Tonight's chin.

What are we watching next time?

Next time, we are watching three episodes.

We are watching episodes 50, sorry, 66, 67, and 68.

Those episodes are strategy and scheme, 15-15,

and pirates and guesses.

Hell yeah.

Oh, we got some good shit coming up.

Yeah, we do.

Yeah, we do.

I can't, I can't, I cannot play

the interpretive game of Hunter-Hunter titles.

Yeah.

Oh, of titles, sure.

I was going to say, yeah, you can.

You've been playing it this whole time.

But, you know, the titles are so specific once you know what they're talking about.

And if you don't know what they're talking about, you're just

completely lost.

So I've given up.

You can go to episode 73 and it's or 74 and it's called A Victor and Loser.

And you think, oh, it's going to be about a guy who wins and a guy who loses.

It's like, nope, they introduced a character named Victor and his wasteoid brother.

The loser.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a good show.

Do we have anything else we want to say?

Go to friendsofthetable.cash, support the show.

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And if you like it, even if you don't listen to Friends of the Table, but especially if you listen to Friends of the Table, you should be signed up on Friendsofetable.cash supporting this show and that show and all the streaming we do, etc.

Hey,

if you're on the Friends of the Table Reddit,

find out an appropriate Reddit because that's a thing that people go on.

There's people over there.

It's a nice place full of people who like Friends of the Table.

If you're also liking this show,

shout out.

If you're also liking this show, find the appropriate place to go talk about this show on Reddit.

Tell them about this.

Tell people who like Hunter Hunter about this show.

Find them online and tell them.

I don't go to the Hunter Hunter subreddit at all.

And in fact, I can't, I don't even Google Hunter hunter hunter um we've really talked about this on the show on the show before if they want to google things they can just google them at any time they want i think early in the show i asked for a picture of tompo and a picture of tumpa was provided yeah um you can't even go onto a website and be like what kind of backpacks are they selling about hunter hunter No, it's really weird.

And, you know, that's, if I were watching the show on my own, I would be less

focused on that.

But I do have, like, because, you know, I'm on the internet.

Sometimes I see people talking about Hunter Hunter and talking about things that I don't know.

And then my eyes, like, had a spike of stress in my brain and my eyes go sliding off the screen,

which means that I've probably seen a couple of spoilers for like a quarter of a second.

And then I've moved away from them very quickly.

It's dangerous out there.

Crowlo is Gun's dad.

Speaking of Crollo being Gunn's dad,

we can't make Krollo Gun's dad because I hate Gun's dad as part of my brand.

That's true.

No, no, no, no.

You ever see

an 80s cartoon and you tell a robot a lie and its brain explodes?

Yeah, and it spocks and stuff.

That's what's happening to me right now.

Wait, Crowloe Goon's Dad, but I hate love.

What?

Do we have...

Just to end with me saying something unfortunate I don't want recorded.

Do we have

did anybody that isn't Jack go and look at some reviews to read out?

Fuck!

Because of the fake.

We did the thing with the fake

spoilers that we had.

I'll go peek.

Okay.

Are there any?

I see the one that

you read last time, Leorio Back Shots.

Leorio Backshots, yeah.

This was not really a spoiler.

It is called Very Real Spoiler from Hubbub Puff.

Gone is a Scorpio.

I don't know if that's true.

Oh, well, I don't think Gone can be a Scorpio because if it's because it's Yoshihiro Tagashi, star signs work in a different way in the Hunter-Hunter world.

And there's like 48 of them.

And, you know.

You know what?

I'm on the Canadian reviews again.

I was like, why are there only 50 of these?

Here's one.

Here's one.

This one, five-star review, These Friends in This Podcast, but in Hunter-style title with X's in there.

From Jay Miles.

A fantastic podcast that reliably provides fresh perspectives and insights I would never have noticed otherwise.

I already enjoyed Hunter Hunter, and this podcast

regularly gives me new reasons to appreciate it.

I can't wait for the group to realize the entire thing takes place in a massive simulation.

Hacker Hisuka is literally true.

That's how he can do things like break the fourth wall to interact with the narrator and audience, as well as measure his opponent's memory capacity.

That's also why nen powers and conditions, etc., all follow rules of basic programming logic.

Fortune-telling, the future, is simply a predictive analytical model.

Obviously, this also explains the chimera ants.

They're bugs.

Oh, that's just simply computer bugs.

They're simply computer bugs.

Damn.

Oh, two little details that I noticed.

Way back in episode 61,

which ends with Bisky observing Gonan and Killer and saying the friendship and innocence of two young boys is such a beautiful thing, it makes me want to ruin it.

And the narrator closing out says, Who is the girl watching them?

And Bisky looks up and pulls a face.

This is a trait that only Hiseker has previously shown in the show.

It's the ability to be the narrator.

Which is, you know, when I wrote that down, I was like, I wonder why she's doing that.

And having seen how she teaches people, I'm like, oh, oh.

The other note that I wanted to say is

I had mentioned in the past that

Hiseka is visible in the title sequence for the Greed Island arc, and so I had to imagine that he was going to come and wreak some unholy havoc on the game.

What he's actually doing in the title sequence is he is fighting back-to-back with Gonan Killiua, which is interesting.

I had a note of that, but when you didn't bring it up and we were talking about it, I decided to leave it.

Yeah, I don't bring up anything in the intros anymore unless Jack notices them first.

Yeah.

My new rule.

Yeah, I had a whole list of things.

You know, in the same way as talking about the thumbnail earlier, I think that, you know, spotting things in the intro and being, what is going on, going, what is going on there?

Who is that?

I mean, we saw Kroller for

we saw a bunch of Phantom Troop members for ages before they were

in intros and address, but I do appreciate you not bringing it up unless I do.

It's like you said, it's part of the fun of watching the thing is noticing that stuff, right?

And we know it, so of course we notice it, but like, I want you to have it organically.

You don't need me being like, and there's, they showed off the men type in this one, and you can take it to the bottom of the basement.

Yeah, listen to the bass.

Listen to the bass in this sequence.

Yeah.

Like, I'm going to turn it up.

Now I'm going to roll it back.

Listen to the bass.

Exactly.

Oh,

okay.

Last thing.

One last thing, and then we're going to go.

The reason that I played Riot earlier, because it's on my board again, because I took it off originally, is because they've repurposed Riot, the song during

the assault on the

auction in York New City.

They've reused a different section of it as like the mournful murdering of all of the people that the bomber has touched song.

And specifically, it's this part.

it's right, right everything that isn't the

obvious spider-like chorus that's going is uh uh and weirdly.

They they they I don't know if anybody else noticed this.

It starts off, it's like got this like weird like sort of staccato piano thing that's very brief and it's not part of the song.

And I couldn't figure out what the song what it was.

Jack, you know what I'm talking about?

I do.

This is um it's it's it's a very like um it's a piano played down in the lower register and it's very uh splashy.

It has like overtones ringing on this piano.

They've used it a lot in the show as just sort of like a menace cue.

And the fact that they're deploying it here with Riot

is really nice

music supervising or arranging to be like, we can stitch these two things together.

It's just a little low rumble of the piano in the left hand that they play sometimes.

This is why, and I've talked about this in the show, we don't need to go over it again.

This is why I don't like to be too fixed with my cues that I'm writing because you know if you had said oh riot is only for the phantom troop wreaking havoc Then you rob yourself of being able to you know use it in sequences like this Which also harken back to a similar use of it the first time you're saying oh, this isn't about the phantom troop It's about like wanton unnecessary violence on a large group of people right or like uh you know there's three different songs that they use for any time like a new nen power is introduced so they've got a lot but then they use it for like anything that's maybe mysterious: auras, latent power, and mystic lands.

That's the one that I played earlier.

The uh,

this one.

This gets played like anytime something is mysterious or they're explaining some new concept.

It's great.

They do a really good job of like having three different songs that could be anything in the small category of like mysterious power sort of thing.

Yeah, it's it's it's it's a style of writing motif that I have always found to be really rewarding and also

economical as a composer because writing motifs is difficult and if you can write clearly enough that these things can double you are doing yourself a service and also stitching together complementary themes in the listener's head as the thing goes.

Okay, bye.

I'll match all that up, and it'll seem, I'll make it seem like flawless.

It'll take me 20 minutes to do that, but I will do it.

I believe in you.

Or just have us going out on it solo.

We should have one where we just do the theme.

We do the whole theme.

I'm sure everyone's ready for that right now.