Greed Island - Hunter x Hunter ep. 59-62: Media Club Plus S01E19

Okay, how does this sound?

Let's see.

Let me press an old familiar.

Yeah, yeah,

that's the volume is good.

Yes, that button still works.

Everybody's jazzed when Chain Bastard gets pressed.

Because it's a fucking banger.

It is a banger.

Okay, you ready?

We're gonna do this.

We're gonna do this for the first time ever.

We're doing it live.

I'm grouping.

I'm getting it.

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

As always, we are brought to you by friends at the table.

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

You can review this podcast on iTunes.

You can tell your friends about it.

You can post about it on Reddit.

You can ask

your whole family to say, please listen to this show.

It's so good.

Please.

Please.

And hey, you can go to friendsofthetable.shop to find the mercy we do for our other show, Friends of the Table.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, Keith.

I'm Jack.

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

If you've been a regular listener, you will have heard over the last weeks and months me bemoaning that spring is approaching the town that I live in and that I have to sit inside and write music.

I had dinner outside this evening.

I had sliced tomatoes with salt on them.

Goat's cheese.

That's lovely.

We're doing this in front of a live studio audience.

Yeah.

They've always been here.

That's just the first thing that they've liked.

Yeah.

They're usually just staring.

They show up every week, but they just stare.

But they like tomatoes or whatever.

It's really upsetting.

Jack, is that everything?

Should I move on?

That's a little nice.

Okay, Andy Lee Swan.

Hey,

you could find me on Twitter at Swadi3000.

Great.

And Sylvie Bullet.

It's so good to be back.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

You can check out Keith and I playing the video game 999 on youtube.com slash friends of the table.

I think that there's a lot of crossover between people who like us talking about Hunter Hunter and people who will enjoy us playing those games.

I think that's true.

Yeah.

Because I think everyone enjoys both.

I can't see why you wouldn't like both of of those.

I don't know.

Yeah.

They're both really good.

They're both great things.

Yeah.

Exactly.

And we stream that on twitch.tv/slash friends of the table sometimes.

I think that's those are the plugs that I needed to get in.

It's been so long since we've recorded a real episode of Media Club Plus.

Oh my God, I miss it.

I know.

I was happy to get back into it.

I was happy to watch more episodes of the show.

I was watching it and I was just like, yes, I'm happy to watch it.

I was very.

I'm loving that.

I'm loving this.

That's what the studio audience sometimes holds up cards saying, but they don't speak or make a sound.

And their expression does not change.

It is

dead.

I think that they're like zombies.

Hunter-loving zombies.

Are they going to react to this?

No.

Hold on.

Yeah, they're going to say.

Oh, they're eating me.

Hey guys, I'm a ghost now.

Oh

I'm glad that your

nin to do a podcast was so powerful that it lived on past.

Yeah, my residual none will last until the end of Media Club Plus.

Yeah, we've got series like 14 months of

residual nun.

Well, I didn't say the hunter-hunter

for season.

The whole show.

So like, oh, that's great.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I'm good as long as we keep talking about shit.

Oh, that's nice.

That's going to work out, I think.

Yeah.

So because we haven't recorded in so long, we're out of backlog.

Our famous backlog, it's over.

This episode is being recorded and then it's coming out, which is crazy.

I don't like it, but fucked up.

We got to get on it.

Yeah, we'll get on it.

But I'm excited to be back with it.

And so, for the first time ever, we're coming to you from barely the past.

I really enjoyed these episodes.

I couldn't remember what the vibe was of the early

Greed Island stuff.

There's a vibe shift, an important vibe shift that I think happens in these episodes, which we'll talk about, I'm sure.

But the main thing is that we're back with our best friend's Gona Kiloa as they put into action Gon's much talked about

but little discussed plan to get themselves into Greed Island, the game that, if you remember, costs 10 billion Jenny.

And actually, we learned costs something more like 25 or 30 billion.

It depends on the specific auction.

Yeah.

It keeps changing.

It basically amounts to the plan finding the rich guy buying up all the copies of Greed Island and asking Nicely.

Nicely isn't quite good enough to get them in, and they spend a week getting strong enough to be impressive to Sesgara, the jackpot hunter.

Once they get inside Greed Island, which they do get inside, they sort of pop in out of

in front of the console and into this big

green field.

It's back to school.

We learn all about Nen, or sorry, not Nen, this other thing.

It's

magic that nobody understands.

And they're just like, wow, I guess there's spells here in the game.

We learn about books, gains, spells, items, maps, monsters.

We learn about a group of players, player-killing evildoers, and we meet our first ever girl of all time in Hunter-Hunter outside of the Phantom Troop, whose desire to destroy Gonakillo's Killer's friendship for fun turns into a desire to destroy their friendship for revenge, turns into a desire to become their teacher for fun, turns into a desire to become their teacher for revenge.

She's amazing.

Oh my god.

I watched the fourth episode of this chunk in which she is sort of like properly formally introduced today.

And I spent the whole day with a the fourth episode of this run of episodes is just like a mind-bogglingly good hunter-hunter episode yeah if we spent the york new city arc watching tagashi and the adaptation team deliver you know uh home run after home run of like interesting hunter hunter episodes because they were tense or because they played out interesting character dynamics um the fourth episode of of this slot episode uh 62 um is a fantastic episode of hunter hunter just because of its like visual imagination and its and its interest in its world and its characters.

It was a joy.

So I spent a lot of today being like,

I resent that we are going to have to talk about something other than, you know,

once we're in Greed Island and we're meeting this strange girl.

But then I looked back on how far we come in four episodes

because

We're given a lot of information here and a lot of it is delivered, I don't want to say elegantly, but I will say successfully.

Sure, it is definitely placed more neatly inside the plot of the show than

Nen's School with Wing.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And it's interesting because it is, you described it as going back to school, Keith.

They really do go back to school.

But we'll get there.

I think the...

place to start is to talk about oh wait actually literally okay I want to talk about the title sequence.

Oh, yes.

Title sequence.

Yeah.

We have a new title sequence.

And

I wrote down, like, oh, here comes a new title sequence, and then immediately was just overwhelmed by new images.

Yeah.

New striking images.

Yeah, there's a lot in there.

There's a lot.

There's a lot in there.

Yeah, there was so much that I started just a list of the different things that we're seeing.

Yeah, karate girl on rooftops.

I wrote down here: Pokemon cards in a big book.

Men in uniform, completely unknown people, weird things floating in the sky, woman with crazy hat,

Dodgeball shows up.

That's interesting.

We see a man throwing a dodgeball, which means he's coming.

You know who.

Hisaker is here.

And we also see Gone in a distinctive green necklace.

Those are the things that really

stuck out for me in the opening title sequence.

Yeah.

There's a...

There's...

Also, the ring, the special ring.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where he's like looking at it.

Which it turns out that everyone has.

Everyone has, but it was very special that he had one without being given it by the rich man.

Yeah.

But there's the cool shot of his hand blocking out the sun, looking up at the ringed finger.

from the opening.

Yeah, we got the anime shot of reaching your hand up towards the sun and then closing it.

Is that a classic?

It's like a very famous, like,

not famous, but it's like a very tropey-like thing to see.

I feel like it's a very common

thing to have your protagonist sort of wistfully looking up at the sun

reaching towards it.

Or the moon.

It's just towards the sky, really.

A celestial body shot.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

There is one thing that we get before the intro.

We get Mr.

Batera, the tycoon, who's been buying up all the Green Island copies.

He says that it is for love.

When you fall in love with something, you want it all to yourself.

This man adores video games.

He's

the only real gamer.

Only real gamer.

The more time we spend with Mr.

Patera, well, so firstly, I was a little disappointed that this mysterious man buying up all the Greed Island games just looks like another Mafiosa.

Just looks like a rich guy.

Yeah, he looks like a rich guy.

This is Tagashi reserving his freaks.

Because this is a really interesting freaks arc.

Tagashi usually loves to introduce freaks in the form of humanoids.

As Greed Island gets going, Tagashi introduces freaks in the form of mechanics, playing cards, and monsters.

Yeah.

And also just make great names for these monsters, too.

But by the time we get a little further into the episodes, if Patera really is doing this for love, he has a very interesting idea of what love is.

He has turned his hunt for Greed Island into not just

an immensely financially expensive pursuit, but also sort of his life's work.

Um, by the time we get to see the sort of Greed Island um setup, it's you know, it's a room in a castle full of hundreds of consoles.

You know, he, this thing that I love the context of him saying, I was, I do this for the love of the game early on when we see quite how intensely he feels this.

Yeah, just to get a quick tally, we're we're in the neighborhood of 10 to 35 billion Jenny per console/slash game game setup.

There's seven and there's I think I think he said sold at the auction.

The seven at the auction.

I think he said that he had like 20.

Plus

the 50 billion that he's going to pay whoever wins plus the people that he's actually like got on retainer like Batera is like not oh Sesgara.

Oh oh yeah yeah but sorry Sesgara yeah Sesgara is like but I think is also competing for the 50 billion but is also being paid for to like do the job of like being the chief of

the sort of operations head of the Greed Island game.

He gets a bonus because he has three different hair colors on him.

Oh, yeah, but Terra does pay by hair color, which is gone to get a lot of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, that's why he gets nobody knows a bonus for being a little green.

Mostly black, a little green.

Yeah,

the Mafiosos say that this is about the sum total of half his wealth, which is very funny because, you know, he spent this massive amount of money and he still has half of it left, but it is also still, you know, he's put in a gigantic stake here.

Um, the the next thing that we get is we cut right back to Karapika, though, after the uh, after the intro.

Karapika has looks like shit and has slept for two days.

Karapika, like, we joked about Karapika being

gone and Killua was like mom, but this is the most exhausted 40-year-old mom vibe in the fucking world.

Yeah, Like she's got a newborn

struggling.

He even damned to when

he interacts with Goan briefly and is like, so I heard you're looking for some expensive game?

And it's like, can't even be bothered to learn about what's even going on.

It's really sweet.

It's really charming.

Karapika, I sort of the York New City arc ended so

I don't know.

It ended so long ago for for us that when we came in and Karapika was in the bed, I was like, what happened to Karapaka at the end of that?

He just got so exhausted.

He just got exhausted.

He got sleepy.

Yeah, he got

Emperor Time too much, I think, is

the thing that's implied at the end of those episodes.

Sorcerer Time.

Sorry, Sorcerer Time.

What?

I called it Sorcerer Time.

Oh, yeah.

Everyone was like, it's Emperor Time idiot.

I forgot about that.

No, it's Sorcerer Time now.

Give it a theory of Sorcerer Time.

I promise, it's like, now that I'm looking at it, I'm like, I don't know if this is worth

how much it struck me at the time, but there is this very funny shot of Leorio looking at a passed-out Karapika, and I'm just like, he looks so odd here.

This is my, he just looks like so smooth, and his glasses look extra small and extra low.

Yeah.

It's that his forehead is also being cropped out.

You know, we usually see

like spiky hair.

Yeah.

Who knows how tall his head is.

He's got a good standpoint.

And the only thing is

if you scroll up, Sylvie posted the picture of him smiling lovingly at gone and like look at how like much eyebrow he has there and that looks right to me but down here for some reason he has like very soft eyes he's got really thin eyebrows yeah he just got them plucked

they grow in so fast because an hour later he's got big bushy eyebrows can i honestly that's how it feels i don't know how much you guys pluck your eyebrows but fucking christ ever twice a day i think yeah yeah

this this image of williorio really looks like it would be like a meme reaction image that you post to someone who posts something like foul on Twitter.

Yeah, yeah, I can see that.

Wait, which one?

The weird face one.

The smooth face Leorio.

Yeah.

Smooth face than eyebrow Leorio.

There's some business.

There's some business with Karapika and Melody.

Karapika exits this arc really gracefully in the next episode.

And, you know, a lot of his appearances in this one are not only to set up the tiredest mom in the world but also to make that exit in the next episode it's also it's very sad nicely i found it very tragic yeah like leorio leaving to do his own thing that was like bittersweet like good for leorio going off to be a doctor uh but for karapika like slinking off without saying goodbye to like not distract them like makes me feel like Maybe he didn't learn his lesson about what friends are.

Like it seems like he used to go back and work for the mafia, right?

Yeah,

he does not want to do that.

Yeah, but he's so dedicated to this fake mission.

It was almost the first thing out of his mouth when he

woke up is like, what's going on with Neon?

Like, is Neon okay?

And it's like, dude, did you forget that you hate her?

Yeah.

He is, he is in the wake of reconfiguring his revenge, right?

Yeah.

He's clinging to the paycheck, as it were, in the sense of like, well, I have to do something here.

Now, could that be looking out for my friends Gone and Kilua?

No.

no um

meanwhile at the auction uh

this is not an auction this is how the auction should go we you know we saw how it went when the phantom trooper involved we've seen a real auction

yes uh someone comes out and uh

plugs in that they demonstrate that the console is working and there's a man playing it right now and there's this kind of like ripple of excitement around the room um and so we get a video feed of inside the game or what happens no we just see a man's We just see a man on screen.

His name is Jitsari.

He has signed a contract allowing the console to be auctioned off while he's in it.

So there's got to be some way to prove that someone's actually in there.

Oh my God.

Well, so here's the thing.

Then a man comes out with a big hammer,

like that bit in Mitsoma,

and he just swings the hammer at the console.

I I wrote like a whole paragraph about this man because he just set me down a little.

Please.

A little what?

A rabbit hole.

I'll just say it.

Imagine being the big dude who hits the joystation with a hammer.

Imagine that being your job.

I'd kill for it, bro.

That's the dream.

Look at his face.

I wonder if it ever keeps him up at night that he's never gonna break it.

Do you think he wakes up and goes, this is it.

This is the day I finally kill that fucking video game, only to fail once more because of his complete ignorance of the existence of Nen?

Does he know that he's a truly impressive specimen, the peak of the human human body's capabilities, and the only reason he fails to do this action he's trained his whole life for is the unseen magic forces swirling around him?

I hope he does.

I hope he's happy.

He looks like a putty man.

That is the most in-depth note I have for all these episodes, by the way.

He looks like he's made out of putty.

He looks like the Goombas from the Mario Bros.

movie, the old old man.

Yes, he does sort of look like the Goombas.

He looks like, what if their face was made out of clay, but like not well.

No.

I love him.

He's massive and has hammers almost as big as he is.

And he can't do anything about it.

He breaks the table underneath the game.

Yeah, no, dude's yoked.

Like, don't, like.

Yeah.

Gasping audio.

Speaking of games, am I right?

Yeah.

Speaking of games.

Now, um...

Games.

We will

learn some stuff.

I was just reading the word games and it overrode my mind.

Nowhere he is.

We will learn some stuff over the next few episodes that

raise questions for me about the games consoles and raise questions for me about

the game's consoles being destroyed.

We can't talk about that yet.

Otherwise, it will be all we talk about.

Goan accidentally bids.

This is great.

Sometimes I love it when Goan acts so perfectly in character that it's like they woke up in the writer's room.

They woke up.

They drank a coffee.

They went into the office.

They wrote the first thing

on the whiteboard directly into the script.

And it's like Goan Freaks accidentally bids billions of dollars.

Yeah.

The thing, the universal force that decides how good Basho's poems are is in the writer's room saying

how much like Goan they've described something that Goan does.

And the little green light goes like, ding, ding, ding.

The Tycoon wins the game.

In the end, it's worth saying that Miluki is outbid completely and is steaming.

So passed.

Oh, one really funny thing about this, really quick, about Goan accidentally bidding.

This is just a pet theory that I have that the reason why they show up with $7 billion or trying to get $7 or $10 billion to bid,

but then every machine sells for between like $25 and $35 billion is because on the very first console, Goan up ups the bid from 12 to 24 by mistake.

And so that is

artificially inflating the price of that first console.

And thinking, Batera knowing that someone out there has a minimum bid of 24 billion.

The other Goan freaks one would be that he just gets excited and keeps doing it.

And we only saw one of them.

Every new console that shows up, Goan accidentally bids more on.

They offer their services to help clear the game to

Baterra.

It's worth saying, if it's been a, if you would like this little recap, Greed Island is a game created by hunters for hunters that nobody has ever cleared.

And it has sort of like taken on a cultural position that, like,

get it done, you know?

Yeah.

It's a known game.

It's like a whispered about rumor since there's only 100 copies of the game or something like that.

Yeah.

Do you have a license?

Says Tesgara, Faterra's man.

And Guns says, Yep, I sure do.

And Kilua says, you don't.

You don't.

That's the porn shop.

There's so many good God and Kilua There's God there's jokes in this.

I've missed that.

It's like so much.

It's like they know that they're back in the show and they really have to sell it again.

Because they do.

Everything they do, I'm just like, they're so good.

It's great.

One of my, actually, one of my favorite things from Batera, because Gone can't prove that they're hunters because of the license thing.

And then Batera says something that 80 other characters could have said and haven't.

The fact that you're here at the auction proves you're no ordinary children.

First normal thinking man so far.

Yeah.

This is going to go home and telephone his wife and be like, there were two really weird fucking children that we auctioned today.

And then they're like, we already have our own memory card and ring.

And his eyes are like popping out of his head.

Like, yeah,

he's spending billions and billions of dollars to do this.

And suddenly two kids pop up and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah, we're like, 90% of the way there on our own.

Yeah, it's great.

We get some information here that sometimes people just apparently give up returning to the real world and choose to live inside the game.

This is the first time I rang Jack's bell of Hunter Hunter is a show about games and the people who play them.

And the bell didn't stop ringing throughout all the episodes I watched.

But sometimes it rang.

It's going to be going ding-dang-dong all through Green Island.

Oh, yeah.

It rang more in certain spaces than others, and those will be the ones that I talk about.

I just wanted to like flag it to the listener that all I am thinking about watching this is the sort of sweet vindication.

That bell, that bell might be moving

for the whole rest of Media Club Plus.

I don't think that there's going to be a significant stretch of time

where it's not ringing.

You're right.

Yeah, this bell cannot be unrung.

York New City was barely about games.

There's like no games happening that whole time.

It's it's games here till the end.

It's just called the show Gamer Gamer.

Yeah, Gamer GamerX Gamer.

At this point, as a new viewer, I am starting to.

What's interesting is that I am feeling the roller coaster of Greed Island clicking up and up and up.

It's worth saying we've never seen what it looks like inside it.

And for all the talk about the game, we actually don't know anything about what it is, how it's played, what it involves, how you win, what you do.

All the stuff that we are getting is sort of like

procedural stuff.

It's information about how the memory cards work.

It's information about whether or not you might need certain items to leave the game.

You're not told how you enter the game.

And this kind of like split in information is so enticing at this point, right?

Where it's like, it feels like I'm walking through the lobby of the theater before I sit down.

And I'm like seeing the posters for the thing and I'm seeing the popcorn machine and I'm seeing the usher who points with the little torch to where you want to go and sit.

But I have no idea what the play is going to be about or what it involves.

That's a really cool feeling.

So

they're testing Gonakillo on their Wren to be like, are they even worth thinking about?

They're children.

They're impressive that they're here.

They have the memory card.

They put on their Wren show.

And Tezgara's like, no, no, they'll die.

They'll go in and they'll die right away.

And surely four days couldn't change my opinion on this.

Well, this has happened exactly before.

This is

the tired woman in Heaven's Arena

saying, if you go down this, you'll die.

And then Wing saying, okay, I can protect you from it, but there's no way you're going to do this in four hours unless then.

Unless they're one in 10 million or whatever.

Whatever Wing says.

One in 10 million, maybe.

But Batera obviously knows that this is the case because he is wise wise and knows that these are weird, freaky children.

And he's like, oh, they'll probably be fine.

Finx and Phaitan have overheard.

Great shot of them, too.

Like, just sort of across, like, you know,

shooter game cover against the wall, like, listening in.

I just spent an entire arc with the Phantom Troop and got so into their interpersonal

sort of

schema that I completely forgot what the job of the Phantom Troop is because I wrote down Finx and Phaetan overheard and are also going to participate in the screening.

And they do like a really good joke about it.

Because you could pause it right after they're like, huh, a screening.

What should we do?

And they go, pause.

They're going to be in the screening.

Cut immediately to they've murdered a man and stolen the game.

And then Fakedown goes, steal it.

We're bandits after all.

It's so funny.

And it's crazy.

They really lean into

recasting the Phantom Troop as villains again.

Yeah.

They do a really good job, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then Phaetan, you know,

takes the game back to headquarters and with absolutely no fanfare whatsoever, enters the game.

When you enter Greed Island, you disappear.

There is absolutely no messing around with where your real body is.

There's no like your body lies sleeping while you disappear into the game.

Yeah, uh, this might sound like a piece of stylization from Tagashi.

Uh, it is deliberate.

We will talk about it later.

We get, we actually, around here, it might be a little earlier than this, we get our first taste of what is called the greed island theme.

If we want to hear the greed island theme, yeah, I would love to hear that.

There we go.

It's really good.

I think it's a lot of fun.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It's really cool.

Does it come to a melody line or is that best for here?

Oh yeah yeah.

It's this very sort of like

on these this singing and bagpipes.

Yeah, it's it's almost like a sort of um

world of tomorrow Disneyland flourish combined with like um

PlayStation era JRPGs.

Um

Which is, I think, consistent with kind of Greed Island.

We'll see.

Yeah.

Some Some of the Phantom Troop are not interested in playing the game.

Fink says, Phaetan's got into a game, and I'm going to play.

Do you want to play?

And a bunch of people are like, no.

No, maybe later, they say.

Although, more of them end up in there.

We get, I think, five or six total by the end of these sevens.

He can't let go of them.

He loves the Phantom Troop, and so do we.

I'm not complaining.

Yeah.

But, you know.

Is this...

This is also another time where one of my favorite bits around Greed Island is that every time someone talks about Greed Island and playing Greed Island, they're like, well, you gotta get a multi-tap, man.

The multi-tap is really good.

You want to get everybody in here.

Yeah.

You gotta get a multi-tap.

Multiple players reference multi-taps.

They like explain it.

Phaeton is like, look, I have a multi-tap.

And then plugs his thing into the thing.

He's like, now we can have funniest shit in the world.

It's so good.

Tagashi, you know Tagashi was like, you can play eight players on a PlayStation or on a Super Nintendo or a PlayStation.

I think they both have multi-station.

Yeah, yeah.

They're going to play like Goldeneye or something when they're not playing Greed Island.

Oh my god.

Yeah,

PlayStation 1 had both a multi-tap and then also a way to link two consoles together so you could do like eight-player 4v4 on each TV.

That walks what they're doing.

Halo Land Parties could run.

It's true.

It's true.

Gon is so mad about his Nen not being strong enough.

Yeah.

And Killu says, we should start thinking about taking this to the next level, which is just absolutely distilled shounen power vibes, right?

Where it's like there is always another tower to climb, however far you think you've gotten in your power and ability.

Yeah, Gon is freaking out, and Killu is like, he's right.

Yeah, Kazaro is right.

We need to be stronger.

While sort of thoughtfully eating his

bunny rabbit lollipop again.

I have a question about Shonen power.

Because based on my understanding, that is absolutely true, right?

Like, part of the engine that drives this genre is, you know, you work really hard to attain a level of power that is sold to you as being, if not supreme, but really transformative.

And you sit at that power level for a while, and then you're told you can go even higher.

You know, we can get even better than that.

This is a classic trope.

Yeah, for sure.

Is it the case that

the people at the very top of the pyramids, your Master Roshi's, your Nateros, your um, who's that little fucker who looks like a catfish and lives in heaven?

It's so funny, Jack, to say Notero at the top of the pyramid, like not knowing if that's true or not.

Did you mean Kinkai?

Yes, I'm pretty sure they meant Kinkai.

Oh, sorry, I tuned out everything after the thing that I wanted to comment on.

What was

the guy who looks like a catfish and lives in heaven?

They're right.

Yeah, they're right.

Yeah.

Are those guys genuinely at the...

Let's set aside Vincera because he's in this story and we don't know if he's at the top.

You know, we can set that aside.

Are Roshi and Kinkai and Ko genuinely at the top of the pyramid?

Or is a key part of their character work their own realization that still they have room to climb?

Oh yeah, Roshi is like,

after the stuff that we watched from Dragon Ball,

very

almost immediately sidelined and doesn't become relevant for 30 years of real lifetime.

Yeah.

So yeah, Roshi is like the strongest human on Earth, basically, until Krillin becomes, and Yamcha becomes stronger than him.

And then Goku is obviously not from Earth, technically.

And

then

every major threat is

extra Earth.

They're not humans.

So he's still allowed to be the strongest human, basically.

But none of the villains come are like humans.

So that's the workaround.

But Tagashi has paced this kind of nicely because we know where the clear next step is to go.

You know, every nen character other than Gonunkilua has done...

We call them like nen abilities.

I call them nen tricks in my note, but that's not quite as friendly.

Yeah, they call call them special moves in this one special moves special moves like again like it's a video game like they're in a fighting game like they're in a fighting game and they will be soon

gone can't think of a move bless his entire heart oh my god tries to keep him this isn't it's a disaster it's really cute and also this is when i first noticed that the animation quality has kind of improved between phantom troop and now uh

I don't know.

Maybe it's just me noticing them playing with styles a bit more or like doing a bit more inventive things with like there's just more facial expressions is what it feels like.

There's like a close-up of gone here that feels really

smoothly animated.

Same with all the nen energy feels very smoothly animated.

And it might not be a budget thing.

It could just be, hey, we've refined our style between seasons.

Yeah.

I think they're trying to do a lot of stuff with that is sort of

unstated or vaguely stated relationship things.

And you've really got to focus on characters' faces if you're going to like have them feeling things that they're not saying.

Yeah, it's great.

Yeah, and they do, they do it well.

I think it works good.

It's almost like

they do it so well that it's,

I don't want to say heavy-handed,

but it's like not subtle.

Oh, no.

And it shouldn't be.

No.

I described this in our group chat as it felt like whatever happens when we need to come up with bonds and beliefs in a game and we just flail around.

And Austin says, all right, well, hang on, let's think this through.

There's a great bit where

Gon says he wants a strong power.

That's sort of as far as he gets.

He'd like power that is strong.

And then Kilua says, Can we be more specific?

You know, this power is too fine, whatever.

And Gon just can't do it.

I thought there was something really interesting about Gon, an impulsive,

you know, very powerful figure.

And he's not necessarily impulsive in the sense that he doesn't think about his friends.

Thinks too much of his friends.

He can't really conceive of power in a way beyond.

I want to be really strong.

Yeah.

Or I want to care for the people around me.

But he is kind of justified very shortly after that.

Yeah, so Killua immediately goes off and starts tasing himself.

We'll talk about that in a second.

Yeah.

Go telephones Mr.

Wing, who gives Mr.

Wing's in really good spirits.

On the advice of this is this is classic, sorry, Jack, this is classic Karapika or Gon and Karapika stuff to me, where Karapika shows up and Gon is like, well, Karapika is the guy who gave us the idea to get special moves to begin with.

I should ask him to be my mentor and get the two-for-one deal of preventing Karapika, distracting Karapika from the spiders so that he doesn't go off and do something dangerous.

Goan, again, like sort of making decisions based off of

trying to do the best thing that he can do for his friends, thinking less about

almost anything else.

Yeah.

And then, but then Karapi's like, no, no, I'm

out of here anyway.

I got a job to do.

I got to go be a

mafia guy again.

Before he leaves, though, Karapika has this amazing little aside,

as Goan asks him how he learned how to summon chains.

Oh, yeah, yeah, great.

It's phenomenal.

So, Karapaka describes something called

imagery training.

Imagery chaining.

Imagery chaining.

He started just like

holding chains, smelling chains, listing chains, tasting chains.

He says he drew thousands of sketches of chains.

At one point, like his master locked him in a room full of chains, and that was it.

Um, and then eventually took them away, and then took them away, and then eventually he started hallucinating chains, and then he was able to turn those hallucinations into

the conjured chains, which is extraordinary.

I mean, yeah,

it sounds bad.

It sounds bad.

There's a hate.

There's like multiple moments in these episodes that are like, oh, hey, learning nen is not good for you.

Yeah.

You have to torture yourself to get good at this.

hey look at the bright side though it let him be a good murderer it let him be a good you know what you make a great argument

a really good murderer yeah really good murderer one of the best good murder hey krapika good murder hey great murder karapika um wing is cheery zushi is training in the background he's got the sort of the red and sort of rippling around him as usual still in heaven's arena the fucking scrap yeah still in heaven's arena they really did just i'll say this that that uh that That 10, not even that impressive.

Sure, it was still.

Sure, it was still this fucking 10-year-old loser.

My poor son, Zushi.

Nah, I love Zushi.

I was really happy to see him in Wing again.

I think the phone call with Wing was very cute.

It's great.

Wing tells Goan that Enhancers don't really need a special attack

since they are the most balanced.

And he also warns Goan not to emulate Karapika.

And

I really do think you were onto something, Sylvie, when you were

not quick to absolve Wing of the same kinds of compromised teaching that we see from other teacher characters in the show.

But I do think a moment like this, where he explicitly says, you know, that person that you know who worked so hard with chains to hallucinate them, to create nen chains, to let them go on a dreadful path of revenge, maybe you don't need to, you don't need to do it like that.

That was pretty good, Wing.

It's a really nice little moment of him being like, like, caring about his students.

The spoken part of it is: it's not going to do you any favors to go in there with a power that you haven't thought very hard about and try and impress them with something that's not finished.

And then the unspoken part of it is

Karapika

put a chain around his heart that would kill him if he disobeyed the rules.

Don't do that.

Please don't do that.

Don't go making any nen contracts, you idiot.

Yeah.

Oh my God.

If anybody should not be making Nen contracts, it is gone freak.

Yes.

He is, more than almost anybody in this show, likely to do something rash.

Well, remember that the moment Goan learned about Nen contracts, he basically said, sick, can I have one?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But Wing does sort of offer Goan a little hint.

He says, you should try doing everything at once.

This causes Goan's brain to short out again.

And he heels over with an audible sound effect that Killua can hear from another room.

Right.

Of course, just do everything at once means use 10 to manifest your aura, Ren to strengthen it, but also Zetsu to close it off.

And this is not an easy problem to solve.

No, I wrote down here that this feels like trying to do a magic eye picture.

Oh.

I can do those.

Those are easy.

There's an easy flaw.

I can do them.

They'd be a great enhancer.

Yeah.

They require me to focus.

My guess here at this point was

Gohan's going to make a very powerful fist, question mark.

And I will say, based on what I've seen so far, I was right.

Yeah, pretty right.

So the trick was that he needed to use Gyo to see that when he concentrated his aura somewhere, which he already knew how to do, because that's what Gyo is,

that

he wasn't fully closing off the rest of his aura.

He was like, oh,

when I concentrate my aura in my eyes, there's still some left.

I got to get rid of that.

And that lets him further enhance the already enhanced thing.

Goan Freaks and Killua Zaldic neglecting Go.

Sorry, neglecting Go, the Nen technique for looking at things, is going to become a foundational part of these little crew of episodes.

You genuinely have no idea.

it really is it's really telling that we have seen a lot of nen action and almost none of it has been that crucial technique look at what your opponent is trying to hide from you well i think something that i think is worth mentioning is like a lot of the nen stuff we've seen has been between experts right like we have not had a lot of rookie nen users stuff gone and killua were so like

Like they were the backdrop for a lot of the last arc or like they weren't in the actual conflicts.

Meanwhile, you get like

everyone in the Phantom Troop and then Karapika are already so competent at it, you don't necessarily think about the actual mechanics of what they're doing.

But then Karapika sort of get a scene like this.

Karapika is sort of stuck in that phase where you've like learned the beginning of something and you're overestimating how much you actually know about it, which leads to what I think is one of the funniest lines of the series where Karapika

taunts Uvo by being like, oh, so you can use Gyo.

Like, I didn't even think you could probably even use that idiot.

And it's like, you're talking to the Phantom Troop.

What are you talking about?

You are the one that just learned about Google.

You just learned this like two months ago.

Yeah, exactly.

It's like when you learn a combo in a fighting game and your friends don't know it yet, but you don't want them to know that how quickly

how recently you learned it.

Even Gonan Killow knew Gyo.

Leorio learned Gyo.

Zushi learned Gyo.

Wait, Leorio didn't learn Gyo, did he?

I thought Leorio.

Oh, no.

No, he learned you 10.

He only needs 10, right?

He's the only funniest one to only know.

Yeah, the haven one.

Yeah.

And then, you know, we move into the closing credits as Killiua sort of begins to.

And they really are teasing the thing that Killua is doing.

He's testing lightning on himself and crackling electricity.

As a transmuter, trying to turn his Nen into electricity Nen.

And how does he do this how does he go about training for the normal way so he he tases himself with a taser um he doesn't seem too too bothered um

there is a lot of uh i'm just playing the flag now there's a lot of self-harm shit with killowaz arc yeah um and this i think is a big part his nen power i think is just a big part of it yeah um i mean he's tasing himself to to be able to visualize this thing that was used to torture him by his family i was gonna say actually and I'm so glad that you sort of, that you brought the idea of self-harm into their Sylvia's way to like lock it together, is that the Killiwa and electricity and electrocution has come up multiple times.

It's come up

when

he

was fighting that man who shot electric snakes at him.

Yes.

Do you remember?

Yeah, he was resistant to it.

He was like, this is not a problem to me.

He had that great line where he's like, it hurts, but, you know, what are you going to do?

All it does is piss me off.

Yeah,

yeah.

And uh, there was another instance of Killiwa getting electrocuted and not really being bothered by it.

I mean, when he was uh, when he went back home after the hunter exam and was like chained to the wall, wasn't Maluki like poking him with a cattle product or something?

He was whipping him.

Oh, you're right, he was whipping him, yeah.

But you know, my read on it had always been, you know, that there was some sort of uh abuse or exercise of control within the Zaldic family.

You know, being

subjected to electrocution is not something that Kiliwa is

unused to.

Yeah, he specifically says that during that fight, but I can't remember if then they show it

or they if it already shown it or if that was uh

yeah, I don't remember the specifics of the the actual torture, and so it is very interesting that this is the thing that he's exercising as his nan power.

We'll see more

together.

This was like always my plan, like yeah, he's he's like something he's been waiting to do for months.

What I just realized, too, is that I guess I had always been assuming that it doesn't hurt you when you're using your nin, but now I'm wondering, oh, does this hurt every time Kilo does it?

And he's just used to it.

Like, Wolverine.

Yeah, that's

like Wolverine.

Kind of always been my read on this.

Yeah.

It's something that I've considered and have no answer for.

Yeah, it will talk.

The main reason I bring it up is because I think it'll come up.

See, it is a useful flag to keep an eye on in the same way that Hunter Hunter from this point on will never stop being about games.

Yep.

It'll never stop being about games.

It'll never stop being about the trauma that our parents inflict on us.

Yoshihiro Tagashi, greatest of all time.

No, that's a Katariama.

Gun doesn't have any trauma for parents.

He doesn't even have any parents.

How can I be traumatized if my dad was never there?

And I'm willingly, I'm willfully ignoring anything about my mom.

That's weird.

She basically does not exist to me.

Yeah, Storm World Kids stuff.

More and more characters show up in the outro, including wild landscapes, strange balloon, or floating buildings floating in the sky.

This is really funny to have this opening and closing title sequence bookending an episode about hanging out in York New City and trying to improve your nen.

It feels like

they moved the title sequence over wrong, like one early.

We also see a girl with pigtails uh and springy springy pigtails in a pink sort of like um

what's the name of that like a dress with a very wide sort of like bell i bet janine would know i know

uh

and then hoopskirt i think it might be a hoop skirt it might be a hoop skirt it's got the like the like um

ring like structure to it i guess

but it's also a cartoon so it's hard to tell if it's just drawn like that or if it's meant to to be

have structure because it's not animated or because they've animated it to have no structure.

I just saw a horse with a weird nozzle for a mouth.

Oh, you mean bubble horse?

I mean, bubble horse.

I didn't know what that horse's deal was.

I was thrilled to see it.

Episode 60.

Yeah.

Karapica and Melody leave.

And Melody tells Leorio that he has the most pleasant heartbeat, soft, uplifting, and very warm.

I think you'd make a great teacher or doctor.

He's Dr.

Warm-hearted Miser.

He is Dr.

Warm-Hearted Miser.

He's Dr.

Warmheart Miser.

It was very nice of her to not include that he sounds like a miser.

He is, though.

You know,

the reed is.

The reed is.

You can't really fault that.

Yeah.

Of all the heartbeats in the city, yours is the most pleasant.

It's soft, expansive, and very warm.

is so nice yeah this is because leorio is like melody please keep an eye on kropica he's not dumb but he does dumb things

and that's also a correct read yeah um uh zepile returns gon's money and gets him a little more having got it got the hunter license back from the pawn shop um and zepile in just like a really funny aside sees how much worth the the hunter licenses hold and immediately decides to become a pro-light hunter and sell his license he thinks this is such a good idea he runs off skipping, basically.

He runs away like John Lennon in that one picture.

Yeah, he's doing the funny one hunter exam arc off screen.

I think Zeppelin would be a pretty good hunter.

You know,

I have faith in that weirdo.

Lots of talk on the news about

what happens if you win Greed Island.

This is like a media object.

Yeah, he's famous for being rich, and he's brought a lot of attention to this weird, mysterious game.

Maybe you get a treasure map, or maybe a giant dragon appears to grant you a wish.

I wonder what that could be.

I wonder what that could be referencing.

I mean, on the one hand, that is a reference, so

that was the first thing I thought.

But the second thing I thought was, oh, yeah, I don't know what you get if you.

What does everyone want?

You know, the people who are being employed by Batera get the

money, but

what's the

you win?

Two, two really funny things before we talk about what you get if you win is uh about Patera and his group and their process here.

Um, because this,

like, we're just talking about, there's like a media circus surrounding this game now because of Batera, and they are so not subtle about the Nen thing.

Um, again, which is meant to be like a secret thing that nobody knows about, not even hunters know about Nen unless they've learned it somehow.

Uh, but when Gonakilo first meet Batera, a guy shows up and goes, you know, like, wait there.

I assume you know Nen.

Let's see a demonstration of your Wren.

And it's like, what a crazy thing to say in a world where Nen is secret.

And then they show up to the screening, and a guy with a microphone is like, you've got to know Nen

to participate.

So if you don't know Nen, go away.

It's like.

It's just very funny.

It's obviously just meant to facilitate the show, like not having to dance around the main main thing the show is about, basically.

But it is very funny that it's great.

Every time people, every time people talk about Nan, um,

everyone's queued up for the screening, hundreds and hundreds of people.

Um, you need to do a demonstration.

Uh, the camera lingers on the girl with the curly pigtails, who through my notes I've called pigtails girl, um,

and a man in a purple jacket with a very square jaw and very round pupils to his eyes.

Yeah, he looks like a Muppet.

His name does look like a Muppet is Hoo-Hot, but I wrote, because I could never remember his name, I wrote throughout that his name was Sleazy Man.

He is a sleazy man.

He's a sleazy man, but he's also kind of charming.

He's kind of charming.

He's extremely wide-jawed, blonde man with the Yakuza suit on.

He's like wearing the suit.

He kind of feels like an alternate palette swap.

Like, not 100%, but like if you picked a like player two color scheme for Leorio,

yeah, he's a little wider than Leorio, but he does have.

Leorio also kind of has this, like,

you know, uh, D-tier Yakuza, you know, thug kind of quality.

Oh, absolutely.

Big, nice purple suit.

And then we get into like a classic sort of like Tagashi digression about

like

how you can deduce people's personality and how you can read the sort of effectiveness of a situation by noticing things about it.

Kiloa has a panic attack self-powerpoint.

He does.

There's no one around to give for the PowerPoint.

You know, Karapika's not here.

Who's the Phantom Troops PowerPoint leader?

It's Shalmark.

It's Shalmark, yeah.

Yeah.

He gives one later in these episodes.

And then Melody is a B-tier PowerPoint player.

But yeah, you're right.

Killer looks for the person who can give him the PowerPoint, comes up short, and immediately immediately starts delivering one himself.

Yeah.

He's over-analyzing, stressing about what.

So

they go like, all right, time's up.

Or

we're ready to start the thing.

Everybody line up.

And some people land up immediately.

Some people are like hanging back a little bit.

And then some people are like hanging back even more.

And then some people are in their seats.

And this is where Kilua was like.

Oh my God, are we doing the right thing?

Are we being watched now?

Is this part of the test?

Should I have lined up right away?

And

Pooh Hat is like,

it's Pooh Hot.

I know.

Got him.

Got him.

Is like, these chumps all lining up.

What a bunch of idiots.

A bunch of maroons.

Sort of lets.

He talks like he has that type of voice in the dub.

Like he has a real name.

He does that voice in the dub.

He does, yeah.

Let's Lazy Man kind of explain to him why he made the right decision.

sort of by accident because they're like of course they're gonna see everybody the people who are confident got up right away.

Everybody else is going to get,

if you weren't confident enough to line up right away or stay seated, then there's no way you could win.

And then Goan was like, yep, I also thought of that.

Then Killu was like, what, even Goan?

Fuck.

It's a lot of business.

This is kind of where the episode felt a little slow to me.

What it does get is the little bit of Silver warning Killua.

So Kilua eventually is like, fine, I'm going to, you know,

I'm going to join the line.

I'm going to take a dangerous path.

And we hear Silva warn him in Flashback to act only when success is guaranteed.

Silva says, waiting is our most crucial job.

And Killiua, and I noted this down, says, I am no longer an assassin.

I'm a hunter.

I cheered.

I like cheered when I was dreaming.

It's funny because Silva, Silva speaking into

the world, the same things that Illumi is saying, which is so funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But what was interesting to me, and a note that I made, is that, like, in the past, when Alumi has said that kind of stuff, Kilua is like arrested.

He is stopped in place.

Like, he can't even think about

it.

He can't move.

Yeah.

Whereas this, he very, like, his dad gave him an explicit instruction at some point.

He's like,

no, that's, that's not how I do things anymore.

Yeah.

I wonder if that's also tinted by the fact that that conversation they had before he left the Zoldek estate.

So he thinks his dad's like supporting him instead of being like, someday my son will betray his best friend and come home.

Oh, man.

That's my Silva Impression.

It's a good silver.

This is kind of bad.

Thank you.

One funny thing about this Pooh Hot thing from

before Silva shows up.

Just his name.

Is

after

I only hear Pooh Hat when you say something.

After Pooh Hot goes like, okay, time for me to go line up.

Kalois says out loud,

loud enough for him to overhear.

He says, people who act smart are the ones who usually fail,

just to throw him off and be mean, but then thinks to himself, he was right, though.

It's so funny.

He just like sort of revenge for

being friendly when Kiloa was feeling insecure.

Oh, yeah.

I have, sorry.

I just got some good Pooh Hot trivia about his voice actor.

Because he does voice someone that we've heard a lot in this show.

I mean, I mean, guess this.

Oh.

What?

It's a joint voice actor?

Yeah, this guy is.

Wait, hold on.

Is this for the sub or the dub, Sylvie?

This is for the Japanese voice acting.

Okay.

Okay.

Is he one of the Phantom Troop?

No.

Fuck.

He's been around before the Phantom Troop.

Oh, oh, fuck.

What's his name?

Now,

you guys are not.

Who's the asshole from the Hunter exam?

It's not Pompa.

Is it a main character?

Is it someone we've heard a lot of?

In a way.

You have heard them a lot.

Is it the

announcer?

It is the narrator.

Yes.

Wow.

Wow.

So

I read through your hints.

I saw it.

Thank you.

I kept dropping my little breadcrumbs while you guys wandered into my devious trap.

Packed them right up like a hungry little bird.

Killer summons a gigantic amount of electricity.

Sorry.

He's thinking about Keith's a hungry little bit.

He's in a little goblin.

Yeah, it's really funny.

Killiwa summons a gigantic amount of electricity, wowing Sesgera, who says, basically, like, well, first, Sesgera says, you're in.

And we get a little tiny Kiliwa, like a little chibi Kiliua, who either says yes in English, or he says os, like Zushi does.

I don't remember which it was.

There's a great os in the

in the

when Goan finally figures out how to chant use Zetsu and Brand at the same time, there's like a big crash, and we just see it from Kilua's perspective in the other room.

Like big crash, look at the wall, kind of concerned, and then hear the Os like yell.

And then he's like, nice, he figured it out.

And then goes back to being competitive and whips up some big lightning to not be outdone.

It's really good.

Two good os.

Tascara is surprised at how quickly Kilua has learned this, and he's sort of masking that surprise, kind of.

Kilua, you know, says, and we've spoken about this, that he was exposed to strong electricity, quote, from birth.

And then with a real smugness, with a real sort of like relish, he says, it's a family business, you see.

And I was really interested by the ways that Killiwa will sometimes play the I'm a Zeldic Assassin.

card, even immediately after saying, I'm no longer an assassin, I'm a hunter.

He really does find it like a useful intimidation tool.

Yeah.

Even if he's not actually into it.

Then Sesgara says, honestly, these kids are scary.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was really funny.

Oh, one really, one really interesting thing is Sesgara's like looking at the lightning, and he has never seen anything like this before.

He says, in theory, it's possible.

Like, he has done, Kiluet has done something that this guy who calls himself or is called the jackpot hunter and is heading up this, you know, 50 hunter-wide

multi-hundreds of billions of dollars project to win this game.

It's like, I've never seen shit like that before.

In the room on the other side of the screening room, Kimiwa sees for the first time some of the people who he is going to be going into Greed Island with.

I am going to read out the descriptions.

Keith, do you want to hit me with some names from the doc as I read them?

Yeah, sure.

I don't have all of their names, but I could get you a list of all the names because you're probably going to say more people than I have.

Do you want to give me a second to get the names?

No, I think...

Actually, yeah, no, I'm seeing this now.

There is a black guy in a blue and white suit, like

a suit with white piping on it.

This man's name is Abengane.

Or how's that said?

That's my memory of it too, but I'm not 100% sure because they don't actually say it.

I believe that is correct.

Yeah, I think so too.

There is Pigtail's girl, currently unnamed.

There is a fat lady with red hair and green eyes.

Her hair up in like a ponytail, I think.

Mm-hmm.

There are two, I wrote down, bandit-looking fellas.

Yeah, yeah.

And then there is a man with big eyebrows and sideburns who is not long for this world.

Oh, that's Jeet.

He gets jeeted out of the story.

Yeah.

The gangsters are Zetsk and Goshtabellum.

Oh, my God.

Great name.

Is Goshtabellum the little cat guy?

Yes.

Yeah.

The one who's waiting for his brother.

And then the woman who you mentioned, her name is Meekly.

Really good names in this show.

Really good names.

Yeah.

Then the room shakes with an explosion, and Gona enters, and is like, I did it.

And it's revealed that he just punched a massive hole in.

it's funny because

i i i really feel he already could have done that even before the training that he did like if if he was allowed to punch a wall before

i think they probably would have said like okay you're in

yeah

maybe

maybe

But it was it was probably a more impressive wren is the thing.

He probably gathered his friend back because of his little training.

Everybody gets a contract, which they immediately wisely go and show to Leorio.

Very shout out to Leorio.

Very funny.

Contract lawyer Leorio.

So the contract is one, if you get hurt or die in the game, you can't sue us.

Yep, two.

Really funny.

Two, any item you bring out of the game, you have to give to us.

We get the items.

And three, if you win the game, you get a 50 billion Genny reward.

And then Leorio looks up and he goes, looks good to me.

And which is so funny with a contract that says you can't sue us if you get hurt or die

it's so funny it's but i i i have to imagine the thing leorio was looking for was a more um

clandestine loophole or something

um yeah like a trick although you know the this is the the first clue that we have that of Baterra's game, right?

I think the fact that item two is any items that come out of the game belong to Batera started to make me think, is Baterra looking for a specific item?

Is Batera trying to get an item out of the game?

Yeah.

Beyond just can I be the first person to clear it?

And Kill also makes note of the item thing and is like, shouldn't we?

Maybe the items are really good.

Like, maybe we shouldn't.

Maybe we should try and get some items.

Yeah, and as context here,

as soon as you, viewer or listener, know how Greed Island works, you are going to start thinking about items in a very specific way.

So it is worth saying that at this point, when I didn't know what the game was about, hearing all this talk about items, I was like,

or rather, I was being asked to imagine the kind of game that might give me items that I would take out of the game.

And I sort of got to the point where I was like, oh, I think it's just going to be like an RPG.

You know, it's going to be like a fantasy-ish RPG where you assemble an inventory.

And if we can make it out of the game with, for example,

the battle axe or whatever, or if we steal the Dragon King's crown, we can get that out of the game.

I bring this up because

we're about to learn quickly that items, how items work and what they do, is Greed Island, essentially.

And so it was interesting to hear that sort of be like slow-rolled here with this first mention of like, you can collect items in the game and you might be able to bring them out.

And I mentioned it on the podcast because the three of you, it has been a long time since you were in a world where you didn't know what Greed Island was.

Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

Don't even know what my life was like back then.

Worse.

Who was I?

It was worse.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, yeah, it was pre-transition for me, so it was worse.

Exposedly worse.

Wow.

Like, that's just like

learning about Greed Island.

I did watch this show when I just started hormones.

Let's go.

What a transitional joy.

Yeah, literally.

Hunter Hunter accompanies me.

I was practicing my Nen.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Girl Nen.

Yeah.

Nen.

It's a thing for girls.

Well, you would think that based on Tagashi's previous output, you would think that Nen is in fact not for girls.

But we can't talk about that.

We're going to get to that.

And Leorio leaves.

It's so sad.

It's so sad.

He crouches down to talk to them.

I always think it's really sweet.

He's so much taller than them that whenever, like,

having an emotional bugunt, he like crouches down.

It's so cute.

I love Leorio.

I said, saying goodbye to Leorio is so sad.

I wish they could all be together, but also wishing they could all be together is part of the show.

Yeah, no, it is.

It is like, oh.

There's like, there's something about Hunter Hunter that

makes you desperately wish that it could have been the Hunter exam forever.

Which I think both would have been a worse show,

a happier show,

but also like the

wanting that back is, I think, a major feature of

where Hunter Hunter goes.

Yeah.

Can you remind us to talk about that a bit later in the episode, Keith?

The like feeling of wanting to go back to the Hunter exam?

Because when Screed Island begins and the the tone shifts, I think it's it's a topic that I'd like to talk a bit about.

Yeah, totally.

I'll write that down.

Hey, everyone's splitting off, and then now it's just going to kill you.

Um, asking with no judgment, remind me again what happens when the phantom troop finishes the job.

Oh, interesting.

They sure do split up.

They split up, yeah.

They sure do

interesting.

They sure do scatter.

They're almost like some sort of dark mirror to our friends here.

sometimes darker than others

yeah

and then we have a little montage a little travel montage it's great god the building tension of what is the game what's it gonna be like gun and kill you asleep on a train that rumbles through the night to a huge castle the contestants are led down the stairs to a locked room in the basement and there are 100 maybe maybe 50 or 60 consoles turned on in the locked room and faces on the screens indicate that people are already playing the game.

Or rather, you know, some of Batera's team is already inside Greed Island.

Multi-taps everywhere.

Multi-taps, left and right.

Another instance of rock, paper, scissors.

Yeah, this is the first

of the rock, paper, scissors encounters that we're actually going to have in this little clump of episodes.

Yeah, I said Gona's following in Leoria's footsteps by winning an important game of rock, paper, scissors.

Oh my god, he really is.

Killowa follows in his footsteps, too.

I know.

They all get their turn winning at rock, paper, scissors.

Just like their dad.

I know.

Now we just need Karapika to win rock, paper, scissors, and then

the main groups all won rock, paper, scissors.

They can all play each other.

Yeah.

You just need Karapa.

Karapaka won eyes spider's chains.

So it's.

You need to play Rock, Paper, Scissors to choose the order that you're going to go into the game.

This is mostly for nice story staging.

They do some sort of like business about how the game doesn't let multiple people go into it at the same time because you have to sort of be briefed.

Yeah.

There's a server limit.

Yeah, there's a server limit.

Goan goes in first because he's Gohan Freaks.

You're the boy who had a save file.

Yeah.

And Killiwa goes in 17th.

And he is told by Tesgara that his save file, his existing, so they actually ask him if he wants to use it.

And Goana's like, absolutely, I want to use it.

Yeah, he says, Jing gave me this and I trust him.

That's a huge error, but

hey, we don't technically know that.

I know it in my soul.

Yeah, you can feel it.

There are strong feelings in my soul about Jing Freaks.

Well, good.

Okay, we'll talk about it.

Go and save File is going to give him something, but the place he's going to go, the place you enter the game, will be the same.

I think some new music starts to play here, Keith, or this might just be like

there's two things.

There's one is Go On, which is a reimagining of one of the earlier

tracks.

I wish I had it, but I can't.

It's the one that goes.

Yes, so there's an electric guitar version of that.

That's Go On.

Here, I'll put it in there because I don't have a button for it right now.

Sylvia, I think this is what you were talking about.

And then it plays

the Greed Island theme again.

There is.

Wait, hold on.

No, this isn't what I was talking about.

Oh, okay.

There is,

I think it's the next episode.

Is there fiddle music, Sylvie.

No, they add, like, choral, like a choral aspect to one of the songs that we've heard before.

So there's actually no, there's only two new songs in these four episodes.

There's the, the theme, and there's the, an unreleased theme of a character that has no name, but I got it.

I got the thing, so I have a button for it.

Damn.

Cool.

Um, Goan disappears.

Into the game.

It has happened.

This has begun.

Um, shock from the people in the room, but in a kind of really fun

Tagashi move.

It's not a shock to the audience because we saw the Phantom Troop do it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This does have some music that I want to press because

it's one of the two songs that shows up every time there's men stuff happening.

There's Latent Power and Auras.

Auras is a really creepy one that starts off the next episode, but Latent Power is the one that ends this episode.

And they both play on the same sort of opening landscape.

Or actually, it plays

for the whole time that Ghana is like getting the lesson of, hey, what is Greed Island from the Green Island girl that we meet?

There's here we go.

It's really nice.

It's really fun.

Lots of like weird sort of glass-like harmonies.

Yeah, playing synth pads is

a headache because you think that they are going to be so straightforward and

you have to be so circumspect in your composing with them.

So whenever I hear really lovely, simple synth pads, I'm like, oh, that must have been a lot of work.

Right.

Do you want to talk about what happens when he gets sucked into the game?

Yeah.

Okay.

Gone is in a sort of...

bizarre shimmering white loading space.

It's mostly white.

It is high-tech, but it's a sort of

mother of pearl or crystalline high-tech.

There's this sort of like

symbol work etched in like shimmering colors on the white walls.

And he passes through a door to meet a young woman sitting in a sort of like egg desk

wearing

a really weird headset.

I love this design.

It's so she has grey hair.

Yeah, she is.

Let me see.

What's the easiest way to actually describe...

This is a woman with grey pigtails, a young woman with grey pigtails, and a black dress or shirt.

Her helmet looks like the prince from Katamari Damasi.

Yeah, it's very, very wide and is covering her ears.

Her pigtails are kind of like peeking out the top.

And she has this like motif of eyes all over her helmet and over her shirt.

We get a view of her from behind her desk at one point, and I can't tell whether she is either sort of sitting cross-legged in a sort of bony chair or if everything below her waist is this sort of like bony sort of like skeletal structure.

So you're saying she might be the chair?

Yeah, what did I write?

This woman is either sitting in a chair or her lower torso is a strange bone-like construction.

Does this woman have a name?

Yeah,

I can't look at it without reading ETA, but I believe that her name is Eda.

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Because I didn't know if her character design is so singular that I didn't know if she would be...

I expected she'd be more than, for example, Heaven's Arena.

Heaven's Arena 3.

Yeah.

Now.

We're going to have to tell you how this game works, or at least how it is presented to us in this this episode.

I got a list.

I have a list of all the stuff she says if we want to just go through it quickly and then comment on stuff that needs commenting on, or we can really tease it out.

Let's go through it quickly.

Okay.

It is, as I understand it, going to be this arc.

Yeah.

It is this mechanic.

Yeah.

Anyone who's wearing a ring has two spells available to them.

Book.

And they say spells.

This is not nen.

In fact, it's crucially not nen.

Crucially not nen.

Book and game.

Your task is to seek out and collect certain cards.

That binder is for storing the cards you collected.

That's what Etta says to Goan.

And then explains the two parts of the binder.

There's the front part for specified cards.

You have 100 specified card slots.

Each slot is labeled with a number.

You may only place a card if its number corresponds.

There's also 45 free slots.

That is for things like

spells that are not for winning the game, but for

spells that you need to win the game, but spells that you need to get other cards to then win the game.

You must obtain.

Like

a brief example here is like a numbered card would be like the Dragon King's Crown.

Right.

And a non-numbered card would be like Rock You Throw.

Yes, exactly.

Or like Town Portal.

Right.

Yep.

Or crucially, leave.

Leave.

You need to get a card called Leave to leave Green Island.

You must obtain 100 items and transform them into cards

to win the game.

You must use a card as the item by using gain to turn it back into an may use a card as an item by using gain to turn it back into an item.

So you get an item and it turns into a card.

You can then turn that card back into the item, but once you've done that, the card is gone.

That's it.

It can either be used as a slot card or used as an item.

Steam starts coming out of Gone Freaksy's ears.

Once you've used gain, it can't transform back.

Every item in the game has a limit to the number of times it can be converted.

So let's say that three people have the

Dragon King's crown, and the Dragon King's crown lets you jump twice as high, and three people have used that card

to get that crown.

You can now no longer use your card to turn it into the crown that lets you jump twice as high.

Also, if you...

There's two rules I didn't write.

Let's see if I can remember them.

If you don't put your card in a slot for 60 seconds after getting the card, it turns back into an item and then it's done.

It automatically uses

gain on it.

And then there was a second thing.

Didn't remember the second rule?

Yeah, this is really...

This rule cements where Greed Island starts getting really interesting for me.

If a player dies, their book and ring disappear and cannot be recovered.

You can't kill someone

and get the contents of their book.

No.

And Gohan says, I don't think it matters to you if you're dead, which is such a great piece of Goan

belief, where it's like Goan can't conceive of the possibility

of them.

Yeah, exactly.

Why the book being valuable after your death?

It's like, well, I'd be dead.

Yeah.

It's not going to matter to me.

And then has to learn this in the next episode, which is really funny.

Like,

him not getting it then means that later on Kilo is going to have to explain it to him.

Which is very funny.

Listener, if Going Freak's theme was coming out of your ears, here it is in one sentence.

Screed Island is a game about collecting 100 numbered cards representing items and storing them in a book that you carry with you.

While having to protect that book from hostile hunters who are also trying to do that.

Yep.

In order to make $50 billion and get a magic item for real.

And as Gohan descends the stairs into the game, sort of stairs appear in the floor, and the Ita is like, go down there.

Something happens.

Oh, yes.

Lights everywhere.

It's an arcade all of a sudden.

The white...

circuitry everywhere sort of starts turning into a multicolored rainbow thing.

Looks like a a modern computer with all those LEDs everywhere

on rainbow mode.

Oh, go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say a lot of this stuff also looks like the, I think it's worth mentioning because it's in the title sequence too.

There's a lot of, you remember the writing on the Nen thread that Wing put on his

on Gun's Finger?

There's a lot of characters that look like that in a lot of, in some of the architecture stuff.

And on the, like, it's pointed out on the ring, but in this starting era, is it Hunter?

Is it Hunter writing?

I genuinely don't know.

I think it is different.

I think it is.

I think none writing is a different thing, but if I'm wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me.

I have the message here if you want me to read it real quick, or if someone else wants to read it, that's also fine.

No, go for it.

We should just hear it verbatim.

It's heartbreaking.

Yeah.

Glad to see you made it in, Goan.

This is the game I made with my friends.

Hope you like it.

If you thought there'd be a clue to help you find me, though, well, too bad.

I just wanted to show off my game.

It doesn't matter what brought you here because you won't be able to leave until you

obtain a certain item.

So go ahead, play your heart out.

This deadbeat motherfucker.

This motherfucker.

This deadbeat shithead game designer.

I'm going to strangle him.

I'm going to kill Jing Freaks.

Either way, you cut it.

It is sinister.

It sucks.

I can't talk about it.

I cannot say what I want to say about this.

Okay.

well yeah I'm gonna I'm gonna commit what I think to the recording so that we have it either Jing freaks

Set up this whole like the Nen box the box to be given to Goan when you know

the the old woman Mito keeps throwing it out and the old woman keeps bringing it back learning the nen to open the box uh getting the money to buy greed island all of this and it ultimately amounts to jing just being like i made a game with my friends and i guess i want to see it.

And I know you're looking for a clue to find me, but I warned you that it wasn't going to be easy.

So, you know,

I'm doing what I said.

It's that kind of thing where it's like, well, you can't be hurt by me.

I told you I'm an asshole, you know?

Or he is lying.

He's lying in this moment, and there is a clue in this game.

And either of those are sinister in a different way.

I, what I'll say is

five, six episodes ago, ago I was like when we were on bat when we were on um whale island the last time

I said there's going to be a time where

if unless I if I don't say it now you're gonna think that I'm defending Jing but I'm not

but I'm telling you now that I'm going to ex explain what I think Jing is doing

but it's not defending him and that is still true this is I this is part of that that whole thing where I'm like, I totally get, I think,

I feel right about what's happening here, which is, which, you know, is definitely, partially up to the imagination, I think.

And the defense, the explanation of what's happening, I think, sounds like a defense, but isn't.

And we will talk about it later.

Yeah.

I mean, the thing that, you know, this is a show, to quote that great tweet about the boy whose dad goes out to find cigarettes He follows him to see if cigarettes are all they're cracked up to be.

Yeah.

Dear Gone, I'm sorry that your father is not active inside your world.

Fool Kendrick about this right now.

That deadbeat motherfucker.

Setting aside, you know, what I mean to say is we're going to keep talking about Jing, and I have to imagine that for...

It must be frustrating for the three of you to not be able to talk about the long view.

And it's frustrating for me to feel that there is this kind of like

there's stuff happening here that I don't have full access to yet that I would love to talk about.

I can talk about Jing.

I could spend an hour talking about Jing easily.

Easily spend one full hour just talking about Jing.

He is one of the most interesting characters in the series.

Like, I'll give him that.

I believe Jing is the first face we see in the new title sequence.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely correct.

Yeah, he's standing on a mountain in a robe.

We see him a lot in these couple episodes.

We see him at the beginning of the opening.

We also see him because Goan is thinking about him when he decides to use his own save file.

And then, only a couple minutes later, we're hearing his voice, like for the only the second time.

That's a lot of Jing.

It's a lot of

actual presence in the show,

huh?

Yeah, only that in the recording, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh,

my fury at Jing Freak's deadbeat dad leader

deadbeat dad leader of the

deadbeat dad club.

Deadbeat Dad thought leader.

Gene Freaks.

Thought isn't spelt, but not the way you think.

My fury at him briefly eclipsed a useful piece of information.

I know where Greed Island came from.

It was built by Gene Freaks and his friends.

Yep.

We know that.

What's the thing we knew Jing Freaks kind of was?

He's kind of like a historian, right?

Yeah,

he's like an archaeologist that goes from country to country, excavating destroyed and forgotten ruins and then

making them accessible to the public and granting them to

the people that lived there.

Interesting.

And he also constructed Greed Island.

Yep.

And also abandoned his only child.

And also abandoned his only child.

Asterisk around that.

There is also the manga canon

trial

to

take custody away from him.

That's true.

I'm just saying I think it's really funny that he's a he's a

game dev who abandoned his son

like that's really funny oh god um gon steps out onto grass in an enormous plain a grassy plain with little lakes and ponds uh and the camera pans out to reveal pans jesus the camera pulls out to reveal that we that he has left a uh colorful red building with a thatched roof and like a tower room bolted on the side of it.

I love these shots, yeah.

Uh, there's a couple in these episodes of like wide shots of Greed Island, and I think it looks really pretty.

Yeah, let's talk about this now.

Greed Island has a really distinctive look that we haven't seen in the show before.

There is something very toy-like about it, there is something very um, it's video game-like, but it's also um

kind of surrealist.

The really strange use of color, not in the way that Jojo uses color, where it's like the camera has painted things in this way, but it's as though the inhabitants of this place have.

There's a great bit

later where they leave this like brightly red and white painted building that looks like a cross between a lighthouse and a buoy, and they were just hanging out in there for some reason.

There is this thatched roof building with the red paint on the side.

There is also an amazing sequence later in a canyon full of enormous towering stone rocks.

The show's doing a lot of work where it's like

during the Hunter exam and prior to York New, the show was so colorful and so expressive in its art.

And then it got so

visually dark and grey during York New, for the most part.

The Phantom Trooper, very colorful.

And then in moving out of it, it's as though it hasn't quite returned to the sort of color space of the main show, but has even gone a little further, has gone a little stranger and

more.

I keep thinking of Dr.

Zeus.

I keep thinking of like naive art, the history of naive art.

And I also think of like the way children draw landscapes and towns.

It's like a lot of the way Greed Island looks to me.

Yeah, that's true.

As we move out of episode 60 and into episode 61, I do want to say one more thing about Jing that we have.

It's one of the, it's easy to overlook just just because of how little we have

is our first time hearing Jing's voice is because he's put a message into

that the cassette tape.

He nena fied a cassette tape.

And then now we've learned, we have learned for sure that he made Greed Island with his friends and nenafied all of these games,

which I think is just an interesting thing.

The only thing that we know about Jing's Jing's abilities as a hunter is that he seems to do something that only Wing has done before, which is like put some Nen into an object and just like let it hang out and like be a Nen object.

Jing is like doing that all over town.

Yeah, we've seen a couple of Nen objects.

Computers keep showing up as Nen objects as well.

There's that bit where they get sucked into the computes that's going the website.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Yeah, sure.

And now,

I think you're right.

And specifically, we're saying here something that has been intentionally infused with Nin, not like the artifacts and stuff that they bought

at the auction.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They had unintentional Nin.

Yeah.

Nin seepage.

Don't say that.

Yeah, don't.

I don't mind that.

Yeah, you wouldn't.

As the players arrive in Greed Island, they can tell immediately that they are being watched.

Almost everybody comments on this.

Yeah.

Gun notices it first, and then more and more people notice it.

As Gunn's sitting there waiting for Killu is number 17, the Killu is noticing it is so funny to me.

Oh, yeah.

How does it work?

He walks out the door, and then, like, before he's even fully in frame, he goes, we're being watched.

Hey, in case you didn't know, I knew, though.

I knew.

The pacing and delivery on a lot of the jokes between Goan and Kilua is so funny.

You know, this is a show without a lot of overlapping dialogue.

In fact, I think there's barely any overlapping dialogue.

And very often the lines are very precise in their delivery, are very, you know,

metered, even when they're really interesting, well-delivered lines.

But the way that Ghana and Killua will either banter with each other or will

deliver information very bluntly to each other, almost as though they're stepping on the heels of each other's lines, never stops being funny for me.

I wonder if, I don't know much about how

Shounen anime or anime in general, or even Hunter Hunter here, was produced.

What are the odds that Gonan and Kilu as actors were in the same room when they were recording?

Very, very low, right?

Probably pretty low.

That's just my production.

Yeah, I know.

I don't think they're comfortable saying either way.

I know that a lot of voice actors work from home.

Yeah.

They have recording booths in their, like a closet or a corner with some sheets.

I know that's very common, especially for

dubs.

So, but the with the, I have no idea what's going on in Japan.

Um, but they have great chemistry.

Uh, and whether that chemistry is as a result of skilled writing and performance, or whether it's as a result of, you know, being in the same room with each other, i i i imagine it's the former um

and we know really oh oh um killiwa is disappointed that jing didn't leave any items in the book he was sort of hoping that they'd have items in there yeah because it was a save file yeah go and is like no uh and he doesn't mention that he also didn't leave any clues at first i thought this was because he was trying to hide that from killiwa but my read on it now is actually that he hasn't internalized that uh that he's so excited to be here in the game on the hunt for his dad that he he sort of just brushed past, oh, there were no clues.

My read on it is

it's similar, but it's almost like

it's not important to him that there aren't any clues.

Or he's just used

at this point.

Yeah, or that he's decided he can make his own clues.

My dad wasn't there for the first 12 years of my life.

Why would he be here now?

And

Ghana is also so honest that getting the message from his dad, and

this is sort of discussed later on in the episode.

Getting the message from his dad, and his dad saying, I hope you like my game.

Please enjoy the game.

It's to me, it feels like Goan accepts that

and like literally sets off to go do that, which is why he gets mad about it when it seems like other people aren't enjoying Jing's game.

Yes.

God, that bit's great.

Immediately, the people that are watching them sort of begin to make an appearance as a man leaps from the sky in a ball of light.

He is wearing a headset, he has short purple dreadlocks, he has facial piercings, and he is holding a book.

This is another player.

This guy's name is Latarza.

Latarza, great immediate character design, also not long for this world.

No, not long.

Not long at all.

He uses a card on them.

And

God, this was sort of the moment when I, you know, even having had the rules explained to me, this was the point at which I went, oh, we're doing this.

We're really doing this.

It does a great job of showing you what an encounter in this game means.

Yeah.

I mean, I loved it, but it was with a sort of like yawing pit opening up in my stomach as I foresaw, you know, oh boy, this is the show.

Because we get a full-screen art of a card.

They look a bit like Pokemon cards.

They look like Magic the Gathering

cards.

Right down to they have,

I'll say it it now.

We can get it out of the way.

They have a number in the left which indicates that card number.

You know, it could be numberless or it could be a number that fits into one of those 100 slots that we talked about earlier, the special items.

Or if it's like

higher, it just means it's not one of them.

Yeah.

Like if it's beyond 100, it means it's a card that isn't.

It's a free slot card and you can use it for stuff.

They get some in like the next episode, I think.

Yeah, they get some fish.

Maybe this episode?

Yeah, when they eat their spaghetti.

Then there's the card Rarity, which runs, I believe, from F to triple S or double S?

I think it's triple.

Yeah, I think so.

And then there is a number that...

So wait, no, I think it runs from...

Doesn't it run for it, like from H?

Oh, it might run from H.

There's some really funny.

Oh, you see a character like double S.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A card that's just rock that you pick up.

And that is a very low-ranked one.

So then the final number on the card is it's.

Keith sort of referred to it earlier as, and I think we'll probably call it in the show like the cap number.

This is the number of times that it can be converted into an item.

You know, if you've exceeded that, if the cap number is five and five people have turned the card that is the Dragon King's crown into an item, I don't know what happens, but you can't do it.

I don't know what the outcome is.

Conversion limit, I think, is what they call it.

The conversion limit.

Yeah, that's what they call it.

Yeah.

Also on the card is a title.

The card that is immediately deployed here is Steel

and its power, which reveals all free slots of the target player that you have met in the game.

And this hunter is using it to test whether or not these are new players.

Of course, they do seem to be new players because they just climbed out of the new player zone.

That could be a trap.

But Steel reveals that it doesn't work because there are no cards in the binder and therefore the person is like, haha!

confirmed and gun and killia are watching this with the the same vibe that i watch you know like a fighting fighting game, which is mostly confusion and then a kind of like mild curiosity about what all of this is implying.

Yeah,

it's nice.

We see him do a little bit of strategy and choose one card over another card because he's like, I know these guys are new to the game.

I'm not going to waste my better card.

And then the second thing that happens is when he uses Trace.

the card that

he shoots, he targets it on Kilua, and it shoots out like an energy beam that Kilua tries to avoid.

And we learned the very important thing: that you can't run away from spells in this game.

They are 100% hit rates.

And what Trace does, the text of Trace, is that it lets you know

wherever that player is in the game.

It's just like on you now.

This is such joyful bullshit to me.

Any of the kind of resentment and frustration that I felt about seeing Nen

boil,

do what I believed to be a boiling down of magic to, at that time, what I thought were, what, six archetypes?

Yeah.

And I suppose there are six archetypes.

They're just very broad titles.

I find this just wildly joyful.

It's something about the game.

This is like my next question, so where I got glad to get there naturally.

It's something about being in a game.

It's something about Gonan Killua being up against someone who knows how to use it really well and and they don't and

that is an antagonistic position.

You know, it's not like I'm teaching you this.

It's like,

look, you gotta figure this out.

It makes it feel much more like a puzzle.

I think it also feels

less...

two things.

I think it feels less foundational.

in the sense that it's not Nen, the magic that underpins the universe and is instead a series of mechanics for a video game.

And I also think that it's not being delivered dryly.

And that's kind of a failing on, not failing.

That's kind of

a result of my own feeling about being like, I'm not interested in just watching these fuckers learn nen, but I am what interested in trying to figure out the rules of this of this weird game.

I think it's also like a personal taste thing where one of my favorite sort of archetypes of play in video games is

a box of mechanics that I don't understand and that are only barely explained to me that I am having to figure out through context clues.

That is like a kind of play that I really enjoy in a game.

And watching Hunter Hunter sort of imply that, like, that's what this arc is about, was so exciting to me.

We talked a little bit about this kind of thing, not so specifically in the Q ⁇ A episode that we did a couple weeks ago.

If you want to listen to that, I think it turned out really well.

It's great.

It was great.

But yeah, we do, there is like a ton of going and killer just in these couple episodes in Greed Island, Gonankillo are like trying to figure out what Greed Island is

and what it means to live there.

Yes, there's a game that's been released recently called Animal Well, which on the surface of it is a sort of Metroidvania platformer set in this sort of like strange underground

flooded cave.

Yeah, and it is a vania.

It is a vania.

Undeniably avania.

I don't know what you mean by that.

Just a dumb run-button joke.

Oh.

See, Keith, this is why I've been building my defenses and you have...

Keith has actually been trying to do the...

What is it called?

Subscribe to Run Button Maybe.

Oh, yeah, Subscribe to Run Button on YouTube Rouse Month.

Yeah, the update on that is that Keith got stuck in the circular

eel trap that I laid in my back garden for about three weeks and then using methodology that he had worked out for a year before, escaped my eel trap and freed all my eels.

Yeah, and I'll say this: watch out for those eels.

I'm afraid.

We are in a sort of like a temporary truce in order to record both this and the Palisade finale, but I'm looking out of my window right now.

Keith's drawing his thumb across his throat.

Yep.

He's holding a flaming torch above his head.

I've got the Roadcaster Pro plugged into a portable power bank.

I was going to say,

a great key.

Oh, yeah, it's my exact same setup.

I'm just walking around.

Zombie audience is right behind him.

Yep.

I took a train

to Michigan.

And I just sort of walked barefoot from the train,

covered in knives with the Roadcaster on, a power bank ready.

Defeated 400 eels.

Yeah.

So if you want an episode in two weeks,

you better hope Jack subscribes to Run Button.

To my point, the thing that Animal Well ends up revealing that it's about is like these complex mechanical interactions that are barely explained to you.

And, you know, you're just sort of like figuring out what the game is as you're playing.

And that's always been something I've loved.

I love Dwarf Fortress.

Greed Island is, what if Dwarf Fortress was, well, Dwarf Fortress is made by a maniac.

It's almost its main feature.

That is almost its main.

Dwarf Fortress is made by two maniacs, please.

Greed Island was made by a maniac.

Yes, that's absolutely true.

Killua says, What did you just do to me?

And the camera goes into Killua's horror movie Monster Mode, where he suddenly lives.

It's great.

And this poor fuck who has gotten so reliant on

Greed Island spellcraft that they've forgotten, just sort of like sheer outside game power, immediately teleports away to a town called Massadora.

We don't follow them.

He just says, Masadora, away, and uses a card to teleport.

Yeah, if you're not watching along, how dare you, but

when they do the travel spells, they turn into Dragon Ball Z

key blasts.

Yeah, that's great.

Are these cards Tagashi's illustrations from the books?

This seems like a place where you could get his direct drawing of how he drew the cards.

Oh, that's a great question.

I don't know.

I will say, I do.

This is like a minor thing.

Eventually, there is like a chapter in the manga that just has the description of like all of the hundred cards.

Wow.

My girlfriend's been reading and she told me about it.

I haven't, I haven't looked ahead.

You know what happens.

I do know what happens, but it's for some reason, you know, I just gotta say.

It's different when I start reading the manga, though, because if I get too hooked into that, I get to the point where I don't know what happens.

And I want to keep it that way until we are all there.

Thank you, Sylphie.

Of course.

Weirdly, the Hunter-Hunter

wiki

has a screenshot of the 2011 and 1999 anime, but they don't have the image from the manga.

I haven't seen it.

They're slightly different.

Okay.

Yeah.

I wonder if on some level that's a licensing thing.

Of just like...

we're not using the exact image from the manga.

That's probably just a practicality thing, too, adapting.

Okay.

Yeah, we might need them to do a slightly different thing.

Yeah.

You know,

I've now looked at three different cards and one of them didn't have a comparison with the manga and the other two were both the same in all three, basically, except for colors.

Hmm.

Interesting.

We talk about Tagashi's drifting camera so often that it might as well be a joke.

You get to tick it off in the bingo of Tagashi.

He's just a little lockatu, like in Mario.

He's pushing around on his little cloud, got a little fishing rod with a camera on it, and he's

peep-opping around the city.

Now he has established his drifting perspective and has sort of introduced a bunch of core players.

He has revealed that he is the absolute master of Meanwhile.

Yeah.

And over these episodes, Tagashi starts exercising meanwhile

in

some really, really joyful ways, including a sad one.

Meanwhile, in the Phantom Troop headquarters, the spiders have made a shrine to Pakinoda.

There is a Christian cross

and her right side up, we're upside down.

Catholicism confirmed.

This is the right side up, right?

I think it straight up is like hard to tell.

Catholicism confirmed.

We know that Judas is real, and you know, I'm just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,

Satan or the devil.

Yeah, and her

Her grave is covered, or her shrine is covered in white lilies.

Um, really, really pretty shot.

Immediately moved over by the fact that Shanak has had an idea.

He doesn't tell us what this idea is yet, but he is assembling a crew to go into Greed Island.

And

I believe he asks for them by name, right?

He brings in Kotopi deliberately.

And then, does he ask for Shizuku, or is she just like, I'll come?

Well, he does end up delivering an important thing about Shizuku in the PowerPoint.

So I think he's asked deliberately.

I think so.

That sounds right.

Um, and as soon as I knew that Kotopi was going into the game,

I'll just let you, the listener, start drawing some conclusions here in a brief moment of silence.

I thought to myself, This game is not balanced for Kotopi.

And I was sort of right, but Tagashi is...

Togashi is thinking of this.

Both of his brains.

Togashi has nerfed Kortopi.

Tagashi has both nerfed Kortopi and made it really interesting for Kotopi to

be in this game.

But part of that is what Shalnak wants to test.

And that's about as much of that as we see.

I don't think we see them go into the game, but we do just get more and more of the Phantom Trooper now starting to rock up.

I wrote down a note here, and I don't remember where it came from, but

I noticed that Killiwa is completely unconcerned by the magic in this game.

I think it might be because this spell that the person has put on Killiware, which allows him to be tracked indefinitely, doesn't bother him.

Yeah, he basically goes, I don't feel any different.

It's probably some magic that only works in the game, and we'll figure it out later.

Yep.

For now, they're hungry.

And they arrive in a large fantasy town.

This is a fantasy town drawn by

Studio Ghibli or children.

Sort of a cross between the two, I think.

Prizes are pinned up on sheets of paper everywhere.

The town is absolutely bustling.

This is Antakeba, the town of prizes.

This also reminds me a lot of the old, as well as obviously being like a JRPG reference or an RPG reference in general.

It reminds me a lot of the like Steve Jackson's sword and sorcery adventure game books, where you're like, this is the city port of traps.

You know, this is the town of whatever.

And you know, you come over the hills into the town of prizes.

There's a rock, paper, scissors tournament in September, which was interesting to me.

There are months in Greed Island.

Weird.

And it must be September because they do that.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, because York New City arc was in September.

Oh, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Come on.

Sorry.

Sorry.

Excited a whole bit about wanting to figure out when September 11th was.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It could be.

This could be the day.

We don't know.

Yeah.

It could be.

It could be.

York New City and greed islander in the same day oh well lots of video games uh sync their server clocks to the real world um yeah

i mean we'll find out why yeah we sure will we like you know uh

they're they're giving away a grand prize the sword of truth this is exciting this is our first sort of like clearly numbered card uh but not much is sort of focused on it they go to the restaurant even in the restaurant there is a speed eating competition that lets you win a card that is help me out here, just an edible fish?

Yes, it's a fish.

There's something about its eggs being like part of a thing to help with long life

in the description.

I didn't write it down, unfortunately.

What's the function of the card in the game?

Rations?

Yeah, it could be healing.

They sell them.

Oh, they do sell them.

I think it's more of an economy thing with a lot of that stuff.

They also talk about later going and fighting monsters to earn money in Masadora

in

last episode we watched this week.

The chef is a cat man.

Well, 11.

He's not quite a cat man.

He is, put it this way.

His name is Cat Diner NPC.

Yeah.

Yes, he is a cat man in the same way green, green, jellybean man is a bean.

Yeah, what if you gave a man slightly pointy ears, whiskers, two little fangs, smiley cat eyes, and a chef hat with a cat on it.

And he's an NPC in that he has limited information.

He likes to...

Describes what a furry is.

No, furries are people who dress up.

Okay.

And not chefs inside Greed Island.

What's the word that he doesn't know the meaning of?

It's like danger or magic.

It's magic?

Yeah, he doesn't know who

it is.

Like, I don't know about magic.

I just make food.

He looks kind of like a Dragon Ball character to me.

He does look kind of like a Dragon Ball character.

Yeah.

She could show up somewhere in Original Dragon Ball for sure.

Kirk's for President Dog or whatever the fuck its name is.

Personal Jeff.

There's a dog.

What?

We talked about the president of the world as a dog.

President of the world is

that we did not mention that.

When did we?

Did we not?

Maybe we talked about this with Austin.

Oh, his name is King Furry.

Yeah.

Oh, you know what?

This is this came up on a stream that I did with Austin, Allie, and Jeff.

Oh, no, we did talk about that guy.

We did talk about that guy.

Okay.

I don't think I knew that he was the president of the world.

Yeah, Ali tried to make him in Dragon's Dogma.

Yeah, I tuned into that stream late post-the revelation that he is the president of the world.

He's got...

His fit is immaculate.

Yeah, this is NPC Chef Kat's Dad.

President of the World dog.

Then a man explodes outside.

Explodes using a spell?

No.

Explodes in a burst of gore that we don't see, but he's lying in a massive pool of blood.

Most of the NPCs either just like crowd around silently, but other players in the game are like freaking out.

Poor Jeet.

We hardly knew ye.

This is the man with eyebrows and sideburns.

His body disappears after it explodes.

It sort of like vaporizes away, like, you know, like in a video game when it's done with a dead body and it just sort of pops away.

And then a man comes up and he says, This guy died because someone killed him with Nen.

And we are introduced to the idea of player hunters.

And I sort of knew that this was going to be the case, that there'd be this sort of PvP element, but I'm so interested by the fact that there's a detail here that comes up in a bit that'll really sort of click it together.

They're not using spells to do this.

You know, people have brought Nen into the game, a thing you need to play in the game, and are just using it murderously against each other.

Yeah.

This man's name is Nicks.

Nicks.

He

has short-ish, spiky.

What color would you call that?

Red.

Dusky, purpley red.

It's like a purpley red, yeah.

He's an older fellow.

He's like an adult.

He has a sort of chiseled face.

He is wearing a hoodie underneath a blazer.

He has a sort of calm stature.

And he says, listen, do you want to team up?

There is a way.

We have figured out a way to clear this game and we are recruiting members to do it.

Yeah, he is specifically and his crew are specifically going around to the new crop of players and being like, look, you can get out of here in three months if you team up with us or you'll be stuck here forever like we have been.

And not just you can get out of here in three months.

You can get out of here with

the victory.

Right.

With like,

you know, your, with like a billion Jenny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, Kiliwa doesn't super super care for this.

Uh, but Nick says: once you realize how hard, frightening, and foul this game is, you'll be more than willing to accept our offer.

Uh, Jing built this and lured his son here, which is

cool.

Um,

but

speaking into the episode that something has gone wrong in Greed Island, that there is something underneath this genuinely very bright and even with the cards, very playful facade, the words hard, frightening, and foul,

really got me really excited about this arc.

And as people begin to talk about what has happened,

oh, let's talk about it.

Yeah, Nick makes an argument for why this has happened.

Yeah, because

Greed Island has essentially broken.

Not Not broken in the sense that the game is bugged, but broken in the much more interesting sense that you sometimes see in

online games where the meta has become so violently toxic that the game has kind of turned into something different.

Because, let me see if I have this right.

Players are killing...

other players in order to deliberately destroy their books in order to deliberately lower the card cap on the cards so that they can play the game better.

They're essentially farming players' books to

overcome the mechanic that Jing put in place to stop people killing each other.

Right.

Yes.

Like,

the length of time that the game has gone on has created an environment where instead of discouraging violence, it has started encouraging it.

Now,

these motherfuckers don't know about how the philosophy of mechanical design is ultimately a political expression, and how in designing mechanics, you know, you can ultimately build in situations like this, even if you're not consciously doing it.

I would say that Jing is not faultless here.

No.

He's either.

Yeah, no, well, it's me because there's a

level, what's happened is

you intentionally or unintentionally

created a situation that he believed would discourage people from killing instead of making killing against the rules.

Yes, which he could just as easily have done.

Right.

This is a very gunfreak solution.

It's also a very narrow solution.

Yeah, this is absolutely delightful to me.

This realization that Greed Island is a sort of corrupted game, corrupted by the players that have been trapped in it for decades, maybe,

and that Gon and Kiliwa are in this sort of like weird facade that on the face of it is still operating as a colorful, playful

card battler set in a world of weird magic and mysterious monsters, and the sort of core meta underpinning it is a lethal death game is just such a joy.

This is exactly my kind of shit.

There's a thing that I love in all kinds of fiction is when characters

have to do something for so long or are trapped in doing something for so long that their understanding of what it is and how it works and why they're there just sort of falls apart.

There's a really great film by Boonuel called The Exterminating Angel, which is about a bunch of people who go to a very wealthy party and then suddenly find that they can't leave.

Sometimes they can't leave because the doors open.

Sometimes Sometimes they can't leave because they are just, they find themselves not compelled to leave.

They're like, should we go?

No, no, we should just stay.

And over the course of this movie, the party not only sort of like falls apart into like an orgeastic bohemian sort of debauchery, but also like the individual underpinnings of the society of these people start to come apart.

They start, I think, sacrificing animals or sacrificing people, all trapped in this gorgeous upper-class party.

And that has been a kind of model of story that I've always loved.

There's a...

Sounds like someone's turned the insane dial up on Rules of the Game.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

There's a one called High Rise, in which much the same thing happens in a tower block.

And so going into Greed Island and being like,

oh my God, it's one of these was just so delightful.

What's the book about like the, I think they're British kids who like,

I can't remember if they're on a boat or a plane but they're basically a bunch of like kids like middle schoolers get like trapped on an island it's called the load of the flies

yeah um and they they sort of they sort of uh come apart yeah i'm sorry dre i thought you were doing a pit

no i couldn't remember the name of the no it's fine it happens to me all the time it happens to me all the time i'm sorry

reading for me i had to read that yeah same yeah no yeah load of the flies is good

yeah it is good

there's a really great i have the conk

there's a really great companion piece to Lotterflies, which is a similar kind of thing.

It's a film.

Oh, yellow jackets.

Yeah, yellow jackets.

What if it was girls?

The one that I am talking about is What If It Was Girls.

It's an Australian film called Picnic at Hanging Rock, which is about a group of wealthy Australian girls at the turn of the 20th century who go out on a day trip to a sort of like rock formation.

And something really weird happens at the rock formation and causes this sort of like very neat girls school setup to just start tearing itself apart,

which is great.

So this is to say, this is my ship.

So Nick,

he's pitching Garn and Kilo on this thing.

He's already sort of proven to them that he knows that they're new by whipping out his book and they like jump back not knowing what to do.

And he's like, that's all I need to know.

Like, you don't even know to call your book out instead of like get ready for a real fight.

Um, uh, which I don't.

I do love how, like, constantly people are like, oh, you're new.

And Kilo was like, you don't know if we're new.

So defensive.

And then their, their pitch is basically like, we're going to, we're just going to go around and use the way, play the game the way it's meant to be played by using, you know, trace cards to track people,

steal cards to steal their cards, and defense cards to block.

And the way that we're going to do that is by like monopolizing these cards, getting more of them than anyone else, so that we can't lose.

And

Gon is like, no, bye.

Yeah, he gets steamed.

He gets really steamed.

He sends away.

He says,

Gonan decides for the both of them to set out on their own because they had nothing but bad things to say about the game that Jing made.

He apologizes to Kilua for getting him attacked with a spell just to help him find his dad.

He's feeling all guilty.

I feel like this is a massive shift in their relationship in this scene.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

This is like.

Kilua is so uncomfortable with like vulnerability in a lot of different ways.

And he's also uncomfortable with Goan's

ability to be

to speak his mind and like just sort of plainly state his emotions.

And they have this extended moment where Kilo like can't deal with this and like is like looking away from the camera, looking down,

like thinking to himself about how much he likes Goan and how happy he is to be there with him, not able to express these, and then just goes like, you're being embarrassing and walks away.

But then he says, actually, Goan, you know, you, you have it wrong.

Yeah.

I'm grateful that, you know, you're my friend.

I'm the the one who's glad.

And someone's watching this.

Yeah, I do just want to say briefly that we get a little watercolor style as they have these tender thoughts about each other.

Prefacing...

Prefacing the arrival of a Sailor Moon character is the only word about it.

I've described the first time I saw this character back on the screenshot stream.

This is Pigtail's girl.

I said, she looks like a Sailor Moon character.

Looks like the way Takeuchi draws.

A tribute to his wife.

Yeah, a tribute to his wife.

Of course, Naoko Takeuchi, creator of Sailor Moon, is married to Tagashi.

And what I didn't know at that point was that they often sit working next to each other and they read each other's stuff.

And the more I've watched Hunter Hunter,

I have seen bits of...

Things that she is interested in not in the sense that like oh, she's writing this shit But in the sense that two creative people who are talking about the stuff that they are making in the same room at the same time, there'll be some kind of a bleed.

Boy howdy.

Because the first thing that this pigtails girl says is, the friendship and innocence of two young boys is such a beautiful thing.

It makes me want to ruin it.

She's my queen.

I want to say, that's actually the second thing that she says.

The first thing that she says is, oh, that's how it is.

She's following them because she knows what you are.

Yes.

She's like, Why is why?

Why did this happen?

She was there at the meeting with Nick's and his allies during the pitch because she's also new to the game.

And when they leave, she leaves to be like, What's going on with this?

And this is my contention.

She's like, I want to understand what is going on with these two.

And sees that exchange and goes, Oh, gay.

Yeah,

that's what it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And she's right.

And she's right.

And she's so smart to have noticed.

I just,

the friendship and innocence of two young boys is such a beautiful thing.

It makes me want to ruin it.

Is just a Sailor Moon line.

That is all people talk about in Sailor Moon, but for girls being friends with each other.

There is an entire arc about...

Hmm.

They need to...

Right, they need to...

The villains need to make the Holy Grail.

That's fine.

Of course, yeah.

Jesus' holy grail.

And the way that they can do that is by finding a pure heart, a pure girl's heart.

And so they just start extracting hearts from kind people that they think will be pure-hearted girls.

But of course, none of the hearts are pure enough, and Sailor Moon and the crew have to go and, you know,

beat them up and restore all the hearts, often one by one.

And so the friendship and innocence is such a beautiful thing, it makes me want to ruin it, is just what a villain says midway through pulling someone's heart out.

I did not realize in making this note about how Pigtail's Girl is a Sailor Moon character, how right I was going to be proven in the next episode.

And surely you're at the limits of how right you can be.

Surely I'm at the limits of how right I could be.

I want to go back really quickly just to make sure that I've got everything.

Goan.

Goan's frustration that people say bad things about the game his dad made is both Goan's classic idealization of his dad.

You know, Jing Freaks is the best.

Why would you think otherwise?

And then also a kind of version of the thing he constantly accuses the Phantom Troop of, of like, this game is made for having fun and playing and you're using it for killing and stealing.

Why are you doing that?

And there's a kind of sadness that he feels.

He really genuinely believed that players were playing Greed Island because they thought it was fun.

Sorry.

He says the scary thing isn't the game, but the players.

Gone's mistake.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One more interesting thing about the Gone Killo bit is

when they are leaving the pitch meeting and Gone sort of storms off and Kilo is like, hey, sorry, but I'm going with him.

You heard the boss.

Yeah, there's a really interesting inversion of the first, you know, the first episodes with Goan up through the end of the hunter exam,

where Kilo is desperately trying to turn Goan into his sidekick

and gets like really visibly upset with Goan when he doesn't just like listen to what Kilua has to say and go where Kilua wants to go

and like gets so mad when Gohan's like, no, no, I'm going to stay here and keep trying to get the ball or whatever.

It happens multiple times over the course of that arc.

And Kilua is now just like,

I'm going to follow him.

I'm the sidekick.

It's fine.

What's the thing they said about Goan during the Hunter exam?

I can't remember who it was.

It was Karaskar, I think.

They talk about Goan being like...

shining or like you can't take your eyes off him.

Illumi though.

Yeah.

Illumi talking to, saying that he pairs up to the sun or something.

Yeah, and he says he's so bright that you don't want to look away.

Yeah.

Really, some real maturity coming from Kellyware in the last few episodes.

I want to throw back real far, real briefly,

because I think this is an important note.

When they're trying to learn their nen abilities back before they entered the video game and the entire season changed,

it feels crazy, by the way, to be like the first episode was just in York New City, and now we're in Game Hell.

Killiwa says to Gon, what's the line?

I wrote it down specifically.

He says,

thank you for your patience.

He says, I already know what I want about his nan power.

That's why I'm helping you.

And I kept thinking about that great scene on Whale Island at night where they're talking to each other and Killiwa admits that he is kind of just completely absent of any desire,

any desire to do anything other than just sort of like be with Goan.

And I thought this moment of Killiua saying, I know what I want with this nan power and that's why I'm helping you was a nice little bit of a nice little bit of growth in Killua's character there.

Back to hell.

There's so much good Killua coming up.

I will eventually be making the case that Killowa is the protagonist of the show now.

I would hear you, Sylvie, but for the fact that I could write a list of names and pull them out of a hat and make a case that they are the protagonist of the show.

No, for sure.

I'm just saying.

I will be talking about this boy so much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's a great boy.

I have no

vest.

Yeah.

He didn't have a lot to do in York New.

He just mostly

pissed about and grumbled about other people's plans.

We got a few prospective episodes of Killer.

Oh, that's true.

He did have sick clothes, Dre.

And yes,

he did intuit half of a hostage situation he was not currently able to see, which was that was big.

Good work.

He's very, very clever.

I mean, I feel like we give Karapika a lot of credit for being the clever one.

Karapaka is very articulate, and Karapaka is very patient.

I don't think either of those are killer traits particularly.

But Killer is very, very quick on his feet.

Yeah.

He's always thinking about where the danger is, and so

gets a lot of mileage out of that.

Damn, I wonder if his upbringing had another thing.

Yeah, I wonder if that's got anything to do with the fact that he's always silent when he walks around.

That's crazy.

His parents let him go on a big adventure with his friend.

They're probably nice.

Yeah, they're super nice.

Treated him crazy.

His dad had a really good heart-to-heart with him once.

About the importance of friendship.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they signed a blood oath.

Watch this.

I'm going to do the first five minutes of the next episode really fast.

Gone and Kilua play rock, paper, scissors, and

Killua wins the sword of truth.

He redeems himself.

He wins and then loses the sword of truth.

It cuts through anything false and breaks if it meets the truth.

It's a specific card.

They are immediately.

Oh, gone.

I was just going to say, I wrote down that earlier that Gone is a rock, paper, scissors master.

Killua is stuck in losers bracket at 17th place.

And then with this episode started, I was like, okay.

Killow has redeemed himself.

He's made this comeback.

They are immediately mugged by a weakling who fails to take the card from them after Goan

just says, I'm going to steal your card.

He says, I'm going to steal your card.

And he pulls out the steel card and Goan just dashes forward and

takes it by hand.

These people have gotten soft inside the game.

So important that that was a card that that guy could have won anytime by playing rock, paper, scissors.

Which I think does kind of like lend some credence to Goan's perspective: like,

people are just ruining this game.

Like, we could talk about like how bad of a game Dev Jing is, he absolutely is.

But

the guy with the worst shirt in the world is like, only babies play the games.

I was about to say, yeah.

I think that's like a really telling quote, and that really backs up some of what Gon, like, at least backs up Gone's point of view.

Yeah.

Does he say Odie babies play the games in your version, Keith?

For me, he says, Only fools participate in tournaments.

It would be so funny if they

editorialized.

editorialized.

He has poetic license.

But yeah, it's that.

That's, I think, part of the genius of the way this has been set up is that, like, sure, Only Babies play the games, but it's not like the death game has completely swallowed Greed Island.

Or rather.

Right.

It's not that it's visibly swallowed Greed Island.

You know, the cities aren't on fire.

you know i mean people are blowing up in the streets but there's a real creepy element to it which is that like oh also all the npcs are gathered around to you know

there's some sort of ideology being uh portrayed here it's important i think that um

oh did i lose it uh

that

the the the game is called greed island

and everyone sort of lands on the fact that it's most efficient to be like stealing cards and trying to take them all for yourself.

Because that is what the cards do the game is about getting the cards and the cards are about getting more cards from other players that they already have so it's not a it's a pretty uh it's a pretty coherent trip from

hey we're in this game and there's NPCs doing contests or whatever

maybe we should just take the card from the guy who played the stupid game well this is also the philosophy of what I didn't know any of these people's names so I called Nick's team I called the clear team because they want to clear the the game um this is all

and they're

and they're

weird well catholicism exists so you know so does yeah yeah um so so does the true religion equal evils

keith fuck off

nick's team um

also basically believes that only babies play the games you know the game that they actually want to play they want to avoid killing but they are saying you know we're gonna steal cards from people.

Yeah, they want to do it non-violently, but they want to use the cards to win.

Yeah.

Um,

Gunn and Killiwa are like, well, we need cards, so we have to go to Masadora, which they've been told is like, that's a city of magic.

There's a lot of cards there.

And as they go to set off,

Pigtails comes up and basically says, please, please let me go.

I need help.

I'm a baby.

I need help.

You can see this joke coming from a mile away, which is as soon as Killiwa says, no, you'll be a burden.

We get her internal monologue and it's like, I'm going to fucking crush these babies.

She says,

you don't know I could pummel the floor with you with one hand tied behind my back.

And then, you know, you play the joke out to the hill, right?

You have her begin to retort vocally to Killiwa by being like, hey, come on, oh, please, let me, you know, etc.

I'm just a little guy and it's my birthday.

Yeah, doing puppy dog guys.

And so off they go, pursued by Pigtails, who sort of gamely runs along behind them, with every step sort of being powered by...

It's like Keith, what did you say at the beginning of the thing?

First, she's powered by a desire to ruin them, then she's powered by a desire for revenge.

Yeah, she wants to ruin them for fun, and then she wants to ruin them for revenge.

Now we've moved into Pigtails' revenge.

Yeah.

She's in revenge mode.

She's no longer like, I'm going to destroy them because it's funny to destroy friendships.

Meanwhile,

Nick's team in a cave hideouts the plan.

Yeah, they have to explain to the people who took them up what they're actually about to do.

They are looking to get a rare card, a very rare card called Angel's Breath, which is required to complete the game.

We're not told really what it does.

The way you get Angel's Breath, they know no one's ever got it through some various card shenanigans that let them, you know, know, learn if it's in anybody's hands.

The way you get Angel's Breath is you trade in all 40 spell cards for it.

But of course, everyone is trapped in the vicious cycle of playing this game, so he's constantly expending the 40 cards to, you know, hold on to their own shit.

This is the dread ideology of the death game being played within the game, right?

Where it's like, you are so close to victory, but you have to scrape by with the very thing that would buy you the victory um you know as you're sucked back into this cycle of cycle of violence inside the game uh but the clear team has got 40 cards they've got them all

um and they are going to trade them in

to

get

Angel's breath, but they need one specific card on top of that a card called prison They essentially need two copies of it one to trade in and then one to have which will protect Angel's Breath from being stolen from them.

Now, this sounds like a lot of business, and it is, but it is really cool to encounter these characters and this unit 90% of the way through a plan.

Isn't it neat?

They've got it figured out.

They know how to win this thing.

It's been in there for two years.

They've been in there for years, and they're like, three more months is what we need, which is like nothing.

Really makes you feel the enormity of the game, too.

Like,

it plays into the myth of Greed Island that we've been told throughout the rest of this series.

There's something that I want to talk about, and I, I, I

involving the game and Jigg, and I don't know whether it's the time to break it out now.

Is this a group chat?

Check-in, um,

yeah, maybe.

Hold on,

when we're done, this we need to invite Jack to the

DLU so they can see it all.

If this is about Shalnark's discovery, we should wait to talk about Shalnark's stuff until the very last moment.

I think I don't know if we can talk about that yet, Keith.

Yeah, it's definitely something that you could infer just from.

Oh, but I'm gone freaks.

I'm just watching these things and

bouncing around the inside of my head.

Anyway, that now Sylvie and Dre now know

what I think the cruelty at the heart of the game is, and it has less to do with one thing than you'd think.

Is that one thing Jing freaks?

No.

Okay, cool.

No.

Okay, so the clear team's goal is...

Alright, you sit over there with 40 cards.

You hold on to them.

We go out and get prison.

We trade the 40 cards in for Angel's Breath.

We use Prison to protect Angel's Breath.

We clear the game.

Plus some other maneuvers that they haven't gotten yet.

Prison is is the place to start

uh prison is the name of a card not a place they're gonna go

right yeah

i mean they already were a trick tower yeah sure

uh there's this really funny thing where um

Gona Killu will learn that the path that they need to go on is full of bandits and monsters, and they're like so excited by this.

Bandits?

The guy that sells on the map is like, beware the bandits and monsters.

And yeah, they're like shitting themselves because it finally started to sound like a real video game.

They literally

literally says it's starting to sound like a real RPG.

Yeah.

It's starting to sound like the fucking opening narration of Hunter Hunter.

It is.

Yeah, it is.

Yes, it is.

That is the vibe that Hunter Diamond for Hunters.

Yeah, totally.

Oh, yeah.

Let's talk about this now.

I have a kind of nostalgia for

the

Hunter exam.

That's what it's called.

I was like, the fucking hunter trial?

The hunter exam.

But this is the show,

if if anything, the most playful we have ever seen it.

This is at its most colorful, at its most playful, at its most like mechanically expressive.

And that is confirmed as we enter just a fucking bonkers back half of the episode.

It helps that it's the rare thing where the characters are literally aware of the mechanics.

Like, it's not real life to them.

Like,

in, you know, like we were watching JoJo's Bizarre Adventure or whatever, or when they're learning about Nen and they're thinking about like powers and strategies and where your nen can go and like what kind of things you can do with crazy diamond or whatever.

Uh, but that's like their life, but now they're in the game and they're like, What about the cards?

How do the cards work together?

And, like, what about fighting the bandits?

And what they get to choose between uh a map that has the locations marked on it, oh my god, the most friends of the table ass thing I've ever heard.

I know, it's it's it's so cool.

Um, The blank map is obviously cheaper.

Both have a little blinking dot marking your position and Goan is like, it'll be fun to draw in the

locations as we find them.

And they get the map and it literally is just an outline of an island with a blinking red dot and Killier is like, this is fucking useless.

He also says, he says something about how positive Goan is.

He's like, you're so positive it makes me sick.

Something like that.

Goan and Killiwa are told that the city is really far to the north, but they're also confident that they can travel 80 kilometers a day.

That's a little fact about these freak children.

Which we actually know that they could do more from the hunter.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, as they set off, we get this rare sort of like, usually we are so locked in to whatever character's perspective that Takashi has chosen for that eight-minute period that we don't often see what it would look like from the outside.

But we see Goan and Kiliwa running through the forest, and they're moving so quickly, they're sort of like teleport dashing.

But as we cut into dialogue with them, we're moving at their pace.

Pigtails is sort of like jogging along behind.

This is the first time we actually see her in her sort of like fiery horror mode.

She gets the classic like little angry symbol on her forehead because her forehead's all wrinkled and like flames ripple behind her.

She is one of my favorite characters in this show and it like, God, I'm so happy she's here.

Her dub voice actress is just so good.

It's really well done.

Her dub voice actress is really good.

Hugely recommend at least checking it out, Jack, before the end of this article.

Absolutely.

Amazing delivery.

She gets battened beyond eyes too when she gets all angry.

It's like they turn like big and white.

She is so funny.

And so far, all we know about this kid is that she, you know, she's, this is the first girl child that we've seen in the show.

You know, most of the female characters have been adults.

Takashi is such.

What's her face?

The butler.

That's true.

Yeah, Canary.

The Canary was great.

But yes, outside of that, Zelda Assassin and Zelda Assassins are weird.

Takashi is such a sharp writer of children's voices and children talking to each other and bickering that it is really fun to see him writing a female character who's a kid and who can sort of like spar with Gonan Kiliua.

Right.

Guessing that's what I'm saying.

And then we'll talk more about that later.

We'll talk more about that later.

But the affect is one thing, right?

Sure.

It's like someone who has been introduced to, at least ostensibly, is on Gon and Kiliwa's age group and tier of power.

Are either of those things true?

No.

That is such a good point, though, Jack, that I hadn't really consciously thought about.

But like, Gon and Kilua are written like kids in a good way.

And it's so...

I mean, you can watch so much anime where kids are just written to be like the most obnoxious creatures possible because it's the only way that they can think to signal that these characters are kids.

And that's not the case in Hunter Hunter.

You can very obviously tell that they are kids written like kids, but that makes them more endearing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when I talk about Pigtails' affect as sort of being childlike here, the thing that I'm talking about is really all we have seen her doing so far in the show is threatening ruin on the characters.

inveiglaling her way no thanks we're gonna hang out on our own and she's like well fuck you two fucking icon hater queen inveigling her way into their group and responding with barely suppressed violent fury

or

running that's it

it is simply a fact that killerwood does not want to hang out with a girl he's a little misogynist he's a little i wrote gay misogynist in my day

he's a he's he hates

girls because he's gay.

Or the other way around.

It is absolutely the, like, playground misogyny of, like, I don't want to hang out with girls.

Yeah.

You're just going to be boring.

The really funny thing about it is that he has already, like, she did her little, I'm just a helpless girl.

Please let me tag along with you thing.

And it didn't work.

And it seems like.

At first, like, Killie was like, no, I don't want to hang out with you because you're going to slow us down because those are the words that he said.

But then then, right after, goes, like, she's lying.

She got through the same test we did just to be here.

Yeah, there's a bit where they are worried that they're going to get attacked by bandits and they're like, well, we'll ditch her when we get attacked by bandits and go and say, Do you think she'll be fine?

And Killer's like, yeah, she's clearly a powerful nen user.

But it's like, this is this is Killiwa's playground misogyny kicking in, right?

Where it's like, but she's a girl.

And they're icky.

Yeah.

And they're icky.

Gone, we're gonna get cooties.

Yeah, exactly.

um

just adding another person to this dynamic is not gonna work just you and me for no reason however what kilua doesn't know is what tagashi has figured out which is that adding another person to this dynamic is actually going to be extremely funny yeah um

meanwhile

Shalnark, Kotopi, and Shizuku are now in the game.

God, the pre-put of the Phantom Troop into this game is so funny.

I've written, hey, it's the Phantom Troop.

Good for them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's reaction every time.

Yeah.

The Phantom Troop don't need to intuit that this is a death game because they would play it like that even if it wasn't.

Right.

So it's not really like a revelation to them

because, you know.

So

they're like, well, of course.

Yeah, that's their standard mode.

Life is already their death game.

So Shell Nark has figured out.

two important things about

Greed Island, which is one, Cortopiece Nen cannot be used to copy cards.

So the game does not recognize them as legitimate cards.

Well, not quite.

They can be copied cards, but

they do not have a game function.

Right.

And I think that's really crucial because we know that one of the things in the Phantom Troop's bag of tricks is like masquerading or like false items or, you know.

Right.

But Shannark is interested in the items specifically.

Yes.

Shallnark is very interested in the items.

The second thing Shalnark notices is that Shizuku's vacuum works, but won't work on items with specific abilities.

This seems to have been an actually, well, it's another piece of misguided game design from Jing.

It seems to be that Jing didn't want people to use Nen to steal cards.

Right.

But, of course, people are going to use Nen to like rip out someone's throat.

It's sure, we see that.

We see that in one way.

But if you kill them, you can't steal their stuff.

But it doesn't matter because the cap is now lowered, which means that I can go and kill.

No, but there's another thing that you can do, which is you can cap, and we see Phaeton and Think suggesting this.

You can torture someone until they give you all their cards and then kill them.

This is absolutely what the evil players, the player hunters, is that what they're called?

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

I think that that...

Torture someone until they give you your cards and then kill them is absolutely player hunter business.

But again, it comes second second nature to the Phantom Troop.

This is like, you know, when the Zelda assassins showed up to hunt down Krolo and all the other assassins were kind of like, well, I guess this is a rest day for me.

This is the Phantom Troop arriving in a game, masters of like

figuring out rules and mechanics.

Well, the important thing is Phaeton and Finks don't yet know all the rules.

They know what

Ada says.

They don't know what Shalmark has figured out because they don't even know Shalmark's here yet.

And they're like, they're in the game.

Instead of wasting one second playing the game by the rules, they create their own game, which is kill as many people as possible.

Yes.

Yeah.

They have a colleague say that that's what they want to do.

God defined as a game.

They're me in multiplayer games like this, where I'm just like, oh, let's just go ruin somebody's time.

They, um, oh, sorry, brief sidebar.

Remember that man that exploded?

There's a rumor going around that there is a player called the bomber.

That's all, that's all we get, but there's a name there.

As we start seeing the Phantom Troop starting to manipulate this game, I'm just getting such an awful feeling about Hisuka.

I'm just.

Why?

It's not like he's in the opening cutscene.

Yeah, why would you ever think that Hisuka would be around?

He's not in the Phantom Troop anymore.

Yeah, exactly.

But, like,

I don't think we're ever going to see him again.

You know, you know.

Surely he can't be in every arc.

I think this is an environment that Hisuka would thrive in.

And I say thrive in the most awful sense of the word.

I feel like the specific skill set that this pervert has developed over his, what, 28 years, something like that, has just built him for Greed Island.

He was playing Greed Island in the Hunter exam.

You know?

What a legend.

And then Shalnark discovers something about the nature of the universe.

And this blew my mind.

I don't know if this is true.

Shallnark definitely thinks it's true.

And it's a very exciting idea.

And when Tagashi discovers an exciting idea, we can sort of

either assume that it's true or it's close to true.

This might not be a video game.

What if the consoles teleport you to a real place?

A real constructed place in the world.

And you have to play Greed Island there.

Wait, but Jack, there's magic everywhere.

Well, okay, so what if the magic is

what if the magic is a very particular application of Nen disguising itself?

Or what if the thing that Jing has done is built a bizarre simulacra?

My thinking is it's Nen.

Anyway.

So you're saying that your best guess is that all of the cards are doing pre-programmed Nen?

Yes.

But then why?

And that the magic items are real items that have been turned into cards, not cards that have been turned into items.

No, I think Nen could turn cards into items.

Well, but they have to be like real things if they're in the world.

Oh, what I mean to say is I think I could cast a Nen charm on a card that I had illustrated with my three friends.

That would mean that if you held this card and said gain, it would turn into a sword okay that's how jack announces that we're making greed island we're the three friends with those net powers that jack mentioned here's the thing oh only three of us huh no yeah jack said they're three friends

if that's you and keith if what shallnock is saying is true and i'm setting aside the sort of like the thematic put it this way jack's everything is a game bell is now ringing so hard that the clap has fallen out of it setting that aside one of two things is true either

Jing

has constructed

like a machine world that's not using Nen, but is like

a bizarre simulacra of the real world.

Not using Nen, but made of Nen.

Maybe made of Nen.

Maybe made of like

set

facades and, you know, um...

He said made of sex.

Made of sex.

He's constructed a weird world made of sex.

No, he's like built a world out of materials that aren't Nen.

I don't know how he'd do that.

Because Nen is the most powerful thing.

Or

he has used his Nene.

Wait, it's about double Nen.

To construct a world.

This is like, you know, the cards are pre-programmed, Nen.

Or...

I'm just realizing this one's really awful.

Magic is real.

I don't know how I'd feel about that.

There's a second thing next to nen.

Yeah, there's nen and there's also magic.

This would be like that's like angel world.

Yes.

Nen isn't even worlded.

Magic is angel world.

There's that great joke in what we do in the shadows where the vampires completely refuse to believe that ghosts exist, which I think is great every single time.

And something about magic being real, or rather, nen is real, but magic, of course, isn't real.

Gives me the same sort of feeling where I'm like,

No, magic can't be real, but nen can be real.

I mean, in any case, it seems like what Shalnark is supposing is that we're actually playing.

He wrote down here:

Greed Island is a trap that sends players who use Hatsu here to this island.

Keith, I'd like you to get a little telephone effect or like a radio effect, and I'd like you to queue up the tape from when you ask me what Greed Island is, and I say, I think Greed Island is a trap.

Did you say that?

I said it explicitly that.

Okay, great.

Yeah, I would love to do it.

I think someone has built Greed Island and it's a trap.

Of course, Shalnark's big brain figures out something really funny here, which is that if Greed Island is a real place and we're the Phantom Troop,

what if we just rob it without completing the game?

He's essentially saying, like, what if we get stuff out?

What if we just heist Greed Island?

It's great.

It's real cool.

I love these fucking weirdos.

Yeah.

Yeah, they're so cool.

Love them so much.

There was a point.

It's very important to have characters in anything whose first reaction to whatever happens to them is, but what if we steal it?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

God, it's great.

I don't know if this is true.

It has earth-shattering consequences in terms of like.

If we think, and the entire world thinks, that they've been playing a bizarre, rare video game, but they've been in fact teleported to like a specially constructed theater arena,

that's that's meaningful.

As is the fact that

hunters think the world is a game theory that I keep going back and back to is it's like hunters think the world is a game game, so they enlist in a magical video game because they can't get enough of games.

But the secret truth, you know, this is Jigsaw speaking to the person on the tape, is that

it's actually still the real world.

You never escape, you know.

I built the game in the real world.

Welcome to our tiny island.

You must play a game and collect the cards.

Hey, do you remember when we saw the world map with the mafia zones on it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And there was an area that wasn't colored in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I said, I bet that's where Jing Freaks is.

What if that's Greed Island?

What if?

No, that can't be Greed Island.

Greed Island's got to be way smaller than that.

Hmm.

Well, time for an extremely funny montage.

As pursued by Pigtails,

Goat and Killiwa move through.

Well, so first they encounter some coughing bandits.

They get given a side quest.

So good.

Ah, the coughing, but the famous coughing bandits.

The coughing bandits basically rob them of their money and their clothes.

And Gun and Killer are like, we'll get some information from this.

They don't.

So for the rest of this scene, they are, you know, wearing their little white undershirts, running through the forest.

Pigtails is just baffled by their involvement in this scheme.

At one point, so they need to put up the money.

Oh, this is so funny.

This is such a great escalation.

Look at the joke they've done three times.

Right.

So

they

want to help the coughing bandits because of the sun.

And

of the sun, S-O-N.

Sick.

Yes, he's sick.

He's going to die.

And I think Gone probably wants to help because he's helpful.

And Kilo wants to help because they might give them items or money.

And they ask for 80,000 Jenny, which is exactly the amount of money we have left.

And then

the pigtail girl goes, I have 80,000 Jenny.

I could give it to you.

And Killer just goes slightly obsequious.

Hunt up.

You are not part of our team.

You're not in our club.

Go away.

They just go, yeah, I guess we'll just give them the 80,000.

They lose $80,000 of their own.

In order to avoid talking to this girl,

for the entire rest of the background of this scene, you can see Pigtails out of focus, just like steaming in the background.

Batman Beyond Eyes.

Batman Beyond Eyes.

Then there is an extremely cool

fight with these massive Cyclopses.

This was a real.

This is a realima, by the way.

They are called Cyclopses.

Okay, cool.

This is in this sort of like pillars of stone I described earlier.

This was a real moment for me of like you can just draw anything you want, you know?

Takashi could have been drawing like city-sized monsters this whole time, and he hasn't been.

He's just like, You want to fight Cyclopses now in essentially an afterthought scene?

And after denying you a tournament arc, do you want to see just like a really well-animated fight sequence with these giant monsters?

Go for it.

I like that Goan punches the Cyclops and does nothing, and then Killer was like, Gotta get the eyes.

It's a video game.

That's made even funnier if it's not actually a video game.

Well, it's still made a video game, like

mechanics, even if it's in the real world.

Oh, that is true.

The specific thing that I put down was like, this is like playtime for Gonan Killua.

And it does just get way funnier to me if they are essentially doing playtime in a continent that they've been teleported to.

You know what I found?

I found, I just saw this in my notes while I was looking for something else, but we never read Shallnark's like real argument for why this isn't a game, which is...

this game isn't taking place in a virtual world.

We're somewhere in the real world.

If the players actually entered the game, their spirits would detach from their bodies, leaving their bodies behind.

Sending them physically into the game would be unnecessary.

Which, to Shallnark's credit, is true of every movie or TV show that I've ever seen where people go into a game.

That's true.

Also,

I was just throwing around words like spirit, pretty casually here, phantom troop,

Consciousness.

Yeah.

Soul.

Yeah.

We have determined that they are Christian.

Right, they are Christian.

We determined this earlier in the episode, that they are a youth group.

They explicitly believe in the afterlife.

Yep.

The Phantom Troops

believe in souls, right?

Or is it only Krolo who believes in souls?

Explicitly?

Krolo says it, but they do reference it.

Other characters do.

Yeah, they think that Uvo has gone somewhere good.

Yeah.

Rather than hell, where he should absolutely go.

Well, to the Vanderdrew, probably hell would be good.

Whoa, to the Joker, whoa.

Well, this is their Adams family thing, where they're just like, all of everything that's scary and bad is actually good and fun.

Well, except for the fact that they do genuinely like to hang out with each other and play cards and chase and play games.

Who loves his wife more than

Mr.

Adams?

Why am I forgetting

Adams?

Yes, Gomez.

Yes, Gomez.

Phaeton is Pugsley.

No, Phaeton is Wednesday.

Who's Pugsley?

A lot of them are Wednesday.

A lot of them are Wednesday.

I think she's a Kuma.

Nobunaga is Pugsley.

Okay, sure.

God, would Nobunaga like Greed Island?

I don't think so.

He'd be like, what is happening?

He doesn't understand.

Yeah.

I'm too old for this shit.

I miss my husband.

We gotta be helping the boss.

They would tell him that if you kill someone, you don't get their cards, and he would forget and just kill people constantly for no gain.

So mad every time.

Yeah, dah!

At this point, Pigtails is starting to move into her new thing where she's like, wow, these kids kind of have potential.

At this point, I started getting increasingly suspicious of her.

Previously, I was suspicious because I was like, she's trying to ruin their friendship.

And now I'm like,

this kid is a Nenmaster.

Yeah.

Although,

you've made the mistake that some other characters have made in the past.

Her being here makes her a Nenmaster.

Oh, yes, yes, that is true.

I think this might not be a normal girl.

Yeah,

that's how easily it happens, Keith.

Just people in the world are making that mistake all the time.

Then they get chased by a huge blue salamander.

That is called the Melanin Lizard.

Why?

I don't know.

That's a fucking crazy name.

It's a crazy name.

It's a crazy name.

That's insane.

Yes.

It's a free Twitter name for someone.

I can't use it, but someone can.

Then they get chased by, or they get attacked by this little tiny sort of like puffball, a black puffball with a little tail.

It swings around so quickly.

That's called the hyper puffball.

Pigtails is watching, sort of just with her head in her hands, going, just use, go.

just you see where it's see where it's going to be yeah rather than just there's a great shot of go to killio just like uselessly grabbing at the air because they can't be bothered to like think about how to defeat the enemy this is me playing any game that isn't a button masher and deciding to button mash and like i do dying really easily and it's like my brother in christ get bit

she is me watching other people play video games honestly this is i am like this and i know it's an ugly part of me but i will be like you guys are fucking doing the mechanics wrong You need to use ten and then Zetsu there's uh they meet an Ikaruga horse

Yep, then they meet an Ikaruga horse.

Uh, this is a horse that plays bullet hell by shooting bubbles from its nose Gonan kill your essentially just poke the bubbles which explode in a shockwave and then shrug and

go away.

Uh pigtails knows how to beat it.

Uh, she sort of is like you have to these bubbles behave in different ways and you can use your your nen to figure out the bubbles with the implication being that defeating this horse would give you a powerful item, Gon and Giliro are just like, nope.

Yeah, they, they, it, it, you, you have to swap between ten and Zetsu in order to get past it.

Yeah, you ever uh encounter like an environment puzzle or a Korok puzzle in uh Tears of the Kingdom, and you're like, this is gonna be too complicated, and you just go plunging off over another hill.

Yeah, I'm busy, I have a town to get to, I'll

mark it on the map and come back.

Uh, and then gleefully,

as if if to say, I'm not done.

Tagashi moves into a montage of these chibi characters.

Or the animators move into a montage with these chibi characters.

I don't know how Tagashi did it.

They run from a snake worm.

They run from a swimming.

They kick a slime.

Yeah, they kick a slime.

They pink.

Sorry, they pink.

I was about to say they punch square pink lightning monster.

Briefly, they just get chased by bees.

The next one is my favorite.

What is the next one?

The next one is the suit of armor.

Oh, yeah.

So, at this point, Pigtails is like, you are wasting your potential, but she doesn't say it.

She's just running, running behind them.

Yeah, tell us about the suit of armor.

So, they're fighting the suit of armor, and it's taking all of their punches, and they're getting really frustrated.

And this is when she finally speaks up, and she's like, Use Gyo.

And they're like, What?

Let's get it.

And so, they use Gyo, and they can see that from the suit of armor is a trail of Nen leading around the corner.

And Goan runs around the corner, and there's a tiny little pink little guy that looks like what if Kirby was a mouse

that's controlling it.

And as soon as it sees Goan turn the corner, it gets scared and poofs into a card.

And his name is Radio Rat.

Yeah.

Oh, a Radio Rat.

Radio Rat.

All these monsters are so playful because, of course, they're playful because the facade of the facade of Greed Island is genuinely nice.

You know, the towns are pretty, the games are fun.

The monsters are cool to look at.

But yeah, as she commands them to use Gyo, we start hearing some new music.

Do you have this, Keith?

Yes, I certainly do.

This is the unnamed theme of Biscuit Krueger.

Yeah.

I'm not sure what it is.

Fucking such a good song.

For us or unnamed for a spoiler reason?

Unnamed for everyone.

It was never released on the soundtrack.

That's crazy.

I know, it's so good.

Wow.

Yeah.

Luckily, I was able to find it.

This is such a great

piratey to anybody else.

It's very pirate.

Yeah.

It feels piratey to me.

It feels it's like a

roughly played folk violin.

I wasn't sure if this was her.

So the next thing that happens is

she gives them a Gyo test.

She says, oh my gosh.

And she raises her finger.

And the number one.

The maneuver here is so funny.

She goes from the annoying girl that's following them around to, I'm your boss now, in about four seconds.

The writing and the performance and the animating to get the character through three distinct modes.

Her clearly facile oo-woo-poeez mode.

Her extremely funny but kind of thin, I will punish you mode.

And then the mode that I imagine she's going to be spending a lot of time in, this like, look, idiots.

Yeah.

It's so funny.

One of my favorite jokes in this whole thing

is that Gyo test.

Sorry, does someone want to describe the Gyo test before I say the really good joke that happens with it?

What, the part where she puts her up there?

There's a little number they have to read?

Yeah, and so they have to get to Gyo as fast as possible in order to like, because she's just like, you should just be using Gyo whenever anything weird happens, which is frankly right.

She's so right, she's so right.

Uh, the fact that we haven't heard this really before is that is going to kill your brain through and through.

Yeah, it's really revealing that, like,

between learning nen and now, they haven't been able to turn their education into experience almost on any level.

They, all of their nen learning is like theoretical outside of Heaven's Arena.

Yeah.

And so Kilo was doing the Kilo thing predictably and is being like, Why should we listen to you?

Who are you?

Who made you the boss to me?

Why should I have to do what you're saying?

And she holds up her finger again.

And while Kilo is protesting, like, I'm not doing what you say, Goan goes like four, and then she stops.

This is what I'm talking about with like

the way that when the the show wants to like amp the pace up of its dialogue, like the literal pace, not the pace of like show pacing, but like how fast people are talking, people interrupting each other.

It's really good at it.

This kind of mode that Pigtails is in as well is very much the kind of affect that I was talking about, about like why it is meaningful that she is initially being presented as a child character, because it lets us into this banter of like how extremely funny it is that one of these kids is just bossing around the other two.

Yeah.

Well,

she has been studying Nen for quite some time.

Yes, Goan,

she says, Killua, drop and give me 50 push-ups.

200 push-ups?

She said 50 for me, or I was laughing so hard that I forgot what she said.

I could be wrong.

I could have sworn it was 200 because 50 seems a little too easy for

Killa.

Says,

Who the fuck are you?

And she says, Oh, sorry, I didn't introduce myself.

My name is Biscuit Krueger.

Yep.

I've been studying Nen for 40 years.

Fucking French the table ass name.

To which Killiua says, So you're an old hag?

And then she punches him into the sky.

He cannot be stopped.

This man hates women.

He screams it at her her like it's a crime to be to be an old woman.

It's so fucking funny.

Well, it's because he realizes in this moment that he has been absolutely outmaneuvered.

So the only refuge he has is

lowest and pettiest to child misogyny.

His best friend in the whole world has betrayed him in an instant and

put himself lower than her and he's just done.

Now, this is a nen teacher.

We've been seeing various nen masters showing up all this time.

This one's the business.

Punch killer into the sky, give Gona Gyota an extremely useful eye test that he should have done for ages.

She says, hmm, like a Sailor Moon character with the sort of success as Ghon looks on with a kind of awe.

And the episode ends.

This is just...

just such a delight.

Oh, this folk violin is playing as she's introducing herself, so I wasn't sure whether or not this was like a...

Something that's fun about going into new arcs is trying to identify whether I'm hearing motifs for places or people.

You know, whether it's like, oh, this is a Greed Island motif that's going to be coming up.

Well, the folk violin is not absent from the Greed Island theme.

So it is like a similar set of Instagram.

But that like rolling, that sort of like, it's, it's a waltz, right?

Or it's a, it's a syncopated, it's in four-time.

Yeah, it is.

Hit it.

Uh, yes.

Sorry, I was doing something else.

It's a waltz.

It's in three.

I'm doing Irish River Dance to this.

Yeah, it's got a sort of Irish river dance for it.

Oh, yeah.

It's kind of...

It's an interesting theme to give Biscuit based on what we've seen of her so far, where she's just extremely impulsive and violent.

And giving her this theme that has a kind of gravitas to it, even in this, like, sort of like,

you know, just because it's a folk violin doesn't rob the melody of any of the sort of like...

shape that it has.

And so I'm like,

is this speaking, is this, is her theme cluing us us into this is a woman with 40 years training in Nan?

Here,

let me scrub through the Reed Island theme just for a second.

Yeah, it's a much different violin.

Yeah, it's played up on the other, um, the other, the top two strings of the violin.

And I think Biscuit's theme is on the on the bottom two.

God, this little Whoville choral sequence.

Yeah.

Tell me what this choral part really reminds me of is like

piece of shit Danny Elfman's composing.

Ah, yeah.

It's got the bounce.

I actually, I like Danny Elfman's composing a bit, but he's not.

I just hate the fucking guy.

I don't know anything about him.

He's a piece of shit.

He's a piece of shit.

I'll believe you.

Yeah.

How long have you been excited for Biscuit to be introduced in the show?

Oh my god.

Forever.

For For a while.

For a while.

Like, since, I would say since Wing showed up.

Because I was like, ah, yes, there's another nen teacher who will be here and I adore her.

I've been trying to get Ally on the next set of episodes because of Biscuit Krueger for four months.

Is Allie a big Biscuit fan?

I don't know.

She hasn't read it.

I just think that she would be.

Biscuit is a very Allie character, I think.

I think Biscuit, Biscuit, you know, not only with the name, I think Biscuit is the kind of character that we often keep putting in things.

Um,

Weird, violent, powerful idiot with hang-ups.

Yeah.

I would never play a character like that.

I will say I'm wary

of

the Canary problem.

Canary is such a great character, and she appeared

and then disappeared.

And I know Canary's coming back.

You know,

Tagashi puts pieces on the board on purpose.

We're going to see more of Canary.

But But I'll be so bummed if we get like two episodes of Biscuit.

If Biscuit is as much of a character as Mizuken or somebody, you know?

Well, damn.

I gave it away.

My dream.

Biscuit is a funny enough introduction to the Goan Killuer dynamic.

that I would like Biscuit to be like a recurring cast member that gets occasionally graduated to main cast member.

That's what I would like to see.

You know, she is in both the opening and ending theme.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

you could get some

look at how things are going to go if you look at the episode titles for next time.

Oh, yeah.

What are we watching next time, Keith?

We're watching three episodes.

Wow.

Three episodes?

Three episodes.

It is a gift.

A hard master.

Strengthen and threaten.

Yep, both of those sound like biscuit steel.

And evil fist and rock, paper, scissors.

What, more?

No, that's one.

Yeah, but more rock, paper, scissors.

Oh, right.

Yes, more rock, paper, scissors.

Yeah, more rock, paper, scissors.

That's one of those titles that works so much better in Japanese.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, really?

Well, because I think that the evil fist thing is a pun, if I'm remembering right.

All these titles rhyme.

They do rhyme, yeah.

And they didn't even bother to try and translate that.

I mean, I don't say they didn't even bother.

Translating is really hard, and translating rhyming is really hard.

It's like a real struggle with localization, I imagine.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm just saying that if I knew Japanese, a thing that I don't, and if I had the skill set of a translator, a thing that I don't, and if I had the amount of time that they've been allotted, a thing that I don't, I'd have made them all rhyme.

Do you want to hear one of my favorite successes of localizing a pun.

Yes,

in Pokemon Gen 2, there's a Pokemon called Girafferig that is a weird two-headed giraffe Pokemon thing.

It's a palindrome,

and in the Japanese, it is also a palindrome, and it's also a reference to giraffes.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's why I nailed it.

I know.

Nailed it.

Good for them.

Good for them.

That's got to be really hard to do.

It must have been so exciting when they figured it out.

Why do we think she's called Biscuit?

First name?

Name.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah, take that off.

Don't.

Yeah.

Hold on.

Take two, take two, take two.

How about I just bleep it in so everyone can be like, oh, everyone will.

Why does she have a German surname?

German.

Yeah, she's German.

She's from Dusseldorf.

Graduated from the University of Dusseldorf.

Yeah, you know, what was Nen?

Yeah.

Deep in the heart of the Rhineland, the Kruger family.

Oh my god.

And now Tagashi's Nen games get even more fun, right?

Because after the joy of meeting all the Phantom Troop and being like, well, these guys are all clearly Nen masters and we're going to get to see their power.

We've been introduced to another Nen Master and we haven't seen Biscuit do any Nen other than looking at things.

Right.

And keeping up with Gonakilua.

Yeah, that's true.

But we haven't seen her do Nen tricks.

Yeah, no tricks yet.

I had so much fun with this block of episodes.

Yeah, I'm really happy now.

It's been so long since we recorded,

but I'm happy now with the decision to have, like, not recorded this episode and then be forced to take, like, three weeks or four weeks off of recording.

I think it would have done a lot of damage to an arc that I kind of think is underrated in the grand scheme of Hunter-Hunter.

Like, it is not...

We can talk about this more as Greed Island goes on, but I think it's not really done a lot of favors

with its placement in the chronology of the series, basically.

I think it coming after Yorknew, I like that.

I love that.

Because it's between Yorknew and the Chimera Antarct.

Yes.

So it kind of gets swallowed up by the two of them.

And it has one fatal flaw that

makes it contrast poorly with those two.

I think, yeah.

I think I agree with that.

Interesting.

I say fatal flaw.

It's not a fatal flaw.

It's just like when you're comparing the things that are so magnetic about York New and Chimera Ant, that thing isn't really in the season, and

it makes it feel flat, even though I think everything that happens in it's really good.

Hey, do you think Krollo could enter Greed Island, or would him using his hatsu to enter the game kill him?

I believe that that is the case.

Well, Krollo actually could enter Greed Island in one way, if Sharon.

That's right.

Yeah, that's true.

But also, who knows what Linden breached Greed Island?

Who knows what could happen?

I mean,

we already know what

the Phantom Troop are up to in regards to Krolo and his Nen powers.

Well,

they want to get him back his Nen powers one way or another.

I don't know how they're going to do that in a way that is satisfying.

I don't know how they're going to say, this guy,

so much work was put into taking this away, and now now we're going to give it back in a way that's going to feel earned.

I don't know.

Have they outlined a plan yet?

I can't remember, and I don't want to say that.

They have no.

No.

No.

They have.

They've talked about residual nen.

And oh, they mentioned briefly that there are, they say, like, there are people in the world who can give people nen.

Who can give people nen?

Or something like that.

Restore Nen.

I think there's people that can remove nen.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

They do talk about that.

Yeah.

Remove the curses.

They have talked about that.

Yes, you're right.

Here's what I'd do.

I would

void it.

I would like put Krollo in a situation where we could safely trigger the heart.

You'd find a way to annul it?

Just give him a second heart so he doesn't need the heart that gets stabbed.

Yeah, I mean, the way I would do it was like, one of the ways that you could get rid of the curse is if it fires.

So is there a way we can actually get it to fire safely?

I don't know.

I don't know.

Oh, it's made way harder by the fact that they can't contact him.

Yes, true.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, very true.

Oh, I should say that these episodes that are coming next,

they are the first episodes in what the TV DB bizarrely calls the second season of Hunter Hunter.

Weird.

That is really weird.

Yeah, so TVDB is like so terrible at numbering anime

because anime often is numbered without seasons taken into account.

So it'll just be like episode 94 or whatever.

And that causes some confusion.

And

so they have like basically two 65 episode long seasons and then like one

like 12 episode long season.

Jesus.

But these are, this is all to say, I gave you the names, but those are episodes 63, 64, and 65.

I don't think I'll see.

I'm very sorry to ask one more thing before we go, seeing as I didn't realize this was another three-hour fucking recording.

Do you guys like the new end theme?

Because it's growing on me like a lot.

I really do like it.

Yeah, I've always,

it was not one that really stuck in my memory, but I've been listening to it just like on its own a lot more.

And I'm like, yeah, this is a little groove to it.

I think it's going to grow on me.

I don't think I'm there yet, but I can, I can,

I'm not ruling it out.

I love the wahoo at the beginning.

I was about to say, I find the wahoo at the beginning to be something of an imposition on

me experiencing this for the first time.

Okay.

And I suspect that that might be

why it's grown on you, because I suspect that the wahoo is actually...

really fun

and when you know what's about to happen doesn't feel like it's like the guy next door has just started singing

yeah fair

it's it evokes the roundabout end of JoJo's season one for me of like, oh, the ending theme starting, so you know the show's about to end.

Except instead of it being yes guitar lines, it's a guy going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

It's got the most,

the most sort of stereotypical shonen lyrics out of any of them yet.

Oh, yeah.

Hit me with some lyrics.

Is it...

Is it, I'm pursuing two idiots, I'm going to teach them then properly?

No, it is not that.

It's what kind of world awaits us down this unexplored path?

Will our silent voices just fade away without reaching anyone?

Yesterday's memories are hard to forget, but let's throw them all away and focus on tomorrow.

When the morning sun shines off our wounds, we'll laugh them off and continue our endless journey.

Wow.

Yeah.

Very.

It's true, though.

This is like...

Classic Shonen Fair, I feel like.

We know the wind is blowing against us, but we have reason to keep going.

It's still too early for us to just live and grow old.

Things we've picked up and things we're stuck with, once we let them all go, something new will begin.

Wahoo.

Wahoo.

What's it?

Throw out the.

What is it?

There's a line that I feel like is very Hunter-Hunter.

It's like, throw out the hunter.

Tear up this recipe for a smooth sailing life.

Yes.

And feel the reason we'll live our own way.

Sick.

Yeah, classic.

This is classic stuff.

Do you enjoy Media Club Plus?

If you do, and I do,

you should go to Apple Podcasts

and leave us a five-star review.

Is a four-star review good enough?

Absolutely not.

No.

No.

Just pick up.

No.

Get out of here.

Is a three-star review good enough?

It's getting worse.

It's getting worse.

Is a two-star review good enough?

No.

No.

Anything below that?

Can I read read a five-star review, sure

that is baffling to me.

Okay, this is from Patreon App User.

Okay, I was like, what is what does this say?

Patreon Appuser?

Anyway, the title is

a classic appuser, god.

The title is, quote, real spoiler, and then the text is just

Leorio backshots.

Oh, yeah, we asked for fake fake spoiler.

That's the most exciting.

Yeah, we asked for that.

Sorry, this, when we asked for that, it was too, it was, it came out

a month ago or something, or maybe six weeks ago, but we recorded it in like

February or something.

29.

Here's a good way to get me to read your review.

Confuse the fuck out of me.

Oh, yeah.

New review style.

Leave something very confusing for Sylvie to read.

Yeah, get my attention.

Yeah.

Can I read a five-star review?

Oh, my God.

Please.

This is a review from March 14th by Kate Snowden,

who says, I was not familiar with friends at the table before listening to this podcast, but I have been a die-hard Hunter-Hunter fan for so long.

And while trying to look for more content and analyses about the show, I found this absolute gem of a podcast.

I binged it all, and now I'm rubbing my hands together, excited for new episodes.

The hosts are incredibly smart and hilarious, and have such insightful things to say about it.

For a while, I struggled to find good Hunter Hunter analyses online, but this one absolutely takes the cake for the best one I have seen.

They talk about everything from character writing, visual symbolism, and use of music in the show.

Listening to the show feels like getting to relive, watching it for the first time.

So excited for future episodes.

Thank you so much, Kate Snowden.

Yeah, that's very nice.

Such a pleasure to get that review.

And yeah,

if you

have friends who like Hunter Hunter

but don't know who the hell we are, all the better.

Yeah, get them to listen.

Yeah.

We think we make a pretty good show

and I think that

they would have a lot of fun.

Put it this way, if I loved Hunter Hunter and I went online and found this podcast, I'd be like, hell yeah.

Yeah, me too.

You know what you should do?

is

tell your friends.

Tell someone,

go to the anime club you've heard about and tell them about it.

Also, if you like talking about Hunter Hunter with your friends and you miss

hearing talk about Hunter Hunter online and you've listened to us and given us a five-star review, you could also make a show yourself.

Yes, it's a lot of fun.

It's a huge amount of fun.

It's almost no work at all.

Well,

I'm looking at the clock.

Alone, vulnerable, and hesitant, you look up to the moon and wish for salvation.

Our journey has made us stronger.

I genuinely can't tell when you're doing it on purpose teeth or when it's the soundboard.

It is just gone now.

I just read a review from people who don't listen to our other show.

And so they don't know that that's the soundboard.

Is that the soundboard?

Yeah, it is the soundboard.

That is the soundboard.

But how adequately can you mimic the laugh?

That wasn't bad.

Thank you.

That was pretty darn here.

Hold on.

I'll try.

Fuck you.

Now I don't know.

I don't know the difference anymore.

No, I can tell.

I can always tell.

That's the soundboard again.

Yeah, that's the soundboard.

That's Sylvie.

Fuck you.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

All right, all right.

I'll do a I'll do a really do a real laugh.

Here we go.

Good night, everybody.

Tiffy Waitos.

Should we do a clap?

Yeah, yeah, that's fine.

All right, three,

two, one.

Say.

Oh, that was so much fun.

Yeah, that was great.