Question x Answer: Media Club Plus Bonus

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

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

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

And today, we're not covering any episodes at all.

We are doing a Q ⁇ A, a recap thing, a comment thing.

And we're going to go through a bunch of questions that we got, mostly from the Patreon, but then also from the co-host

at Friends-Table and then also from our email address,

friendsofthetable at gmail.com.

My name is 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.

It is May.

May is follow run button on YouTube or else month.

Or else.

Or else.

You know, and I, you know, I can see, I can see when people don't subscribe because

it tells you how many people subscribe.

And then I'm like, seven, seven and a half, eight and a half billion still, still not.

And well, here's a question.

I've already subscribed.

So am I safe or do I need to make a new account and subscribe?

No, no, that's safe.

One is safe.

I'm not unreasonable.

Okay.

I'm just...

Not a fascist.

No.

Just don't let me catch you not subscribed.

You do not want to see Keith in the streets if you're not subscribed.

Lots of stuff coming up on Run Button.

We've put out more videos in April than we did the whole rest of the year combined.

So why don't you check out Run Button on YouTube?

With me, as always, is Jack Take.

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.

Sylvia Bullard?

Wait, I don't subscribe to Run Button right now, and instead of subscribing, I'm currently constructing elaborate defenses.

Oh, my God.

Oh, shit.

I can make it past those.

I train all year for this month.

I hate it, but it's necessary.

That's fair.

Yeah.

People hearing about subscribe to Run Button on YouTube or else month, they're just getting started now on their defenses.

You would have had to start last May to beat me.

Yeah.

You're fucked.

He's the Apex Predator.

Sylvie Bullet.

Yeah.

Hi.

Is this Randy Orton?

Yeah, shut the fuck up.

I'm...

I'm.

This is off the rails already.

Hi, I'm Sylvia.

You can follow me pretty much everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And you can check out the Friends of the Table YouTube, where Keith and I are playing 999 right now at youtube.com slash friends of the table.

It's also live on Twitch sometimes, twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

Andrew Lee Juan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at Swanzeri3000.

If you like the

energy that has been present so far in this recording, you should go listen to our episodes of the slow knife on Patreon.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

We get it.

The Slow Knife is great.

That's Tangent City.

That is like

the Kingdom of Yap is.

What is it actually called?

Oligo, I think we decided on?

It's great.

I've had a blast with the Slow Knife.

We have one episode left to record, I think.

Yeah.

And I'll be sad to see it go.

But

it'll be on the Patreon forevermore.

Yeah.

We've also got the new merch at friendsofthetable.shop.

You should check that out.

If you haven't seen the new merch, it's all great.

Look at the sugar.

Look at the glass.

Look at the look at the candle.

We have a candle.

Haven't you always wanted another candle?

We have a glass and a candle.

We're doing, we're, we're not just your average run-of-the-mill t-shirt shop.

Uh, there is a sick t-shirt, though.

There is a sick t-shirt, though.

Like, we do have t-shirts.

I'm wearing one of our t-shirts right now.

They're very soft and they're me too.

Utmost quality.

Yeah, I wear them all.

So there's several reasons why I wanted to do this this week.

First of all, it's the last

by the time the next arc ends we will be past the midway point and if if i had to pick which one would be best to do like a series so far discussion on it's now and not then it's it will be too late by then yeah um uh i think i think dre and sylvie know what looms around the corner

god yeah we've

oh this

This time next year is going to be so interesting.

Yeah, it is.

And

so it felt like now would be a a good time.

The other thing is, our famous backlog, it's gone.

We have nothing else.

And so in order to avoid recording an episode about Greed Island and then having to wait two weeks to record a second episode about Greed Island, I decided to do this today so that we can do a bunch of Greed Island closer together so that we can do Greed Island justice.

It deserves that.

And so we asked for questions and we got a bunch of questions.

But before that, do we want to talk a little bit about how Hunter Hunter's been going, how the podcast has been going, things that like we're excited to talk about today specifically before we get into questions?

Oh, I don't know.

I'm feeling great about all of this.

This has been like such a delight to do.

And like, I already loved Hunter Hunter, but it's nice to have an excuse to be really annoyingly in-depth about it.

And

you don't get a lot of opportunities to have these discussions about the thing you're super focused on.

And another thing I was, I was editing episode 18, and the thing that I noticed was like

how

after a lot of anxiety about the order specifically of that season and talking about it honestly too much, the thing that I came out realizing was that Hunter Hunter is like really good if you have someone feeding you exact episodes to watch.

Because left to my own devices, both times I watched Hunter Hunter all the way through, I was watching five, six, seven episodes at a time.

Yeah, gobble it right up.

Absolutely devouring it.

And

being forced to take it a little bit more slowly and also to like have the really good episodes to stop on forced on you.

The episodes that make you go, I gotta watch more.

We have to stop on those

because we can't.

We can't watch.

We can't do a 15-episode long recording session.

It wouldn't, it would go on for two full days um so that's been fun i i'm now relishing that power that i didn't realize that i had by

by dictating which episodes exactly that we watch

the more the more of it that i watch the more

maybe it maybe there's maybe it's a bell curve and it actually gets easier with the long view but right now the more complicated that task seems to be to me of like deciding how you were going to break it up, how things were going to work, not just in the sense that we're going to talk about arcs, but here's how you're chunking up episodes within the arcs.

At this point, it seems extremely complicated.

But maybe once you've seen the whole thing, you have a broader view of it, and it's actually not quite as complicated as it seems from In the Trenches.

I don't know.

So this was

maybe the reason why I talked a lot about the episode pacing in this arc was because I hadn't had a hard time of it until now, and I wasn't anticipating having a hard time with it.

I am anticipating the Chimera Ant Arc being really difficult and

doing edits on that.

That's already in the background.

I've gone back every couple of months and changed things around slightly.

In the same way that the Hunter exam had a sort of internal structure that helped guide how we were doing it.

You know, the Hunter exam, they play these sort of these games.

The games are, some of them are a single episode.

Some of them are a little run of episodes.

York New City doesn't really have quite as transparent a structure.

If you look for it, it's there.

You know, York New City is like a stealth mission, a massive assault, a series of hostage negotiations, etc.

Is there something in.

Because the thing I know about Chimera Ant is that it's unbelievably long.

Is there something within Chimera Ant that is guiding, that is a skeleton that you can build it on?

It almost seems deliberately designed to fuck with this podcast.

yes a little bit like

the thing about the pacing of a chimera ant is like

it is both the thing people criticize a lot about it and something i tend to enjoy about it is it gets very weird yeah um structurally

and content wise yes and like like every possible way um and yeah i don't know i don't want to i'm worried about letting something slip like what if tagashi did tagashi's trick to the very idea of pacing a show

it's fascinating i'm so curious especially because

you know people talk about as austin has said last time he was on the show there are two arcs that people say are the best arcs of hunter hunter and it's chimera and yorknew yeah and having come out of yorknew and it being such a sort of singular

um

propulsive little bit of television,

I'm curious to see...

I'm trying to figure out how to put it.

York New was very striking to me because of how much it played with genre, of how it slowed things down in a big way at several moments to do these like queasy, clammy, almost like noir-ish sequences.

Yeah, you know, we talked on the show about the way York New

changes the tone so spectacularly that whenever you get like Gone and Killiwa in the park having a food fight, it's like come crashing in through the wall.

It changes the tone, it changes the main characters.

It changes

the genre and main characters change.

It becomes like 30% about Karapika and like 40% about the villains.

And then, you know, a little bit about the children.

Everybody else has left.

Yeah.

Some of it's about Art Appraisal.

Yeah.

Including Gonakilua or the rest.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so with that in mind, you know, having seen one of these sort of like gold standard arcs completed, I am.

It's very, it's a very strange feeling to me, and I'm sure it's a very strange feeling to you in a different way, to have this sort of specter waiting out there.

And I don't mean this in the sense of like, I don't want to make too much of it.

I'm actually being very careful in terms of like

setting expectations for what's going to happen.

But based on the amount that people talk about it and the sheer volume of the thing, it feels like

something moving in the dark next to a submarine out of

the south.

The other thing is like,

it's funny now talking about Chimera Ant, like, thinking about what

is fundamentally a very different kind of season than the York News season.

Like,

it's not a surprise to me.

They're two very great seasons, and it's not a surprise that there's like a kind of person that doesn't like the Chimera Ant arc.

And maybe those people, I think there's definitely, even though it's my favorite arc, I think there's definitely more of a case of like bouncing off of Chimera Ant versus like, I don't really see the argument of like people who like Chimera Ant arc being like oh I don't really like York New City yeah that's weird

it seems more like a defensive thing like those people hate my season so I have to hate their season I don't know that's just like a wild guess it's just like nothing to hate about York New like my one

one of the the one of the most impressive things about it is how tight it is versus my real wish is I wish that it was longer.

I really wish that instead of 15 or whatever episodes in the York New City arc, we had like 25.

Here's what I will say about York New, actually, and I thought it was great,

is I'm glad it's over.

Not in the sense of like, I disliked it, I had a fantastic time with it, but my delight that it is over is the same feeling that one gets finishing a book that you really enjoyed and suddenly realizing, oh, I can read something else now.

Or, you know, like.

I can start thinking about another place and other characters or whatever.

Yeah.

It's a really oppressive arc, and it tells such a sort of self-contained, tight story that by the time I've gotten out of it, my feeling is not, I wish it were longer, because I think it gets everything done that it wants to get done.

I agree.

The feeling that I have is, oh my god, where are we going?

Where are we going next?

And, you know, we can't talk about this because otherwise, we'll just start making the main show in the sideshow.

But I've watched the first episode of the Greed Island arc, and

the

oh, that's fun.

There is something really we have been so hyper-focused on the phantom troop yeah and the problems that the phantom troop are causing that to be told that there is

there are there are other worlds than these you know that there is like uh there there is um

there are other imaginative spaces other depths to mine it feels so exciting I mean the title sequence of the

Greed Island arc already there is some wild stuff going on I got to see for the first time what happens when someone goes into greed island uh from the outside and you just saw like one second of that right it ends like right there doesn't it am i wrong it it ends

um

we're doing it we're doing the thing i haven't watched these yet

we've decided we were doing these well i have but not in a not this calendar year keep yes fair okay all right okay okay roll it back um a question one uh that i would like to ask, since we're talking briefly about chimera ant, this comes from several people.

We got several people ask this.

And I can answer this really quickly.

The question is, do you have a new best guess on chimera ants?

In the past, I have

spoken about my

sort of loose theory about what I think the chimera ant arc is.

If you don't recall, in brief, I think a chimera ant is a kind of animal that can

mimic a person almost perfectly.

Right.

And can

there's billions of them.

They can replicate like ants.

They can get everywhere.

And what the chimera ant arc is, is like an extremely extended game of like spot the intruder.

Yeah.

Has that changed?

No, not at all.

I haven't really thought.

about it beyond that point.

Here's what I will say though.

Because I formulated that idea before I knew what Nen was.

And now I think that the Chimera ants have to do something about, have something to do with Nen, or they can wield Nen in some way, because there's no fucking way a bit of this show is going to be introduced that isn't about Nen.

So, I don't know.

When we recorded the Jojo episode, Sylvie, and you revealed that the rat has stance.

Yeah.

Part of me is like, well, what if animals have named?

Look out next month, by the way, for the second part of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure bonus episodes where we talk about the rats.

Those were such a delight.

Those were such a delight.

Oh, my God.

Such a finish that season, by the way.

What did you think of the ending?

Whole

talk.

Oh, my God.

My God, it was so good.

Yeah.

We got him.

It was so good.

Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

It was so good.

Do you want to watch more JoJo, Keith?

Like, go into season five?

I think it's a good thing.

I think you go either show.

I mean, for you.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I was thinking, well, I watched it with Isaac, which is why I have already done with it.

And I

part of me is like, maybe I should watch

part three,

and then, but I really would like to go forward from here.

So I'm sort of like in between.

It's sort of like 50%

70% chance that I watch it

and 30% chance that I don't, and that's split evenly between watching part three and watching part five.

I would say I think

part five is very fun, but there's it does call back to part three a little more than part four does.

Okay, so maybe that's maybe that's my decision there.

I'll watch part three.

Yeah, I think at least that's in my memory it does, you know.

Oh, the only other thing I know about chimera ants is that I've heard a lot of litigation about whether or not they are ants.

That's something that we have talked about, not on this show, but we have talked about this.

Interesting, right?

Yes, because you're not sure whether they're ants or not, which is, of course, why would, like, on one hand, why would they be called ants if they're not ants?

But on the other hand, why would they be ants?

I mean, I remember before making this show, and even before talking about making this show, Chimera Ant came up, I think, while you were watching it, Keith, or maybe while Austin was watching it, and the two of you were talking about the Chimera Ant arc.

And you didn't get into specifics, which is amazing in retrospect.

It's very serendipitous.

But I do remember that there was some discussion about, like, I don't know if that's an ant or like or something along those lines.

So, I don't know.

So interesting.

I have no memory of what this is or what I said.

So I can't.

Yeah.

And I won't, even if I did.

But that's my answer to that question.

No real change.

I honestly haven't given it too much thought, in part because I've been thinking about the 13 freaks.

Well,

how many now?

I don't know, a million.

The hundred thousand.

Oh, no.

How many phantom troop members are there now?

No.

Oh, now, Nine?

Uvo's down.

Uvo's down.

Uvo's down.

Crowlo's down.

Crowlo's down.

He's down.

Crowl's on display.

Well, but they're not in the troop.

So

nine, if you can't.

Crow's on injured reserve.

Yeah.

Put Crowlo on IR.

Okay.

What's the next question?

All right.

Jack, this is another one for you.

Having seen what you've seen so far, what scenes would you use for your own devious screenshot game with someone who you would want to watch Hunter Hunter?

that's from Morgan.

This is such a good question because if my goal is to watch Hunter Hunter with someone, that is a very slightly different goal than what we had when we constructed the screenshot stream, right?

Yeah, it was to mystify you and bewilder me.

It was to mystify and bewilder me, and you succeeded.

So if I have the latitude to make a screenshot, a collection of screenshots for someone that I want to see the show with, I'm still thinking about similar sort of criteria.

I don't want to give too much stuff away, but I can get kind of fun with it in a way that

you were less able to.

So I would like to see

just a huge, a massive number of mafiosos in a cavern at night.

What's that about?

Why are they there?

I would show.

It's community.

It is.

It's a community.

It's a community expression.

Yeah.

Show

the indoor fish swimming through the air.

Yeah,

that was actually a

contender for my screenshot was the indoor fish.

Wow.

I love those indoor fish.

I wonder who Krolo took that power from.

And then let's see, a third one.

I want something really colorful.

I want something really...

Oh,

everybody queued up, ready to cook those huge pigs for the

hundred people ready to cook a massive pig?

Sure, that's fun.

And I think paints a characteristically broad brush, both in tone and in like literally color.

Yeah, good, good set.

Dre, do you want to read the next question?

Yeah, sure.

Which character from Hunter Hunter would you all like most like to hang out with?

And that is from Ivor.

We've talked about this

several times, but this is i think an ever-shifting question

like

you know and also i thought to myself when i read this i would like to hear this in including the main four and then excluding them if you couldn't hang out with them sylvie we already know crowlo

i can maybe for both answer probably answer without crowlo

Well, actually, I had a different answer for the main four too, by the way.

Sorry.

I'm sorry for thinking about this.

Because I do, I prepare.

It's fine.

It's just, I am predictable, but sometimes I like to throw a curveball.

I think, so I realized recently that aside from the one major misstep, Leorio is basically my best friend Mike.

So I think we got along great.

It's good.

You're saying Mike's major misstep.

Yeah, of course.

Yeah.

The domestic terrorism.

Mike's major misstep, MMM.

Yeah.

Just to say, my friend Mike hasn't done domestic terrorism.

I don't want him to get banned from any countries.

It's important to put most of the countries do listen to this show.

You know what?

I am paranoid now.

2024.

Everyone's listening.

Yeah.

I think I'm with you, Sylvie.

I think my answer would also be Leorio.

It's just like, what am I going to talk to two 12-year-olds about?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jack?

It's Karapika Karapika

because

he's sage and calming.

Except for the bit where the dagger pressing into his heart impels him to do awful revenge.

But, you know.

And we know he can hang.

We've seen those scenes.

Do you remember when Gunn and Killua were pillow fighting and Karapika was trying to sleep and then he does a little smile because he's happy his friends are having a good time?

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

My second choice is Killua because it would be a weird experience.

Yes, it would be weird.

uh

and for your for your non-four

i got one off the rip easily great mr zeppile nice oh oh that's pretty good you're gonna hang you're gonna talk about art

uh also i'm gonna give him a thousand dollars and he's gonna turn it into a hundred thousand dollars yeah

uh mine is no bunaga um

he's scary he's a bit intense i would sort of feel like i was you know uh maybe i would feel like i was on the back foot but at the same time he values his friends um he has a good time uh he can take a joke but grumblingly you know

for me also leorio

and it was it was back and forth it was uh like the long the long it was not gone sorry gone i love gone but i love gone on a tv show yeah

um and then i was like maybe killua and it's like no killuwood would be mean to me.

And then this was also my worry.

And then...

Not if you brought him candy.

I don't think so.

I think he'd insult my outfit.

Yeah.

And I think he'd be like, why are you bringing me candy?

Why are you bringing me candy, you creep?

Yeah, like, come on.

No, you're right.

You don't think Kilua would be roasting the shit out of you.

That's true.

Most people.

I just, you know.

And so then you're left Karapika Leorio, and I just have more in common with Leorio.

And he won

a cruise in a mole by playing rock, paper, scissors like here.

Yeah, which is something that I have also tried to do.

What's your non-four

hang, Keith?

This was tough.

I had a joke answer at first, and it was going to be the cowboy bartender of the hunter website.

That's a pretty good joke answer, though.

Yeah.

And then

I was thinking that maybe it was going to be neon because I was like, give me a fortune.

Give me a real fortune.

Oh, that's a good answer, too.

But I decided on Satots.

That's who I would like to hang out with.

Oh, yeah, that guy's chill as hell.

Yeah, he's chill.

What about here's a green green jelly bean man?

He's a collaborator.

I mean, I suppose so is Satots, but like with the police?

With the Hunter Association.

Netaro, yeah.

I didn't realize how hard-lined the Anti-Hunter Association stance had become.

Yeah, sorry.

I actually, I also would hang out with Netaro.

I mean, that guy seems crazy.

Zeno is another one.

I would hang out with Zeno.

Probably the most dangerous.

The magic answer was melody.

I'm just trying to hang out with myself.

Oh, yeah, melody's not a bad one.

I feel like,

like,

I just, like, want to have...

Melody would be maybe

too calm for me.

Yeah, that was mighty worthy.

True.

Yeah, she'd like hear your heartbeat and say the most beautiful thing anyone's ever said to you about it.

Yeah.

But I'm here for the yucks.

Okay, that's fair.

Here are some other, here's some low, low-tier picks who I think would nevertheless be good.

Coco, the announcer from Heaven's Arena.

Sure.

I usually thought about the very tired girl from the hallway.

I would hang out with her.

I would absolutely hang out with her.

We have so much in common.

Right now.

Yeah.

God, it's been such a beautiful spring couple of days here that that, like, everything has turned green.

There's this, like, beautiful purple flowering tree at the end of my street, and I have to, like, sit inside and write music all day.

I'm

furious about it.

Um, it's an aside about springtime.

Uh, another good person to hang with would be the absolutely weird freak who interrupts the

Matthewsos to tell them about

the treasure hunt, the hunt for the phantom troop.

Okay.

You remember this person?

Oh, yeah.

It looks like a Raggedy Ann sort of person.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's not a bad pet.

The magical shape-shifting monsters that are part of the...

Oh, you want to hang out with the Kiriko?

The pre-hunter exam?

No.

Kiriko?

Oh, Kiriko.

Sorry, sorry.

I was thinking of the other shapeshifters, not from the pre-exam, but from the exam.

Oh, I hang out with that one guy who had the monkey so I could meet his weird monkey.

Yeah, I'd probably hang out with Squala to hang out with his dogs and then just make Squala be in the other.

I would not hang out with Squalla.

It did not go well for him.

I would hang out with the monkey so I could meet his weird owner.

Hang out with the monkey so I could give him a pair of shorts.

Sylvia, are you next for a reading?

I can be.

Yes, you can.

Okay, this is for all of us.

Please describe your hunter-hunter universe and then users persona, fashion, sense, slash drip.

Do you go normcore with an eccentric headpiece?

Businessman Leorio, fancy boy assassin, or perhaps full bondage gear?

Please and thank you, so-so.

Wow.

I would like to take my inspiration from a great man and a dear friend, Arthur Martinez-Tebel.

And I would like to try and choose an outfit that is really hard to animate.

I would like, I would,

my, my drip would be confusing.

Um, I don't know whether or not that would be because it had like um

it would be like a bunch of weird shimmery um circles, metal circles all sewn into my clothing.

Or maybe the back of my outfit, back of my hat, collar, shirt, pants, uh, is painted perfectly to look like the front, including my face, so nobody knows where I'm looking.

I don't know.

I want it to be visually confusing, and I want it to be a a pain to animate.

Hmm.

Hmm.

Which isn't usually an affordance that characters have.

They don't usually get to pick their own clothes based on how annoying it would be for the animators.

Well, anybody can make that

nun power.

Yeah, it does tie with my nun power.

I irritate the animators.

Anything else, Jump out?

The thing is, sometimes I just already do dress like an end user.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This just kind of comes from skewing gothic at times.

I have a big black fake fur coat.

I feel like that's phantom troopy.

And like,

if I had Hunter credit, like,

I would just be spending it on clothes that I want because that's most of the

only thing keeping me from not dressing ridiculous all the time is that I can't afford it.

Yeah.

Is money.

Yeah, so that probably would mean following that logic, which I like, I would just have all the tattoos.

Because that's the only reason I don't have more is the money.

God, Nen tattoos would be sick as hell.

Yeah.

Swimming around.

Nen tattoos swim around.

I don't know.

I think, so here's what I like.

Here's what I would do.

Everyone remember Pockle?

Oh, yeah.

Pockle sort of dressed like a level one fantasy character from like a, from like an RPG.

Yeah, it's with the bone arrow guy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Um, who like just barely is able to win a match during the hunter exam.

Um,

and uh, right, am I right?

Pacle wins, I think.

Oh, right, because only Killowa loses.

Um,

well, from the last thing.

Uh,

so I would, I would do that.

I would, like, not those exact clothes, but I want to like look like I came from like a different genre.

That's what I want to do.

I want to like have like a like a bit of like armor on and it's like, what does this person do?

That's or they go, must be a hunter.

Okay.

All right.

Okay.

And then next question for Jack.

As someone new to the series, apart from screenshot exposure, what aspect of Hunter Hunter have you found the most surprising?

And I put a little note here because reminding myself that you're also very new to Shonen as a genre, conglomeration of genres, whatever you want to think of it as.

And like

to not just be specific to Hunter Hunter, but also like the genre conventions that you're learning, sort of rapid fire.

Rapid fire learning of conventions, not rapid fire answer.

I think I have been surprised by

Hunter Hunter's breadth of interest

in

kinds of storytelling and kinds of places to go I mean I went into the show no knowing nothing about it you know not knowing what it was about

but but even in something like Dragon Ball

it's like uh you know um go and get the dragon balls and fight the guys along the way hunter hunter doesn't really have a core

goal when it starts.

Oh, I suppose, become a hunter.

Find your dad.

But we've sort of dispensed with that by

the beginning of the second season.

And we are going into a story about art heists.

We are going into a story about a weird series of saw games.

We're getting trapped in a video game.

We're going to go meet my new best friend, whom I'm teaching to love's Assassin Family for four episodes, and then they're going to fall out of of the story for a bit until they come back later.

Hunter Hunter is painting with such a

broad brush and also such a varied sort of like set of art implements to extend the metaphor.

And it has been a real pleasure and a surprise to arrive at the beginning of each new season and go, well, what are we doing now?

Where are we going this time?

That's really exciting.

As to Shounen, it's been odd because

I think Hunter Hunter is a really strange first shounen to watch because it is trying to, you know, Takashi is explicitly trying to deconstruct aspects of it.

It plays in very different ways.

But even just watching the bits of Dragon Ball that we watched and watching the bits of Jojo that we watched and dovetailing that together in my head with what I know about Sailor Moon, which is obviously not Shounen,

but Shoujo and Shounen anime are sort of, you know, they dovetail together to a certain extent.

They are very Hunter Hunter and Dragon Ball are very, very different shows

in very, very striking ways.

And

I can't tell how much of that is that Tagashi is

really trying to do something new or really trying to do something strange, or whether it is the case that my sample size is too small and Shounen regularly branches off into a very different style.

Good answer.

Dre, do you need a second for your dog?

No, it's all good.

Okay.

It's fine.

I just want to make sure that you don't need to

corral or uncorral.

No, no.

A stranger rang our doorbell.

Oh, terrifying.

I was going crazy.

Stranger to you.

But everything is.

Huh?

Stranger to you or to the dog?

Both.

Okay, because dogs are just like, everyone's a stranger.

I know two people.

This is for Jack.

This one, you sit out on this one.

Oh, no.

I just read one.

So.

Trey.

No, Jack.

It's your turn.

I got it.

I got it.

I saw my head.

I got a system.

Question for all but Jack.

Great.

What if anything about Jack's response?

I can read this in the first person, I suppose.

What if anything about my response or experience with Hunter Hunter was unexpected for you?

And then in brackets, did anyone predict demon world theory?

No.

And then Sam

says, thanks for making this podcast.

It got me to watch a show I never would have otherwise and that I now really enjoy.

I'm so hopeless.

Well, that's good.

Hey, a really easy answer.

All the fucking shit that you predict.

Yeah, it is that.

Yeah.

And it's funny because sometimes it's like you're

like you get something really specific, like 90%.

Sometimes it's like you get something really big, like 10%.

And even those,

like,

those, those,

you know, those misses where, like, there's just one aspect that's on is still like, whoa, I can't believe they got that.

I can't believe it.

It's Matchi's hunches.

Yeah.

It's, yeah, it's very, it's very fun to every once in a while.

It's, it happened today.

I didn't hear, I missed what Dre saw.

I think Dre.

Yes, I missed what Dre saw, the connection that Dre made to something that you said, but I saw the message in the this group chat of all the times that that's happening.

Oh, right.

They have a secret chat.

I don't know if we've talked about this on the show.

They have a chat that is not me, in which they just talk about Hunter Hunters.

Yeah, it just, it just, it just, uh, it flares up every time you say something uh prognostic.

Yeah, and then I post the Paul Dano face, The Riddler does he know meme.

Yeah.

Which I don't understand.

I just think it's a funny image of.

I like people respond to it when someone says something like

when someone guesses at something without realizing it.

In reply,

I've seen it.

He's great.

Yeah.

Anyway, it's mostly just for me.

You've seen Swiss Army Man.

What a film.

He fights a lot.

He does.

Mostly at the beginning, but yeah.

I don't know.

Daniel Ratcliffe fought a lot.

Oh, right.

Daniel Radcliffe farts a lot.

My bad.

I forgot who was the corpse.

Yeah.

It's funny that you can.

It's funny that.

I haven't seen it since it came out and I didn't really watch it attentively.

A movie of two people, and one of them is a corpse that farts a lot.

And you're like, I can't remember which one was the corpse.

And

that's the point of the movie.

Maybe the one that's a corpse is the one that's really alive.

Whoa.

Whoa.

Good movie.

Really funny.

There's a part where

the song in the background gets lyrics to like soundtrack gets lyrics, and the lyrics are like specifically describing the things that happen that is happening in a montage.

It's one of my favorite things I've ever seen in a movie.

It's really funny.

Were you ever worried that I wasn't going to like Hunter Hunter?

Yeah.

Was that not really concerned?

Yeah, I was worried.

Tell me's a concern.

Yeah.

I don't think there's anything like specific to you that made me worry.

Like I didn't think ever like Jack is specifically predisposed to not liking this.

Um, but every once in a while you and I have no specifics, but every once in a while you don't like something that I expect you to like.

And the same is true with, you know, anybody, you know, a lot of A lot of people expect me to like Radiohead, but I don't like Radiohead.

That's fine.

Yeah, right?

It's fine.

Some people get mad about it.

But like every once in a while it'll happen and I was like, oh, I hope that Jack doesn't weirdly dislike this for some like specific reason.

But it didn't happen.

And that's good.

Dre?

And even when...

Oh, sorry.

I was just going to say, even when I had the blip in Heaven's Arena,

you knew what was about to happen.

Yeah.

And I saw that blip coming too.

I knew that anybody watching that was going to feel the difference between that season and everything that had come before.

Um, because I felt it when I first watched it, not everybody has an immediate, like, oh, this is like slower and like kind of weird.

Um,

but uh,

you know,

also, I knew that it would pass and that there's a lot of reason why that season is the way that it is, and most of that stuff pays off.

So, even if you never, ever end up liking those episodes, it's 10 episodes out of 146.

So who cares?

Sylvie, no, Dre.

Doesn't matter.

I think it's me.

It's my turn.

Sylvie decided.

Yeah, I did.

If the main four are on a road trip, what are they playing when they get the ox from Lawson?

Killua listens to Blade, I think.

The movie?

No, the rapper.

It would be funny if Blade

plays the audio from Blade.

I'm going to link the type of shit I think Kilo listens to.

And it's kind of an insult, but it's whatever.

My answer was going to be SoundCloud rapper.

Well, hey, that is what I said.

I just named one because I listen to SoundCloud rap.

I don't.

I totally see this.

Yeah, I see this for sure.

Yeah.

Gone.

What would Antmito listen to?

Because that's the music Gone's been exposed to.

Soft rock.

Shania Twain.

80s, 90s.

Oh, man.

I want a fucking Shania Twain, Hunter, Hunter, Ant.

It's got to be out there.

Yeah, Mito definitely listens to Shania Twain and like

the rest is still unwritten.

Yeah,

you know, like

Natasha Bettingfield.

Gone has a very like

intimate knowledge of all this like 90s girly pop stuff.

Absolutely.

And then Done

feels like being a little bad boy, and he pulls out Michelle Branch because

that goes harder.

Does she say swears?

I think Michelle Branch swears.

I don't think I know Michelle Branch.

I don't really know her.

It wasn't one my mom listened to.

I don't know if I've even heard the words Michelle Branch.

I've definitely heard the word Michelle Branch.

One of the songs, Keith.

Probably.

Well, maybe.

Learia listens to Led Zeppelin, and he's a ska guy to me.

Look at how we dress.

I think it's both.

I think it's like Led Zeppelin, but it's also like Street Light Manifesto.

I was thinking like the specials.

The specials.

Oh, yeah.

Like Second Wave Ska.

Do you think Second Wave Ska?

No.

I don't know.

I just, I think it's because he dresses like the type of guy who's really.

I guess the Mighty Mighty boss tones are more a third wave than I think.

They are, yeah.

But

Karapika

Paul Simon and Gaffaludas.

Karapika.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what Karapika will play on the aux is very different than what Karapika plays with his fucking beats in.

Because

I bet Karapika listens to some angry, sad shit when he puts the headphones on.

Three Days Grace.

Yeah.

Slipknot.

Karapika is the most likely to listen to Slipknot.

That's true.

And corn.

I think that, I think Kilua is the most likely to listen to Slipknot, and I think Leoria might be number two.

I don't know.

I feel like Kiloa really likes Tyler the Creator, but maybe it's just because he reminds me of the kids who really liked Tyler the Creator when I went to school.

Yeah, I don't think, I don't think that Karapika has a like secretly indulging in aggression thing because

he so publicly indulges in aggression.

That's fair.

But that's just my yeah, I think that it's I think it's really the gentle stuff.

And

who I also think Karapika just puts on a YouTube video of alpha brainwave sounds to help everyone relax too.

Yeah.

I think that's everyone.

I don't have any other weird music polls that I think one of these fools would listen to.

Kayla was really the fun one.

Kaylo could listen to anything, really.

I think that he's got the free time for it

and is also like has the luxury of being,

you know, both a rich kid and also

not like a latchkey kid because his mom is his mom, but like long periods of being

unsupervised.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's,

Killer was not a latchkey kid because he never left the house.

It's just for him never leaving the house means he can be 15 miles away from the house.

Yeah, he has a whole house is a mountain.

Yeah.

Dre, question eight here.

Yeah.

Say for some reason, I don't, I think we could all manage to qualify as hunters.

I'm on the record of saying that I would qualify for Islander.

Say for some reason you managed to qualify as hunters get your card and nin powers what is it you would dedicate yourself to hunting

this is from db rare

comedy old weird comedy albums the bit hunter the bit hunter yeah

gourmet hunter number two

i'd be like a a building hunter like the like the process of building not like buildings like that have been built but like different construction hunter yeah but like you know like i'd i'd want to learn woodworking and then how to do concrete and then how to do like all that stuff and i like you know climb to the top of a mountain to learn how to forge a sword from a sage or something

like yeah oh man thing does but oh it has a zepile

um

it's zepile that's true yeah zepile too but zephile is doesn't isn't an end user or hunter not yet

I would be a bird-watching hunter.

I'm not a bird-watcher in real life, other than the sort of that I like to see them outside of my window.

The reason I would like to be a bird-watching hunter is that hunters get real specific.

So, so I would do the sort of 15 minutes thing where I would see the like 58,000 birds that exist.

I'd see them all.

And then I'd start getting into the really fucking weird, weird birds.

So you'd see all the birds that exist in the end of the world.

The only thing left is birds that don't exist.

Yes.

If God did not exist, the bird-watching hunters would have to make them.

No, it's because I know that out there there's like a hunter who's like a make weird birds hunter who is like through a combination of genetics and Frankensteining producing some really extraordinary birds.

You know, that's what I'm going to be doing.

I've got binoculars.

I've got my nen ability, which is

Oh god, my net ability is like, is like I can like turn into a tree or something.

I don't know.

Sure.

I love that you weren't like, oh, so like, I can't like slow them down or like slow or like perceive them slower or anything.

No,

I'm the tree.

They sit on it.

I'll just hang out with them when they arrive.

Yeah.

Question nine here.

Who

what are other people's net ability?

Oh, yeah.

Sorry, we.

What the fuck?

I thought we got everybody, but my bad.

No, you were trying to keep me from saying I would be a MILF hunter, weren't you?

Yeah,

of course.

I wrote MILF Hunter all over the sheen name.

No,

it stands.

Hold on.

You don't.

Let me explain the acronym.

It stands for Monsters in Lands Forrent.

So,

yeah.

Like, that's awesome.

There's some Humpha Infinite Loser shit going on here.

No, no, no.

What powers would you have to help you be a MILF hunter?

I'm able to communicate with any cougar.

The cat!

The big cat!

Yeah, uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Okay.

Okay.

Keith,

are you asking for my power now or to please move on?

No, your power.

What does a yuck hunter need?

What does a bit hunter need?

I think maybe

I

can absorb

where people have laughed in the past.

I can absorb those like

their sons, and I'm a plant that is like,

what is the word?

Begins with an H.

When you absorb the sun in your plant.

Do you mean photosynthesis?

Yeah, there we go.

Photosynthesis.

Photoshosnthesis.

Doesn't mean an H.

That was close.

It was the second letter.

Yeah, I can photosynthesize

from laughter.

Oh, that's pretty good.

And it makes me so strong I can kill.

Wow.

Okay.

Yeah.

Kill comedically.

Yeah, I was about to say, kill your audience with humor.

With humor.

Mine in powers, I could measure and calculate anything instantly.

Oh, wow.

See, that's going to get really useful.

That's really useful.

Can I tell you a joke that I misunderstood for years?

Yeah.

Does you all know the comedian?

That's been very frustrating as a yuck hunter.

I know.

I know.

Do you know the comedian Eugene Merman?

Yes.

I know often.

Has now played Gene on Bob's Burgers for years, but was a stand-up, was a stand-up comedian for a very long time.

And I was a fan of

his in like early high school, I think is when I first learned of him from Lexington, Massachusetts, by the way.

And he has an album, and on the album, the very first thing that he says is he walks up to the mic and he goes, get ready, I'm about to start killing.

And I thought that this was a hilarious non-sequitur and was Eugene Mermin going, I'm about to murder my audience.

And I thought that was so funny.

And only in re-listening to it recently, like a year or two ago, did I realize that either he just means killing, as in killing comedically, like, get ready, I'm about to be really funny up here, or it was a pun.

I don't think so, though.

I think really it was just that he meant comedically

much less funny.

I really thought it's funnier to just tell a room full of people you're going to kill them all in that exact tone as well.

That was a perfect.

It's a hell of an opener.

Yeah, it's a hell of an opener, especially because then he would have just done some comedy and everything.

Yes, he did just do some comedy, yeah.

Uh, anyway, I'm I spent

probably 12-15 years misunderstanding that joke, and then one day day you went, oh, that's less funny.

Who, this will be a quick one.

Who, I think, who are your respective faves among the Phantom Troop from what you've watched of the show so far?

And that's from Rowan.

Sylvie?

You know.

Yep.

It's Finx.

It's Sphinx, yeah.

From the last episode.

Yeah.

It's Krillo.

Yeah, it's Crillo.

Oh,

okay.

I wasn't sure if I was being given the space to say that or.

No, no, I think we're just thinking.

It was just a positive.

I'll say for me, I like really forgot about how awesome those last couple episodes are for Finx,

who when he with the phone stuff.

Yeah, with the phone, and then getting the Makinota memories and kind of like having this sort of interesting moment with Gona Kilo at the very end.

Even him just being the sort of like

he briefly becomes the villain inside the Phantom Troops in this arc.

Yeah, which is great.

And that stuff is all really interesting.

So, like,

I had just forgotten about that.

I remembered liking Finx and thinking he was goofy, but feeling like he doesn't do much in this set of episodes, and then being really pleasantly surprised at the end at how good that like Finx really kind of gets a pretty significant arc that, like, kind of out out of nowhere, um, that develops so fast.

Like, you're like, oh, I didn't realize, I didn't even realize that this was

in progress.

I didn't realize they were doing something with Finx at all until it started happening.

Um, it could be Finx, it could be Pakunoda.

I think that her stuff at the end is like really phenomenal.

Um,

yeah, Pakunoda's great.

God, Rip.

What a way to go out.

I know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think it's from these episodes.

It's Bonalenov.

Yeah.

No, yeah.

I was going to say that.

Are we going to get some Bonalenov stuff?

I will.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

There's a little.

There's a little.

I think Franklin's probably my favorite.

I think honestly, it's Uvo Gien.

I think for real it is.

Really?

Yeah.

Uvo Gien.

Why Franklin for you, Dre?

Man,

Franklin just like

reminds me of the kind of guy that you would like work at a job with and like two months in, you'd think he's one person and then like you'd go out to a bar with him afterwards and he would tell you a story and you're like, oh.

You're you're a fucking scary person.

I'm glad that we became friends before I was.

I was assuming this from the other way around where you meet Franklin and you're like, obviously, this is a terrifying man.

And then you go out for a drink and he's like, oh, he's also like, sensitive and intelligent.

Yeah, no, I think, I think, you probably, I think he would lead with the sensitivity and intelligence.

I can tell you that in the season, I want to give Franklin a kiss, is what I'm realizing right now.

Many, many such cases.

Yeah.

Is it just because he was introduced working in a little sub-team with Faytan?

Or are Phaytan and Franklin regularly paired together within the story?

I'm trying to think if

they regularly work together, or it was just that we met them at the same time, so we associate them with each other.

It's funny because I don't associate them with each other.

I think it might be

a big moment at the auction, right?

Like, they come out on stage together, and that's like a very

shot together, but also with Nobunaga.

I was about to say, the thing I remember from Franklin first showing up is Franklin and Nobunaga fake fighting each other.

Yeah, that's what I remember.

And Phaeton sort of like kind of getting roped into that.

Yeah.

And was Machi with them then, or was it?

Yeah, Machi was with them and was not happy about it.

Yeah.

Machi is a real contender for me.

I think Machi is a really interesting Phantom Troop member because she's the first true member we meet.

And there's like this real excitement of like, this is the ambassador from the Phantom Troop.

And then when the Phantom Troop arrive in earnest, and it is revealed that she is just a very even-tempered, fairly normal,

trusted, mid-ranking member of the Phantom Troop.

That was really interesting.

You know,

the show, the Phantom Troop would have been shaded in a different way if, for example, Franklin had been the first person we met talking to Hisaka or whatever.

But it just being this sort of like quietly spoken doctor with semi-prescient hunches about the future.

That's really cool.

I think Matchie's fun.

I think that she is

she is untroubling in scenes.

Unlike, for example, Finx, she is not really putting the cat among the pigeons.

She's often there to say, well, hang on, we haven't thought about this.

Let's be calm about that.

I think that's an interesting character.

I think Finx is fantastic.

Nobunaga is my favorite personally.

I think he's a really fun character.

And they do so much work with him where, like, compared to the way some of the others look his character design is not the most interesting i feel like i've seen that sort of ronin character in a lot of things before right um he's no shalnark

shallnark is a real doozy shallnark is such a nasty little piece of work and

so rarely lets the mask slip or rather

his mask is a cheery evil mask you know it's never never in any doubt that he's evil he's just he's just very comfortable about it at all times I don't read him as that.

I mean, obviously they're all evil murderers, but it's funny, like, I don't read anything sinister from his cheery disposition.

It's because his ability is so chilling.

Is that when you find it terrifying?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that is the sort of thing, like the fucking Tarantino thing that all of the Phantom Troop do, which is like a bunch of murderers having like a fun, funny conversation, and then they go murder a million people.

I guess the thing with Shalonark is that he just sometimes reminds me of the two boys from funny games.

I've never seen that.

He really does.

But

they are very

nice, polite young men who also do horrible fucking crimes to a family.

But always have that sort of smiley disposition for the most part.

And that's what Shalinark really reminds me of.

And they also have a TV remote.

They also have a TV remote.

They very famously have a TV remote.

He has a cell phone.

Same

little cell phone.

I think his little cell phone was made by the same people who made Gon's Beatle phone.

Yeah, it's got like a little, it's like a little bat phone thing.

It's got like weird.

It's like

it looks, he looks like he's from

Dragon Quest, and the phone looks like it's from Dragon Quest.

Both phones.

I think it's telling about the Phantom Troop that even now, like, it's hard to not just say six of them or whatever.

Like, every, like, they're so good.

They're They're such good characters.

Who's your favorite?

And it's like, well, here are my seven runners up.

And then my favorite is either these two.

I think it's also, it's not just that they're good characters.

They are also,

they come as a package.

Yeah.

You know,

they don't mean a lot outside of the context that they are in.

And so as soon as we start talking about one favorite member of the Phantom Troop, we are then, you know, firmly in the Van Diagram of the reasons why why they

intersect so heavily with the other ones.

And this is Krolo's whole deal.

Krolo's whole deal is like you built the spider out of the legs and the head.

You know, they are one unit working together.

Speaking of packages,

Sylvie,

do you have your matrix?

Oh,

that was insane, right?

That was a really insane way to do that.

That was like how I get stopped at the TSA.

Talking about the shipping, why did you describe it as a package, Keith?

Is it like a

shipping matrix?

So shipping makes you think of packages?

Yes, that's why.

Okay.

Well, I'm going to put it in

our chat here.

I'm so excited.

When did you first talk about this?

I don't remember.

I had no memory of this, and then I saw four people asking for it.

Yeah, I've said it.

I think I mentioned when we were before we started recording

that.

This is so funny.

Yeah.

Wow.

There's a lot of unrequited arrows towards.

Oh, yeah.

This is me showing the.

I'm very open about being a Fujoshi, but the unrequited stuff is the Himajoshi coming out, which is the Yuri version.

Oh, I went to Anime Club.

I'm curious.

Could you talk about this in a very broad sense of what we are looking at?

Oh, I forgot to

be familiar.

Yeah.

This will be linked, by the way, so people are going to be able to see this.

The three colors of lines, and then you can start going into detail.

So, okay.

When I started doing this, I was just going to do like

because I needed an unrequited color for

Hiseka.

Because that's how I feel.

And I realized when I was doing, because I made jokes about this because I was like,

one of my favorite jokes I've made about the Phantom Troop was saying that they're a polycule and everyone hates Hisuka because he won't do the dishes.

Like, it's, I just make a lot of stupid jokes like that.

And so mentioning this just seemed natural.

And then I was making it and was like, I just think most of these people are friends.

So I added a platonic line.

And then there's the romantic line,

which is red.

So

blue is unrequited, which I I didn't mention.

You can see the image.

I'm going to be mentioning

which line goes to which

and discussing it, I'm assuming.

Yes, please.

Are there any of these that stand out to you guys that I should start with?

Yeah, I want to know the three unrequited arrows going to Shizuku.

I just, so when unrequited,

this one's like soft, but I feel like those are three people who would,

because Phaeton, I remember being like weird about her nun power, but maybe I'm wrong.

I feel like these are three that I could see flirting with her and not her not picking up on it.

Sure.

You know?

You know, if Phaeton only has

Crowlow, though, there is an unrequited error going from Phaeton to Crowlo.

I think that there's a...

There's room there.

The weird sickoness that we've talked about in Shizuku is enough of a draw.

So what have you got written down for Phaeton's relationship with Crowlo?

Well, he's in love with his boss, but in like a Mr.

Smithers Alex Horn from Taskmaster type of way.

Yeah, I agree.

Sorry, Phaeton is.

Phaitan is.

Yeah, that's what the arrow is indicating.

Absolutely.

He is a small version of Krolo who has sort of specialized into torture.

Exactly.

Specialized into impressing Krolo is another.

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm going to talk about the sort of Krolo-Ilumi-Hisuka situation here now.

Oh, yes, because there's a little guest.

Ilumi has joined in as a guest.

Ilumi, yeah, there's a little bonus Ilumi here, because I think it's important to understand the way I conceptualize these three, and of course, it's the one thing I forgot to label.

He was in the room,

he was in the church with all of them.

Oh, right, right, right, because he was pretending to be Hisuka.

Right.

Oh, right.

He was.

I forgot about that.

That was great.

So Hisuka and Ilumi are the worst couple in the world, in my mind.

That is a romantic line between them.

Yeah, that is a red romantic line between those two.

And Hisuka wants to do a, hey, we noticed you from across the bar and we liked your nen thing with Roland.

Who is like.

We're really into your strong.

Yeah, who's Yulumi's work friend?

And so it's really weird.

And that's how I see that whole thing.

Uh-huh.

There's the sort of, I think the most important part of this is the British lads hitting each other with chairs after kissing

squadrons.

And you're 100% right.

This is with these four for sure i would say that you're 90 right because so there's four here there's uvo franklin nobunaga and finks and they have yes and they have a platonic green line that meets in the middle and says british lads hitting each other with chairs and kissing yeah

i do not find that

video to be platonic

that it is romantic you're right it is romantic i should have put romantic on this one this is on

green you know it's red green it's christmas it's christmas

i think it's I think it's I have the document of this still open.

I can edit this while we go.

I think that it is

green for Finks.

You know what?

Yeah, you're right.

And it's red for everyone else.

I'm adjusting.

And I also, and I'm not so sure about your unrequited line from Uvo to Shall.

I just wanted to make a joke about when he kisses him on the cheek after drinking a bunch of Heineken.

She is so flummoxed by this.

It's true.

It might not be unrequited.

I think that this is fully required.

That's what I believe about them.

Oh, the flummox is that he is realizing that it is awakening feelings in him that he had been.

I think he's embarrassed that this is happening in public.

That's what I think.

You're right.

I really dropped the ball on some of these.

I'm sorry.

Well, no, it's a process, Sylvie.

This is, you know,

Plus and Brighton, the first draft is

bringing the work.

Obviously, Nobunaga and Uvo are married.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I just thought that one was really self-explanatory.

I didn't really need to go into it.

Nobunaga is a widower.

Damn.

Nobunaga and Machi I put as best friends because I liked the mission of them hanging out together and looking like

a Twink and a butch chilling together.

Totally.

They argued a lot on that mission, but that's also how the Phantom Troops were.

It was in a way where it let I argue with my friends, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And at the end of the day, they actually had each other's backs.

It's clear that Nobunaga respects

Shizuku's.

No, not Shizuku.

Machi's hunches.

I

this might be

a failure on my part.

to not see it because yeah her nen power is terrifying yeah but i just i read uh

machi as maybe the least evil out of all of these people no that's fair um

maybe too

spacey to be evil to be that evil um this is the i don't know but she's i really ran into a brick wall with shizuku i'm gonna be honest yeah um

but but the the the thing that machi ends up doing whether it's like intentionally or just a byproduct is like trying to save Gonan Kiliwa from the Phantom Troop for most of like that is like

that is her function in this is like keep these kids out of here, just let them go, don't show them to the boss.

Um, God, Nobunaga's repeated insistence that he wants to hire Gonan Kiliwa is one of the funniest things.

And if you haven't been watching along, one of the reasons the joke works so well for me is that he makes an initial really strong pitch and sort of gets shut down by everybody in the the room and then sort of like sulkily goes quiet for ooh eight episodes in which it is not mentioned at all until it's like he he is seized by the spirit again and he pitches it again eight episodes later because it's exactly the same failure yeah it's great yeah well to be fair the failure is is really induced by them initiating a hostage situation

Yes, that is true.

Yes, the hostage situation does sort of

cause some issues there.

Because they're like choking out Gonen Kilua, about to read them from Pakanoda, and Nobunaga's being like, just don't worry, we'll get you into the troop everything we find.

So funny.

Nobunaga is great.

Krolo and Pakanoda, you've written down here, Mom and Dad.

Yep.

I feel like that just makes sense, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I do like you've got the spooky corner over here.

You have

the friends, the Xbox friends, Phaeton, Kortopi, and

Bonolenov.

They play Xbox together.

Bonolenov and Kortopi are an item.

They go antiquing on the weekends.

Yes.

Yeah.

Phaetan and Kortopi have short solidarity.

Of course.

I think during the screenshot stream, I referred to them both as small children.

You did.

Oh, can I just say, by the way, there is a lot of like

fan art of Kortopi being in the this like adorable little cherub underneath the hair while I was looking for like a good icon to use for this and it's bizarre to me because underneath Kortopi's hair to me it's Okuyasu's dad to me it's

so we never see Kortopi's face I don't really consider this a spoiler genuinely don't remember I don't remember I never have thought of it

Wow it might happen in the manga yeah I have no idea no clue looking at this chart and seeing the Phantom Troop laid out here

it is notable to me that we know fucking nothing about Bundolenov.

Yeah, nothing.

It's funny.

Basically, no lines, maybe literally no lines.

That's deliberate.

You don't do that by accident.

Why is one member of the Phantom Troop a mystery?

Not everyone is

like their own little storyline, has relationships that have formed.

I don't even remember them saying Bonelinov's name.

His name is mentioned,

I think, twice.

First,

in that great scene where the Phantom Troop all arrive and just happen to use each other's names a lot.

So we, the viewer, know that.

And then later, when Krolo is playing the Professor Layton puzzle of sorting up the groups, he points out Bonallov.

There's definitely a version of this that has Bonolenov with no arrows, and it just says he works here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're willing antiquing on the weekend.

I do like it.

I like that they have a little spooky triad going on.

I thought so.

Yeah.

There was a draft of this where I had Shalmark in a corner that just said doesn't know what sex is, or if he does, it's really weird.

I kind of regret not keeping it, but

it's funny.

It's really funny.

The episode where

Uvo, Franklin, and Shalmark are hanging out is like

so sexual, it's insane.

It is like

the horniest the show has been like and out of nowhere.

It's mostly Uvo centered, but

oh yeah, Uvo, the camera is horny for Uvo in a major way.

God, rip to Uvo.

What a cool character.

And also at the same time,

because he was constructed purely for this one arc, he was able to be so precisely constructed for that purpose.

By which I mean, when you're making a character that's going to run the whole thing, you need to give them or build into them or allow for certain little attitudes to be like, I want to do a story about this with this character.

You know, um, Ubergin's loop was so small that Tagashi and the team could be so precise about like what he represents in the story, how his affect works, how they're going to draw and animate him.

It was great.

Perfect little single-serving character.

Yeah.

I thought Phaeton was a single-serving.

I think so.

I think we've.

Did we mention that?

Photopoda and Machi are also mom and dad to me.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Who is the Phantom Troops Karapika?

Is it

Machi?

It's probably Machi.

Oh, it's Nobu because of the revenge.

It's also a little bit Franklin.

It's almost like, hmm, this entire group is matching.

And it's also Shalmark.

Hmm.

Because Shalmark does the PowerPoint.

Shalmark does the PowerPoint.

Franklin has the insightful character moments.

Nobunaga has the revenge.

And Machi has the disaffected demeanor.

Krolo has the ability to bring a group of people together for a broader purpose.

All right, we're discovering something about the Phantom Troop.

Next question.

Oh, this one's so funny.

Can I read this?

Please.

Question 10.

Hi, French listener here.

I wanted to talk about media.

I want to say just a note quick.

These two, 10 and 11, these are old asks that I never did.

I just didn't see them or I didn't answer them.

But I've added them here, and they don't have names because they had names on the co-host, but they didn't know that they were signing up to be on the podcast, so I didn't put the names.

Oh, sure.

Fair enough.

In the latest episode, Jack mentioned that Base's name, Base, is the

hypnotized love kiss lady who met her and unceremoniously, I think at the hands of Shizuku, who just clonked her over the head lethally.

Oh yanked.

Yeah, she got beaned.

In the latest episode, Jack mentioned that Base's name means kiss in French, like the little kiss on the cheek.

That's not quite right.

The little kiss on the cheek is la bis, B-I-S-E.

Base, B-A-I-S-E, is a form of the verb base, which in old French did mean kiss, but in modern French almost exclusively means fuck.

I have no idea whether Tagashi was aware of this, but I think it makes for interesting characterization of that character.

Nonetheless,

my guess is that he absolutely knew that.

Yeah.

I love that.

I feel like I was making a Hunter-Hunter character mistake.

by saying, it just means a little kiss on the cheek as base swans into the scene, hypnotizing people left and right.

Nice thing

about the assumption that Tagashi would know this is that it makes it a really funny pun.

Yes.

Tagashi's doing French puns in

Hunter Hunter.

I wouldn't put it past him as the thing.

No, I totally wouldn't.

I mean, you know, writers look up words when they're using them.

Yeah.

No, I've never.

I would never.

And then the next, which I will just add on here, this is, like he said, another anonymous question.

Someone says,

I have to imagine this is a different person, but because they're together and they're both anonymous, my brain is like, this person who had the great French fact is now also chiming in with this good fact.

Oh, a wild thing I wanted to say read the most recent episode of Media Club Plus is that Melody's theme, A Field in Spring.

I wanted to see if Keith would hit it.

Oh, yeah,

I redid all these, so I don't have it, I don't think.

No, no, no, it's fine.

Instantly reminds me of the opening of Stravinsky's ballet, The Rite of Spring, which famously caused a riot when it debuted in 1913.

It's so interesting.

I haven't had a chance to listen to the opening of The Rite of Spring prior to this recording.

Pretty close.

It really is.

Oh, wow.

So this is great because

it's a pun, again, right?

Tagashi is calling it a field in spring, and Stravinsky's piece is The Rite of Spring.

And then again, you know, Melody's whole thing is about this sort of like calming, transformative power of music that at the root of it comes from this, like a song the devil wrote that transforms you into a monster.

So that's that's another really nice I will

not to be a pedant push the rigs a little and giving Tagashi credit for that because I don't know how much he had to do with the naming of the soundtrack because it's Field of Spring is a new name.

Oh yes, you're absolutely right.

I couldn't remember whether or not Melody calls it the

Field and Spring at any point.

What does what does Melody call this song?

The Devil's

the same.

Although, this is this is these, I believe, are two different songs.

They are two different things.

Yes, the uh, the flute part is not actually, it's, it's confusing, right?

Because we know that Melody's friend, who obliterated herself, um, played the part on the flute, uh, and Melody's theme is played on the flute.

So, at first, I was like, oh, wow, that's we're hearing it.

But no, Melody's theme is the field and spring, which is the power she uses to calm Karapica.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Good song.

It is close.

I tried

to read about the riot that supposedly took place.

It seems like maybe,

I don't know, overstated or reported on much later that it was a riot, but it definitely was a raucous occasion that seems to have been

mostly inspired by the dance.

People were not happy about the dance that went along to Right in Spring.

They thought it was was too sexy.

No, they thought it was Avant.

Avon,

they were stomping around and stuff.

Yeah,

this is supposed to be beautiful.

Stomping is beautiful.

I think Stomping is beautiful.

Not in 1913.

But anyway, that just, you know, I looked into it for five minutes, and that's the best I could do on the riot, the Rite of Spring Riot.

Let's see.

Who wants to read number 12 here?

I can't.

I can.

You go ahead.

I scooped you last time, please.

Hey, friends.

I appreciated and was compelled.

God damn it.

You are a yuck hunter.

Yeah.

I appreciated and was compelled by Austin's argument many episodes back that nin is a generative storytelling tool.

I think Jack's gut reaction during those early episodes jives with my own instincts and generally with friends at the table's output too.

More wonder, less definition.

It's got me wondering something though.

Does the way Tagashi and company leverage Nin in Hunter Hunter soften your heart for any other media with rigid or exhaustively defined magic systems?

Or is what Tagashi has done really kind of special?

Do you think you'd ever approach magic this way in something you made yourself?

Thanks for everything, Brandon.

Thank you, Brandon.

I think the first thing I want to say, and this isn't quite an answer to your question, is that I don't know that I agree necessarily that Friends at the Table's output is explicitly rooted in pushing against this style of storytelling, in part because the way we structure Friends at the Table and the tools we use to play are about finding, you know,

frameworks or methods for definition to enable us to tell stories better.

I think that, you know, what we come back to a lot is that we are not really interested in answering questions unless they are

at the forefront of our minds or they are immediately relevant to the story as we're telling it.

You know, we say play to find out what happens instead of figuring out something,

you know, rigid off the bat.

And I think also a sort of

sentiment against that kind of structural rigidness that you might be detecting also comes from our

desire to

depict worlds that represent a

variety of perspectives or a variety of styles or a variety of decisions about how action is taken.

But I mean, if I look at Friends at the Table, I think about the Steles, you know, often talked about this on the podcast as well.

The Steles give us a really nice structure.

I look at the cantons in Sang Fial.

I think that we, in general, do tend to put in place these systems of

structure.

Where I pushed against it in the show is more about personal taste, I think.

I think that I have a tendency to sort of want to go splashing around in the periphery of these things before I start to move in and nail them down or figure out what they are.

And I think early on in a show where it felt like there was such limitless potential for sort of what, you know,

there's a magician out here who can turn people's arms into butterflies, you know?

What the hell is going on here?

That when I felt the framework starting to fall into place, I felt a little bit like when I have to go and grab Virginia to put her into her carrier to go to the vet.

And, you know, you sort of look around and go, what, fuck, what, what, what, this?

And, and, you know, it's not my favorite way of working through

conversations about magic or working through conversations about

the kinds of people that there are or the kinds of ways of thinking that there are in the world.

So I don't know that it's softened my heart to it to an extent, but I do think that Tagashi is doing it really well.

And as we have gone into

nen frenzy that I have on good authority is only going to get more,

I can see why those structures were put were put in place.

Does that answer the question?

I sort of feel like I...

There's something else about Friends of the Table that I thought of while you were talking, Jack, is that one of the luxuries that we have is being able to

build our part of the story on top of someone who's written a book about all the rules that we don't talk about a lot, but we spend a lot of time thinking about and reading through on our own time.

And

I mean, compared to, say, a novel or a television show, the rigidness of a tabletop game's magic system is pretty intense.

And I think it shows like

when

something's working, how

buried it can be without being seen.

You know, you could,

it's, it's, you're really able to

take

to hide a lot of rigidity under narr underneath like narrative and plot and stuff, uh, and character work dialogue, uh, what and you know, whatever.

Um, I do though, I do have this sort of thing where when I hear people,

this happens a lot with fantasy, mostly for obvious reasons, um, uh,

but there is a kind of way that people read fantasy novels or things of that nature where

the seriousness and exactness

of the

magic system or whatever is kind of the

like biggest metric by which people judge it.

And I don't, I really don't understand that either.

Um, for as much as I appreciate in Hunter-Hunter having the scaffolding, when we do friends of the table, having those books that have all of the rules exactly laid out.

Um,

and you know, it's not

that stuff is never why I like

the books that we, the games that we play.

It's the stuff that we're able to do

with it.

Like, it's not the, it's not the rule, the rule book that makes the game fun.

It's the way that the rule book manifests in the show.

And the same way, it's not the facts about NE that make it fun.

It's what they're able to do with the Nen in the show.

I think, which speaks to your point, Jack, of like the stylistic difference of like, well, they did have to tell me the rules, but I wish that they, or maybe the first instinct, I don't know how you feel now, is I wish that they had

papered over some of the, like, it was a literal lesson in Hunter Hunter.

You don't get more literal like rules book in a television show than welcome to Mr.

Wing's Nen class,

which in a way I appreciate the straightforwardness of it.

And I think it lets it, it lets you go really far, really fast with Nen when you do it that way.

And I think that that's what it does

in Hunter Hunter.

Yeah, I think my dissatisfaction with over-explaining, or rather, with too rigid or too,

it's not just the

rigidity, it's the sort of intensity of

a system in a story is that it leads to two things that I find

distasteful as a reader or as a as the person on the other end of the story.

And I don't mean distasteful like a moral judgment.

I mean distasteful like they are things that I that don't sit right with me when I am you know experiencing a story.

The first is that I feel like if your system is too intense, it's too multifaceted is too you know multi-roomed you know you can go and explore over there you can go and explore over here it invites people too quickly to overexplain things.

And I think that if you overexplain stuff in a story,

you're three quarters of the way to turning me off it.

You know, you see Stephen King get really worked up about, listen, I'm going to tell you exactly how this works.

And it's like, come on.

A third of that would have been, would have been lovely.

Or does the opposite thing of...

He tells you nothing and then bends the rules that didn't exist.

Then you're like, how does this work?

What is this?

Also kind of irritating.

The other thing that that i feel like these systems tend to do is they invite pedantry and i can't stand that in a story i cannot stand it when the narrator or or other fans of the thing are saying oh no but actually that means that you can't do that because actually

Actually, your

fourth level power means that your third level power, you can't actually do that.

I do, I want to, after you're done, Jack, I do want to speak for the pedants.

I can't fucking stand it.

And

despite Tagashi's Nen lessons at the beginning, he hasn't really fallen

into either of those traps.

He can't really over-explain something because A, he hasn't actually really told us anything about what Nen is, only how it works.

It's sort of a property in the world.

And B, there is so much out there that he couldn't begin to be pedantic about, you know, because some weirdo would show up and be like, yeah, I am now Xeno, and I'm going to launch a Nen Dragon

at Krolo.

And I feel like in that way, he's sort of sidestepping the two problems that I have so often with these kinds of like very involved structures.

Which is also, it makes a ton of sense.

It's something that's really hard to see from in front of the whiteboard when you're learning about the six Pokemon types.

Yeah.

Yeah, well to see the fact that later down the road, you know, there's going to be indoor fish.

Right.

Yeah.

It's hard to see that, but even more like concretely, it's hard to see how, you know,

he's starting something that might end up being a pitfall, but because where he stops, what he doesn't say, the limits on how we know Nen works, it doesn't create as much room for

those pitfalls.

You want to speak for the peddling?

I want to speak for the argument here.

There is something I really something I really don't like about a loosey-goosey

thing

is

when I think about stuff like this I always think about this maybe this is not entirely no it is it's entirely fair I think about Riverdale

oh yeah whatever you're gonna say

God it's just there's something about a show that's that's like that gets its

like uh

uh you know it gets its joy from like we can make anybody do anything any magic can work anyway any like

when when

the way you get yourself into a problem

the way to write yourself out of it is to like make something work in a way that something else made me think it couldn't work that way

Sometimes you can sort of puzzle box it out and it's like, oh, you made me think it worked some other way so that now you can do this.

But sometimes it is the exact opposite thing where it's like, no, you fucking told me that this worked this way.

Why now is it this?

And I think that that's a totally

common reaction and fair reaction to like when someone is kind of holding back on how things work or has decided, like, no, I've the powers are cool.

I'm going to like write

like cool stuff happen.

Oh, yeah.

And then you get into like a Naruto thing where, and Naruto's not the biggest

perpetrator of this, but where it's just like

the powers are so self-contained and they're always changing, and then like things are working in ways where it's like, does that work that way?

It sort of feels like it wouldn't work that way based on other stuff.

Um, uh, an example of this is, uh, um,

like, uh, I, and I'm in the middle on this.

This is like, this is a weird example because I kind, or maybe it's the perfect example because I kind of like this and kind of hate it.

There's a part in Naruto where they reveal that Naruto's main thing is making shadow clones of himself

that go and act on their own and they punch and then when you do too much damage to them they poof into a cloud of smoke.

There's a point where they reveal that

when he makes a shadow clone and they poof away, he then, we've talked about this before actually, he then absorbs their entire experience back into himself

and then uses that.

to like rapidly level up a new move that he's struggling to master.

And I kind of love this because it's so goofy.

But then the other thing is, like, wait, this whole time he's been like absorbing hundreds of realities

from these different, and like, that's not disorienting.

It's not even worth commenting on.

So it introduces stuff like that.

And I, I want to respect the pedant's way.

I think that we are describing two extremely irritating poles.

And

there is a space that we enjoy storytelling in the middle.

I mean, this is what, you know,

people have said,

don't you feel like the dice are getting in the way of telling stories?

And it's like, no, the dice are the, you know.

I'm very happy to have these strictures in place, or not these strictures, these processes in place that can guide and can shape and can inform and can restrict the kind of stories that we're telling.

And I feel much the same way about these sort of systems.

Where it gets irritating for me is when you have to deal with like grappling rules, you know?

Yeah.

I see all the time TikTok.

TikTok is constantly feeding me like tabletop discourse.

Oh, and it's like, how does it know everybody?

How does it know that this is relevant to my life?

Because I don't engage with the title.

Do you have

the Friends of the Table account on your phone at all?

I do, but it predates that.

Okay.

But

the thing that I see all the time, it's just like every couple of weeks, there's like a new crop of people arguing of like, should a, should a, a, a GM be like lying about dice in order to like not have consequences happen to players.

And it's like, I just hear that, and I'm like, I understand the impulse.

I understand the impulse.

I do get why people feel this way, but I'm like,

so don't understand

following through on that feeling.

It's like such a,

I don't know.

It's just, it just reminded me of like the, this sort of squishy, like, well, the thing that happens,

um,

we want the thing that happens.

It can just sort of be, it can just sort of be anything.

It can just sort of be anything.

Yeah.

Um, Brandon asks, do you ever think you'd approach magic this way in something you made yourself?

I think it'd be a really fun technical exercise.

I think I would probably do it

really

small.

Did we not?

Have we not?

I feel like we did in Palisade.

Maybe this is because you're the faction game, but like...

Oh, this is absolutely what you did in Palisade.

We did kind of do a little bit of this with the

because Armorist

does this, so like the system was already there.

We just had to, like,

make it fit our setting.

And I do think that flavored a lot of stuff.

Absolutely.

Even just the narration of like the way that it affects the senses, the way that it informs the sort of like, what are they called, approaches?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I was thinking, I was thinking, I took this as more like a, if you had to make an armor stir,

I would like to

do that.

I would never make a game.

Yeah.

I can't.

I can't keep up with the rules of the games we play.

I don't think I could make a rule set.

I think you'd surprise yourself.

Yeah, do

Sylvie and Dre, Keith and I talked a lot in this one.

Do either of you have anything you'd like to add here before we move on?

Kind of.

The conversation is kind of, I feel pretty satisfied with it.

Yeah, honestly.

I don't know.

Like, I don't think I have anything really smart to add here.

Do you have anything dumb to add?

I could add a dumb thing.

Okay.

I usually do, but I'm struggling.

Yeah, I mean, you know, sometimes you talk a lot and it's interesting, and sometimes you talk a lot and it's boring.

You know?

Yeah.

This is a visual veiled comment.

Wait,

was that the dumb thing?

Yeah,

Smart Dre.

Oh, thanks.

Here's my dumb thing.

Did you guys know that Scooby-Doo from the Scooby-Doo franchise is technically part Interdimensional Alien?

Sure.

No, I didn't know that.

I've heard that.

Is that true?

Yeah, I believe they

had one of the continuities they made.

Yeah.

So,

sorry, let me just, I'm going to read this from the...

This is from the Scooby-Doo fandom wiki, and I'm sorry for you said if I had something dumb to add, I would

here we are.

Um the Anunnaki are a race of creatures living in another dimension every few thousand years during an event called Nibiru.

The barrier between their earth and their world and earth grow weak, allowing the Anunnaki to visit Earth.

Some of them are good, some of them are evil.

It is revealed that the animals which can talk are descendants of the Anunnaki.

Scooby-Doo is one of them.

Wow.

Unbelievable.

That's wild.

I just thought that he was a dog from Massachusetts.

Nope.

I'm pretty sure if you dug into this stuff, it is probably deeply offensive, and I'm sorry.

But I just think it's really funny that the Scooby-Doo Mystery Incorporated team was like,

what if the dog is half

alien god?

What if the dog is half alien god?

They did do this a little bit with the Scooby-Doo movie with

the scream guy, Matthew Lillard.

Yeah, there was

in that one.

But they were just like, yeah, magic is real.

The show about how magic is fake and

all the villains are scams.

No, now it's real.

These are real.

I think they did that in a recent Nancy Drew thing.

Yeah,

I don't like it.

I like when detective stuff has spooky, magicky stuff in it.

Oh, me too.

Absolutely.

Well, you've got to do it much like when it's hard to take a property about how it's fake and then be like, actually, it's been real.

In every Nancy Drew thing, it could have been magic the whole time.

but the joke about nancy drew right is that like it's always like a gas leak or it's always like someone

that's really funny i have that is a really funny thing to say

um nancy drew is fucking great uh

jack from another first-time hunter hunter watcher do you think gone will ever get a named ned move of his own if so what do you think he will call it same questions for leorio from connor now i would have answered this question differently had I not seen the first episode of the Greed Island arc, which, without spoilers, involves

Killiua trying to engage Goan in a sort of brainstorming session about what it would be like to have a special power.

That is not resolved at the time of recording, but I can say that I think Goan is going to get a named power.

I think it's going to be really stupid, is my guess.

I think it's going to be called like

Goan's Punch

Or something.

Or something like that.

You know, I've already seen the avenue that Lioria that

Killur is going down, and I've sort of been teased the avenue that Goan is going down.

If you haven't seen the show, Goan develops a very interesting technique for sharpening his Nen abilities, which is the most Goan thing I've maybe ever seen.

Same question for Leoria.

Will Leorio ever get a named Nen move?

No.

Leorio is going to bebop around the periphery of this story, occasionally arriving.

I don't think we're going to focus on Leorio long enough to see him learn and deploy a Nen move.

This is funny because I think that this question has been asked before, or I just got an overwhelming sense of deja vu of you saying almost that exact same thing of like, Leorio will not learn Nen.

He'll just show up sometimes.

I think that something like that was asked, and that is the answer.

And I've been semi-vindicated.

Leorio has learned about a third of Nen at this point, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we have not seen him applying himself since.

No.

No.

Um, uh, Sylvie, do you want to read the next one?

Yeah,

that is number 15.

Four yeah, 15.

Yeah, sorry.

Um

question.

Any chance I actually probably didn't need to read the word question here.

Any chance you can give your thoughts on a specific bit at the end of the Karapika and Uvo fight?

I feel like I was missing a look into the scene where he's inflicting cold and steady, almost analytical violence, scientifically figuring out what attacks worked on Uvo, and then his outburst of disgust about how the violence makes him feel.

I think there's a lot about Karapika's rage and commitment to doing violence contrasted with the burying of his emotions that really bubbles to the surface in that moment, and I'd love to hear what you all think from Pseudonym.

I think I have a pretty quick answer to this, which is that

what this makes me think of is two things

that I've sort of spoken a bit about on this recording.

The first is the Phantom Troopers a mirror.

The Phantom Troopers a way of working through

ideas that our characters,

that our main characters, are good protagonists at working through.

And I don't just mean this in the sense of a foil, you know, the traditional, like, have a character, then have a foil to their character to let them explore this stuff.

I mean a mirror in that what they are exploring is very often the same sort of set, core set of ideas.

You know, we've gone over in the past about how something that is really stuck in Ghan's crawl is the idea that villains could feel

camaraderie and loss and love for each other, despite existing in a world where, you know,

they inflict such harm on others.

And I think that the other thing that it makes me think of is what I talked about.

Uvo as a specific construct for his death.

He has been built top to bottom to be like a perfect use case for this sequence.

It's funny how Goan sort of and Kilua tried to like really actualize that thing, try to keep Karapika away from that contradiction that he sees in the Phantom Troop by like saving Krolo and Pakunoda.

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

And it was

specifically saying we don't want him to be a murderer.

It's offering a kind of an alternative, and that's something that really strikes Pakinoda to the core and powers her through that

arc.

And, you know, Finx has gotten that knowledge now.

Actually, a bunch of them did, but Finx was kind of the one we saw really turn.

So I think to your question, Sudanim, about Karapika's

precision then bubbling up into a kind of violent disgust is the consequence of placing a character who bites half of a person's face off, drinks beer, pisses out leeches,

swears revenge, throws a pebble at the moon.

It's just this like audiastic,

hedonistic force of violence and setting him against Karapika's, you know,

cold precision and then challenging that precision, you know, making Karapika realize that even in the depth of that precision, there is some sort of disgust or

burning violence.

He really has that gone moment on his own, but like in the middle of actualizing the contradiction is like,

you know, upset about it.

Like, I wish he wishes he didn't have to do revenge, which is fair, I guess.

And we don't really see

the sort of analysis that Karapiko works

being displayed by Uvo in the same way that we see the kind of like blood-red violent hedonism of Uvo being displayed by Karap.

And where we do actually kind of get it is in watching the Phantom Troop maneuvering afterwards.

Yeah, you know, I think a lot about the scene where Krolo

sort of plays a riddle game with Hiseker to try and figure out what the Shane user's powers are, and there is this real sort of like cold analysis of a situation.

But we don't really get to see Uvo exploring that because he's a beautiful creature bred for death.

I really love the Phantom Troop.

I love the Phantom Troop.

They're so great.

They're so great.

You might think that we're out of the Phantom Troop arc, but the Phantom Troop do at least one extremely funny thing at the beginning of the Greed Island arc that is great.

It's funny that

Gunn is able to speak the plot of the like the the whole the the theme of the Phantom Troop thing, which is like

this

contradiction of you know, their protagonist coded, they, we watch them, we think with them, we identify with them, but they're also bloodthirsty murderers who, who knows what horrible crimes they've committed, because they don't show us because we're like watching them like be the main characters instead of watching them be the villains.

And Goan just like says out out loud, like, this is crazy.

Like, how do you do that?

And still,

even though he just says it right out loud multiple times, like, why are you like this?

It's still so much fun to think about.

Why are they like that?

I don't know.

Why are they like that?

We'll find out one day.

Burler doesn't love talking about it, so we don't know.

Next question.

Yes, from Sylvie?

Not from Sylvie.

I just read this one.

You just read this one.

I just read one.

Not this one, but I just read Sorry Story.

I don't, I can't keep track of things in my brain.

No worries.

You were the one who said you had a system, though.

No, I have a system, and it's to forget every time who read.

And then, just in case any listeners forget, me forgetting I'm framing along with you, and then we all learn together who's supposed to go next, and it's me.

Hey, y'all, really loving Media Club Plus.

It's very fun listening to someone experience the show for the first time.

And the focus on on the music is especially an angle I haven't ever really engaged with.

Something I always am kind of fascinated by with stories I love is a supplementary material that gets made for them.

I always find it endlessly interesting to see people explore nooks in a world they didn't create.

So I ask, if you were given free reign to tell a hunter-hunter story in any medium or format of your choosing, what would you be interested in exploring?

Give me your pitches.

My pick would be Leorio Med School miniseries or a Zushi movie.

Also, and I hear this a lot.

The only thing that I can say is

I have no,

I cannot look that far into the future to see what we will all want to do or be doing.

You should definitely read the post-anime manga when you hit the end of the anime.

I will read it regardless of if we do it.

Oh, yeah, I'm going to read it.

There's no fucking way I'm not.

Yeah.

I have been putting

specifically

for the show and not wanting to be for the show so um

does anybody have i have a quick and easy answer for this

i would like to tell a story that sets out by being a sort of

cozy slice of life story in a little village that all the hunters have to pass through to get to the hunter exam or the like hunter candidates like that like the the quiz from a book sure yeah i was wondering what they call that with the guy holding the leg horn,

yeah, except what starts out as like a really like

capital C cozy, capital W, wholesome slice of life story with the baker and the you know, running down to the waterfront just turns into like a Cohen brothers ass nightmare as the hunter organization, you know, just like

does what the hunter organization is.

So, this is like the story is like um, when the Olympics comes to town.

oh yes absolutely when the olympics comes to town everyone's excited we're gonna take part we're helping the new crowd of hunters oops they've destroyed the city yeah our infrastructure is completely fucked now but it's not just that because because Something about the hunters is that they're like deeply compelling to people as well.

So it's not just that they've destroyed the city.

It's like two-thirds of the city have really gotten it into their head that they have to get the treasure under the watermill.

And there's like a demon under the watermill.

Like all the kids are now playing being hunters, you know, the barn catches fire.

It's great.

That's great.

I have like the most boring answer of all time that is,

it is practical to my life.

What I want is

do Sandland but Hunter Hunter.

I'm playing Sandland.

I just want like a really long, really good video game Hunter Hunter.

I'm sorry, Dre, and maybe Sylvie, I'm not sure.

I don't like fighting games.

I think you should mostly be apologizing to me.

Do you play fighting games?

I have a very on and off relationship with fighting games.

Like, when I play them, I will play them like super heavy.

But I just, I can never get past like the initial like glass skill ceiling that I have.

So.

Yeah, man, I'm on dust loops and shit.

Like I'm in the

fighting game minds.

Yeah,

I'm a little cracked.

The thing I like about my games is that I don't like any game where I have to like read about a meta in order to be good or like read about like

I just want to be natural.

I want the natural league where nobody knows anything.

I don't

care about metas when I play stuff.

I just go for what feels good to me.

And that usually bites me in the ass, but sometimes it doesn't I am going to play a hunter hunter and then impact quite a bit.

Oh, I'm gonna play it even if it's bad We should we should play it together Yeah, y'all warned me recently that the like footage is out and it's full of spoilers Yeah, I cannot imagine what that means

Because if it's just people I haven't met sure, but like that's definitely a big part of

people.

Yeah, I mean look I haven't watched that new trailer yet.

I don't know what's in it.

Characters throw powers in fighting games, you know?

You know what I mean?

I haven't seen the footage, but that's what I'm imagining.

It's like, okay, this is a character that you're going to meet in 35 episodes, and also their nen power.

I wonder how they're going to implement Krolla's power.

Do you know that an upcoming villain was just straight up announced?

There are more villains?

Shockingly enough, Arcs have antagonists.

Who was the antagonist?

It was the Phantom Troop.

No, the antagonists were the first people.

I would say the Phantom Troop were the Phantom Troop plus the Mafia community.

Yeah, I mean,

it changes depending on the perspective, right?

The antagonist was the mystery of

who's doing what from either side.

The friends we met along the way, the questions we answered along the way was the antagonist of.

But yeah, look, I'm under no.

I am.

I'm under no misapprehensions about how an open world game is extremely expensive, time-consuming, and requires a lot of skill.

Yeah.

However,

can we have one?

Can we have one, please?

Can we have one?

And can it be just a, just a, like a half a letter grade better than Sandland is?

Oh.

Oh.

Sandland is like

totally decent, but I really would like it to be awesome.

Is it like C plus decent or B minus decent?

Um

it's br it is definitely bridging those two.

And I'm not sure exactly which one.

Love the vehicles.

Loved upgrading my vehicles.

You know,

there's a little bit of a,

you know, in a game when you're moving around and you're jumping, you're like, wow, it feels really good to move around and jump.

Stanley doesn't have that.

They have really figured out in video games how to adapt Toriyama's style to 3D now.

It looks great.

It looks really good.

It is beautiful.

A lot of the characters are great.

The story is fairly simple.

The game is pretty fun.

There's a little bit more combat in the vehicle than I expected, and definitely less combat outside the vehicle than I expected.

But the vehicle combat is the better combat.

So tons of vehicle stuff.

That stuff's really good.

Yeah, I mean, my memory of the manga is that it revolved around the little tank they were in a lot.

I love Beelzebub and did not expect to.

He is.

Oh, my God.

I adore him.

Have you never read Sandland?

No, I had never even heard of Sandland.

Keith, you should read Sandland.

It's like a one-volume thing.

It's really good.

Yeah, I heard of Sandland when the trailer for Sandland dropped in like last summer.

Yeah, I'm the I read it when I was 12 years old because it was in my school library.

Wow.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, make.

Sylvie and Dre, what are your?

Oh, God.

I know what mine is.

I want the cookbook made by Buhara and Minchi.

Oh,

great.

That's really good.

First, catch 100 pigs.

Well, catch her.

Next, fail to cook 100 pigs.

Remember when she nearly flunked everybody out of the hunter?

Yeah, she was great.

I adore her.

Really, really good.

Did not get mentioned during the Who Would You Hang Out With?

Almost mentioned her.

Almost mentioned.

Oh, same.

Yeah.

I think my one would be like

if it's any medium, can I just like make people's outfits real?

Sure.

There are just certain articles of clothing where I'm like,

this is normal now.

I want to be able to wear what Killa was wearing in real life right now.

Yeah.

Which one?

You want the shirt that says ABC CBA?

Yeah, that like raincoat.

I'd love that.

You want to be all bastard cops, cops, bastard all, raincoat all, yeah.

Now more than ever.

Or his weird backpack with all the strands on it.

Mm-hmm.

That's great.

Yeah, the backpack with strands is great.

Okay.

The strand game.

D

asks,

of all the people you've met so far, whose advice/slash guidance would you trust the most slash the least if offered?

Karapika slash Karapika, depending on the situation.

That is a Karapika slash Hiseka.

Oh, yeah, I was going to say Neon and then Hiseka for trust the least.

Hiseka has given good advice in the show already.

Yeah, but he has might also bungee surprise a contract that I signed, and then it turns out I owe him like $10,000.

I was thinking of like the literal capacity to give good advice and

not factoring in the, like, can I trust this person?

Are there

a person?

Yeah, I forgot.

I was thinking, like, no, he can give good advice.

He's just a horrible liar and a villain.

And I feel like in defense of Karapika, Karapika knows that the stuff he's doing is bad.

And he tells like Gonan all the time, like, hey, don't be like me, bro.

Yeah, that's fair.

Don't do this.

And then Goat's like, but I wanna.

I really wanna.

I think probably

a ship captain from the very beginning of the show, I think, would probably

have

good advice.

Sure, yeah.

Mito, bad advice.

I I think Micho has bad advice for people.

Oh, probably.

Just stay obsessed with your cousin your entire fucking life.

Hey, weirdo.

You freak.

Wing is like an easy answer.

That's like going chalk, I feel like, but I would like to learn none from either Wing or what's his fuck, who teaches Karapika.

Yeah.

Oh, Mizaken.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

Mizaken is the fucking...

Ugh.

He's the tough love teacher.

He is.

We get some information about some Misakin teaching methods that we did not see in the next episode.

They are scary.

Krappiga is also the tough love student.

Yeah, that's true.

Teach me how to do chains and do it now.

No, it just got out of my chain.

No!

Let's see.

I think.

Oh, Neon, great advice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, well, yeah, that goes without saying, but that's not really her.

That's the demons.

Sure, the demons.

It is the demons, yeah.

Sure, that's fine.

As long as she's the one carrying them,

I'll listen.

Carlo, for the same reason, Carlo is a very good leader, you know?

And that might be good.

Some good leadership.

That's true.

He is.

Yeah.

Remember when he's like,

you should do everything I say,

but unless it's to save my life, and then just let me die.

Yes, that was some classic Krola Lusofa leadership.

Drain everything.

Yeah.

As someone catching up, I just wanted to note the detail that I caught as the exam arc ended: that the entire penultimate island badge scenario was a trial built to prepare future hunters to be able to hold onto their license.

I wonder what other skills the exam was built to ensure a new hunter would have starting out.

And that is from Wolter Zeitgeist.

That didn't really work out great for Gunn.

I don't think he really absorbed that lesson.

Yeah, they didn't say don't sell your badge in

the on Zevil Island.

He knew where it was.

Yeah, they actually said you can totally sell your badge a little bit after that is, I think, what they say.

And he listened.

He sure did.

That's a great note.

And it is interesting that, like, the hunter exam doesn't really know what kind of hunter you're going to be.

And in fact, they offer a variety of sort of different kinds of hunters.

But they do know that they're about to award you a

hunter license, you know?

So that they're about to kill free cards.

Yeah.

Yes.

So I think the first one's obvious.

It's extreme endurance.

Do you have the raw endurance to be a hunter?

Can you walk a hundred miles in in a row?

Number two, when I was thinking about this, was really fun, which is like,

let's pick

a kind of hunter that people will look down on and then show them that they can learn something relevant to them from that.

Yeah.

Right.

And they all say that.

That's kind of the vibe.

Yeah.

They did fail.

Because that's the hardest thing in real, actual life is

taking stuff that you've prejudged to be not worth your time and then showing, oh, actually, there's value all over the place.

Yeah.

Anything else on the other notes?

I don't think there's any lesson in the last thing besides hunters are cruel.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Netaro teaches you that hunters are cruel.

They play fucked up games with your head.

Although all of fucked up games win fucked up prizes

i guess that's also what uh fucking trick island or trick tower does too yeah

um hunters will torture you so

do your best

enjoy this is the life you've chosen

good luck if you've made it this far oh cooperating obviously with other hunters that's the that's oh but only they only not every group had that only their group had that so i don't know.

Yeah, I wonder what the other ones were.

Yeah, we'll never know.

That's a good bit of side medium, writing other hunters

from the hunter exam, writing their path through Trick Tower.

Not to make my second Taskmaster reference of the night, but they were just doing shit like, get all the toilet roll into this thing from a certain distance away.

Well, you've been watching a lot of Taskmaster.

I've got very depressed and watched a lot of that show.

Yeah.

Also, Chain Bastard's done a really good.

I I feel like I got very depressed and watched a lot of Taskmaster.

It's like that is a classic British experience, you know, the rare commonality

of the biggest shows on the island.

A lot of depressed people, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.

I also just like know a lot of European comedians because of my family over there, whereas so it's a lot easier to get into because it's like, oh, yeah, my dad used to show me Dara O'Brien clips.

Sure, I recognize this.

Yeah, a similar thing just from like being into comedy every season.

I'm like, oh, yeah, I know those two.

Those two I know.

Yeah.

Anyway, somewhere at Pacle is just like moving a bunch of flour to find some grapes and like having a miserable time.

Like that's the type of shit I'm picturing for Trick Tower.

Big, strong recommendation from me for Taskmaster New Zealand seasons two and four, by the way.

Okay.

It's a really good time.

Season four, I think, is up there with some of the best seasons.

The dynamic between their Alex and their Greg is like totally different and very, very, very.

They didn't just cop and copy you.

No,

their Alex is like pretty similar.

His name's Paul.

His name's Paul Williams.

And Jeremy Wells is their Greg, and he's like very stern and austere and like statuesque.

It changes a lot.

The tasks are really good also.

They stole.

I don't know who makes the tasks every week.

I know that Alex has a lot of them for the British show, but I don't know if he's using New Zealand as like a test bed for tasks, but

a lot of tasks that were on New Zealand first then ended up in the UK.

So part of me is like, ooh, the New Zealand writers are making some really good tasks, and then they're taking those for the UK one when they work well.

That's the British do that.

Yeah, no, that fan is a very British thing.

They're colonizing New Zealand again comedically.

Wow.

Next question.

What question?

Where are I lost?

Albedo of.

Okay, there we go.

Skipping the movie?

Yes.

No.

Yeah.

Probably.

People have asked us a lot.

So the reason why we haven't engaged with any of the movies is because they came out after the 2011 series finished and contained spoilers for it.

That was the main thing, right?

Which is just like

characters are in it that wouldn't be, and you know,

it just doesn't, it also doesn't feel right to me.

I'm just this, I just have this kind of brain where I'm like, uh,

watch it in the order it came out.

Don't watch it in

the order, don't watch it in universe chronological order, watch it in the order of real life.

Um, not the first time you go through, yeah.

Yes, we might watch it at the end.

I don't know.

I'm not going to promise that.

It might be an interesting experience for me to see the ways in which they have folded these things together.

You know, characters showing up earlier, but that's not something I'm interested in doing until we're

ready.

Yeah, I'm definitely interested in watching them for the show.

We'll get there when we get there and see how it goes.

But yeah, I have nothing against them.

It just is something that we

makes more sense to look at after we're finished.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm also really curious about this is This is actually an argument for watching it, not watching it until the end.

It's an argument for watching it at the end.

I want to know what Hunter Hunter feels like in an unbroken like hour and a half.

Rather than being structured for like 23-minute episodes.

And I'm really curious.

I don't know what that's going to be like.

I'm not going to have Karapika's story.

So I do want to know what's in there.

Oh, there's new Karapika stuff?

Yeah, one of them is like fully,

you know, Karapika prequel.

Something funny earlier is that an earlier question said zushi movie and i know zushi's in one of the movies oh that's funny whoa that's like one of the only things i know because i i got spoiled on that when we were doing heaven's arena and i thought it was i could just look at a wiki page because i've seen the show before

but you couldn't yeah it's like it's a non-canon spoiler so i'll take it um okay nice and easy uh you said in the last media club plus episode that a lumi might be the biggest freak of the zoldic family what's your collective Zolick freak ranking from most to least normal?

Particularly for Jack, considering the Zoldics

at this point of the story.

Thanks so much for an awesome podcast.

I look forward to every episode.

That's from Rowan.

Thank you, Rowan.

I think this is, for me, this is easy.

I've just got it.

I feel like I've got an order too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Same.

I would love it if you're just going to the same order.

Say the order.

Are we going

starting to least?

Starting with

least going to most.

Okay, I can't.

Least freak or least normal.

Least freak.

Okay.

Okay.

Zeno.

Least freak.

Kiliwa.

Oh, sorry.

I was in my mind excluding Kilua.

But yes, Kilua's the least freak.

Then it's Kaluto for me.

Don't know much about him.

He went on that mission with Illumi, but he's just a little

kid.

Creepily stands with his mom and yeah but but also seems to show signs of like being curious about things outside her orbit or control um then uh zeno

then maluki

then

silva

then

um

what's the mother called kiki

and then illumi as the most frequent jack we are the exact same just swap Silva and Maluki.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

I think Maluki is more of a freak because of his fucking gooner cavern that he has in his background.

But I mean, compared to Hunter-Hunter freaks, that's fairly normal.

Well, he mentioned mosquito bombs.

He does.

He does.

He's got a freaking evidently implied that gooning is very normalized in the hunter-hunter world just now.

And if you don't know what that is, don't Google it.

Yeah.

Don't.

Or do.

I got it.

It's for fans of the Arsenal Football Club.

Yeah, in it.

Wait, we're talking about Ann Hathaway now?

Wait.

Oh, yeah, no, she famously

famous schooner.

Oh, my God.

Okay, look, Keith and Sylvie, what are your favorite freaks?

Order the school.

Sylvie, you can go first.

I think Killua is my least of the freaks.

And then, you know what?

It's pretty similar to your order, order, Jack.

I feel like I probably would have Miluki a little lower just because I think

I

have met Miluki's before, minus the bombing, you know?

Bombing is an important part.

The bombing is a huge part, but like it's a sliding scale here, right?

And I think Ilumi's always at the top.

Kikio's up there.

I also think that.

Yeah, no, actually, I can.

Where are we putting Tommy Pickles?

Tommy Pickles is the freakiest of freaks because he's a theoretical freak.

It's Schrodinger's freak right now.

What is that guy called?

Hang on, what are the names of the Zaldics we're missing?

There's Zeno's grandfather, who's like 6,000 years old?

I think I do know the name.

I used to know the name, but I just think of him as Tommy Pickles now.

Can I say it if I think I know it?

Isn't that a spoiler?

Yeah, I don't think it's a spoiler.

I think it's Maha.

And is there another kid?

But

no.

How many people are missing?

There's definitely people missing.

Sylvie, you're right.

Maha is.

Well, there's a lot.

There's like...

Yeah,

I know that there's people that are in

the manga, and then there's, but I don't think that that's Tommy Pickles.

I think that's someone else.

Okay, I thought that was like...

And it's not Maha.

Yeah.

Okay.

But Maha Zoldik is a thing, right?

That's not just, I didn't just inception that name.

It was Tommy Pickles.

Yeah, no.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you nailed it.

Maha's Tommy Pickles.

Sorry, but there is someone else also that's from the manga who I won't.

I won't talk about it.

Listen, we take those.

Okay, here's my.

I thought I've been thinking a lot about this.

Thinking a lot about this, and I might be wrong.

I'm putting myself out.

I'm putting myself on a ledge here, willing to be wrong.

Least freak, Zeno, number two, Kilua.

I see it.

I see it.

No, you know why?

I was really thinking, like, I feel like Zeno's kind of normal.

Zeno's keeping it.

He just murders people a lot.

But then I have something later that makes that not make sense, but I'm just going to roll with it.

Next is Kaluto, then it's Miluki.

And then it's

Kikio, and then it's Silva as the most freak because he's the architect.

Oh, and then Alumi.

Sorry.

Again, Alumi is the de facto last lowest place.

Silva is one above Illumi because Silva is the architect of this nightmare and he deserves the blame.

Yeah, Zeno's the architect of the nightmare.

But that's a lot of three days.

But then you watch them in action, and

Zeno seems to have a really good work-life balance.

Yeah.

It also feels different.

Zeno does not fucking like Maluki, it seems like doesn't like Maluki, doesn't fuck with Illumi's whole deal.

God, I bet he thinks Hisaker is a real Hisuka.

I bet he thinks Kilu is a real bad.

I'm kind of going out on a limb and being like,

Zeno hates his son and the way his son deals with his family.

Interesting.

Which is why

being

is everyone's favorite.

He's the mom's favorite because she's a boy mom.

He's the dad's favorite because he's the strongest.

And he's Zeno's favorite because Kilo is the most normal.

Yeah, 100%.

It's interesting then that Zeno and Silver are like work partners.

They are the ones that team up together.

That's so.

I keep thinking about that one Silver conversation we had and how good it was.

Such sharp, singular characters.

I've never seen Hansen Squidward so sharp.

Jesus Christ.

Okay, Mark asks, which side characters would you like to see fleshed out more?

It's a good question.

Basho.

Basho.

Oh, Basho.

Zushi.

Great answer.

Zushi also.

Zushi would be great.

I'd love like a proper canon catch up with Zushi.

Because I want to know what Tagashi has in mind for Zushi.

Not necessarily what a movie team had.

Because I don't know how involved he is in that, right?

I I have no idea.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting because Zushi is

the archetype of the like patient, studious,

not really an adept, but working through it martial artist.

And his role in Tagashi's deconstruction was to be blown past by the other characters as they dangerously, violently, you know, claw for the power.

I would really be interested to see Tagashi be asked to write a patient martial arts story

where Zushi was his protagonist.

How does he take that archetype apart?

I want to see what Tonba's doing the other 340 days of the year.

Yeah, you're a good idea.

Yeah, he's not dead.

He's kicking out there somewhere.

He's like you for real life.

He's like you for Run Button.

Subscribe to Run Button May or else he's training every day of the year, every fucking day.

Yeah.

Coming up with new juices to give to people.

Yeah.

Right?

God, I bet he's.

How often is the Hunter exactly?

Once a year.

Really?

Yeah.

So, I mean, he's probably coming up on, you know, time's been moving.

Tompa's probably getting ready to go again.

Yeah.

What a funny character.

That's, yeah, I would love to see some more Tompa.

I'd like to see Green Green Jellybean Man.

Sure.

Who's our ninja friend?

What's his name?

Hanzo.

I also thought about Hanzo.

That's why I thought about Tompa because I was like, maybe Hanzo.

Slice of Life Hanzo Hanzo anime would also be a fun side.

He'd be a great gag manga protagonist.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Because he makes you sick.

Yeah.

Gag manga.

Not making any more of these noises.

Why not?

Why not?

Because people have to listen to this and enjoy it, hopefully.

Did anybody say Zeppelis?

Because I feel like Zeppelin could have some.

Oh, yeah, when I see Zeppelin turning into the road show.

Oh,

Corto P and Funnel and I'm here.

They're here a lot.

Yeah.

Why aren't they in every episode?

They're cockparking.

They're going to touch everything for so long.

Whatever.

It's probably fine.

That's really good.

Okay.

And then I think our final question.

This is a great question.

I think it's a great question.

There's a couple PSs here, too.

It ends on a really great PS.

Yeah.

I'll read this one, Jack, unless you want it to.

No, yeah, go right in.

Hello, Hunter Hunters.

Something that always interested me when hypothesizing about Nen is thinking about the implications of Basho's Hatsu.

He writes a haiku to produce a result, like his punch making something burst into flame, but according to him, the quality of the haiku dictates the strength of the outcome, which is why he gets annoyed that the fire barely burns through the chair.

This has always driven me crazy because that means that Nen and the laws that govern it recognize an extremely subjective element like the quality of poetry.

Like, does Nen have an artistic taste?

I know that Demon World Theory is honestly well built to take on this element, but it makes me think about what other ways Nen is subjective and what ways Nen has its own perspective.

Does it have a sense of justice?

Is there a chance of negotiation?

I wonder if there are any other Nen abilities that we've seen that have or could imagine having a subjective element included.

Thanks for making the podcast.

Hunter Hunter is one of my favorite things of all time, and I've been so excited to hear y'all's thoughts on each new story beat.

This is from Paloma.

P.S.

I was really lucky to be able to visit the retrospective exhibit of Tagashi's work in Japan recently, and there's a lot of cool info and fun bits of manga art of iconic moments.

If you want pictures of the book I have with stuff like a full nen chart, let me know.

It definitely has things that are spoilers, but it's also just really neat.

Yes, I would love to see that.

I looked at a lot of that stuff that was online when that happened and it seemed awesome.

PPS, Tagashi literally just announced that he's starting work on pages again.

I'm hoping that's a sign of him in good health.

So very auspicious.

That's great news.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great news, Tagashi.

I also hope that it means that he's doing well and not just that he's decided to work anyway.

Yeah.

Same.

I

please.

He's taken the time.

We know that he knows how to take the time.

So let's hope that it's good.

Pour one out again for Akira Toriyama.

Yeah.

Also, happy recent birthday to Tagashi.

He has the same birthday as my mom.

Wow, that's great.

Wow.

How old is Tagashi?

He's in his late 50s.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Late 50s.

Yeah.

Good work, Tagashi.

This is a great question.

Stay healthy, bro.

My gut instinct right away about the sub, like, what have we seen that's subjective?

I think that

Karapika's anxiety about whether his own Nen dagger would pierce his heart when making the law about only using it on Nen.

Yeah.

I think that that is subjective.

I was going to say that too.

That's like the prime example that comes to mind that we've seen already.

Yeah.

Because it really could go either way.

And

about like what, how Nen works, like why is Nen's objective?

What's governing it?

To me, it could be that

Karapika's anxiety about it is what makes it potentially true.

Yeah.

I would also say, like, that was my kind of theory to to explain this for Bosho: is that that is the quality of it has more to say about like what Bosho thinks of his own work, and then that you know enables him to better, you know, pull more of his aura out because he's like, oh, yeah, this is sick.

And that's an that's an interesting point, Dre, because what it means is that it's able to reflect your

real feelings to you, which is something that, you know, there

is

not always easily accessible, your real feelings about something.

Although it could be,

it could also be compromised, right?

It could be

your

subjective or confused or angry or weird feelings about, like, I feel this, you know, I think I'm deliberately not answering this question by talking about demon world theory because I think that Paloma is right.

Demon World Theory is like a methodology for thinking about.

A demon reads your poem and then says, you know, check.

Yeah, there's like a relev of aesthetics in the demon world.

We've gone over this.

But like, on the terms that the show presents it, Nen is sort of, and correct me if I'm wrong here, sort of like soul energy, right?

Yeah.

And so I think that it is subject to

a lot of the other conversations and questions

and, you know,

ponderings that people historically have had about the soul, vis-à-vis how it relates to yourself, how accessible your soul is to others, or whether it is a sort of like purely internal, sort of solipsistic thing, how the soul relates to art, you know, whether or not art making is drawing from some sort of like objective truth of your soul.

And I think that that is probably the method by which I would try and account for these things in the language of the show, right?

Where it is that Nen has access to either

the truth about what you are actually feeling.

That's, you know, Keith and Dre saying, this is a thing that's inaccessible to people sometimes, or it is sort of like a flailing connection to

how you believe you are feeling about a certain thing.

Which is also the crime about the anxiety over the Nen Dagger.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, insofar as historical and philosophical and artistic writing and thinking about the soul has always been moving in these sorts of magical or semi-magical

realms.

I think that, you know, Nen and the soul sort of move just as easily in thinking about those questions.

I think art is either good or bad, and the ground underneath your feet can tell whether something sucks or is awesome.

The earth can feel it when you draw a shitty drawing.

Yeah.

And I think just the earth decides.

The soul of the earth goes Bad.

Bad poem.

No fire for you.

Just a small amount of flame.

Slightly toasted wood.

Any other thoughts about this or any other questions that we missed?

I mean, my only thought about that last one is that I think it's something that's going to come back up again, probably.

I feel like just with the fact that we are...

I don't think it's a spoiler to say there will be a breath of nen abilities throughout throughout the rest of this show.

And I'm sure that this will apply to at least one of them.

Yeah.

The other thing, you know, that that reminded me of, because I'm just like tallying through Nen stuff that we haven't seen yet in my head, and then going like, in a way, this is kind of how a lot of Nen

works.

And it like,

you know, in some way, you're gathering energy from inside your body and like putting it out of you.

But in another sense, like if I think about like the force from Star Wars, you know,

like Yoda's thing from the movies is like,

it is your inability to

manifest this that is the issue.

It doesn't, it's not about, you know,

like

muscles in your arms.

Or you can't do this.

You can do it.

You just have to then go and do it.

And Nen works a little bit like this too sometimes where it's like like are you or it appears to anyway like are you leveling up a meter are you gaining experience are you getting stronger are you put is there more energy in your body than there used to be like or are you just like better at thinking through this process

um

and

That has some parallels with like writing a poem and feeling that it was good and

then using that poem to burn a chair properly.

I don't know.

This is, you know, this is the fun, kind of squishy part of this stuff where it's like, yeah, we will never get real answers about these, and that's fine, but it is fun to think about.

And that's all our questions for now.

You know, you are welcome to send questions to us on co-host at friends-table or to our email at friendsathegmail.com.

We probably won't do another sort of questions episode for a bit.

We got some Hunter Hunter to watch.

But, you know,

we're there and we'll do this again.

I'm so excited to watch Green Island.

It's been too long since I watched Hunter Hunter.

I'm so excited.

Did you like the first episode that you saw?

Yeah, I did.

Although,

we can't talk about this.

No, no, you can't.

I want to be part of it.

We can't talk about this.

We can't talk about this.

I'll say two things I've seen in the title sequence, and then we can't comment on it.

We have to move on.

I've seen people

pulling item cards out of a big book,

and I've seen a horse with a

trumpet for a nose.

Moving on.

Great.

Anything else before we go?

I think that's everything for me.

This show is such a delight to make, and we're able to make it thanks to your support, friendsatthetable.cash.

I mean, I realize that when I say it like that, it sounds like a plug.

And if you have been thinking about supporting us on Friends at the Table to get a bunch of extremely cool bonuses,

if you like us talking and you're not unfamiliar with Friends at the Table, you can check out the Clapcast, which is sort of, it's not really behind the scenes.

It's how we talk when we're hanging out and warming up uh before recording anything you might also want to check out friends at the table we have a season called bluff city that you can jump into with no sort of prior experience and it rules it is about a

strange mirror of atlantic city uh in new jersey it's uh it's about casinos and heists and people trying to get by um there is also media club plus specific bonuses you can listen to two little arcs that we did first we watched dragon ball We watched the Tian Shin Han at the World Martial Arts Tournament arc of Dragon Ball.

It was a huge amount of fun.

And then

we watched one sort of cogent section of Jojo

in which we saw

an episode about the

what are they called?

The

Nijimura brothers?

The Nijimura brothers.

The Nijimura Brothers.

And then we also saw an episode about...

Was it just the three Nijimura Brothers?

Yeah, three Nijimura.

These Nijimura Brothers episodes.

And then, yeah.

Then we saw an episode called Let's Go Eat Italian Food.

Yep.

That's in the second slot.

It's one of the strangest episodes of television I've ever seen.

Sure is.

For reasons that I won't go into, because you'll have to find out for yourself.

And then we watched a really scary

double bill about a serial killer.

Yep.

Called.

What was that called, Sylvie?

It was just wants a quiet life.

Yoshi Kagekira just wants to live a quiet life or just wants to live quietly.

It's

one of the two.

Could be both.

Yeah, I think it's translated differently depending on the localization, is why I'm not sure about it.

Yeah.

But I like these episodes so much that I watched the whole season, and

the ending is so good.

You know,

I gotta say, like, the first half of the season is like really, really great, you know,

kind of

mostly episode of the week week

shown in anime stuff that all was awesome.

And then the second half is like, what if Death Note was good?

Wow.

We need to, hold on.

All right, this has been Media Club Plus, everybody.

Death Note is

a foundational text.

Some buildings have bad foundations.

That's fine, but those boys got handcuffed together, and that's part of my heritage.

But thank you for supporting us.

In order to make this show possible, it is a delight every time I get to sit down and watch Hunter Hunter for my job.

I'm having a great time doing this.

I can't believe we are nearly halfway through in both directions.

It feels like we have both done way more and way less than that.

I sort of

can't figure out which it is.

It feels like we haven't watched that much Hunter Hunter, but it's also hard to not think of not doing the show.

What else have we done?

We've done the exam, we've done the little interlude with the Zaldics, we've done Heaven's Arena, we've done York New.

York New City, that's in it.

Yeah, wow, and we're about to embark on Greed Island.

They are not being coy about what this next season is.

I know where we're going.

Unless you're being...

Gosh, he's tricked.