What Is Your Birthday? - Hunter x Hunter ep. 51-54: Media Club Plus S01E17

Hey everybody, it's Keith.

Just a couple quick things at the start of this episode.

First,

make sure to check out friendsofthetable.cash, the friends of the table Patreon, to get access to the upcoming JoJo's Bizarre Adventure bonus episode where you watch the three-episode Nijimura Brothers arc from part four, which is season three of the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure anime that's going to be up this week.

The other thing is, we talk about an upcoming merch drop in this episode that we weren't sure when it was going to be out.

We're pretty sure that it's going to be out on Monday, April 22nd.

So make sure to check friendsofthetable.shop.

We will post about it.

So if you don't want to forget, go to x.com slash friends underscore table or co-host.org slash friends dash table or friendsofthetable.cash and sign up for an account and we will let you know that merch is dropping.

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.

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on Twitter and I'm co-host at Keith J Carberry.

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

You can listen to the podcast and your podcast app.

Those go up on run button also.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, Keith.

You can find me on co-host.

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.

Sylvie?

Hey, I am Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And you said leave a five-star review and everything,

I didn't say that today.

Jack and G job.

Hey, my job.

Sorry.

No, no, no.

I only talked about Run Button today.

You know what?

I appreciate the grime set, you know?

Anyway, leave Media Club plus a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or your platform of choice, podcast platform of choice.

I'm too excited to talk about these episodes.

I'm stumbling all over the place already.

And I'll read it on the show.

I've got a few that I'm going to read later.

Stick around.

There's my plug.

Hey, I'm Dre.

You can find me on Twitter at SwanDerry3000.

I don't think I have anything to plug.

Speaking of things to plug, I'm drinking out of my fruit of grape glass here.

I got a fruit of grape glass.

It's great.

Go get a fruit of grape glass at runbutton.shop.shop.

Yeah, go to friends of the table.shop.

You can get a mug.

You can drink coffee out of your friends of the table mug, and then you can drink juice out of your Run Button glass.

We will have new merch.

When we are recording this, we don't have that merch yet.

But when this comes out, we will have new merch.

Will I say what it is?

No, because I know better

than to tempt God or man.

A very wise woman, stop saying dates and what did she say when Allie told us off for the finale that one time?

Stop saying dates and numbers when we were like, the finale will have three more episodes.

If it's the spring, check friendsofthetable.

Actually, always check friendsofthetable.shop, but definitely if it's the spring.

Yeah.

It's like an important season for us.

Because this, because who knows when this will be out?

Six weeks, eight weeks, something like that?

I don't know.

Anyway, wow, these are exciting episodes.

Do we want to go straight into the recap?

Please.

All right.

All right.

Okay, so we start on Neon, who like I sort of forgot about.

Although I think we ended on Neon also.

Neon was basically tricked into leaving because they're going to redo the,

or they're going to do the auction, even though they totally shouldn't because of the Phantom Troop.

And they've told Neon, we're not doing the auction.

Go home.

Well,

she might be extremely weird and kind of evil, but she's not stupid.

She knows that they're not stopping the auction.

And so she runs away from Basho and Melody and her, you know, personal attendants.

She runs away from her shopping spree to immediately head back to the auction to bid on the items that she wants, which, as a reminder, are like disgusting human remains.

The Kurta eyes, specifically.

Well, Curta eyes, a jellied infant's brain, the like hair of an or the teeth of an actress, and then like some old mafia guy or something or some old actor.

I don't know, something like that.

She doesn't have a pass to get back in, but fortunately, she meets a nice man named Krolo Lusilfer, who gives her a ride.

While the Mafia is introducing their small army of assassins, Krolo gets his fortune read

and becomes the second spider to shed tears for Uvo Gien.

He goes to start their Requiem, the Spider's Requiem,

which is a full-on assault of the auction house and also kind of the surrounding neighborhood because of the blockade that the mafia puts up.

Karapika is torn between his desire to confront the troop and his charade of loyalty to the Nostrods, and also maybe some genuine concern for Neon, who was knocked out by Krolo after the fortune-telling.

He doesn't know that it was Krolo.

And while he's torn between his passions and his plan, the Zoldics are duking it out with Krolo, Dragon Ball Z style.

They're in a ballroom.

Silva is throwing Dragon Ball Z moves.

Luckily for Krolo, the troop is just as good at backroom deals as they are at frontal assault.

And the fight is called off.

The Phantom troop pulls out a massive victory while at the same time making it look like they were defeated.

Word of their alleged defeat reaches Karapika, who is thrown into despair just long enough for the spiders to regroup, each learning their fortunes from Krolo's newfound power.

Bangers on bangers on bangers on bangers on bangers.

It's so good

you know we talked to big game

you lot talked to big game about this arc yeah um in general the sort of the the phantom troop arc yeah and as we got you know uh the chaos emerging around uvo fighting the mafia in the desert and uh and karapika killing uvo um and i i think i actually said you know a couple of episodes back how does this escalate uh i was not prepared for what was going to happen to the tone

of the show.

It becomes a different thing in these episodes.

There's actually a point in episode 54 where

we're freed momentarily from the kind of the grip of this.

It's so funny.

Yes.

Do you want to describe the moment briefly and we'll get back to it later?

Yeah, when the gang sort of reconvenes, first in a park and then in a hotel before defeat is snatched from the jaws of victory and we go plunging back into this awful tone again,

we get this sort of like

reprise of the sensation of being in the early optimistic days of the Hunter exam or having fun on Whale Island.

And it is so funny that this has been placed at the end of a chunk of episodes that feels like Assault on Precinct 13 or like

Or, you know,

the most high stakes,

grimmest moments of Diehard.

This arc is amazing.

And I watched two episodes.

I watched all of them today because I'd screwed up my planning this week.

And I got halfway through and episode, the second episode in the group we watched ends with

Silver launching a Dragon Ball attack at Krolo

and seemingly obliterating him.

And

I went to have a nap and I couldn't sleep because I was thinking,

is Krolo dead?

Have they actually done it?

Have they actually killed Krolo?

What does this mean?

Obviously, he's not actually dead and he's going to come back to life, but and you know, and of course, that was all revealed.

Suffice to say, I had a great time with these episodes.

They were oppressive and heavy and regularly

tense and unpleasant, but I had such a good time.

Well, and I think that the other thing that makes these episodes so great, in addition to all that, is like the underlying current that, you know, these like monsters who have decided to

like spend their day,

you know, wantonly slaughtering the downtown area of York New City,

they're all so sad.

Yes, yes, yes.

And they are really sad about their friend, which is like the sort of the contradiction that Goan, you know,

makes

you know makes plain in the last set of episodes that we watched is like, why,

why are are you sad about him, but you can't see how what you're doing creates this kind of sadness in the world?

Um, and I don't think we zero into any sorts of conclusion there.

If anything, it just further complicates

well.

There's one, there is one moment where I think that they

sort of elucidate it slightly in one of the later in episode 54.

I think it's, it's, it bridges episode 53 and 54.

In episode 53,

we get a recap on what Meteor City is, which is where the family trillion miles.

We're jumping ahead.

Yeah, we are.

We're jumping ahead.

We will get there.

I think the place to start for me is with the reintroduction of, towards the start of this chunk of episodes,

everybody's favorite, the world's most professional and also celebrity influencer assassins, the Zaldic family.

Sure.

The Zaldic family, I mean,

we have a representative of the Zelda family of our our own in the show most of the time, but the other members of the Zaldic family arrive kind of brilliantly in much the same way as,

you know, we knew they were coming,

but they're just here.

You know, the Zoldic theme plays.

Keith, can you do you have

the Zaldic theme?

The thing that I really appreciate about the Zoldics in the next couple episodes is

also

banger.

Banger theme.

One, I appreciate the fact that we got to hear the theme more.

Two,

I really appreciate how workman-like Zeno in particular is about everything.

Wonderful.

My first note for this was that his tavern, when he shows up, says never retire.

He has a new tavern.

That's so cool.

I just get a subtitle for that.

This is our first time seeing

the

professionalism of the Zaldic family.

You know, we last really encountered the Zaldic family at work with their Maverick weirdo Ilumi doing things for his own ends.

You thought they were monstrous, but they're actually monstrously professional.

They are extremely professional.

So the Mafia have brought in them as part of more, like a team of assassins.

And everybody realizes pretty quickly that this isn't going to work.

As soon as the other assassins realize to their horror that they are dealing with the Zaldics and are sort of like, well, you know,

we can try our our best here, but I'm sort of really outclassed.

There's a lovely moment where the idiot baby assassins are picking out code names for themselves, and they're like, oh, they're doing reds.

Let me just name, let me just give us the names for these assassins real quick.

We have Pagan Gardener, Military Guy, 90s Punk, 15th Century Merchant, 15th Century Merchant 2, and a Normal Guy.

Yep, that is absolutely what they look like.

They look fantastic.

The wiki has him listed as Assassins A through E.

Tagashi cannot resist.

It's so funny.

The thing is, Tagashi cannot resist drawing an extremely weird-looking character, but at the same time, occasionally, something happens.

He freaks out and draws an extremely normal person.

Yeah, one of the assassins is really just like

a guy

with pants and a hoodie.

You get it?

The one clue he's an assassin is that he has a medium-sized scar on his face.

Yeah.

And then one of them is just Gara, too, which might actually be the chicken and the situation.

Yeah.

90s Punk Assassin is extremely Gara vibes.

He is, yeah.

Yeah.

Same color, hair, lots of makeup.

The makeup is so similar.

They both got the really heavy Trad goth thing going.

And Zeno, who, far from being the

sort of

maniacal murderer that you might suspect from one kill a day and

being the head of the Zaldic family, says, look, you guys can call each other what you want, but I am Xeno Zaldic.

This is my son, Silva.

Yeah, yeah.

It recontextualizes one kill per day

less of like a mantra of like, I'm a bloodthirsty fiend that must kill once per day, and more of like a self-motivational, like, get back out there kind of thing.

Yeah, sexual affirmation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Much like how Silva has the Ben's Knife Collection Instagrams and those got an inspirational quote grind set Instagram.

Yeah, it's the assassins, like live, laugh, love.

One kill per day.

What's the new one say?

Never retire.

Never retire.

I love the line where he says he'll give the other assassins 30% off because

they're on the same line of work.

He has such a

Al Pacino and the Irishman vibe to me in that scene.

He's like, what can't you do?

I'm not sure what

the Irishman.

He plays Jimmy Hoffa.

Oh, okay.

Yeah,

it's such like a

graceful insult.

Yeah.

Like, you can't, if there's someone you can't kill, just let me know and I'll cut you a deal.

Yeah.

And you get the impression he genuinely means it because

as the episode sort of, as this chunk continues, we really do learn that Zeno is a professional.

He is committed to how he makes the Zaldic family work and what they do.

When the assassins are giving themselves color names, and I want to bring this up because this is Jack ringing their special bell,

Zeno remarks that this is just like a game.

And, you know, he is saying that in a very belittling fashion.

Zeno clearly does not correspond to the Hunter ideology of the joy of the world is in the ways that it can be made, made like a game.

It's like, you idiots are just playing.

This is just a game.

I bring this up specifically because there's another great mention of games later in this that we can come back to then, but it's worth putting a pin in here.

As the assassins get ready, a little sort of subplot begins to bubble up, which is that there is a real resentment in the mafia, in the mafia community towards please yes nostrad um and the the reason for this seems pretty straightforward nostrad is new money mafia who has made his name

off the back of his daughter's nen predictions which people can easily choose to believe are fake

Yes, yes.

And I think that there is a real sort of blend of both a resentment of who is this upstart coming in here and, you know, clawing his way to the top in a new way, and a kind of self-loathing from the mafia community of being like, but we keep buying predictions, you know, and we keep following them.

Because over the course of this, there's this great shot as the sort of siege begins of all the mafiosos thinking and talking about their predictions.

Yeah, totally deluding themselves into thinking they can cherry-pick little parts of it.

Yeah, and so I think it is this thing of like, partly, who's this fucking guy?

And

deep in the sort of worm of their hearts, they know that they're relying on him and on and on Neon.

This is Zenji who's introduced in this episode.

He's

the guy who like carries this kind of subplot, which is tied in with the sort of other thing, which is like Karapika's got his plan and his plan is to follow through on the Nostrad stuff to get himself closer to to the eyes and to the people who buy the eyes

and his

his like real burning desire to go confront

the

Phantom troop and this guy Zenji is like putting him in a position to have to like protect Nostrad, which he clearly doesn't want to be doing.

This set of episodes, this is like the start of something this set of episodes does really well, which is juxtaposing karapika's like stated desire of i want to get the my like kinsman's eyes back like i want to return it them to them uh versus the like very

like

you know the less much less noble desire for revenge right like typically like you know it's it's the the violent urge versus the the sentimental urge that's going on yeah um putting them to rest versus like a personal revenge thing Yeah, that and like we like will we have to come back to that during the the Requiem stuff.

Right.

Well, yeah, it pairs really well with

what

and I it's a it's happening right now in the episode.

One of the first scenes

is Neon at the

table with

Crowlo talking about fortunes and how she's a fortune teller and she's talking about like how fortunes are for the living and if if you do a requiem, you do it for yourself.

Which Krowlo says, No, we don't.

There is an afterlife,

and

I have to do this for

he does, he does, yeah.

No, I know he does also say that, but he does for a second.

He does, doesn't he also say, I guess you're right before that?

Uh,

yeah, I think that he's just talking until he gets to the point where he wants to be in front of the camera to knock her out.

That's a good point.

Yeah, um, he's so he's so charming when Crowlo arrives.

And

this is our first real encounter with Krollo as a fully featured character with dialogue, with intentions in a conversation.

Off screen, too, we cut to them already being together, which is

great.

And the thing that was immediately notable about this,

not just by cutting to them in the middle of the scene, but in Krolo's affect throughout this scene, is that Tagashi is denying us Tagashi's trick at this point.

You know, so much of his power is situating the camera with

someone, putting us into their head,

letting them talk through what they're thinking,

whether or not they're a villain.

You know, Tagashi's favorite game is this drifting perspective.

Cutting dramatically or cutting aggressively into this scene with Neon and an extremely bizarre Krolo, he is daring us to try and figure out what Crowlo is doing.

Because we are given no sort of, at this point,

he's like a

sort of a

still pool of water.

This is the part we are trying to figure out.

Like Jacqueline, you said, this is the part where it starts feeling like a different show.

Yes.

Because it's so dramatic, like, as in drama,

and

it just feels like a different way of interacting with

the filmed characters where

they're not giving you anything.

They really are just playing out these scenes back to back to back.

Yeah.

Crowlo is extremely polite.

He is extremely charming.

And there is so little work being done to say

this man is sinister outside of his reputation.

He's animated really charmingly.

There's this great moment where he writes down his name and his name, and

he gives Neon his real name.

This is, Keith, I have not been able to stop thinking about you describing Kiryu as being essentially sort of unassailable because

he could punch his way through any problem.

I think Krolo is a lot of people.

He's allowed to be like human glass, like totally transparent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And honest and open with the world because

consequence for him.

Or

there's no consequence.

Is that he's not afraid of the consequences and has like borne out that the consequences roll off of his fists like

you know, you know, one punch after the other.

Yeah.

But yeah, Crowlo is like kind of the dark mirror of that.

Yeah, he writes down his name and hands her back the piece of paper and there's just this lovely little animation of him like sitting back patiently in his chair and it is wildly alienating because

oh sorry but

there's also the little bit where he's like my friends call me boss and it's just like a cute anecdote to her and like putting her at ease more she says that his name is funny and he's like well my friends call me boss and she's like that's even funnier yeah but he doesn't do any he as far as we can tell he doesn't do anything to trick her into getting in this car, trick her into this restaurant, trick her into giving.

The only thing he's doing is leaving out that she's part of his plan.

Yeah.

But it's not like, there's no nen going on here.

There's no, there's no, there's not a lot of law.

It's like very much like he's just able to do this, which is kind of scary.

But it also

go ahead, Jack.

Okay.

I mean, to me, that just goes back to like,

God, the mafia is just very, they're just bad at everything.

But,

you know, the

I can't remember what, I think it's in this episode when we're first introduced to the jerk mafia guy.

and Nostrod says something like,

because Karapika is like, well, that guy's an asshole.

And Nostrod basically, his line is something along the lines of like, some people just can't recognize their own incompetence.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is hilarious to me because he is incompetent without basically relying on his daughter.

And because he has to rely on his daughter due to his own incompetence,

she also has like not learned anything and is also wholly incompetent.

A thousand percent.

Because he just treats her like a golden goose.

And so

yeah, she has he

he hasn't allowed her to develop any kind of self-preservation or

you know world knowledge because anything she wants she gets because he just needs to make sure she keeps laying eggs.

Yep.

Yep.

Something

a side effect of this scene with Crolo sort of being our first real

I'm so cautious about real.

Our

um lengthy dialogue with him uh immediately makes you wonder is this krolo you know like for example had we seen um him being very sinister and very talkative and and even making plans you know something that's been notable about krolo prior to this point is that um his position and his power has sort of gone without saying you know we don't often see krolo planning we see members of the phantom troop planning and members of the Phantom Troop respect Krolo.

So we're like, okay, so he's the boss.

But had we seen him talking or planning, and then had we had this scene with Neon,

we would be able to make more clearly a sort of a guess as to like, what is Krolo really like?

You know, how much of this is acting?

How much of this is a performance?

But by

jumping straight into this, we're like, is this just...

Is this just him?

Is this just what he's like?

Yeah, I think.

I mean, I don't have the answer to that question,

but

I think that, like, part of the same thought of the, you know, the Kiryu comparison that you made, Jack, is that

if he doesn't

need to

put on a huge disguise in order to get these things done, then it probably is, he probably is being like, he's free, he is

the strength that we assume that he has and the talent that we assume that he has, it seems like he probably is free to just live his life in these moments and not worry too much about like putting on some show.

Because to him, the show comes after this.

Like, this is just the setup for the show.

So, my read is that he is sort of being real.

As real as you can be when you're sort of tricking

this girl into going into the hallway so that you can although that is, you know, we don't know his plan, but we do have the little bits of things that he said along the way, which is, you know,

he predicts, you know, 10 episodes ago, they must have had someone who could have told them that their

auction,

the auction items were in danger, but not known why.

And then they learn about Neon, and then they put together that Neon must be connected to Karapika.

So we never get any planning, but we do have these like bits of

knowledge that they also have

into the mix of like 10 or 12, however many episodes we've watched so far, sort of all mixed in.

And then it all comes out the other end, this fully formed plan that they don't really tell us that they're enacting.

But it works really well.

It goes down smooth.

Yeah, two things here.

One is a little thing that I want to say and then put a pin in because

I think I'm about to say something awful.

Okay.

Wow.

Goblin.

Is

don't say the G-Wade.

Is

Crollo

a kind of Leorio?

Wow.

I need to think about some things.

Or rather, is Leorio a kind of Crolo?

Can you draw the line that you're seeing?

Oh, I can.

Yeah.

No, I see it.

I mean, we'll get into it as we begin to talk more about Meteor City in terms of like maybe a more dire.

Is this the line?

But there is something to be said for someone who is

God.

Is Crolo too.

Sorry, I didn't mean to.

I'm going to have to.

No, no, no.

I'm going to have to keep picking at this because

it is such a grim idea.

Here's the one.

Doctor Dark-Hearted Miser.

Is Krolo to Leorio what Hisaka is to Gon?

Who is Leorio?

I don't think that.

I don't.

Leorio?

In the sense of, like,

something really interesting about Hisaka is that we can see reflected in him at times, like

a kind of dark path.

You mean as a foil?

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This is the opposite side of the coin.

I thought you were like, Cromo really wants to see Leorio get strong.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

I really misunderstood that.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

I see, Sylvie, how you got there.

Hisaka is a kind of corrupted or

transformed or like

mangled gun.

And I wonder if, I don't know if this is true,

the thing that Leorio and Krolo are at their heart might be the same thing.

I don't know if

this is true.

I'm just, I'm just, it is so weird to see Krolo in this setting as our first main encounter with him, as this like fast, not fast talking, but charming, slick.

Well, I do think that the show,

I think Hunter Under is interested in a sort of,

like, if anyone's ever played Kotor 2, we'll

maybe see the parallels with this.

This is real.

I'm not just saying it because I like to bring up Kotor 2.

But like,

the thing that is behind someone's ability to be a magnetic person.

And

all four of our main characters are kind of magnetic people in their own way.

But Ghoan is sort of like the star of the show, pun intended.

The, you know, Krolo has the same sort of thing where he is also surrounded by, you know, extremely powerful people who are all kind of magnetized to him.

And then we see him able to do that again with Neon.

And, you know, later on, we'll have more characters who there's some part of that.

It also becomes a very core part of the

main themes of the show.

I think this aspect of the show gets foregrounded more and more as the show goes on.

And then we get more characters later on who's like, there's something about them that causes them to be surrounded by people who want to help them and want to be near them.

Zephile is someone who we just saw like me meet to go in Kilo and immediately, like, I want to be around you guys.

I want to help you guys out.

There's just something about you that makes me want.

And Coach War 2 is a game.

Spoilers for Coach War 2.

If anyone doesn't want to hear it, I won't.

If any of you three don't want to hear it, I won't say it.

Yeah, that's fine.

Yeah, go for it.

Coach R2 in the background is a game about how the superpowers that you have as a Jedi

kind of bend people's reality around you, and you become

kind of like a

kind of like a gravity well of charisma.

People who wouldn't normally agree with you are agreeing with you, people who wouldn't normally tolerate you are tolerating you because of this thing that you have that like literally is affecting people's reality.

And

Hunter Hunter never gets as

literal as that,

but there is something in there in how people treat the different characters.

And Krolo is like a major example of someone who

is

given leadership status by the show.

And the people who respect him as a leader are like truly, you know, like

inhumanly dedicated to him.

Yeah.

I think to make a point that I can argue more effectively or argue with more evidence, an understanding of the show at this point, I think

it is notable, you know, you mentioned Krollo's plan earlier, Keith.

And for a creator who loves to keep telling us characters' plans as they are doing it, you know, to do this sort of like Columbo style trick of the plan isn't actually the secret.

The interesting bit of the story is watching, you know, watching them work through it.

And we get some of that in episode 54, too.

Like a huge, maybe the most on-the-nose version of this.

Yes, but, but

in 51, in this scene with Neon, Krolo's plan is

absent to us.

Yes.

Or is inaccessible to us.

You know, we can,

like you said, Keith, we can put pieces together, but the pieces that I put together...

Firstly, it is notable that the show is asking us to put pieces together rather than just have Crollo tell us, you know?

But the pieces that I put together were that Krolo wants the

fortune-telling power that Neon can have, and so is going to kidnap her.

Or,

and then

my thoughts about that were kind of troubled when, rather than trying to kidnap her, Krolo just sort of asks for his fortune.

We'll get into the fortunes in a second.

But, you know, for most of this arc, until what had actually happened

sort of became clear to me, I didn't know what Krolo was planning.

And so that it meant that that final moment where what he had done became awfully clear hit so hard.

It's true.

It's true.

There is no real explanation for why he wouldn't want to kidnap her until all of a sudden it reveals itself.

You know exactly why.

And this is the downside of Tagashi's trick revealing itself.

Because when you see what Tagashi withholding his trick lets him do, you're like, oh, that was a really great moment.

Yeah.

He is playing a balancing act.

Now, we're going to talk about fortunes quickly, and I am going to be the nen PowerPoint

person here briefly.

This is going to sound, if you haven't watched Hunter Hunter, if you've not been watching along with us, this is going to sound like we are dialing into stuff that we don't need to dial into.

We need to talk about this.

I'll say this.

If you haven't been watching along, I implore you.

I mean, continue to listen to the show and not watch along if that's really what you want.

But please.

This show is so good, you guys.

Come on.

I am really fun.

Okay, there is real quick, I just want to say we skipped over a little bit of Krabika talking with

Light Nostrahd.

By the way, editing an episode, I realized maybe this is something I knew at some point, but his name's Light, her name's Neon.

Duh.

Didn't even see that until I was editing not this recent episode that came out, 13, but the one before that, 12.

And this is a little funny because Tagashi, in general, doesn't really like themed names so much as he likes an absolute spaghetti at the wall

naming technique

the Phantom Troop members names are I suppose themed a little to their abilities but they're not themed as a group you know this isn't like everybody in Dragon Ball has food names or underwear names or underwear names yeah of course oh the so

they Nostrad says this is just some some mafia community lore.

60% of the votes in the mayoral election were bought, and the police chief is the mayor's protege.

Imposing traffic restrictions is simple.

So, what has happened here is that in response,

this is structurally important to these episodes, if not like an important scene in itself.

The mafia has, in response to the Phantom Troop, made a massive blockade around the like couple blocks that the auction is taking place on.

So, the only way to get in or out of this whole part of York New City is to have an auction pass.

Yeah.

It sort of puts page to the claim that the Mafia auction is secret now that we know that York New City is functionally run by the Mafia.

It's just whether or not you are claiming that a thing is a secret, you know,

regardless of whether or not it actually is.

By the way, if you needed to buy 60% of the votes, your candidate must have been really unpopular.

Wildly unpopular.

I know.

I've seen New York politicians.

Briefly ringing the bell, the world of Hunter Hunter sort of infrastructurally is fucked.

Every time we come back to this, new horrors emerge.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And there's worse to come in these episodes.

Straight up, like, we, the, so much of this show

right now feels like just peeling away the layers of the like fun adventure world that the show started with.

Yes.

And I really enjoy it.

Yeah, 100%.

Okay, Neon can tell a fortune using a nen power that she sort of doesn't really know she has.

I mean, she knows she can tell fortunes.

A demon appears from the demon world and manipulates her hand to draw a fortune.

She tends to write four or five little tiny poems in one go.

She doesn't know what she has written,

and she doesn't read people's fortunes because she believes that they sort of

her involvement

even by reading them will

sort of alter their outcome in some way.

I think in in a very uh

it's very like this show to do this, but they don't they never give us a clue as to whether that is something that the power is that is that a feeling that the power is generating within her or if that's just like a superstition she has.

Yeah, it's great.

We move now into a kind of a new presentation for these poems.

This hasn't been done before.

The last time we saw the poems was for the mafia bosses, which read this.

In the basement where prices rise, your bed shall be made with your brothers.

Do not ascend stairs you have never climbed.

In numbers, do not compete with others.

So that was the last fortune we saw.

But from now on, and we're going to start seeing a shit ton of these.

The character who the prediction was about appears, sort of lit by a spotlight in the bottom left of the screen, and the fortune writes itself in a panel that takes up most of the screen.

And so we get Crollo's first fortune.

Crowloe's fortune says this.

Forever set, a precious moon is lost.

The others mourn him with ceremony grand.

Rising up to heaven, the mighty moon of frost, with a melody from the morning band.

And Crowlo sheds a single tear

on reading this.

I think this poem is great.

I love the poem.

I had a slightly different translation, but I like

that.

So

that is the poem that is also in the dub.

The sub that I have

is almost, but not quite, what I think is also in the manga, but it's very close.

It is:

the calendar loses a precious component.

The remaining months gather to mourn.

The mourners play a melody while the 11th moon quietly rises.

That's so interesting.

So, two slightly different metaphors, so they do at the end both end up using months as a metaphor, but the beginning of this as Uvo is the moon versus Uvo is just one of the months.

Yes, as it transpires, we learn that

the demon from the demon world is describing the Phantom Troop members

as though they are calendar months.

By the way, I mentioned last time we recorded that

demon world proponents are going to be feasting.

Yeah.

I was going to ask about Demon World theory as we continued.

Yeah.

We'll get further into Demon World Theory, but the demons are calling Phantom Troop members months.

Uvo is the Frost Moon.

It's so interesting that they are going for moon and month language rather than spider language.

I don't know what that's about.

Do you have some thoughts there, Dre?

No, I mean,

I think it does continue doing the weird like push and pull of like

simultaneously showing how these people are all like heartless monsters, but that they're also still like people.

I the moon thing

was a callback to Uvo dying under a moon.

Like the bit the moon featured so prominently during

the story kind of draw the two comparisons.

I think that they're playing with two different important aspects of the spider story.

The moon

is

this great metaphor for like the

magnitude of their loss, the precious moon,

you know, finally set or whatever it is.

Like, it'll never rise again.

You know, that's huge.

And I think that it shows like how big of a force Uvo was for them.

But the calendar metaphor speaks to like how the spiders view themselves ideologically, which is like simply replaceable limbs on a spider, 12 legs and a head.

Oh, right.

Yeah, they do match up

sort of number-wise, exactly.

Crowlo crying is so interesting and produced for me.

And it's so hard to say.

We're going to get a lot of me adoring Lee saying, you have to throw so much love for Crowlo.

And it is.

It's beautiful.

It is beautiful.

And, you know, you've seen the whole show.

And so I feel in part bad by saying things like, I am freaked out by this weird, soulless

pool of water of muscle.

You missed a

part of the appeal.

Yeah, that's all.

What I was going to say was, is that

it reminds me a little bit of when we saw Hisoka

taking a shower and washing his hair, where what seems at first like a concession to the humanity of a character, you know, you feel like you're going to be brought closer to a character by being shown, you know,

their quote-unquote humanity.

I don't want to tie humanity to whether or not you cry.

I don't think that that's exactly how it works, but you know what I mean.

It ends up moving you further away.

You know, when you see Hisuka getting out of a shower in his apartment, you're like, fucking hell, he has an apartment?

You know, he just goes through.

Hiseka pays rent.

Yeah, we see Krolo crying.

It's worth saying, you know, we will learn during this that we will learn Krolo's Nen powers.

We will learn what Krolo's plan is, short-term plan.

We don't learn any of that acts of like rubber and gum.

And so we see him cry, and we don't get any internal monologue.

What is it telling us?

Is it telling us that he loves his friends?

That seems to be what it's telling us.

If that's the case, how have we been shown that in the show prior to this point?

We haven't, really.

We saw Nobunaga and Uvo fighting back to back.

We understood that there was a kind of

sort of a feeling of comradeship among the Phantom Troop.

Sure, that's fine.

But here we see Krolo,

a silent tear pass down Krolo's face.

And instead of coming closer to the character, I find myself sitting back and going,

what is happening here?

I find this, I think that this is a moment where the show is trying to reveal to you that this is how Krolo, who they've portrayed as, you know, calm and cool, in control, unbothered, unconcerned, you know, sort of above the fray of his group.

I think that this is where they're saying, like, he's like off the clock, kind of.

He's like not around.

I think this is the clearest reading.

And I think that he's letting his guard down,

allowing himself to let his guard down and be, you know,

I think that the tear is the most genuine thing that Krollo does in these episodes.

Yes, I do still think it is a problem to see Krollo do something genuine.

It forces you to sit with that character in a way that you haven't been sitting before.

I don't know.

What do you think, Krolo Stan Sylvie?

Well, so the thing that

I always figured was like the cue for what made him cry was losing half your limbs as opposed to just like being confronted with Uvo's death.

I was like, oh, I'm going to lose more of these people.

That is, that is,

that transforms that moment for me.

That's so interesting.

That's how it came across to me.

In that moment, they have not read the whole poem out loud, at least.

That's true.

I

a little crisped by knowledge in that.

So I think that they're, I, I,

and it might be true that, like, you go back and you read it, and he's read the whole thing.

But he re they read the whole thing about the morning band and the um the you know, the uh

uh

the melody from the morning band, and then he asks her specifically about the uh the reference to a requiem for a friend.

Um, and so I think for me, me, that's where

they're focusing in on.

They leave the restaurant, and there's just a wonderful piece of music supervision as the sort of gentle piano that has been playing in the restaurant cuts out mid-measure.

I have music about this

too.

Let's go.

So, this is a song called.

Let's see.

This is a song called

Those Called Friends

and I'll play it here

The interesting thing about this song is that we've only heard it two other times in the show.

This is huge the only the two only other times we've heard that song be played is when

Kiloa has been you know kidnapped by the Zoldics and is like speaking fondly of Goan and how Goan's definitely gonna come rescue him and the other time was about Goan telling Mito how he's only going to stay for a few weeks and then he wants to go keep traveling with Kiloa.

Wonderful.

The best.

So I think they're drawing such like a.

I think they're using that music to draw an equivalency in those relationships.

Yeah, there's like a real effort being made to

compare the bond between the troop members to the bond between our like core four, you know?

Yeah.

But why and why is their bond so corrupted is the thing that makes Ghon so angry?

Yeah.

Because if it could happen to them, maybe it could happen to him.

Yeah.

Damn.

Something to think about.

This is the value in not,

or at least the value that I have found in working as a composer in not assigning motif too heavily to characters.

There's a real temptation.

I felt a real temptation when I was starting out to be like, here is a character and here is their theme.

And I play the the theme when the character is there.

And Hunter Hunter has done really good stuff with this, with the way the Zaldics work, with the way Requiem for Aranea.

Requiem for Aranea?

Is that what it's called?

Requiem Aranea.

It's the best.

And I've had fun writing themes for character, you know, solid themes for characters in the past.

But what you open yourself up to when you write themes or motifs for sensations or for feelings or for a particular kind of thematic push is that you can start playing with them in really striking ways.

Like, hey, you know,

there are emotions here that are resonant with the emotions that Gonon Mito felt or that Kiliwa felt when he was, so we can play the theme.

You know, the moment you give yourself permission as a composer or as a music supervisor to start assigning

tracks outside of the kind of strictures of the way you might think you would be assigning sort of motif work, I think you can get really interesting stuff done.

So it was, that's so cool to hear that.

But yes, it cuts out mid-measure, mid-bar as they leave the restaurant.

The moment that we cut out of the restaurant, the music just stops.

By the way,

the thing that's happening while they're in the restaurant is we, first of all, we learn what Shell Nark's power is a little bit more.

And he has used that power to try and throw Karapika off of the scent

by controlling a guard, having him call Light Nostrad and say, oh yeah, your daughter showed up, but we turned her away.

We don't know where it is.

Luckily, uh, Karapika's truth-telling or like lie detector ability that he used in the early 40s with the

Nethers Unite episode, I think.

You know, back before back during the war.

Back in the early 40s.

That

lie detector ability is also like a GPS where if he holds it over a map, it can tell him where someone is.

And

we are playing Calvin Ball here to a certain extent with the way Nen works.

But if we weren't up to playing Calvin Bull, why are we watching Hunter Hunter?

Exactly.

Yeah,

you got to be in there.

You got to be ready for it.

The laws of this reality are so mutable.

I bring it up because they are trying to throw.

They are like part of their plan involves throwing the Nostrads off of the scent.

And it does, like,

it is most of what Karapika ends up doing these episodes is like, like, kind of chasing his own tail.

And I thought it was important because we got a little bit of Shalmark's power a few episodes ago where,

Jack, you thought maybe it let him see through their eyes or something.

But this is where we.

No, no, we learn how it, it how it does in this chart.

The confirmation that, no, actually, he can use those little darts to control people.

And I will say that at this point, he is controlling them with a terror level of about 15%.

Yeah.

I wonder if that'll go higher.

I think that we might see this number climb to maybe three digits.

There is some business between Neon and Krolo before Krolo kind of makes his move.

They read the whole poem.

We haven't.

I want to get there's a little bit of stuff before that.

Okay, sure.

Neon believes her fortunes will be more accurate if she doesn't get involved.

She was

sort of really influenced by this TV fortune teller, a woman called

the Galactic Matron.

I'm so glad you wrote it down.

Who also got arrested for fraud?

Who got arrested for fraud?

Krolo knows about her.

That was a really funny Crolo moment.

Krolo was like, oh shit, the Galactic Matron?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's the news.

They found out about Neon through TMZ.

Yeah, you must be talking about the Galactic Matron.

I hope we see the Galactic Matron at some point because I have a mental image of what Togashi would draw a character called the Galactic Matron like.

I'm stoked.

This woman, the Galactic Matron, known for Aud, said the purpose of Fortunes is to make people happy.

And from this, Neon draws a really interesting conclusion.

A real

I am the daughter of a mafia family conclusion, which is that she is always happiest when she produces negative fortunes

because she sees that as a vector for people to improve their lives.

You know,

this tells us something interesting about Neon's fortunes that we get into a little bit later, which is that they are not firm statements of the truth.

You know, there's a way of understanding fortune telling where if I turned over my fortune and it said, you know,

Jack, you you will get hit in the head by a flying bird tomorrow.

And I think to myself, well, then I simply won't go outside.

You know, there's one school of thought about fortune telling that's like...

events final destination style would transpire that someone left the door open and as I walked into the kitchen to make a cup of tea a crow just smacks me or something right it's by trying to avoid your fate that it like sort of karmically seeks you yeah yeah yeah neon's fortunes it seems don't work like this you know this hasn't fully been confirmed we sort of get hints as to it you know mafia members, some Mafia members do seem to avoid being killed

by, you know, following Neon's fortune carefully.

And so I can kind of see what Neon is saying.

If she manages to produce, and again, she can't control what fortune she writes.

If she manages to produce a negative fortune,

it provides a very clear path for her clients, right?

Yeah,

I mean, in the case that we see it with the the

mob bosses who got it done when they resume the auction, right?

Where they're like, oh, if I just don't go, I just don't need to go.

Or is it because they didn't go downstairs and they're going to stop?

Because they didn't go downstairs.

And that genuinely seems to work.

And this is very interesting because it produces a different kind of relationship to the role of the fortunes in the story.

Were you to have these kind of

sort of fixed fortunes, you know,

which would transpire,

the narrative would have to wrap itself in circles,

final destination style, to be about fulfilling the fortune as we see the characters try desperately to sort of wriggle out of it.

And we're going to get some of that because that's just how fortune-telling stories work.

What this lets us do is it lets us see characters make plans with the expectation that they might work.

And the stakes then become which aspects of the fortune are they able to avoid and and which aspects aren't they able to avoid.

Luckily for us, what it does is it turns each of those fortunes into a little game, into a little puzzle.

Oh, I'm going to get to that in a second.

Because he introduces this puzzle first.

You know, yes,

the way to introduce talking about this is as soon as we get these fortunes,

Hunter style, the viewer is once again introduced to a new game, which is watch the show to see how the fortunes transpire.

And here we get more of Crowlo's fortune.

This is when it starts getting a little little odd.

I would say, I would say that I have found Neon's fortunes open.

So, it's so clever.

He's such a clever writer.

Neon explicitly says, Because I make four or five fortunes, the first one is usually something that has happened already.

And this acts as a control both for the viewer and for the client.

Yeah, because we can't.

We can say, Oh, yes, yes, that is it.

And it lets us get our eye into the way the demons talk.

And also, what she's writing about is so obvious when we've already seen it on screen

yeah yeah and then so it allows the rest of it to be you know opaque in a way that in retrospect would seem obvious

and invariably will seem obvious my my suspicion is that when we go back and read these fortunes

in the future we will know pretty much exactly what they were talking about and we do kind of with these ones so here's the here's Crowlo's full fortune I won't read through the first one that I read but it continues on the show we'll will do that eight or nine times.

Yes,

we'll talk about it being repeated.

Harvest barren, wine-spilled lovers slumber, beside the bloody scarlet eyes.

Though cut in half shall be your number, tis not lost wherein your advantage lies.

New paragraph.

Amuse yourself with the entra act.

Seek out new friends once in a bind.

Perhaps to the east one can be tracked.

The one most needed, you're sure to find.

And I wrote down, Hanzo in the Phantom Troop.

I will read the corresponding

part of the

sub

text.

Next, please.

The chrysanthemum withers and falls to lie on the ground beside bloody scarlet eyes.

But you will remain supreme even after losing half your limbs.

Enjoy the interlude.

Seek out new allies.

East is the direction to go.

You will find the one that awaits you.

It's

um

and then Crowlo starts asking about the afterlife.

Remember, at this point watching it, I didn't know what Krollo's power was.

Yeah.

And so as he starts to dial into, do you believe in the afterlife?

And then he says the line, I believe we have a soul.

That's the reason I wanted to fulfill my dead friend's wish.

And combined with the upside-down cross and the, you know, his name is Lucifer.

and he's regularly seen reading, and, you know, I know now what that's about, but I didn't then.

I started, and

I've been taught to just, you know, bet big with Nen because I will never be able to really guess what

Tagashi is going to do.

I thought that what was happening here is that Krolo is

how to put this from the afterlife.

Oh, okay.

Krolo is an emissary from Demon World.

No, no, the Demon World is not the afterlife.

I don't know how much clearer I can be.

To be fair, yeah, sorry.

I also don't want to gloss over the fact that you said the poems are an insight into how the demons talk.

Yeah, because the demon's the one that writes it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I really appreciated that.

You know, I'm here as a representative of Demon World Theory.

The demon world is out there.

Demon World is where demons are real.

If you could show me even one other character that has a demon-related ability, then maybe we could talk about Demon World the fucking woman.

This is a joke because there's a character who has a demon move in a little bit.

Oh,

sure.

We've already seen the woman at the Hunter

booking thing who summons that little goblin.

Yeah, that's a demon.

Yeah.

The devil who made the Christian devil who fucked up Melody.

That's possibly related to Demon World.

I don't know.

I think Demon World is where Nen comes from, is my main thing.

You know, maybe Demon World is the setting of Hunter-Hunter.

No, because

it's a separate.

I was just saying the world was kind of fucked up there.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

I don't mean to deconstruct

your theory.

I'm always here to theory.

You know, other people are power scaling, and I'm just out here breaking down how Demon World works.

But what I was thinking was that...

Because it could probably connect to power scaling real easily.

Because, like, who's to say the Demon World isn't connected to Dragon Ball Z?

Who's to say the Kamehameha wave isn't a Satanic?

This is secretly a part of Demon World.

No, the thing I thought was that Krolo is

not dead,

but is a being of the thing that comes after.

You know, Krolo has come from a place

that you go when you die.

And he is, rather than, you know, being a human who has gone to the afterlife, he is the inverse of that.

He is something from over there that has come here.

Think of the way they talk about Meteor City later on.

I don't know if you're like that far off from a kind of read on this.

Oh my God, I kind of am.

Yeah,

we'll talk about that.

That's wild.

But yeah, Krolo believes in the soul and he believes in the

afterlife.

I love it when a show doesn't kind of flatten itself out to saying that

good characters are ones who are associated with souls and belief in souls and have souls.

And evil characters are separate from that.

They are soulless characters.

They are, you know, they are cut off from that kind of way of thinking about the world.

It is so exciting to see someone as plainly villainous as someone.

There is an afterlife.

Everyone has a soul.

I have one.

I want to do the best with my friend.

That's good.

That's how you write good books.

And that means killing 900 people today.

Well, so then you said

it.

Yes, a lot of them are cops.

And the rest of them are mobsters.

You know,

I think that might be onto something.

Wait, sorry, sorry.

Say it again.

Repeat this.

Oh, most of the people they're killing are cops, and most of them are mobsters.

It's like, I don't know.

Maybe they're onto something.

Victimless crime.

Yeah.

Well, I mean,

look.

Who of the victim troop ever victimized?

Name one person.

I'm struggling to think of anyone.

Yeah.

I definitely.

I got more of this episode.

We get some good drops later.

And of course, then Crowlo just launches his attack.

And I've been so primed to be like, what is Krolo's Nen ability?

This is what Mr.

Wing has taught me to do.

And I was like, oh, this is it.

He moves his hand really quickly and kind of like just knocks Neon out, wounds her.

His Nen ability is a fast hand.

Yeah, he's an enhancer, clearly.

Hand servant.

Nope.

This is just because he's

stupid.

That's dumb as fuck.

Well done.

This is just because he's a good fighter, right?

He just takes her out because he's a

right.

Yeah.

It's worth noting that Kilu is stronger than Goan in strength,

but is not himself an enhancer.

And then I'd sort of like to zoom out a little.

The assassins begin to enter the building, having guessed that maybe a phantom troop member is inside it, as Requiem Aranea plays

in full

from the opening, as over silence, we see a montage of destruction and violence.

After the troop is told that the boss has added an additional rule, make it a big show.

Krolo reads out his fortune once again.

Feitan decapitates people.

Shizuku and Franklin attack a roadblock.

Revealing himself to be the nastiest little freak among the freaks, Shalnark puppets possess soldiers with a terror level of 1,000.

Their eyes go bloodshot.

They are giggling and semi-conscious of what they are doing.

They are moving jerkily.

Their head sort of lulls and twists on their shoulders.

This isn't even the scariest possession that he does.

No, no.

That comes in like 53.

Machi Puppets.

Let's run down.

Yeah, run down all the powers here real quick because there is some stuff I want to talk about.

Yeah, totally.

Let's see.

Fate anticapitates people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Check.

Shizuku is

people.

Finx

rotates people's heads around their neck in a way that you shouldn't do.

It looks so cool, though.

It does look very cool.

The animation during this whole sequence is really, is really well done.

Oh, I should say, by the way, I love the make it a big show line when they're talking.

It's Phaeton and Finks, and they're like, oh, the boss added a rule.

And the rule is

fuck them all up.

Yeah, is

Make It a Big Show.

The dub, sorry, the subs

that I have.

a translation of that was go absolutely crazy.

Oh, that's maybe a

better translation.

The boss said go stupid, go nutty.

I see why I think the make it a big show thing because it ties into the performance, the requiem.

It's a clearer metaphor.

But if at the same time we want to get a little

later on,

someone describes Crollo as sort of revealing his bloodshed only for a brief moment.

His blood, what did they say?

Bloodlust?

Bloodlust.

Yeah.

His bloodlust, only for a brief moment, and then there's barely any trace of it left.

And I think go absolutely crazy would be a great moment of just like give Krolo dialogue he wouldn't otherwise say.

Yeah.

In this moment, I think I like both translations.

I think

I like them both.

I do, I do, for I do for both of these, actually for a few lines of these episodes, I think the dub does a really good job of,

you know,

staying on the theme of the performance and of like, like, making it big for Uvo.

Is Krolo's English performance good?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah.

I mean, good.

His Japanese performance is so good.

And I think that

the

vocal direction

or the casting, or it might have just been the two actors talking, Krolo and Hisaka do a really good job at

they are both sinister people who speak very placidly and speak at a very you know uh very softly fatan as well gentle register fatan as well and i think that hisuka and krolo's performers and the the the vocal direction do a really good job at not making them feel too similar yeah um

uh let's see uh shizuku and franklin attack a rope block franklin does his trick again which is just uh his hands become machine guns it's fun to see every time

uh oh speaking of horror level a thousand what about machi

Oh, yeah.

Machi puppeteers

dead people with her nen threads

to create sort of

zombie soldiers.

I don't know if I said it into the microphone, but this had been my guess as to how Machi's Nen stitches were going to work in combat the whole time.

So I felt very vindicated.

And she can, like, you know, choke people out with them,

trip people, times a guy with one letter.

What's Hisuka doing?

Nothing.

Watching?

Just vibing.

Just watching.

He is a bad member of the Phantom Troop.

He is not a.

He's not a bad guy.

I mean, he is not a member of the Phantom Troop.

Fundamentally.

He is a member of the Phantom Troop.

Well,

this is well.

He doesn't consider himself one, right?

And so, like, this is the big symbolic gesture for a fallen member of the Phantom Troop.

But why the fuck should he bother?

It's a bunch of guys that aren't worth his time.

Yeah.

It's not going to be an interesting interesting fight.

Oh, it's a bunch of dudes like the guy in the Hunter exam, right?

It's not going to be an interesting fight.

He's not, he's weirdly not the Joker from the Joker movie.

You know, like

he, yeah, Hisuka's like primary motivation we have seen throughout this entire show is like finding people who will fight him in a way that challenges him.

Yeah, Hisuka wants to be almost killed by anyone he fights.

Yeah.

That's his goal.

And, you know, I said, you know, if you have a fake phantom troop tattoo

when we learned about that, what's the difference?

You know, you might as well be a phantom troop member at that point, you know?

But no, I think what we are learning is that there is a grim, loving brotherhood

to be a member of the phantom troop.

It doesn't just mean being a really strong piece of shit.

The Phantom Troop are not the Shadow Beasts.

No.

They're also not the Hunter Association.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I do think it's the Hunter Association, though.

Like, when we look at Hiseka sort of just sort of watching this going on, and like, I know that what I'm thinking of is like, this isn't even interesting to him.

Like, he's, he's annoyed to, he's annoyed that

in order to stay close to his target, he has to put up with, you know, this shit.

That's the sort of thing I'm projecting onto him.

I can see that.

And he doesn't even get to see Krlo fight.

I know, yeah.

He doesn't even get to see Krlo fight.

And it's funny to to think of that contrasted with how Hiseka felt in the first 15 episodes of the show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like after killing all the people in the forest and removing that guy's arm,

I think that I would have bet that

Hisek would be all up for a weird attack on a public place in the middle of the city.

But no, it's not as bad.

This is a form of Taka.

Oh, go ahead, Dre.

I disagree kind of with that.

I mean, I think Hisuka, like, listen, Hisuka's not a good person, and we could say a lot about how Hiseka has been betrayed.

But, like, every time he fights or kills somebody, it is like either with a very intense, albeit fucked up, purpose,

or it's been self-defense.

I'm like trying to think of a time where that hasn't been.

Oh, that's totally true.

No, you're right.

The only exception is like when

he killed

Castro, but that was like during a match where you were allowed to kill people, and Castro was like his big disappointment.

Like, Castro was supposed to be a good fight.

Yeah, this was supposed to be like one of his, like, like the seeds that he planted to use his weird metaphors.

I mean, I guess my point is that Hisuka is not Uvo.

No, he's not.

And I think that, like, this is something that Takashi

really enjoys, and I think will continue to enjoy doing is adding depth to the villains and directions that you don't necessarily expect or that

really recontextualize

the super early, super tropey aspects of the show.

And I think that

the fact that Hisuka is not the Joker, despite the first couple arcs where we are led to believe

he is like

mr mass murder that he would be like doing a fucking like complete wipe of the hunter exam if it wasn't gonna like disqualify him and it's just like completely changed um

by by this stuff where you see that when given the go-ahead when in the perfect situation to just commit wanton wanton slaughter uh he doesn't uh because it's it's not I don't even think it's from a moral perspective.

I think it is from a what's bored.

Yeah, he's at least not worth the effort.

He's intellectually above it.

It's kind of pedantic, isn't it?

It's kind of like watching him going, oh, not like this.

Yeah, that's the perfect word for it, Jack.

And making Hisaka pedantic is such a fun

aspect to add to that character.

Takashi and the

adaptation team are just so good at adding these little wrinkles to character to character to character.

I mean, I had so much fun watching Dragon Ball, and it is ultimately a different show, but could you imagine if a single Dragon Ball character sort of worked the way that a Hunter-Hunter character does?

Actually, there is Vegeta.

I knew both of you were going to say that, so I just shut the fuck up.

It would have been really funny if we all three said it, though.

Yeah, it's Vegeta.

You don't know shit.

It's Vegeta.

I think you'd like Vegeta.

And it's Piccolo.

Have I met Vegeta?

No, I love Piccolo.

I love Piccolo.

I know what he says.

He's my boy.

I think that one of the fun things about not having seen a lot of these things like through,

you know, seeing a little bit of Dragon Ball,

but like not getting a full picture of it is like

Hisuka really is not just connected to Dragon Ball, but like born out of, you know, Dragon Ball's obsession with turning,

you know, bad guys into allies,

which then gets put into

a bunch of battle shonen, you know, do this thing where, you know, we saw Tian Shinhan, yeah.

Tien becomes an ally, Piccolo, literally the next arc, Piccolo becomes an ally.

Yamcha starts off being like a bandit who is, you know, trying to,

you know, fight Goku on his way to some other place and then losing and then being like, well, I guess I'll follow you around now.

Right.

And then Vegeta, and then, you you know, later shows like Naruto,

this is like Naruto's core identity is like that Naruto is such a sad,

like his life is so sad that it makes villains go like, gee, compared to this guy, I had it okay.

Very funny way to put it, but you're kind of right.

We talk about this on the Dragon Ball podcast, which I, on the Patreon, that I really recommend people check out about the sort of the way that ideology is done through fight scenes in Shounen, the way that people are won over there.

And I think that like

I know, I don't know if there's been a moment in Hunter Hunter that I would give that quality to.

No, but Hisuka is like,

is like the, is riding that line, is like definitely playing with this idea of being a Vegeta.

Although Hisuka's like worse, or like, not worse, but different than Vegeta.

You know, Vegeta's a mass murderer, like a, like a

planet-scale mass murderer.

Yeah.

It is,

but differently evil, Hizuka is.

And never quite, but like, has a malice that

Vegeta never really has, who is more like a Batman villain than, you know,

like

a malevolent sexual, you know, evil.

The difference is Vegeta's driven by uh inferiority complex, and right, not as Vegeta's driven by a superiority complex,

like the pink straight up.

Um,

uh, but but but you can see how, like, okay, he's he starts off, he's killing people, he's evil, he wants to fight Goan, he's attracted to children, uh, he's getting boners during fights, and now he's working with Karapika.

The, yes, it is,

it is a challenging character to

ask the viewer to sit with.

And it is a challenging, as in difficult character to write.

And I think that part of the reason that the show works so well when it is humming along is that Tagashi and the adapters are just zeroed straight into doing the damn thing.

You know,

you gotta sit here and watch them figure this out,

which is

compelling.

It's something that

the experience of Tagashi within the genre starts to show.

We've talked about how part of the reason that ended the way it did was that

the

publishing company wanted it to go longer than he wanted it to go, and he wanted to do more deconstructive work with the characters that he'd built.

And so Hunter Hunter becomes a vehicle for that.

I think we talk about that on literally the episode that just came out.

My backup is acting up.

I don't know if it's shut off or if it just never got turned on properly.

Do we need to pause?

We just need to do a quick 3-2-1 clap so that I know where this is going.

Okay.

All right.

Three,

two, one.

Great.

Perfect.

Okay, let's go.

And I think...

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

It's okay.

I'm just trying to remember what I was saying.

He was saying talk about his experience.

Yeah, there's like there's a genre of savviness that comes from being someone who has just like been immersed in this stuff for a period of time.

And like

Yu Yu Haka Show, because it's so much like compared to Hunter Hunter, it's a lot shorter, uh, in at least to my knowledge.

Uh, no, they're they're almost exactly the same length, really.

Yep, okay, never mind.

For some reason, I okay, even then, like this speaks to it.

Like, there's a perception that I have where it's like, oh yeah, that's the little show that came before the big one, and it's not true.

Like, he's spent so much time

figuring himself out, honing these tools to the point where he can do a character like Husoka within this stuff and make it work in that way that you've been talking about.

I should say, so I don't know how this works out for manga chapters.

I guess they're not exactly the same length.

Yu Yu Haka shows 112 total episodes of the anime, which compares to

Hunter Hunter's 146.

I was thinking more manga-wise.

Yeah, I just general generally I think it's probably gonna be the same like average length per manga chapter, but I don't know for sure.

Yeah.

I just meant like in terms of like, yeah, no, like this is an almost 200 chapter

long manga, but yeah.

While we're on the topic of, you know, the challenge of trying to do this with Hisaka and try to pick a very difficult character to thread this needle with, does it work all the time?

It absolutely doesn't.

You know, there are moments where Tagashi

says to the pitcher, he is both the pitcher and the hitter in this metaphor, says to the pitcher, give me a really tricky one.

And the pitcher winds up and Tagashi just whiffs it.

And he hits him in the face.

But sometimes he says, give me a really tricky one.

And he just swings to the fences.

There's a metaphor, I think it's from Joss King things where they describe Stephen King sometimes hitting dingers constantly and then sometimes he's in the stands hitting himself in the nuts with the baseball bat and I think Tagashi Tagashi definitely can do that too.

Yeah.

Said with all the love in my heart.

The confidence to do it.

It is so it is one of my favorite things in media is watching an experienced creator do something with a real confidence and with it.

Because it speaks to the moment of going, what happens if I try this?

Sometimes it doesn't work.

Speaking of absolute murderous weirdos and Jack's ongoing quest to figure out what Krollo's nen power is before the show decides to tell me, Krolo is in the building stabbing a lot of people with ballpoint pens.

Yes, he kills.

Does he kill every single other assassin besides the Zoldix?

The one that I'm...

No, there's an assassin I'm about to talk about that he kills with another reason.

Sorry, besides also that guy, yes.

He doesn't kill Karapika with bumps.

Sure, I wasn't.

Karapika is definitely on the assassin team, but just I wasn't including as an assassin.

Sure, sure.

So I'm thinking to myself, okay, Krolo is often seen with a book.

This makes sense.

Holy shit.

He's got a lot of

pens.

He's a Jason Bourne.

There's some sort of writer thing going on, you know, Krolo.

And I'm trying to, I'm just, I'm just like...

Floundering.

You know, I'm trying to figure this out with no information.

Okay, so he's trying to write things into existence in the book, and he uses pen and

That's the definitive.

Yeah, yeah.

But he's killing people with pens.

And I don't know why Krowlo kills people with pens.

My assumption is that he has a lot of pens for reasons that we will talk about in a bit.

And it speaks to that kind of like sudden shock of bloodlust that we come to associate with Crowlow over this.

He wields a very distinctive weapon later, but in this moment, he is very much like...

Have any of you seen Gross Point Blank, the John Cuzak?

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gross Point Blank is a film about John Cuzak, who goes back to a high school reunion.

He's also a murderous assassin.

One of my favorite moments in that movie, and I think about it all the time, is when no violence has happened in the movie, and an assassin suddenly tries to kill him.

And in the middle of a school corridor,

out of nowhere, John Cuzak launches this incredible high kick.

It's like his introduction to violence in the movie is John Cuzak launching a high kick that lasts half a second.

And this is how I feel about, you know, probably why Krollo is using pens.

He just walks down a corridor, he pulls out a pen and he stabs you in the throat.

That's it.

One of the assassins, a particularly unfortunate man.

The military assassin.

This might be the worst way to die I've seen in the show.

We've seen some bad ways.

This might be the worst way to die I've seen in anything.

It's so cool.

Okay.

He encounters

an assassin who has been killed by pens and he realizes Krello is there.

Krello has sort of led him into a trap.

And Krillo says, don't worry, I'm going to fight fair.

That's sort of true.

Let's fight one-on-one.

So they both draw knives and we don't see the fight.

We only see the aftermath as the man is pinned to the wall by a pen.

And at first I thought that this man had sort of been fused to the wall because it looks like there is sort of

like an incursion of the concrete into his body.

But what you learn is that he has been partially eaten, but eaten bloodlessly, such that what you're actually seeing is the wall sort of behind him.

There are no wounds on him, just sort of missing segments.

And

the spots where

the pieces are missing are glowing, like chunks of him have been sent to another dimension.

At this point, I had to cross out everything that I had thought about Krolo's net power because Krolo introduces

So the man is laughing.

He's been driven mad.

He says, Why am I alive?

What is happening?

And Krolo says, This is an indoor fish,

as two or three large

plated

silvery fish swim through the air around him.

Criminal bones.

Yes, they look like fucked up deep sea fish.

Not the kind of deep sea fish that protects itself from the high pressure by being very sort of floppy, but the kind that protects itself from high temperatures by being very armored.

This is a nen fish,

okay, that can only live in enclosed spaces.

You can't bleed or feel pain as you're eaten.

You can't die until the fish disappears, and then he opens the window, and the fish and the man die.

Can I read the literal translate, the like more literal translation of this name

of this ability?

More literal than indoor fish?

Yeah, it's

fish playing behind closed doors.

I guess literal isn't the word, but like

that's great.

Yeah.

The verbatim translation?

Maybe that's

I don't know.

I guess I just don't know where this translation is coming from.

It's on the wiki.

Here's some questions.

What is a nen?

Why can nen be fish?

Keith, why

can nen?

Can nen live?

Yes, Keith, I have the exact metaphysics for you.

Have you heard of something called the demon world theory?

Tell me about it.

Let's go!

Indoor fish are just creatures from the demon world.

They can live.

They can live in indoor spaces.

Yeah.

No, they're playing behind closed doors.

Okay, so here's how they're.

They're constructing a new bell, and the bell says, what is nen?

Nen is to the demon world what the laws of physics are to our world.

It is,

you know,

Nen is a system of rules.

That's how we understand it in our world.

I think that's fair to say.

You know,

it is a thing you can learn about yourself and about your capabilities, and then you can apply those rules to do magical things.

In the demon world, the entirety of the demon world is constructed

as though all existence is powered by Nen rules.

And so there are such things as fish that can only live indoors.

Because just as you can say, my Zetsu, you know, it is only my Zetsu that allows me to do whatever, you know, even the flora and fauna in the demon world is being powered by this kind of nen logic.

And so, you know, what Krolo is able to do here, and we learn later how he does it, is he brings over something from the demon world.

This also explains, it doesn't really explain the vacuum cleaner.

I don't really know what to do with that.

That's just what vacuum cleaners are in the demon world.

Yeah,

yeah, some of them are.

It's a demon.

Well, yeah, Blinky is a demality.

Yeah.

Blinky is short for Beelzebub.

I love that they have like given mere crumbs to try and figure out what Krolo's nan power is, which is, I'm sure, something that everyone is thinking when they're watching this.

What the fuck is it that this guy does?

We have the indoor fish crumbs, and then all of a sudden it's like indoor fish.

And then five minutes later, they're gonna be like, No, wrong, stupid, you're stupid.

Oh, you thought it was fish?

It's

like, stupid fish, you idiot.

The indoor fish is such a trap because I was so confident about

he's a writer.

Because it fit with the way I was thinking of his character.

He can write something and bring it to life or bring it to death.

Yes.

Oh, that's why he needs all those pins.

Right, so he's, and that's why indoor fish is such a ridiculous thing because it's like, okay, guys coming in, got to eat him or something.

Okay, indoor fish, what are the rules?

Okay, as long as the window is shut, indoor fish can eat him.

Great.

Done.

Yeah, and I mean, we know this is Basho.

This is what Basho does.

Right, Basho kind of already does this, yeah.

But that's what I had thought.

And I thought that actually, you know, seeing the indoor fish was really fun because I was like, oh, my mic is freaking out.

I heard that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't like this.

Do you have a loose connection somewhere?

Am I back?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That looks much more simple.

You're recording a good, though.

There's a little bit where it's fucked, but it's for like one second.

We'll be out.

I just know that when my mic does that, sometimes it'll stop my audacity.

I love the

waveform when there's electrical issues and the tight compacted waveform suddenly becomes really loose.

Oh, yeah, the horrible like...

Yeah, really, really cool.

You couldn't see that I was waving my hand up and down to do the...

Oh, no, I got it.

I felt it.

Yeah.

The impression I got was, oh, the thing Krolo does is he summons beasts.

You know, he's sort of, which is not.

completely wrong, but I thought he was going to be out here summoning fish and shit and stabbing people with pens for some reason.

I would love to talk about the window.

Can we?

I really quickly.

I set up a thing that I didn't end up talking about because we got further.

There is so much puppetry imagery going on.

There is.

All of this.

And I think even before

this arc, not ARC, but this chunk of episodes, it's really present.

But then you get into

Machi's ability, Shannon Arc's ability.

Krolo orchestrating all this stuff with the troop themselves.

Ned Puppets from

the Highly Instagram.

But then there's also the like back, the

it's basically

the whole way down.

It's like who's pulling the strings is like a question that they want you to be thinking about and a thing that they want to be at the forefront of your mind.

Because also we get tons of Hisuka changing the

field of play for everything

later on in these episodes.

And I think that like that ties into this stuff.

And I wanted to bring it up while it was front of mind during the

La Crimosa Requiem sequence.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, totally.

And the,

you know,

Crowlo puppeting indoor fish, the man being pinned to the wall like a puppet.

The composing.

Yeah, the conducting.

Yeah.

Yeah, you want to talk about this window, Keith?

Because a couple of episodes ago, when we were talking about York New City's skyline,

and the three of you said, oh, no, wait, I think there is a really distinctive shot of York City's skyline.

Then you all paused and said, Do you mean the and I was thinking, What's that gonna be?

And it's this, right?

It is this, yeah, Krolo.

There's actually another really good one, it's not it's a little bit abstract, but um, uh, we didn't talk about it.

But during the scene where we get the whole of Krolo's um fortune, he's descending a glass elevator with neon, and we get reflections of the night city in the glass as we're looking at them through the glass.

Uh,

That's really nice.

All of this is just that we are plummeting into a kind of noir horror

or like a noir thriller.

And all this reflection imagery and the puppet imagery too, just

comes back to this.

Sylvie, do you have something?

Well, I also just remembered that the helicopter,

not helicopter, elevator.

I'm fine.

The elevator scene

is sort of like the

not necessarily the start of it, but like the

when the Crollo repeating the

fortune over and over starts, which kind of like I think it's done like three times overall in the same episode.

And that to me was just like he's turning this over in his head the entire time this stuff is happening.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that he,

I think that he finds it very comforting.

Like, I think that he really thought, I really, I think that he really loves that that

whatever it is, that the universe is like recognizing what they're doing for Uvo.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I agree with you.

That's so sad.

Yeah.

And the thing that they were doing for Uvo

is

everybody's.

Yeah, it's the final shot of Karen Kasama's The Invitation.

Explosions blossom, you know, over York New City.

Distant sound of screaming, gunfire.

He presses the button,

and it's the, you know, it's revealed that this big room, actually, the whole wall is like a glass window that retracts into the floor, which is very cool.

One of the stupidest rooms I've seen in a long time, but it is very cool.

This is extremely rich person shit, I guess.

You want to turn your whole room into a balcony here.

And the indoor fish starts sort of dissolving into, you know, a white glow.

And the white glow on

military guy Assassin also starts disappearing.

Blood coming out.

He's falling to the ground.

I don't know if we said, but a quarter of his face is gone.

He is

gruesome.

It's so bad.

Is this an image Tagashi likes coming back to?

Because we also had Uvo bite half that guy's head off.

I think that's probably intentional mirroring.

Maybe, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

It probably is an intentional mirroring.

It is.

I just know here on Friends at the Table, we keep cutting people's hands off.

I like to bite the top of people's head off.

Yeah.

You know,

it's a good, like, once you've

ripped the band-aid and had a guy with half a head in your show, it becomes like a useful visual.

It's like, when I need to really be gross, what can I do?

Oh, give someone half of a head.

Go back to the well of

keep it up.

His, his sort of, his, like, like, mad cackling is really distressing and disturbing.

Oh yeah, it's not good.

It's all good.

They do this.

This comes up a few times in this episode.

And we haven't seen the Phantom Troop do this before, but they do it enough times in this episode that I think it must be a hallmark of the way they operate.

They're using the language of the show here.

They seem to be able to drive people mad in

their banditry.

You know, over and over again, we see victims of theirs just sort of cackling

amidst the destruction, which is great.

The show is

most interestingly queasy in terms of

attaching our perspective to these people when it is constantly problematizing them.

I would be so much less interested in it if, as soon as we had started cutting to the Phantom Troops' perspective, they said, oh, but they're not actually that bad.

Yeah.

We get some hints at the backstory.

We don't get much of it though, you know?

The fun of

making us sit in this place and making us sit with these characters is keeping them as bad as they've always been, you know?

Yeah.

So he gets to the window.

He's like fully in character as the conductor of this Requiem for Uvo.

And

Mozart's Lachrymosa starts playing.

It's so fucking bad.

Yeah.

I have a huge amount of respect for Hunter Hunter's composer.

He has done excellent work throughout the show.

He is not as good as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

It's a hot take, but you know.

And sometimes...

Mozart never wrote a manga.

No, no, that's true.

Mozart never worked for Death Note, so.

Yeah, sometimes as a music supervisor,

you save your Mozart for the right moment.

You say, let's hand this to the guy.

let's let's let wolf handle this let's let the big dog well it is funny though because uh

uh geez what's what is his name is hirano yeah yeah it's hirano uh

yoshihisa hirano right yeah yeah okay um

it is funny though because he does debut a new track like Like Mozart does fade into his track Riot.

Yeah, I mean, that's just smart featuring.

That's sample work, you know?

Yeah.

So it's the same scene.

They're just all killing.

It's like a very long scene of the attack on the

attack on the auction.

The auction.

And it fades from Macrobos into this, into Riot.

Yeah, I mean, two things here really quickly.

I think that given the history of, you know, use of music in film and in television and in general,

playing Mozart's Requiem

or Requiems by Mozart have

they produce an effect almost outside of the music.

You know,

there is a kind of association that comes with hearing that music.

And I think deploying it in this moment for Uvo's Requiem.

You know, what you get by playing Mozart in this moment is not just the skill of the composer and the performer, but also the kind of role that that music

has come to play in soundtrack.

So I think it was really, really, really smart.

And yeah,

Krollo is conducting, and we just get a little bit.

You know, you don't want to over egg the pudding there because

if we just stand at the window watching him conduct for a while, I think it would lose it.

Instead, they cut wisely to just want an awful destruction from the Phantom Troop.

Yeah, we get like three good shots of him, you know, pretending to conduct.

And it's just enough to be like

to not start being lame.

Because

eventually you do start to imagine, like, so you're just going to stand there and wave around.

Like, there's no,

there's no music there for you

he's humming i bet probably

uh most

exists in this world

in hotel

yeah well that's what he's composing too um

yeah and the narrator calls the bloodshed overwhelmingly sad yeah this is a lovely moment of the narrator we we talked about it and seen him do it over and over again you know drawing a line under the emotional content of an episode

rather than just the sort of textual or plot content of an episode.

I love these because for most of the episodes in this one, it ends so abruptly.

He really just comes in, says one sentence about what's going on, and then fucks off.

And it almost feels like it almost feels like that's it, that's all you're going to say.

But yeah, he comes in just to say it was the beginning.

Oh, sorry, first of all, before we get there, we get after or during all the bloodshed,

as it's sort of winding down,

we get, you know, Shalnark's level 5,000% terror, where the guy's like cackling madly.

He's like, they're too strong.

The troop is too strong.

Should I show you how strong they are?

And then he brings out his gun and starts shooting everybody.

He's like,

and then

any sound.

Any sound.

And then

Krolo says, well, Uvo, can you hear us?

We're playing a requiem for you.

And then it sort of fades into the narrator saying, It was the beginning of a stormy night that, while fierce and drenched with blood, was somehow overwhelmingly sad.

And then credits.

That's it.

But the credits play over

what, Riot?

Or over the Lacrimazo?

Yeah.

That one.

Such a choice to like, that's like one.

They've done that like a couple times, right?

Or with different songs?

Or am I wrong about this?

This is the first song, I think.

Oh, wow.

No, I think they've done the credits on screen while a scene plays out before.

Yeah, I think that they have done that.

Yeah, I think I'm thinking of a different.

Yeah, this is the first time then that the ending theme has just been changed by a character theme.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I'm just like scrolling through that website with all the music to be like, is there anything with the timestamp at like 23 minutes?

And it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem to be.

Yeah.

Worth it.

The Hunterpedia is Sphinx, who is strong enough to punch through a body, and sometimes he dresses in Egyptian clothing.

The frog that Gunn shot at in the last episode is alive and doing well, but is then snatched off screen by a huge pink tongue that also pulls Gun off screen.

Oh, that's the Hunterpedia?

Yeah.

Yeah, I missed it.

I thought this one didn't have a Hunterpedia.

I guess I did.

No, it did.

Okay.

It feels like it shouldn't, but it doesn't.

You know, I maybe skipped through the credits and skipped over the Hundredpedia and into the next time on.

And then I was like, oh, I guess there isn't a Hunterpedia this day.

So do they say what Finx's power is, or do they just say he's smart enough to punch through a body?

Okay.

And sometimes he dresses in Egyptian clothing.

I like Finx.

I like that Finx is not worried about

being too on theme.

No, no, he's great.

He's committed to the,

he's an 80s wrestler.

So everyone is like, you know that we're trying to like cultivate a a vibe here, right?

And he's like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

How about one foot in the door?

Is one foot in the door okay?

And the mummy is like, no.

God.

You mean Bardurov?

Yeah.

Bard.

Bonolinov.

Okay.

So now we're moving into episode two of our four episode thing.

I would love to

three.

Nope.

No?

Nope.

Four.

Oh, that would.

Oh, yeah, you're right.

Sorry.

I'm on page two.

So I was like, but no, I just took page.

We're moving into episode two.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We only talked about one episode.

Jesus Christ.

Okay.

That one.

It took me as long to take notes for that first episode as it did for almost all three of the other ones combined.

Yeah, we're going to pick up the pace here a little for you, dear viewer.

Yeah, but also.

No, no, no.

This is, we should be doing this, but I wanted to just make sure that we spoke into the world.

You know,

that's what they do in Demon World.

They speak it into the world.

Yeah.

York New City is now functionally at war.

Thanks to the Mafia's control over the city,

everything is shut down.

This is one of my favorite things that a TV show can do:

build up to a real high explosive situation at the end of one episode and pick back up, still in the damn situation.

You know, the narrator saying this is the beginning of a stormy night.

And as we move into these next episodes, part of the power of this chunk of episodes is it just keeps going.

You know, the Phantom Troop have got a grip over York New City,

and

everybody is at war.

Crowlo kills another assassin.

The ambulance to look after Miss Neon

arrives and is held up by the Mafioso sort of sub-boss, a man named Bean.

Sort of beautifully shooting yourself in the foot there with the traffic situation.

In what way?

By creating the roadblock.

My brother in Christ, you made the roadblock, yes.

Yeah, by creating the roadblock and

then by creating the roadblock, they've basically

trapped Karapika in with Neon so that he can't go like help the Zaldics or find the other troop members or see what's going on and is kind of stuck in this place, kind of looking after Neon, who he, you know, realistically doesn't really care about

and probably hates, I think probably hates her.

And to that point, they press a little harder on the wound of, you know, you're wasting your time in here.

More internal mafia bickering, more internal Karapika angst that he should be out there.

But it's time for some telephone calls, some nice consequential telephone calls, because

sort of going, why is the city at war, but not terribly bothered because he's the green boy who lives in the forest with boundless optimism.

Gon calls Karapika and says, hi, we found the fans control.

Karapika is immediately in angry mom mode, which is like, why did you do that?

When you could have been hurt,

which you get when you don't check on your kids.

And then Kil says,

my turn.

This is amazing.

This is such an interesting character moment for Kilua.

This is huge for Kilua.

This is huge.

Yeah, because what Killua says at first is, yeah, I know.

I admit that I screwed up here.

I thought that they were stronger than us, but I thought we could have a go.

And what I learned is that they are stronger than us, and we should not have even tried.

You know, we were lucky to get out of there.

It's great hearing Killua speaking this way.

Now, does Killua remain...

sort of regretful and

ready to open up to his own weakness throughout the whole of this conversation?

No, but it's progress.

No, but I think that the other stuff is actually just as important.

Same.

It is just as important.

Yeah.

So he says...

Oh, go ahead.

He asks for help

getting stronger.

For help getting stronger.

And then one of them, I think it might actually be...

No, it's Karapica says, this isn't a game.

And I wrote that down just because it's the direct mirror to Zeno saying this feels like a game.

And something about the sort of triangle of violence happening between the Zeldix,

our crew and the Phantom Troop and you know breaking down who thinks that this is playful and is being playful and who doesn't is interesting.

But yeah,

Kilo does not like this and feels, I think, probably like he isn't being taken seriously and sort of shouts into the phone, if you won't even consider thinking of me and Gone as your friends or equals, we'll do whatever the hell it takes to make you help us.

And then shoves the phone into Gone's face, like, I'm done, I can't handle this.

And he's brooding for the rest of the conversation in the back.

I put the screen cap of it in that thing.

I do think it's like so crucial though that he led with friends instead of equals.

I know that's very that's big for Kilo.

He's he's come a long way from uh oh, uh, Karapaka, right?

And Raolio.

I was thinking about that too.

Such a funny moment.

Uh, and then Goan says, you know,

he tells Karapika about Nobunaga crying and then about how angry it made him.

And I think that this is a moment where even in the sort of grip of

his revenge, of his desire to make this right,

we've talked in the past about how

sometimes it feels like Karapika's desperate desire from revenge separates him from other people.

It makes him distant, it makes him nihilistic, it makes him

cruel.

And in this moment, I think that the show and Gone is offering Karapika a way to be close to someone in your anger.

You know, in hearing that Ghone also is dealing with this, Nobunaga cried and it made me feel furious.

It's a moment of commonality.

It's a moment of recognizing that, you know,

shedding tears for lost loved ones is

not only

the province of

you.

The villains are out here also doing it and you can be angry about that.

You don't need to cede ground to them in recognizing that fact.

It's great.

It's a real nice moment of emotional intelligence from Goan, and it's a real nice moment of

Karapika's readiness to listen and be there with his friends.

He's really only got a couple scenes in these four episodes, and

in both of his two scenes with Karapika, he is like really gracefully able to,

you know.

I don't know.

And it's hard to know with Goan, like, does he know that he needs to try to say the right thing, or does he just say the right thing?

And I don't know.

Sometimes it feels like.

like

we're going to be calibrating that compass the whole time.

I mean, I think part of what makes Goan glow as a person is the latter, is that Goan just says the right thing.

But I think that what we are slowly learning and maybe what Goan is slightly learning is the way he can turn that tool.

He can calibrate that tool, you know?

But it works on Karabika because I think Karabika is so

receptive to that kind of

connection.

Especially because they're, of course, already friends.

And,

like, it's so obvious how much better Karapika was when he's hanging out with Leorio and Gonan Kilua than when he is on his own.

It's not good for him.

And I think he knows that.

I just think that he did not want to or did not believe that he deserved that proximity.

You know, he was like, I've got stuff to do.

And I think what he is learning right now is that those two things are not mutually exclusive.

Which is great.

And I think

he's also, I think, being honest that what he's doing is

bad and like dangerous and

would rather take that on himself than endanger his friends who, you know, he doesn't see as being involved.

Yeah.

Karapica thinks.

about this as hell.

Karapika thinks.

Karapika thinks.

Name of the arc.

Karapika thanks.

Inside, things are not going well with the assembled Mafiozos, who are desperate for their weapons back.

Remember, you have your weapons confiscated.

And

they have this great line where they say: if you're going to depend on those freaks, they're talking about the assassins, at least let us fight.

This is the problem with the Mafia through and through.

You know, we talked in previous episodes about how it really is the Mafia versus the Freaks, and because of the misfortune of being in a Tagashi, we will always side with the Freaks.

Oh, what?

You think the guy in the $300,000 suit's gonna not be able to shoot the fan troop?

Ah, come on, come on.

What's a clown gonna do to me?

This guy shows up with the face paint.

It's done.

It's over.

There's another good, there's a good line from Karapika, who's just like wandering through the mafia community here.

Thinking, I think thinking to himself, everyone here is either a leader or an executive member.

They're endangering themselves needlessly only to prove they aren't afraid of the troop.

And there is like, you just get snippets of like random guys posturing.

Like, it really is just like, oh, yeah, here's a bunch of idiots sort of trying to be macho.

And it's like,

it's like watching them like

trying to grab their guns to fight a monsoon.

Like, there's nothing you can do with your gun.

The guns don't work on monsoons.

Yes, yes.

Watching the idiot square off against the gorilla on the other side of the glass at the zoo and it's like buddy we both know exactly how this would go and zeno and silva come out and silva smashes the wall to get everyone's attention is this that the scene yeah

and it is basically like you better be thankful the glass is here Yeah, Zeno says, it wouldn't matter if you were armed.

I could eliminate the lots of you in under seven seconds.

And at this point, the Manfia do sort of go, okay, because once again, the Zelda family are not only professional assassins, they are celebrity influencers.

This man said he would eliminate the entire Mafia community within a vine's length.

That's crazy.

And as we, you know, at this point,

I was like, how would he do that?

But once we see how Zeno fights, yeah, he could do that.

I want to talk briefly about Silver and Zeno working together.

It's weirdly heartwarming to watch.

Silver keeps calling Zeno dad.

Yeah.

I can't remember

what either because i have i switch back because i'm taking notes i'm always switching back and forth between the sub and the dub depending on like if i need to write out a long thing um or

and but i've always got this the subs

on so like even when the dub is on i can see what the sub would be saying uh

and uh i can't one of them calls him old man most of the time and not dad

dad is so much better yeah dad is so good.

I think it's the dub calls him dad, but the

dub does call him sub calls him old man.

That's probably just a translation thing.

Yeah, yeah.

It's always just, you know, it's all just choices.

Yeah.

Yeah, because I wonder, are we saying old man as in like you, old man, or it's like, oh, no, that's my old man.

I think it's both.

Yeah, pups.

I think it's kind of both.

Like, he plays it both ways, which is kind of fun,

which is why it's nice to have like a kind of a

malleable word like old man in there.

Um, we missed a very funny joke, by the way, when they are introduced to the assassins and we talked about how they're not playing their stupid, like, you know,

uh,

dogs game.

Yeah, um,

uh,

the uh

when Silva says his name, it's only Zeno that they think isn't playing because Silva sounds like Silver.

Yes,

that's very good.

I missed that.

That's really, really good.

What color is Zeno?

Yeah, what color?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's really funny.

Yeah, it's very funny.

The pace here as Silver and Zeno stalk the halls is great.

The pace just drops down real low.

The halls are deserted.

Everybody is either dead in the room with all the executives or out on the streets.

There are bodies killed by pens

everywhere.

You know, by now we know what is happening, which is Silver and Zeno are stalking Krello.

You know, there is only one Phantom Troop member in the building

so far,

and

they are going to get him.

There's such a good...

Oh, God.

Oh, I was just going to say that.

And now we know why we learned about N a couple episodes ago.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, because Zeno extends his N.

It's great to compare Nobunaga's N with Zeno's N.

In what way?

Nobunaga's

N, and we don't, just a reminder for anyone who's not watching, N is a Nen technique that lets you extend the perception of your body.

So you can make an orb around yourself.

Let's say you extended a meter out.

If someone moves a meter from you, you can tell, like, oh, you know, with your eyes closed, you can feel it as if they're touching you.

And you can tell where they are in that field.

It's a sort of, you know, it's like a super perception.

And Nobunaga's

N was like something like three meters,

something like that.

It was very localized.

It was very localized.

We don't know.

We know he's a duelist and that he works best one-on-one.

And so he may not have ever needed to practice his N,

but we do know that

Zeno extends his Nen 100 meters and says that if he needed to, he could do 300 meters easily.

But he thinks N is tired.

He refers to N as tiring.

He's just such a good, grumpy old man moment.

Yeah.

It's like, I could do it.

It's just.

But I just don't want to.

It sucks.

Oh, God.

I like Zeno a lot.

This is pointless.

Yeah.

And that's just a while to be like

full awareness in a 100-meter radius.

How old is he?

Do we actually have an age for Zeno?

We don't have his age.

I think he's over 100.

He is very...

That sounds about right.

I googled Zeno age and a Dragon Ball character came up and I was like, he is not 8.5 million years old.

Yeah, Zeno is like the king of the universe in Dragon Ball 2.

I'm pretty sure.

God.

We did a character in a Friends of the Table live game a while ago, Alia, Janida and I.

It was a skeleton that was 3.5 million years old.

He was alive when there were oceans over Neville March, which is the

society setting.

That's the oldest character we've ever done.

There's a really funny sight gag

as the two Zelda assassins kind of like get ready outside these two separate doors

and sort of count themselves down and then open the door simultaneously and step in to reveal that both doors stepped into a large ballroom.

And Krolo is waiting for them on the ballroom stage.

The first thing he says is, We meet again.

And this rankles Silver a little because he's like, You remembered?

And yeah, Silver killed a Phantom Troop member in the past.

If there's one thing I know about the Phantom Troop, it's that they all love each other.

So, of course, he remembers.

Zeno is probably around 150 years old.

Holy fuck.

Okay.

Wow.

Great.

There's a lot of talk.

Not a lot.

There is some talk before they fight as they're sort of doing that

pre-shonen fight thing of being like, I'm ready for you to do X.

And

Zeno just tells us what Krolo's nan power is.

Krolo can steal people's abilities.

And I thought, nah,

that's a little disappointing.

I've seen this in other sort of I've seen superpowers where they can steal people's abilities it fits really nicely with the metaphor of Krolo as like a like a flat mirror you know there is something you know you you look into Krolo and you just see a reflection

or Krolo sees a reflection of himself it's also a great metaphor for meteor city where he's from yep

Oh, yeah, totally.

We should say that for when we talk about Meteor City.

So I was a little sad that Krolo's ability is steal people's abilities.

And then the fight began.

And Tagashi has done a twist on how stealing people's abilities work.

And

I mean, I have had several moments where I'm like, nen makes sense.

I understand why it was taught to me like this.

This is the moment

when I went, oh, I see what we're doing.

Because the three of them suddenly burst into

violence.

Yeah.

This is Dragon Ball violence.

I wrote explosive opening volley dash no music.

Yeah, this is...

I wrote down elaborate, incredibly fast Nen combat.

And this is Nen combat in a really pure way.

This is sort of like three Nen, and I use the word here with a lowercase S, not a capital S.

This is three Nen specialists, people who know it intimately, being like, we're just fighting with our aura at this point.

You know, we don't need to do cool nen powers.

The three of them are just leaping around, smacking each other.

It's a lot of fun.

We've got to watch him Dragon Ball.

Keith, we, Keith.

Keith, we we did him.

No, sorry.

We should watch Dragon Ball.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

I didn't finish my sentence.

We got to watch him Dragon Ball Z.

I watched Dragon Ball Z.

It's great.

Eventually.

Krullo slashes

Silva with a weird three-pronged knife

and says, this fight is tiring.

I think everybody sees that knife and goes, I know what that knife is.

Yeah, I did.

And so does Silva.

This is a mid-era Benz knife.

Sylvia and Silva moment, shared moment, where we both go, that's a mid-tier Benz knife.

He has a mid-era Benz knife.

He also says, must be a good knife if it can scratch my skin.

Yeah,

I don't know what that means because that implies that his skin is powerful outside of his Nen.

I don't know.

We kind of have that with Uvo, too.

Oh, that's true.

We did have that with Uvo.

There is a sort of an additional level in Hunter Hunter of you can have Nen and you can also just be very, very strong.

There's this amazing, like, total total no sell of the poison that is on that Ben's knife.

He says, he sort of thinks to himself, must be poison in it, and then uses like a thin thread to sort of like tie off his arm.

Zeno's like, you okay?

And he's like, yup.

And then Crollo thinks to himself, 0.1 milligrams of that stuff is enough to paralyze a whale.

I love the running Crollo commentary that we get throughout this too.

This is the first time getting any Krolo commentary.

Yes.

I don't think it was a thread.

I read it as a piece of his hair.

Yes,

it's a piece of his own hair.

I'm pretty sure that's what he did.

Yeah, I thought it was like a thread or like a small twine, basically.

To Dre and Sylvie's point,

I want to put a marker here.

We're in.

We have been given the floating camera

on Krolo.

And all it took was

a night and a half of slaughter, or rather half a night of slaughter, an episode and a half, and a fight against the two Zeldic patriarchs.

Those are the conditions that we need in order to get into these episodes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's also, I really love that the Ben's knife reveal is almost

superfluous and genuinely feels superfluous.

It's just a lovely little detail.

You know, we were taught about Ben's knives earlier.

It's so funny.

We were messing up Ben's knives.

It's really what Tagashi seems to love doing is telling you about something and then maybe reminding you about it later.

And then later on, you really,

it pays off, but it pays off in a way that at the end of it, you're like, I guess that was a nice detail.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't surprise me

a jot.

The leader of the Phantom Shrope from Meteor City wields a Benz knife.

Who else would wield a Benznife?

Right.

In a rules, too.

Like, the fact that it is just such a small thing adds so much to me for me.

Like, those little details are the.

It's the secret sauce.

this it really does it's that kind of

thing

that sort of you know it's not a show that has a lot of lore in it or that does a lot of like

scaffolding for their okay sure that that does a lot of scaffolding for their world building you know like i mean

you know i see why someone would disagree but we're also 50 something episodes in and we know almost nothing about the world that we're in uh like we spent multiple episodes in a row learning the facts about Nen, but we don't know anything about the politics of the world.

We don't know most of the country.

We barely map

the map.

Yeah, we know about Meteor City, kind of.

The things that we know are really disparate, but it is little things like this to kind of build the world out in a way that kind of makes it feel like it's full.

Like you could go anywhere and there'd be stuff there.

Which is is a tough.

Give me a Hunter Hunter RPG.

I don't want to fight anymore.

No, yeah.

Give me a make and make a Hunter Hunter Sandland.

Make a Hunter Hunter Sandland.

Make a Hunter Hunter Dragon Quest.

I cannot explain to you how much I want a Hunter Hunter Sandland.

I can't say the thing I'm about to say in the chat, but there is the perfect game you could make for Hunter Hunter.

I think I know what you're talking about, and I think they could do better.

No, I'm going to type it to you.

Okay.

Yeah.

By the way, I haven't played Sandland.

This might, I think, by the time this comes out, Sandland might be out.

So

we should be clear that it's yeah, but based on the trailers that I've been seeing since

that is a good thing you've put in the chat.

I'll send it to you.

I think you might have just sent it to me.

I DM'd it just to you.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, sure.

I get it.

I'm into it.

I don't love

that game.

Well, but I see why people do.

But, yeah.

Zeno offers more guidance about Krolo's ability.

Krolo is a specialist.

This is consistent with what we know about specialists.

As a reminder,

you're not really born a specialist or you don't sort of emerge a specialist.

Instead, becoming a specialist is something that you do or is done to you through a period of like intense

trauma or change.

Yeah.

Can kind of cause you to become a sneaker.

I think there's a lottery element to it, also.

Like, sometimes you just are neon, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Although, who knows?

And

there's some business about the

show uses two words here.

They use the word cost and conditions.

Because, of course, this is Tagashi, so everything is a game.

Zeno correctly identifies, and it's confirmed by Krolo through the floating camera,

that

there is a cost to stealing someone's power.

You can't just do it.

You have to to clear four or five conditions by stealing an ability.

And it turns out that to do that while fighting two Zelda assassins is functionally impossible.

So as long as they can keep the pressure up on him, they're not worried about him stealing their powers.

And as

Krollo confirms that this is right, and as Zeno starts to walk towards him threateningly, his aura sort of bursting into flame around him,

Crollo's aura appears and his book appears in his hand.

This is when I figured out what was going on because the gift of Crollo's stealing powers is this.

The least interesting way to write a superpower that involves stealing somebody else's powers is you go into a fight with, let's say, someone who can throw fireballs.

You have the character put their hand on their forehead or something, and then they throw fireballs for the rest of the fight.

We've just got two two guys throwing fireballs at each other.

It's not very interesting.

The flip side to this is we learn what Krollo's book is, and it is a Pokedex of freaks.

Krowlo has been collecting guys.

And one of the guys he collects is the guy that collects other things.

Yes, because Krollo's book appears in his hand.

He opens it up.

He pages through it, kind of studiously, deciding what to pick out.

And at this point, the entire runway is visible to me.

for as long as Krowlo is in this show we are going to be served dish after dish of bizarro nen power as this freak draws from his repertoire

and the first one he pulls is owl the man we encountered who uh uh moved all the goods who trapped an opunaga in the car uh and who eventually got tortured to death by phaetan uh as krolo uh sort of summons owl's big um top haul in what do they call it in the show a cloth uh yeah they call it a cloak

A cloak.

And sort of starts to move around like a matador, you know?

And this move is called Skill Hunter Bandits Secret.

Yeah.

Zeno obviously counters with a dragon.

Yeah, Zeno references his favorite DD module and uses Dragon Lance.

Yeah, he creates a big purple dragon out of Nen and is able to direct it with hand motions.

And it's awesome.

It is so cool.

It's so fucking cool.

I love this grandpa's

murder powers it's the coolest thing that we've seen in the show to this point like in terms of wow factor of like battle anime combat stuff

sure

it is also so funny seeing this against it really does feel like uh krowlo is out here with postmodern nen and zeno is out here with you know like traditional nen uh zeno is like i'll make a dragon out of my aura and krolo is like i've assembled a load of powers that I just get to pick from.

They fight.

It's great.

The risk to Krollo is that in order to keep this power up, he has to hold the book open the whole time.

Right.

Must fight one-handed all the time.

Well, when he's using his men.

He's done that.

It's too Zelda.

He's a Zelda power.

Yeah.

It is two Zeldax.

He is definitely done.

He's toast, right?

2v1, one-handed.

Oh, man.

He's not getting out of this one.

And in fact, the Drakon crunches him.

Silva launches into the sky and just does a sort of a

kamehameha at him, right?

He launches two massive, massive, he launches two massive energy pulls at Carlo, and there's an explosion that, you know, rips through the building.

And that's the end of it, right?

That's like the last, it's like kind of cuts out.

There is a little bit of them during their fighting back and forth, they like keep cutting to each other, kind of complimenting their opponent.

It's very funny.

They'll cut to Crowlo being like, this old man is really something.

He was able to read my mind in an instinct.

And then it cuts to Silva saying he's dodging dad's attacks by a hair all while keeping an eye on me.

If we want to stop him, we may just have to pay with our lives.

We get a really brief flashback to Silva and Crolo's confrontation in the past, too.

Yeah, like one second.

One second of it.

And

still enough to have my mind being like, What the fuck happened there?

Show me the whole thing right now.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the narrator says, Karapika had no idea that those shockwaves would lead to an unexpected development.

The Hunterpedia is Shalnark.

Both kids get stuck with Shalnark's antenna and are controlled.

It's very funny.

We get the subtitle for Shalnark's Nen Power, which is translated to Black Voice.

I would probably have translated it differently.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, it is what it is.

Oh, we get

we get

like probably the worst thing that Shalnark says in these episodes is from earlier, reminded me, when he is,

when he's controlling the guy who, like, they runs up to the auction house and starts like shooting in through the window, like where Karapika is.

This is only a few minutes into the episode.

This is like right after the phone call.

We get a peek at what it looks like while he's doing it.

And it's basically he's playing a first-person shooter on his phone.

Yeah, he's on that damn phone.

And then the guy dies, and he goes, depending on the translation, he goes, aw,

he broke.

I need to find my next machine or puppet.

I think the dub says puppy.

Yes.

And it is

so creepy.

His like, like sort of happy, go lucky, cheerful attitude.

It's the exact same now as it was 12 episodes ago, except now he's like kind of bummed that his toy broke.

Didn't Jack kind of call this.

I feel like we talked about Shalnark seeming twisted early on.

Maybe I'm wrong.

I've always been on Team Shallnark Cater.

And by Shalnark Cater, I mean I don't hate any character in this wonderful show, but I think some of the models.

You can hang out with them.

No, no.

Who in the Phantom Troop would I hang out with?

Easy answer for me.

I would hang out with Lebanaga.

That's who it is for you, right, Sylvie?

Well, I used to box.

He's a boxer.

We have a lot to talk about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

At this point, I took a nap.

It was a crazy thing to do.

Didn't sleep right away.

I'm obstinate.

And often when a show does a cliffhanger, I fold my arms and say,

Harump.

Well, nay.

Harump.

Nay, I shan't.

But the joke was on me because it was one of those naps where instead of just lying in bed and, you know, looking at my phone, I wanted to fall asleep and I couldn't fall asleep because I kept thinking, is Krolo dead?

Yeah.

I got to be honest with you.

I mean, that would keep me up at night, too.

You know, as long as, you know, with the caveat that, like, I'm safe, I'm not in danger, I would hang out with a lot of the Phantom Troop, I think.

I agree.

The problem is, Keith, that that caveat is wild.

Yeah.

Well, you know, like, you know, they wanted something from Gona Kilua, and even they were mostly safe

during their kidnapping.

All right, let's keep going.

I have one, I have one tangent before we go to the next one.

Let's milk this cliffhanger.

Because there is a character that's already been mentioned, Jack, by you, a new character to these episodes that reveals something small but important about the world.

And that is that there's a character, a human character who looks like a normal guy wearing a suit and he has a little bit of a ponytail named Bean.

Which means that Beans' name, you know, frame jellybean man, whose name is Beans,

is not named Beans

because he's a bean, but because a bean and beans is just a name you can have in Hunter Ontario.

I have a theory about this now.

I have the Bean Ben theory, which is my demon world theory, which is that after the Ben murderer, Mr.

Ben's knife, happened, they were like, okay, well, we can't.

So the name is Benjamin now.

Oh, they changed it to Bean because no one wants to to use him.

So it's just they have the same name, but it's a shortened version differently.

You know, like you call your friends Benjamin Ben's.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

His name was previously Gren Grand Jelly Ben.

And they had to

They really had to change a lot there.

Bean is really funny.

I also had exactly the same thought, Keith.

I hadn't put together that this implied that Bean was not named for his appearance.

Right.

But I was like, he has the same name as my favorite little guy.

I hope that little guy shows up again.

I love beans.

He is, however, complicit.

I'm not, you know,

I'm not freeing Green Green Jelly Bean Man from his role in the nightmare that is the Hunter exam.

The further away we get from it, the worse it feels.

All right, here's who I would hang out with.

Shalnark.

You would hang out with Shalnark?

I would fucking hang out with Shalnark.

I'm sorry.

You would or wouldn't?

I would not.

I would hang out with Shalnark.

Well, Shalnark just seems like a guy who's up for anything.

And so, just something, you know, the kind of friend who's like, Yeah, I don't mind, you know, whatever you want to do.

Um, and that's nice, you know, like that's a nice kind of friend.

Sometimes it's possession and torturing of a man, yeah.

That part's like, Yeah, but I don't want to do that, so I think that he'd be like, instead, we can play, and we know that he's in a video game, we can play, yeah, we can play Dragon Quest, yeah, that's not a multiplayer game.

I just said that because he looks like one of those characters

because he seems prickly.

Um,

uh, I wouldn't wouldn't hang out with Bonalinov because he seems kind of scary.

Courtopee is also kind of scary.

I don't know if I'd hang out with him.

Oh, you'd make so much money, though.

You would make a lot of money, but I'm just looking for a good time not to commit crimes.

Oh, Machi.

I think Machi would hang out with Machi.

I would hang out with

Uvo.

I think Nobunaga also could be a fun hang.

Shizuku, I would hang out with and would feel bad afterwards because I think the conversations would be very stilted.

Who knows?

Who knows?

A Phaeton, no thanks.

He's scary.

Franklin, a little bit too intense.

Nomunaga, a little bit too intense.

I think

he's a chill hang.

You didn't hang out with Franklin?

That's fair.

Yeah, he seems chill.

He seems pretty good.

The first thing that we see him do is attack Nobunaga

for no reason.

Because he was completely.

I would not hang out with.

Franklin, I would hang out with if it wasn't just me and Franklin.

Like, I would hang out with Franklin with Machi.

You know what I mean?

It's one of those situations where it's like, oh, yeah, Franklin can tag along, but I'm not, like, texting Franklin.

Yeah, I can't hang out with Franklin because I always sing around when we're hanging out together, I always sing the song from the Nickelodeon show Franklin at him, and he hates it.

And he hates that.

Oh, he doesn't want to count the play.

Yeah.

Come in to your house.

Count by twos and tie his shoes, do you think?

I definitely think that he can

count by twos.

I don't know if he can tie his shoes.

Okay.

It's a long way for him to reach.

Franklin seems like a guy who would not tie his shoes to me.

Velcro guy or flip-flop guy?

No, untied laces.

Oh, that's twisted.

Yeah, well, it's the phantom droop.

They're the phantom troop.

You're right.

Yeah.

I'm sorry for Durango.

Sorry for During the drink.

I'm just going to go down the list real quick.

Krolo, yes.

Machi, yes.

Pakanoda, yes.

Nobunaga, yes.

Sphinx, no.

Shizuku,

no.

Uvo, yes.

Shalnock, no.

Feitan, no.

Franklin, yes.

Kotopi, yes.

Hisuka, absolutely not.

Oh, right.

He'suka, no.

Pakinoda, yes.

I missed those two.

Tagashi loves to open an episode in a completely different place.

Yeah.

It's one of his favorite things.

Why would you do it in two places in a row?

That sounds boring.

Yeah, on an island, possibly floating in the sky, possibly floating in the sea.

The shot is very dark.

During a rainstorm is a huge mansion guarded by armed men that have very cool white umbrellas.

The way the scene is lit, the umbrellas don't literally glow, but they kind of pop in the scene in a really great way.

These are Mafios, those.

Suddenly, all the power goes out in the mansion, and every guard drops as the...

I don't know if I'd call them the B Zaldic team.

Maybe I'd call them the...

Wild

Zelda team.

Yeah, the next generation shows up.

Kaluto, Kiliwa's little brother, and Ilumi has appeared for the first time since the end of the hunter exam.

It felt great to see Ilumi.

Really good moment,

but also I agree.

We get something that you were just asking about.

I can't remember if it was like one of the last things that I edited or one of the last things that we recorded because those blend together.

But you were just asking about Ilumi's needles and if we were going to see them again.

And the answer is yes, but not immediately because the 10 Dons.

And not in the way that maybe we thought.

No, no.

The Ten Dons invite the Mafiosos via their sort of subordinates into the main auction building.

The Mafiosos read their fortunes very carefully and figure out that this is probably fine.

They're not in a basement.

They're not going to descend stairs.

They've never climbed.

And the leader of the Ten Dons on a video link says, Krolo has been dealt with.

And the Ten Dons are watching live.

And since Krolo is dead,

the auction should go ahead and begin.

Except all is not well.

Something has gone very wrong because as the broadcast finishes, we see the Tandons sitting motionless around a table in the center of this mansion as a fly lands on one of their staring eyes.

Good

so good.

And the camera,

the camera pans back to reveal that the Don who was delivering the message is being puppeted

by being just just

absolutely covered on the back of his body in Ilumi's pins.

The Zoldic theme rises in the soundtrack as Illumi stands in the window in the rain behind him.

This is just, this is great.

And it is, you know, after an episode of such explosive, chaotic violence from the troop, seeing Kaluto and Ilumi bloodlessly wipe out all ten dons in this mansion in the middle of nowhere is

great.

A completely different kind of malicious violence.

Well, now, and what the heck is going on here?

Because didn't the Ten Dons hire the Zoldix to kill the Phantom Troop?

Well, they hired some Zoldax.

They hired Zoldix to do it.

Yeah.

The Zoldix,

as I suppose you can be when you are both...

professionals and unbelievably good at your job are not really interested in conflict of interest

as the full scale of this is revealed.

Krolo is alive.

He has survived the attack in the rubble and he sits calmly there.

Ilumi calls Krolo my client after telephoning

Zeno.

He says we've disposed of the 10 dons.

He feels as he could wire the money to the usual account.

Yep, Krolo has just been Krolo is like I'll

you know I have I have 12 members plus me.

I can't be everywhere at once.

Yeah.

Let's just get Illumi to do some stuff.

And this just

this completely crumbles any kind of the the the Zeldic family are such professionals that now the 10 Dons are dead, Xeno and Silva aren't attacking Krolo anymore either.

Yep, they dug off their clothes.

They're like, all right, bye.

Yeah, like, well, that was a waste of time.

This implies a little bit of an extra thing.

They don't get into it.

This is total imagining on my end, but I can see a clear picture of,

you know, Ilumi working for Krull every once in a while and then telling his friend Hisuka, like,

hey, Hisuka,

I know a guy you might be interested in.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

The most toxic thruple in Yaoi history.

A little note.

Zeno says, it's not like we take any pleasure in killing, and I certainly don't want to work or die for nothing.

This just

underscores what we've sort of been learning about how the Zaldics operate.

They are.

Ilumi really is an oddity among them.

In that, you know, Ilumi is

all of the Zaldics are creepy.

The Patriarchs really do just seem to be running an operation.

It's an evil operation.

He's the shitty son of.

he's like the rich kid shithead.

No, the rich kid shithead is my dear friend, Killua.

No, no, no.

They're all different flavors of the rich kid shithead.

But it's sort of like, yeah, there's a sort of like,

you know, when you're rich,

when you have that sort of generational wealth,

you know, the children become like degraded, like morally degraded.

And it's tough, it's hard, but from, yes, from the world's most famous assassins, you can still be morally degraded.

Yeah, no, Kilua is AJ Soprano.

I understand completely.

That's just for me, but that's fine.

We'll get that.

The troop assembles in the ballroom.

Krolo says, I'm beat, and locks his hands behind his head and leans back.

And with that,

you know, we have been,

it took us a while, and we were introduced to him slowly.

And there are still great, uncomfortable depths of that character that we are unable to plumb.

But through

just this,

you know,

this outpouring of violence,

we have been awarded the drifting camera to Krallo as he lies back and says, I'm so tired.

And we miss his little, because the rest of his conversation with Zeno, he asks Zeno, if it was just the two of us one-on-one,

who would have won?

Would you still have won?

Yeah.

And Zeno says, like, not a chance.

And then there's like a beat.

And then he's like, It would have been a different story if you were trying to kill us, though.

It calls him like a brat or something, too.

And, like, yeah, I feel like this was a big moment for solidifying my Crowlo fandom when I first watched this show with him just being like such a little shit after barely making it out of this.

Um,

how old is Crowlo?

I think he's like 26 or something.

He's like, He's in his 20s.

I know they comment on him being young in

older than Crowlo?

Yes,

yeah, we all are.

Yeah, Yeah.

Oh.

Dear.

Okay.

Let's see.

Crowlo briefs Kortopi to start making copies.

Oh, he also really quickly just goes like, I couldn't even steal their powers.

Yeah,

because he was trying to like trap them in

the cloak.

Because

to Crowlo, the joy isn't put the hand on the guy's head and now you can cast fireballs.

It's I want to build my book.

I'm a thief.

He's a thief.

The sensation is very much like when you accidentally kill a Pokemon instead of capturing them and you're like, shit.

Fuck.

I'm never going to be able to cast Dragon Lance.

I could have fucking had that guy.

Accidentally killing the Zoldix when you would...

That's like accidentally killing Mewtwo or like

Homer or one of the other legendaries.

Yeah, I mean, I am sure Krolo is aware of the most powerful people.

Oh, we'll come back to that.

Hopefully, one of the higher things.

One one of the users can save scum.

That's their abilities.

They can reload earlier, save.

God, do you think that the spiders are all in Krowler's book?

I don't know.

Ooh,

we can answer this question later.

Okay.

I do know the answer.

Oh, that's a good question.

Because the relationship that they all have is genuinely one of

it's a complicated care, but, and I could, and it doesn't seem like having your power taken by Krowlo weakens you in any way.

I don't know.

So

I could see him being like, I have the Phantom Troop and I can act as the Phantom Troop

if I need to.

I don't know.

We will see.

Because at this point...

God, the horror show.

This just plays like a...

Like a piece of horror, and I love it so much.

We are watching a train crash in slow motion as the auction begins.

So the first thing that happens is Bean says, all's well that ends well.

It was dicey there for a minute, and then he runs into Hisuka and Machi, who hang him from the ceiling backstage.

First item comes up for bid.

It is a solid gold execution sword from the Yol National Treasury.

The

people stop bidding.

It looks cool as hell.

It's like an engraved sword.

There's a lot of business with the auctioneer talking, and it's only after a while that the camera just gently, you know, moves back and we see that Shalnark's antenna is in the man's neck.

Now it's time for a Celadon porcelain vase.

The vase comes out.

People start bidding.

Backstage, Kortopi is slowly copying all the items one by one.

And what's Kortopi's power called?

Kortopi's power is called...

I gave you the image of the power if you'd like it.

Oh my god, this wasn't subtitled on my screen actually.

That's why I didn't write it down.

Kotopi's power is called Gallery Fake.

Divine left hand, demonic right hand.

What right hand?

Okay, so the thing is,

here's the thing.

Jack thinks this is a red herring.

No, no, no.

The

objects in the real world

are that is to say our world no matter how material how physical they feel are the signifier to the sign in demon world.

You know, the demon world contains the sort of the platonic ideal of the object,

the truth of the object exists.

You're inventing chainsaw man in the demon world.

Like, straight up, you just invented a huge part of the chainsaw man cosmology.

And so, what is happening when Kotopi does his divine left-hand...

Kotopi, is he him?

Yeah.

I believe so.

Yeah.

Does his demonic left hand, sorry, divine left-hand, demonic right-hand is he draws the object out of the demon world.

This is especially funny because humans believe that what he is doing is creating a copy when in fact what he is doing is bringing the truth of the object itself.

So you're saying that the copy is actually a better version.

Yes.

Yes it is.

And they don't know this because demon world is.

Everything works out at the end.

You got a better version of those eyes.

Yes.

A big thing about demon world is that humans are extremely bad at understanding or thinking about it.

They call it nen.

They don't really know it's there, you know?

But Kruhl is from the afterlife.

No, no, he's not actually from the afterlife.

That was my thinking of

Virgo.

That's different.

That's debunked.

That's debunked.

Demon World, however, is true.

But the bidding continues as the auctioneer's assistant comes on stage, and it's Pakanoda.

And by this point, we realize the extent to which the Phantom Troop has an absolute grip over the auction.

They have not just stolen the goods of the auction, they have stolen the auction itself and are just working it to their advantage.

It's such a good reveal.

So they're getting.

That's great.

They're getting.

Here are the three things that they get.

They get every single item.

They get a mafia full of people

who don't know that they've been duped.

And they get all of the money that's supposed to go to the 10 dons.

They do.

Because now they're the ones being paid.

And there's an extent to which I see the Phantom Troop acting like bandits, you know, and

kill them all.

You know, Carlo's big order, take everything, don't let anyone get in your way.

And I think, how good could these people be at thievery?

By the time this auction coup is complete, this is a beautiful piece of theft.

Yeah.

I mean, it's tremendous.

I mean,

like a trillion dollars they're going to steal or a trillion jenny anyway.

I mean it's like definitely like minimum 10 billion dollar just the GDP of a small state is what it feels like honestly.

Just Karapika's one item that he's gonna bid on is three billion jenny

um

Karapika discovers the bodies of the

Phantom Troop of a lot of the Phantom Troop not all of them Karapika you know believes that there are still some out there but Krolo's body is there Franklin's body is there, Machie's body is there, Shalnak's body is there.

And because of the way this episode is paced, we know that these are copies.

We know that these are copies.

Krapica

should know that they are copies.

And in fact, later, once he learns that they are copies, he's like, of course.

But...

I forgot about then.

It's not just that.

You know, learning that the Phantom Troop is dead

breaks something in Krapica.

Something transformative happens and it is not the catharsis that he was hoping for.

It's hard to tell exactly why this shatters him so much.

It could be the numbness of seeing his revenge come to fruition and realizing in that moment that it wasn't worth anything.

You know, I don't feel any better.

It could be that he wasn't the one wielding the knife.

It could be the horror that he realizes that he has made this Nen condition against his own heart and it is now essentially useless.

But the light goes out of Karapica's eyes.

And so I think in this moment, not recognizing the, frankly, easy discovery that these are copies makes perfect sense to me.

The other thing,

before the bodies,

there is a moment where he gets the phone call from

light that they've been taking care of.

And he's like, he has this conversation with Zenji and is like, I won't believe it until I see it.

And that's when the bodies show up.

During that time, he declines a call from Hisuka.

Yeah.

And he cuts to Hisuka being like, I just wanted to

give him the good news.

He says,

yeah.

And here I was trying to lift his spirits a little.

Yeah, this is not a copy from Kotopi.

This is a conjurer.

Yeah.

And Hisuka's a conjurer, right?

Yeah, because we learn about,

it's funny,

they're so good about not giving you what all of their powers are until it's appropriate.

But

they also don't waste time

doing some big reveal for them.

We find out what Kortoby's ability is like in some throwaway dialogue.

Kortobi shows up and then Kroll's like, hey, are you ready to do your thing?

And then he's just like, oh, yeah, just remember, I can only make copies of

unliving things.

So this is Hitaka.

What do you mean by Hisuka made the bodies.

Oh, I know, I understood that as like the bodies are like he can't make moving people, but the bodies are like

if it's Hisuka, though, because Hiseka says,

I was trying to lift his spirits, and there's like a oh, but it doesn't actually help Hisuka if Karapika is out of the picture, right?

Hisuka is in Hisaka's best interest back into the picture, picture.

Right.

But that, but, but I, Hisuka having made the copies doesn't preclude him from also telling Karapika, hey, by the way, the bodies are fake.

So I guess, I guess it's, because I also read it that

Kortipi probably couldn't read the copies.

I think that

for my sub, it said that

he could only do living, or he couldn't do living things.

Or maybe it was just he couldn't make living copies.

I don't know.

I read it as that.

I had genuinely thought it was Kotopi making the bodies until I thought, shit, what if it's Isaka?

But in any case,

time to just, you know,

drive Karapika even further into his despair because he is now being asked to bid on

the Kurtzer Eyes.

It's tragic.

It's so rough.

I don't think we need to illuminate for you, the listener, why this is sad.

It's not just that he has to bid on them, it's that he has to bid such massive amounts of money.

The Mafia boss, who has sort of had it in for Light Nostrad, you know, raises the price to a billion dollars to the point where, you know, Krapaka is bidding Light's money, so it doesn't matter, but he bids $2.9 billion for his own clan's eyes, and they're fake.

You know, they're not even the real thing.

It's like such a

shame.

It's like such a horribly disgusting thing to have to do.

And then also for us as the audience to know that it is literally for nothing is

like

the knife being twisted.

Because what we haven't talked about during this whole thing is that like every once in a while we're cutting back to Karapika being like jerked around by

Light Nostra, jerked around by trying to find

the Phantom Troop, having to sort of like play both sides of this thing to like be the assassin and also be the bodyguard, and then also having to counter that the

Phantom Troop are like looking for him, but also trying to stymie him.

And what we see is that Karabika has been like right about every beat of this plan.

And he's punished.

And is punished for it because of this one final thing that he can't see through.

He can't see that the bodies are fakes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what is especially grim is he learns the bodies of fakes

so quickly, you know,

after this.

He just missed it in the moment, is what I mean to say.

He,

and then, you know,

Light says, oh, it's okay, you know, this is just more money for the community.

Because as we know, you know, bidding in the Mafia auction sort of establishes your standing within the mafia.

All of this is so hollow, given that we know that the Tendons are now dead.

The whole structure has just fallen apart.

Right, that 3 billion goes probably to the Phantom Troop.

Goes definitely to the Phantom Troop, right?

Yeah.

They never say it explicitly, is all, but yeah, I think it does.

And just so many good images of Karapika, just at this low point.

He takes out his contacts.

He washes his face.

He has the box containing the eyes just next to him on

the shelf.

you know,

this is probably the first time he believes he has been in proximity to, you know, any remnant of his kinsmen, and they're fake, they're not, they're not even real.

Um,

meanwhile, Leorio and Zepoli are getting on great.

Oh, yeah, Chainsmith's bro drinking, having a great time, yeah.

Leorio goes trying to bully Kilua into drinking, it's so funny.

There's some real

sort of bluff city logic going on here.

Kilua, because it's a children's show, says, I'm too young to drink, and aren't you?

Neglecting the fact that he's a mass murdering child.

You know, there's some sort of boundaries here that

this is a weird like anime trope of like children being around alcohol and being very assured to say, I can't drink, I'm too young to drink.

Don't give me alcohol.

I'm a murderer.

Yeah.

That happens for some reason in tons of anime.

Kids being presented alcohol and then saying no

i don't want it i'm 15.

i'm conceptual conceptually very pro this

uh but in the fiction it does feel a little odd um

killua he's talking about karapika's power and he suspects that karapika knows quote a strength that doesn't need power or even experience to make it work he has misunderstood or misidentified how a nen contract works kind of categorically right he's he's done it in a very killio way which is like what if I could just get the power you know what if I could just be strong enough well he has correctly identified you know there's no way that through the training that we went through Karapika is this much stronger than us just doesn't make sense so there's got to be some secret thing that we don't know But he doesn't know the cost.

He doesn't know that there is a dagger.

But there is some truth to that, like putting a dagger in your heart doesn't require experience.

And in fact, experience may have taught Karapika to not do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

As we think about the bodies, the fake bodies of the troop, and as Karapika reckons, it's so sad.

Karapika reckons with the fact that his revenge has either been completed or stolen from him.

We just cut to the Phantom Troop drinking auction wine together.

You know, everybody is there except Nobunaga and Uvo.

There is something

so sad

and good and fun

about

the

camaraderie in this moment.

They're celebrating.

They did great.

You know, they're in a position of difficulty right now.

Uvo is down.

There are weird fortunes being written about them.

But they did the damn thing, and Karapika is just falling apart.

The narrator comes in with my favorite narrator line of this chunk of episodes.

You know, to your point, Keith, of him appearing, saying a line and then leaving.

He just says, Karapika is now drowning in an indescribable emptiness.

And I was waiting for the narrator to do a follow-up, right?

To develop that idea in the way he so often does, where he's like, will so-and-so do X?

Or like, only something will be able to do whatever.

But he just sits on the line.

Nope, just Karapica is now drowning

in an indescribable emptiness and the episode.

It's lovely.

Good, good television.

The Hunterpedia is Kotopi, who can do gallery fake.

I might be a fake too, says Gun, as copies of him rush the screen.

There's a note where it says, note, Kortopi cannot make living

replicas, which is like, no,

Gon's just on some other shit in this Hunterpedia.

It's stressful.

He's learned a Naruto technique in a show that he shouldn't have.

Who can make copies of themselves?

That is Naruto's signature move.

Oh, no, I saw Goku do it too, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Goku can go really fast and it leaves an after image.

Naruto can be a bit of a damage.

I thought you were talking about the Kagebunchin no jutsu.

Yeah, sorry, the shadow clone.

Yes, sorry.

Yes, the shadow.

Of course.

Shadow clones are like

weak.

They're like glass cannon clones of yourself.

They're like 10 brave little soldiers.

They have full sentience.

They have your whole memory and histories.

They're just as strong as you, but if you punch them, they sort of poof into thin air.

What is their experience of the world?

They are literally Naruto, except that they know that they're a clone.

Although things do get a little dicey when you have them out for too long.

Okay, the prestige.

And then when they die,

this is structurally important to Naruto.

When they die,

the real Naruto absorbs all of their memories and experience.

Wait, including what it's like to die?

I mean, I think.

Man, I gotta fuck a watch Naruto.

Okay.

It's good.

good.

Um,

okay.

Uh, episode, hang on, wait a second, I'm gonna sneeze.

That's yeah,

episode 54 begins as children play in a ruined city.

Some new music, too.

Yeah, hit it.

No,

that's not it.

Hold on, say new music too again.

There's new music, too.

This is a rearrangement of Requiem Marinea.

Because we learn, or we see pretty quickly, that the children playing in this ruined city include a young Crolo.

He already has his book.

He's running, holding a book.

Oh, running, laughing in a horrible junkyard wasteland.

Yeah.

And then Crollo awakens from the dream.

He is back in costume again.

This is something I will say.

Crowlo's costume is so good that

having our first arc with him where he's in disguise felt kind of like a waste.

I actually like him in the suit so much more than I like his silly costume.

I like them both.

Don't get me wrong.

He looks better with his hair down.

He does look better with his hair down.

How does he usually wear it in a ponytail?

Yeah.

No, I think there's something kind of there's something kind of like a

when he is in his like full regalia as the leader of the Phantom Troop, there's almost like a

ritual costume about it.

Like he takes on a ritual position wearing this very particular outfit.

And seeing him in a suit and also missing the tattoos on his head, does he usually wear those?

What is his ear situation?

He's got like two fortune, he's got like two crystal balls as his earrings.

Yeah, like these weird

glass orbs.

Yeah, and something I just noticed from the uh of the um

uh Sylvie's uh official Sylvie Phantom Troop ranking.

I'll just say it really quickly: Krolo S, S, Machi, Pakanoda, Nobunaga A,

Finks, Shizuku, Uvergin, B, Shalna.

Not funnel enough.

So

Kotopi, C, and then Hisuka in his own tier.

Because of the way this is cut, I'd never noticed it before.

Krallo is sort of wearing a priest's collar.

That's cool.

Yeah.

That's neat.

That's in his main costume, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, but he's shirtless, right?

How does he have a collar and

shirtless?

Is he?

He's kind of titty out.

Is he really?

He's kind of titties out.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, no.

He's tittied out 3000.

He's listen.

All right, let me

just say.

Oh,

I guess he does have a collar here, but he doesn't usually pack.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, he's.

Such a funny drawing of Crolo because

he's not lit.

This is fan art, I think.

Or it might just be like a turkey model.

It's just scan.

It looks like a scan to me.

It's just a scan.

This looks like it's from a manga cover.

Yeah, because he's not lit, he is so pale.

The whites in Krolo.

Because usually, I mean, he's a pale guy, but he's got shadow on his face or whatever.

He looks really funny just here.

I turned the contrast on Krolo in the wrong direction.

He's also wearing stupid shoes.

Great outfit.

He wakes up and he just looks up at the Phantom Troop.

And I can't think of more of a confirmation that we have now been guided into Krolo's viewpoint than beginning an episode with him dreaming and continuing the dream, you know, into

the real world.

Gone and Killier are having an extremely messy picnic.

Oh my god, they are stuffing their faces.

It's so funny.

Why are they doing that?

They're having a race.

They're having a race to see who can eat the food the fastest.

Yeah, I mean, listen, I've done this when I was that age.

I will say, though, I saw them do this.

With chicken nuggets, but you know, the food looked really good.

It did

look really good.

I thought to myself, I mean,

I live in Michigan.

It's February when we're recording this.

And I'm like, I can't wait to have a picnic.

I'm just so excited to, like, green on the trees.

I get to go out with my friends.

I get to sit in a park and drink a beer.

It's going to be so exciting.

Maybe by the time this episode is airing, I will be doing that.

Oh, my God.

Wow.

There's this great moment where

Karapika Karapika shows up during the food eating contest and Goan shouts, Karapika, and food explodes out of his mouth and onto Killa's face.

So funny.

Karapika is reintroduced to Goan in the moment of him saying, well, now you've killed the Phantom Troop or now the Phantom Troop are dead, you can focus on the goal of getting the eyes back.

And Karapika smiles at this.

There's like this moment of recognition of like, this is Goan.

You know,

this is the thing that Goan is able to bring to my my life is like,

it's okay.

You have a, you have a plan bigger than this.

You can recover and later rest your brethren.

After,

you know,

so long of tortured Karapika, it's nice to see, you know, he shows up to the picnic and there's just like a long shot of him like like smiling at Goan and Kilua playing and then just like laughing to himself

and they just like take like five full seconds to to show Karabika kind of like his icy heart melting a little bit.

This is the point at which I was like, the show has changed again.

We are back to this place in this moment as Leorio briefly pitches, stealing all the money from Gonankiliwa, but is apparently kidding.

It's funny because it happens so quickly that you might think that it's like

jarring or incoherent, but it just feels like being around Gonan Kilawa, like, is,

you know,

like, just can do that.

Yeah.

And it works, and it makes it feel, it makes it feel like two different shows that are trying to reconcile with each other.

Yeah.

Yeah, and the thing is, the note I wrote down was,

the crew is reunited.

We have pulled out of the the nosedive of the auction arc exclamation point.

All it took was completely ruining Karapika exclamation point.

And I think that, you know, this moment of like,

is he, did he actually feel this?

Did Leorio actually feel this way?

How much of him is kidding?

You know, how easily, now that we have seen the show in this other mode, how readily can we say, ah, it was just a joke?

I think that there's no way in the world that he would ever do it.

I think it's no, no, and but I do think that Leario is a dumb idiot,

and so I think that he might have said it seriously as a real thought, but

never would have done it actually.

The PowerPoint King has returned, and he immediately assumes his throne

as he reveals to

Killio's horror, and we learn why that horror is in a second,

that his power can only be used against the troop, and he pitches them on how Nen conditions work.

He says, my ability is the product of my pure and unadulterated hatred.

You remember when he just did a PowerPoint about the rules of rope, paper, scissors?

Yeah.

Oh, brighter days.

I know.

Brighter days in the dungeon of Trick Tower.

I know.

This deeply moves Killiwa, who says, why would you tell us something so important?

And this is so fun, because, you know, usually Killiwa's line would would be, why wouldn't you tell us something so important?

But now Killiwa knows.

They're all

everybody knows.

Kilua knows

that Karabika does it, which is about Pakunoda.

They are now all deeply afraid of Pakanoda.

And we talked about this in the last episode of

how clever Pakanoda's ability is in terms of guiding the plotting.

You know, what do characters know?

And when do they know it?

And when are they in proximity with someone who could take advantage of that and now it has only gotten worse as the kind of the the virus of the the rocco's basilisk but it's pakadoda has spread to

has spread to the rest of the crew akillur is furious um

and they don't they don't really know what to do about this and and we sort of cut away from them in the process of going like shit we might have We might have screwed up here.

Yeah, they just come like, I guess we gotta stay away.

Yeah, Karapaka thinks his pact with Hisuka is over now that Krolo is dead.

I love this little domino effect of

deaths, real or fake,

breaking contracts.

The same thing happened when the Ten Dons died and the Zelda's were just like, well, not killing Krolo anymore.

But now

it's time to go back to the Phantom Troop as

Krolo and the troop wants to leave.

They want to pack up and I think go back to Meteor City.

But Nobunaga, still powered by the animus of his revenge, wants to stay to kill Karapaka.

He has a great line.

He says, he's going to be bored in the next world if we don't send the chain user to join him.

And Krolo says, no, we're going.

And Nobunaga says, I mean, of course, the leader's word is true, but are you really speaking as our leader right now, Krolo?

You know, rumblings of mutiny are beginning to emerge in the troop.

And Krolo addresses these rumblings of mutiny in

an incredible way, which is that we enter fortune-telling season

in a big way.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

As the full scope of Krollo's power is revealed.

I didn't.

Because of the way this is paced and because of the intensity of the fight with the Zaldics, because of the discovery of the dead bodies,

I had not put two and two together.

I mean, I know Krolo met Neon.

I know Krollo can steal people's powers.

And then so much is thrown at you that it is so easy to forget the fact that Krollo has got what he wanted.

You know, in addition to the Mafiosos, the auction gang,

sorry, all the auction goods.

all the money he has made off with Miss Neon's power.

He never wanted to kidnap her.

He just needed to be there to perform the conditions

that

he had tier four

priority was just like, and it would be nice if I could get that fortune-telling power.

And he did it.

And he desperately.

I remember the moment when Krolo tells Nobunaga, like, what's your blood type?

And I go, like, ah, of course.

It was so good.

Because Krolo says, I have some questions for you.

And I didn't even know where he was going.

I was like, is he going to interrogate him?

Does he think that Nobunaga is a spy?

And he says, what's your blood type?

What's your birthday?

What's your name?

Which is how Neon begins all her fortunes.

And I went, Oh,

okay.

How do we do this?

Now,

he could have just had me write it down to begin with.

Yes, yes, because Krello is a showman.

Yeah.

Let's just do some fortunes really quickly.

Please.

Nobunaga.

Forever set,

a precious moon is lost.

The others mourn him with ceremony grand.

The wolf alone misses out on morning frost and seeks frost's moons and seeks Frost Moon's shadow across the land.

Harvest barren, wine spilled, lovers slumber beside the bloody scarlet eyes.

Though cut in half shall be your number, unhindered the spider flies.

Now, if you are listening to this, listener, and thinking, that sounds familiar to Krolo's fortune, but not quite the same, this is the second level of Tagashi's kind of brilliance with the fortunes because

these being similar but not exactly the same is so clever.

It helps sell that it's real.

You know, the magic is working the same way every time.

You know, if it wasn't working, events are true.

So you would imagine that the fortunes would be similar.

It's kind of outrageous how powerful of an ability this is.

He really wanted it.

The thing that

because just think of like what

the little demon has to do to make these fortunes real.

Is like it needs to be able to butterfly affect out the whole universe for one month

and then conjure four stanzas that are applicable to you and your future.

And that

good out there in the demon world.

They're good out there in the demon world.

And I say this specifically because I know that this is the way that

these abilities get.

It feels like this is what the stuff that Tagashi is thinking about when he's writing the Nen powers and stuff.

What would it take for these things to work?

We'll get characters later that have abilities that are kind of crazy.

And then when you think about what it is that they're actually doing, you're like, oh, that's scary.

It was scary when it was Neon, Neon, and it's scarier now it's Krolo, because Krolo is going to exploit it.

The other thing, and this is to Sylvie's point earlier about how clever the fortunes work as a narrative device, there are two layers of prophecy at work here.

The first is get the viewer watchful about the prophecy coming true.

Get the viewer to start thinking, is this X?

Is this Y?

What could this mean?

And then get the viewer to dial into the differences between the various prophecies.

What does it mean that Nobunaga's prophecy is very slightly different?

You know, what does it mean that

where are they similar and where are they different?

And playing that kind of two-layer game with the prophecies is so much fun.

Anytime we've ever done prophecies in Friends at the Table, it has always just been so delightful as a storyteller to be like...

We are building a framework for ourselves that we can play around in.

I mean,

if this is something we want to do on the podcast i am up for it i am not terribly up for like trying to decode these riddles on the show um i don't think we need to

i think keeping them in mind going forward for the rest of the arc is something important yeah i don't think us going stanza by stanza

that jumps out at you because you're the only one that doesn't know what happens yeah so if something jumps out at you that you want to talk about i think that that's great if you want to dig into a specific line, I think that's great.

But I don't think that we have to like have a segment to do a close reading episode.

I don't think so.

Because we are in prophecy.

When you said a couple of episodes ago, three of you were like, there are going to be more fortunes.

I was like, how?

Why?

Is Neon going to be this important for Kale?

Surely Tagachi can't figure out a way to get more fortunes in here.

This guy got any other tricks?

Come on.

Oh, man.

Carlo is going to put a little sticky note on this page of his book.

The only line I wanted to dig into here really quickly, actually, was the line about Nobunaga.

The wolf alone misses out on Morning Frost.

The subtitle spells it morning M-O-R-N-I-N-G, Morning Frost, like Frost that you wake up and see.

The obvious double meaning is the wolf misses out on Morning, you know, Uvo.

And this is interesting because the Fortune is needling at

Nobunaga's anxiety here.

Yeah, the other thing is that, unless there's another thing connecting it to Frost that I'm not thinking of, but it's Morning Frost, and what number was Uvo?

11, right?

Yes.

So November.

So that would be

like

the Frost.

We'll get into this

a little bit later.

But I love that there is something about the Fortune that is almost designed to prey on the anxiety of the person it's being told to.

There's a little bit here of Neon's delight when the Fortunes are negative.

Sounds like some real Demon World stuff.

They don't really think the way humans do in demon world.

I don't think that they're like...

It's not hell.

They're not like...

It's more like a realm of incoherent ideas.

And also the truth of objects.

Okay, now we're off to the races.

Shizuku asks for her fortune.

Forever set, a precious moon is lost.

The others mourn him with ceremony grand.

But lonely not be the moon of frost.

Soon your blood will join his grave of sand

in the chamber of treasure ill-gotten there is no choice but endless sleep your greatest fear should solitude be lest upon your lonesome form he creep shizuku figures out she is going to die there's and she the delivery on this in the dub which is what i was watching for this part of it was great um she goes looks like i'm gonna die next week and look pacing on and shellnark are gonna die too she's like so weird

because they're the phantom troop.

Death is the thing that they, you know.

It's weird, right?

Because

yeah, it's odd.

They mourn Uvo so genuinely.

The death of Uvo really moves them, but at the same time, they are also out here treating the fact that they are prophesied to die fairly relaxed.

I think that might also be a Shizuku

character thing more than necessarily something about the whole troop.

Yeah.

Very, very possibly.

Yeah, she figures out that

the sort of the reference to harvest and to wine

and to lovers and to,

yeah, it's those

correspond to calendar months.

And so that is how she's sort of figuring out the thing.

As they start to dig into the meaning, they're also like, why do they keep talking about scarlet eyes?

They don't know what that's about.

And then they all sort of freeze and have a real like,

oh, someone survived

that time we massacred that whole clown.

Who was in the remembers?

Anybody know who isn't that remembers?

Sip Finks?

Might have been Pakanoda.

I think it's...

It's...

Fuck, I thought I remembered.

I think it might have been

Paku, but maybe I'm wrong.

And this genuinely starts to sway the tide for the Phantom Trooper.

Or rather, it strengthens Krullo's argument.

He makes a little cost-benefit analysis where he says, look,

Shalnark and Shizuku and Pakinoda are like information gatherers.

And if we stay here so you can execute your revenge, they are going to die.

You know, there is, there is, there is, we are going to be losing real value.

And there's just part of the argument that it's like, they're more important than you.

And

it's really interesting.

He says, you put your life on the line when you sort of became...

the attack dog along with Uvo of the Phantom Troop.

And you understand that to be true.

You did that willingly.

And Nobunaga says, yes, I did.

You know?

When he says, you know, they're more important than you, it's not so much like, I don't value your contribution and more like, you have taken on a role willingly.

And I need you to understand that that role is different from the ones who are about to die.

Yeah, what he means specifically about they're more important is like they have extremely useful and rare abilities and you're strong.

Yeah.

And they yeah, and like we can't lose the people that like let us be thieves

because that's who let us be thieves.

And we get a little confirmation that at least from the characters' perspectives, they are

these fortunes are not like determined.

You know, we described them earlier as like

what does

Amra Stir call them?

Loose

and

locked?

Deep?

Loose and deep.

Deep.

It's not a deep fortune, you know, that you are locked into.

It's a loose fortune.

So,

oh, sorry, go ahead, Jack.

They are genuinely thinking, like, we just have to stay away for a certain period of time.

You know, these fortunes are tied to weeks.

We just have to see this out and then we can recoup, and then we can work on revenge if that's something we actually want to do.

Now, Jack, I don't know about you or Dre or Sylvie when you first watched this, but the thing that I was doing while this was all happening was freaking out

about

what happens when they get to Hisuka.

Because I was like, Hisuka is going to have a different fortune.

He's fucked.

He's fucked.

And then what happens is Hisuka goes, Hey, and he knows this, but he goes, Hey, why don't you read my fortune?

It's crazy.

It's so good.

So good.

This fucking clown motherfucker.

Sure.

You know, sometimes

I was

years ago, I was talking with a friend of the show, the excellent Dongwan song, about

plotting.

And I don't remember whether or not Dongwan was quoting someone or whether this was something that

they said.

But they said, you know,

characters are just engines of plot.

Characters just, you know, bebop around and vomit plot everywhere.

And there is something so compelling

and so, so like turbocharging to the decision to just make Hisaka go, yeah, read mine.

You know, why not?

What's the worst that could happen?

There's something that I love about comedies, especially

Arrested Development, which is like the rare kind of comedy that

is like deeply invested in having a week-to-week plot that is like progressing and changing.

Oh, yeah.

And the thing that I love about that show,

besides that the joke writing is really good,

is

that the characters are like so

consistently themselves.

Everyone is always acting

according to

how they were set up to be.

They're like...

And then, and then from that

and some like more traditional kinds of plotting, the story emerges.

Like everything that happens is a reaction to the characters acting according to their own interests and actions.

And it makes all of the plots seem to follow really, really nicely from stuff before.

Contrasting this to things that shows in like

the, you know, the golden age of television from, you know, in like the 2010s or whatever, shows that were massively critically acclaimed, but that I mostly didn't care for.

Things that I loved, like, oh my God, the first episode of Breaking Bad is one of my favorite things that I've ever seen.

And then I couldn't make it past

two seasons.

I really didn't like it.

Because

you've got to.

And the same thing with Game of Thrones.

You know, like, there's parts of Game of Thrones that I really liked, but that's a show that revels in being able to make any kind of plot happen

just because, like, you know, it's instead of the characters moving, it's the world moving, you know, like, you know,

this thing was happening already.

It was always going to happen.

And we're just introducing it and it's fine.

I really like the thing that I really like about

Hisuka in this moment is like

they did something that is simultaneously so unexpected, and also is, of course, exactly what Hisuka would do, which is like be a be a

little shit who

almost feels like he knows that we're watching.

He does.

It's great because it's also like

it's Hisuka doing something that feels very brazen, but you can understand as calculated.

Because if I'm not right, it's a limited hangout.

It's well, it's like after he

does this after Krolo's revealed that he doesn't know what the thing is

while writing it right, you know?

Yes, like that like and so he's like well That means I have a chance to do what he does end up doing which is texture surprise it into something else It's like a really slick little sequence of just like oh, yeah, this is how he would deal but it's not exonerating No, not at all.

He doesn't give he doesn't provide himself an exonerate he makes himself look guilty, but guilty of something else

Because the goal is not not to help the Phantom Troop.

The goal is to fight Krolo still.

Right.

Like, that's a big thing for him.

But I think that this is...

And then I think this is self-preservation.

I think that

if his thing just looks like everybody else's thing or,

you know, it's not interesting and it doesn't really work because

their stuff is so tied into the emotion of being a member of the Phantom Troop that he doesn't.

like have yet or you know not yet he's not planning on having it uh so instead it's got to, instead, he like lets himself look a little guilty because everyone's already suspicious of him.

Yeah.

And by making him.

And everyone hates him in the troop.

Yeah, everyone hates him in the troop.

So he makes him Krolo.

Right.

Well, who knows what Crowlo thinks?

Krolo might just think he's strong, and that's the end of what I have to say about it.

But who knows?

But yeah, it is such like a perfect character moment.

And it's something that I like about Hunter Hunter a lot is that it has that sort of really reaction-driven

plotting where

things happen because characters do what it feels like they were meant to do.

It's sort of like the opposite of

the fucking, is it just called Archie?

What's the Archie show?

Riverdale.

Riverdale.

Riverdale.

Yeah, it's like the opposite of Riverdale, where it's like anything could happen at any time.

Any character can do

They could act in or out of character totally at will,

which is like a fun and horrible roller coaster in its own right.

Like one week, a character can be your best friend, and then they can betray you, and then we can just go back to being friends.

Hunter Hunter feels so

unlike that in a way that

is what I think makes it such a smooth ride.

Yeah.

Before we dig a little further into Hiseka's fortune, there's

a tiny little scene with

the crew

as

Kilua and Gone and Karapika have a bit of a disagreement.

Kilua says, look, we're in a dangerous situation.

We need to go strike now.

You know, Pakanoda's power over us is only valuable as long as she's still alive.

The leader of the Phantom Troop is dead.

We know where their hideout is.

Let's go.

Goan says we should hang out and lie low.

You know.

And Karapika decides to go with Goan here.

Much to Killua's chagrin, but Kilua sort of is sort of seething at this point rather than

fighting.

At this point, Hiseka texts Karapika and lets him know that the corpses were fake.

With a little

emoji.

Yeah.

The emoji is like two little flat eyes and an underscore for a mouth and then

playing card symbols on either side of it.

And Karapika just tumbles again.

You know, we just, we just,

the

bottom falls out of the thing and Karapika plummets.

But in this moment, his revenge kind of powers itself again.

There have been so many good moments of...

The note I wrote down was like emotional saturation in this chunk.

Karapika is just so

what's the word

submerged in this depth of feeling over and over again that it feels numb.

And for it to just happen again after this little, like a false drop on a roller coaster where they thought they had a moment to breathe, but they don't.

The corpses are fake.

They're still out there.

He had just kind of accepted

Gunn's, you know, olive branch, emotional olive branch of like, well, we can focus on the eyes now.

But he can't.

And now this galvanizes them.

They're like, the situation has changed.

We need to start thinking about what to do here.

And at this point, Melody...

Oh, so the crew is all like, we're with you.

We're going to see this through now.

Melody calls Karapika and learns that the Mafia have called off the hunt.

for the troop.

The dons have decided to call off the hunt because they are dead.

Fun choice by the Dons.

Fun Choice by the Don's.

We learn a little bit about why they called this off as we learn that the troop are from a place called Meteor City.

We'd heard about this before, but the most striking new thing that we get about Meteor City is that it is a place populated by people who, quote, don't exist.

This is where we hear the arrangement of Requiem Marinaire again.

The town has a population of zero officially, but at least 10 million people live there.

The impression that you get is that it is just this impoverished, sort of ruined city

where people take in anything that is sort of dumped there, whether that's weapons or technology or food or humans.

You see someone sort of rescuing a baby that has been dropped there.

It says it began as a dump over 1500 years ago.

No matter what's there, residents take it in without second thought.

And Leario says, I've heard residents there share a bond thinner than water, but at the same time thicker than blood.

And there's a kind of fucked-up relationship with Mafia here, because under the guise of providing them with food,

no, under the guise of dumping stuff, the Mafia supplies the residents of Meteor City with golden weapons.

Because, not golden weapons, gold and weapons.

They are looking to recruit people from

Meteor City, you know, desperate people who they've trained up in a situation sort of designed for ruthlessness and capability.

And so Melody's read here, which is a really smart read.

She just hasn't considered the fact that Ilumi has killed every single one of the Tendons,

is that the Mafia

are trying to preserve their relationship with Meteor City.

And they know that if they go against the troop, they are also in some way going against Meteor City.

So they are choosing to let loose their grip on the troop for now in service of a continued relationship with Meteor City.

It just sort of reinforces that question of like, does this have anything to do with why they targeted the auction to begin with?

Like, does the Phantom Troop hate the Mafia?

Is the Mafia, is the Mafia's exploitation of Meteor City something that the Phantom Troop has a grudge against?

I don't know.

But those are, that seems relevant.

Like, out of all of the world that they have to,

you know, do banditry to, it's the, it's the

first time they all get together in like five years or whatever they said.

Yeah.

It's to attack the auction.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is and and you know as we are

Corlo's dream, you know, the slowly revealing curtain that the bonds that the phantom troops share is genuine.

There is something going on here in terms of the way that

they are saying, you know,

there is a unity here in Meteor City.

Back in the den, everybody has now got fortunes.

And yes, there's at this point that Hiseker says, why don't you read mine?

Hiseker's fortune says this.

With eyes of red, a customer comes to call.

Half of him an angel, the other death.

Secrets of the moons tell him all.

Those of the frost moon he awaits with bated breath.

On the day of the sun, under this customer's care, alone with the man of cross reversed, removed from the calendar is the false hair, H-A-R-E.

With six months gone, the year is cursed.

It's tough.

I don't know what to do here, because if I'm being perfectly honest, I hadn't considered that he had

false-skinned.

What did they call that?

Texture surprise.

Texture surprises, because what happens is, you know, his fortune obviously possibly names him as a traitor.

But then, as he hands it off to Pakanoda, the fortune changes, and it now reads this.

A red-eyed customer comes into view, of bartering and sweet deals he croons.

The sword of law he plunges into you and makes off with secrets of the moons.

The eleven-legged spider longs for home.

Five more legs shall break before it's done.

But from your shelter, do not roam, for of those five you shall be one.

At which point, Nobunaga draws his blade on Hisoka, furious, saying, You know, did you sell out Uvo?

And as the credits rise up, the narrator says, but you know, points out that the fortune changed,

and you know, asks,

why has this happened?

And I hadn't read it as texture surprise, although that absolutely makes sense.

This would explain why Hisuka was doing what he was doing.

My understanding at this point was

Demon World is projecting Hisuka.

No, was that something was going on with fortunes being observed?

We know that Krolo can't read the fortunes when he's writing them because it's sort of the demon does that.

And Neon not only can't read them, but chooses not to read them.

And so I was...

My read was like, something happens when there is a relationship between observing a fortune.

And now we are kind of seeing it for the first time in action with the troop handing Hisuka's fortune around.

It's changing in that way.

But if he is doing Textual Surprise, I'm curious to discover where the surprise has happened and which fortune is genuine.

It's probably the first one, right?

Well, there's one of them has a lie in it.

Let me see.

Remembering the key that some of the fortune will have already happened.

With eyes of red, secrets of the moons tell him all those of the frost moon.

Wait, I can't spot this.

What's the lie?

A sword of law has never plunged into Hisuka.

Oh,

yeah, yeah, that's true.

Yeah, a red-eyed customer comes into view of bartering and sweet deals.

He croons the sword of law he plunges into you and makes off with secrets of the moons.

It's like you say, this is this gives Hisuka some culpability, but it's cast in a very different way.

It's a limited hangout.

He has admitted to having met with

the red-eyed customer who tries to get him to betray, but something has happened with we know what the sword of law is because he used it on Uvogien.

And of course, it's part of their deal.

Hisuka also knows what the sword of law is.

And

so when the crew is piecing this together, it's gonna look like

you know, duress.

Like Hisuka was, yeah, it was under duress, whereas in actuality,

and

the fake one also

pairs down Krolo's involvement, or rather Hisaka's designs on Krolo.

Alone with the man of cross reversed, removed from the calendar is the false hair.

With six months gone, the year is cursed, says the real Fortune.

There's no mention of Krolo

in the false fortune.

But it's great.

We're just fully in Fortune world now, and I imagine that with Krolo with this power, we're going to be here for a while.

No comment.

gotta find out.

Yeah.

Gotta watch to find out.

Gotta play to find out what happens.

And watch, we will.

Oh, wait.

My final note is that the Hunterpedia is

the mummy

whose whole face and body are covered in bandages.

Go don't kill you or spin around and cover themselves in bandages.

That sounds like them.

Yeah, that's the kind of thing they do.

Okay.

We want to talk about what we're watching next time?

Do we want to do our next time?

I'm so excited.

First, before we do,

I'm going to read a couple reviews.

Oh, great.

This seems like a good spot to slot that in.

So I have two five-stars

here.

One of them from Triangle Pascal is finally got me to watch Hunter Hunter.

I tried watching Hunter Hunter about eight years ago and fell off.

Wow.

This show has helped me appreciate it better, and I'm making my way through it.

The cast is all great, and their dynamic is wonderful.

I agree.

I think that we are great.

We have a wonderful dynamic.

Yeah, I tried to find funny ones, but everyone was just being genuinely very sweet.

So it's just a couple nice ones.

Yeah.

Interested to see what's next.

They're doing a great job dissecting Hunter Hunter, and I'm looking forward to seeing what will be next for them.

That's from Joanne BB.

I think

it could be Joan Nebb as well.

I'm excited to see what's next, too.

There's a...

There's a hint.

I have been wondering

what the next arc is.

At the end of almost every Hunter-Hunter arc, I'm like, where are we going now?

And up until the way this broke in the last four episodes, I was like, this is Greed Island.

You know,

we're going to pull the trigger on Greed Island.

Gon and Killur are going to...

going to get a cartridge.

Although that has completely fallen apart.

And I think we're going to meet your city, which is going to be

very interesting if that's true.

Oh, yeah, one interesting detail.

One interesting detail that I think we didn't mention is that during all this, the Dons, of course, called off the bounty on the Phantom Troop.

Yeah, no, we did mention the Phantom.

Okay, good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's no bounty.

I remember us saying that they called off the search, but I wasn't sure if they said they also canceled the bounty.

So yeah, no.

The whole plan has now just gone

gone.

Well, now we're that's why we head back to seeing uh Zepile and uh uh Leorio because it's like I really you guys better have made us 10 billion uh Jenny because this is all we've got.

Um,

anyway, sorry, uh, Sylvie, that was your second one, right?

That was it.

I only had two.

Okay, so uh, next time

we are watching another four

really, Really?

Yeah.

Yeah, sorry.

No, it's fine.

55, 56, 57, and 58.

Okay.

This may or may not be the end of the Phantom Droop arc.

More

brainworms from me.

By the way, I think that now at the beginning, I stressed how

difficult this arc in particular was to do the episodes for.

Like, it ended up that getting, like, having these, having the the i have them listed here as uh uh uh uh uvogine capture that's that was when we did 44 through 47 and then i have phantom troop assault 51 through 54 um how those like really needed to be together and that caused a whole bunch of pacing problems for the rest of these episodes but i think it's fine i think there's people out there that want us to be covering more episodes per episode and so you're welcome to those people enjoy enjoy enjoy this, enjoy this.

Yeah, um, these long-ass pause.

Anything else that uh we want to say before we go?

Yes, you have a little Crolo figure on your desk, Sylvia.

Oh my god, you want to know about how I change the hair of my Crolo nenderoid?

That's less the question about how you change the hair and more, how many hair options do you have and what are those?

I have two.

I have flicked back and I have down, and I have three faces that I can put on him.

I gave him one of the smiley ones because, you know,

it's good that he's smiling when he sees me, you know?

We're married after all.

We need to end this podcast.

We're going to have to do a

GFW podcast reading of your marriage proposal to Crowlo.

Oh, my fucking God.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

Does everybody know what I'm talking about?

I have no idea what you're talking about.

Not really, but just the concept, really.

There's an old Games for Windows Live podcast episode where

there's a forum.

It's a very old forum where

it's for people who want to marry Sonic the Hedgehog characters.

And so it's a forum where they talk about how awesome it is that you can go to this website and make a marriage certificate.

And

so they're talking about it.

They read off this conversation about this guy who's really mad that he's not allowed to marry multiple characters.

He wants

to Sonic and Knuckles.

That's me.

Not those two characters, but I am this guy.

Let me marry Paku and Krolo.

Yeah, so we're going to have to

do a

name Paku.

Pakuna.

Pakunoto.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Anyway,

that is from forever ago.

Yeah, that's from like 2004, 2005 or something.

I don't know.

Almost as early as you can be

and be a podcast.

Yeah, that's fucking

have a Krolo nendroid on my desk, but I do have

seven zoo adults.

We can't do this bit on the air.

This is a screen recording bit.

This is for us.

I mean, you do have a.

We have seen a gorilla on your desk, and you have seen a screenshot of Hunter Hunter where there's a gorilla.

An inconsequential gorilla.

But you do have a Hunter Hunter character on your desk.

You have the gorilla.

That's true.

Speaking of Sonic,

I do have a little Sonic and a little Mighty on my desk.

Oh.

And I have a Killua keychain.

Oh, hell yeah.

And

I have one zoo animal.

I have a platypus beanie baby.

I have Crowlom and I have my dramatical murder statue.

I'm not like a toys guy, so I have almost none of that kind of stuff in my life.

I don't keep it on my desk.

I have some stuff on my bookshelf.

Anyway, that's it for us.

Anyway.

Yeah.

Hey, did you like that?

Did you like the last two minutes?

Why don't you go to friendsofthetable.cash and sign up for our Patreon?

And then you can get every month the Clapcast, which is all of the stuff from, you know, usually before a recording where we just gab.

They're great.

They're fun.

We love to yap.

We love to yap.

I can almost not stop from yapping.

So before I flap my stupid gums anymore, let's end the episode.

Bye.