The Mafia Community - Hunter x Hunter ep. 42+43: Media Club Plus S01E14

You know what, I haven't mentioned, and I'll probably have to drop this in at the beginning because I forgot, but by the time this is up, both halves of our Dragon Ball bonus episodes will be up on the Patreon,

which again is friendsofthetable.cash.

So if you need yet another reason to sign up for the Patreon, listen to us talk about Dragon Ball for a cumulative seven hours.

All right.

You will not regret it.

You will not regret it.

You will regret missing it.

You will regret it.

Your friends will have heard it, and you will be embarrassed when they start to begin with it.

Everyone will be saying fiddle D D.

Everyone will say Fiddle D D.

Like, what are you talking about?

They'll say it's the funniest thing of 2023.

Yeah.

2020 D.

2020 D by the end of the

Fiddle D D.

Fiddle D D Goku.

Who am I being?

Who could I be?

Who could that be?

Is it King Kai?

No, Yacho.

Is it Seoul?

Is it Yacharubi?

No.

Too nigga.

Oh, it's it's a Saber man.

No.

Oh, it's Dende.

No.

Is it nail?

Now we're naming

characters Jack doesn't know.

I don't know.

Jack, is it nail though?

No, it's oh, it's Bojack the pirate.

Okay,

Broly.

No

fiddle D.

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

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

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

With me today is Andre Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at Swanjeray3000.

If you're a friend to the table fan who's here joining us for the first time, thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you for hanging out.

Yeah.

Go please give us a review.

Give us a review.

Yeah, give both shows a review.

Yeah,

yeah, do that.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere on the internet, pretty much, at Sylvie Bullet.

And you can check out this show's TikTok at friends underscore table and subscribe to the twitch at twitch.tv/slash friends at the table and check out the YouTube at youtube.com/slash friends at the table.

Some great recent streams up there.

There's also the co-host, which is cohost.org

slash friends dash table.

I did it.

That's the one weird one.

Yeah, friends dash table.

And Jack DeKeet.

Hi, I'm Jack Eerily Accurate Predictions Dekeat here to

check in to Hunter Hunter.

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

I can't wait to hear which of your predictions were right because I don't specifically remember any ones for this time.

I feel like um there were a few moments during these episodes where uh

and and I feel like you guys do this too but it's sort of cheating because you know what happens in the show yeah but there were several points that I was watching and I went I said that would happen

yeah I've got a constant trail of uh

of

rhetorical questions that sound like genuine questions.

It's so funny.

The thing that's great is that I've been listening through to the podcast, you know, as it's released, because we're on a kind of delay deliberately.

And so it's nice to know what people are listening to kind of at the time it comes out.

And I've already hit several moments where I have heard y'all asking these sneaky rhetorical questions and already know the answer.

And I'm like,

they got me.

We've been talking about Nen from the beginning, but just in secret terms.

The one that trips me up is when I can tell you are asking a question

or you have some weird turn of phrase that is so hyper-specific and I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop in six months when I listen back to it.

Like, I will, you'll be like,

wow.

Bigger than before, right?

And I'll be like me listening to it.

I'll be like, oh, I guess something's going to be bigger than before when it shows up.

I cannot wait until

if something shows up and is bigger than before, just wait until it's even bigger than that.

I'm very excited.

Should we jump into the recap?

Should we see that?

We should.

Yeah.

So we've got

Karapika's undercover and the Phantom Troop is in town.

So naturally, it's time to

scam auction goers so that two kids can buy the world's most expensive video game.

Of course, after meeting up with Leorio and buying some normal cell phones.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Please tell me we're going to talk more about these cell phones.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

We'll talk about this too.

Before a quick detour to learn that the biblical Satan is maybe real, we're checking in on everyone.

The troop is in their spooky house.

Neon is throwing a fit about not really being allowed to go to the auction proper, and the bodyguards are getting ready for the auction.

The auction is getting underway and running smoothly for about zero seconds as our on-screen death count quadruples.

This is what happens when you hire the Phantom Truth to MC your event.

After some robbing specifics that we'll get into later, the chase is on, then quickly off, as I think the troop decides it's not worth having people follow them.

So they stop to kill all of the people following them.

Yeah.

That's what happens.

This is two episodes.

Two episodes.

You know, when Mr.

Wing is on screen, Hunter Hunter spends two episodes repeatedly describing

metaphysics to you.

When Karapaka and Leorio are on screen, more specifically, when the team of 13 murderers, the Phantom Troop, is on screen, I feel like

the dial on the running machine has been set way too high, and everybody has to just scramble to catch up to their shenanigans.

Because the real driver of these two episodes are the Phantom Troop.

Primarily,

this kind of like triad of Uvogin, who Uvogin?

Uvogin?

Evojo, Uvogin.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Uvo Guin.

Yeah, Evo Gin.

His friends call him Uvo.

Uvo, yeah.

You've probably fallen to just calling him Uvo.

We'll get into Uvo later, but yeah, most of the Phantom Troop action in these episodes is Uvo, the

sort of barbarian murderer.

Fake the human mountain.

Barbarian type.

Barbarian as an adjective.

He's not murdering barbarians.

He is a barbarian who murders.

He would.

Listen, he's so good at murdering, he's definitely murdered a barbarian or two.

Oh, yeah.

I just wanted to be clear about his profession.

Yes, yes.

Feitan, the frightening child who

seems to be warming up to give Killua a run for his money in terms of sort of pint-sized villainy.

And then Franklin, a Frankenstein who reveals himself to be full of bullets.

Question mark, question mark, question mark.

And these three Phantom Troop members are really just the

driving force behind most of the action in these episodes.

But before they arrive, yeah, I think the place to begin is Gon and Killua.

And a little conversation that they have as they arrive in York New City.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Is this a pre-Leorio button?

Yes.

It's like the first, the opening scene.

This is a, so we don't have any like brand new music this episode, but since the buttons are new, I got a few important

soundtrack songs that we've probably talked about all of them before, but I thought would be nice to press buttons for because

pressing the buttons is fun.

And this happens to be one of my favorite songs.

It's called A Voyage.

So it's a scene that you're talking about, Jack.

Oh, that's really loud.

No, that's still too loud.

Oh, does that slider not do what I think it does?

How loud was that for you?

It wasn't terribly loud, but it was fairly loud.

I couldn't handle it, but you know.

How's that now?

How's that?

Yeah, this is good, and we can talk over this volume.

Yeah,

uh, yeah, I adore this song.

It, it, I feel like it's you, it's one of it's gonna be one of the songs that's used like to the end of this show, right?

And from the beginning, it totally is from the beginning into the end.

Uh, that song gets used all the time.

Uh, I think it's kind of it's so, it's such an on-the-nose emotional song that it it it it almost it makes me want to cry, but I think it's kind of a cheap cry.

You know what?

I'll take it, though.

I do love it, but I love it.

I think it's so good.

It's very sweeping and fun.

And

the other times that this is happening is like Goan is experiencing a brand new world full of wonder and magic.

But this time, weirdly, is

he's still full of wonder and magic, but it's mostly Kilu explained to him how many trillions of Jenny gets spent at the auction every year.

Yeah, because they rock up that

this marketplace.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead, Sylvie.

I was just going to say it's a little bit like

time to learn the wonders of capitalism.

It truly is.

Yeah.

So they're at this outdoor market.

And at first, Gona's like, is this the auction?

And Akillio's like,

not even close, but not even close.

This is like a village market, essentially.

People are, or a flea market.

People are selling all sorts of cool treasures.

We get a lot of really really neat crowd shots.

It's kind of

set up to scam people like Goan, who would go, is this the auction?

Yep.

Yeah, Goan is so excited about this marketplace, and Killua

sees it for what it is, which is transparently a method for like

greed and gain, you know, exploitation of an auction going public.

And on the one hand, this is Killua just being like, you know,

I'm smarter than everyone, and I can see the dark heart in everything.

But I think that this exact uh sort of um split is the Gonan-Killua relationship, right?

It's Goan looking with a kind of wild, uh, wide-eyed, joyful wonder at something, and Killua saying,

This is kind of all a bit shit, really

sucks to be here.

But he, it is, it is funny because he says he is saying, oh, it's all shit, but he also says

that, oh, no, no, no.

Sorry, this is about the actual auction.

He says,

something that sells for 10,000 today could sell for hundreds of millions tomorrow.

Bam!

Instant fortune.

It's where dreams come true.

Yes.

It's very funny.

It's very weird.

Well, and I think that it kind of foreshadows the thing that happens next, which is after he finds that Gohan doesn't have a telephone, we get this great shot of Killua's phone, which looks like a Fisher-Price phone.

It's great, and he realizes that Going doesn't have one, and they get midway through being scammed into buying a phone.

When?

Who should show up?

Geek Squad member Leorio is here.

He's back.

Leorio's been reading so many blogs about which phone to get.

He's an informed consumer.

It's his mute.

My god, it's Leorio's music.

He's walking.

He's talking.

You can actually start to turn it up a bit now, Keith.

Okay.

Yeah, that one might have just been really loud.

That was the last one I added.

I think I maybe didn't.

Color.

I love this one.

We get two Leorio themes.

I don't know if anyone noticed.

He deserves it.

I've missed him so much.

This is real life.

This is a great theme.

Yeah.

It's called All I Need Is Money.

Money in all apps.

That's the title I like.

We've definitely talked about that name before.

Yeah.

I think we did it on the backstory for Leorio.

The other Leorio, uh, uh, like the

theme variation is called

Dr.

Warm-Hearted Miser.

How does that go?

Have we heard this yet?

Okay, cool.

This one's like a bit slinky.

Yeah, it's a slinkier version of it.

This is when he's like pitching scams, is this one.

And then there's a third, a third one.

It's not really a variation.

It sounds similar.

I don't have a button for it, but it's it gets used every time Tonpa is thinking about doing something deceitful.

It plays then and it plays a few other times.

And that one is called I Ain't Your Grandpa.

And it's sort of similar.

They play it during the armor.

Who says I ain't your grandpa?

Is that Leorio or Tonpa?

I don't know.

Yeah, it's actually genuinely hard to tell.

What I like about that second one is you can tell that Leorio is always whispering and has one finger up and has that look on his face where he thinks he's very smart whenever it plays.

It's like, ah, yes, immediate mental image.

Leorio helps them

get

a good phone from the one that the guy is coming.

This phone is

called the Beetle 07.

Let's say it's your fucking Beetleborgs communicator.

Yes, it is so good.

This phone,

people might not know because there have been technology things that are

in the show because it's been updated slightly from the late 90s to the early 2010s.

The Beetle phone is in the manga.

It's so good.

Now, this is one of the rare moments where I am going to ask for and be good with hearing spoilers from the cast,

not from you on Twitter.

Are we going to see Gunn's Beetle phone again?

Yes.

Great.

Okay, I didn't remember.

I'm glad you're on.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was something that I thought last time I re-watched the whole series.

I was like, oh yeah, does the Beetle phone ever show up again?

And I made notes several times of it showing back up because I couldn't remember what it does.

Yeah.

That's a relief.

It's too good, especially because we haven't seen it open yet.

We just see it in this little box.

It's so good looking.

Dre has posted a Beetleborg in

the chat.

I love Beetleborg.

Beetleborgs was my shit back then.

I just need to get on it.

No, we do, because what is Beetleborgs?

Beetleborgs is a.

You're familiar with Power Rangers and Super Sentai as a concept?

Not Super Sentai, but I'm familiar with Power Rangers.

It's like a.

They're the similar things basically.

It's, you know, the transforming into sort of armored superheroes type of thing, you know?

Common writers.

I like it when that happens.

Oh, and I know that's.

Common Rider, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Ooh, if we ever do bonuses, a tokusatsu show could be fun.

Yeah.

But we've got other things.

Anyway, anyway.

Beetleborgorgorgorgs.

If we do do bonuses.

well, I meant if we do more down the line.

I'm trying so hard to get through the fact that Beetleborg is this.

I believe it has something to do with like a magical comic book that they find.

It's a magical comic book about the Beetleborgs.

And then the Beetleborgs show up when they go to a haunted house.

They're like, we're real.

And we're like, oh, no, no, no.

They meet a genie in a haunted house who grants them a wish and they wish to be the real Beetleborgs.

Yes.

Like from the comic book

that I'm seeing here, this next image.

Oh, no.

I think so.

Maybe.

I believe it is.

Yeah.

I think that's Flabber.

Yeah, Flabber, who is, as you would expect,

a Jay Leno bit, basically.

Oh, sure.

I'm pretty sure he had a Jay Leno voice.

Who lives with the dark universe of universal monsters such as the Wolfman and a Dracula and a Mummy?

And I'm not joking.

Jay Leno or the...

Jay Leno does in an old mansion.

They're sort of like there's Zordon and Alpha.

Okay, no, not real Jay Leno.

Not real Jay Leno.

This

flapper, Flapper.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

As far as I know

where real Jay Leno lives.

Yeah, real Jay Leno has to live in a haunted mansion because he never spends any of his

tonight show money.

Right, right, right.

Well, he spends it all on cars, so there's nothing left.

Look at this.

This is a famous thing that Jay Leno has said several times where he's like, I don't spend any of that money.

That money just goes into my savings.

I'm still living off of my entertainment money from before I got the show.

It's just some weird thing that he said 15 years ago that I don't think anybody believes.

Do we like the Beetleborgs?

Are they goodies?

I like the Beetleborgs, and yes, they are.

They are goodies, yeah.

Okay, they are like three teenage or like 13-year-olds, I think.

They're like, Yeah, they're very young, yeah.

Um, but yeah, the Beetleborgs is like, What if uh, Power Rangers was worse, but way funnier, and yeah,

slightly cooler if you really like bugs.

Speaking of way funnier, to get us back on track.

Yes, thank you.

Leorio arrives, and the

tone of the show doesn't so much change.

The show has always had a capacity for lightness and humor, even when Leorio is not on screen.

But we get like four back-to-back laugh lines that hit really well on Leorio's arrival.

And something about him showing up and me just like starting to laugh out loud at the show is fantastic.

His first great joke is

after he buys the phone, we sort of cut away as he's beginning to haggle.

And then as they're walking down the street, Gone or Kilua just says, I've never seen anyone get applause for buying a cell phone before.

He gets like an 80% discount.

Yeah, from haggling.

And

people are clapping.

And there is something, it reminds me very much of the line where Leorio in Trick Tower was like,

he won a cruise by playing rock, paper, scissors in a mole.

Do you remember that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He won a luxury cruise by winning a rock, paper, scissors tournament.

In a mole.

And I feel like that is the same Leorio as the one who is able to get applause for buying a cell phone, which is, that's really good.

The second great Leorio joke is they're sort of catching up.

They're learning about what went down.

It's a really cute scene, the cutaway to like Leorio reacting to all their heavy arena stuff.

Really nice.

Um, this is the value in splitting your protagonists up, right?

Because you do get moments like this where they where they get to come back together.

And uh, Kilua says, Did you learn Nen?

Or maybe maybe go and says, Did you learn Nen?

And Leorio leans forward and says, You better believe I did, and then

describes 10, the first step,

one of the first exercises to learning Nen.

You need to read how I wrote this down, which is

he's so proud of himself, and then he gets, are you smarter than a fifth grader?

Like a 12-year-old just immediately shows him up by being like, well, yeah, that's 10.

Have you heard about all this other stuff?

It's so funny.

I also love in the screenshot you posted, Keith, just to rewind to the haggling, Kiloa's extreme,

oh, my mom embarrassed me at the mall face.

Oh, my God.

It's so funny.

By the way, look if he's the shop owner in the background.

Oh, he's just like, okay, so

pain, in emotional pain.

Yeah.

Like he just lost a very intense Yu-Gi-Oh!

battle.

What keeps us posted is this tiny cutaway moment.

And I love this frame.

I sort of, so someone says, I'd never seen anyone get a puzzle buying a cell phone before.

And we get this little tiny cutaway to people clapping.

And it's a really funny shot.

I wonder if the joke would have worked better had they, you know, had we not seen the cutaway.

I feel like the image in my head was almost better than not seeing it.

But it turns out that what we are seeing is really funny.

Leorio is whistling.

He's got a little music note coming out of his mouth.

And then he's Captain Morganing, also.

Yes.

Yes.

And Gun and Killiua are standing next to each other, holding up the phones in bags as though they are having to present it to the crowd.

Yeah.

Both embarrassed in slightly different ways.

It's great.

It's really good.

And yeah, when Killiwa learns that Leorio only learned the first step of Nen and believes that's the extent of it, he says, that's pretty much what I expected, which is

brutal.

Which is really good.

I feel like you asked at some point whether or not I thought that Leorio had learned Nen.

And I think my answer was, of course, he has, because the story needs to kind of move that way.

But him only learning step one is the funniest possible way to do it.

I would like to,

and I'm worried about like

a friendly groundhog that you just want to take a closer look at, but it doesn't know the difference between you and a predator.

So any movement scares it away.

I'm worried about saying this next thing, but I'm going to say it anyway,

which is that it's very funny how far we've come.

Just in a few episodes about Nen,

Jack, your attitude towards it and about learning about Nen.

They've taken the umpteenth time to reset and remind you the different parts of Nen.

They go like, you know, he's like, that's 10.

That's just the first part of of Nen.

And they just have, it's a quick, like, you know, 20-second reminder of what Nen is and what's going on and what you got to know.

And this time, it's fun and we're having a good time with it.

And we're not bored and we're not annoyed about it.

Well, it's because, it's because it's, it's, yeah, yeah.

Look, I'm not on.

No, it's fine.

It's fine because I said, I knew, and I said it in the very, one of the very first things in the very first Heaven's Arena episode that we did, I was like,

I found this boring the first time I watched it.

Don't worry about it.

It's great.

Looking back, it'll be fun.

There is a moment at the end of this group of two episodes

in one of the final scenes that for me feels like I'm being rewarded for my patience with them.

That is so delightful.

It involves some little freaks.

And we'll get that.

But I feel like it makes the first freak we've seen so far, question marks.

So I was delighted when these guys showed up.

If you haven't been watching along,

which is fine,

I feel like we try and make this show that it's comprehensible to you if you're not watching along.

You might be listening to us now and thinking, surely they can't be getting more freaks.

Buddy, you have no idea.

We just late last episode we got a new slew of freaks.

Honestly,

like, barely at the tip of the iceberg of freaks.

Yes, we scratched the service.

Straight up, do not know how many freaks you will find within Hunter Hunters pages and episodes.

Now that I've got these screen caps open, because I posted them, we've also already got a new Kilo outfit.

Well, we have.

Yes, we have.

He's wearing a pink shirt.

He's wearing a...

This is absolutely Kiloa Rich Kid.

Yes.

Yeah.

He's wearing a pink.

A pink shirt and banks Kiloa.

He's got like a little custom

necklace, right?

Yeah, he's got a little custom gold necklace.

It's like a dress shirt, like a kind of rumpled dress shirt under a pink, a loose pink t-shirt.

He's also got cuffed jean shorts on.

Okay, I'm going to do a bit of, not exactly cinema sins, but I have a lot of...

You're going to ding him, though.

You're about to ding him.

I am going to...

No, I'm not really going to ding him.

I'm going to say...

Because the question I'm about to ask has no bearing on the plot.

It's not interesting to think about outside of, you know, like talking with your friends.

But luckily, that's what we're doing.

Where does Killua get all his clothes from?

Does he pack a bunch of clothes when he leaves the Zelda Asteroid?

They just just draw it right on him.

Fuck off.

They just draw him right on him.

Just draw it right on him.

In fact,

he's nothing before they start drawing the clothes.

That's when Killua shows up.

No, because he didn't leave the Zelda Mansion with a suitcase.

Is he just buying clothes with Silver's credit card?

I would believe that.

I love that.

I would believe that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He knows he can't buy, for example, Greed Island with the credit card, but he knows that for his whole life, Silva has been seeing his family buy fancy clothes on his credit card.

So he's like, it's, you know.

We missed the most important part of this outfit, which is that

it comes with a little bunny lollipop.

It does.

This little lollipop's great.

He has this little bunny lollipop for most of this episode.

This little shitter loves candy, and I think that's fantastic about him.

Hey, I watched Home Alone 2 Trouble in New York over

Christmas.

Killer has kind of Kevin the murderer energy, doesn't he?

Like when you need traps.

He's like, I'm talking about Kevin too as well.

When he's setting traps, when he's spending his parents' money, when he is enjoying the fine things in life.

He's an old soul, you know?

He's also kind of the the kid from Blank Check sometimes.

Yeah.

I don't think I've seen Blank Check.

I don't.

Okay.

Unless you love.

I just saw him in a movie yesterday.

Paul Giamatti.

Why would you tell Jack not to watch Blank Check?

Oh, no.

I'm thinking of Big Fat Liar.

Paul Giamatti.

Blank Check's just not a very good movie.

No, it's not.

It's about a child who gets a blank check.

A guy gives a kid a check to

a 70-year-old boy hitting on an adult FBI agent.

That is the way it is.

Oh, God.

And she kind of goes along with it.

She kind of killed.

I think Tone Locus trying to kill the child.

Okay.

Because when you said this is a movie about a kid being given a blank check and spending a lot of money, I was like, this is just a great premise.

You know, it's not a complicated movie to make.

Why?

How could you fuck it up?

And then you told me immediately how they fucked it up.

He goes on a date with an adult woman.

Yep.

There we go.

That's the way they fucked it up.

He gets a kiss from an adult woman.

Oh, God.

No, I'm not going to see this.

this.

Sorry.

Okay.

Brief note.

We get the name of the auction house.

The auction house is called Southern Bees.

I love it.

I love this.

We got so many good names for things in this episode.

Now, yeah, now that I am saying it out loud, I'm realizing that this is a Sothebees joke.

Yes.

Yeah.

But when I saw it written down in the subtitles, I just thought it was a really cool name for the thing.

Southern Beers.

But now Leorio has arrived.

The game plan kind of returns to we need to make a bunch of cash.

And they begin sort of scheming.

We get a tiny little cutaway to learn that Maluki is having trouble making the game go.

And so he sets off out into the world

with the implication being that he is going to try and bid on the game himself in exchange for killing 15 people in order to get a loan from his dad.

How much is that loan loan for?

15 billion Jenny.

15 billion.

They say they can't put a price on a life.

You've never met a Zoldic before.

Because he says

he's gotten like 9 billion as it is.

And he's like, that's barely enough to do the lowest bid.

And it'll be double this, probably.

So then he gives himself some extra room,

gets 15 billion.

So he's going with 23 billion.

What if every time Kilo gets a new outfit, it is because screen he called his dad and was like hey i need a new fit i'll go kill somebody for you

i don't think he i think i i

sorry i got too i got too serious about kiloa there because i was about to say i think that's funny but i don't think it's true to the character it would be sad right we know the guy is trying to um but it is good to it is good to think about well i i do like that it gives us like some measuring stick for the economy that the zoldics are dealing in

Yes.

That's funny how they have all that staff in that big ass house.

Yeah.

It does make me wonder.

Silver must be the one who gets all the murder money, right?

Because otherwise, Maluki could take on his own clients, right?

Maluki could just

go to however Zoldic targets are set, pick up a bunch of clients, get the payout.

I don't know how they split the work between

between Zeno and

Silva.

This is just taking

the supposition very seriously.

I wouldn't say definitely

Silva's dad has no say in the business.

Yes, I think so.

But definitely true of Maluki.

Maluki has to ask for money.

Notably, despite talking about them every episode, we haven't actually seen a lot of Zelda assassins in in action right we've seen Ilumi trying to disrupt the hunter exam

and we've seen that's it right we've met them on their home turf but what do you think it would look like if we got some Zoldic assassin in action uh brutal uh

you know

uh

it wouldn't be good right

there yeah

I don't know how many of them are actual.

They're an assassin family, right?

Which makes me think it's probably Silver

works in the field maybe zeno works in the field uh what's the mother called um kikyo yeah yeah

because it can't just be that the kids are the only ones who go out doing the killing it's illumi killua

and maybe the mom and dad i don't know not good

uh possibly maybe too little maybe kalato is learning like he goes

goes on a goes on a journey but we know that this show makes kids do fucking horrible things to each other constantly something i will do that you know we'll get to later is we do see a Zelda technique in these episodes.

We do.

I didn't notice that.

I didn't notice that, but I but I saw it on your thing in the dock, Sylvie.

Yeah, the rhythm step or something appears.

We see Killua's hand thing.

Yes, we do.

We'll get to it.

That's gonna be.

The Phantom Troop have not yet appeared in this episode of Media Club Plus, and when they do, the train is gonna go crashing off the rails.

Right before the Maluki thing, we also get it.

We get another play,

Like Southern Bees, we get

Woogle.

Oh, yes.

Woger, I thought it was.

Woger, the Google search engine.

Oh, before we move off to Zelda Assassins, and to your point, Dre, about what if the way Killua is getting all these great fits is just taking on clients and murdering people.

It is actually notable that Killua has a...

a way of making a lot of money very quickly.

And the thing that they are trying to do right now is make a lot of money very quickly.

Oh, I didn't even think about that.

You're totally right.

And I think it is very notable, right, that he is not doing that.

We know that the Zodic assassins are not just, you know, your regular hit people.

They are getting top money for the stuff they do.

And I'm sure that Killiwa could go back to Silver and say, you know, give me a job.

I need to go buy Greed Island.

But he doesn't, because he wants to do this the proper way.

That is to say, scamming punters into a beat a child at arm wrestling game.

I love this because for us, not just that, I mean, I love it in general, but for this show, we have made so much hay over

people not

understanding how strong these strong children are, despite numerous context clues.

They have made a literal game, they have gamified other people's inability to process this information

In universe.

In universe reference.

This game works exactly the way you think it does, right?

It goes like this.

Step right up, arm wrestle the child in exchange for...

Okay, so first we have a bit of business about the different kinds of auctions.

This is all bullshit.

Leorio describes that they go on the Wikipedia page for auctions and learn about different kinds of auctions, including one called a conditional auction, where you are,

they say you are bidding with a thing that is not money.

You know, so when this was described, the implication, as I understood it, was sort of like, this is an auction for, you know, barter or whatever.

Say

open services auction.

Yes, I want this gem.

I am prepared to offer you

use of my plow for, you know, six days or whatever.

That's how I understood this.

The way Leorio has understood this to be is essentially just like a game of chance or betting.

Leorio has confused a conditional auction for betting.

So he has bought a diamond with a certificate of authenticity or forged one.

My suspicion is that they put some of their money down because they knew they were about to make a massive amount of money.

And you have to pay a 10,000 geni entrance fee.

And then you arm wrestle Gohan.

And he beats you every single time while sort of pretending.

to strain and have a difficult time.

Gohan is sweating and people are like, oh, that's because he's straining so hard, but it's actually because he's brought out in a cold sweat at the thought of scamming all these people.

Yeah, he's upset about scamming.

That was a really funny joke.

People in the audience are like, He's probably getting tired.

We should try and beat him now.

No, he's not getting tired.

He's getting bored and nervous about lying.

However, Killua, often as usual, acting as the

reigning on the parade,

notices to himself that they will need to arm wrestle eight eight hundred thousand wait eight hundred and eighty nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine people in order to get the opening bid for greed island

well there's something to be said for just getting the cash to fund your next scam sort of you know

instead of uh you know you multiply by two and then two and then two and then two and then instead you're like well now we can multiply by eight instead of two that's true yes that is true i do feel very much like it is like that thing that people say about how like um the difference between a million and a billion and you know you could count to a million in x amount of time but to count to a billion it would take 31 years or something um this is killer learning this about uh how many people he needs to he needs to arm wrestle yeah

and i and i think that uh I think Gunn would be done by then.

Just bored, if not tired.

Yeah.

Probably also tired.

I think he's very powerful, but I don't think that he could do that, could he?

I don't know.

Hey, we get our first Phantom Troop appearance.

Oh, what we get even before then is a screenshot.

It is.

This is the screenshot with the, I'm sorry, but I don't know that man.

bit

where in our hunter-hunter screenshot stream you showed me this game um i think i pretty correctly guessed that uh this was going to be a scam the um

you know scam people by thinking that they can't beat the small child scene however i lose all my points by not correctly identifying one of the four main cast of the show

yeah we we definitely were like is there anyone else in here what about this guy you're like that's normal businessman yeah yeah well i thought he was a businessman who had come by to watch the game and he was shocked Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I would like to jump back a little because

we, before this scamming scene, we get a little bit more information about the auction.

And there is a lot of business about how the auction works.

Southern Bees is this nice normal auction.

But at the same time, there is an underground auction where the mafia

come.

Wait, is there a good auction at all?

Or is it all just the underground auction?

It's all just the underground auction.

Yeah.

It's just

auction goes to shit.

It's all the mafia auction.

The whole thing is the mafia auction, and then there's like the shady part of the mafia auction.

But yes, the whole thing goes to shit immediately.

Okay, wow.

I had thought that like this was just sort of like a side gig that the mafia run during the real auction, but no, okay.

So, uh, the mafia auction works on, frankly, a stupid system.

Uh, it operates on a weird sort of trust system.

No weapons are allowed inside the auction house, but also no security cameras are allowed you know either um

the um

what's the guy called he's named like a mouthwash dalzaline uh yeah dalzaline

yes dalzaline yeah names like a mouthwash is a wild pull

and it works

rare insults account there's two of them two of them are named like mouth like mouthwashes because there's also uh linsen oh linson and dalzaline you use them together for their effectiveness.

It's Tuesday.

Yeah, the two-step process.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Dalzeline says, you know, you've got to check your grudges at the door.

There is this real, and we're getting all these shots of the mafia here.

There is a real

sort of sense, mistaken criminal naivety here, right?

Where it's like, we are the respectable mafia.

We all dress in suits.

We look out for ourselves.

It's just a bunch of very normal-looking men in shady sort of suits.

No freaks at all.

No freaks at all.

And I think that, you know, on the one hand,

we make a lot of hay about the value of freaks on this show.

But I do think there is something to be said about the way this criminal organization just cannot conceive of the kind of danger and

affect that is out there waiting for them in the world.

Whether it is through the gonzo heroics of the Hunter organization or through the just

like pantomime bizarro murder of the Phantom Troop.

This is like very much the old guard of criminals, or like a particular kind of criminals.

You know,

there is something kind of interesting about this to me, which is, and I'll just say outright, this is not something that gets touched on in the anime, like

at least on a surface level.

But

the one thing, really, that we know about this mafia is that it's born out of the same place that the fandom troop was born out of.

Yeah, Meteor City, right?

Yeah, Meteor City.

Meteor City.

Yeah, the vibe that I get from these guys are very much the people who are like, I just love watching fucked up, twisted movies like, and then a long pause, and then they say, like, Donnie Darko or

Christopher Nolan's memento or something.

Boondock Saints.

Now that's cinema something to say.

Exactly.

Meanwhile, the hunters and the phantom troop are out here watching like a three and a half minute long full-length movie about you know someone machine gunning a crowd or whatever.

You know,

there's some real bullshit out in this world and the mafia are not prepared for it whatsoever.

Especially because

it speaks to the mafia's unpreparedness about nen.

You know, they say, leave your weapons at the door.

Nen users do not need weapons, as far as we can tell.

The way this whole auction is run is just funny to me.

The 5% kickback to the mafia community.

They keep saying the mafia community community.

They see it so much, and it's so funny.

It's really funny.

Well,

I think that they explain that pretty well.

I think that totally makes sense to me.

I mean, they explain it better as the episode goes on.

I think when the 10 dawns are more established as a thing, it makes a bit more sense.

I just think the wording of it is funny.

Yeah.

So

because it sounds like when Budweiser talks about, we're reaching out to the LGBT community.

We're reaching out to the mafia community.

Send us the alphabet, Mafia, Sylvie.

You figured it out.

It's shit.

It's Tosino.

There's 10 of them for every letter.

It's Tosino who originally explains it to Bayes.

And like, why are they?

Like, why are they so confident?

And it is, there is, like, a horrible overconfidence problem, as we'll see in just a minute.

But,

you know, Bayes is like, why are they, what is going on?

Like, why are they allowed to just have the auction?

Why isn't anybody scared?

And Tosino is basically like, this is every family's opportunity to

like make themselves seem awesome by spending a ton of money at the auction.

Because in addition to paying...

whoever the person is that's selling the thing, the

Bafi essentially

operates as an auction house where they're taking a 5% commission on everything.

So they're like, yeah, people overpay on purpose to funnel more money into like the mafia community.

Yeah, to like increase their status, right?

Right, yeah, because it goes to the Don'ts, basically.

It goes to like the main organization and it can get you noticed.

And then I think he explains that some families have like gone bankrupt doing this,

trying to make themselves look good.

Yeah.

Nightmare.

Yeah.

But also so sort of flatly stupid in a way that the Phantom Troop and the Hunters are expressively stupid.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, I think we are sort of seeing the Phantom Troop.

You know, I don't know if they've actually showed up yet in their cool.

Nope, they have not.

We kind of skipped.

We skipped.

We skipped around a little bit because we ended right before Shizuku appears at the arm wrestling.

This is the first appearance of the Phantom Troop, actually.

Because suddenly, out of the crowd, at the arm wrestling, comes Shizuku, the new Phantom Troop member, alongside Hisaka.

She is a short woman in glasses, wearing a gold cross around her neck.

We don't know what her nan power is at this point, but we'll learn.

Oh, we will.

She

arm wrestles Gone.

And Ghon learns very quickly that this is a nen user, and he has to put his full effort into it, and he beats her.

But both people come out of this interaction going, ooh,

that was interesting.

What happened there?

And in fact,

Shizuku goes back and reveals to Feitan and Franklin that she is left-handed, and she was using her right arm.

Yeah.

I love the little bit of character we get from Shizuku this episode, where she's like,

kind of just

a little like ahead in the clouds a lot of the time was like well he put his right hand out so I just put mine out on instinct yeah and then when she realizes oh yeah I use my weaker hand let me go back and try and yeah again yeah I really wanted that diamond and they're like no we're we are not going to do that sorry she specifically say we're thieves when we want something we steal it or like we want something we take it something along those lines boy do they um

but yeah it is uh it's always very fun when characters who are going to be sort of fated

foes or friends meet each other ahead of time.

And it's such a great

thing to have them both be surprised that the other person wasn't a normal person.

Yeah.

Does Go know what the Phantom Troop is?

Has he heard?

Yes, yes.

He heard Karapika talk about it in Trick Tower.

Yeah.

Okay.

And

I think that Karapika explained about it during the plan to meet in New York New City, told them what Hizuka had told him.

Yes, that is correct.

And then, you know, having met Shizuku here, the Phantom Troop makes their proper arrival in this episode as they ascend in a black and white striped hot air balloon.

Haunted hot air balloon.

As their choral theme plays.

Keith.

Yeah.

Already on it.

Already on it.

Oh.

I love the haunted hot air balloon.

It's such a funny idea.

It's so whimsical.

It is so whimsical, except the

composing on this chorale that they have is so genuinely melancholy and sad that it does produce this bizarre aspect, right?

Where it's like, look at all these freaks going up in the sky in their hot air balloon as like a genuinely unsettling, sad piece of music voice.

And then we get a little montage.

It's fitting.

This is the dirge.

The dirge from the dark side is what it's called.

The dirge from the dark side.

It's really good.

This might be my favorite Phantom Troop cue so far.

As Hisoka sitting at a window, you know, draws cards from his pack, draws a Joker, looks around at the other members of the Phantom Troop, sort of, you know, getting themselves ready, and then looks over at Krolo, who is reading his book and looks up.

And they're staring at Crollo, like, for a while.

We get this just hyper close-up on each of their eyes as they look at each other.

Does Krolo look up?

I feel like it took a while for Krolo to look up and that I might have even missed it.

Yeah, I can't tell if we get just the close-up on Krolo's eye as he's reading or because the memories

are just reading.

Yeah, which I think it's important to like, I think the fact that Krolo is not paying attention to Hisuka while Hisuka is like staring very intently at him

is just like a worthwhile thing to mention.

Also, like, I know that, I know there's some shippers out there who are like, yeah, that was something, huh?

And I just need to throw them a bone.

But I also, Hisuka has always dominated the room whenever he's been here before, right?

And I think it's like interesting when someone is barely paying attention to him, even though we know the threat that he's a whole

room full of people who are like

on Crolo, don't care about Hisuka.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It flattens Hisuka in a or rather.

So we get these close-ups of their eyes.

Krillo's eyes, he's looking at the book he's reading.

And it's just this very, you know, it's the eyes that we've seen before.

Very placid, very

not quite unfocused.

Very focused, but very

plain.

You know, straightforward, emotionless, relaxed.

And then Hisaka's eye and the animation on his eye is so good as, you know, he sort of squints and his pupil moves.

And it's just that sort of like bubbling,

inchoert

malice and potency of Hisuka.

And usually when we've seen that in the past, it has sort of presented itself as frightening or as dangerous.

But here, in this room full of Phantom Troop members who are, yeah, like he said, either focused on Krolo or just focused on doing their own thing, it kind of makes Hisaka look like the little dog in the corner of the room in the cage, who is just barking a lot.

And all the other dogs are just like, I don't know.

Paying this any attention whatsoever.

Which is really interesting.

Seeing that exact move of like watching the bubbling pot of Hisaka's rage and malice boiling over, and then suddenly seeing it in a room full of very professional chefs who are like, I don't know, it's okay.

It's not a problem.

It's fine.

Don't worry about him.

He does that sometimes.

It does,

you know,

I guess there's two directions to come from where it's sort of like,

you know, spending 40 episodes where Hisuka's this monster.

And then it's like, oh, now there's a room of monsters.

And they're not even impressed by the monster that we've been scared of this whole time.

And then the flip side of it is it sort of

sort of levels out like a really unbalanced scale where it's like, okay, Hisuka's the strongest

horrible creature and is so scary.

And then it's like, okay, there's like a world of these people.

There's, we've only seen villains in that world so far.

We've only seen like Ilumi and Hisuka and the Phantom Troop.

You know, but it is not, you know, Hisuka's not,

you know, maybe Netaro, who knows?

Yeah.

But Hisuka's not like

an an

alone, tremendous force in the world anymore,

which is,

you know, it changes the balance and the scales a little bit, I think.

On a rooftop overlooking the Southern Bees auction house run by stupid mafiosos,

Karapika confides in Melody after she asks about kind of the heartbeat that she heard.

You know, she describes hearing Karapika's heartbeat, a melody of wrath.

wrath why did i say it so weirdly a melody of how do you say that word wrath wrath wrath

um and then also a melody wrath i get it wroth uh and then a melody of boundless fury uh and sort of you know is like what what's that about you can confide in me um and karapika opens up you know says that um adds a new wrinkle to it.

He says that he is going to return the eyes of his fallen brethren to them, which this is the first time we've heard about this angle, right?

It's previously been a revenge quest, but it also seems to be about, you know, like laying these people to rest properly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's always felt like an unspoken thing there, and like,

I think having that, like, laid out at the like

more of a dimension to Kurapika's revenge, even though, like, it's already like he's mentioned wanting to get the eyes, but he hasn't said, like, what.

Oh, I have been assuming, based on what he had said, that finding the eyes will bring him closer to the kinds of people who would hunt Kurta eyes, which is true.

Yeah, I think that I think he said both of those things.

And then we get our first great sort of

zigzag of these two episodes.

Hunter Hunter is very good at every so often just throwing something into it that makes me stop, and I have to imagine

made you stop the first time you heard this.

As we learn about Melody's uh history

yeah

remember when you mentioned melody's beautiful flute part keith yep yep

melody is maybe wrote that flute part oh i don't know melody is seeking a certain piece of sheep music called the sonata of darkness

she's a music hunter Yeah, I was like, of course, she's a music hunter.

We know that hunters seek treasure.

We have been bombarded with so many striking treasures over the last few episodes: the mummy of Princess Corco, or whatever her name is.

The

cutter eyes, you know,

another hand of an Egyptian mummy.

The jellied infant skulls.

The jellied infant skulls.

Yeah, the lock of a singer's hair.

So when Melody said she was searching for a piece of sheet music called the Sonata of Darkness, I was like, okay, yep, she's a music hunter.

Sounds good.

However, as the art style changes to horrific, abstracted fire with the hint, the hint of figures visible in it,

we learn that this is a sonata said to be composed by the devil himself, containing solo parts for the piano, violin, flute, or harp, and hearing or playing the music will give you a horrible curse.

How do we how do we want to because the the word that I'm drawn to immediately here is the devil himself.

Yeah.

Yep.

Let's get into it, huh?

So, the devil's real?

I can't tell whether

Tagashi.

So, I have two thoughts here.

I can't tell whether or not Tagashi is

making

meaningful statements about the nature of his world, or whether he is engaging in something that we know he loves to do, which is a kind of collage of real-world

things to produce a kind of effect.

You know, we've seen this in Yorknew.

We've seen this in Egypt, Persia, the place that they talked about earlier.

Oh my God.

We've seen this in.

Sorry, I'm looking at

the

hunter.fandom.com wiki page for Sonata of Darkness, and there's something very interesting about the way it's depicted in the 1999

anime.

I'm going to share it.

Okay.

Fascinating.

The other thing, you know, I think that that second argument, you know, he's just doing a collage that he likes to do, is all very well when you're talking about York New City or Southern Bees.

But I think when you say something as specific as this sonata was composed by the devil himself,

and then as we get into some interesting

just compare, that's the one, that is the one that we see in the show.

The one that in the night in the 1999 anime

is that it's Crullo.

Yeah, that is fucking fucking Cruelo.

Wow.

Oh, that is Crullo.

Okay, so Keith has posted.

So

the vision that we see

when Melody describes the devil writing the sonata is in.

So in the 2011, we see this.

Both of these images are in a sort of

abstracted the thing that it really reminded me of was like the art of Francis Bacon.

You know, semi-abstract, very unsettling, smeared colours.

Here we can see the devil or a horned figure holding a quill next to some skulls writing a piece of music.

And this is also how it appears in the manga panel.

Actually, it's almost exact that they've carried this manga panel over.

It's this horrible, scribbly drawing of, yeah, a Christian devil

grinning and writing a piece of sheet music.

Now, the mango version, the like

line work on it really reminds me of like Amano's Final Fantasy Fantasy work.

Oh, yeah,

totally.

It's both.

This is like a bad guy from FF2 or something.

It's both more scratchy and like scribbled and than the 2011 anime, but it is more legible because it's in black and white.

Now the 1991 version is much more

the 99 version is much cooler.

It is again this sort of Francis Bacon, but it's even more explicitly a Francis Bacon thing.

Rather than being an image full of detail and color, it is these two, it's a black screen with two images, one on either side.

On the right-hand side, we can see a loot, a medieval loot, being played by these kind of twisted tentacles rising out of the darkness, a sort of Hieronymus Bosch style thing.

And on the left, we have a distorted figure with a ruined, sort of shattered, snarling face,

holding open a book that is Crollo.

It's got Crollo's black

jacket.

It's got the white ruff that he wears around his head.

He's got blood coming out of his ears, which is incredible.

I think he even has detail on his sleeve that matches the detail on his side.

Yeah.

I love how the collar and the shoulder bit come together to look like he's partially made out of a vulture.

Yeah.

Oh, that's really cool looking.

This is wonderful.

In general, when I've seen stuff from the 1999, I have preferred the way that the 2011 thing looks in terms of the depictions of characters.

But this is unquestionably a better frame here.

Yeah.

I can see why they might not have.

Okay.

Takashi drew the devil.

The 2011 drew the devil.

The 1999 drew Krollo.

And

that is an adaptive move.

I could see why they might go,

we're not going to do that.

You are saying things when you draw that.

Yeah.

It also, to me, it sort of implies that the devil thing is not literal.

I mean, yeah, that was what I actually, thank you.

That jogged my memory.

That was something I was going to bring up when we first got on this is like it is said to be written by the devil, but like it is also like Nen use at such a high level could be what's responsible for this thing instead of it being

the actual devil, right?

Yeah.

I am now playing in my head with a working theory that I've been thinking a lot about since Nen started showing up in a really big way, which is,

and

this is playful thinking.

I don't expect the show to vindicate this.

Nen is the power of angels and demons.

I think Nen is something from a demonic place.

I think Nen, I think that

humans have misunderstood something and they call it Nen.

And they say that it is a power of the human aura.

That is their way of talking about

tapping into a world that is

dangerous and on the other side of some kind of veil.

You know, the thing that the woman made when she said to Karapika, can you see this?

That was a demon.

The ghost writer that Miss Neon uses to tell people's fortunes, that is tapping into a demonic realm.

And so, in this sense, when it's like, oh, this melody was produced by a devil, and you say, well, it could just be Nenus,

that might be the same thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We'll come back to talking about the devil in the next episode.

But Melody reveals.

Frequently, honestly.

Melody reveals that

she pulls up her sleeve and in silhouette reveals that her arm is.

I can't really tell, and it's deliberate that you can't tell.

It's either that her arm is very badly scarred or that it is covered in fur.

But she says that she heard one movement of it played on the flute in solo, and it did this to her.

And

the woman who played it on the flute, God, this is great, creepy description.

She says,

That day we were drunk and giddy.

And I love this feeling of these two people.

You know, one of them plays the flute, and they have found somehow a piece of music that they have heard, a legend, is cursed.

And they say, you know, oh, maybe it is cursed, maybe it's not.

And they, you know, have too much wine or whatever.

And then she says, says, all right, I'm gonna play it.

And she sight reads this piece of music.

And then Melody says, Her whole body turned to this.

And we suddenly cut back into this Francis Bacon style as we see just a room drenched in smeared, abstract, red, gory colors, and a shriveled, blackened sort of husk of a body lying on a bed.

It's fucking great.

This is the

biggest sort of like

Nen reaching into the realm of like cosmic horror, uh, in the way that the show is depicting it.

You know, this is the, this is the classic music that makes you go mad, or like, um,

yeah,

as I understand it, the concept of like the devil in music, you know, the

diminished fifth or something.

You know, there was, there was this chord that was considered to be unholy or a source of the devil in Christian music.

And as I understand it, that is a, is broadly apocryphal and is primarily constructed by like 19th century musicologists wanting to, to, you know, make statements about how ancient music worked.

But nevertheless, people have always been excited about the idea of cursed or demonic music, um, and it showing up in this show in this way is so cool.

And hey, we know that you can imbue Nen into a cassette tape, so why not into

a sheet music?

Yeah, exactly.

It's so creepy.

I love it.

Um,

what is sheet music but the cassettes of the past?

That's what they say.

Um,

the Diabolistin in Musica is the tritone.

Three adjacent whole tones.

Also known as the Devil's Interval, which is great.

She wants to restore her body and believes that she can.

And she also wants to, as part of this, find the score and destroy it.

and has been has has come to this this underground evil auction by saying i was hoping one devil would know another uh which is kind of exactly the same as karapika's reason for coming but for a very different sort of goal you know karapica is there because he saw uh his entire culture destroyed for their eyes melody is here because she and a friend destroyed themselves uh and she is looking to save herself and prevent others prevent this fate from happening to others

I love Melody so much.

Yeah.

We get so much good.

Like, this whole thing, I just was like, oh yeah, this is why this character is like so fondly remembered by me.

Is the like this whole story and the way she carries herself with Karapika after it?

Like just like I think it's like very

I like that

we the way that we got relationships for Gon and Killua outside of the main group with Zushi and Wing.

I like that Karapika gets that with Melody and the other bodyguards, at least while they're around.

You know what I mean?

Like, I think it's, I think it's like a good, like, a, just like, like, characterization 101 is to make sure that your characters don't like, like, interact with more than just the protagonist.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

It also, um, it's a great, she's a great vehicle, like, just practically speaking, for

showing how

Nen

and the abilities are

bigger than how they appear on paper.

Like the ability, like super hearing, hearing heartbeats, like,

sure, you can think of how these applications would work, but then when you mix that into

real life, you get,

you know, their real life, you get someone like Melody who's like, oh, I could hear how people's hearts change

as...

different things are happening and was able to figure out that the the the kurta's eyes were important to karapika without ever having heard him say anything about the eyes.

Just like every time they came up, his heart changed and got like

intense and angry, wrathful, I think is what she says.

But like, that's like a really interesting application

of a power that when you first hear of it, seems like kind of a minor ability.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, not hearing someone's heart once, sure.

Hearing someone's heart, you know, 500 times in a bunch of different contexts, and then being able to piece things together from that is like very cool.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's fantastic.

Yeah.

I love her.

Music hunter.

Real good, like, here are the.

Did we specifically shout out the shot where she pulls her sleeve up and it's like kind of blurry, but you can see the...

Okay, good.

Because like that, that's just good framing.

I love the fact that you don't get a clear image of what it did to her.

That's the end of that episode, is the Sonat of Darkness explanation.

Yeah.

Um, and then we start episode 43, unless there's anything else from 42 that we had a melody note.

Uh, what did I want to a melody note?

Um, oh, I want to say that I was right.

I had two harmony notes.

I think the way that melody, uh, I think, I think last episode I said, I think melody is a, an experience has experienced some great trauma that has transformed her into the way that she is.

Oh,

yeah.

And we're going to, we're going to learn about that.

And then we did.

Very quickly.

Was that your, was that your

prediction from the beginning of the episode that you were talking about?

That's one of them.

Okay.

Ooh, multiple.

So the beginning of the next episode, we actually already covered this.

This is the mafia bidding

at the auction, like the political stuff about the 5% with the...

So we already covered that.

And then

the first thing that happens is okay time to start the auction who's the mc oh it's phaeton and franklin

it i it makes me so happy seeing them come out here in their shitty little fucking

way yeah and also again nobody seems to notice

no well until the bullets until the bullets but like franklin is a is a

uh

conspicuous dude yes yes i think someone interesting.

Yeah, somebody would be like, hey, I don't think the MC was that big.

I guess not.

Jack, go ahead.

I am so impressed by how little the Phantom Troop mess about.

Yeah.

We have seen so many characters in this show screw themselves over.

by showboating,

by pissing about.

You know, the Phantom Troop are wasting absolutely no time.

It is funny what Tagashi decides to spend a lot of time on.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Then four episodes.

Beating these three idiots who hang out at the Heavens Arena.

You know, three episodes.

Thinking about...

the He's a Castro fight, one whole episode about thinking about a fight.

Then that fight takes a whole episode.

The Hunter exam took something episodes.

We got zero minutes of auction.

Yeah.

They

had this auction for like, for two seasons, they've been setting up this auction.

And then the auction is over before it starts.

Franklin, we are not kidding when we say there is no auction.

Franklin and

Feitan show up.

Feitan introduces, you know, says, thanks for coming.

It's time to get this started.

The tips of Phaitan's

fingers fall off, hanging on by chains, revealing that each of his fingers is a machine gun, and he machine guns the entire crowd.

This ability is called dual machine gun ambidextrous automatic weapons.

It is.

To be clear.

Was mine slightly different?

Yeah, mine was slightly different.

My ambidextrous automatic weapons.

Double machine gun.

You might be thinking really good.

Surely you don't mean everybody is killed everybody is killed

everybody is killed

include our three friends uh yep and in fact they're killed extremely unceremoniously yeah um oh tocino to chino tocino yeah uh he he says like what does he say he he he uses his special spell called 11 assistants thankless heroes oh

mine has a a worse name this time thankless heroes 11 black children is what it's called that is that is not as good as terrible um and these are I'm not adding that one to the dog.

I don't have anything.

Which, by the way, I added an ability name section.

I do thankless heroes a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's very funny.

With an exclamation mark at the end.

Yes.

Tachino kind of fucks up by breaking one of Tagashi's great rules in much the same way as IO Interactive, who make Hitman, seem to have made a pact where they have to include an extremely fancy kitchen in every single one of their levels.

Tagashi freaks are not allowed to be introduced without a montage of the freaks' cool individual powers.

So Tachino was fucked by introducing 11 guys who look the same and do the same thing.

Because they all get machine gunned and then he gets shot in the head and dies.

Who goes out next?

Another one of the bodyguards gets taken out?

Well,

they do fit in some like nen chess into the brief window where Tosino is still alive when the bullets start ripping through um his thankless heroes and he goes oh my god these are nen bullets they're going to rip through my thankless heroes and then into my body and then that is exactly what happens you know the normal bullets probably wouldn't have done anything to either of them but uh

this also confirmed our first emitter ability being used right others in wing maybe kind of doing that to the wall um castro used an emitter ability his body double.

That was emitter.

Keith from the future here to tell Keith from the past that Castro is an enhancer who is using manipulation and conjuration, not emission and conjuration.

Oh,

was that an emitter?

I thought that was a

conjuring emitter.

It was both.

That was the problem with it.

It was conjuring and emitting at the same time, like an idiot.

Classic mistake.

Wow.

Uvo's not making that fucking mistake.

Let me tell you that.

It is so funny to me the way this show, and I have to imagine this is just going to keep happening.

This is going to be a hallmark of the show.

Is that's not just regular X.

That's nan X.

Seems like this is going to be the game.

You know,

I'm willing to say right now.

Yeah, go ahead.

There's a point where

we're not in a position to be thinking that anything is anything other than Nen.

And

it moves things along.

Yeah, that's true.

I was going to say, to Jack's point, the next scene is

Ivinklev.

Is that his name?

Oh, yeah.

This is one of the previously unnamed bodyguards.

Yeah.

It's close to that.

I have it in the dock.

I'm just not on the right page.

It is.

I named a one-piece character.

Ivinklov.

Ivl.

Yeah, okay.

So, yeah, then Ivanklov or Ivinklov just gets killed by a vacuum with Nin.

Yeah, he does.

Yeah, he does.

So, Jack, I'm glad that me accidentally spoiling that a vacuum is in this show.

The thing is, you get to close that loop real quick.

It didn't help.

I didn't.

And I think I said that at the time.

It didn't.

Yeah.

I had forgotten.

The vacuum cleaner when it arrives, which is this is the Nen art of Shizuku, is so

bizarre.

Please, it has a name.

This vacuum cleaner is called Blinky.

Uh-huh.

So called because it is like a...

It's one of those vacuum cleaners that is like on a little trundling guy that you drag around.

And the little trundling guy has eyes, and also the top of the vacuum has a mouth and sharp teeth and a tongue.

And she just fucking obliterates people with this little vacuum cleaner.

This is very odd.

And I think that's all I have to say about this.

Yeah, I love how like unsettling the Shizuku attack is.

Like, it's so...

There's something about...

There's some weird difference to me with how the Uvo stuff felt versus seeing someone just like...

The fact that I think it was Beze running away and getting clonked in the back of the head by

Blinky.

Yeah.

That really made me be like, oh, this is kind of horrible.

Yeah.

Up to that point, we'd only seen Shizuku.

Like, we haven't seen her be violent at all.

And in fact, kind of like, like, oh,

oh, beans, I lost arm wrestling.

Oh, that doesn't seem like the type of person who is like, no, I'm going to kill you in cold blood as you try to run away.

It's really.

I think it's also so, like,

silly.

There is a very unsettling mismatch between how

ridiculous Blinky is.

It's a vacuum cleaner with eyes, but she uses it not only to kill, you know, a character that we've been set up as not a main character, but like an interesting secondary character.

A named character.

Yeah, totally.

And then she goes into this room that is just full of bodies and this massive pool of blood.

It's a genuine pool of blood.

The whole room is covered in like an inch of blood.

It is the blood of a hundred people.

It's a really good shot.

We get these great panning shots in a lot of Hunter Hunter, usually like wide shots as we move across this wide room, often of like a bunch of weirdos.

But here it's just we pan up through bodies to the phantom troop.

Uh, and then Shizuko's vacuum, Blinky, cleans up all of the mess.

Um,

well, not quite all, because

she says to Blinky, clean up the blood, the corpses, and pick up any valuables, I think, um, that are on the ground.

Yeah.

Um, but that does not, that order does not cover uh people who are still not dead.

And so there is one person who is bleeding out, yeah, um, left in the crowd of of bodies right before this happens i think it's really i think it's really it speaks to the phantom troop i think you know phaeton still sounding bored the the fact that they just killed 100 people is it like

it's not even

it's not even meaningless in like a sort of nihilistic sort of way They just genuinely seem bored,

but they do get a little kick out of Shizuk using the ability.

Phayton says, Her nen ability is always fun to watch.

Yeah, it's creepy.

It's so funny.

Yeah, so this one surviving Mafia member basically says, we're gonna fucking get you.

It's like the classic,

it's very much a dying Mafioso

dialogue, you know, of like, the families are gonna fuck you up, they're gonna torture you, they're gonna cut you into pieces, we will be avenged, or whatever.

And Phaytan

sharpens one of his fingers, fingers, like Killua does, and decapitates him in one blow, saying, Family, what's that?

Which I love

because

Feitan has a family.

They're called the Phantom Troop.

Feitan absolutely has a family.

They're called the Phantom Troop.

This is the most toxic person you know writing about how much they love found family stories.

Yeah.

This is when I say it.

This is what I mean.

It's great.

Brief Feytan note.

um, we've previously seen Feitan depicted in this very distinctive outfit with an extremely high collar that covers his mouth.

Yeah, I had thought that this was because there was something cool or creepy going on with his mouth.

When he is in his auctioneer guys, uh, he's just wearing a suit.

Nope, yeah, he's a normal-looking guy.

He's just the guy, he's just a pale, short guy, just a creepy little like Mongaw.

He does have, he does have like a distinctly creepy kind of look to him.

Here's, here's, here's a screen cap of of

his starting the ceremonies.

This is him skipping the formalities, which is also what you did post earlier.

I posted this earlier.

Look right apart.

I'm skipping the formality sample, blinky.

The vacuum is above it.

I forgot that I posted it already.

It is worth saying

that between the

sharpened fingers, the way that that

death is shot in like a side view, where we have the silhouette of the blood, and then

Phaetan's line, you know,

family, what's that?

This is killer.

To the point where

I my immediate thought was, oh, is Phaetan a

what are they called?

A Zelda

assassin.

Oh, assassin.

Well, a Zelda assassin.

And the jury's still out on that.

I think that that is.

I mean, we know one thing.

He is an assassin.

He is an assassin?

The Phantom Troop are not assassins.

They are thieves.

Please.

Well, they do assassinating.

Sometimes they just kill people while they're stealing things.

You can steal away.

That's, yeah, that's very true.

But I just think

it is not just me, right?

There is something deliberate happening in the use of the move, the way it is shot, and then the

neat summing up of Killiwa's main character sort of motivation

is notable to me.

I,

you know, knowing Phaeton's last name, I don't know if they ever say it.

I don't know.

I don't find it.

Phaitan Paradonite.

Oh, that'd be crazy.

That'd be great.

But no, I like Feytan.

It's fun to have

a little normal weirdo in the Phantom Troop.

Sure.

Because they're all.

There's a lot of normal weirdos in the Phantom Troop.

See, I don't know.

I might not have seen them long enough, but I think even Little Dragon Quest Boy, who would be normal anywhere else, he is creepy because he's in the Phantom Troop.

I think Uvo.

I think he's the most normal one.

Actually, I think that

Shalmark.

Shell Mark is the normalest guy.

But I think that makes him less normal.

Yeah.

This is what I'm saying.

Well, he is very normal to me.

Which one is Finks?

Finx is the race car driver.

Oh, shit.

He's just like the angry guy.

Yeah, Finx is pretty angry.

That's a really funny answer, Keith.

No, that's from.

That's a

callback to last

recording.

Oh, okay.

Yes, we've called him the racing car driver, the race car driver before.

Yeah, I can't remember who originally said race car driver, but I

thought it was Jack.

Okay, I knew that Jack would remember.

Yeah, I still don't know their names yet, but I

threw them.

Depending on the thing, you can look at them.

Oh, yeah, but I, you know, why, why, why should I use the resources that we've made for ourselves in this show?

Um,

no, that's not true.

Uh, so this is great.

This guy's the little killer, and I think they're going to be great friends.

Yeah.

The problem with there being thirty- no, it's an anime.

I was about to say, the problem with there being 13 members of the Phantom Troop is, are all our heroes going to get a chance to meet them?

But it's like, that's kind of the thing.

We're going to play themes and variations on who meets whom.

Sure.

Anyway, the auction's fucked.

There is something really, really cool here about the way that this all gets reduced back down to nothing.

There is something really striking about the show going from the most intense mass violence that we have seen,

and then immediately turning the volume back down to zero.

Once Shizuka is done and the Phantom Troop have escaped, it is as though everybody has disappeared completely.

Yeah, they created a mystery by using Blinky to suck up all of the blood.

Like, they're gone, and we know that something's happened, and they didn't take the bullets out of the walls, or they didn't take the bullet holes anyway.

I guess there wouldn't be bullets because it was Netten, so it's probably just dissipated or something.

Yeah.

But it's like, clearly, clearly something's happened.

Hundreds of people are missing.

And there's bullet holes in the wall.

And then Tagashi performs Tagashi's trick.

This is one of my favorite

instances of the trick, which is now that the mystery of where have all the people gone has been solved, we, the viewer, know exactly how that mystery is solved.

We are introduced to a new mystery.

Except our guide to this mystery is the Phantom Troop.

Because the phantom troop discovers that all of the goods in the vault disappeared before they arrived there.

The mafia on the ground do not know this.

Nope.

Some higher up mafia has ordered this.

And we'll get into what the phantom troop's immediate sort of supposition is here, but I do want to you know, zoom in specifically on the move that Tagashi makes here, because from here on, the Phantom Troop are kind of our POV characters for this episode as they begin to try and solve this mystery.

It is wonderful.

Tagashi has sort of freed us from the uninteresting legwork of watching our heroes try and solve, you know, the mystery that we just saw the Phantom Troop execute, and instead is burdening us with a much more interesting mystery to solve and much more interesting characters to see try and solve it.

There's a kind of readiness to

offer the camera, to hand the camera to his secondary characters and to his villains, and then find interesting questions for them to have to answer.

You know, it's not just a case of, oh, we're cutting to the villains and we're getting to see them do villainy.

We're cutting to the villains because they've got a problem they need to solve, and we are going to be let into the process of them figuring that problem out.

It's so cool.

It is a sort of signature to me of the show how

over the course of it, the net that the camera casts gets just wider and wider and it is like it does sort of feel like um

uh

it does sort of feel like we're breaking some sort of barrier uh and and we'll see this a lot i think going forward of like when the camera is flying away with the phantom troop in the hot air balloon it is like it's like stretching a rubber past its breaking point, and it will no longer return to the small

original size.

It is now forever warped by this.

This is the furthest away that we ever really go for the longest amount of time.

It will stay, it will stay warped like this, I think, forever.

That's so interesting.

It's wonderful because this is an extension of the thing that we saw first when

Tonpa, you know, introduces himself, and then the camera goes wandering off with Tonpa.

Except now it has been introduced to the villains, you know, these boogeymen who were off camera for so long.

We are now sticking around with them as they struggle to resolve a narrative question.

They do such a good job of foregrounding this kind of thing.

If it just happened out of nowhere, if this was like the first time we ever left the protagonist, it would be so weird to all of a sudden be in the Phantom Troop show.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The genocidal maniacs.

It's not even like they're anti-heroes.

No.

Well,

I think

Tagashi,

I think

it's another thing he's trying to stretch is the definition of anti-hero sometimes.

Yes, because as we see them trying to figure this out, the camera is treating them like people who we are invested in beyond.

I feel more comfortable when the Phantom Troop.

This is such a fucked up thing to say.

I feel more comfortable when the Phantom Troop are on screen than when Hisaker is on screen.

Even though he's one of them, kind of.

Well,

it is funny, but like there is this, there is this notion that I think will

continue, it'll increase.

Like, we're getting a lot of personality from the Phantom Troop.

And I think that the show is like, like, what do you think about all their relationships with each other?

Like, what do you think about how they all feel about each other and stuff?

Like, what's going on there?

Don't you care about that?

And it's it's like,

I didn't, it didn't, it didn't occur to me that I would care about that, but

they're the villains.

Yeah.

Okay, yeah, let's see what you got, weirdo.

So, the phantom troop call Carlo, and they say, I think there's a traitor.

Specifically, Uvo thinks that there is a traitor in the troop that has tipped them off.

This is and sorry, this is one of the great functional things of the whole series to me.

Like, they do such a good job of closing off a massive avenue of the, like, because the suspicion could run wild.

They already don't really like Husaka, who genuinely kind of isn't one of them.

You know, if Krolo isn't able to shut this down, it would be a real, or if like Tagashi never thinks to shut this down, it could be a real narrative issue.

And they just go so eloquently, You know, Krullo is able to go, like, no, this is why it doesn't make sense to consider any one of us.

And whether or not he makes a convincing argument, I think he does.

Everyone else is behind him anyway.

So they just forget about it.

Krollo's argument is essentially boils down to: if they knew the Phantom Troop was coming, they would have been prepared for us in a way that they transparently weren't.

And what would any member of the Phantom Troop have to gain from selling out to the stupid Mafia?

And that's a good argument.

You know, you want money?

We have a huge amount of money.

You want

comfort?

We can sort that out for you.

To betray all of us, what would a trader ask from the mafia?

And he gets here with eerily accurate prediction, Jack.

Or rather, in the last episode, we talked about Judas.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

I feel way smarter about this after seeing them explicitly say it.

I should have been more confident last time.

Even at the time, I was thinking, yep, Sylvie's got this.

And I wrote down, this is exactly what we said in the last episode, because, you know, already we're in this biblical space by hearing about the sonata that was written by the devil.

But here we have Crowlo and Uvo talking about Judas, who, you know,

sold

information about Christ, essentially, sold out Christ in exchange for money.

And

Crollo's argument is you know uses the well judas wanted money in exchange so why would you know what what do we have to gain um but i do think it is interesting that the show is dialing straight into this um biblical sort of 12 disciples plus a 13th imagery that we were talking about last time there's this other thing that happens during this conversation which is fascinating because

We know and Krolla makes the case like clearly they knew something, but it wouldn't have come from us or, you know, XYZ, they wouldn't have been unarmed and let us kill hundreds of them.

That's bizarre.

So they must have gotten the information from somewhere.

Meanwhile, we know

who, you know, definitely did warn all of the top rats of the mafia, and it's Neon, Neon's then ability, that they have no idea about.

And I think there's just a direct suggestion from the plot that that it's neon.

And I'm saying this because I genuinely don't remember.

I promise I don't remember.

While this is happening, the camera is laser focused on Hisuka, being like, you know, Krollo's saying, you know, it's on Krollo's face, then it's on Udo's face, and it's on Krollo's face, going like, why would anybody betray us?

And then cut straight to Hisuka, who we know is a, you know, a sh a wolf in a different rival wolf's clothing

yeah it's weird right because i don't think hisuka sold them out in this way for exactly the reasons that krolo

uh uh sort of lays out but do i think that hisuka is looking for his exact right move to betray the phantom troop yeah absolutely that guy's that in fact that guy's biggest weakness right now is that is that he is he is champing at the bit ready to question mark question mark question mark i think he wants to kill krolo or something i it's

the the we have to be in in an episode about Hisaka to properly figure out the murky depths of Hisuka's

motivations.

It's quite tough to do it in another episode.

But this is kind of the longest we've heard Krowlo speak.

And it's really interesting because.

And I say this not as a judgment on Krillo, more just the way the story works.

His character design and his character isn't really coming together for me yet.

I think that's partly deliberate.

I don't really know what this guy's deal is or how I am supposed to think of him.

He is, you know, being set up as this as this terrifying boss of a murderous, lethal, feared organization who mostly sits at a table and reads.

The crew look up to him for some reason that we don't know.

The Phantom Troop is capable of immense violence and ability, but we never see, or we haven't so far seen Krollo do that at all.

His character design is this kind of

hyper-saturated blacks, high contrast

goth vibes,

but his presentation is this.

What?

Is this

hyper-detached,

laconic, almost absent

figure.

There are like a lot of bits of Krolo that are being put onto the table in front of me, and I haven't quite got yet to the point where like I see the broader shape that they are making.

And I'm on this train.

This character is clearly really cool.

He, right, right now,

I am on the Krolo train because he is the boss of the Phantom Troop, and the Phantom Troop are great.

But I'm so curious to see, you know, where this is going to come together, as opposed to someone like Hisaka, who showed up on screen and I knew his deal pretty much from the off.

You will, you will understand Krolo.

Or at least have a vibe in mind when you see Krolo, I think.

When we get through the next

watch through, I feel like there's some Krolo stuff coming up that's going to be big.

I also feel like one of the most interesting things about Krolo is how

slowly he reveals himself through the episodes and how big of a contrast that is with Hisuka, who's happy to

instantly let everyone know what the deal is.

And that's part of the horror of Hisaka, because

you described in the past Goan as being a bit like Kiryu in the Yakuza games, where Kiryu is functionally unstoppable because if someone disagrees with something he says, he just kicks the shit out of them and is like, you know,

you can't beat me either ideologically or physically because all ideological concepts are...

He's not able to be tricked because he can always win the fight.

Yes.

There is something about the way Hisuka presents himself that is very similar.

You know, the depth of Hisaka's grossness and absurdity and power is on the surface of him at all times.

He's just emitting it.

He's not emitting it.

And he's just conjuring it constantly.

It's even sort of, you know, it's reflected even in how he fights, too, when he talks about his punji gum, which has the properties of both rubber and gum.

He says in the

fight with Castro,

or maybe it's right after with Machi, and he's like, My power is, it's so good.

It's such a good power that it doesn't even matter if you know how it works because you still can't defend against it.

Yes, Krillo feels like I

am, I have dropped a coin down a well, and I am waiting to hear the sound that it it makes in order to let me know how deep the well is.

Right.

And right now, I've dropped the coin, and I'm going, well looks pretty deep.

And there's 12 murdering freaks standing near the well, being like, oh, it's deep.

Trump says it's deep.

The thing that makes Crowlero.

I love this well.

I die for this.

I die for this well.

And the thing that makes Crowler so funny is that, you know, we have this blank, implacable well, you know, my shiny quarter disappearing down into its depths.

And yeah, there's all these weirdos saying, I love him, I'd die for him.

And one of them is a mummy, and one of them is dressed like a racing driver.

One of them is your friend Sylvie.

One of them is from Dragon Quest.

Hisucker is there, and

he is just as animated about the rest of the Phantom Troop, but in a kind of different direction.

It's great.

Did we say...

I can't remember if I talked about it in the last episode.

I might have just said this already.

But the vibe that I get with Hisuka and Krolo is: it's like he can't tell if it's like, I want to be with her or I want to be her.

Looking at her.

that is how I interpret

it.

I think that's yeah, that's it.

Yep, great.

Um,

Crowloh's book.

I want to talk about Crowlo's book.

No, it's fine.

Is it the Bible?

We know Crowlo likes

the Bible.

It's just, you know, they're in that ruined church.

They're always playing the like

choral music.

His name's Lucilpha.

It's the same book every time, right?

He is.

Yeah.

It's great.

Is he.

He's reading this same book?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yep.

Okay.

Interesting.

And the book has some writing on the title that if I knew how to read Hunter script, I would be able to read, but I don't.

We learn what the book is.

Yeah, I will.

That's what I figured.

My suspicion is that the book is.

It's probably about an end, isn't it?

Okay.

Well, it's time for the Mafia to respond.

Well, the Mafia are going to respond by calling in

the 10 Dons.

Ring the bell.

Takashi's bringing in a new squad of freaks in silhouettes.

Don't we see them all?

I love the rules of these 10 dons because it's like, okay, there's 10 dons.

They meet

each of the districts of the world.

They've divided the world into 10 mafia zones.

And we see

the world map the first time.

We see the world map.

yeah we see the world map for the first time we'll get to that we'll get to that each of the ten each of the ten mafia zones are ruled by one of the ten dons and each of the ten dons has a special little men guy named a shadow beast

i know

it's like it's like uh uh um oh uh it's the hierarchy of needs except it's freaks like a pyramid of freaks the hierarchy of freaks that's that is also just not the hierarchy of needs for me it's yeah yeah yeah

because you show me some guys like our friend worm and i'm satisfied forever it's it's it is he cannot takashi cannot resist he he he introduces all the hunters there's our first crew he introduces the hunter um

uh people uh the hunter bosses the hunter teachers he introduces um the uh who's uh next freaks all the weirdies that karapaka meets at the manor house yeah yeah then he gets he gets really excited because he wants to unveil his greatest freaks so far the 13 members of the Phantom Troop.

And then, as if he's just like, he sees the applause, it's a drill turning the racism tile.

He sees the applause from the audience at the unveiling of his 13 freaks and gets so excited that he introduces 10 more freaks and then 10 more freaks in a single breath.

When we say he introduces them, I want to be clear that it's not just that he's saying like there's 10 Dons out there.

Both the 10 Dons and their special forces unit, the Shadow Beasts, are shown in silhouette.

There's lots of weird, spiky people.

There's, you know, it's we each of these people has a character design.

And then only seconds after this happens, we get a fucking diglet dig coming right towards us, and then Worm pops out.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Worm is way later.

We got Worm

Shakespeare.

Yeah, we don't want to

say that it's Mafia Slaughter, though.

We do have some more

Mafia Slaughter.

But before we talk, firstly, is

now here's the thing.

I feel like unveiling a little gang of freaks is something I associate really strongly with Sailor Moon.

This is something that happens all the time in Sailor Moon: is that the arcs are generally sort of like one gang of freaks shows up, and then the Sailor Scouts defeat the freaks, and then they're replaced by another gang of freaks.

But I feel like Tagashi is going for this with a particular kind of verve and delight.

Is this a Tagashi hallmark in his other media?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he likes making a Pokedex of weirdies.

So, okay, so um, there's the uh, there's Yu Yu Haka Show is his other major work, um, and we get a, we, we get a steady drip of freaks up until I think the third season is called the dark tournament.

It's the longest season of the show, it is like one of five seasons, but it takes up about a third of the show, maybe a little bit more of the show's total runtime.

It's like 45 episodes or something, and essentially it's it is a tournament arc.

The whole thing is a tournament.

It's 45 straight episodes of tournament.

And every time they, it's a team.

So every time the Yurameshi team,

you know, moves up a rank, we get a whole new team of freaks to fight.

So it's just like, we're just getting every three or four episodes, we're just getting five plus new freaks.

Lovely.

It's great.

Yeah.

Is it a shonen thing as well, but just to a slightly lesser degree?

It's not not.

It's not.

I don't know enough to say that.

But it's not not.

I feel like it's the team of freaks that's the important bit.

Because I feel like Dragon Ball is really fun where it's like, oh, we're introducing a guy that they have to fight.

And he has magic.

He has cool...

What are they?

What is Dragon Ball called Nen?

Spirit powers?

Key.

Key.

Okay.

Yeah.

But there is something about the way that Tagashi opens them up like a little book.

You know?

He opens

his address book to the page, Phantom Troop, and each little slot.

It's really charming.

And with how, like, Nin works in this universe, every new character is like, you know, it's going to be like something new.

It's going to be like, okay, well, I get to learn how they're like a fucking weird freak in both their visual appearance and how they act as a character.

But then I also get to learn about how they're a weird freak with their Nin ability.

Yeah, yeah, 100%.

And not to, you know,

degrade Tagashi's ability here or whatever.

I think

he is clearly demonstrating himself to be a real master of creating freaks.

But if this were my job, I would just love it so much.

You go to work every day.

You get to come up with a new fucked-up guy and the thing he does.

It's lovely.

But wouldn't you, eventually you'd feel the pressure of like, oh my God, I've got a new whole new kind of freak to come up with.

I've already

themes things, Keith.

And why what?

That's why he themes them.

Oh, yeah.

To the Phantom Troop, you know?

And that's why they have sort of spiritual anchors to sort of nurture them, like Krolo.

He's there to sort of like lock all the freaks together and help them achieve their best.

Satan is my drug.

Sure.

Oh, it makes sense.

No, yeah, no, totally.

It makes sense.

Let's talk about the map of the world.

Because as the Mafia Dons are revealed, or we get a shot of the map of the world.

Now, a couple of episodes ago, I asked, are we going to see a world map?

And you said, yes, we are.

Do not look it up.

And I was not expecting it to be so soon.

You know, that we see a map of the world.

I still don't look it up.

Yes.

I still will not look it up.

But

let's just say this outright.

The map is Earth, except all the continents have been jumbled around.

Yes.

And angled in towards the center.

Well, almost all of them.

Angled in.

Really quick before we get into this,

I found a map a map that has locations marked on it.

We'll not be linking that.

I did take that and put some places that we've already been to.

Oh, okay.

Put it on.

Oh, silver.

Do you guys want to see that?

Yeah, absolutely.

This is great.

Okay, cool.

This would be great.

It's very simple.

I literally made this in paint.

So, like, don't be too impressed.

But the red ones on this is Kukaroo Mountain, which is

on the literally just Africa is the continent.

It's just, yeah, Cookaroo Mountain is in North,

not by Hunter-Hunter map, by our map.

I'm like arranging the world.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kukaroo Mountain is

Northeast Africa.

Yeah.

It's in Northeast Africa.

It's also in Northeast Hunter.

It's in Northwest Hunter World.

Oh, sorry, Northwest, right?

Yeah.

And then that's near that is Heavens Arena, which is on the sort of like southern diagonal tip of that continent.

Yep, South Central Africa.

the hunter selection hotel is where the hunter selection tournament took place i wanted to double check that i was really like hold on is this about something further no that is where gone got uh almost murdered by hanzo right um that's on i think that's

is that south america yeah that is hard to take down

yeah yeah and then uh zabon city uh is by the like sort of bottom of that continent in the hunter-hunter world in our world is at the top

yes

somewhere you're getting into central america yeah this next one's up this one sucks

what uh york new city yeah york new city is in

i'm gonna have to turn this up no keith that's

that's europe isn't it no i thought that was canada no that feel like america yeah those are some great lakes right there that are really great going into the ocean yeah that's yeah so that's like york new city confirmed Toronto.

Yeah, okay,

Toronto, I guess.

Now,

what in our world is the bottom of North America and what is the east of this continent definitely do not look the same?

Yeah, yeah.

So this continent where York New City, it looks like

part of

America, like half of America and most of Canada.

And also the edges are kind of weird.

Do you want me to tell you

the names of these continents?

Especially like the Nordic countries and islands.

I have the names of some countries, but I don't know if they come up.

I know some that do come up later that I won't be sharing.

Okay, give us some that don't come up.

I can at least tell you that York New City is in Yorbia.

Is that the country or the continent?

That is, I think that's the country because this is partially

it's like half of that continent basically.

Oh, it's like a mafia district.

It's like the top

corner.

So, because this screenshot I took was kind of dark,

let me pull up the 10 Dons map because that I might at least be able to be like

it's this color on that.

Listener, I'm aware that this is a podcast, and what we're doing here is probably very different.

Describing J-Player.

It's okay.

This will be in the description.

This will be in the description.

Okay.

I really recommend looking at an image, and a lot of this will make sense.

If you're worried about spoilers, look at the one in the description because that will be this exact thing, and we won't find spoilers um

honestly i'll say this too if you the hunt if you go to the hunterpedia i felt brown like and you and you look at their world of hunter hunter that map that they have there is the same map here just don't scroll

or read anything else yeah well no that map has the the tags that i referenced to make this oh also your that's why is the name of the continent by the way okay it is okay cool that's why i made this because i was like I want to be able to talk about this

amount we've traveled without spoiling things for Jack.

I think Europe is the very northeast where you can see Ireland in the UK.

You can see the UK.

You can see Scandinavia.

And then Europe.

You can see the Iberian Peninsula.

If you are listening along and not looking at the image, the kind of notable thing is that

two notable things.

Our characters haven't gone onto the eastern side of the map at all

yet.

And also in the north, in the middle of the map.

So, you know, we have these kind of these continents that have been, these Earth continents that have been separated and kind of turned inwards.

And then this big ocean in the middle.

And at the bottom is Australia and Japan

and New Zealand.

And in the top is an island that...

does not appear on Earth's map.

It is...

That's not Japan down there.

Japan's over by Zaban City, actually.

It's that little island off the coast there.

Yeah.

What?

Because that one's literally called

Japan.

They just changed.

They added a P and changed the second A to an O.

Why is Japan there?

Okay.

Why is any of these?

Yeah, a lot of the islands are chopped and screwed.

It seems like.

At the top of the map is an island that looks like a

sort of an N

with a circular island in the middle of it.

It's like a barrier reef around an island.

I'm just going to make a prediction now.

That's where Jing is.

Maybe not when we eventually find him, but in that shot of him on

the Tita Tota Tower of Monsters,

that was there.

That's my guess.

This map is great.

I don't know, like I said, about the devil, whether this is just Togashi's collage or whether he is trying to say something specific.

You know, and the thing that he's trying to say is the world of Hunter Hunter is the world of Earth that has been changed dramatically in some way.

Much like, you know, is this a

what's the series that Shadow of the Torture is part of?

Uh, oh, uh, a book of the new sun.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, um, no, that's why I wanted to talk about this, was because of the, like, there are things that you could imply from the shape of the continents here about this being either an alternate timeline or a far future or whatever version of our Earth.

Or it could be

playful Tagashi doing the same thing, you know, doing the same thing as York New City.

But do we get York New City because it's Earth that has been chopped and screwed?

I don't know, and I'm not sure how much stuff

I can draw.

from this meaningfully with this amount of information right now in terms of it's fun it's just fun it is just fun it is consistent with the way that this show thinks about

the world, right?

The world as a place of mystery and danger and playful exploration.

And Wikipedia and weird cell phones.

There is something to be said for the fact that the world that it takes place in is a version of Earth that has been mangled

to create this kind of bizarre, dangerous playground.

But beyond that, I think it is fun to notice.

It was great to see the map and pause it and go.

Oh.

Oh, I want to ask you all a question of something I just noticed on the map that Sylvie posted that has like the Dons.

Oh, yes.

I can't tell if the little island that looks like an inn with a dot in the middle of it, I can't tell if it is purple colored, like the bottom half of what is Hunter, Hunter World Africa, or if it is uncolored and therefore it is like non-mafia territory.

I think it's it looks great out to me.

Yeah, that's because Jay looks good.

I would say that it looks terrible to me, like the uh, like the

bird part.

I could go both ways, yeah.

Like where uh, geez, what is it?

Uh, Heaven's Arena is,

yeah, oh,

interesting, yeah.

So, I think that I think that that is the same territory, but I don't know.

I love to see this map, and I'm excited to see more about to see more about

why it looks like this that green and yellow it must be the bottom half of america and central america

hmm

you can see florida

oh yeah that's what i think that's what this is all stupid doesn't doesn't matter

it's fun it's fun let's get back to it yeah we heard someone talk about um

the globe in one of these episodes and after having had map uh map excitement, I was like, oh, that's interesting.

This, this, you know, this, this is a round world, not a flat world.

Uh,

although whether that was just a figure of speech and we are going to discover that it's a flat world, I don't know.

Who knows?

Um, who knows?

Who knows?

Who knows?

Hey, generally, Jack, I don't know.

Great.

I know a little something about it.

It was very fun when we decided that

Hiron was flat.

That was fun.

That was fun.

Yeah.

I forgot we did that.

Yeah.

It's good to decide that a world is flat and it not be consequential or rooted in a bunch of gross stuff.

Okay.

The Phantom Troop have learned that

one of the shadow beasts, a man called the Owl,

who has grey skin, wears sunglasses and a shirt, came to check out the vault before the auction.

He wore a tax.

How did you find this out, by the way?

Oh, they tortured a man to death.

I have the line about this.

This is one of my favorite lines in

these episodes.

So they're talking to Krolo.

Uvo tells Krolo, Phaeton tortured him.

So we know he wasn't lying when he said that he didn't know where Owl went.

And then it cuts the close-up on Phaeton, who says, he had the worst luck of anyone today.

Terrifying.

Great.

Horrible.

Absolute horrible monsters.

Yeah, so the owl goes in, or owl goes in, and the vault is full, and then he leaves with nothing in his pockets, and the vault is completely empty.

And Krolo surmises that he probably has a similar nen power to

Shizuku, right?

Shizuku.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is smart thinking.

And it's very interesting that the way the world works is such that it's like Krollo's response isn't so much,

how could this mystery have happened?

And instead, it's like, oh, okay, a particular kind of nen user.

We'll have to get to the bottom of that.

I also think it's funny, they show you Shizuku and her insane vacuum that vacuums up everything in a room when you tell it to.

And then, like, to us, it's crazy talk.

And then you tell it to them, and they're like, oh, probably something like Shizuku, normal stuff.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Normal, probably you suck up vacuum kind of power.

If 13, if number 13 is the weirdest, most fucked up up power in the Phantom Troop, and number 1 is the most normal, sensible power in the Phantom Troop,

my guess is that Uvo is probably one.

How accurate would you say that is?

Wait, sorry, where one is the most normal and 13 is the most fucked up?

I think that's accurate.

Okay, what is Shizuku?

Like, what number?

Yeah.

I think that it's very similar to her actual number.

Which is 12?

What is the number?

I think her number is 8.

No.

8!

4?

It's either 8 or 4, right?

It has to be.

Hold on.

No, isn't 4,

Hisuka?

It's 8.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think that she's probably right in the middle.

I think she's something like 6, probably, right?

She's on the lower end of fucked up nun powers.

She's definitely in the first half, I think.

There's some interesting nun powers.

Yeah.

Wow.

Hisuka is probably we've seen he could Hisaka do some pretty cool stuff.

He's probably

But it's it's a it's a relative scale, you know in a room full of absolute weird bananas guys Hisaka would rank pretty low

Maybe well, it's got rubber and gum it does have rubber and gum.

I'm gonna say Hisuka is a

five because his power is objectively less weird than woman who has a vacuum cleaner.

Okay, here's a here's a question.

So, we also know Machi's power.

Sort of.

Machi is a doctor who

stitches people back together.

Right.

We know about her net stitches.

So

that's a really impressive power that's like really cool and like difficult, like

physically, biologically complicated.

The fact that she can take a severed arm and instantly repair it with essentially no

evidence of harm done to that arm within minutes.

That's great, but we're not ranking for power.

We're not ranking for power.

We're ranking for absurdity.

Right?

Yes.

Yes.

Okay.

I'm going to count out loud.

We have pictures of all of them.

I'm going to count out loud, not tell you names, and I'm going to go in an order that you will not be able to predict.

So I'm going to count out loud who I think has a weirder power than Shizuku.

One,

two,

three,

four,

five, maybe six.

Great, great.

So excited.

Because we now move into just a banger piece of exciting television as everybody goes on a car chase following the Phantom Troop's balloon.

The Phantom Troop resolves that they are going to turn and fight with no sort of sense of loss or danger here.

They're not turning and fighting because they feel they've been backed into a corner.

Quite the contrary, they're turning and fighting fighting to make a mess and get people off their trail so they can get back to more important stuff, figuring out where all their treasure has gone.

So they land the balloon, and we get a mafia standoff in the desert in the dark.

It's great.

This is why people invented storytelling to do stuff like this.

There's two parts of this that I just love.

The first thing is Uvo immediately being like, I've got this.

Like, I'm going to do it.

I'm going to beat them all up.

Yes, yes, that's his plan.

He really is just like, leave it to me, boys.

And then everyone else is like, okay,

we're going to play cards.

Yeah.

It's so funny.

Shallnark?

Shalmark?

Yeah, Shalnark is like, oh, this is dull.

Looking down as Uvo.

Let's not beat about the bush.

Uvo starts slaughtering the mafia members.

Cars keep showing up full of mafia members.

Catches Uvo.

Catches a bullet in his teeth.

He's great.

I've written down, what's his nan power i bet turn into a bear no he's a bear

kills uh i don't think a bear could catch a bullet in his teeth no no no

maybe he then breaks the man's neck who shot him with one swipe and the camera turned sideways for a pmb shot from this man it's it's great it's my favorite shot in the episode i think it's such a good little like oh he just knocked this dude's head sideways and he's still alive long enough to look at him from that perspective there's this there's this thing that happens where it's like, and it's something that I always have to remind myself of when we're watching, or just not have to, but it's something that I always end up remembering when I'm like, why is this happening?

Uh, that Nen is secret.

Some of these people know about Nen because the mafia knows about Nen, but these are all grunts.

Like, they don't understand

how this guy isn't just a normal guy.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yes.

And so it isn't until something very specific happens that they're like, oh, I'm officially too terrified to fight.

Like, until this thing happens, everyone's like, well, eventually one of these bullets is going to work, right?

It doesn't.

Well, eventually my Super Bazooka will take care of this, you know?

And this Super Bazooka is when people start to go,

ah, I'm scared of running for my life.

A bazooka Super Bazooka didn't even do it.

Before this, two great things happened.

Nobunaga, so yes, Shanak says, let's just play cards, and they sit down, and I had thought they were going to do like a betting game of like, who's, is he going to do it?

No, they're just playing,

yeah, they're playing GoFish or something.

Um,

Nobunaga says, his philosophy, talking about Uvo, his philosophy is simple.

Be stronger than anyone or anything.

And boy, is he demonstrating it.

From a mountain on the other side of the valley, a mafia sniper lines up a shot.

The shot hits Uvo, and he kind of shrugs it off, and then he picks up a pebble and throws it like a mile across the valley to kill this sniper.

And he loved doing that, too.

Can I say, and especially in the shot where he's picking up the pebble and throwing it, Uvo looks so much like a Saiyan?

Oh, yeah.

He does look a lot like he is like Nappa, yeah.

Very styled.

Like, um, I was thinking like Super Saiyan 4 with the head with

the

size of him looks like Nappa.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

But I just thought, I don't know.

It stood out to me probably because we watched Dragon Ball recently.

Power scaling has come up as a term that hasn't been.

We haven't been able to do it because Jack has only seen one thing.

But I'm going to do some pointless and stupid power scaling now, or I'm going to make a power scaling statement, which is that

I think Master Roshi could beat Uvo in a fight.

I think that pretty handily also.

I think that Master Roshi is much, much, much stronger than Uvo game.

I'd love to see that.

Have we met anybody in Hunter Hunter who you think could beat Uvo in a fight, excluding his beloved boss, the man he'd die for?

Um, so this is the interesting thing about Hunter Hunter, and what makes it a really fun show, is that people's powers make it so that whatever their ability is, like, they can overcome not being physically strong by having an ability that they use well.

And so, I'm going to say yes, but not because they're

not necessarily because they're literally stronger.

Right.

Fair enough.

Yeah.

Something I really.

I think maybe a couple in there, though.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I'm thinking.

What if Wing fought Uvo?

You think that would go well for Wing or you think Wing is?

Wing's an enhancer.

That's what I'm saying.

Something that I've just noticed is Karapika is the first of the crew who we have sort of seen have like a Nen power in the way we understand nen right karapika does his chain bastard maneuvers uh whereas gone and killiwa sort of just dash about

let's go

gone and killua sort of dash about right we haven't seen them do there's gone's push and killua's yeah

they haven't like developed an ability but karapaka absolutely has and that's very karapaka he's he's done the homework yeah he's you know

um it makes sense for gone because like part of being an enhancer is like

focusing your Nen into a strong punch.

Yes.

And a lot of enhancers can get by on just being a strong puncher.

Do you think you could beat Uvo?

No.

Me?

No.

Guy like me?

Probably.

I would be stomped like a tiny ant beneath his massive boot.

I'd appeal to his bets in nature.

Oh, okay.

Sure.

Crack open a couple Brewskis.

Crack open a couple Brewskies for the Uvo.

I think

if you're saying if I crossed paths with Uvo, could I avoid being killed?

Then I think the answer is yes, because I have nothing that he wants and I would not oppose him.

He is a murderer, though.

He might just take you out.

I don't know.

But he doesn't seem like he would, though.

Listen, do you think you could beat

Uvo?

If the answer is

rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts, so let let us know.

The answer you know still rate us five stars.

Tell us how exactly Uvo would kill you.

I would use my Nen ability, Ultimate Nap Time,

Goodnight Moon, and he wouldn't kill him.

He'd go right Betty by.

Oh,

this is an ability where someone else falls asleep.

This is an ability where you fall asleep in the middle of the fight.

No, no, no, no.

It puts people together.

It's all false.

I would use my Nen ability, make another cup of coffee, even though I haven't finished the first, and then he'd kill me.

Well, but wait, it's such a good cup of coffee.

I know, I know.

Oh, such a shame.

At this point, Karapika, stating the obvious, says, it appears the enemy can use Nen.

This is notable because he can't tell this is the troop.

That's really interesting.

At the very end of this episode, it says that he hasn't realized that it's the Phantom Troop, which I think is an uncharacteristic oversight.

It really is.

What does Karapika know about the Phantom Troop based on his conversation with Magitani?

They don't count kills because they have so many.

This makes Magitani look even funnier.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

The.

Magitani's trick requires you to be in the very narrow scope of people who know about the Phantom Troop, but don't know anything about the Phantom Troop, including how strong they might be.

Yes.

Yeah.

So Krapika doesn't, Krapaka doesn't know.

But at this point, Melody hears another heartbeat.

Oh, and we have been told that the shadow beasts are coming.

They have been dispatched, so it's not exactly a surprise when they arrive.

But they turn and see the best freak in a while.

And that's saying something.

He's the freakiest freak, that's for sure.

I called him this earlier, but he does have a poop head.

Like, straight up.

He just comes out of the ground.

And he's a little turd.

He's a weird little turd.

He is called

Worm

Worm.

His name is Worm.

He is like, What if

he is like, what if a Worm?

Yeah.

He pops up and he just talks.

I don't know what this guy's deal is.

I don't know if he's like a demon.

I don't know if he is a human who has made himself look like this through Nen.

I don't know if he is a human who has experienced some sort of massive bodily trauma like Melody has.

But he digs under the ground.

And then out of the shadows.

Hey, maybe we'll have time to learn.

Maybe we will.

Togashi, just Tagashi,

excited by the wild audience reaction to Worm, gets overexcited and promptly introduces Rabid Dog, a shadow beast who looks like a human with sharp teeth and spiky hair.

Leech,

a sort of short, weird shadow beast.

He just looks like a kind of creepy guy.

He just looks like a guy.

We'll figure out a little bit more about Leech.

And then Porcupine,

who

looks like a guy with a single weird eyebrow in the middle of his face.

They all introduce themselves.

Yeah, it kind of is Krillin, that little Mafia baby.

The English dub sounds like Krillin, too.

I don't know.

He's kind of a little apologetic.

He's sort of like, hi,

hi.

I'm Porcupine.

You guys can call me Porcupine.

And they get ready to fight.

Karapika is kind of excited to see them fight.

He has one of those sort of little sort of expressions as they begin to head down.

And the episode ends as everybody moves in to attack.

I will say there's a couple of interesting things that happened here as this episode ended.

The first is that I know based on the way we've talked about it, that the episodes that are coming up are real doozies.

And I am so interested to see in what way they are real doozies, if they are opening with this kind of assault by this kind of like two-pronged assault by the phantom troop versus the shadow beasts in the desert.

I mean, that alone would be fun to see, but I'm curious to see what makes these next few episodes so well liked.

The other thing is that we've talked a lot in the past about how

I have not even begun to meet the full quota of Hunter Hunter's weirdies.

You know, I'm still so early in the amount of weirdies.

And when we talked about that, I was like, how can there be more?

You

how can there be more characters?

And I think with the rapid introduction of the shadow beasts, something I had never heard about prior to this episode, I'm beginning to see the way Tagashi will introduce his freaks, which is that they'll just run up against a new gang every so often,

which is great.

I'm seeing the

deep water of

weirdos ahead of me.

Yeah, we can be firmly...

We can be firmly.

uh,

shit, what is the, what is the, uh,

the word for,

wow, I can't believe I'm blanking on this word.

The, the word for, like, plot details and stuff when

someone will, you know, do this at the beginning of a story to, like, like, hey, you get fired from your job.

And it's like, okay, this is a character who might have gotten fired from his job.

Is it foreshadowing?

No, no, I'll be using an E, I think.

No.

Exposition.

There we go.

Yep.

Exposition.

Okay.

I feel smart right now.

Like, we can be fully expositioned into a season.

Like, okay, I know all the beasts.

We've got the Phantom Troop.

We've got Cropic Undercover.

We've got the video game stuff.

Like, we're going to do this.

And then all of a sudden, you know.

80% of the way through the episode.

It's like, by the way, have you heard of the 10 shadow beasts?

And then one minute later, it's like, hi, it's us, the 10 shadow beasts.

We've showed up.

Yeah, and I think part of the reason that it's funny, although maybe

Tagashi will, I need to call Tagashi Karapika, which is very funny.

I think Tagashi is wise, but Tagashi is Karapaka's wisdom with Hisoka's delight in freaks.

I think that it is especially funny that he introduces them in groups of 8 to 15.

If he shows up and he's like,

the 41 men, each of whom are named after an element on the periodic table, it loses a bit of

its joy.

This whole show starts off with an introduction of 400 freaks.

Yeah, that's true.

400 numbered freaks.

400 numbered freaks.

Yeah.

It's great.

What a delight.

I think the last thing we need to talk about is the hunterpedias.

I'm going to blitz through the first one really quickly because the first hunterpedia features.

Is there something notable about the second hunterpedia?

Yes, it's very sweet.

The first hunterpedia is just them introducing Basho, and God says, I'm going to write a haiku, and then writes, by any metric, the worst haiku you have ever read.

Whether or not you are...

Too many syllables.

It's not just that it's too many syllables, it's that

it has none of the sort of like

forms and conventions of the haiku whatsoever.

It doesn't introduce an idea, introduce a reflecting idea, and then, you know, tying them together in a way that complements them.

I don't remember exactly what he writes, but he just botches it completely and Killoa looks over at him and is like, no.

It's great.

All right, let's talk about the second one.

What is the second Hunterpedia?

The Second Hunterpedia is Beze.

They explain her ability instant lover, where she pretends...

The way they explain it is

Gon says, she pretends to like you and then kisses you and then is uninterested, I think is the exact wording.

Yeah, it's a real lover.

I don't know if you do anything to listen to her.

Yeah, yeah.

What's important about this is that Killowa kisses Gone, and Gon gets big hard eyes and tries to kiss him again, but Killowa doesn't let him.

And by the way, no one who likes Hunter Hunter will care about this.

No one who likes Hunter Hunter has ever talked about this, will ever care about this.

Is it true?

People talk about this a lot, right?

This moment as like a...

This is Gone and Kiloa kissing?

Gon and Kiloa are,

to many people, boyfriends.

A thing that I think I've brought up before on this show.

Okay.

Very early.

Yeah.

And I'll be honest, was a little admonished for it.

And so I feel a little justified.

Okay.

So we get a little out-of-character moment where it's like, yeah, no, Kilo a kiss is gone.

Even if it's just in the Hunterpedia.

And he gets the little hot eyes.

It's so sweet.

Yeah.

I think I am, you know.

I think God and Kilo might be boyfriends.

I...

This might be a story about boyfriends, but I think at the same time,

it's not a story about boyfriends, but it's also not a story about boyfriends.

Yeah, exactly.

And sometimes you kiss your bestie.

This is

your homies on the list.

This is another way I read the scene, right?

It's like the Hunterpedia version is that these papercraft characters that like

play out the emotions and

feelings of the characters of this really, they have like, they have like two lines before they, they have to get out their feelings as quickly as possible before the episode ends or whatever.

And this really felt like sometimes you tuck in the homies at night and give your besties a little little kiss

to me, which I thought was really, really sweet.

Yeah.

It's very cute.

Which I say that not to, you know, be like, and you couldn't possibly read it as boyfriends or whatever.

But there is something kind of joyful to me about these two guys being like, woohoo, this is how they kiss.

Well, we'll see if that develops.

It may or may not.

God, is this show gay?

I mean, the show is gay.

This show is extremely gay.

But

I'll say what I believe, which is that this show is about one boyfriend and one not-boyfriend.

You know?

That's really interesting.

Keith, we're going to have this conversation again in like 50 episodes.

A boyfriend can be one guy.

Usually it is.

No, I mean, a boyfriend can be a single entity.

You don't need reciprocal boyfriends.

Right.

Sometimes the world falls out in that way.

And, you know, who's who?

Nobody knows.

I know.

I was thinking about this.

You can just Google anything about Hunter Hunter you want at any time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You can't, but we, the rest of us can.

Yeah.

You can just be like, I want to see a picture of Tompa.

And if I want to see

if I see a picture of

Tompa, I have to ask you to send me a picture of Tompa.

It's humiliating.

Feel free.

I don't mind.

I'll send you a picture of Tompa.

Oh,

that's what you, what are you doing with this?

Oh, no, no.

Give me a picture of Happy Tompa.

This is Tompa after he's been all beaten up.

Hold up.

There's a Happy Tompa.

Oh, who's a Happy Tompa?

Yeah, there he is.

Two Happy Tompas.

But I loved this final Hunterpedia.

It was great.

It was also, it's so funny the way that the Hunterpedia plays with the visual conventions of the show.

Like,

you know, in the Hunterpedia, there are these little papercraft figures.

So it would make sense that Goan gets hot eyes when he has been kissed by Killier.

Except for the fact that you do actually get hot eyes when you've been kissed by bass.

Yeah.

That's canonical.

Yeah.

Rip to base.

I mean, maybe.

She gets a Hunterpedia after she dies.

Oh, he is super, duper dead.

Yeah, but I just don't care as much.

Yeah, that's true.

His sidebones are pretty cool.

And his 11 Thankless Warriors.

R.I.P.

to the big dog.

R.I.P.

Dog.

Big Dog Torchino.

By the way, you've seen a Thankless Warrior before.

I was just thinking this.

I have seen a Thankless Warrior before.

The Thankless Warriors are these weird hooded figures

that I saw in one of the screenshot streams when they're playing volleyball with a gorilla.

Hmm.

So

that'll be interesting when we get there to talk a little bit more about Thankless Warriors.

But what are we doing next time?

We're in it now.

Next time, we have we have a special guest, Austin Walker's gonna be here,

and we're watching four episodes.

Four,

they're they're wild and crazy.

What are the names of these episodes?

Uh, we've got episode 44, which is Build-Up to a Fierce battle.

Episode 45, restraint and vow.

Episode 46,

chasing and waiting.

Jack, if you have screenshots turned off, this is a fun screenshot, or thumbnail.

Okay.

Actually,

I would say don't look at all of the thumbnails because one of them is a spoiler.

But

I think that there's some weird characters.

There's some fun characterization in episode 46 thumbnail.

and then 47 condition and condition

oh yeah

we're in for it next week i'm so excited for it we're gonna go four episodes

i'm telling you now these are going to be four of the best episodes in a row of the whole thing yeah Up to what we've seen now, this might straight up, I think, be the strongest run of episodes.

We didn't hype it up too much.

What was the last really strong?

The Zoldic family was great.

The Zoldic family was really good.

I liked the end of Heaven's Arena with the Hiseka fight, with Gon and Hiseka fighting specifically.

I thought that was a pretty high point for that arc.

Yeah.

And I think the set of episodes that includes

the final Hunter Exam thing.

That was like another really cool thing.

Oh, the Hunter exam was so much fun.

The Hunter exams had this really nice structure where every couple of episodes we shifted to a new feel.

Yeah.

I like that a lot.

Yeah.

So I'm really excited for these next four.

Uh, it's gonna be a lot, uh, but it's gonna be worth it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Uh, anything else before we close the book on these two episodes?

Uh,

I got nothing.

That was, I'm just, I'm so excited that we're like in the middle of this arc.

I feel like we're like really getting to like

the meat of Hunter-Hunter now.

Uh, yeah, yeah, for sure.

Um, I have a couple of music notes that, uh, that we sort of moved past them and I don't want to stop just for the music.

But I lied.

I actually do have I Ain't Your Grandpa just for just a reminder is

this is the all I need is money

and then the alternate Dr.

Warmhearted Misery the same key as well.

It is.

It's just like slinkier.

The guitar is different and it's got like a short bones and shit.

Yeah.

And much slower.

Yeah.

And then I ain't your grandpa.

This is the deceitful one, but we're looking like Dr.

Wormhearted Miser is, I'm deceiving, and we're in on a little thing together.

But I ain't your grandpa is I'm deceiving and it's embarrassing.

And I'm probably doing it to be horny.

Yeah.

The other thing is, we got two of the best sort of fight songs in Hunter Hunter.

Uh, there's Mano and Mano, which we've heard before, and we talked about because they used it as a really long drum break while we're sort of montaging Goan, sort of uh,

uh, prepping for not watching the Castro fight.

But we got a lot of the like guitar parts here during um

some uh

Phantom Troop stuff.

Great, great stuff.

And then as a drum break, did they just play the isolated drums?

They just played the isolated drums, yeah.

It's so good.

And it's great.

Speaking of drums, there's this amazing song called

Oh, the title's so long.

As for those outlaws,

too long, it's too long.

I can't read it.

Wait, why can't you read it?

Oh, it's scrolling

is too long.

No, it doesn't scroll.

As for those outlaws, Unrivaled Strength.

This is only played a couple of times, but they play it right before

Uvo slaughters all of those mafia guys.

As they're amassing, it plays this.

Great.

New music.

This is.

Yeah.

It's great stuff.

Love that.

All the drum programming is so good.

The drums in the show are fantastic.

They use like bongo drums a lot.

They do.

Big, heavy taiko drums, and then this, you know, really sharp, clipped, percussive bongo drums.

Played so well.

I'm so curious about

how much of this soundtrack was recorded live with an orchestra and how much was virtual instruments.

But it sounds brilliant.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just an unbelievable soundtrack.

The way that it's able to bounce back and forth from like shonen-style fight music with electric guitars and big drums to

like

you know 300 years worth of classical music is like it's very impressive, really, really good.

And it doesn't come across as cheesy, it's like really good,

yeah, unless it wants to come across as cheesy in Walmart or Maza or whatever.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, anything that we want to plug before we bounce?

The next week's episodes, you know,

I haven't said this in a while.

If you're listening to the show, but not watching a lot,

you should watch along.

This shit's really good.

It's really good.

You should watch along.

And

if you haven't taken the opportunity to go to Apple Podcasts and rate the show and review the show, very important, then I would ask you to do that.

And if you want to check out my other show, Run Button, you can go to youtube.com/slash run button and watch the

Sonic Superstars Let's Play that we just did, where we stopped in the middle of it to play Sonic 4 and Sonic Mania because Sonic Superstars is not very good.

Anybody else want to plug anything?

Yeah, you should go to the patreon.com slash friends of the table or friends underscore or friends of the table or friends underscore table patreon friends of the table dot cash.

Uh at the time of recording, um, we are also making a slow knife game, uh, playing a slow knife game with three out of four of the people who are on this podcast right now.

Sorry, Jack, you're we we got art in instead of you, but you know,

oh, uh,

it's coming along very well.

That first episode, I don't know if it's out yet.

It's not out by the time this is out.

By the time this is out, I don't know.

Yeah, I figured.

This will be out in two months.

So that'll definitely be out, I think.

Unless I really fuck up.

Yeah, I'm not gonna really fuck up.

You're doing great.

Nah, it's gonna be fine.

It's it's it's going well.

I'm very excited to get back to it.

Um, yeah, very exciting.

We're doing it tomorrow, right?

Um, yeah, see that.

So I'm worth the price of admission just to listen to that.

I mean, that was a it's gonna be really good.

Uh,

we

could not stop

doing

world building stuff

for the first episode.

It was just non-stop.

It was a blast.

One of my favorite episodes of world building stuff that I've ever done.

So tune in for that for sure.

Friends at the table.cash.

Is that it?

I don't have anything to plug.

That's it for me.

Yeah.

You want to plug in?

Not quite real.bandcamp.com.

Oh, I plugged that at the beginning.

I suppose

the thing that I'm going to choose to plug here is I know that we have some listeners who listen to Media Club Plus but haven't listened to Friends at the Table.

Friends at the Table rules, and we have two really cool places to jump on if you would be interested in jumping on.

We have Partisan,

a story of a burgeoning revolution on a holy moon.

You can jump into it without having listened to any of our previous shows.

You get to meet all sorts of cool characters: a war criminal, a super soldier, a pirate, an ancient sort of advisor priest, the worst teenage girl in the universe, the works.

You can also listen to Sang Fial, which is a horror season that we have made set in a kind of ruined

Dust Bowl called Sang Fial.

It used to be a series of vineyards and greenery, but something very wrong happened there and it all sort of fell apart

in a great panic.

Both of these shows are great to jump into if you've never listened to Friends of the Table Before, if you have been interested in jumping in.

They are full full of cool music, cool discoveries, weird surprises, tangents about animals.

It's a really, really great show.

And if you have been looking for the moment to join us, now is the day.