The Chain Bastard - Hunter x Hunter ep. 39-41: Media Club Plus S01E13

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

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

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

My name is Keith Carberry.

You can find me on Twitter at Keith J.

Carberry and co-host at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

And you can find the first ever bonus episode for Media Club Plus on friendsofthetable.cash.

We recorded two and have released two bonus episodes where we watched basically half of a season of Dragon Ball.

It was a blast.

You should absolutely hear us talk about Dragon Ball, a show that

I have seen all of multiple times.

Dre and Sylvie have seen a little bit of each, and then Jackson has seen none of.

And that's the voice of Sylvie.

Sylvie, do you want me to interrupt?

Yeah, no, it was a really good time watching that episode.

You can, if we're going straight into my plug, you can go to every Sylvie Bullet on all your social media platforms.

Literally, like search me on there.

I'll show up.

I promise.

And if I don't,

sorry.

Something

I went out for cigarettes.

You can also check out the show's TikTok at friends underscore table and our YouTube, Friends of the Table.

We also have a Twitch channel, twitch.tv.

Lots of streams recently.

Lots of stuff.

We're repeated

Lethal Company, which is going up on the YouTube at some point.

That was a blast.

Really encourage people to check that out.

It was very funny.

Watch Sophie be a pro fucking gamer.

We were all on that.

No, I know, but like,

pro gamer moment.

For people listening, so they know, all 400 were on that.

As well as Austin and Allie.

Actually, everyone who's been on Media Club Plus

Media Club Plus extended universe stream.

Yeah.

The MCPCU.

Andrely Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at Swanjury3000.

And if you haven't already, you should rate and review this podcast five stars.

Yeah, I totally agree.

You know, the reviews have slowed from the enthusiasm at the beginning.

All the people who are really

the kind of person that would listen to us when we ask you to go rate and review, they've all done it.

So now it's on, now it's on the feet draggers to go rate and and review.

Go rev review.

Tell me who your favorite Phantom troop member is, and I will tell you whether or not you have good taste.

Keep in mind, there isn't going to be a delay from when I record this and when you hear this.

So it might be a little bit, but I promise you'll hear it.

And Jack to Keith.

Hi, I'm Jack.

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

I know that last time in an episode that aired recently, I said that there was going to be new themes for this podcast, and that's still true.

I still fully plan to do that, but I had to move house, and it's quite exhausting.

Yeah.

Well, by the time this comes out, you may have decided that you can do it because this will be out in three months or something.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And we're definitely not busy during that time.

No, no, that's true.

Well, I'm just happening.

A lot can happen in three months.

I'm not, I love the theme as is.

I could keep doing that for two years.

So, feel free to not make a new theme.

But two years, yeah, or you know, I guess a year and a half at this point.

Depends on recording, you know, kind of give us that little buffer, right?

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

So, we got a couple new things, a couple new things in the production line here, the pre-pro.

Uh, I talked last time we recorded, I think, about the website that I found that has all of the uh soundtrack um listed like time stamped per episode.

That is amazing that Jack can't look at.

But anyway, can you send this to Dre and I?

Yeah, I can send this to you too.

It's great.

So I've been checking for, because really, it's actually really hard to

listen to the song in an episode and then figure out even what song that is.

So it's been really great to like...

have time stamps with the dubbed names of the song so that I can see, oh, that song is called Chain Bastard.

Fuck, yeah, it is.

Yeah, it is.

That's scary.

So, kidding me, that song is called Chain Bastard?

Yes.

Yeah, it is.

We'll talk about the Chain Bastard.

If you're not familiar with the show and you haven't been watching along, right now, take a guess as to which of the characters that we know is the Chain Bastard.

Yes, obviously.

Hey, I have a question.

If you haven't been listening to this or watching the show, and this is your first episode, what the fuck are you doing?

Chainbastard was a heavily, uh very influential rapper from the memphis scene in the 90s

oh yeah what a guy uh very exciting so i have taken hustle and flows based on yeah uh i've taken all of the first appearances that we've got in this these first three episodes that we're covering which by the way are episodes 39 40 and 41 uh i've and also one second appearance that we only got a very brief snippet of way way way long ago so we're going to talk about those.

And I've even put little buttons on my mixer that I can press that will play a very, very short couple seconds of the song so that everyone can know what we're talking about.

Including little you.

Yes.

You will be back to here.

Keith, you are

the host with the most, as Drake said before we were started recording.

I'll press one.

I'll press one.

Do it.

Press a button.

Oh, shit.

I'm going to go charge my nin.

So I have a bunch of buttons to do that now.

We'll talk about those when those songs come up.

Wait, is that Chainbastard?

That was Chainbastard.

Chain Bastard goes hard.

I love Chain Bastard.

It's great.

That is at the very beginning of the song, and it goes really hard.

It's great.

The other thing that I have, this is based on the struggles that we had

during the Hunter exam.

I have got all of the new characters that are introduced and their name with a little picture of them next to them in our God.

Yeah, seriously.

Basically, basically in order of appearance.

So,

there's a couple that I got, I didn't get exact, but anyway, so that is what we are, that is the new stuff that we're working with.

The music, the buttons, and the pictures.

And do you want to give you a little bit of recap?

Yes,

let's go.

I'm jazzed.

I'm so excited to talk about this art.

We start off with a, I think, it was a long flashback, but I think a pretty good recap because, like, eight episodes ago, we saw a little bit of what Karabika was up to, which is

trying really hard to find the Nen office or the hunter office, not the Nen office, because Karabika did not know about Nen, the hunter office that gives you hunter jobs.

And the very cool lady who is the in charge of giving people jobs said, no, come back when you can see this, and then points at nothing.

Karabika found a man in the woods who almost killed him.

I was about to say, found is an interesting way to say, ran into a man who shot a bullet at him.

That actually was an acorn.

Okay.

Well, shot an acorn like a bullet.

Like a bullet, but it went conquer on his ass.

Yeah, he went conquer on his ass, took out a, it blew a huge chunk out of a tree.

It was an acorn.

I don't know if we ever get that guy's name, actually.

We do in the Hunterpedia.

In the Hunterpedia.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Whatever his name is, if somebody could let me know what that guy's name is.

That would be good.

This man's name is

Mizuken.

Mizuken.

Okay.

So Karapika meets Mizuken, and Mizuken's like, I'll teach you about, or sorry, he says, your hunter exam isn't over yet, is what he says.

I was about to say.

First, he negs Karapika, and then is like, all right, I guess I'll teach you about Nen.

Yeah.

So he's learning about Nen from its stranger from the woods.

We get a quick Nen recap.

I'm sure Jack was excited about that.

As part of an expositional reveal that Karapika is a conjurer.

You might remember Hisuka's little conjurer lesson or

Nen-type lesson.

Conjurers are high-strung, overly serious, stoic, and nervous.

Yeah, it's exactly.

It's exactly.

Yeah.

Then we meet a...

This is Hisoka's trick.

Then we meet a string of new allies

and we get their powers.

We get super hearing, dog training, magical poems, men puppets, and hypno-femdom.

Uh-huh.

Also, please please stir haikus.

Also, dog training.

The last one could also be called dog training.

Also, great dog training.

There's two different kinds of dog training.

That's some real Venn diagrams happening here.

Karapika's newfound powers have something to do with whipping chains around, but also they can detect things.

It's so cool.

It's very cool, but it's also confusing.

And I'm sure that we'll learn a lot more about that in the future.

We take a quick detour to Gon and Kilua, who are on a boat, and Kilua has a pet hawk apparently.

They learn more about Greed Island and then lose all of their money trying to make a lot of money.

We see Karatka's plan start to take shape.

Basically, he wants to get in good with the mafia to find and kill the body traders, T-R-A-D-E-R-S, who buy and sell Kurta eyes.

Kurta is the name of his clan, if you remember, the clan that was wiped out for their eyes.

Depending on the sub or the dub or which sub you're watching, they're either one of the seven most beautiful objects in the world or much lesswhelming, one of the seven most beautiful colors in the world.

That's my

dub.

No, yeah, my dub says seven most beautiful colors.

While this is happening, an even greater group of freaks is assembling in some abandoned building.

Dot, dot, dot.

They're finally here.

They're finally here.

We've been hearing about the phantom troop since like episode seven.

No,

even before that.

Even before that.

Even before that.

Yeah.

They're referencing.

We will currently do that, but I think they're named in episode seven first.

You might be right about that.

We will get into.

We are going to spend basically the back half of what you are listening to right now talking about the Phantom Troop.

But I think that it is.

It is so exciting that we have immediately sort of dialed.

I just nearly knocked a fucking full cup of tea off my desk.

Holy shit.

Good lord.

So jacked up.

It is so exciting that

we have immediately dialed into the fact that we have been talking about the boogeyman since episode one

in this show.

And the boogeyman has finally been introduced.

And the way that that happens is really cool.

Really, really interesting.

It's a real Tagashi move of how he chooses to introduce his characters.

We're back to the old intro.

Sorry, by the old intro, I mean the intermediate intro.

We briefly returned to the original intro, and now we're at the second, the Nen intro.

it we got a brief back to the like monsters and beasts uh the better intro and now we've got the nen intro again which is fine um any first uh any other first impressions uh that we want to get at before we start getting into like stuff that happened in this episode we also did you mention uh neon at all in your summary did i miss no no so uh we could talk about yeah we could talk about

neon i just say neon i think it might have been neon yeah i might have just been hearing an accent.

Yeah, maybe at some point, honestly.

So, oh, yeah, Neon, who is the daughter of the

crime boss that Karabika's trying to work for and has a fortune-telling poem ability.

They introduce her and refer to her as just the boss, even though her dad obviously is the like in head of the head of the family.

She is there.

She's, you know.

They basically seem to answer to her, which is interesting.

And yeah, we'll get to that.

I think she shows up in episode 40.

I believe so.

Yeah.

Toward the latter half of

what we watched this week, at the very least.

Any other

anything else to get out before we dive into episode 39?

I'm ready to go.

No, let's go.

All right.

Let's do it.

I will say that I think, and this is diving in.

Togashi's game

that he plays on me every time is that he he starts a and this might also be Keith's game.

I don't know because I know you've spent a lot of time looking at these spreadsheets as to the episode order.

The little episode chunks of three episodes or something start out and for about 12 minutes, I'm like, yeah, okay, yeah.

This is, yep, it's more hunter-hunter.

Yep, this is what, this is what happens.

And then the afterburners fire, and like a cavalcade of nonsense takes place.

And it's like,

this trick has happened to to me so many times that I just need to fully buckle in for the first 10 minutes of every chunk of Hunter Hunter to just be like, we're going to get a little recap.

You know, pieces are going to be moved around the board that I've seen before, but don't worry.

Just get it.

I'll say that, like,

having four minutes at the beginning of every episode, every new episode of an anime being basically unnecessary is super common.

Sure.

This is like a way to pad out episode lengths.

Animation is difficult to do.

It's expensive.

They're working with

like unfinished material a lot of the time.

And so it's like,

we need four episodes that don't advance.

We need four minutes that don't advance anything in this episode, or we're going to run out of manga to adapt.

Also, with something like Hunter Hunter that's sprawling so much,

they use that as a way to

like

basically catch up on things that would be

I don't know like you could do like a last time on recap, but instead they do just like a truncated version of the events.

So you can just like, here's what happened chronologically to Karapika is kind of like how it feels.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

And it's not exactly as true with Hunter Hunter that, like, they're trying not to bump into, although I guess it is with Tagashi's like health issues and long hiatuses.

I guess it does make sense to try not to like, hey, I know that we've still got 70 episodes more that we can make before we hit the end of what is written.

But

who knows if we get there and there's nothing more that he's written in that time.

So I don't know.

Like, it does sort of make sense that they

do the normal, to me, the normal anime thing of like having a long intro and a recap at the beginning or just like replaying the last two minutes of the previous episode, stuff like that.

But I will say that this is the most tortured section of the show in terms of me grouping episodes together.

This has changed for everything else that we're working on is like basically exactly as my first draft had it,

which is fantastic.

But the Phantom Troop arc, I have rewritten four times, including

just last week.

Are you able to speak to why you are making those changes?

Or is that better to be talked about after we finish the arc?

Okay.

Do you would you consider, and I know that you're not the most sensitive person to spoilers in the world, but sometimes, you know, it's still better not to know.

Would you rather not know when there's which episodes I consider having some really exciting stuff in them?

No, no, you can say that.

I'm excited.

It's watching the show.

Episodes 46 and 47 have some really exciting stuff into them, but I didn't want them to be their own two episodes.

So I've been trying, it's really difficult to like make sure to like line things up so that these two episodes in the middle of the season

then have like a balanced

the whole rest of the season has to be balanced around them.

So for a while,

they were split up and I really hated that.

And then I redid it so that they were part, they were on their own and I didn't really like that either.

And then I had the impulse of like, well, maybe we could do the first five episodes instead of the first

four.

and then I was like, no, because then we're we barely have any episodes covering this arc, and I like this arc a lot.

So instead, I did a compromise, which is I put four episodes that I really like together in the middle, and then we're going to do three this week and two next week.

And that I'd rather have the two next week that I think is a little bit like um underripe as a as a set to watch than

blow through these five episodes or isolate the two really

important episodes.

So

I've been, this has been a torture to

figure out how to work.

So I did watch these three episodes and I think that they all work really well together and I'm glad with how it turned out and there's no going back.

Yep.

Fair enough.

It felt consistent.

It felt like it worked.

Yeah.

I mean, so these episodes begin.

It was such a delight to begin with Karapika.

And at first, you know, I felt this kind of resentment that we were just covering old ground.

But we got some really interesting stuff in short you know we learned that karapika is a conjurer and um we have some really interesting conversations with mizuken his sort of trainee slash uh murderer i will say another thing is the sorry jack to interrupt but uh another another

important thing about that recap at the beginning is that it's important to remember shunnen is for kids and these kids have forgotten what is going on because it happened 10 and

200 yeah like also serialized media it happened two and a half months ago.

Two and a half months ago.

Right, exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, for us, for us, actually,

two and a half months ago.

Yeah.

I think also,

I'm thinking about for children as well, and also for people like me who like Karapica, we haven't seen Karapica for a while.

And kind of getting re-situated with Karapica's interests and affect is valuable.

And those interests and affect kind of come through quickly.

Karapica is grumpy right now.

Karapica, separated from his husband,

Leorio,

is in a foul mood.

And he's also in a foul mood because he wasn't allowed to take a hunter client.

He has to learn Nen.

I get the impression that Krapika feels about Nen similarly to I do.

It's a lot of explaining.

Krapika is the king of explaining things, but even he

maybe he maybe he loves to be the one giving the PowerPoint and doesn't like to hear the PowerPoint from somebody else.

That'll come on

that next episode.

Oh, we'll also touch back up.

We'll also touch back on on that in five episodes.

Yes.

Some of Karapika's worst lines happen at a very crucial moment, which is very funny.

But Karapaka is, I'll watch Karapika do a PowerPoint presentation.

We get some really good Karapika PowerPoints.

He returns to the narrative with

his full capacities to exposite stuff.

But

we learned that, you know, Conjurers, Karapaka is a little disappointed that he is not A.

That

what does he want to be?

He is an enhancer.

Yeah.

Because enhancers,

per Karapika, he could use that to like hone his body, hone weapons, you know.

I think he sees,

wrongly, an enhancer as having the clearest utility for a path of revenge.

And

what he is told is, well, look, you can learn enhancer stuff.

And we get, you know, reminded again that your proximity on the nen wheel to the other sort of nen schools means that you can

it's easier and harder to learn from them.

And we get percentages.

Speaking of speaking of, we do have, we do get, I think we've gotten those percentages before.

80, 60, 40.

I think Wing went into that.

That seems like a very wing thing to have done.

But what we do get one new thing, which is

what is

special about the placement of

the specialist on that chart?

The specialist is at the bottom, right?

Yeah, between conjurer and manipulator.

And we are told, and this is very odd.

This is, I think, just

weird writing.

We're told that there is a 0% chance that you can learn conjurer skills.

However,

kind of

specialist skills.

However, you kind of can, right?

We are told almost in the same breath that there's a 0% chance you can learn them, but with real application, you actually can.

I'm not sure I followed what was what's happening.

It's like we might have different dubs for our subtitles for this because I think they explain it pretty good in mine.

Sorry, Sylvie, do you also

think it's the wording is really funny.

At least on mine, Musican says,

you can't change what you're born with, which is really funny.

It's just personally, very funny.

And then also, in like a slight, like later, I think they use the words like something about like developing into a specialist or like becoming one, but not necessarily that you'd learn their skills.

Like that your nen would change in a way to become a specialist.

Am I right, Keith?

If you have a better explanation, please go for it.

Right, yeah.

So the um uh

the the basically the thing is, yeah, you can't learn a specialist skill, but you can become a specialist, which is the thing is like like they wing also kind of talks about how uh it's rare, but your nen type can change.

And Mizuken

says that a specialist is usually someone who goes through an extreme hardship when they're young or they're just born with it.

And so I think the implication is that

someone who goes through an extreme hardship

in their later years could swap to specialists.

Their nen type could change mid-life.

And

that is more likely to happen to conjurers and manipulators.

Because of their proximity on the wheel, too.

And to come back to the way Austin talked about the sort of schematic

construction of this, especially as it relates to children's fiction, there is something really

cool.

And I think you see it quite a lot in these sort of schematics of like,

here are a bunch of special groups, but one of them is kind of more special than the others.

Might not necessarily be better, but even within that wheel, there is like a like a

there is a further tier within the wheel, and here that tier is specialist.

Have we, prior to this chunk of episodes, and we'll get

I'm so excited to talk about the goblin later, but

prior to this chunk of episodes, have we met a specialist?

There is

a remember, I forget his name, the guy who fought Hisuka and had the

Castro.

Was his

manipulator, right?

I know he was a manipulator, but wasn't the whole thing that he was basically trying to be a specialist with

the doppelganger.

Okay, it was.

I don't remember if the doppelganger was classified as conjurer or specialist or whatever.

This is not super important.

I believe that the thing with

Castro was that he was an enhancer who was using both conjurer and emitter techniques.

Or manipulator techniques.

Conjurer and manipulator.

So he had like a really low

compatibility with manipulator and conjurer, and his doubling technique relied on both of those things.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, no, I don't believe that we have anyone whose power we can look at and say they're a specialist until

maybe

this episode.

Yeah, until the ones we've watched today.

Yeah.

Yes.

So, but what is interesting is that, you know,

Mizuken sort of breaks down some interesting things about conjurers and sort of says, you know,

you could conjure a really sharp...

So firstly, you can't conjure weapons that sort of have inhuman capacity.

You could never build a sword that would cut anything.

You can build a very sharp, you can conjure a very, very sharp sword, but at that point, you might as well just go and buy a sword.

I love that.

It is so interesting, and I don't have the information or necessarily the interest to like dig into this specific aspect of it, but there's something so interesting to me about the way hunters are like

money doesn't mean anything to us.

You know, the thing that is interesting to us is like

our own skill and effort.

There's a big moment like that later with Gone and Kilowa 2 that I think speaks to

money being like weirdly non-material to

hunters.

Yeah, just go ahead.

Although, I think I have a counter to that when we get there that'll be a fun thing to talk about.

It's in my notes on the dock if we want to get into that when it comes up.

Having learned Nen, but still with some sort of reservations, Karapika goes back to Rey, sees her horrid little ghost gremlin in the air,

and takes on a client.

Karapica is looking.

And by the way, we never learn what the fuck that thing is.

Yeah, it's just a Nen spirit she's conjured, right?

Yeah, it was just like, no, but there's no like hint, like, you know, no one that we've met so far could like point to the air and conjure a weird spirit thing.

And we have no idea what that thing does.

I just think it's fun to have this horrible little guy that we never figure out.

And we just, like, there's just no, there's nothing about it.

We just, you know what that is?

That's a stand.

It is a stand.

There are a couple of stands in this sort of.

I will point out when there are none users who are very, oh, you have a stand.

Because there's a few.

And,

you know, so Karapika is looking for a job at York New City, and it is very interesting that a lot of the clients,

there are a few clients available.

There are four that Karapika could

work as a bodyguard for, and they're all bidding on different things.

One is trying to bid on, as far as I can tell, a fancy gun.

Another is trying to bid for fine china plates.

The third is a flesh collector, seeking a piece of tattooed skin with a dragon on it, the head of a child with jelly syndrome, and some other things.

And at this point, Krabica's eyes turn red because it is this proximity, like Keith said, to the flesh collectors, to the people who are buying and selling, among other things, Kurta Clan eyes, that is not only a path to his vengeance, you know, vengeance for anybody who would touch that thing as a product, and also a path to the Phantom Troop, right?

If these people are moving in the same circles as the Phantom Troop, it really is sort of like a perfect tactical nuke of revenge from Karapika.

I feel like

this

part where the Flesh Collector comes up and Karapika's eyes turn red is just like one of the first really good indicators of the tone that this arc is going to be playing in.

I think that while Heaven's Arena definitely had some like darker moments, especially with Hiseka and

when the Evil Nun came up, this definitely still feels like it is getting darker.

I think that they do a good job of using the color palette to that effect.

A lot of these scenes, especially with Karapika at the

job agency, the Hunter Job Agency, is like more muted and like navy colors.

And

a lot of the stuff feels like it's either happening when it's overcast or at night.

Yeah, lots of half-shaded face, like close up on Karabika.

Yeah, there's a lot of that in these episodes.

And you'll notice, actually, that is like, I mean, it's, it's, um,

it's like, it's, it's, it's impossible to know exactly what they're trying to say, but that to me looks like, that is like what's inside of Karapika's head at that moment.

Like,

there's a moment where very clearly it is a bright, sunny day, green grass, green trees, and it cuts through Karabika.

It's at the very end of this episode, I think.

Or maybe it's the end of next episode.

But

yeah, it's the end of next episode where,

like, it cuts to a close-up of his face, and it is like...

evil woods that he's surrounded by and it's like everything is purple and black and his face is like covered in shadow.

One second ago, it was a sunny day.

It was like mid-afternoon.

Yeah.

And they do that a lot.

Like, like, you know, there's a, there's a storm brewing in Karabika about this.

It's really, I think it's really well done.

It's, it'll be even more apparent later on.

Um, but I really enjoy the way the way that this arc sort of presents itself.

Do we want to jump back to what happens in between the two visits to the

hunter store?

The training.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Specifically the chain stuff.

Yeah, absolutely.

Oh, the chains we need to talk about the change.

I think that's the thing.

The chain stuff happens after he is told that he could sign on with a flash collector.

Oh, it is?

Oh, okay.

Oh, he goes to the corner.

Yeah, we see the scarlet eyes, and then it flashes back to that conversation.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's the order.

Oh, okay.

That makes sense.

We learn that Karapika.

Oh, this is great.

This is...

Karapaka is.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

I was just saying because I'm now looking at my notes instead of just remembering them.

And yeah, that is the order.

We do.

We get a remark about how it only took him six months to learn, and how that's very impressive.

We just saw a couple kids do it in like two months, but that's fine.

No, it was about six months.

It was about six months.

Yeah, but they all, like, it is, I mean, I also assume that, like, Kilo, or that Karapika didn't get his fucking nin pores blasted open.

Oh, yeah, that's probably true.

He didn't get his nen pores blasted open.

Yeah.

Um, I forgot that happened.

So, so, yeah, we do, we cut back to the

camp where they've been living in the woods learning nen.

Yes, and Karapaka has decided that the weapon that he would like to conjure.

So he's heard everything that this man has said about the limitations of conjured weapons.

He passes his pop quiz.

He passes his pop quiz.

He gets given a little quiz.

And he decides that what he wants to do is conjure chains because

there are some people who walk this world that need to be chained to hell.

Yeah, there's an evil

subset.

There's an evil running loose that needs to be chained down to hell.

Killers.

It's so sick.

So sick.

Karapika is

15.

He's 15.

And his whole...

Or something.

No, I was kind of aiming for that, right?

I think I remember.

He's probably in his late teens, right?

Yeah, I know he isn't like...

like under 18.

He's younger than Leorio, who's like 19, and I think he's a couple years younger, and he's also a couple years older older than

12.

So he's like somewhere from like 15 to 17 or something.

The reason why I remember, I have figured out why I remember this.

Someone mentioned that he

is 19 where the manga is right now.

And was 17.

So on the wiki, he is 17 at the time of the Heavens Arena arc.

Oh, okay.

So 16, 17, yeah.

I think it was very much a Karapika should be at the club right now post.

Instead of whatever

whatever's happening on the manga, which I don't want to know about.

Yeah, so like Karapika as a character, especially when he is in the sort of group of four, represents a kind of wisdom and a kind of patience and a kind of

reserve and also I think a generosity to others

that is sort of the flip side of his revenge.

He is someone who has been through

an immense torment and has kind of come out of it being like, there are so many things that I've learned about the world and the ways I want to interact with people.

And as we've seen in the Trick Tower, the other side of that coin sometimes reveals itself, which is that when in proximity to his revenge, whether that is sort of mental proximity, you know, being asked to think about it, or when in physical proximity to his revenge being meted out, the coin is turned over.

And he is just as sort of poised, but he is deeply bleak.

And it's like what we talked about with, you know, looking around him and seeing the evil forest.

And it is so interesting after, it's great pacing, actually, after having had this lovely little mini arc with Goan and Kilua at Mito's house, playing video games, figuring out essentially a fun little scavenger hunt, to cut back to another character who is just like usually quite cautious and careful and thoughtful, being like, I'm going to craft chains to tie my enemies to hell.

And I think this is just because he feels that proximity to the revenge.

He is like, it's now or never.

We are going to York New City.

The Phantom Troop are going to be there.

Would you like to learn something interesting about spiders?

You know?

This is your friend of yours.

having an absolute hell time at their job and their entire personality transforms.

There's also like, you know, we talked about not having Leorio around.

You know, Leorio forces Karapika to defend that other side of the coin by being

kind of outward, whether it's true or not about Leorio, like presenting as sort of greedy and practical and in it for the money and in it for living an easy life.

Uh, and so Karapika has to like defend justice and uh

uh and like do goodery.

And instead of having Leorio around, he's got no one around and doesn't trust anybody and is like, all of these people are my enemy.

And has just had to learn nen, which we know is really intense and unpleasant.

He seems to be being taught nen by someone who doesn't like him.

The only reason he is learning it is to, you know, start hanging out with the flesh collectors.

And this is

who he wants to kill.

This is the

classic story of revenge.

Of, you know, I need to get close to the people I want to do revenge on.

And that means that I have to make compromises about the things I believe.

You know, it is like the deep dark standard revenge story that is just fun to see played out.

And that they tip the hand of way back during Trick Tower when they're interrogating Karapika about his intentions and if he can go through with his plan having not killed anyone before.

And he's basically like, yeah, I'll do whatever I got to do.

And in Trick Tower, Karapakiro is in full de-escalation.

I don't want to kill anybody.

I don't need to.

We need to talk this through mode.

Through most of the Hunter exam.

And it is very interesting to hear Karapaka say, I'll do whatever I need to do,

writing the check that he is now caching in this ruined city.

Hey, is this Meteor City, do you think?

I don't think it is.

No.

There are just multiple ruined cities.

Well,

Meteor City will come back on the map.

Yeah, that's also true.

I hear that the Phantom Troop are from there.

No, what does Canary say?

She says, like, it's a terrible place.

That's why the Phantom Troop are from, though, or something.

Yeah, that's basically...

Yeah, yeah.

Oh,

it is the dumping grounds for the world's pollution.

And it's a place that is not on any map.

And

there was something of the Phantom Troop, but I don't...

I don't remember.

It's like lowlifes.

And it was also like, yeah, the world, like, it's where it is the, it is the home of the, like, the world mafia and also the phantom troop.

Yes.

we don't really know much about Karapica's chains at this point.

We get a really cool close-up of his hand, and we can see that he is wearing one of the sickest anime weapons I've ever seen.

Right now, it looks like a piece of jewelry.

Are we doing it a disservice to call it a weapon right now?

It just looks like he is wearing a series of chained rings connected on his knuckles, his fingers and his thumb.

Honestly, I need some.

He gets in a big fight with Misukin over this because they had just finished saying there's no point in conjuring a weapon because you can just buy the weapon.

Conjuring it doesn't do anything for you except make you waste a bunch of time learning how to conjure the thing.

Uh, like if you want changes, go out and get chains.

It's not even that hard.

And like, this is the this is like kind of like this is an obstinance that we haven't seen from Karapika, who's just like, I've got my mind set on the chains and I'm going to make it work.

Storm comes an ideological weapon, it's an ideological weapon, right?

Which is why

he's the chain bastard.

We got the chain bastard.

And yes, the chain bastard's theme makes this emergence as he talks about hell.

This theme is amazing.

And

who were the composers on Hunter Hunter?

There is just one composer.

I'm forgetting his name right now, but I'll look it up.

Right now.

I'm looking it up.

He has this

Yoshihisa Hirano.

Yes.

Hiranu.

Amazing.

Hirano has this thing that he does regularly that I love so much.

It's the inverse of.

He is, and he's writing so much music.

And his capacity to jump from these battle themes with the electric guitar to like beautiful, beautiful classical instrumentation.

It's great.

It's amazing.

We actually get an excellent moment of that in just a minute.

So, but go ahead, Jack.

Hey, everyone.

This is Keith just popping in with a music note.

I didn't have this information at the time of recording.

I just missed it, but I just wanted to give full credits on this.

We have Yoshihisa Hirano

does have series music by credits on 148 episodes.

We also have

Shigeki Ippon credited as the Contra bass player for all 148 episodes.

No other musicians

are credited.

And then you have

Theory Mallet credited as composer, additional music orchestrator

on 116 episodes.

So, not on anything that we've seen so far.

No, that's wrong.

We've just started getting into the Theory Mallet stuff.

I don't know what additional music orchestrator means, but there you go.

His resume makes a lot of sense.

Yeah.

With some of the stuff.

There's a really sad

dip in that resume because he, because Japan is really, really terrible about drugs, and he was caught with marijuana and was like, no,

no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, he's too fucking cool for

me.

He just started working again, which is really exciting.

But yeah, he was basically blacklisted for almost a hundred.

He was one of the composers that they still hunter,

which now they are about that stuff.

Yeah.

So he has this technique where often with these really great battle themes, he will have this just roaring guitar intro.

Hit Chain Bastard, please keep

the theme develops over the next few minutes, he is a savvy enough composer to be like, I sadly, I cannot just rip the electric guitar for two minutes because my viewers are going to need to be interpreting information on the screen.

You know,

there's a degree of sort of satiation that you have to avoid with stuff like that.

And so, very often, his battle themes move into these like really striking rhythm guitar sections or really striking percussion sections as we, you know, move out of this massive guitar flourish to open.

And this one, Chain Baster, turns into this really cool kind of like triplet shuffle groove.

It settles into this really like driving, syncopated, but also with the kind of lightness of triplets of sort of waltz time.

It is so cool.

Actually,

I think it could probably do.

Oh, yeah, there it is.

Is that the part?

Yep, that's exactly the part.

It's like that floor-to-the-floor groove of like the

cymbals with the rhythm guitar coming through in these triplets to give it this kind of waltz feel, which serves to, you know, have Chain Bastard.

Chain Bastard is a figure of dynamism and power.

And there's something else.

I don't know if you heard

in that last, there's those dissonant single notes on the piano.

The boot, doop, boot, doot, boop, boot.

Did you hear that?

In what I just played?

That's the bastards.

That's the bastard part.

And when I want, Jack, I don't know how much you have left in your point, but I want to drive through this while we're here.

As

Karapika is leaving the Nen office, this song has been playing the whole time, since the fight, through the entire conversation, last bit of the conversation with, sorry, what is her name from the hunter office?

Ray.

Ray.

And then it fades out into just that last stuff, just the those dissonant notes.

We got this stuff here.

So cool.

It's just close up on his face.

And then someone notices him.

And we get this like, huh like turns around and it is a it is a new character that we don't know um we will soon learn that her name is melody she can hear heartbeats and that sound the chain bastard sound

that is the sound of karapika's heart it fucking rules it's so it's so good it pulls it pulls the sound out from the soundtrack and into melody who can literally hear it um her tune by the way is called A Field in Spring.

Let's save it until we get to.

Oh, no, we'll save it.

Because we got to introduce, and I say this with all the love in my heart, the goblin.

Oh,

the rage goblin?

Melody is the goblin.

Melody is the goblin.

Oh, my God.

You will regret your words and

you will regret this.

I am the goblin lover.

I always have room in my heart for a goblin.

Okay.

Okay.

Melody arrives and is a very small person

of initially indeterminate gender, which I mentioned because the show makes a point of that later on.

She is

she has a bald head and like a

bald top of her head and like a ring of hair, almost like a monk's tonsia.

She has very pale skin.

She has a single pair of sharp sharp, sort of like buck teeth.

She looks like she's come from another show.

Yeah.

And at first, I was like...

Not the only character that looks like they've come from another show in these set of episodes.

That we will see today.

And she almost looks like she's come from Dungeon Meishi or something.

And my first reaction on seeing her was, this character is familiar to me.

And I think this is because

I'm about to make some predictions here.

Okay.

First, I was about to say, I think Melody is a very well-liked character, but I can't imagine that there are any characters in Hunter Hunter who aren't very well-liked.

That's fair.

I'm going to say it's fair.

I'm hearing the ohs, but I'm saying.

No, yeah.

I guess, yeah, it's the difference.

Should they be well-liked?

But yeah.

I think that's the better.

Yeah.

So my sister is a single-shaped.

I can't even imagine who you're talking about.

Yeah, I don't know.

Schween.

Excuse me.

it's Shween.

Please get me.

Sorry, my man.

So I, I,

my suspicion is that I've probably seen Melody in screenshots.

Like, in the same way that I realized after doing the Dragon Ball stream that I'd seen Master Roshi out in the world prior to.

You've seen her in the outro.

I have seen her in the outro, but I think I've seen her on Twitter.

Oh, maybe.

Yeah, I can't think of like what specifically people would be posting with Melody in it, but I I wouldn't be surprised.

I think

maybe this, I'm wrong about this.

People can correct me on this.

I do feel like this arc and the infamous Chimera Ant arc are the two most talked about arcs of the anime.

Sorry, Jack, not the influence.

No, no, no.

So let's see.

First reactions to Melody.

The first thing I, so Melody immediately zeroes in on Karapika's heartbeat and decides to

also take a job in York New City, revealing that she is a hunter.

I spent a while worrying that Melody was going to be a member of the Phantom Troop,

in part because one of the things that I know about the Phantom Troop is that they have this incredible diversity in character designs.

And I was like, oh, this looks like someone who might be in the Phantom Troop and can hear people's heartbeats and is zeroing in on Karapica.

And so for a long time, I thought, oh, Melody is shadowing Karapica.

to essentially like report on him to keep him you know uh under under watch but it seems like melody is a hunter with

another backstory.

Melody is the hunter that I think is a specialist.

I think that the thing Melody can do, which is, yeah, listen to people's heartbeats, is

a specialist skill.

Okay.

Although, I am thinking about what Austin said, where it's like, sometimes you will see people who have a skill and you'll be like, what is that?

And it turns out that they're just an extremely strange evoker or something.

And you're like, how the hell is that an evoker?

um until it sort of makes sense um

but no i think i think melody is melody is great i'm very excited i don't mean to offend anybody by calling her the goblin

you're fine

is there is there a follow-up or that's end of thought that's that's that's end of thought that's end of thought my suspicion i'm putting pieces together rapidly in my head in the way that i can't really predict this show but between you will regret your words and deeds and people become specialists through immense trauma.

My suspicion is that Melody has been

forged one way or another.

Sort of

the person that Melody is, she got to through a history of violence and trauma, which is exactly how Kojima got to quiet, but he's a hack.

Wow, that's a hot take, dude.

Is it?

I think so.

I don't know.

Kojima is, I wouldn't call him a a hack, but I would call him less consistent than people like to act, you know?

Sure, that's true.

I believe that during in the run-button let's plays of

Metal Gear Solid one and two, we dubbed Kojima the world's smartest dumb guy.

Yeah,

I think

I realize I'm defending him because Hunter Schaefer is in his new video game.

But this is the Hunter Schaefer defense squad,

not the Kojima squad.

Nicholas Winding Reffin is a hack.

Oh, yeah.

I think Reffin is more of a hack than Kojima is in a weird way, because I think Kojima has knowingly made things I'm more engaged with and find more like thematic distress things.

That's fucking incredible.

Yeah.

Anyway, what I'm saying is Reffin didn't make Metal Gear Solid 2, you know?

Nope.

No, he made fucking Drive is Gear.

He made Drive Solid.

But unfortunately, he also made...

Did he make Only God Forgives?

Yeah, he did.

Ugh.

Um.

Alright, let's get back on track.

Let's see.

Yeah.

And then we get...

We start cutting very rapidly between different situations.

The pace of the episode changes.

Oh, there's one last thing to do.

We talked about the goblin, but we missed.

Oh.

Yeah.

Does the goblin's theme emerge at this point?

This is so beautiful.

Yeah, it cuts right from...

the goblin's theme.

It cuts right from the end of Chain Bastard, where she's hearing

the horrible dissonant piano of Kropiga's heart into a song for spring, which is Melody's theme.

It's and which I can only assume is the sound of her own heart.

It could be the sound of her own heart.

It could be the sound of, you know, there's a kind of precision to the sound of the flute that could just as easily be read as

a kind of watchfulness.

The thing she is doing is, or listening, a kind of precision in listening.

There's a kind of cleanliness to a flute part that is like focused in, and it's a solo instrument as well, focused in so specifically on this, on these sounds, that it might be the sound of her listening.

But it's beautiful, and it's by Hirana, who just wrote Chainbasted.

It's great.

And also, shout out to this flutist.

This performance is

played so beautifully.

It's really, really good.

Yeah, and there is a kind of lightness to her

in this moment, but an anxiety as well, right?

The impression that you get, whether or not you are, as I was at this moment, reading her as possibly a spy from the Phantom Troop, because this hasn't been disproven yet.

The thing that you get from Melody is a kind of anxiety and caution about Krabika's whole deal.

Yeah, sure.

And I think it does make sense, like the sound of her listening, it makes sense because, you know, what we've seen so far is that she is listening.

That's like what she's doing.

We have like two, we're about to get to the second scene with melody in it, and they are both sort of demonstrating her listening to the sound of people's hearts and emotions.

Yeah, um, yeah,

and uh, first appearance of both of those back-to-back:

hearts and emotions, hearts and emotions, yeah.

No, chain has heard and field and spring.

Yep, lots of new music in this

third, it's gonna be a third one just from this episode.

We start cutting rapidly to new locations.

Yeah.

The click, click, click of the roller coaster has reached its top and it goes into its first dive.

This is a roller coaster with multiple dives in the blue chips.

Yeah, exactly.

But we are beginning our first descent as we learn that the Ritz Carlton exists in this universe.

Tell me about the world's scaredest man.

Okay, so

a tall

purple-haired woman arrives.

You know, she's wearing like a cocktail dress.

She looks very cool.

She's wearing a purple dress.

She steps out of her car and opens the back door to let out the world's scaredest man.

I wrote down, accompanied by her ward question mark, a scared purple-haired boy.

And then I wrote, oh, date.

Because immediately some bad guys arrive and talk about how this is this woman's date.

And she says, no, no, no, he's not my date.

He's my employer.

And I wrote, oh, employer.

I was getting swizzed by Tagashi the whole way through.

Tagashi's true trick.

Tagashi's trick.

The men kind of harass her and, you know, threaten her, threaten the man.

And she responds by kissing this man.

and casting a nen spell.

The lines are specifically, he's like, I w what you could guard my body.

And she's like, I don't guard ugly men.

And then she just kisses him.

Yeah,

yeah.

Um, this is the first time we have seen this in this chunk of episodes, and it will not be the last.

A full-scale magical girl anime uh title card when a new move is introduced.

I know Dragon Ball did this, but it didn't give it the full treatment that either this show is doing or that um the Sailor Moon series do, where when a new move is introduced, we often move into freeze frame and a title card shows up to introduce the move.

This

is first, she kisses him and she kisses Nen into his mouth.

There is nothing

sicker and sexier in fiction than someone poisoning someone with a kiss.

This is that version.

Does anybody offer the sound effect that happens during this?

Of course I do.

It was the Menshe sound.

Or not Menshe, the

what's her name from Trick Tower when she got revealed.

It did the exact same wow.

Oh, I forgot about that.

Wow.

Yeah.

Wow.

Oh, wow.

And the name, Jack, you set up the cut to the name so well, but what's the actual name?

The spell is 180-minute love slave instant lover.

Sure is.

It's so good.

She's mother, you know?

She's just incredible.

She's great.

And I like it.

Look how specific it is.

180-minute.

Yeah, three hours.

Three hours of lover.

Yeah, three hours of lover and because Nen takes effort to do.

You know, right.

You don't want to.

And also, it is

clearly a utility thing rather than an emotive thing.

Why would I want these men to stick around for longer than three hours?

Three hours is pushing it.

You know, they get annoying very quickly.

Yeah.

Well, you could surely order them to go into the closet.

You sure could.

They get pink love hearts over their eyes, which is such a funny...

Demonstration of the way Tagashi uses Nen to

sort of literalize some of the conventions of animated fiction.

It's very similar to the way that cartoon logic works in like Who Framed Roger Rabbit or something.

The fact that she is using Nen to literally give him glowing hearts over his eyes as opposed to it just being the visual effect of hearts over eyes, I thought was really, really good.

Every single person that she kisses becomes her willing slate.

It is funny.

Sorry, Jack, to interrupt you, but you made me think of the one of the first times that we have this like

interplay between

like conventions of television and audience-TV relationship with Hisuka like breaking the TV screen

early on in the sort of cutaways between episodes.

It talks to the narrator at one point.

Yeah, it talks to the narrator, acknowledges the TV, like looks at you through the TV during that moment.

And then earlier, we've got the

sort of taking uh the soundtrack and making it part of the

what a character is actually hearing, like pulling it from being

uh non-diegetic to being, I mean, at least in a character's head.

And then now we've got this sort of wily coyote kind of, or I guess Pepe Le Pew is really what it is.

Um,

you know,

Looney Tunes, Looney Tunes, yeah, Looney Tunes shit.

I should go, I need to get back into checking the manga just occasionally because some of

these specific moves are things that I want to know, like how much of this came about in the adaptation process of the anime and how much of this was like in the manga.

I'm sure something like the hard eyes was, but like, was Hisuka breaking the fourth wall in that way?

Also done that way in the manga, like that sort of thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also,

I

think all of the

Nen users that we meet in this little bit here are all characters that a Yakuza subquest, or a Like a Dragon subquest, would revolve around.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah.

Is there more with...

Yeah, you say her name.

Is there more with her?

Helen is not introduced later, but she is called Base.

Yeah, Base.

Which I wonder if she is.

She is a reference to...

Is it reference to kissing?

The French formation.

Oh, maybe.

Oh, I didn't know that.

Like a peck on the cheek.

I know that Basho's name is also a reference.

It is.

Sure.

So there's a lot.

So it wouldn't surprise me if maybe all or several of these

people have names that are references to something.

I mean, Melody's name is literally Melody, right?

Sure.

Right.

You know, maybe Bae's name is a reference to the fact that she's Bae.

All right, I'm going to quit the show.

This has been fun.

Yeah, good.

Thanks for having me on.

Before we get to Basho, who is our next guy, I do want to talk really quickly about this line that she says.

So her employer freaks out and runs away.

And she says, oh, I'm going to have to get a new employer.

And this is fascinating to me.

There is a really interesting relationship between hunters and their employers or their clients.

It's very odd.

I'm so curious about where the power dynamic rests.

Whereas, like,

what do the hunters get out of this arrangement?

Okay.

Is it just money?

Well, I think, too, it's also interesting, Jack, because that like seemingly is in contrast to the other, the approach to money that hunters almost always have otherwise.

Where it's just like, oh, it's just fucking money, man.

Who cares?

Yeah.

So there is something interesting about, this is not the first instance of this.

They don't, they don't, it takes a long

time to sort of collect these thoughts from Hunter Hunter,

but it reminds me, like, we haven't got, we haven't seen all the stuff that we'll see about this in this show, but it reminds me of stuff that he's done before in Yu Yu Haga Show.

There's like a major plot point of the boss of their, like, they're, they've, the, it's the same sort of thing.

Guys from the underworld have hired

demons to be bodyguards.

And at some point, try to tell them to do something that they don't want to do, and it doesn't go well.

Uh, because it's like, you hired us, but we're demons.

Like we,

you don't have the power to make us do anything.

You have no real leverage over us except like

like, you know,

that we technically said that we would work for you.

Yeah.

It really does remind me a lot of

demons in the like sort of Faustian sense, right?

Or demons in the sense of drawing a summoning circle and there are very specific restrictions that you as the summoner, you are inviting a great and terrible power into your life that can

grant you your wildest dreams.

But even setting aside the bargaining, if you take the wrong step, the demon's coming out of the summoning circle and it's going to get you.

And that kind of very terse relationship of

obligation and need.

being wound up in that really does remind me a lot of the way we've heard powerful hunters talk about their employers.

It's so funny how

if you look at if you look at

the trouble that Tagashi was having towards the end of his run on

Yu-Yu Haka Show,

he's like, he's

like sick.

He's got back issues.

He has a really hard time delegating

and like wants this creative control.

He's not being able to do the story stuff that he wants to do because he's being told, like, not to write it

by editors and wants to start doing new things.

And it is very funny that, and, like, specifically, he's like, I want to be, I want to start deconstructing these characters that I've made because, like, that's the only thing that I have left to say about them.

And they were like, no, you can't do that.

So, he spends a while kind of trying to figure out how to end things.

And Yuyu Hakasho has like a famously divisive last arc, basically,

that I think is like basically fine, but is, of course, not the best and probably is the worst part of the show.

Anyway, it is very funny that the spirit detective that gets created as the main character and a couple of side characters in Yuhaga show, it really is

in Hunter Hunter being like, what if there was just,

I don't know, a thousand of these guys?

Yeah.

And it's worth saying, what if this was a thousand?

Because

this really is the starting pistol for the freaks.

Tagashi and the team of animators have had to piss about for a while, teaching us how Nen works and teaching us the groundings of Nen.

We've had to fight several fairly normal men.

Mr.

Wing has been there.

He wears a button-down shirt.

We've had a lot explained to us.

Melody arrives.

Bass arrives.

The starting pistol goes off.

Here come the freaks.

Freak number two, and three experts if we're including melody.

This is Basho.

He is complimenting the moon and writing a poem when the police try.

So this man is, let's describe him.

He's a pleasure.

He's muscly.

He's a muscle man.

He's wearing a

like a vest, like an open jacket vest.

He has a Elvis Presley brunette coifed hair that bobbles around.

He's got ripped sleeves.

Has he got ripped sleeves?

He looks like

he would have ripped sleeves.

I think he just has a vest on with like and like no shirt underneath it.

For he's got beard and mustache.

For you, you Hakajo fans, it's uh, what if Kuobara was a poet?

Yes, and had

a lemmy facial hair situation.

Here's yes, yeah, here's fully Lemmy.

Here's Kuabara for everyone who doesn't know what Kuabara looks like.

And we're talking about Lemmy from Motorhead, who you should also look up.

Oh, yeah, totally.

He

is immediately arrested by the police for stealing corpse samples.

Yes, because he says, time for you to,

I guess, have a taste of my fists.

And he turns around and he starts beating them up as his theme begins.

Yeah!

This theme continues, and it's like the main instrument is a koto.

It's got a really awesome, like distorted electro koto in it.

Yeah.

Originally being played through like a hot mic or something.

Which is consistent with there's such a funny thing happening here in the same way that there's a really funny thing happening to Enzo.

Trying to keep it going.

No, I feel you.

As a ninja, where it's like, later on, we learn that Basho, this guy who looks like Lemmy from Motorhead, meets Elvis Presley,

says that Haiku is like an ancient poetic form from his homeland and his main theme is played on a japanese koto where it's like there's this real evocation of japanese cultural history in music and in you know poetic forms

and this dude looks like a guy from motorhead um which is brilliant do you think this guy knows how to make sushi

Yes.

Okay.

I trust him.

I trust Basho.

Because he kicks the shit out of these cops without using Nen at all.

In fact, he says, I didn't even need to use my Nen.

No, that's a little later.

But he says, I didn't need to use my Nen.

He fights some...

Ah, we'll get to them.

He fights some

things.

Hooded summons.

But yeah, he beats the cops up.

And later, when we learn what his Nen power is, or what his primary Nen power is, it rules.

Basho is cool as hell, but right now we basically see him on a rooftop kicking the shit out of some police officers.

Yeah.

Also, just another group of people who have no fucking idea that Nin or seemingly hunters exist and what they're capable of.

Nin is secret.

Yeah, that is a

secret.

It is hard to accept that it's secret because of how little anyone else.

Well, the thing about it that makes it really hard to accept is that the fucking internet exists.

Well, yeah, but there's like a separate dark web for hunters.

Yeah, I get a URL for the hunter website.

They had to send it on a hawk.

Yeah.

I know

this is just a suspension of disbelief that

the show wants you to go.

But it is funny to me every time.

It does play every couple episodes.

We get someone who's like, oh,

you're just a lady or a kid or a whoever.

What could you do?

And then they get the shit kicked out of them.

Like, this happens every day.

And nobody learns anything.

It does help to think of like, okay, the main thing about Nen is that if you don't know Nen, it's invisible to you.

Yeah, like you cannot perceive it whatsoever.

We spent the first, you know, 30 episodes of the show not being able to see Nen and so not knowing what it was.

And then once we learn about it, then we as the viewers can see it happening and then it's everywhere.

But there was a lot of Nen happening during that Hunter exam that we just couldn't see.

And so we were just like, oh, I don't know.

I guess some of these people are just magic or something

yeah yeah i mean they specifically talk about hisuka having an aura the the hunter exam people did you all ever catch yourself

calling it nen during those first episodes no we didn't i think i would have no we were i was very like we barely even talked about the aura stuff because of accidentally

like you know stepping into it i think i talk about that and i describe it as i i i describe it as nen without the words i remember feeling the way I felt about that was it's like Isaka is radiating murderous malice.

And that's like, yep, that's Ren.

We talked around the aura stuff because aura is in a lot of shonen.

It's a staple.

The reality of having like a physical manifestation of your spirit energy is like key to having almost every anime that deals with people having powers, how those powers work.

And so we were talking The Oltero fight was Nen.

Must have been.

With the bull.

You think so?

Yeah, probably.

I mean, I don't know.

I think

not necessarily.

But, you know, Netero is also a person where it's like,

you know, how do you distinguish someone like Netero, who's like so strong, how do you distinguish what's Nen and what is not?

That's true.

There does get a specific moment.

Saying, sorry.

Sylvie.

There's a specific moment in that fight where he talks about how he needs to block Gon in a way,

but if he does,

if he blocks it properly, he'll kill him.

And that to me feels like he is using 10 right now.

And if he used it there,

the impact would kill Gon.

But again, that's an inference.

Like, you are right in saying that.

We can't know for sure.

It is the sort of thing where, like, once you are

like a, you know.

Once you're like professional level ned user, it sort of becomes like a different kind of breathing or just like always in your body, you know?

So it's just like, like, unless he was specifically repressing it, which would also be a weird thing to do with Zetsu, then it probably was using it in that he just like lives with it.

Yeah.

I'm still not 100% sure on which, on the, which one is which, but we will, I will have time to figure it out.

Yeah, they talk a lot about it in this show.

Zetsu is the one that Gon learns while hunting.

Hisuka learns how to suppress his.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Then we have another hard cut to a man chatting on the phone.

This is just a really nice conversation.

This is a brown-skinned man in a cool sweater.

He is sitting on the floor surrounded by dogs in the garden of a massive mansion.

This man's name is Squala.

Yep.

And he is chatting on the phone with, I have to imagine, his partner, And it's basically saying, don't worry, I'll get this job.

I'm going to bring home the money.

We'll be fine.

Babe, it's going to be totally cool, babe.

Don't sweat it.

I know.

He is Val Kilmer in Heat right now.

In the film, they should be in the film Heat.

Right, right, right.

Yes.

No,

have I seen Heat?

You should watch Heat.

I haven't watched Heat.

You know, I haven't seen Heat either, Jack.

It's three hours long, but it's good.

It's a plus bonus episode, maybe.

I don't know.

Is Heat the one that ends with the fight fight on a boat?

I don't want to tell you about the ending of Heat, but that's like Heat's the one that Payday is about.

Heat is,

yes, and also Heat is

a fantastic love story between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Okay, they're both good.

Yeah, also kind of Death Note before Death Note in some ways, too, except he's not killing people.

He's doing Ryuk is.

He's doing heists.

I wish Ryuk wasn't.

Well, it's very good that Jack

Ryuka who Ryuk is just because we happen to be be talking.

I assume that you know because we happen to be talking about a research.

I knew who Ryuk was before that.

I couldn't remember his name.

Okay.

But Death Note will come up again later.

Yeah.

So this is Squala, and

he is also joined by an unnamed man, unnamed for now,

who has cool, curly sideburns and the ugliest sweater on the planet.

These are the ones who are.

We have him written as Link from Zelda looking guy.

Yeah, he is Link from Zelda.

What did I say?

If Link from Zelda had busted facial hair.

Yeah, he has a bat.

Well, he has a bat.

Well, the curly thing kind of feels like a Zelda thing.

It's not.

I guess he's a sort of.

If he was a Zelda shopkeeper, I would like to see that.

Yeah, he's more like a Zelda.

If Link had that facial hair,

I'm turning to Mr.

Burns from that one Simpsons episode where he keeps saying, shave the sideburns.

He just looks kind of like a Hylian.

He does look like a Hylian.

And then Karapaka arrives at the castle, revealing that this is the

interview crew, or rather, the prospective employees for this flesh collector job.

I wrote down, they're all here.

Karapaka, Basho, Purplehead, Kiss Lady, Goblin, Dog Telephone Man, and Curly Sideburns.

And it becomes clear straight away that because he cannot resist it,

we're in another death game.

Tagashi has constructed another death game.

Because the interview is in two steps.

The first step involves finding items, scavenger hunting items from a list.

And the list includes these items.

Lock of hair from a famous actress.

Right arm of mummy from Egyptian tomb.

And if you, viewer, are thinking Egypt is in this world, this is a mistranslation that we will get back to later.

Scaly skin of patient with ichthyosis.

Skull of one-horned creature.

Kurta eyeballs.

Classic, you know,

red eyes at this point, as Karapika, you know, gets the

sharp, bitter taste of his proximity, or his necessary proximity, to people that he finds the most repugnant that there is.

I was so the

Egyptian tomb thing really struck me because at first I was like, I wonder if that was like a mistrano, like a very literal translation of like how pyramid is written in Japanese.

But then later on, there's something in the subtitles that make me think, no, Tagashi is just doing things here.

Yeah.

Tagashi is just naming things things.

Togashi is just naming things things.

I think that they mistranslated that subtitle.

Why save it for later?

Later, the mummy is talked about again, and it's described as an Egypt-Persian mummy,

like

a portmanteau of Egypt and Persia, which in and of itself, those are different countries.

They are not close to each other.

Sure.

But it is the like York New City thing.

And I am a little saddened because it robbed me of the excitement of like,

is this Earth?

Are we?

Are we?

Are we...

Are we in

Book of the New Sun?

Is this Earth?

Is this Earth?

So I was actually a little disappointed when it seems like instead of that, it is just these weird portmanteau sort of like interpolations of real world spaces.

Well, you know, I mean,

if they can rename New York City to York New City, they can have a different country named Egypt Persia.

That's true.

Or they can have a different hotel named the Kits Raralton.

I would say, I would say, you know, if something that you're curious about is

what planet is this?

You know,

keep being curious about that.

Yes,

also hey, don't Google it.

Don't Google it.

Don't Google it.

I will I am I will not Google anything.

Oh, I got some I got not Hunter Hunter spoilers, but

what was I doing and a hunter hunter character showed up on oh I saw some fan art of Karapaka of Killua and Gone just on TikTok the other day.

I was just scrolling through TikTok and it was not a spoiler, but I was like shit, I gotta be careful.

Yeah.

But that's just the world you live in.

Yeah.

You know, there's not much I can do about that.

This is really funny.

So I was doing that little character thing, and I was on the section of the hunter, hunter,

dot fandom.com wiki.

And in order of appearance, it has

Sarah parentheses hair listed.

Incredibly good.

Yeah.

Remember when I said that the first step of the interview process was that you have to get

the items on the list?

No, the first step of the interview process is leave this mansion with your lives.

I had a really quick

thing.

I can't remember if this happened here or if it happens after this, but I think it's this part where, you know, they're showing the items and they show the eyeballs of the Kurta clan.

And Basha has a moment where he sees it and he starts trying to explain what it is to Karapika.

Yeah.

And then we cut to Karapika and Karapika has the scarlet eyes and like Basho, and she basically tells or he basically tells Basho hey shut the fuck up and then Bosho sees the scarlet eyes and he's like oh there is something about

her there is something about these eyes I didn't want to mention it before but maybe now we should mention it they're not quite scarlet that's true

huh

and uh and you know I don't think it's a spoiler because this is definitely something that I noticed uh when I was first watching Karabik is wearing like gray contacts to keep his eyes from changing.

And

yes.

So you can sort of see the red on the outer ring of the eyes.

So, and it could be true that Basha got a good look, saw that the eyes were kind of weird, and was like,

this guy must be Kurta.

But I actually think that what's happening is just Karabika is being extremely intense and scary.

And Basho does not know why, but it's just like, I'm going to drop it.

Because

you see Karapika being sort of

being sort of secretive about his identities and powers in the next episode in an interesting sort of way?

Yeah, I feel like

I wonder if, I guess, is more of a way to put it, the red glow is just for the viewer as opposed to something that Basho sees because of the contacts.

I think it's just supposed to be like the cue that Karapika is feeling angry enough to activate the red eyes.

And also just in general, like worth flagging this as part of the ongoing theme of Karapika having to deceive people to get his revenge.

Yeah.

And like be very guarded about the most important thing in their life so far.

And not just, not just be guarded or be deceiving.

I think that there is, I'm so glad that you brought up these contacts, Keith, because I completely missed this.

But I think it is

so fascinating the way that

Karapika's control,

the demands on Karapika's control of his emotions, and on some level, sort of respectability, right?

Of not showing grief or not showing intense emotion

is physicalized.

You know, it is physicalized in the first place, you know, where when Karapika feels these really strong emotions, and usually the way we see it is fury, but I believe it is strong emotions of any kind.

His eyes turn red.

You know, everybody feels very strong emotions, but Karapika's are physicalized in his eyes turning red anyway.

And so it feels like such an interesting next step to say,

and then he has to hide that.

He has to shut that away.

Do we think that the because there is an undoubtedly a massive change between Karapika's demeanor when he is sort of

gray-eyes, even-keeled, stoic,

maybe slightly neurotic,

Maybe.

But like careful.

I think is another thing.

And then the eyes turn red, and it is like fully, like a barely controlled rage.

And even when we saw referencing Trick Tower again back when he was fighting Magitani, he knew the whole time that Magitani wasn't in the Phantom troop, but still could like barely get a hold of himself in that moment.

And what I'm curious about is if

Karapika's demeanor, if there's always this like bubbling rage,

or if the eyes turning red literally change his personality?

So

I think that's something that like we should keep thinking about.

And this is probably a conversation we could save for later, but we brought up Leorio earlier as sort of a foil for Karapika.

And I think that like Karapika having the more,

I've just, like, for lack of a to keep things simple, like, a good exterior personality, like a personality that, like you said, is kind and like wants to, like, de-escalate things and stuff like that.

And then having this sort of like darker,

like, fury and anger sort of always, like, in the background is

really like worth putting as against Leorio's

situation where he is presented to us early on as very greedy, very like, very hot-headed, very angry, and then has the opposite sort of thing going on

where like we

talked about it in the early episodes.

Like he is

one, there's the doctor thing already, but like he is very like caring and kind.

In addition to that, like

will go out of his way to

the example that's popping into my head right now is when he stayed behind with the

shapeshifters that I can't remember the name of

in the Hunter exam.

The Kiriko, thank you.

To like tend to the wounds and then like

the way he like would stop even for Tompa to help Tompa with his like tummy troubles and stuff like that.

Like I think it's interesting to because Hunter Hunter by giving us a main four

to like

bounce off each other.

Yeah.

There are a lot I want to watch Yu Yuhaka Show because I was talking to a friend about how there are similarities to the main four in that, but their positions within the like story are changed.

It's a whole thing we can talk about when we watch some Yuyuhaka show at some point in the future.

But

I was going to say, is I think it'd like something to try and do, I'm trying to do especially as we do this is

use all four of them to sort of like mirror each other or like how like the way that they they like bounce off each other in terms of similarities and differences.

And I think that the way that Kilowa and Gon have that going on, there's a lot of that with Karapika and Leorio.

Um, maybe not as explicitly, but still there.

It's oh man, I get to sound smart in this podcast for once.

Um, but I mean, like, what you're talking about here, Keith, also plays a lot into like what we know about how the brain works when it is exposed to trauma and then is also re-exposed to something that the part of the brain, like this is a very like bare bones.

Like, I'm not going to use like big neurosciencey terms because I also suck at neuroscience-y terms, but like the middle part of our brain is the part of our brain that is like fight-flight or freeze response, right?

That part of the brain also sucks at the perception of time.

And that is why something that happened to us a long time ago that is like particularly traumatic

in general.

Yeah, it can like hit us the same way.

And we also know that when we go into a trauma response, the part of our brain that is more like emotionally intelligent and also probably more, let's say, calm and compassionate and intellectual and reasoning, like literally that part of the brain, like its activity level goes down because you need blood and oxygen going to your muscles and all the other things that help you punch things or run faster.

So like, like that, that literally like what is happening to Karapika is an illustration of a trauma response.

And this happens every time that Kurapika is reminded of his trauma, of having like his whole people killed.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

reduced to

treasure.

It's the other thing.

It's not just the horror of a genocide.

It is, and I mean, decentralized.

The cruel indignity

of that.

It is the indignity of being commercialized, mass dehumanization.

It's so startling also to have these two arcs paired back to back, um, getting off of Heaven's Arena.

We talked about earlier how, like, this is already so much darker of

a plot line than we were dealing with, which was like, yeah, they were fighting, and there was some stuff with Hisuka, and there was like,

you know,

some stuff with the

Nen hazing.

But really,

it was fairly lighthearted

most of the time,

except for the fact that it's fully taking for granted, I think intentionally show, so taking for granted, like, the violence inherent to

the

world that they're now part of.

Like.

Goan gets beaten half to death with magic spinning tops and is basically like, all right, I learned a fun lesson about Ned.

Like, and it's funny to jump into the Karapika plotline where the consequences of violence are taken so seriously.

It's the only time that so far the consequences of violence are really taken seriously, where Karapika is like, fully changed as a person because of it.

And you can compare it to something like Naruto, where,

you know, admitted, oh, God, what's his name?

Kishimoto from, is that the Naruto author?

You got it.

I always forget it.

So this is the first time I've ever remembered that.

Is fully admits that

Sasuke from Naruto is a sort of composite character of two

Tagashi characters.

One of them is Karabika and one of them is Hiei from Yu Yu Hakasho.

And

Sasuke also is

a sort of dour young boy with eyes that turn red when he's mad with superpowers that had his entire family get slaughtered.

And

he is like also sort of kind of forever changed by this.

But the way that it plays out in the sort of day-to-day

is

kind of like a long,

slow, like a sort of like sour angst.

Like he's angst, he's angry, he's depressed, he's

extremely competent in a similar way to Karabika, but it is sort of funny to have these two things to compare that.

It's a way to take that sort of character

where

it just feels like the violence is taken and the consequences of violence is taken so seriously in Hunter in this part of Hunter Hunter that is not just dissimilar from other parts of Hunter Hunter so far, but from almost any other show in the genre that I can think of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I do think there is a distinction there in terms of like the violence that we saw with Goan and Heaven's Arena isn't a weird way of violence that Goan chose to experience,

which is not to say it's any less terrifying.

No.

But it's the same people.

Like, Hizuka is

in the same group that,

that you know asterisk but as in the same group as the people that did this to the kurta clan and to karapika like it's it's a different situation but it's the yeah it's all those people are capable of it and are part of a world that that does stuff like it i do think it is interesting and this is we'll talk more about this later but they do are they are kind of playing with this idea of not only how much is hisuka actually a member of the phantom troop but later on it's was Hisuka a member of the Phantom Troop when this happened?

Right.

Um, yeah, yeah, we will definitely learn more about that.

But it is, it is, I think, a, an interesting juxtaposition, I think, an intentional juxtaposition to have,

like,

have a new,

have a,

be following so closely a character that is like interacting with

doing violence and receiving violence in a much different way than the last 15, 20 episodes.

Sure.

Well, or even in the last 40 episodes.

Anyway, that's right.

That was a long tangent.

No, I think a valuable tangent.

Time for killing and fighting now.

Yeah.

You know what we're all here for?

Keith, Chain Bastard.

It's Chainbastard.

Keith.

The wall of the building explodes, and a bunch of masked

men wielding swords and guns burst out.

You know, we are full-scale.

Tagashi death game has begun.

You are now trapped in the mansion and you have to get out.

This death game is really funny.

Not content with looking the tournament arc dead in the eye and saying,

That's enough of that.

I feel like Tagashi looks his own death game dead in the eye and says, that's enough of that after about, you know, 15 minutes.

Like, what could be a whole arc gets dispensed with so quickly.

I'm just going to hit the big things here.

It is the crew learn quickly that one of the men, the Hylian, the man with the sideburns, whose name is

Shakmono Tocino, which is the sideburn name?

Tosino.

Great name.

Tosino.

Hey, it's my cousin Ticino over here.

There's a lot said about

oh fuck, I forgot his name.

But the guy who made Gundam.

There's a lot to said about his names.

Tagashi's got some great names too.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He is an imposter.

He's conjured these figures.

He is a cat thrown among the pigeons by the

by the crew.

Oh, sorry, by the by the employers.

And he lets slip, perhaps deliberately, that there might be another imposter among them.

At which point, Karapika, the chain bastard himself,

busts out a chain and uses it as a dowsing rod to do what is essentially the blood test from, well, what seems like it's going to be the blood test from the thing, you know, where he lines them all up and he says, you know, if this moves, you're probably the imposter.

Melody,

who I didn't know who she was.

She's not named yet.

I wrote down The Goblin, subtitled Short Woman,

gives a PowerPoint presentation on dowsing.

And this is how I knew that her and Kurapika were probably going to be fast friends because,

you know, PowerPoint is a very important thing.

This is after Kurapika gives a PowerPoint presentation on like how he knew it was the highly imposter.

I do love this part where, like, we haven't figured out what is happening here, but we get a lot of, it's back to the old thing of like watching Karapika get some distance on an event and just like kind of look at what's going on.

And you do see that these guys are not very good swordsmen.

Yeah.

What is going on with these flailing idiots?

And then we get a little bit of Basho punching one and kind of being like, something is weird about this.

Do we say what they are?

We are.

They're summoned.

They are

kind of a ninja.

They are

shaped like a human.

Yeah.

Oh, it's so great.

We get this great shot.

Very studio ghibly or Miyazaki shot of like one of them getting hit and shrinking down into this tiny doll that then shrinks down into nothing.

Really reminds me of the

actually these guys remind me a lot of the like

goop men from Howl's Moving Castle,

Witch of the West's horrible goop men.

I'm sorry to pause here, but we have changed episodes.

This is episode 40 now that we're in, right?

And

I didn't watch any of the Hunterpedias this week, and I only realized that.

This one's so cute.

I only realized that because before the show, I was looking at

the scratch doc that has some of our little notes here.

And Dre, you have a note about the Hunterpedia.

If we want to really quick hit this Hunterpedia.

Oh, yeah.

The Hunter PD at the end of episode 39, they're talking about Kuropica's teacher.

I'm forgetting his name again.

Mizuka.

Yeah.

And they say something along the line.

I think Goan says something along the lines of, I guess Nin users are destined to be Nin teachers.

But how do people end up being Nin teachers?

I mean, I'm just assuming.

that there is no like rhyme or reason or organization or qualification to it whatsoever because that's everything involved with the hunter Association outside of the exam.

I mean, it's like, hey, we can use Dragon Ball as a

touchstone now.

I guess it is kind of in the same way.

It's like, what qualifies Master Roshi, right?

Right.

Like,

it really, it really is.

Well, that qualifies him.

He knows something that he can teach people.

Yeah.

But I guess it's about,

it's got to be at least half about the student, right?

And so

Goku just shows up and sees Master Roshi one day, and they basically are like, I'll teach you how to be a bar of that.

And they, they just sort of like form a decades-long bond based off of, it is really vibes-based, I guess.

Yeah.

I guess we do get mention by Wing that it is a school of martial arts, the Shingonryu school,

does teach Nen.

And that doesn't isn't to say that all Nen is the Shingenryu martial arts or whatever.

I think that's more tied to the philosophy that's attached to Nen that he teaches.

But I think that does imply that there probably are some organizations that have popped popped up that have like codified how to teach nin and understand nen in this kind of way.

I guess it's got to be in the same way that some people are like, I want to become a hunter.

I've now learned about nen and I'm going to dedicate myself to being a gourmet hunter.

I would not be surprised that a lot of people are like, I want to go learn a bunch about Nen so that I can teach someone everything that I've learned about Nen.

Very possibly.

I think that's very possible.

The other thing I picked up from this little Hunterpedia ending is that they don't just say,

I wrote the line down exactly.

I guess nen users are fated to meet Nen teachers.

Maybe that's why we met each other, says Gon and Killiwa.

And they rub cheeks together.

And then they rub cheeks together.

It is so cute.

I don't know whether or not we should take from there that one of them is a nen teacher and one of them is a nen user.

I think that they're both nen users who met teachers, but it's like we were classmates, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's more how I think it's.

It's the two translations sort of have it coming from the opposite way one of them are nen users are destined to become nen teachers and the other one is nen users are sorry jack what was yours again uh nen users are fated to meet fated to meet teachers

which is

yeah this is jojo-esque that's a jojo-esque thing to say speaking of jojoesque

I have uh the guy that originally at the very end of the last episode, we skipped it.

It's not super important, but the guy that gives them their mission over the TV speaker, I said that this is a JoJo-looking guy to me.

Oh,

what's his name?

I could be wrong.

Maybe I'm Dojo.

I want to call him Dolezal, but

Dalzaline.

Yeah, Dalzaline.

He's a very Dojo-looking guy to me.

Famous Dale.

Not a meme character.

Yeah.

No, I don't see.

Pretending to be a nun character.

Nun user.

Um, let's see.

Uh,

okay, so they will fight.

Uh, the imposter starts pointing towards Squala as a possible uh, sorry, the dowsing points to squalor as a possible imposter.

And then it's so funny that it's just like, why can he,

why can he do this?

What is this?

Nen power.

Okay, so he's a conjurer, so he's conjured a little ball that can detect what?

What does it detect?

Well, have I got some news for you?

Because we're about about to meet the coolest, stupidest nen power we've seen in a long time.

Basho pulls out an inkbrush and supposes a poem.

So good.

His poem is something like, my hand makes a punch, and whoever I hit will burst into flames a bunch.

Basho's power is called Wandering Haiku Poet.

It is so.

And in his title card, we get watercolor illustration of him in the style of like old Japanese watercolors.

It's so funny.

There's so many weird little differences between the subs this time.

It usually doesn't come up this often,

but

the

translation for

your poem is so much.

Mine was something like, I don't have it written down, but it's something like, whatever I punch will burst into flames, is what it was.

No, he definitely rhymes punch and a bunch.

Yeah.

So he sets up a new poem, which is,

if you're a liar, your painful death will be swift and in fire.

And now this is a the thing blood test.

You know, Karapaga was just pissing about with a little dowsing rod.

This guy is going to burn someone if they reveal or tell a lie.

This one has like a little bit of

like, it's a little bit evidentiary.

If someone will

not tell the truth, they will burst into flames.

They will self-combust.

Yes.

And there's this lovely little moment where, you know, they ask the Hylian if he is an imposter.

And he's like, Well, yeah, sure, yep, of course I am, and doesn't burst into flames.

And it is revealed that Squala is and is an imposter.

He is working for the crew, which means that our new employees are Melody, Bass, Basho, and Karapika, or the new prospective employees.

Squala is a manipulator who doesn't have a hunter license.

He is a hunter without an official license.

Hey, what?

Yeah.

I wrote that down as like, oh, we are now using hunter as shorthand for nen user as opposed to

mean accredited hunter.

Which I think is a very pointed thing at this point in the show, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because it really means that the thing that's important about being a hunter is not the test.

It's not passing the test.

What, you mean the death game where most people die?

Including

nearly gone?

That is merely

the turn that you take to set you on the path to learning Nen.

And also the thing that you take so that you can't get arrested for murdering people.

Sure.

That's true.

Okay, I'm ringing the what is a hunter bell.

New prospective answer.

Anybody who can use Nen is a hunter.

Well, but there's people with hunters licenses that can't use Nen.

And never learn.

Yeah.

Oh, they are still technically hunters.

But are they only technically hunters?

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah.

I mean, it goes back to like, I remember we, we, I think, Sylvie, you said this, like, right after they got the exam, and they're talking about, like, well, now that you're a hunter, you can ride the bus as much as you want.

And it's like, well, this fucking sucks.

Why did everybody like, why did so many people die in pursuit of a free bus pass?

And I guess like, this is the answer, right?

It's that the free bus pass is also the pass to like sending you on a track to learn nen, potentially.

I hate it.

I think it's probably just such a headache.

Learning Nen.

Oh, almost definitely.

And not just because your pores get blasted with none sometimes.

I imagine that is also, it gives you a literal headache.

Yeah.

Yeah, probably.

But it gives you really good skin.

Maybe.

It turns out that Squala has

sort of charmed the dogs

around

using dog nan power.

Hey, Jack, how do we learn this?

Oh, 180-hour.

Nope.

No.

No.

that would be so powerful.

180-minute kiss slave love.

What's it called?

Instant lover.

Yeah, it goes exactly as we expect.

There's something about the efficacy of 180-hour love

and

Basho, I can make a poem about anything that really is just like childhood games.

Like, well, I have the gun that fires endless bullets, and it can do anything, and you can't beat me.

The gun is very Calvin Ball.

Yes.

It's also extremely binary.

It's sort of just like, my move works.

Like, it flips on.

Yeah, and it's so fun to see this outside of the context of a tournament arc where people are like setting nen powers off against each other.

Whereas it seems that post-tournament arc, it's often being used like a Swiss army knife.

It's just like, oh, do you have the nen power that lets you open doors of a diameter wider than three feet?

Yeah, of course I do.

Bang, doors open, No problem.

Um, look at your brief power that lets you make a video game.

Don't even get me started.

I'm so excited to talk about the game.

Um,

uh, subset of uh dog PowerPoint presentation briefly introduced.

The Maltese will nip at people's heels, the Supanard will smother them, the dogmans will swarm in and kill.

If the target escapes, the bulldogs will finish them off.

Everybody is now just delivering like more and more elaborate PowerPoint presentations.

And this one really was just a slideshow of lovingly animated dogs.

It was great.

Yeah, easy way to get some dogs in there.

And then they just leave the mansion.

This is Tagashi going, I don't think I want to do a death game today.

We're done with this now.

This could have been 10 episodes, but it's just half of one.

The joke is that these people, despite some of them being nen users themselves, were just woefully underprepared for four skilled nen users to rock up.

It is phenomenal that when something starts happening in Hunter Hunter, there's no way to know if it's going to take one half of one episode or 80 episodes.

It's so funny.

It is so funny.

And I think it's part of why I keep getting tripped up by the beginnings of ARCs feeling a little slow.

It's like I'm the guy who has never ridden a roller coaster before and doesn't know what it is and is like, oh, this bit where we just go slowly up a hill is so uninteresting to me.

Especially for a guy who's so committed to

like building that track and like giving you a height to drop from.

But sometimes Tagashi will just go, all right, everybody off.

Rollercoaster's done.

We're all going to go and get hot dogs over on the other side of the park now.

Completely unrelated.

Melody keeps her nen class secret.

They have a little chat about what they are.

Melody's answer is basically, wouldn't you like to know, Weatherboy?

Which is really funny.

um

melody's great karapika also keeps his name and skill secret because he doesn't know if they're going to be working together and they begin the scavenger hunt it's funny because melody is like really wants to know karapika's name because she's sort of like

she sort of figured him out and is curious about his secret darkness and is like what's going on with this guy he's so interesting

what's up with his strange swag but karapica is like i'm working with four people one of them's a goblin end of story.

Simply end of story.

Goblin with a really smart understanding of dowsing history.

So like Melodius is currently fighting an uphill battle to become friends with Kropika.

Yeah, but she does have...

She got off on a really good foot by giving a power pay presentation.

Yeah, that's true.

But it has to be about the right kind of thing.

And they hate to be in the same city at the same time.

And they seem to like that about each other.

Yes, that's true.

um

uh back in the mansion the tall man what's the guy called dolazine what's his name oh it's stupid it's a stupid name it's it's a dalzon dollzine

dollzin we have it written down we have it i'm reading it dalzoline yeah d-a-l-z-o-l-l-e-n-e dollzoline Dalzoline for mild to severe skin irritation.

Sorry, Jack, say again, what'd you say?

Dalsoline for mild to severe skin irritations.

Back in the mansion,

Dozaline is talking to the candidates, sorry, to the infiltrators.

And they say, one of the candidates looked promising, at least more than him, and points to like a man bound and gagged in the corner.

And then Dozaline says, it'll be a while before I require him.

You should put him away, Squala.

And Squala's like, okay.

And this does not come up again in the episodes that we have seen.

There is some sort of game being played here that we do not have access to.

Oh, first no,

I also thought that was maybe the butler

who I didn't include this note, but the butler who is the droopiest man I've ever seen in my life.

The butler who immediately no, the butler gets immediately killed by the button.

Right.

Yeah, by instant butler.

Yeah, butler instant loved and dies protecting women.

Right.

Sorry, I also.

But I also was like, I don't know, man, maybe that butler didn't die because it's Hunter-Hunter.

When does this come up again, Keith?

Sorry, you're saying the man in the corner doesn't come again?

The bound and gagged man in the corner, yeah.

He's the living, he's like the horrible body on the wall that gets gooped up on the wall.

Oh,

and they're like, Yeah, I don't like this, it's too realistic.

And they're like,

Yep, we'll get to the gooped man.

Yeah,

he becomes the gooped man.

Uh, chordal music rises as Karapaka reaffirms his desire for revenge, his aura burns around him, his eyes turn red.

So, we've got a couple new songs in this little part.

Uh, we get, we get, uh, we, sorry, I never said the name before,

but

Basho's little theme

is called the

Ida, the

Eido Lunatic is what it's called.

That's the

presumably, much like the chain bastard is Karapika, the ideal, Idolunatic is Basho.

Yeah, that's this one.

That one.

We get

the second appearance here of Requiem

Aranea,

which hasn't happened since the last time that we talked a lot about

the

Phantom Troop.

This is when I wanted to bring up Death Note again, because this is very similar to...

Oh.

I don't interrupt.

I think you could have talked over that, but I let it pass.

Fine.

I showed deference to the troop, you know?

Yeah.

A lot of the work Hirano did on Death Note was these very operatic choral songs.

Like, I think he

did a lot of the stuff in the latter half,

but don't hold me to that.

There were two composers on Death Note, but like the ones that he's credited to,

the one that I'm thinking of in particular is...

Did you mention earlier that he was also on Death Note?

I did.

I would miss that.

I would definitely missed missed it.

That's crazy.

Yeah, no, he did a lot of, like, he did, like, Dominique Kira and like the Requiem in that show as well.

Yeah.

A lot of these,

like, you can hear, you can picture them being recorded in like a big cathedral type

songs, you know?

It's beautiful composing.

Oh, he's fantastic at it.

Like, it's really good.

I'll send you some.

I imagine it's the same style of music in the other thing that he started doing in 2006, which was composing for Oron High School Host Club.

this guy's great

this guy's

he's got a he's got a body of work he does a reveal body final fantasy 13 as well he was an additional composer on that

um it's it is this record that plays is great um

i am

such a vibes-based uh like music supervisor in my own work in terms of like what i choose to soundtrack and why Um, and in my own work, I'm always so resistant to being like, This character's on screen, so I'm playing the you know, or like this character has a big martial thing, so I'm gonna play big stomping steps to sound like his footsteps, or whatever.

Um, so I'm always so reluctant to do that in my own work, but I don't know how you know the composers and music supervisors here are feeling about it.

But I do think it is really notable that in these moments when Karapika is uh

um

I wanted a better way of saying rotating the phantom troop in his mind.

Yeah.

I mean, when he is

focusing on the singular object of his revenge, when he doesn't think about those spiders, when he's thinking about those

spiders, oh,

we don't get his theme.

We don't get Karapika's motifs.

We get the troop's motifs.

And there is something about it preying on his mind.

So this is the second time it's shown up, but it's been so long.

And the only other time was, yeah, the last time that he was talking with the troop, basically.

It is similar to a lot of Zoldic music.

The Zaldic

stuff is a little more romantic,

but there is this line being drawn by Hirano of like

bloodshed and specifically like

bloodshed in the service of money.

I would call the Zaldic's one to me is like bombastic.

Yeah.

It's like evil, but it's also bombastic.

This one is tragic.

This is like, yes.

this theme is so

it is like haunted.

It is like a haunted house kind of sad.

It's so lovely.

I really thought about this a lot

when it was showing up in the thing where I was like, oh man, I would love to arrange this.

But so much of the power of this is in his instrumentation, is in these, this, this choral voicing.

And you would lose so much of that power if I, you know, transposed it to different instruments.

It's just such a gorgeous piece of composing.

And as the troop starts to appear, we are one episode away from the arrival of the phantom, the proper arrival of the phantom troop.

I want to say this: the scene where it's playing,

the difference between the sub and the dub, because when something cool happens, I usually switch just to see what's going on in both.

But the

English dub for Karapika,

Erica Harlicker, is super angry delivering this like model.

He's like monologuing his plans for the Phantom Troop

and

complaining, basically talking about like all of these, what do they call them?

I keep calling them body traders, but they're called something else actually.

Flesh collectors.

He's like, all these people, I'm going to kill all these people.

And she hits it really hard.

The voice actress is just furious.

Mizuki's Sawashiro, the Japanese actress,

is

unhinged.

Extremely disturbing delivery.

It's great.

She really goes for it.

And, you know, it coincides with that or with the aura burning.

When I say burn, I don't mean like fire.

It's this effect that we've seen when purple smoke.

It almost looks like...

No, it's not even purple.

It's the white evaporation around their bodies when you see that.

Oh, yeah, it's the 10 being escaping instead of being contained.

Oh, it's great.

Yeah.

I know everyone, yeah.

In the Zaldic Estate, Maluki is reverse engineering the game.

You can tell that Maluki is a technical person because he uses four keyboards at once.

And then he delivers the web address.

He basically says,

I can probably get the game from this.

You know, I can, I can.

Killer gave me the real deal.

I can probably

crack the game.

And we're not...

We're not entirely sure what his plan is.

He talks about

making something revealed, but it's not clear why exactly he wants the game because he could presumably afford it.

He's the Zaldix are super rich.

I don't know what's happening to him.

It is a lot of money, and

they have limits.

Because if you remember back when he was torturing Kilua, he's like

talking about a deal that he had to make in order to afford a new computer.

I think that they are on sort of strict.

They're on like

a little walking around money.

Yeah, they have an allowance.

Yeah, that sounds like to spend $9 billion

on a video game.

Sorry, $9 billion Jenny.

Yes, and he decides that he is going to give Killua the

goods.

He's going to follow through.

He writes the URL on a little scroll and sends it off on a hawk.

This is the Zaldix through and through, right?

The opera, the

splashy, overwhelming, kind of silly, even in the moments of violence.

They're camp.

They are.

They are camp.

In a way that

the Phantom Troop, the Phantom Trooper camp in a different way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh,

I totally missed this.

Sorry to hit this again, but we actually, not only do we get,

uh not only do we get the the requirement uh are anea the fandom troop theme but we get a more specific theme we get um and maybe i'll play it when he shows up instead of now because we're past the moment but is this krollo's theme the man of the reversed cross

yeah

do you want it now or do you want to wait until next episode let's wait until let's wait let's give him his moment you know yeah yeah yeah uh

do we like the songs in in the thing do we like this is good i love it okay great yeah i'm having a great time.

Great.

And viewers, we can't hear you.

No.

In three months, you can tell me whether you like it or not.

On a boat, Gon and Killua see York New.

They get the Hawk message.

They are excited to meet the rest of the gang.

It's very sweet.

Killua is wearing the silliest outfit he's worn so far.

Oh, does anybody want to describe the outfit?

You mean the sickest, drippiest outfit that Killua was in?

Yeah, absolutely.

So good.

Go for it, Dre.

if you got it i don't have a picture in front of me i i have it written down i have it written down here if you haven't written down go for it i could do it off memory he's wearing a burgundy tank top yeah two ripped black arm sleeves

a striped cream and black pants like like like in like oversized pants uh he's wearing a feather necklace like two feathers on a string He's carrying a hawk.

And we actually don't get this.

I had to add this in because we don't get it until next episode.

And he's wearing flip-flops.

Killer dresses like lesbians, I know.

Like, just straight up.

And Icon, Killa was older.

I know that that tank top is a $500 tank top.

Oh, yeah, no, that thing is...

So are the like torn-up arm warmer elbow pads for sure.

Those go for like $500 each.

Yeah.

You know?

It's so funny.

Yeah, the Gustial Killer was look, and it's that collage of,

huge amounts of money.

Yeah, it comes out to $28,000 United States dollars.

Yeah.

Although that's what Kilo-I don't know.

I don't know.

Is that what Kilo spends his alliance on?

And candy.

And candy.

Yeah.

His allowance is candy.

It's possible.

And a skateboard.

Where's Kilo's skateboard?

This is really funny.

I don't know.

Where's Guns?

I don't know.

Where's Guns Viscall?

I don't know.

Fair enough.

This is something that I've had in my head for a while, but maybe instead of spending all of his money on clothes, i wouldn't be surprised if the zoldix have a like uh they employ a clothes buyer because um kalu uh no what's her name kikio

also dresses incredibly silva also dresses incredibly they all dress

yeah so i'm thinking that they have a an a stylist that they employ yeah that or they just you know they kill people and take all their clothes that's true they only kill the most fashionable people one murder a day one murder a murder a day It works.

Stage and four murder dreamer worked like this, Jack, where you had to kill the people to get the clothing.

This is Love Nikki.

You're describing yourself.

That's right.

I am.

Okay, on to episode 41.

Yeah.

York New City is surprisingly uninteresting looking.

Any of this buildup.

Anything good?

Any good Hunterpedia for that one?

I didn't write anything down, and I've been writing them down if they are interesting to me.

Okay.

I think it's about Musican, so no.

Yeah, sorry, no, Musican was the one we did.

We talked about the Musican one.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, that was the teacher one.

Whatever.

If it's...

It's probably not important.

Yeah.

I don't remember what it is.

York New City is very bland.

And it makes me wonder.

None of the cities that we've seen so far have been particularly interesting looking, have they?

The show is very good at these singular images.

You know, the image of the hotel where they had the cooking competition with all the pigs on the spits in front of them, the image of Cookeroo Mountain, the image of the Zaldic Estate,

some of the stuff we get later with the Phantom Troop set.

There's some really nice set design, but not a lot of it is like

cities

and good-looking cities.

We do get some good, we get some really good locations in New York New City,

but like not a ton of like beautiful New York city landscape, like postcard shots, you know, like there's not a good sky very interesting color work.

It's very beige.

We get we get some really good like, oh, here's a wide shot of like a street at night, like some nightlife shots.

And then we get some really, really nice daytime stuff.

But yeah, we don't, as far as I remember, there's not a really nice York news skyline.

Yeah.

I think you're right.

I think there is one.

I think there is exactly one shot where I would consider that.

I now know exactly the one shot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Come on.

Yes.

There's a very actually important shot of it.

Yes.

I also think that they do later, when we get closer to the auction, make the city have a more distinct feel.

Yeah, totally.

You get a really good, the city is really cool once we get to like know a few places, but there is this, now that I'm thinking it, there is this very fun

sort of like they save the view for when we get to the view.

If that's

that's great.

So

that bizarre tower that you see in the opening frame of the show is in York New City?

I think.

Okay.

Interesting.

I thought that the bizarre tower was Heaven's Arena.

Oh, I don't know.

I think there might be another skyscraper.

Yeah, I'm not.

I cannot recall all the images from that right now.

Yeah.

In any case, it's time to go to an internet cafe.

This is shirt.

This is wonderful.

What a revealing, what an embarrassing reveal on how hunters see themselves.

Yes.

So, Garden Killer against the Hunter website.

Its splash page is a bad CPA photograph of a bar.

And even before we go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I thought to myself, hey, do hunters have taste?

No.

No, right.

Because Killer was not a hunter.

That's true.

Killer is not a hunter.

The hunters are regularly some of the coolest people you will ever see, but they're like, oh, here's the thing.

I want to find an exact quote.

Oh, it wasn't that.

And I've reached my monthly limits.

I'm just going.

I'm just going to.

I'm just going to fucking adler.

But

yeah, the vibe I get with the hunters' taste reminds me of a great quote from

some piece about Steely Dan that I read in which the author, she describes the great paradox and success of Steely Dan is something like the fact that it is extremely entertaining to watch the two least cool dudes you have ever met try to make the most laid-back music in the world.

And this is the impression that I get watching hunters do anything.

They are like, they are simultaneously, overwhelmingly powerful and look extremely cool and are also just spectacularly tasteless, self-obsessed weirdos.

It's great because we have to log into their website with our little hunter thing and we get that you have to get the URL by hawk.

Yeah, yeah, I imagine it's like a what are they like a like a tour URL or something where it's just like a string of numbers I don't think it's like a real you can't go to www.hunterwebsite dot plus it's hunterhunter.onion.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And we enter it and it is a point-and-click game set in a cowboy saloon, complete with a sort of website.

It's a flash website, complete with a little bartender.

And of course, this is being made at a time when flash websites,

were more

popular.

Or more common.

Right?

Actually, it was like right before they were pop popular.

This is like slightly ahead of its time on the internet, I feel like.

Yeah, I guess if you consider when the manga was written too, like very ahead of its time.

Yeah.

Which is why they they actually had that they added the next thing that happens.

This is unique to the 2011 anime.

Oh, because the next thing that happens is so f oh, so firstly, we learned that uh it costs money to get information from the forum it's just terrible this is uh this is the uh prima games of of things you have to pay money for a guide that you could get for free um and a weird man will tell you

Yeah, because Nen starts coming rushing out of the computer and sucks them into the game.

Yeah.

Something about a website having had, having been spelled, having been witched by Nen and dragging you into the computer is just, this is by far the least stupid thing we have seen Nen do, but there's something so like facile and petty about it, about like, you know, Nen can do anything, but instead we have witched a website to draw you into it.

Uh,

and uh

we are now chatting with the bartender.

We pay him a bunch of money and we learn that Greed Island is a game created by Nen users.

It has multiple creators whose motives and identities are unclear.

The game is Nen-infused, pulling the player into the game.

As long as you stay alive in the game, the console will continue to run.

Even if the card is removed, you can only return if you find a save point.

The game is very dangerous.

People will send hunters into it to give it a shot, and none of them will come back.

And all I could think about watching this was how cleanly and spectacularly I called the shock when in the first episode of this show, I said, this show is obsessed with games and like abstracted game ideas.

Hunters make for themselves a world that is just literalized quests and games.

Even the little website.

Even the little website.

But, you know, Greed, I felt this when Greed Island was introduced and it was like, oh, it's a game made by hunters for hunters.

But like learning that it draws you into the game, you know, it literalizes the metaphor of what hunters are.

You know, if hunters are people constantly seeking to be drawn into a world of adventure and mystery and intrigue and violence, you know, how much more literal does Takashi have to make it to have these people pay vast amounts of money to be physically transported into a game?

Yeah.

It's it's great.

The

other note that I have here that I put on the dock is before they get sucked into the website,

they

are they had to buy the information.

The information was, I think it was two million or twenty million Jenny, it's like two hundred thousand dollars, which is a lot of money.

Uh, and um, it reminded me, just popped into my head, is like the old, it's like the old saying about the gold rush, where it's like the real people who made a fortune from the gold rush were the people selling like pails and shovels.

Um, yeah, and

the

person who makes the website that hunters go to buy information at is the only thing, gave me the sentence here.

The only thing

a hunter must have, a hunter must have started the hunter-only website.

What's the only thing more powerful than a hunter?

A hunter who is also a capitalist.

And like to use the power and reach of

of what being a hunter gives you to profit seek is terrifying.

Yeah.

Because we've actually not, it doesn't matter whose version of what a hunter is, we've heard.

The only profit seekers that we've heard about have been like poachers and thieves and murderers.

We haven't heard a lot of hunters who have like

started businesses.

To me, it is so much worse to live in that world, to have the scale of resources that being a hunter gets you,

than to be like, you know what we need?

Amazon or something.

Yeah, yeah.

Hunter, Amazon.

Hunter, Amazon.

This is the, you know, ebex.

If Ebex was watching Hunter, Hunter.

Yeah.

If Ebex at the beginning of the show.

Ebex at the end of the show would be watching Hunter Hunter and probably thinking something different.

But I love this.

We learned that seven copies will be sold at the auction.

The lowest starting bid is 8.9 billion Jenny.

Gone and Killua, two kids who don't understand money or the internet, are incensed.

They were like, we could have just got this at retail.

Cheaper than that.

It's bullshit.

These children.

Of course, there is no retail.

There's a hundred copies.

No, they're gone.

No, but

they are discovering that the holder of the rare commodity is the one who sets its value in real time.

And they respond in the funniest possible way.

Dre, you you had to note about this yes yeah dre

yeah they got scammed on fake ebay they got scammed on fake ebay after

after

a short but intense montage of them like making deals online and not just making deals online the pictures

making deals for treasure yes for treasure

their whole plan is we should just buy a bunch of treasure and then sell it for a profit and that's how we will make the $9 billion.

People are drop shipping.

Yeah, they're

drop shipping treasure.

The thing that makes the joke work so well for me really is the fact that it's treasure.

That we cut to seeing what they're seeing on the computer screen.

It's just like bejeweled amulets.

It's Indiana Jones shit.

For me, it's how quickly they go from free, like still, three still images, Kilua talking on a phone, making a business deal, gone, mouse in his hand, leaning over at the screen, Cut to the two of them, Goan, hands in the air and laughing.

Kilo giving a big thumbs up, and then cut to head in hands.

We lost all our money.

So funny.

It looks like in about eight minutes, they lost

790 million Jenny.

No, 790,000 Jenny.

It's wonderful.

It's a lot.

I wrote down here, they simply can't make enough money.

Oh, wait, let me go back a step real quick.

My first thought when I heard about Greed Island being a game that sucks you into the game, loads of people have gone in, none have come out.

Nobody knows who built it and why.

There are certain criteria for going in and coming out.

Literally, the first thing I thought when I heard it was like, this is going to make a really sick arc, several arcs down the road.

I was just like, this is a good setup for a story going inside the cursed video game.

But it's Tagashi, so he might go in there for 10 minutes and then he'll be done with it.

But I don't know.

We're going into Greed Island at some point because it's to do with the gene plot line.

I'm stoked.

Meanwhile, back in the place where people haven't just gambled away all of their money on a plaster cast of

a dead queen's head,

the crew of Weirdos is shown a

man who's sort of been sealed in carbonite if it was somehow worse.

He's sort of been

lacquered.

He's been...

He's been engoped.

He's been engaged.

This is a man who's been engooped.

Yeah.

Enveloped by the goop.

Enveloped by the goop, yes.

I was going to say, it's like

he's caught in a digestive enzyme on the wall.

Yeah, you know, horrible.

Horrible.

And this is a previous bodyguard who

gave bad information, understood bad information.

The impression that you get isn't that

he fucked it up

inoffensively.

You know,

he made a screw-up, but it wasn't like he betrayed them or anything.

He just was wrong about something.

And they are introduced to the boss.

It's time to meet the boss.

The cutest girl with the worst posture I have ever seen.

This is the first.

I've seen cuter and I've seen worse.

I'm ringing the bell.

This is our first.

When we had Ali on and we were talking during the Zaldic arc, Ali talked about a panel in the manga where Tagashi says, oh, I have just gotten married to the Salem Moon creator.

You know,

this is us proposing.

This is us planning the wedding.

And now we work together.

And there's that shot of them, you know, sitting side by side as they are.

Presumably as Tagashi is working on the Zaldic arc.

Miss Neon, the boss, is our first fully formed Salem Moon magical girl character design showing up in the show.

We have had

Menshi a little bit.

We've had Machi the Doctor, but I think those are just shonen ladies.

I think that Miss Neon is a magical girl character design produced by sitting four feet away from the woman drawing Sailor Moon.

Totally.

I 100% agree.

Shout out to

Naoko Takeuchi, who

very clearly, I think, inspired the design.

And it's great.

It's a great design.

Yeah, she's surrounded by by plushies.

All you need to know is

Bardie.

Yeah, all you need to know at this point is she is the flesh collector boss.

And at this point in the story, we just have all the business that you can imagine surrounding.

She's supposed to be intimidating, but she's just a cute little girl.

You know, that is really where we are at this point.

It's like, there's a mismatch between her.

menacing status and her actual affect which is just a friendly yeah uh bubbly team girl and we just sort of get like really quick the plan to

uh

to like take the boss from the airport to to the auction site.

Um, there's nothing really interesting that happens here, except for um,

the sort of head bodyguard gets into a sort of

a mild bickering match with Karapika about, like, Karapika's like, I'm going to make a plan and I'm going to figure out what's going on.

And is there anybody you know who would do something to take out to harm the boss?

And he's just like, no, it's not about that.

You just need to protect her from everything.

Well, this is also him, I think, beginning to get the idea that Karapaka is asking a lot of questions.

Because what Karapaka is doing here is fishing for information that will draw him closer to his targets, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Now, I have a question.

Yeah.

Before we move on to the...

I'm ready to move on to the next scene.

Is there anything about Miss Neon that we would like to see?

I have one note about Neon, which is that her vibes are, she's like one of those Twitter users that has like gained a following for being like cute and quirky and whatever.

And then you find out that they work for Raytheon.

Because it's like, oh, she's so cute and quirky.

And then it's like, oh, yeah, she's also like, she buys like the eyes of a fucking genocided people on the black market and collects like both the living and the dead.

She sure does.

Do you know what she is?

She's the girl who got canceled on Tumblr for stealing bones from a cemetery to do her witchcraft.

Oh, yeah.

That's what Neon is.

Yeah.

Yep.

Jesus.

That was a real thing that happened.

I believe you.

She's great.

I'll say that

she does have a sort of haunted quality about her.

Like,

she's like, she does have the hunched over.

She has slightly stupid views there.

Interesting.

Yeah.

She's got like a tattered

bandana that ties her hair up.

Her clothes are kind of like

pink witch.

There is something that is like deliberately, I think, very off about her.

Like as much as she has the sort of like bubbly quirky personality, she is also like presented as being a little off kilter.

The one way that she's not exactly the like

the girl you find out, the influencer who turns out to be working for Raytheon, atheon is that

she also is kind of scary right away and those people are like squeaky clean

yeah yeah

um

i have a question yeah yes

let's say oh you will yoshihiro tagoshi i probably have one thing before this yes i'm pretty sure that before the next scene starts in proper,

we have the shot of them leaving the airport.

Am I right?

Or does that happen a little.

I guess it doesn't really matter.

It happens after.

Okay,

I think.

I think.

Because there's a music thing that happens there.

There is, yes, there's a music thing that happens, and that's part of it.

The transition needs to work.

Yeah.

Here is my question.

Let's say you have

over hundreds of pages of a manga and a television show constructed an evil organization so far-reaching and so menacing in their power and capability.

Even the mention of them causes your heroes and anybody who knows their name to freak out.

Would you

introduce them

at the beginning of their own episode?

Would you give them a real big classic build-up to the beginning of their own episode?

Or would you cut suddenly to four of them and their boss essentially in a lobby hanging around waiting for everybody else to show up it's an abandoned lobby

this is it is amazing the phantom troop are introduced what 15 minutes into an episode that is only tangentially about the phantom troop you know we've been known that we've we've known that this arc is walking towards the phantom troop for a long time yeah

but the moment that they are introduced is tagashi's trick it's him saying yeah oh you want the phantom troop okay here they are well and then what's their vibe jack okay let's talk about this because i uh i i went i went on tagashi's wild roller coaster here uh we see uh a sort of ruined church building yeah and we start panning down this church building and i was like

this is how he's gonna do it the phantom troop is gonna arrive and sure enough with his back to us and then in tight close-ups of him reading a book without his face being revealed we have crolo lusulfa not named i think at this point right or maybe they call him crow towards the end

they just call him the boss they just call him boss yeah they don't say his name yeah but this is if you have watched if you're like why does jack know the leader of the phantom troop uh we watched the uh the screenshot stream in which the character was named and i have known that this guy is the leader of the phantom troop because he has has appeared in every closing and opening credit scene

for

a long time.

I believe also that, hey, if you haven't heard that stream, it's the episode zero in this feed.

Yeah, totally.

It's a lot of fun.

It is a lot of fun.

Yeah, it's great.

It's very fun.

And, you know, I recognize straight away that this sort of abandons church is that room, right?

This is that space.

The Phantom Troops meeting zone.

Krello is reading a book.

He's just hanging out.

And then

the Phantom Troop members are introduced.

And they are

bickering.

Sorry, real quick.

This is stupid.

But

if you haven't watched that episode zero or listened to it, and there's the links

for the screenshots that we tease Jack with are in the description of that episode.

We might be about to resolve a couple of those screenshots in the next

section.

Was Miss Neon in one of those screenshots?

I think she was.

I won't tell you.

No, no, she wasn't.

I don't remember.

Neon was not.

Neon was not, but one of them, you can guess based on what we're talking about now.

And another one will probably be a surprise when it happens.

Exciting.

Yeah.

Okay.

So,

brief, we get a

detail on Crowloe's, the back of Krollo's jacket.

He has an inverted cross, which I sort of figured out

from the screenshot stream.

But something I I missed is that the cross has two like blood teardrops,

one on either side of it, right?

It's like a very specific logo, and I can't tell whether this is...

No, it's not.

This is his logo.

This is his crest, because we know what the logo of the Phantom Troop is.

It's a horrible spider.

It's a horrible spider.

Interesting.

Don't play his theme yet, but what's his theme called?

The man with the inverted cross or something?

The man of the inverted cross.

Oh, sorry.

The man of the reversed cross is what it's called.

Interesting.

The Phantom Troop are

very,

by hunter-hunter standards, don't get me wrong, there's a mummy wearing boxing gloves, there's a man as a Ronin, there's a one-eyed person, you know, but by hunter-hunter standards.

There's a Frankenstein, there's a Frankenstein, they are very normal people who are chatting and bickering and checking their watches and greeting each other and hanging out.

They're just a bunch of friends.

They are dangerous people, but they are

hunters.

They're just hunters.

And we are introduced to them very quickly.

We have Pakunoda, who is a sexy lady.

She has a lovely piece of animation.

She checks her wrist watch at one point, and she's wearing her watch like a bracelet with the

face on the inside of her wrist, like some people do.

So she's like looking at the inside of her wrist to check the time.

We have Shalnark, who is a little Dragon Quest boy.

He is like cheery.

He's happy to see everyone.

He's just a nice lad.

Yeah.

We have Finks with a PH, P-H-I-N-K-S, who is a grumpy racing driver.

He's a man in a sort of racing driver.

Okay, that's an interesting.

I didn't think I racing drive for from him.

I always got the...

Yeah, I totally get it.

Chris Multasanti from the Sopranos, the like tracksuit vibe.

Yeah, totally.

He's absolutely that tracksuit vibe.

I also saw it as like a

racing jacket or like racing colors.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I think you, i like you're totally right i just when i first watched this it wasn't i that i i don't remember when they reveal what his power is but it's very funny and it's not to drive fast yeah

um

yes and between the uh uh bass um wait i can do it uh bass

uh melody karapika and who's the fourth oh i can do it yeah um you know we we are now we are now so firmly and after the whole shit in the heavens arena, we are now so primed to be like, each of these people are nen specialists, and each of them is going to do something fucking weird.

So as Tagashi is just introducing the Phantom Troop like faster than lightning, you know, one appearing almost before the other has left the screen, all you can do.

Very conspicuously using each other's first names.

Yep, yep, yeah, exactly.

What is this person's deal?

What is their nen power?

Here comes Bonolenov, a mummy who is wearing boxing gloves.

And shorts.

And shorts.

Yeah.

Bonolenov is great.

If you are,

I know we're kind of blitzing through these descriptions quite quickly.

There are 13 members of the Phantom Troop.

Yes.

This is what he feels in the show, though, too.

Yes, we will invariably talk more about them as they, as focus falls on them in later episodes.

But Bonolenov is a gangly mummy, wrapped head to toe in bandages, circular, bright circular eyes peeking out, and wearing boxing gloves and shorts.

They are, what is Bonolenov's pronouns?

He, him, him.

Yeah.

He is accompanied by Kortopi, a one-eyed, or maybe, hmm, a small child in a green raincoat with long grey hair, cover with only one eye visible beneath.

Then there is Uvo.

Fully covering

their face.

Like, yes.

Can't see their face.

Uvo is a spiky-haired, gigantic, sort of fur-wearing,

almost like

a RPG barbarian sort of vibes from Uvo.

He has like

there is

like a boss character from a Dynasty Warriors game.

Yeah,

he absolutely does.

And then finally, Shizuku, who

wears a cross necklace on a chain, has purple eyes, wears glasses, and is a new member of the Phantom Troop.

and they briefly mention another group of people that are on their way Phaytan's crew who who I don't know if you thought we were done meeting Phantom Troop members we are not but we are gonna take a little break from them for a few scenes

but the implication is that the other new phantom troop member is a certain clown pervert whom we all know and love yeah he's he's a camaro do we want to get the man of the reverse cross here while we do the transition into uh no because i think the time for the man of the for the reverse cross is when we see his face at the end of the episode okay that's always time for the man of the reverse cross

as far as i'm concerned i'd rather we get his face at the end of the episode ouga um

listen i'll post my notes uh

does it say wuga in there

it's that should

but yeah it's it's it's really interesting you know uh the this first group i think pekineda says like has the other new uh addition arrived yet and is responded to with someone saying, you should ask Machi.

Where, you know, Machi is sort of like the contact with Hiseka.

And over this, the choral music of the Phantom Troop, you know, rises up again.

This beautiful choral part that we heard last time, that you are now hearing in the podcast.

This thing fucking rips.

This is great.

As we meet all the members, and then without an interruption in the music,

we cut back to the bodyguards and karapaka loading neon into a limo off a plane and this is just this is beautiful uh music work here as you know uh

we keep the choral part of the phantom troop but cut to presumably their targets as we see them all moving this is this is just nice classic uh film scoring technique of you know build tension by assigning one threatening theme to a particular um entity and then carry it over into the next.

So that is actually two songs, two separate songs on the soundtrack.

And it's interesting because before I went to go get the name of the song, I was watching the

cars driving away from the airport.

And I was like, this looks like a funeral procession.

And then I looked up the song and put it in my notes and it's called Dirge from the Dark Side.

Yeah.

It is lovely.

And I want to be specific specific here when I talk about the way it is being used.

I think it goes beyond just assigning, just motif work.

You know, it would be one thing to say, this is music for the Phantom Troop.

You've heard them.

And then later in the episode, as the limo cavalcade moves, we hear their theme again.

I feel this is pretty classic motif work to be like, oh, but watch out, there's a threat coming.

I think what sets this apart and what makes it a really nice sort of compositional technique is the way the scenes flow directly one into the other.

You know, we are introduced, we are submersed in the soundscape of the Phantom Troop.

We see them

not being too threatening, just chatting with each other, bickering, we hear their sinister music building, and then seamlessly transition to, as the music continues, our team moving in the limos.

And something about that straight line drawn between the two scenes with no scenes in between, you know, no additional music stuff, really sells the sort of the sinister,

the way that the Phantom Troop are off kilter.

That we've just seen these people palling around, getting ready, you know, and then we are seeing, you know, perhaps the target of their,

you know, their fell misdeeds.

The other thing it really reminds me of is one of my favorite scenes in The Dark Knight.

Where,

because Christopher,

no, what's his name?

Hans Zimmer.

Yeah.

Good composer.

I would not want to spend any time in a room with him, but he's a good composer.

It's because he bites.

It's because he's rude to junior composers.

Is that true?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Hans Zimmer, a piece of shit.

Just piece of shit.

I don't know anything about Hans Zimmer except for that he does the big sounds.

There's this moment when they are transporting

Harvey Dent early on in the Dark Knight.

And there have been kind of threats that

he is going to come under attack.

And so they stack up this massive convoy, and you just get these just detached, horrible helicopter shots of the convoy, you know, moving unthreatened through Gotham as, you know, Hans Zimmer's cues of menace and threat build up in the soundtrack.

And it really reminded me of these great shots of loading the limo as this dirge is playing.

Really, really good.

Because the bodyguards are just like, well, doing our job.

Um, inside the limo, everything is normal.

Hmm.

I don't think so.

I have to disagree.

Yeah,

you might have some issues with that.

No, I think it's normal.

Dows the league

gives neon her tasks for September.

Because it turns out that Neon is a powerful nen user and a fortune teller.

She has a, like many characters in this show, complicated relationship with her parents.

Her father is a Mafia boss, but as Karapika figures out later in a kind of PowerPoint presentation,

is ultimately just using his daughter's magical ability to allow him to climb the ladder.

And this is just, again, this is fully the way that Hunter Hunter is about people's relationship with their parents and the way that their parents instrumentalize their power or their capacity.

And just how adults instrumentalize

people in general.

Yeah.

Regardless of

if they even have the claim of being a parent.

Yeah.

And so,

you know,

Neon chats with her dad on the phone.

She has these cute little phone charms on the back of her phone.

And one of them is a character from Yu Yuhaka Show.

Kill.

The little penguin-looking thing.

His name is Pooh.

Its name is what?

His name is Pooh.

It's spelled P-U.

Oh, okay, never mind.

And we soon learn how Neon performs fortune-telling in rules.

Does someone else want to talk about this?

Because she gets that little pen.

Does anyone have the name of the move?

Because we get the sort of like named move, even though

I think I have it written down.

Lovely ghostwriter angelic auto-writing.

Yep.

Yep.

I have that in quotes and then unquote and then creepy.

What does it look like, Dre?

It is just this, like, okay, you know, Slimer from Ghostbusters,

yeah, Onion Head, yeah.

Yeah, what if you took Slimer and you made him purple instead of green and then you kind of squished him a little bit so he was like

longer and taller, yeah, and then also just had a deeply unpleasant face.

Um, and so there's just this like awful spirit creature with like this big mouth, like seemingly like just whispering into neon's ears, and she's just like writing down everything.

It's actually weirder than that, it's controlling her hand.

Oh, you're right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It like is basically like it.

I guess they don't say this, but it seems to imply that it is basically possessing her.

Yeah, this is a stand as well.

Well, they say that's the other stand that I feel.

Yeah, if this was named Rockwell, this would be a stand.

Uh, it doesn't need it to be named after a band of some sort.

They say, at the very end of this episode, one of the last things, it's um, is uh, uh, the head bodyguard on the phone with Neon's father

and confirms that she never remembers the fortunes she tells and she can't tell her own fortune.

Those are like two of the rules of the thing.

I think it's unclear if she knows what Nen is or knows that she's doing this.

Keith, I think it's unclear whether she is conjuring.

Is that a demon?

Like, for real, is that, you know, are we outside the realm of Nen and she is actually tapping into some underworld otherworldly power?

Because why would I straight up like

subconscious?

Why would this subconsciously be happening?

We do learn.

I

I don't want to talk about this yet, but we will I think I could explain this later on down the road when there are more nen rules revealed.

Interesting.

Because the read I got was

I realized that in a show with nen in it, what I'm about to say is going to sound absurd.

I think this is a ghost or a demon or something.

You know, this is some James Juan bumhouse shit.

You know, she's got a cursed pen.

She knows how to tap into the other world.

The demon writes fortunes for her.

I mean,

straight up, like, it might be just worth thinking about, like, how

Nen could encompass so many things that are just that.

Like...

Nen can be demonic in its nature, right?

And so, like...

Is Nen just a way, you know, Wing interp- Wing and the general convention interprets Nen as being about your aura.

But what if Nen is a way to touch some other world?

You know, um, this is a good time.

I sort of forgot about this from earlier, um, but just to squeeze it in here before uh we end the episode.

Um,

it is interesting that Nen is known to the under Nen is supposed to be secret, but the underworld seems to know about Nen, at least further than just the Zoldix.

Um, and it doesn't seem out of place to anyone that a mafia guy would hire a bunch of like nen user bodyguards.

Uh, but also being a bodyguard for the mob was not on anyone's list of jobs a hunter might have during the hunter exam.

Yeah, like this is like, however,

oh

it is a hunter job.

It's a common enough hunter job that four hunters have showed up, right?

That's what I was gonna say.

There are like three that were already hired.

Um, like it seems, it seems like it seems, it seems very weird.

Like, and it's it's got a high bar, a barrier to entry.

Like, you've got to find the hunter office and you have to know net.

So this is like fully a hunter job.

It's like, it speaks to kind of the

weird, well, like we talked about net hunters and their relationship to money earlier.

And like this kind of puts it in the opposite way where they are the service that only the hyper, like the hyper-rich can afford for the stuff.

Right.

And because of that, Hunter is being so powerful and being like

the

standard of like this person is going to be able to handle your problems.

They end up inevitably working for rich people who have gained that through like

unscrupulous means.

I mean, you know, as if, you know,

you know how I feel about all rich people, but you know what I mean.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then in just like a just a great little twist, the car blasts past a group of people walking by the side of the road.

This is the second detachment of the Phantom Troop who do not give a shit about the Limo convoy.

They are just...

They are.

Was that a red herring for you?

Or was it...

Okay.

Well, I thought that the Phantom Troop were going to launch an attack on Neon.

Sure.

But they just happen to be watching

some reason.

Yeah.

They're just...

It's.

Oh, it's ships passing in the night.

I do love that shot.

It's great.

Yeah.

This is Phaetan's group.

Sorry, time for more

Phantom Troop members.

Although, I think

never apologize for the Phantom Troop members.

I mean,

you can apologize for the troops.

Never apologize for talking about them.

Yes.

These are, I think, our last Phantom Troop members, right?

Very nearly, yeah.

We have Phaetan,

a small, frightening child with a tall collar with a skull on it.

Phaitan's affect is

like

Hisuka drained of the

sexual malice and delight.

He has that same very light voice, very

low, measured, but whereas Hisuka's is just crackling with a kind of lascivious menace, Phaitan's is sort of

loose and detached.

Listless, but violent and menacing.

Yes, I don't know anything about Phaitan.

We are telling you, I mean, not the other three.

We are putting into this episode all we know about the Phantom Troop right now.

You know, we are not being given any more about any of these people, what their powers are, what their relationships are.

We're just going on vibes from these guys.

Feitan is joined by Machi, the Nen Doctor, who we last saw dealing with Hiseka.

Great.

Good to see her here, you know, with her people.

And also...

A familiar face.

A familiar face in a gang of weirdos.

It's always important to have.

Also with them is Nobunaga, who is a Ronin with a classic sort of top knot and a robe and a katana.

And then finally, Franklin, who is Frankenstein.

He's a big Frankenstein with big ears, big long long ears.

He's like a Buddha Frankenstein type of thing.

Yes.

He has

elongated earlobes and he has stitching on his face in sort of chunks.

They walk together and they basically bicker about the...

Well, first they say, it's been a long time since we have all been together.

It's been

years.

And during that time, Phantom Troop members four and eight have changed.

I think we knew about this in the past, that Phantom Troops

organization is based on like seats rather than an increasing membership.

I think we got this with Machi and 16:12 arms and a head.

Yeah,

yes.

Um, four and eight are new.

This is Shizuko, Shizuku, the uh woman wearing the black turtleneck and the chain and the glasses.

Wait until you figure out what she's about.

I'm excited.

She uh, we saw her and she was just very polite, um, very quiet and chill.

I doubt she is.

Um, Feyton

doesn't care too much for.

It is Phaitan, right?

Yeah.

Or is it Franklin?

He doesn't care too much for Hisuka.

It's both.

Both of them.

Yeah.

Phaitan is like complaining about Hisuka.

Machi is like, yeah, whatever.

You know, it's not my business.

She also doesn't like him, though.

Like, we saw that on screen.

Nobunak is like, he's here because he's good, so leave it alone.

And then Franklin is like, he's not that good.

And then Phaitan says, basically, are you questioning the boss's judgment?

And there's a really interesting sort of power dynamic here where Phaitan is very prepared to say, I don't like Yusuka very much, but is not, is, is going to kind of like bristle a little at the idea that Krolo has misjudged Hisaka.

I think there's a really interesting parallel here with, so the reason that Phaitan and crew aren't fond of Hisaka is that they say that Krollo lets him do whatever Hisaka wants.

And this is

making text what is sort of made sub-text with Natero and the Hunter exam.

Over and over again in the Hunter exam, we hear people like Satot say, you know, the Hunter exam is here for weeding out the violent people.

But as we've talked about, all it does is ensure that the violent people that get through are the most violent people, are the most sinister, horrible people.

And there's an exception.

And also that the good people that get in are the most violent good people.

Yes, yes.

You know, almost everybody who is in a position of power over Hisoka has been giving him, consciously or not, a very long leash.

And

this is

going to have consequences.

And it is interesting seeing that where Satots was not really able to say, hey, Notero, Hisaka, really?

He tried to kill an examiner last time.

Feitan is at least prepared, maybe not to his face, to at least say, I don't know if Krolo should be giving this guy as much leeway as he's getting.

Yeah, this is where, this is where

um

like

nobunaga has something to say about it basically like he can do you know he's not

he's not he's not doing any he's not breaking any rules and he's talented and then uh i think it's phaeton who accuses nobunaga of like kind of subtly saying that the boss is scared to tell

Right.

Hisugo what to do.

And then none of them, none of them like that.

Franklin and Phaeton are both mad about this.

This is a great moment.

They all walk in silence for a bit.

This is kind of our first sign of the Phantom troops

of the, let's say, the tension roiling under the surface of the Phantom Troop at all times.

They walk in silence, and then Franklin and Nobunaga both just like suddenly lash out at each other.

And explode into a scrap.

Yeah, it's great.

It's almost a jump scare.

These two, you know, suddenly bursting into violence.

And Machi and Feytan are sort of just like, oh, they're just bickering.

Yeah.

But it really is that like sudden lashing out of violence

to each other.

The

vibe of

not every single interaction that we have is

with the Phantom Troop, but like a lot of it.

It is so tame.

Like we get, we do get this like sort of fight between Franklin and Numanaga, but it's pretty much immediately hand waved.

They don't even stop to look at it, they just keep walking.

Um, and then and then we do see them kind of fighting, and it does seem more like sparring than anything, they're just kind of going at each other.

Um, uh, but there's a lot of friendliness in the Phantom Troop.

The vibe is so strange,

like, it's very clear that they are mostly friends and that they are not like

they're not like, you know, in a movie when, like, a character is evil, like, everything they do is evil, and you know, they sing scary songs, or they're like, like,

you know, being arch.

No one here is arch.

They sing scary songs.

No,

no, you know.

What scary songs have you been watching?

Like a Disney movie.

Like in a Disney movie.

Yes.

Disney movie.

Great example.

Okay.

Don't help me.

Oh, no.

This is a bad example.

This is a bad example.

Okay.

Everyone remembers

The Pirates of the Caribbean.

Of course.

Sure.

Yeah.

This is a bad example.

It's a bad example because you want Johnny Depp, but it's a great example

without that part of it.

The ghost pirates, they were all just pirate crew until they turned into ghosts, but they really, really commit to being scary ghost pirates.

You know what I mean?

You know, they're singing like

you see shanties and whatever.

And it's like, if I became a ghost tomorrow, I wouldn't immediately be into haunted stuff.

You know, I'd just be a ghost who is into video games and music and comedy.

But what's happened here is that we have the world's most dangerous group of literally genocidal villains.

Yeah.

Who are also just like this is my colleague.

Yeah.

It is.

It is.

I am.

We're about to get really into the Phantom Troop on this show, I bet.

I am so interested to see how this is going to play.

Do you want to know the other name for this arc?

Because it is the Phantom Troop Arc for a lot of people.

Yeah.

What is it also called?

The York New Troop?

The York New City Arc.

Yeah, or the York New Auction.

Yeah, I have a lot of fun.

We did not just hit, by the way.

What?

On what?

What's the punch?

It's Japanese.

So in Japanese, the word for new, well, the word for new is shin so when they say the York new auction they're saying York shin auction

So it's just like wordplay because they sound similar

I really hope don't answer this I hope we're not gonna just dispense with the Phantom Troop at the end of this arc these guys are fucking scary and are all great characters and I want I want at least some of them to stick around longer than their own arc I just love that we get we get some of them arguing we get some of them happy to see each other we get some of of them gossiping we get we get two people who are like mad that someone's late like uh

have they ever wiped out a clan

have the phantom driver wiped out a clan you know it depends on the configuration maybe we have to reassess

it does depend on the configuration because right like we get that confirm

we get confirmation that both shizuku and hisuka are pretty new right and they both seem like real good souls i mean hisuka i'm not defending and i'm not i'm not even defending Shizuku.

It's just interesting to be like, they are part of this organization and the only ones that we could really consider.

Like, we don't know which ones were there for.

I wonder if the health of the sky changes too.

We will learn all.

The answer is that we will learn all about pretty much.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We will find out more about, like, we will be able to confirm some people who were there is why I like that.

Yeah, totally.

It would be bad storytelling if it was a completely different phantom troop.

Yeah, exactly.

Like, I don't want to bring, I I just want to bring that up in terms of what we end up seeing Karapi could do to them, like, and the extents to go to get them when it's like almost, you don't know how ship of Theseus to this group is, you know?

And that dovetails so well with a classic

revenge storyline, right?

Because it's like, upon whom am I meeting the revenge?

How far down the chain of

actual culpability?

Is my revenge going to be?

Yeah, I think that that is what would make if it was a full ship of Theseus and none of these people were there.

I think that that could be fun.

I think, yeah, I think that could be fun.

I also do think that it is an intro.

Like, I like the decision to make it clear that, like, some of them weren't, some of them were.

It's Tagashi, so there's, like, a whole set of rules about it.

So

we have to learn very specifically what is going on here.

Do we want to,

do we,

I do, I mean, we have more to say about the Phantom Troop, obviously, but do we want to talk about the last little bit of this meeting?

Uh yeah, please.

Oh, wait, well, that comes right at the end, right?

Oh, we

have more of uh.

Oh, we have the fortune telling.

The exact fortune.

The fortune telling has already happened, but we hear what her fortune was.

Or rather, something interesting happened with the fortunes that she told for four high-profile clients of her father's, four Mafiosos who are going to be at the auction.

One of them's Krillin.

Oh, yeah, right.

The baby Mafia guy.

If you haven't heard the or been able to hear the episode, go to friendsatable.cash, where you'll be able to get access to the bonus episodes of Hunter Hunter, where we talk about Dragon Ball.

And I didn't know who Krillin was because he arrived for the first time in a full suit.

I thought he was a Matthiasa baby.

Yes, something is odd about these fortunes.

Four of them begin with the same opening lines, suggesting that the outcome of the fortune is going to happen to all four men at the same time, suggesting that it is going to be at the auction.

Especially because the fortune reads something like this.

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

Do not descend stairs you have never climbed.

In numbers, do not compete with others.

Which is a great fortune.

It rhymes.

It's lovely.

It's spooky.

Seems like that sort of thing a demon would write.

Yeah, exactly.

If I can, if I'm not quite an omen, but if I could could

deliver your fortune, Jack, you will be hearing more fortunes and you'll continue to like them.

Oh, excellent.

That's great.

I feel very good about that.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Yeah, you will.

Yeah, you will.

Yeah.

And so, you know,

the

bodyguard, whose name is also a topical anti-irritant, says,

Neon cannot go to the auction because it will put her in danger.

We can't tell her why, because she can't remember her fortunes and she can't make fortunes of her own and she won't listen to us if we try and keep her out.

So instead, this is just nice.

You know, put the characters in the room.

The bodyguards are going to be sent to bid in her stead, putting them in danger, putting them at the site where this fortune is likely to transpire.

Um,

the bodyguards

directly, uh,

like specifically ignoring what the fortune says, which is don't bid.

It says, don't bid.

Yep, but no, they're going to go and bid because they.

This is, this is a demon.

This is a demon saying this.

How is her subconscious helping her learn this?

This is also

Nen

can

know

the future.

Yeah.

Yeah.

How do you feel about NED now, Jack?

Do you feel has anything changed for you?

Great question, actually.

Yeah.

Okay.

Here is what the experience of learning about NEM has been.

It has been as though someone has handed me a manila envelope containing seven to nine small print, small spacing

descriptions of the core mechanics of NET.

This is Mr.

Wing's lesson.

And I look at this sheet of paper of this little manila folder and I'm like, I have to read all of this and I have to internalize it before I can move on to the other good shit of the show.

And when I finish reading it, Tagashi takes it back from me and says, Great, that was the prologue of Nen.

Now look over there.

And I turn around and it's one of those fucking circus organs where the guy is like playing the organ with the left hand and smashing plates with the right hand.

He's literally about to say smashing plates like that one

escaped from I think he should leave.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

He's playing a harmonica at the same time.

He's stamping his feet.

Behind him, there are like 12 cheerleaders.

Someone has lit a bonfire.

And you didn't even see the place until he started smashing them.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Takashi is like, all right, chapter one, Ned.

And he points at this shit.

And I turned around, and Mr.

Wing and the Manila Envelope has disappeared.

They have just gone.

Right now, Nen is fucking great, but it is also

everything else in the show.

So, you know, I still feel justified when I was saying about how much I hate Wing going into all that Nen shit.

I just didn't realize that all the interesting Nen stuff had already been happening elsewhere in the show.

And now I just get to go splashing back into that swimming pool.

But look, Wing, your own thin ice.

But no, no, this stuff is great.

This stuff is fantastic.

And I bet every single member of the Phantom Troop does something freaky with Nen, right?

Can you tell me?

I'm going to give you a I'm going to give you a music and pop quiz.

Can you tell me who's an enhancer on the Phantom Troop?

Let's see.

Okay.

An enhancer on the Phantom Troop

is

the barbarian.

Uvo Gien.

Uvo.

They call him Uvo.

His full name is Uvo Gien.

Yes, Krolo calls him Uvo Gien.

I was going to tell you.

Nailed it.

You got that right.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

You got that right.

Oh, that's great.

Yeah.

Also, watch this.

Watch this.

I'm closing my laptop.

Can I get a little bit of the Phantom Troop music?

Yeah.

I'm going to name all 13 members of the Phantom Troop.

Oh, shit.

Oh, my God.

The Phantom Troop is led by Krolo Busulfo.

There is

the sexy lady.

Package.

That's not a name.

There is

Sphinx, the racing driver.

There is Sharkla, the little dragon quest boy.

There is Uvo, the barbarian.

There is Shizuku, the turtleneck lady.

There is

Fatan, the creepy boy.

There is Borodev, the mummy.

There is.

He was named begins to decay.

You got it.

Come on.

Congratulations.

Okay.

No, I didn't say you got it, like, they're done.

The one-eyed guy.

That's eight.

There's Machi, the Doctor.

There is Nobunaga, the Ronin.

There is Franklin, the Frankenstein.

Franklinstein.

You're missing a very funny one.

I'm missing two.

I'm saving the one I know for last.

Okay.

So I think that's a good one.

I think you know two for last.

Maybe I'm wrong.

Maybe you said it and I didn't hear you say it.

Um,

I

well, there's Hisoka.

Yep.

Yeah.

And who's the last member of the Phantom Troop?

We haven't seen Sonic for one.

I think that they mentioned Krolo.

Oh, I thought it was Krolo.

Okay.

Yeah, that's probably why I don't remember.

Yeah, I think you got them all ages ago.

Well, you got, you, you did.

Yeah, yeah, you got them all.

You got them all in spirit.

What was it?

Shalcran and Bondorov?

But yeah, alright, now I'm opening up my laptop to look at my notes again.

It's great.

I love it when a show is like...

I mean, this is also...

This is also

any sort of

schematic of like a crew.

The fun of a crew is who are all the members and what are their weirdo powers.

Yeah.

Is Krolo a n-user?

He must be, right?

He must all be then users.

I'll just say yes.

I don't think so.

Yeah.

Spoiler.

Yeah.

okay.

Uh,

so they get ready to go and bid.

Um, let's end on Crolo.

So let's talk about what they are going to go and win.

Um, they are trying to win for Neon.

The bodyguards are trying to win.

The intact mummy of Princess Corko.

Yep.

Cody Princess Made of Cork.

Good luck.

A tissue used by the actor Sonny Lamarck.

Crazy.

Weirdly enough, one of the grosser things.

Yeah.

And

the eyes of a cutter.

The rising action to this moment, you know, over the course of this episode has been lovely as Karapika stands on the rooftop, his chain in his hand, resolved to go and bid on the eyes of his slaughtered brethren to get himself closer to the moment of his revenge.

It's good storytelling.

But

Hisuka has not arrived.

And one of the members of the Phantom Troop is like, he's not shit.

And if he arrived, I bet I could beat the shit out of him.

At which point, the candle gutters and goes out, and Hisuka steps out of the shadows.

And this is really interesting to me, because I think that Tagashi and Kru are going to have to, if they are interested in it, which they might not be, are going to have to do a lot of work to make the Phantom Troop scary alongside Hisuka.

Because we know how menacing Hisuka is.

We know how powerful he is.

We know how malicious and predatory his intentions are.

And the show is writing a very complicated check that it is going to have to figure out how to cache, which is, Hisuka is terrifying, and we need these new characters, or at the very least, we need Krolo to be just as scary.

And I don't know how we're going to do that.

Because right now, the setup is that, like, weirdly, despite hating him, the viewer is aligned with Hisuka.

He is our guy entering this villainous space.

He's chronic as man.

Yeah, exactly.

He is there to make

the Phantom Troop look bad, right?

You know, like they say, Hisuka won't show up, and when he does, I bet he's not even going to be really powerful.

And he shows up, and we're like, it's Isaka, here he is.

We know this guy.

You know, it's exciting to see him.

I guarantee he was waiting in the dark for them to get mad enough at him to be like 100%.

And so, in much the same way that I was really curious about how the show would disempower Killua, you know, would put Killiua under threat.

I am so curious about how the show is going to handle how do we make Krolo menacing and powerful and scary alongside Hisaka, a character whose menace and power we know intimately and are already kind of

aligned with in the narrative.

We've spent so much more time with him.

We understand his perspective more.

How do we get Krollo and the Phantom Troop to be frightening?

And I don't know how we're going to do that.

Sorry, I'm writing secretly to everyone but you, Jack.

Yeah, no, no,

that's absolutely fine.

You know where I'm coming from, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, I think that's a very

understandable way to look at this from a first viewing.

I think that is the question it raises for the viewer, right?

As like,

oh, we're turning Hisuka from

almost the like, I mean, not almost an antagonist, from an antagonist to a POV character in a way.

Yeah.

Situational

ally.

Yes.

If not a literal, I want to be as clear as possible that when I say Hisaka is our guy, I don't mean that I am, you know, I'm switching my allegiances and I'm now, this is now a pro-Hisaka podcast.

I mean, in terms of the way you structure character moves in a story if you are introducing a character you have spent a lot of time with to a group that you the viewer have not spent any time with i think the natural thing that happens is that you align yourself with that character in that moment and and we are friends we're view as viewers we're friends with karapika all of us uh and

And we are sympathetic with his goal to kill the people in the Phantom Troop, the people that slaughtered his entire clan.

And

he's been put on this path by Husuka.

One of the only other things that we know about the Phantom Troop, besides that they were going to be here now, is that Husuka's wearing a fake number eight.

Yeah.

But what does that even mean?

You know,

is it eight?

Is he eight?

Am I right?

He is either four or eight.

He's either four or eight.

It's the same as a fake hunter license.

Oh, not a fake hunter license.

It's the same as the difference we were talking about between like, I don't have a license, but I'm actually a hunter.

And it's like, what does a being a fake Phantom Troop member actually mean?

You're a member of the Phantom Troop.

Yeah, we don't know exactly what it means, but we do know that he sent Karapiga here, knowing that he's after the spiders.

Yep.

Yeah.

We don't know why Hisuka is.

Oh, Hisuka has ill designs on the Phantom Troop for some reason.

I don't know what that's about, but we get a clue as

everyone's like, all right, boss, time to speak.

And Krollo stands up.

Hidden.

Let's fucking go.

Do you know what they're singing?

I don't.

I think that they're singing.

They're singing Aranea, is what they're singing.

Well, you've heard that name before.

Yeah, that's the.

That is the name of the Phantom Troop is Requiem Aranea.

Aranea means spider.

Oh,

sick.

And despite having a huge cue like that, Krullo, much like Illumi and like a lot of the very dangerous killers in this show,

has a weirdly gentle affect.

You know, we see his face for the first time in the show outside of title sequences.

He has very pale skin.

He has very big eyes.

He has a kind of placid, relaxed expression on his face.

He wears a spiky, furry collar and this black jacket with rivets in it.

He is holding a book.

And the Phantom Troop are so excited to hear him speak.

They clearly have a lot of respect for this guy.

They're wondering what he's going to ask them to steal.

Because we've talked about the Phantom Troopers murderers, but I think they are also specifically thieves.

They're specifically thieves, yeah.

It's just in order to steal Kurta eyes, it involves

going to murder them first.

I mean, you're stealing them from their head.

It's most likely they're not going to live through that.

I don't think they're taking their time to do it safely, you know?

And there's these little moments where the crew is like, what's the boss going to ask us to steal?

He loves reading.

Maybe he wants us to steal a book.

And, you know, that's about the depth of character that we get from Carlo at this point.

We know basically nothing about him other than that he is held in very high regard by the Phantom Troop.

I really love this moment of them all talking about him, like he's not there, like guessing what they're gonna ask.

They're very excited to figure out what he's gonna tell them to do, what their orders are gonna be.

Uh, and they're like, Maybe it's the video games, maybe it's the books.

It's very, very funny, waiting for him to reveal.

And Hisaka looks up at Krolo as he speaks with-is this fair to say, a familiar expression on his face?

Uh-huh, yes,

horny

Hisaka sees Krollo and is filled with a kind of lascivious adoration.

And

this is really striking because the only other person we have seen Hisuka really look that way to is Gone.

Sometimes he looks that way at people who are trying and failing to kill him, but it really is Hisuka's recognition of a power that he can manipulate.

It's creepy.

It's really, really creepy.

Yeah, it's.

It's definitely

a signifier of what Hisuka's looking for from the Phantom Troop, you know?

Proximity to a kind of magnetic sexual power?

Yeah.

Sort of.

What a horrible little weirdie.

I think that

we haven't gotten a lot of it, but we should be looking out for things maybe more material than proximity for Isuka's motives here.

Interesting.

Interesting.

You said more material.

Yeah.

What are we going to go and steal?

Everything.

Everything?

Everything.

Everything.

Every freaks out.

It's great.

It's so good.

There's the

Uvo.

Are you scared?

Are you frightened?

Because he's like, what?

Everything.

We're going to make enemies of everybody in the underworld.

And it's like, no, I'm excited.

Oh my my God.

You said right.

That's not even safe.

He is just, he is thrilled to go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, it's great.

And then he's, Uvo says, go in then, Crollo, basically, give the order.

There's this sort of ritual.

There's this weird ritual about it.

Even after having been told that they, what they're going to steal, answer the whole auction,

he's waiting for something.

He's waiting for a specific order.

And Krolo says, I give you permission to kill them all, anyone who dares get in our way.

And that's the apotheosis of this meeting, you know, this kind of ritual order of take everything and stop at nothing.

Anybody who gets in our way dies.

It's so interesting that you described them earlier as bandits, Keith, because like when I think of bandits, I think of like 14 guys with clubs sort of ravaging and pillaging.

And up until this moment, I didn't get any of that until Krolo gives this like this ritual order of we will get what we want and anybody who gets in our way will be killed.

In game terms, which is the terms that Hunter Hunter is asking us to put things in all the time.

All the time.

This might be every single member of the Phantom Troop might be the boss of a crew that you have to kill that like the grunt is just called a Ravager or something.

Yep.

Yeah, totally.

And it's you would have the great revelation after having spent 40 hours killing Ravagers that their bosses are 13 fairly relaxed normal people.

I would like, I know we've been going long, so I don't want to, we don't need to spend too much time on

my boy Crolo here.

This is a good set to go long on.

It is, but it's also late, and some of us need to be up to the bus.

I need to go.

Yeah, I don't want to.

Yeah, I'm like, you know, I want to be considerate to you guys.

I'm fine.

I'm fucking around.

Anyway,

they are bandits.

They are also

sort of apostle-like, with one of them being a traitor in the midst of our buddy Sharon.

Oh, yeah,

they're fully like

a

you know, like a sacramental perversion on the 12 apostles.

I think that is like

that up at all, but the inverted cross, the number of them plus one imposter in Hiseka, the fact that they are meeting in an abandoned church, the choral music.

Yeah, I would not have got that.

Thank you for bringing that up.

Yeah, no worries.

I have a lot of Crolo feelings.

He's sitting here on my desk looking at me record this right now.

I'm sure we will have ample time to get into them.

Yeah.

But that along with the, because we were talking about it earlier, and I looked at it while we were recording, the two blood drops that you mentioned to me look like devil horns,

which I think is kind of like a

possibly, probably meant to read us both

to the viewer, but I think, you know, worth mentioning with his name and then talking about the sort of

like

weird um evil like holy men apostle vibe uh we just mentioned.

I but if we extend that metaphor out it gets weird it does get very weird where it's like if Crollo is Crollo Lucilpha, he has devil horns on his thing,

we have a kind of like a like a black sacrament happening, right?

Where it's like, but in the context of that, the imposter would be a force for good,

Yeah,

the Judas figure would be, you know, someone sent in to destabilize the

other thing about Judas is that he is, he is, he is preordained.

His, you know, his role is

always going to happen, was necessary, was a necessary part of the

of the resurrection, right?

Yeah.

Interesting.

It's also just like

I like I wanna we'll we'll definitely revisit.

I think this will come back up

again, this sort of the inversion that they're going for here.

But also it's

to give the shout out to the let's not think too hard about it crowded is also just

aesthetics.

I'm not shouting them out, but I am throwing them a bone that the aesthetics here are good and maybe he's just doing that.

I don't think that's true, but I do think that

it is a key parallel.

Yeah, but this is a common thing to get drawn on as just a like.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it's a, it is not a, you know, I think there's a difference between like a literal metaphor and like a useful metaphor.

Yeah.

Like this is a, this is like a

pat, we're past aesthetic metaphors and into like meaningful metaphors.

We are.

You know, the thing that's making me say this is because I have had this talk about organization 13 with someone and it doesn't hold up as well as it does with the phantom troop that's more what's organization 13 from kingdoms oh yeah i have no idea jesus yeah

it's fine it's fine it's fine uh i'm it's it's i'll be okay um

Oh, but I'm so excited that they are, that they have arrived and that they have arrived in such a weird way.

It's so weird.

Look at those freaks.

Look at those freaks.

And they're friends, and they're just like guys, but also

they really got excited when they got permission to go kill everyone.

Yeah, yeah, all of them

just

a nice quiet lady with her.

Like, yeah, let's go, let's, let's murder, let's do it.

Who has a

nothing?

Okay,

yeah, okay, never mind.

No, ignore that.

You had a long time.

Yeah.

Finally, you flipped.

It's fine.

It's fine because the way that that resolves, it won't even feel like a spoiler.

It'll feel like a red herring.

Okay, sure.

Okay.

The.

Hey, beep that out, Keith.

Yeah, I'll beep it out.

Every time we say that word, beep it out.

Yeah.

Well,

okay, I'll put a flag on you.

What about a f?

You have to leave that one too.

Sorry.

It's like a.

But the modern technology lets you.

be guys.

Come on, it takes me like eight hours to edit these.

Sorry.

Let's make them do another one.

The

I had something.

I had something.

I had a last, final, I had a final thing.

Anyway,

yeah,

sometimes metaphors are just are just aesthetic, but I think that I think that there's we can get something useful out of this metaphor beyond that it just happens to be 13 and it's cool, dark.

I regret how I worded that.

I should have said how it is a common

aesthetic choice that Tagashi is doing more with than just that.

No,

I think you brought it up in a way that made a lot of sense to me, although I don't know where we're going.

The idea of

including a bunch of stuff from the Bible, including plot points, and then saying, but it doesn't mean anything, is, I think, it's a self-defeating argument because you've already taken plot points.

Yeah.

Once you're taking plot points, you have to admit that it means something.

Yeah.

Media Club Plus.

You have to admit that it means something.

It means something.

And I think that probably does us for today.

Yeah.

We've at a really great point.

It's worth saying that we just reversed the order of those last two scenes so that we could end on the Phantom Troop and Kroller showing up.

But it does end with that great image of Krapica on the roof, you know,

powered by rage as he gets ready to bid on his comrades' eyes.

The guitar kicking in.

The closing credits guitar starts.

I fucking love that guitar.

It's so good.

Hunting for your dream is one of the best songs in all of anime.

Just like I'm putting that out there.

I think it is fucking killer.

This is my smile bomb, Keith, you know?

Yeah.

We had some listeners who did not like the Scream-O aesthetics of the first song.

Far be it from me to, you know.

Yes,

I'm going to finish my sentence.

Far be it for me to, you know, frown on another person's enjoyments or dislikes, but they are wrong, and so are you, Keith.

But this is better.

This ending is better than the first one.

Absolutely.

It's not going to value on that.

Yeah.

It might be 16 times better, but I also like the first one.

Yeah.

I think it speaks to the strength of chasing after a dream.

I'm excited to get to the themes that come after this because in my mind, this is my favorite one, but it's been so long since I've heard the others that

we'll see.

It makes such an impression, though.

What are we watching next time?

Next time, we're watching two episodes.

You're going to join us for Ahoo Weekend.

It's going to be two and a half hours.

I'll get all my Crollo stuff in then.

Well, you know, I need to do a lot of that.

Buckle in.

Please, please buckle in for the episode after next.

It's four episodes, and they are: it is the thickest steak you've ever had.

Um,

oh, but not this next one, no, this next one, this is a scurry.

It's a good appetizer, it's some garlic bread, you know.

Yeah, it's a scurry.

It's a moose bouche.

Um,

and so 42 and 43, defend and attack, and a shocking tragedy.

I hope Crowlo doesn't die.

I don't think that that would earn

tragedy.

I don't think that that would earn

Sylvie's Nendroid.

Krollo shows up in one episode.

He has full lines.

Yeah, he has four lines and dies, but everyone's like, oh, hey, Gothboy, what's up?

Still in the ending every single time.

Yeah.

About 10 times more screen time in end credits than in the actual show.

Koropika finds a sniper rifle, and the rest of this art goes by real weakness.

Please,

we know that bullets can't affect these people.

We didn't mention it, but Karapika blocks like 12 close-range bullets with the chain.

How did we not mention that?

That was such a chain bastard maneuver.

It was a total chain bastard maneuver.

Yeah, he swirls it around, and he swirls it around, and then it stops the bullets right in their tracks, and everybody notices it.

It's really impressed.

If you said to me, If you said to me one episode ago that we are going to start calling Karapika the Chain Bastard,

you wouldn't have been able to get the money.

And you wouldn't have never heard it.

I was like, oh, is that maybe Krolo?

I think we had known to ask someone on the Phantom Troop.

100%.

Yeah.

Someone on the Phantom Troop is the Chain Bastard.

Yeah.

No, it's Karapica who's become the Chain Bastard.

It's funny because we will bring up the Chain Bastard in relationship to the phantom troop.

Of course, I mean, the chain bastard is the phantom troop's, you know,

kryptonite.

The phantom troop is ready for anything, but not chain bastard.

Yeah, that is who is saying.

Chain bastard.

I tell you what.

If I was part of a villainous outfit that killed every member,

oh my god, Allie.

What?

Look at the Media Club Plus.

Yeah!

I didn't want to post it.

I didn't want to be the one to post it, but I do love this image.

They made Leorio uglier for 2011.

Allie has posted a screenshot from the original Hunter Hunter anime with

what I'm going to guess are user-added scripts.

I don't think these are the original captions.

No, this is in the original anime.

Yeah, it's in the 96 anime.

Leario is talking on the phone to Grappica and saying, so you'll be masturbating a lot.

And then eyes emoji, smoking emoji, hot eyes emoji.

And then

Karapica in the next frame is saying, Leorio.

And doing the like classic Karapika face, like the smile, close eyes, look away.

Like the

sandwich.

Like,

yeah,

why in this picture Leorio looks like fucking Andy Sandberg when he's doing all of the goofy ass songs about fucking Justin Kumberlick's mom.

Do you see the question he's asking?

He's asking

if they'd be masturbating a lot.

That's an Andy Sandberg line, if I've ever heard it.

I had something

before we went.

No, I don't know.

I don't know.

I'm so glad to get back to this show.

We've been a while.

It will not have been clear because of how we release these episodes, but we took a break.

We basically can't...

We watched half a season of Dragon Ball, and we couldn't do that at the same time as watching Hunter Hunter, otherwise otherwise, we would have come apart.

Yeah, so we took a break from watching Hunter Hunter to watch those 10 episodes of Dragon Ball.

So it felt really good to get back to Hunter Hunter.

And it's also honestly the structure of this, because we don't want to go two weeks without watching Hunter Hunter if we don't have to.

But also, that means that we'll be increasingly further away.

Having all of those episodes backlog, just like sitting on my hard drive, is emotionally difficult.

I hate it.

So it's nice that the structure of doing the bonuses can have the real

feed catch up a little bit to where we're at.

So, yes.

Yeah.

It is a good opportunity to take a little bit of time off to do a bonus, catch up a little bit, and then reset.

All right.

Well,

we will see you next time where we will watch episodes 41.

No, nope.

We will watch episodes 42 and 43.

Defend an attack and a shocking tragedy.

Sweet.

Yeah.

This is an easy.

Hey, and remember to watch episode zero if you haven't, if you haven't listened to that one yet.

Yeah.

Check out the screenshot stream and look out for the chain bastard.

And go again to the feet, to the feet shufflers.

Oh,

what are you doing on Tunes?

Oh, I see.

Right.

Sorry.

I thought you said

it was the feet shufflers as though it was a place.

No, no, I'm calling back to the feet.

I'm like, three and a half hours ago when we were talking about the people who drag their feet on.

Those are the people that are left.

You need to go do that.

Tell us your phantom troop takes.

Again, I will have opinions on them, regardless of what you say.

Yeah, go write your strong, listen to the bonus, the Dragon Ball bonus, and start leaving criticisms or opinion on Dragon Ball.

But also give us five stars when you do.

But also give us five stars when you do.

Yeah, you can say anything you want as long as the five stars are there.

I went on a walk in the countryside today.

I walked around a forest trail in Ann Arbor for three miles.

It was the middle of winter.

There were no leaves on the trees.

It was very still.

Squirrels running up and down the trees.

And during the walk, I listened to

us weirdos doing the Dragon Ball episode.

And that was very pleasant.

Dragon Ball.

It's nice to walk around and listen to a podcast about it.

It's so good that Jack listened to it and they were there.

Yep.

Yeah.

And we will eventually start remembering to write some of these down so that we can read them out ahead of time, like Jack said that they would.

Jesus, yes, wow, you know what?

I also said that just to like also take the bullet.

Jack, well, you know what, Keith?

Yeah, look, Keith, I don't want to have to do this.

That one will do.

Oh, no.

Okay.

Well,

five stars to the show.

Oh, but we got to do some reviews.

Zero stars to Leorio being a a gross pervy idiot in episode 11.

Come on, dude.

True.

True.

True.

Thank you.

Five stars to Leario every other time.

All the other moments of Leario.

Yeah, every other time.

Almost every time.

Most other times.

Most other times.

He's got like a 90%

hitting rate for me.

This person gave five stars delivering this five-star rating so we don't have to euthanize Dray and Sylvie.

Thank goodness.

Thank goodness sideways face.

You too.

I remember talking about how I was going to cry if you didn't give us a

story earlier than you.

I talked about killing and dying as I am one to do.

I apologize.

Andre hopped on board with it.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, that's

just me.

That's just good podcasting.

Yes, and me.

I appreciate it.

They also say

a hunter is, according to this podcast, um, wait, hold on.

I have it here somewhere.

There's a lot of good forgetting what a hunter is

reviews here.

Um, at least some more of this.

Okay, bye.

Thank you.

bye.

Good night.