Gingsaw - Hunter x Hunter ep. 37+38: Media Club Plus S01E12

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 J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

You can find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com slash run button, where we've by now well finished a Let's Play of Sonic Superstars, a very mediocre game, but we've played all the other Sonic games literally, so why not play this one too?

Who knows what we're doing now?

We've got an upcoming Let's Play of Digimon Next Order, the sort of spiritual sequel to Digimon World.

I'm very excited to get to that.

We have not started it.

I was wondering if you were going to jump into World 2 afterwards.

No, well, the thing about World 2,

they're very dungeon crawlery,

much, much different.

Next Order, I think is what it's called.

It's the same as the first one.

Yeah, it's very similar to the original Digimon World, which i love and hate uh you know very conflicted but it is interesting and weird and fun it makes a great let's play i think

yeah it does have we ever talked about how i've all i've played all of those games and no you've never mentioned this to me i should bring that up some time yeah yeah we'll talk about digimon world uh let's see you could also uh go to friendsofthetable dot so no well yes you can go to friends of the table.cash to support this show uh this show is brought to you by friends of the table and actual play podcast it's really good you should check it out

The last two sci-fi seasons have been really good.

That's what we're doing now.

You should listen to Partisan and then Palisade.

You can go to twitch.tv slash friends of the table to watch us stream games.

If you like this podcast, twitch.tv slash friends of the table is like this, but we're playing a game.

Yep.

With me, as always, is Jack Dakeet.

Hi, I'm Jack Dakeet.

You can find me on co-host at JDQ.

You can get any of the music featured on this show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

Two hours ago, I went to a CVS and received two vaccinations as part of an immigration medical exam.

Right.

I don't know what the consequence of these vaccinations is going to be vis-à-vis my comfort and clear-headedness as we make Media Club Plus.

I think they'll make you very powerful today.

Sure.

I was the bravest little soldier.

Yeah.

That's good.

That's good.

Some people are not very brave.

But you're very brave.

Thank you.

Is that it for you?

Is that all you have to say?

That's all that I have to say.

Yeah.

All right.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, it's me.

You can find me on Twitter at Swandery3000.

And Sylvie Bullet.

Hi, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

You can follow the TikTok of this show and Friends of the Table at Friends underscore Table on TikTok.

Did we mention the Twitch?

I did mention the Twitch, yeah.

Cool.

And that stuff also

has echo, Sylvie, after

YouTube,

which is

same thing as Twitch.

YouTube is friends at the table, no underscore.

Correct.

Yeah.

Cool.

I felt that really brought me back to being like pop quizzed in school for some reason.

I ask a lot of questions on this show.

I like it.

It's good.

I didn't know that I did that, but I've been editing them.

And thank you.

uh, I've been trying, which is, I want, I don't want to say new, uh, but it's definitely I definitely want to come across as a good host, which is not something that's been on my mind, despite having been podcasting since 2008.

Um,

Jesus, part of the part, I know, it's insane.

Part of the Run Button style has never been being good at hosting a podcast.

Uh, even the Run Button is really good, um, it is the best video game podcast that exists, and I'm seriously.

Were you hosting a podcast during George W.

Bush presidency?

I've been doing,

we started our first, me and Kyle, my cousin, who I do Run Button with, started our show,

Complex Rockets,

after Obama was elected, but before his inauguration.

Wow, wow.

Wow.

Yeah.

Yep.

So yes, yeah, I was podcasting during a lame duck George W.

Bush,

which is super weird.

But today, we're here to talk about Hunter Hunter.

And in fact, we're here to talk about just two bits of Hunter Hunter.

It's a light one today.

It is.

Although I had so many quotes.

This is a very quote-heavy.

These are good episodes.

These are

good episodes.

It's two of them, but they're juicy.

Oh, they're juicy.

This reminds me of

some of the early Hunter Exam episodes where there wasn't a ton of action happening, but there was so much talking and all the talking is gold.

It's so good.

It's that image of the guy writing and the pen is on fire.

It is Tagashi when he was writing these.

Yeah, we are on the heels of some of the most exciting action that we've seen in the show so far.

And these are like two big feelings and lore dump episodes that are some of the best of that that we've seen so far, at least for me.

Yeah, I agree.

I think we're hitting a really good stretch.

Like, I think we're in the middle of a good stretch, honestly.

Like, I think it's

everything that's upcoming.

Yeah.

It's so good.

It's so good.

Yeah.

For context, Keith restructured some of our, it won't matter to you because you don't know, but the episode order we'll be watching, like what chunks we'll be doing.

And so he watched a little bit of a lot of

like, what, you said 15 episodes?

I watched like five minutes of between 12 and 15 episodes to make sure everything flowed right.

I'm so excited.

I'm so excited.

But these episodes, we are vocalizing and codifying a lot of stuff.

This is very heavy, gone and killowa relationship stuff.

Uh, we're getting a lot of uh Aunt Mito feelings, a lot of uh, Jing Freak's backstory, and

some, I think, fun nen stuff that we were we spent a little bit of last time, especially Austin in the last episode talking about like what kinds of weird nen things we might be covering.

We've already hit a weird, cool Nen thing, I think.

So I'm excited to dig into that.

Any thoughts on the beginning of episode 37?

To remind everyone to do

a real quick recap?

That was the recap.

It's a short recap.

Okay, yeah.

Yeah.

To be fair, it's like,

I guess we.

They go to the island for a couple of days, and then they leave after getting some info from Killowa's brother, if we want to be a little more specific.

And listening to a cassette tape.

And listening to a cassette tape.

Listening to a cassette tape.

Yeah.

Yeah,

I had some longer stuff for the recap, and I was just like, we're just going to talk about everything to talk about.

So let's just skip.

Let's just bare bones this recap.

Let's just do it.

Okay, do we have a new title sequence or am I

misremembering?

I think we have a new song.

With the lyrics, you just try again.

Oh, and just go away.

So the lyrics change.

There's

versions of the same song that they jump back and forth between.

And I don't know if we've seen this one before, but

we'll get both again as the time goes on.

Do we have a new title sequence?

I don't know.

Some people count this as part of the next arc, but a lot of the official sources count this as the end of the hunter or sorry, of the Heaven's Arena arc, which is how I have it structured.

This is maybe worth bringing up because this has happened before, right?

The last major arc also ended with this little interlude sequence.

And I am curious about, I would like to talk through this structurally, right?

Because both of those came at the end of two really big, very intense

sort of action arcs.

The first was the Hunter exam, which was

lethal for many, many humans.

And the other was the Heavens Arena, which felt like it was lethal.

And

they bridge to a sort of usually like a smaller arc, right?

Was the first one,

what was the first little interlude?

Was it the Zaldic family?

It was the Zaldic family.

As we move into Heaven's Arena, and this is this little tiny whale island visit, this little gone goes home visit, as we're presumably on our way to York New City and the auction.

Although I don't really know if that's where we're going to go next.

That's where it feels.

And I think it is notable that these two interlude scenes are both family focused and are both about zooming into the home lives of our two protagonists.

That was like the first note I had about this episode was that like we never got to see Gon's actual like home life with Mito in the first episode.

All of their stuff was based around Gon's like

like challenge to be able to do the hunter exam, right?

The like catching the Lord of the Swamp thing.

And so it was all colored by that.

And so, in these episodes, when we get there and see like

how she reacts when she sees Ghana Kiloa and is like, you need to go have a bath right now and you wash your dirty clothes.

Oh, I wish you told me we were having friends, you were having, we were having comfort stuff just so I could get ready for it.

It is not super often that there's like relatable stuff happening in Hunter Hunter, but like this feeling of

going to your friend's house and it's very different than you're used to

and just sort of like watching your friend interact with his mom.

And it's like, is this how they do things here?

Ending with the very funny scene where Kilo starts eating and everyone's trying to say grace.

And I'm like,

I know this.

I know that feeling of

this is a family that says grace.

That's so weird.

Hey, they say grace, by the way.

Yeah, well, they give thanks.

This is what they say.

Yeah, it's a lot of silence giving thanks.

Which is, you know, it is interesting that we don't really know.

I imagine that in a show this big, we are going to come back to this, and it will be notable if we don't.

We haven't spent a lot of time in faith and spirituality outside of men.

But, like, there is this moment where the family kind of sits quietly to give thanks, and Kilua just is looking around.

Mito also scolds Kilua at one point.

I don't remember when, but she it's that thing of like, oh, it is clear that Mito is the boss of this family, and in entering the family, Killua has to sort of stick by her rules.

But they're these very gentle, sort of loving rules, unlike, for example, the nightmare home life that

Goan was introduced to when they went to the Zaldic mansion.

Yeah, they're the rules of a normal family where the parental figure cares about your well-being instead of cares about your ability to kill.

It's huge.

It's like, it's like, it is, it's such a good way to just like have that be in the show without.

I mean, Kilua does at one point say, I wish I had a mom like Aunt Mito.

I know.

It's very cute.

It's very cute, but it's a great way of setting that up without being super in your face about it.

Yeah, they really do do a great job of like teeing up the amito stuff that comes at the end of this episode and some in the next episode too.

Yeah.

And Kilua, this is Kilua getting to see a family, obviously, to see a quote-unquote functional family, unlike his, but also having to listen to parents or listen to guardians in a way that he doesn't really listen to his parents.

You know, we have known that Kilua's reactions to being told not to do things by his mom is

he attacked her.

Yeah.

And like, there are these moments where like...

Mito is like, all right, now you have to go and have a bath or whatever.

And you get these like looks from Killua of like, I guess this is

how this is what we do.

Yeah.

And in much the same way as we're seeing, you know,

Gon acting as a vector for Killua to experience the joy of being a 12-year-old.

I wonder if Mito is also a vector for Killua to experience like being a 12-year-old and having a parent who cares about you.

It is

really interesting how Gone

is like ostensibly the main character, but we are very much like seeing this world through Killua's eyes.

Not in the way that we've been inside of characters in other ways.

This is like the sort of the original thing that Hunter Hunter shows us.

It's good at, like back on the boat with Karapika, where it's like so good at

framing the show as the observations of a particular character without necessarily telling you that that's what's happening.

Like this is all Kilua noticing all of this stuff and how weird and different it is.

And like we feel like we are visitors in Ghon's house, even though it's like presumably the main character going back home.

It doesn't feel familiar.

And

like it feels familiar because

I've been to houses like that.

But it doesn't feel like, ah, we're home with Goan, our main character and our friend.

Like we feel, it feels more like Kiloa is who we're meant to be seeing this through, which is very interesting.

We've talked about it a few times about how the show is good at kind of switching perspective

through the way that it like presents things and not just necessarily narrative focus.

And I think here is a really good example of it of like these episodes, a lot of it is just through Killiwa's perspective.

Like particularly all the family stuff, but like we got the phone call with Milloki later.

Like there's a, I don't know.

I think it's just another like example of how the show is able to sort of like move in and out of who the POV character, quote unquote, is

very seamlessly.

And I like it.

It's a good thing about the show.

This is just a comment.

That's a thumbs up, basically.

So, I mean, oh, go ahead, Jack.

Oh, no, no, you go ahead.

I mean, I was going to say, I think the scene after dinner is Goan and Kilua going outside to have the run of the island, right?

Yeah, it's wonderful.

That scene where Goan and Kilua are like sitting under the big starry night sky by the big lake where Goan caught the fish at the very beginning of Hunter Hunter.

And like Goan is talking about, like, oh, I know exactly what I'm going to do.

I'm going to go to York, New City.

I'm going to figure out my dad.

And then Kilua, like the most vulnerable we have ever seen Kilua be, looks at Goan and says, like, I forget exactly what he says, but I think he says, like, I admire that about you.

And it's even implied, he's basically saying, like, I'm jealous that you have this.

I am jealous that you have this thing that drives you and that you care about so much because I don't have anything like that in my life.

It's, it's, it's just, it's so good.

Um, yeah, I would love to talk about this scene.

I want to go back just one tiny step because I feel it inflects this scene in a really great way.

As they're eating dinner, um,

a cue that we've heard before starts playing, which is these sort of like overlapping bell chimes and these sort of rumbling drums, which is often used to like

discovering something or

not like a not like a climactic discovery.

But this music builds out into this like cello.

It's quite sedate.

It's quite melancholy.

Oh, I actually know exactly who this is

thanks to a new website that I found.

Oh, yeah.

It's called My Father's Back.

And it's called,

it's sort of like a cello and piano nocturne.

Like it's like.

Very sad and slow.

It's very beautiful.

And we get these shots of Ghan and Killiua out exploring the island.

And I think most of these are static shots.

We get some motion, but we are seeing Ghan

exploring Whale Island and Killiwa following him.

And this is our first kind of real look at Ghoan's day-to-day life on

Whale Island.

And in the same way that...

Keith, you were talking earlier about like having been in that house where people say Grace and going like, oh, I relate to that experience.

I feel like the experience of seeing seeing your friend in the place that they feel most comfortable and going,

oh, that's why they're like that.

Or, like, oh, this is why Goan is like this.

Or this, you know, it must have been a really interesting moment for Killua.

And I think

helps get him to this place in the next scene.

Where, yes, like you said, Dre, Killua is suddenly very open.

And says, I wrote down the line, I was just thinking, I admire you.

There's nothing I want to to do.

You have your thing.

I don't have anything.

And I just realized, too, we have seen the show has invited us to see what it is like for Kiloa to feel compared against Goan.

Yeah.

And every time previous to this, Kiloa has bristled at it.

And this is the first time where I feel like Kiloa,

one, admits that he, in some way, is quote-unquote lesser than Goan, but also like doesn't bristle at it, doesn't like,

doesn't respond with like, that's not true.

But instead, like, yeah, it is, and that's really special about you.

Yeah, it's clear that it's a moment of pain for him.

Yeah, there is some discomfort there.

But yes, I think it bristling.

There's a real sense of

this conversation is very still in comparison to the way that we've seen a lot of conversations or a lot of action in the show.

And it might just feel this way after Heaven's Arena.

But there is something about these two people by a campfire under the stars.

it is generative of a particular kind of conversation that I think produces in Killua a readiness to say these things and not bristle about it, to go, you know what, actually,

because I think he's been shown something that he knows he doesn't have,

not just in terms of Goan's sort of like spectacular drive, but also the relationships that he has with Mito and with the island and with sort of like Goan situating himself in the island.

I think Killua is ready to say,

I admire this about you, and I wish I had something like this.

Just to bring it back to the thing you said about stillness, I think it is actually worth mentioning that this is the first time they've sat and had a conversation like this without being in the middle of something like the Hunter exam or Heaven's Arena.

Sure.

They've always been

on the road for something, and I think that this being a moment to pause is what, like, I mean, you basically said, like, is what lets Kiloa kind of be vulnerable about this?

It's lovely character writing, too, because we know Tagashi likes and is capable of telescoping the perspective into a character and letting them get real deep in their feelings, often very expositorily deep in their feelings.

We've seen this with Karapika and Leorio, we've seen this a lot with Leorio.

You know,

the view will telescope in and we'll go into this really very intense

description of how a character is feeling.

But this feels like a conversation.

You know, these two people are not outputting expository emotion at each other.

This scene is very sparse and very gently written.

I think it's a really lovely scene.

It also, like,

you know, the, I just linked a couple shots.

The drawing of the characters is so good.

The line where Kiluwa says, I was thinking you're sort of admirable, and is like faced away and like head down and like shoulders up like he looks like admitting it is um

like a defeat almost and then you see going next to him just like uh kind of surprised kind of like kind of interested but also like open and engaged with like the the sort of like side-on perspective with the camera instead of like killer was sort of facing away uh uh they do such a good job in this scene and in a couple other scenes like drawing their,

like, putting them in really interesting positions, uh, that do such a good job of, like, showing what's going on.

And, uh,

it helps that, like, like, Kilo is so, um,

he retreats from this sort of thing.

Like, uh, Dre, you brought up that every other time he's compared to Goan, he sort of bristles at it.

Uh, uh, and this time he sort of doesn't, except like he is kind of, um,

uh he's like turtling, he's like pulling into a shell, but Gona's like sort of definition of kind of heart on your sleeve, kind of live wire emotionally character

is like

uh, I mean, this is the thing that you can do in a, in, in,

you know, when you're the author, right?

You can just like like, oh, I have a character that wants to retreat, and I have a character whose like magic power is pulling,

point them at each other, yeah, yeah,

Yeah.

I want to, for the listener, earlier when Keith was talking about positions, I mean, obviously, you're talking about the sort of emotional and narrative structural positions, but I think in this particular thing, you are referring to the way the characters are placed in the frame.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like the physical blocking of these characters, the choreography of these scenes.

And yeah,

if during the fight with Hisaka, we saw the show's animation team really zero in on making a fight really compelling.

There is so much animation work being done on these characters' faces and expressions.

None of these are throwaway lines.

And then

Gohan responds to Killiwa kind of opening up a little by opening up a little himself.

Gohan says, you know, how Whale Island is an outpost island where fishermen who have been away at sea for a long time come and get stuff and resupply, maybe rest a little.

And he knew a girl here for a while who was his own age, but not for long, presumably because everybody was sort of moving on.

And Gohan says that Killua is kind of his first friend.

And Killua is withdrawn and embarrassed by this.

You know, Killua is a little bit more.

It's so cute.

He bristles really embarrassing stuff like that.

And Goan is like, of course not.

Just, you know.

No real.

Goan does not feel any shame about saying this.

It's great.

But he's sort of met Kilua's bet by saying.

This is the first time I've been in a relationship like this.

I love that line because it sort of illustrates something that sort of like is kind of right under the surface of their friendship, which is like

for their,

and

it ties in really well with that they are each other's first friend.

For Goan, that is like a surprise.

Like he makes friends so easily.

Everywhere he goes, people are

immediately taken by him and, you know, his like friendliness and his,

you know, cleverness and his,

you know, just general personality.

And

even though some of those things are true about Kilo, also, like, you can tell, and they show us in the story that he doesn't have, he doesn't have, he hasn't had friends.

But the thing that's right underneath the sort of surface is like, Four Gone talking about this stuff is

like easy and natural.

It's like easy and natural for him to be telling someone, like, hey, we get along great.

Let's like hang out together and be best friends.

And there's something about like Kilo is like ashamed of this, or like is ashamed of or

scared of or made nervous by this

the prospect that for Gohan is like almost nothing.

Like it is not, uh, it doesn't seem like a big deal for him to say, to declare friendship.

I don't know if that's true, though, because I think, like, Keith, you're talking about how everyone finds, you know,

I think every, a lot of people would say that Goan is their friend.

I don't know if Goan would say all of those people are his friend.

And I think that's like a, in the way that he would say that about Kilua.

And I think that is a big distinction.

I just think it's two different levels of friend.

No, I agree.

Yeah.

But I think like when Goan says like, Kilo, you're my first friend.

I think like

that is his first friend.

It is not the first person he's friendly with.

Yeah.

Ghan kind of strikes me as the kid who's like didn't have because I mean like this is literal like you didn't have a lot of kids around was ended up being very friendly with like the adults in their community, but never really felt like they had like a peer.

And it's what's kind of what he's getting at.

And I I think that the fact that

he's able to just be a kid with Killua and not have to

think about what the adults are thinking about him

when he's trying to have fun is probably part of this, right?

Yeah, no, I agree.

I'm just, I think I'm just, we're, I'm just using friend to mean two different things in the same.

Yeah, like the, the, it is the fact that he is capable of making quick connections with people who feel like

that, like they,

the

Ghost's potential for making friends is demonstrated to be very high.

And so it's kind of a surprise when they reveal, hey, he hasn't had a friend, but he hasn't considered himself to have had a friend before.

Because we saw him with Leorio and Karapica.

We saw him making friends with the.

We saw him making friends with the friends.

I didn't think about the order there.

Right, yeah.

Leorio and Karapica blown the fuck out.

We saw him making friends with the They currently have the mom and dad.

Yes, they are his mom and dad.

And

Hilaria is the mom.

The

I think they take turns.

Yeah.

It's just this sort of like, like, oh.

The ease of

being able to enter into this sort of like promise of friendship is one-sided.

Like, Kilo is willing and uncomfortable to be Goan's friend in the same way.

Like, this is

something that Goan feels is easy and Kilo does not.

I also wonder if,

like, because I'm sure Goan has been complimented by people a lot for like his

physical attributes and his like quickness and his intelligence and like all of this stuff.

And I wonder if maybe Kilo is also the first person to say that, like, man, your ability to like have a goal and a dream and to fight for it is like so admirable.

That's actually worth bringing up because like a lot of people tend to

like

out of worry for Gone,

not encourage that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In a lot of ways.

Like, genuinely, like, I mean, Karapika and Leorio, I think, also both did it.

I'm not just talking about Mito here.

Though that is the first thing that we we see in the show, is Mito

trying to discourage him.

Yeah, I just, because we're talking about this

relationship sort of like Nexus here, I didn't want to make it seem like that's the only example I'm thinking of.

Yeah, I don't know.

I think that I think that's actually like a major key to this, Dre, is like Kiloa being

like

supporting Gon's ambition.

That's the word I was looking for.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think also Kilua, like,

Kilua is also a nightmare child that Gone is.

Oh, yeah.

And so, like, Kilua never has the moment of like, oh my gosh, you can, that's insane that you could do all that.

And Kilua instead is just like, oh, yeah, of course you can do that.

I can do that.

That's no big deal.

Let me figure out what's actually cool and special about you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Goan, Goan, you know, takes this on board and says, all right, look, here's the deal.

I'll go look for my dad.

You come with, and you can look for something you want to do while we do that.

Yeah.

Which is so sweet.

You know, I think coming from anybody else, it might feel like, you know,

he was just

kind of moving on.

But

I do feel like Goan is like, well, look, we like each other.

I know what I want to do.

You stick by me, and I'll stick by you and we'll figure something out along the way.

It's fun hanging out with you.

Yeah.

It's fun hanging out with you, which is what

Gon says,

I think it's fun to be with you, which is just so sweet.

It's funny.

I think my sub was different.

It's

also good either way.

It's good either way.

It's so cute.

They're so like.

And now the conversation turns to parents.

Because

I just want to say one more thing about Do you think it's fun to be with you?

And you can see it, and I link the picture here.

Like, you can see it in Ghan's face.

Like, this is not like an offhanded thing this is like a declarative

this is a a reassurance and a declarative statement like i am telling you this i'm not just saying it uh which i think is very interesting

yeah

um

so kilua asks gone about his mom and gone says

I don't really know about my mom because it transpires that at first Mito told Gon that both his parents had died in a traffic accident because she didn't want Goan to know the truth about his dad or she thought that he would go off to be a hunter which is exactly what happened yeah

she was she was she was exactly right and so since gone has learned that his dad is alive he has sort of figured and the way the way um he expresses this

is is almost as though He's sort of taking a mental position rather than necessarily believing it to be true.

He just sort of goes, well, I figure my mom was the one who must have died in the accident.

And something about the access delivery and the way this line is phrased really does make me feel like, I don't know whether or not Goan actually believes that.

It's just the sort of the story that he tells.

The story that he was told first was that both his parents died in a traffic accident, and then when he learned that his dad was actually still alive and had kind of abandoned him, he just sort of moved the decimal place one, right?

Over he was like, surely this story is at least half true.

I guess my mom must have died.

And this this kind of

cuts to, I think, one of the central emotional sort of ideas in this pair of episodes is that he doesn't really think of his mom at all.

Or he claims not to really think of his mom at all.

Because, as he says it, Mito is his mom.

He says he doesn't ask Mito about his mom.

He says, there's nothing for me to ask, and I don't need to.

And on some level, this is, you know, this is very sweet to Mito, to be like, you know, she takes care of me like a mother.

I love her dearly.

I don't really think of my own mother.

But there's something odd about the way this is situated alongside the relationship with Jean.

Jean is such a...

It's a candle in the sun moment, I feel.

Like, Gene is such a powerful force for imagining and...

like as a way of imagining himself and as a way of imagining his relationship with adults and as a way of imagining himself as an adult, that

he doesn't need to or consider paying much attention to his mom because Gene just swallows up all that energy and light,

which is interesting.

And in the next episode, something happens that makes me doubt whether or not I believe Goan when he says this, but as it stands right now, when he says that he doesn't care to learn about his mom, yeah, yeah, I think there's some

sadness there.

I think, like, I read it as

like

that

it's something that he decided out of

love and respect for Mito

without maybe even,

I mean, almost definitely without asking her about it.

Like, do you, is this something that is it is it important to you that I don't know about my mom?

I guess, uh, you know, like,

it definitely seems like,

to me, something that is

at least friction for him.

It suddenly opens up a vacuum in the show because, you know, I wrote down in my notes, wait, we don't know who Gon's mom is at all.

I had not even thought of that up to this point for, you know, a couple of reasons.

The first is that these kids are just going through like a delight nightmare constantly.

You know, they're out there running through tunnels and fighting beasts.

You know, I wasn't thinking about that.

Stuff that someone who had a mom would do.

But the other thing is, it's like Gene is the focus.

The absence of Gene is the focus.

And Mito's there.

Yes.

But I don't think that that is a.

I think that the show is deliberately problematizing that.

The show is very aware that

this is an odd situation.

Yeah, for sure sure yeah

uh amito overhears this she is delivering them some food um it's really sad i mean it's like obviously you know she's happy about that like this is i think a touching moment but it is like i don't know sort of watching

watching this made me sad i don't know for sure no there's like a melancholy yeah it's very melancholy

this is a sad episode for sure like almost everything that happens in this episode is sad.

Like, this sort of like touching moment between Gohan and Kiloa is kind of sad.

Kiloa himself is kind of sad.

Like, Ghon thinking about his parents is sad.

Going returning home is like, I think, you know, it's rare to find some fiction where returning home isn't a little bit sad.

Like, there's even just like the everything's just where I left it.

The woods are still here.

The spot is still here.

You know, the cliff is still, like, even all that is kind of sad to me.

I feel like this is the episode where I just keep disagreeing with you.

That's fair.

That's okay.

I definitely think, I feel this episode, it's definitely melancholy, but I guess like it's hard for me to classify it as sad because I see Kilua as someone who is so like legitimately and obviously traumatized and is and is still and has like found a person with whom he can be safe with.

And it's hard for me to like view that as sad.

I don't know.

I think that the maybe

happened for sure.

Maybe the thing I'm

well,

there's a few things.

Some things are not for the show yet.

But

what I will say is, like

what it it feels like to me is Kilua wanting

to

feel safe with Goan and

still not, is

what I get out of it.

It's like being close and closer than he's been, but still not.

Yeah.

And I guess for me, you know, I just like seeing that he has even the capacity to be close is really, is really important.

Yeah.

I mean, yeah, I think it's, I think it's like, and I don't think it's like like purely sad.

I think it's just all also sad.

Yeah, sure.

I mean, even like, even like the parts where like, like you said, Mito,

it's like, it is like all of the stuff with Goan and Mito is both like touching in which it's like, oh, wow.

Yeah.

It's so great that Goan had this kind of figure.

But then it's also like, oh man, it is so fucked up that that's.

that's who had to play this role for gone.

Yeah.

And it's also, yeah, like, like, it's also, you know, that he's going to leave again tears her up.

Sure.

Like, she's so sad that he has chosen this life.

Yes and no.

And I, and I, you know, this is, this is the thing that I said is like my big question that was inspired by this episode is that, like,

yes, she is sad that Goan has chosen this life and she doesn't want him to leave.

But it also is a very different kind of sadness than she felt when Gene left.

Yeah.

Well, she also was, you know, a kid, basically.

Yeah, but like,

she understands why Goan is leaving.

And even though it makes her sad, she is like happy for him and can respect that.

At least that's how I read it.

Whereas when Gene left, and I guess this is starting to bounce into episode 38 stuff, but it's like, you didn't tell me.

You didn't tell me why you had to leave.

You didn't explain anything.

You just left.

Yeah.

And so then I had to fill in that void myself.

Yeah.

Should we begin to move towards the Gene freaks hour

um

just before just before we do uh

i and i think that this this speaks to your point as well here dre um and i think you might bridge the gap between where where dre and keith are on this i've spoken in the past about how i think that ghan's relationship with killua with

uh hisaka as a sort of uh opposing pole uh sort of opposing ideological and emotional pole uh is the thing thing that is underwriting a lot of the drama in this show.

You know, the question is: is it's like

put

Hisaka and Goan on either side of Killiwa and then see which way the characters move.

Essentially, no, make a triangle of those characters and then see how close the points get to each other.

But I think that, you know, in coming back to Whale Island,

we have

skirted real close to

the things that caused these two characters, Gona and Killua, a lot of pain.

Whether that is the absence of Gene or whether that is Killua's reluctance and prickliness about opening himself up to somebody else.

I think part of the reason that these episodes felt so

melancholy and so emotive for me was

of the characters' proximity to these emotions, to these kind of central points of pain in each of these characters.

And it did make me think: oh, God, if we're in episode 37 and the show is deliberately pulling these emotional heartstrings and it's working for me, we got a lot, you know, there's a lot more big feelings that are going to happen in this show, I bet.

No comment.

Yeah.

Okay.

When they return,

Mito gives Gone a box and says, this box, which looks a little like if a shipping container was

exactly 15 centimeters tall on every side.

And says, your dad

gave me this to give to you.

when you become a hunter

and we are immediately off to the races in terms of some hunter-hunter mystery excitement.

After spending the first episode having a lot of really deep emotive conversations, Tagashi was like, oh, wait, shit, I have to make a puzzle box.

Yeah, literally.

A literal puzzle box.

Tagashi watched Hellraiser and was like, hmm, the lament configuration.

This absolutely has big lament configuration vibes, except instead of opening it and being pulled to the sex demon dimension,

you're pulled to the deadbeat dad dimension.

You're pulled to the deadbeat deadbeat dimension.

By the way,

that box that's been sitting in a cupboard for 10 years or just safe and sound?

No, she's tried to throw it away like every day, and grandma fishes it out.

It's cool.

I love it, grandma.

Oh, grandma really.

I believe this is Mito's mother.

This is actually Mito and Jing's grandmother.

Right, so it's Goan's great-grandmother.

This lady's old.

She's a little bit of a damn.

Yeah,

most of the time her scenes, she's just sitting sitting off at the table making us like sort of smiling and looking into the distance, drinking some tea.

She's fucking great.

Yeah, we can sort of we can touch on this point again.

I was listening to one of our earlier episodes, and Austin was talking about the way that this show

bounces between different sort of anime genres.

And we are now so firmly in a slice of life anime.

These two episodes absolutely episodes.

Right down to the lovely grandmother.

Great-grandmother is here.

And yes, the grandmother has been throwing this box away.

Mito's been trying to get rid of it.

Although the grandmother sort of intimates, if you really wanted to get rid of this box, Mito, you would have done by now.

You were just, you were sort of taking an action with this box.

You were just trying to get it out of here, knowing that I would always bring it back.

And...

Convenient.

Actually, about that, Mito's reaction to where she gets, she gets both very, like, like, annoyed and like standoffish, but like, in a way, that reminds me of Gone a little bit.

I don't know how to put it, but other than like, oh, the faces she makes when she gets like embarrassed about this stuff.

And like, Tito's great.

The way, yeah, like the way that they just like have her moving and talking.

I'm like, oh, yeah, this is kind of where the kid gets it from.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then she says something wonderful.

She says, do you want me to tell you everything I know about Gene?

And the show's animators just sell Ghon's reaction to this, to just like, the world is opening up for him.

And this is kind of weird because Ghoun wanted to become a hunter to go looking for his dad.

And now he has returned home and he's a hunter and all his dreams are coming true.

This is, you know,

the premise for him of what being a hunter would let him do,

it would be like if Leorio said, I want to become a hunter to get really, really rich.

And he went home from the hunter exam and someone gave him $480 million.

And a fucking license to be a doctor for free.

Yeah, just instantly.

So,

Mito and Jean are similar in age, but Jean is older.

By maybe four or five years.

There's a line that is.

Not to bring the sadness back up immediately, but one of her, the first thing that she says is so sad to me.

The

where am I?

Okay.

Was it about always looking at Jing's back?

Yeah, yeah, I felt like I was always looking at his back.

Yeah,

and I think that is worth thinking about with the song title you mentioned earlier.

Yeah, what is it?

My father's back or something?

Yeah, my father's back.

Yeah, it's

gone being Mito, but like in the present, yeah.

But yes, very much sort of like little sibling, older then older sibling vibes.

Although they're not siblings, they are

cousins.

Yes.

But it's very much the vibe of like the older sibling going off and exploring and the little sibling idolizing them and sort of

following them.

Because that's what happens.

Gene would go out and explore Whale Island

and Mito would

go off running after him wherever he went.

And

Jean wasn't very good at taking care of Mito when she was young.

They would go out into the woods together.

And often, the implication is that Gene sort of didn't really pay any attention to Mito following him.

He was sort of like off the wall.

I don't think that's the implication.

I think that is explicit.

It wasn't.

Sorry, Jack, say anything again.

What is.

Oh, it wasn't like they were going out into the woods together.

It was like Gene goes out into the woods, Mito follows him.

Yeah.

Gene knows this, but pays almost no attention to her whatsoever.

And in fact, she says that she was always trying to get him to play with her, but he was like, no.

She would

often go missing when they explored together.

This

is so sad.

Come home, and everyone would be like, where is Mito?

And they would have to send out like island-wide search parties to find her.

Maybe I misunderstood this or read it differently, or I don't know how.

The thing that I thought was that she was running away, like irrespective of them going out and exploring, she was just like running away on her own and hiding.

And it really, it felt

the implication to me anyway was this is like a ploy to get Gene to pay attention to her.

Absolutely.

Well, because don't they mention that Jing's was always the one who found her?

Yeah.

And was the only one who could?

Yeah.

The grandma, Grandma Freaks was like,

you know, the people in the town started thinking that you were playing pranks on us because he was almost like you didn't want to be found.

She said.

So sad.

Which is like so sad.

Why was she running away?

Why was she doing this?

Because she idolizes Gene.

She wants to see her.

Yeah, and it's the only way that he would pay attention to her.

This fucking guy.

And this is amazing because suddenly a bunch of stuff snaps into place kind of immediately.

Not just in the sense of,

I'm going to talk about these two things separately rather than just saying one thing and immediately moving on to another.

A lot of stuff snaps to place with Mito.

You know, we now get to feel a lot of understanding for the way Mito feels about

first Gene abandoning her completely

and then

Ghan setting off.

You know, what initially seemed to be like just a sort of regular, sad, your father abandoned you, and now you're leaving to follow him.

So it's a sort of a chain of disappearance, is now layered with this real deep

sort of spider web of loss

and desire for Mito, right?

Also the desire to be seen and recognized by somebody you look up to.

And then a lot of stuff snaps into place with Goan in the sense of generational trauma and in the sense of the way

people's feelings about their family naturally get passed down from parent to kid.

And so we sort of get this sense of like, obviously Goan wants to find his dad because he's his dad, he's gene freaks or whatever.

But at the same time, Goan has been raised.

by this woman who had this this relationship defined by absence with the person that she she looked up to the most.

There's just a real domino train of

sad, uncomfortable feeling about abandonment in this family.

And at the end of the domino train is Gene Freaks.

Sure is.

Yeah.

So,

oh, also, Mito's parents died in a traffic accident.

Yes.

I think it's actually worth, yeah.

Worth mentioning, too, like, that she gave Gone what happened to her as the

like reason that his parents weren't around.

Yeah.

So Gona leaves.

You know,

Mito.

I think she's great.

I think that they play her as a mom really well.

I think that her relationship with Goan's really cute.

The

lying and

sort of like hiding away information and the deception to keep Gone from being a hunter.

I understand not wanting, like, look, I've seen the hunter exam up close.

I get it.

I get it.

But wow, it's so bad.

There's so many.

This doesn't even include the manga canon of

her.

Part of the lie.

Part of the lie that she tells that

Jing dies in a traffic accident is then she's like, okay, okay, he didn't die in a traffic accident.

He abandoned you.

And like, is this like kind of thrown in Goan's face?

uh and then it's revealed he didn't abandon uh gone like she basically um forced him to go to court to get custody of him and then like kicked jing off the island oh oh that's

yeah there's a there's also there's a bunch of other or there's one other big uh manga cannon thing that they removed they cut from the uh i learned why they cut this from the 2011 anime and it's kind of a shame.

I think it's a pretty big mistake, but I don't really know how much to say about it.

That also colors some of this early stuff, but that probably won't be relevant until later.

I just think it makes a better beginning to the

series.

Yeah.

Well, and I think, like, if you want to talk about intergenerational trauma transmission, there is not a bigger neon sign saying, hey, this is what happened than Mito telling Goan, Hey, what happened to my parents actually happened to your parents.

Yeah.

Oh,

yeah, like a direct transposition, right?

Like a

lifting one and putting it onto the other.

And then, so yeah, Goan leaves.

Oh, my God.

Well, and I think Gene leaves.

Oh, go ahead.

Hold on.

The only thing I was going to add is that I think, too, this is also, like, this episode to me is also the illustration of Mito

going from

my trauma and my unresolved stuff about Gene makes me want to hold on so tightly to Goan and never let him go

to, okay, Goan is different than Gene, and I can let him go, and I believe that he'll come back.

Yeah, and he has come back.

Yeah, and he's written her the whole time.

Well, and he's come back, and he has brought her somebody.

This is another interesting mirror, right?

Gene came back, and he brought...

Let's just talk through the order of this.

Gene leaves age 12.

Miser's parents die in a traffic accident.

Gene's dad goes on a fishing trip and disappears.

Just a little bit of a drink.

I'm just going to say, real quick, I don't believe that guy's dead.

I think

the freaks'

brother's dead.

Jing's father.

Sorry, father.

Yeah, father.

No,

I think this is where Jing got the idea from.

I think this is going out to get a cigarette situation.

Oh, man.

Yeah, somebody's dad just got on a big boat and left the island and disappeared.

He disappeared.

This man's off in York New City, getting lit.

He's in York New City.

He's invented some kind of new, cool way of hanging out without your kids.

Yeah.

Gene was running.

He's in Kevin's Arena.

He's Kevin.

Kevin Freaks.

Yeah, Kevin Freaks.

That's who popped into the announcer room that one time.

That's actually

the episode title for episode 11.

I almost never know until after I've exported an episode of being like, fuck, I need a title for an episode.

I forgot to think about it even once.

Here comes Gene.

He's got a baby gone.

All he says about Goan's mother is that they.

No, that's not right.

In my notes, I wrote, celebrate it.

I meant to write,

sorry.

We're celebrated.

Your mother and I, we celebrate it.

This is also when Gene left Goan the box.

So

he gives the child, he gives the lament configuration, and then he leaves.

It's just the worst.

Deuces.

And Goan is being asked in this moment to understand Mito's position.

And he does, insofar as a 12-year-old being faced with this massive weight of generational trauma, kind of can.

Goan explicitly says, like, that must have been really sad, right?

There is this moment of connection between Goan and Mito here, I think.

Yeah, for sure.

Now, does

Goan learn the right lesson from this?

No, because he has just been given

the lament configuration.

Well, let me ask.

When he's the right lesson,

I don't know.

Well,

but not fuck dads, because he's suddenly like, Jing.

Jing.

That's right.

I ought to call him by his first name.

That

stood out to me.

Yeah.

There's a couple of things going on here.

The most generous reading that I can give to Goan is that he is recognizing that his father has his own personhood, right?

He is acknowledging his father as someone other than dad.

You know, this is Gene freaks.

Now, this is kind of undone a little by the fact that Gene's whole deal is his outsize mythology

in the eyes of his son.

So it's less like my father is his own person and more, oh, right,

that statue on the pedestal has a name graven in marble underneath it.

And it says Gene.

Hey, worth considering that he doesn't have an outsized personality.

Not as far as we know.

Well, I don't know much about Gene.

I will say that.

We know some pretty impressive stuff, is really all we know.

You know, he's in history books, he's influenced hunters that have not known his name, and then the stuff from the next episode where we see some kind of weird stuff going on.

This is all pretty impressive.

I don't want to get ahead of myself.

No, no.

But something happened in 38 that gave me a big emotion.

Time to try and open the box.

Goan is like, oh, my hunter card will open the box, right?

Kilois is so funny.

Yeah, he's

telling me, bro.

Oh, it's so good.

It's so funny.

Because, like, what Kilo says is, what do we have now that we didn't before the hunter exam?

Hunter cards.

Gone's like, right, the card.

Before we go.

Oh, no, no, no.

This is still 37.

This is the very end of 37.

I think so.

Yeah, I think this is the very end.

He's like, no, you moron, the superpowers we developed.

Oh,

oh, the superpowers we developed.

Right.

Sorry, that's not like visible to me, so I forget it exists because object permanence doesn't happen.

This is very funny.

You just wait for six months dedicating our lives to the study of men.

I went one day without doing it and I forgot.

He also forgot about his hunter card the first time he got it.

Just, what a guy.

Did we mention Aunt Mito trying to break the card, by the way?

Oh, God.

No, we didn't.

That was great.

That was a really good bit.

Again, another bit.

He does it, and then it's like, man, this thing's a piece of shit, huh?

That's also another moment of her feeling a lot like gone to me,

where it's like kind of mischievous and very just like forthright about what she's thinking.

It just like

impulse going right to your hand and bending it, just bypassing the brain.

The only thing missing is like her sticking her tongue out the way Coke does.

Yeah, exactly.

When I was a kid,

you know, whenever we were like staying over at someone's house, like as a family or whatever, my mom would invariably end up like breaking the curtain rod or something or

bending or whatever.

And when she was asked why, she was like, well, I just wanted to see what happened if I bent it that way.

Or I wanted to see what happened if I

did that.

To the point where my dad called this test to destruction.

I was just testing it and it broke.

And I feel like Mito is a real test to destruction moment here, being like, well, what if the card just bends?

I wanted to see what happened if I bent it.

Goan is like, give me that back.

So they use their nan powers.

Goan uses his nan power.

And the box explodes into

a lot of little tiny pieces of steel that have formed the outside of the box.

This is so good.

With a similar script written on this steel to the one on Mr.

Wing's promise threat.

The steel implications looks extremely cool.

It looks so cool.

The implication being that you can, like, and I think this is the first time we've sort of seen this in action, or rather, we saw it with the promise thread, but this is sort of being explained.

Right.

You can write nen onto something, like a spell.

You can sort of like, this is how I read it.

You can like engrave a nen charge onto something.

Very interesting.

Imbue.

There's a box in the box, and this box is very toyetic.

We we talked talked about sort of toyetic

aesthetics when we described Gita Aku early, you know, something made to look like a toy, carry the characteristics of a toy, be sold as a toy.

And this is this very distinctive-looking plastic.

It's probably not plastic, it's probably ceramic or something.

Shiny box.

It's purple, it's red, it's got a slot on one side, it's got a cross-shaped keyhole.

It's a very distinctive, It looks almost like what if a pokeball was square and purple?

It does look sort of like a square pokeball.

It reminded me of the poly pocket boxes.

Oh, my God.

Yes.

One of my most treasured possessions is a gift that Janine gave Kat and me once, and it is a poly pocket from the original Janine Hawkins childhood.

This is an original Hawkins poly pocket.

It's very cool.

I love it.

It's a little bedroom.

I loved poly pockets when I was a kid.

I could never have any of them, but now I'm an adult.

But yes, this whole thing is very much like a polypock.

Jack, you put in the Discord a picture of this device and said, Hunters, stop making everything a game challenge.

Parentheses, they will never stop.

And I said, LMAO, just wait, which is.

Yes.

Because

like five minutes.

Yeah.

Well, it's the next episode.

Yes.

We are right back into hunters and the way hunters think about the world is a game.

You're either playing the squid game or you're playing like a I Love Bees style ARG.

I can't wait for these sorts of statements to be fulfilled fully.

Wait, they're going to get fulfilled more?

Maybe.

I don't know.

Yeah.

There's a.

Did we.

I guess we didn't talk about that when they opened the box.

I'll save my game.

Inside the box is

a cassette tape.

Lovely.

Love it when you open a box given to me by my dad when I was a baby and there's a cassette tape inside.

This, to me, is storytelling.

There is also a ring, which Gurn and Kiliwa immediately notice has Nen engraving on the inside.

So I think wisely they say, don't put that on.

Well, think about this.

And there is what looks like

an SD card, like a memory card.

It looked, as Gurn points out, it's a little bigger than a usual memory card.

And I didn't put together what this was.

And I won't say what it is until we get to the next episode because the reveal of what it is is wonderful.

These things are nestled in this box, like a little presentation box.

It's funny.

Jing has excellent attention to detail.

Oh, he's absolutely.

I literally, in my notes, wrote Jing Song.

Like,

straight up.

Hello, son.

Would you like to play a game?

Yes.

listening if you would.

That is like

John Kramer more.

Yeah.

A Jingsaw is actually a tool used to cut a puzzle that enables you to abandon both your son and your cousin.

So they make a copy of the tape and they put it in this little boom box.

It's very cute.

I think in order to frame this scene better, but also because Ghana and Kilior are both just weirdos, they plug the cassette player into an outlet on the wall of the room and then drag the cassette player right into the middle of of the room on a rug to listen to it.

Well, Kilo has the excellent idea of like, we got to make a double of this tape just in case something weird happens.

Yeah.

Because he's a smart little boy.

He is a smart little boy.

The tape starts playing, and for the first time, we hear Jing speak.

He says,

and not very excitedly, in a tone of sort of,

one might say, resigned.

I feel resigned.

It's actually taunting.

It is kind of taunting.

He's a fucking guy.

Yeah.

You've spent your whole life wondering what your father is like.

Would you like to play a game?

He says, hey, Goan, I have a question for you.

Do you want to see me?

The narrator says it was the first time Goan had heard his father's voice.

Cut to credits.

Woohoo!

Hunter, Hunter's great.

That was lovely.

What a great episode.

Just whipped.

That's the end of 37.

Yeah.

This is not extremely important, but I was looking at the voice actor for the Japanese voice actor for Jeng,

Rikiya Koyama, the behind the voice actors credits page that he's got.

And

he is in the Japanese dub of Fallout New Vegas, among like a bunch of other credits.

But that was very funny scrolling through and seeing like a Fallout character.

He's Craig Boone in Fallout New Vegas.

Oh, that's the Japanese dub.

Yeah, that's the sniper competitor that lives in the dinosaur.

He is also my favorite Yakuza character, Saijima, but that's beside the point.

Saijima is your favorite one.

I love Saijima.

I love Saijima so much.

I'm a big four and five head, though.

And that's not me talking about my skull.

That's me talking about Yakuza four and Yakuza five.

His first name is Taiga.

Oh, God, this guy looks fucking great.

Four and five are great.

Oh, fantastic video games.

Yeah, really.

Another thing that I really want to make sure we talk about before getting into this episode is how we once again have

Kaiju.

Yep.

Yes!

This was the next thing I was going to say.

This is what I almost said when we talked about the Gazette.

I was like, before we talk about the Gazette, and then I remembered, wait, we're still in 37.

But yeah, the intro begins.

The narrator says, Kaiju, Shinju.

We get to see the fucked up creatures.

I felt so.

Stood up and cheered.

Oh, it was lovely.

Like getting back into the.

No, no, enough of this Nen shit.

And the thing is, I'm very happy to see the Nen in the magic Nen writing on the box.

You know, there's.

You want Nen in practice, not in theory.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

You don't want it explained to you again.

What's the name of that?

I'm looking something up.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah,

there is a collection of essays that I have not read.

I only know the title by Susan Sontag called Against Interpretation.

That's how I feel about Nen.

I am against interpretation of Nen.

I just want to see Nen happen.

So seeing this title sequence, yes.

Lovely.

At this point, I made a little prediction.

I said, there's going to be another elaborate game on this tape, isn't there?

And there sort of is.

In fact, what is on this tape is

we were in the Gene Freaks hour.

We've moved into part two of the Gene Freaks hour.

I've had enough of this fucking guy.

Oh, brother, this guy stinks the episode.

Yeah.

Does anybody have the specifics of what he says?

Because I don't have it word for word written down, but I feel like the way he says things is going to be important.

I have one part of it, but I don't know.

The first thing he says is,

do you want to see me?

Now, then he says, stop the tape now,

if you don't want me to continue, essentially.

He gives Goan an out.

And when Goan doesn't stop the tape, he says,

I don't want to see you.

I don't know how I could face you.

I'm not a decent guy.

Hunters are selfish creatures.

We are willing to sacrifice anyone and anything to get what we want.

And then he says basically, so come and find me, but I will always be the guy I am.

And then we'll talk about what is shown on screen during that in a second.

Ringing the bell, by the way,

that is a this is what hunters are statement, if I've ever heard one.

Hunters are.

Dean's continuing the trend of like everyone just projecting their own bullshit onto what a hunter should be.

Yes, totally.

Well, it's like Goan lives in a kind of fantasy of hunters.

Perhaps one way to read this is that like Goan's fantasy of hunters is indistinct.

He wants to find out what the big deal is about cigarettes, right?

He's just like,

well, hunters have got to be good because my dad was a hunter and he was great and he's got to be the best.

So hunters have got to be this sort of like pristine entity.

I mean, that's what Karapika thinks about hunters too.

It's worth finding out.

I do want to say I

personally, I feel like there's there's there is less,

I read less deification of uh Jing from Goan.

I think it's like a more sort of neutral curiosity.

It's a powerful curiosity.

Oh, sure.

But I think that there's like, and I think that the reason why I'm even bringing it up is because of how odd it is that he sort of is simultaneously like, he's like at certain points impressed by his father.

He's like deeply curious about his father and his motivations and hunters in general.

But it is like weirdly

like value neutral or like

weirdly like non-judgmental.

It's odd.

It's very odd.

And there is something

deeply unpleasant happening here in the way that Jing

the show is making very clear

that there is a kind of remorselessness to what Gene is saying when he says I don't know how I could face you I don't want to see you I'm not a decent guy this reads to me about as far away from an apology or a reckoning as it could he is sort of very selfish yeah he's saying well look it would give me bad feelings if I saw you and I'm not gonna change and that's just the way that it is it really is the uh dirtbag saying,

Well, look, I'm just a cruel person.

I just say cruel things.

And you're just going to have to deal with that if you want to get to know me.

And it's like a you know, a complete rejection of the capacity or desire to change in any way.

And this being the first thing that Goan ever hears his father say is great.

This is good television.

There's going to be a time

where we're going to have to talk a lot about Jing.

And I'm saying now

that there's going to be a way to hear what I have to say about Jing that's like, he's defending this guy?

I'm telling you now, I'm not.

I'm not defending him.

He sucks.

He sucks shit.

But also, Hunter Hunter is a very weird world with a bunch of very weird people in it.

And

the things that is going on in the show is bizarre uh and i cannot wait to talk about it but i'm telling you now if you're hearing what i'm gonna say then and and saying he's the famous guy i'm not this is your warning to not think that okay cut off the tape if you are going to um

but yeah it we've sort of i feel like we have talked on the show before in the abstract about and obviously you you know gene steel i didn't and i probably still don't we've talked on the show in the past about how Gene is probably not the greatest guy because of how he abandons Mito and Gum.

Yeah.

And he says, I'm a bad person.

My dub.

He says specifically, I'm a bad person, is what he's saying.

Oh, yeah, but I mean, I mean, sort of prior to this point.

Yeah.

And I had sort of thought that that was like an external reading that we were making.

I imagine that the show was going to kind of grapple with, like,

is this guy a good guy or not?

I was not expecting the opening salvo from the show to be explicitly, hey, Gene might be awful.

Yeah.

However, as Jing speaks, we get just this beautiful shot as the camera sort of zooms rapidly out away from Whale Island, up through the clouds, far, far, far, far, far, far away.

And this cut, it's not a cut,

it's a zoom and then a pan.

It takes so long and is being played against the tape that I was like, oh shit, we're going to see Jing for the first time, you know, like in the moment.

We've seen him appear in flashbacks a couple of times, but I was like, this is going to be our arrival, our meeting with Jing.

And it is so interesting and clever that after having told us, having showed us the cold reality that Jing is not a particularly nice guy, that there is a kind of flat, unpleasant, uncaring thing at the heart of this mythos, what the camera zooms in on is so startling startling and exciting that you immediately challenge what you have just been told.

You know, you have just been told, this guy's not a great guy.

And you think in the moment, okay, right, fine, let's pump the brakes a little on Goan's curiosity and excitement about this.

He is someone who has abandoned his child and he's not prepared to deal with it.

And then they show you him doing the coolest thing I've ever seen.

This is so red.

It's like a joke.

It's like a really hilarious joke while also being

extremely awesome and very cool and I want to see more of it.

A bolt of adrenaline in terms of how weird this image is.

We see this red, massive red island with what seems to be a huge

tall volcano or a tree, like the trunk of a tree growing out and a sandstorm.

And we zoom in close on Gene, who is got, he's got a short beard, he's wearing an animal pelt kind of like jacket, as he says, I'll always be the guy I am.

And then he calls out, he says, Bo.

And I don't know if he's making,

he's naming a creature or if he's giving a command, because he is riding the head of an enormous, genuinely unsettling-looking creature.

If the noggin-lugging turtle and the frog in waiting were a kind of Dr.

Zeus

caricature, there is, you know, this was a turtle that ate people, but it grew strawberries on its back.

There was something kind of cartoonish about this creature.

The creature that we see Jing riding is like a

it's huge firstly.

Jing is sort of tiny on the top of it.

It is like a melted

frog.

It is sort of like a melted frog.

If you've ever seen the movie Shin Godzilla, something I really loved about Shin Godzilla was that Godzilla goes through these kinds of different

sort of metamorphoses over the course of the movie.

And one of the earlier metamorphoses in Shingodzilla, he's this very odd-looking, frightening lizard with a horrible staring eye.

I'm gonna put a picture of it in the Media Club Plus

chat.

And there was something about the creature that Jing rode that conjures this sense of like, this is very unpleasant-looking.

This is a sinister creature.

And then the camera pans it out further to reveal that that creature is sitting on the head of another massive creature.

It's on a giant monster that's riding an even gianter monster.

Like 10, 20 times the size of this other monster.

It's extra.

Exponential.

For however small Jing is compared to the monster that he's on, that monster is small compared to the monster it's on.

Yeah, totally.

And then we cut to a wide shot to reveal that this is a dragon.

Yeah.

Jing is riding a melted frog.

A monster that that is riding a sort of melted dragon.

Sylvia's put the panel from the manga.

Yeah, I found the manga panel.

The way this.

Well, you found it.

Okay.

It's a very low resolution, it's four by six.

Yeah,

I didn't realize it was so low, right?

This thing is.

The scale, it's just so good.

And situating it at the end of this scene, right, where we were being asked to come to terms with Jing as a kind of squalid, unpleasant, absent father, and then to show him to it.

The coolest thing you've ever seen.

Yeah, it's like the irresistible gravity that is Gene.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to say this is

a good spot to say the slight difference in the sub between our

bits on the tape jack.

Mine says,

you know, he goes to the thing like, I don't want to see you.

I don't know how I could face you.

And then he says, after all, I chose my own desires over my parental duty.

I'm a bad person.

And that's what it cuts to

to him flying on the frog, on the dragon, through a tornado, in a hurricane, and then landing on a weird, like Martian-looking planet.

Sylvia's posted a screenshot from the Hunter-Hunter Reddit.

It shows, it's from the 91 anime, but the

91.

Before the manga.

Wow.

The terrifying

pre-manga adaptation that they made.

It's very cool.

No, this shows Jing sitting on top of the creature, sitting on top of the other creature, and

the subject says, What are these creatures Jing is sitting on?

Does this help in power scaling it?

Yeah,

I saw this and I knew, like, because I think the most recent episode that came out at the time of recording involved us explaining what power scaling is.

The episode that just came out two days ago, we explained to Jack what power scaling is.

It's episode six.

Man, the Hunter-Hunter Reddit.

No, it doesn't.

Sorry, go ahead.

I was just saying, the Hunter-Hunter Reddit is a place.

I think after last episode, I linked a screen cap from a Hunter-Hunter Reddit thread of where someone was arguing, who's Ghon's better father figure, Husuka or Leorio?

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

It's Leorio.

Easy.

It's Leorio.

Easy.

Although, by the way, if you hang out on the Hunter-Hunter Reddit, you should post about this show there,

and maybe they'll like the show and listen to it.

Who is Ghon's better hunter-hunter?

Wait, father figure?

Is it Hisaka or is it the Noggin-Lugging Turtle?

Ooh, great question.

It's the turtle.

It's the Turtle.

It's the Turtle.

Will we ever see these creatures again?

Is this a good Sylvie, as your recording goes?

Yeah, my recording's fine.

Discord has just been deciding to stop giving me audio.

Apologies.

That's okay.

Jack, what were you saying?

I can't tell if we will ever see these creatures again.

Ever.

Or if this is Gene's horse.

He's got a stack of chacks.

He has a stack of horses.

He, what is the circumstance that has led to this?

Okay, I'm going to figure it out.

The circumstance that has led to this is...

Well, I mean, sure.

He wants to ride a creature that rides another creature.

The second thing...

The melted dragon has a symbiotic relationship with the melted frog.

That's the only possible reason.

know, if you want to ride the dragon, which he does for some reason, you have to ride the frog, and then the frog rides the dragon.

He saw the wait, hang on.

I'm going to make a funny.

I'm going to make a funny tweet.

I'm going to make a funny tweet in our Discord.

Okay, you have to imagine that you're seeing it on Twitter.

I'll scroll up so that I can scroll down to simulate the experience.

Okay, scrolling down, scrolling down.

Normal.

Ching's car.

it's a it's a image of uh

these look like a series of iron statues it is a chicken riding a cat riding a coyote riding a donkey it's the animals of bremen uh statue in bremen uh but yes that's that's my tweet um

anyway

The tower of creatures flies off.

Gene says, I'm sure I'll be off horsing around somewhere.

Okay.

If you still want to see me, find me.

But like I said, I don't want to see you.

If I see you coming, I'll bolt.

Catch me if you can.

And Goan smiles at this challenge.

Goan is like, yeah, okay.

There is

this like colonel at the center of this.

Like,

if

Jing didn't want Goan to find him,

he simply would not lead a wild goose chase to try to get Goan to look for him.

Sure.

Yes, this is me.

This is when I say the line that David Fincher always puts in his stupid movies where he's like, of course, serial killers want to be caught.

Right.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think it is like.

Gene was acquitted of those crimes.

Yeah.

I think, like, I think Gene, a part of Gene, probably does want to

apologize to Goan.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

But again, he

not even really apologize, but just be like,

whatever the fuck, the closest thing you get to an apology from the sociopath Gene Freaks would be.

But yeah, it goes back to the thing that you said, Jacket.

It's like that, well,

I feel bad and it'll make me, I'll feel really bad if I see you.

So like,

I guess I'll let you find me, but it's going to be really hard because I don't want to feel bad.

I think that there's an honesty to that, to like, oh, sure, to the guilt that he feels.

But the other half of this, and I don't, it's hard to know what to say sometimes.

It's hard to know what, you know, the like the knowledge of the rest of the show, it's hard to go, like, what thoughts am I having based on what I've seen and what am I?

It's impossible to like really separate it.

Um, so I always try to be careful and err on the side of like not saying too much, but I don't, I don't think it would be out of line to

put out there, like,

this is a challenge for gone

this is like oh this is like jing

saying

come do the i dare you to try to do this very difficult thing in a way that we've seen people

uh

to on a on a on a really wide scale of uh

benevolent to malicious

treat gone this way treat

Treat him as something

to

like,

you know,

to build and grow.

This is the whole Hezekik thing in like a really dark and evil way.

But it's also like Wing is also like this in a way that isn't dark or evil.

The thought that just came to me is that I wonder if Gene is like, I want Goan to have to go through all this trouble to find me because then by the time he does, he'll understand and he won't be mad at me and I won't have have to reckon with what I did.

I wish that the thing that they caught from the first fucking episode was still there.

Sylvia and Dre, you both know what I'm talking about, right?

I know what you're talking about, yes.

Okay, maybe.

Is this something that is going to become relevant later?

And that's the reason we're not talking about it.

There's a character that you meet that we are going to meet

in the 99 anime and in the manga, you meet in chapter one.

But they cut from

the 2011 anime for kind of it's not petty reasons, it was basically like

uh, they weren't sure that the anime was going to be successful, so they just really wanted to get straight into it, and so they cut this bit of story.

That's an impulse that I understand, yeah.

This this character uh in the 99 uh series shows up in episode one, like you said, in the manga in chapter one, and in our version will show up in episode 75.

And the show is weaker for it.

Well, the show is like the biggest blunder.

And you know what?

Fuck it.

I'm not going to say what it is, but I am going to tell you.

I'm going to talk around it a bit.

We meet a character that teaches Gone what a hunter is.

And

that character also happens to know Jing.

Interesting.

And it gives a lot of context to like

what this sort of cat and mouse game is about.

Sure.

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I'm looking forward to talking about that in episode 75.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's weird.

It's such a weird decision.

It's obviously something we won't be able to talk about fully until then.

But it is definitely, I agree.

It is the most like

formal blunder they make with this.

And I think also

going in such a different light.

yeah yes and like gone's dry wow yeah it's it's bizarre it's bizarre yeah

uh i think that tagashi has come out and been like they shouldn't have done that um

king

um

and uh

the um

anyway i don't think that the show is broken because of this obviously i still really like it like i didn't know that this was like we're gonna get to a we're going to, we're going to, there's going to be, I think that anyone who's only experienced with Hunter Hunter

will have thoughts about, like,

why is this such a, why is this thing that's happening such a big deal here?

And the answer is because, like, every other version of Hunter Hunter sets this up, you know, way, way better and more cleanly.

And it is weird.

Like, this is, we're kind of feeling the first real repercussions of not knowing about this stuff.

Um,

and uh, it like

uh

I think it sells Jing short here to

you know, and it's very fun to do this anyway, to be like Jing is a dick, end of story.

Uh, because he's not just a dick, he's a he's a real fucking weirdo.

Uh, and uh, I'm excited that the show still still gets into some of that eventually, but

you know, it is bizarre that we're missing a bit of that context.

Gene says, okay, there is one more thing.

I want to tell you about your mother.

And I'm going to offer you another out.

If you want to know, keep listening.

And Goan turns off the tape.

It's so good.

It's so

good.

It's just good character writing.

And Killiba kind of looks at him, like, are you sure?

Sure about this?

And Goan says, I do have a mom.

Meeto.

But it's okay, because they'll be able to come back to this tape, right?

I have really bad news, Jack.

What happens?

Nin tape, nin tape, nin tape.

The song Auras starts playing, which is a song that I think was introduced in the Heaven's Gate

or Heaven's Gate, Heaven's Arena season,

uh, which is like that very haunting thing.

Whenever they're talking about Nen, some weird Nen stuff is happening, there's that, like, ooh,

oh, yeah, the like coral thing almost, and it's it's very, it's super, super, um, uh, eerie, it's a very eerie coral song, and the cassette player starts glowing with nen,

and all of a sudden, the tape starts rewinding on its own, and gonna kill starts freaking out.

They're like, What is happening?

The tape is rewinding on its own.

It gets to the beginning.

They're trying to stop it.

The record button presses in on its own.

The tape is deleting itself using Nen, and they're punching the thing.

They're throwing it against the wall.

They're trying to press stop, but they can't.

This thing just erases both tapes in there.

Killer is a smart little idea of

trying to stop.

Immediately comes to nothing.

Yeah, it's like,

he's seen enough TV to know like this tape will self-destruct in five, four, but does not know Nen enough to be like, well, obviously, Nen will just erase this tape on its own and also break the cassette player.

In a kind of dark little joke, the cassette has recorded them realizing it is erasing itself.

It's great.

It's so good.

And this is like,

you know, it's something that, oh, excuse me.

Cutting in my throat.

This is sort of like

what

we were talking about with Austin last time we recorded.

Like, there's going to be stuff that happens with Nen, and you're going to look at the Nen chart that they spend so long explaining to you.

And

you're going to be like, this is one of those.

And it's like, where on this chart was

imbuing a cassette tape with Nen that causes it to overwrite itself from any distance through

10 years later.

If you have a question about this, right, Dre?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you think is Gene's...

What do you, what type of NIN user do you think Gene is?

Remind me of them again.

Enhancer.

Let me pull up in the Hunterpedia.

Enhancer.

We've got it on our

conjurer, specialist, manipulator, and emitter.

I need to figure out a mnemonic for this.

Sure, sounds like a manipulator, am I right?

Genuinely, though, like

this would fall under that.

Like, I'm not saying inanimate objects.

Yeah, I think so, right?

But argumentative and logical.

Is that how Jing has seemed so far?

Well, hold on.

He would say

Hisaka's fucking personality test bullshit doesn't mean hey, we have that whole thing.

It fits.

It's a perfect match.

We had that whole scene.

We did.

He's right.

We did.

That's so funny.

And like, my kind of like follow-up question to this, too, is also, so now that we've been introduced to this Nin script, right?

Is this a thing?

It seems like seemingly that is a thing that anyone with Nin can do with enough skill.

Right.

And so is this cassette tape, like, is there nin writing

on the, like, on the tape itself?

Or are we supposed to take this as like, no, this is representative of Gene's like Nin skill?

Or I think, you know, Ghan's got friends with of different skills.

Maybe Jane has friends with different skills.

And this is something that he commissioned from a stranger or got someone that he knows to do.

Another thing, too, is it's hard to figure out what type of nen user someone is just from like this small thing because as we were told, like you can use nen techniques from a different like class of nen user.

Yeah.

And it just like some of it, it's a compatibility thing, but you can still learn to do it.

I'm just thinking about Gene going to some nen freak and being like, I need you to make up a fucked up tape that will erase itself with this message on.

And the nen uses like, for your son?

And he's like, for my son.

My abandoned son.

This is a common.

This is a Tuesday special.

It's on the board written in chalk.

Yeah, son, fucked up nen tape.

Yeah, nen tape to trick son.

A lot of this is being intercut with Mito cooking dinner and sort of working in the house below as all this stuff is going on.

And this had a had an effect on me.

I was like, I am worried something is going to happen to Mito.

And I still might, I think I probably still believe that.

But I thought something was going to happen in this episode.

There is something ominous about watching this nen tape erase itself as we cut to Mito just hanging out downstairs, you know?

I liked it.

I thought I sort of read it as like

this sort of contrast of like she's like living her daily life, you know, happy that Goan's home, doing her chores, and they're like upstairs like on a mission.

They're like doing adventure stuff in Goan's bedroom.

Yeah.

Well, the specter of Gene is haunting the house upstairs.

It kind of does feel like that.

There's a real ghostliness to this, right?

So Gunn says, why would he do this?

And Killure is like,

well, I'm about to make some really wild claims about audio.

Killier is like, well, this is part of the test.

You know, he knew that we could extract some clues.

And obviously, there is a kind of

a field of information intelligence that can extract information from audio.

However,

Killure claims that you can basically learn everything about a person from hearing them on a tape.

Their height, what they look like, what diseases they have, their mental state,

gender,

the works.

Does he say that?

Does he include gender as well?

He did in my subtitles, yeah.

Oh, my God.

It's uh, it's they know uh they know just about as much about um

uh cassette tapes as they know about bee allergies.

Yes,

just to say they are very confident.

Uh and they they have,

I would say, a fifth of the information that I would consider a passing grade.

But Killer is much more interested in this memory card, which he says.

He does make one good point about the tape, which is that a Nen user might be able to extract a lot of stuff because it's magic.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, Kilo would have.

Kilo would have to use pro tools, but a Nen user can just

tell you anything you wanted to know.

This memory card is not a memory card for a camera or a synthesizer or a computer.

It is a memory card for a games console.

What's the game?

What is the name of that games console?

It is called a Joystation.

Goan has never played a video game.

Of course, he hasn't.

Goan goes out there and punches fish.

Kilua says you've never played any video games?

That's pretty weird.

The consumer Smash Brothers is the Hunter exam.

Yes, yes.

So-called because of how much Smash do you do.

Yeah, that's him watching Killiwab beat up the Blowjob Brothers.

Yeah, yeah, you beat up the Blowjob Brothers.

Super Smash Brothers.

So Killiwa just heads off to the video game store, to the toy store, to buy a Joystation.

I love that Whale Island has a toy shop that you can buy a PlayStation in.

I had sort of pictured Whale Island as like a tiny parochial fishing town, but Killiwa just heads off to buy the

joystation there's a really good vibe here oh just there's a small moment where like Kilua heads out of the house on his own and Mito's like where are you going and he's like the toy store

I really like this moment this moment feels like being on vacation with your friends and your friends going out to do something while you like keep house back home it was a really good feeling

there's also like a um you know the flip the switch that flips when you're at a friend's house and you just like kind of become comfortable there and it's like you've sort of made the transition from totally, you know, not like not being a guest in the home, but sort of like, oh, I have to ask to use, to like get a glass of water versus like opening the fridge and, you know, pouring yourself a glass of orange juice.

Yeah, it's cute.

He comes back.

This is not a game.

It is

a save data.

memory card.

And we are like right back into the explicit metaphorization of hunters and hunting as like a game and toy-like.

They are making this metaphor as clear as they can.

Step one of the find me gone treasure trail that Jing has left is save data on a PlayStation 2.

And it gets even wilder because they figure out that this save data is for a game called

Greed Island.

Yeah.

Which they look up and find that this game doesn't exist on the main market.

And we're already now fully in the like

urban legends about games territory.

You know, the like

the bend round or whatever.

I was going to say, gone drowned.

Gone drowned.

We have moved firmly into this, like, the mystery of games that were only a few of them were made or whatever.

Because we learn that this game.

Does someone else want to read out the name of this game?

Because it's amazing.

The full title?

Oh, yes, I have it.

It's called Greed Island: a hunting game for hunters.

It's great.

Jesus.

And it costs an immense amount of money.

It costs...

It's only 5.8 million.

It's only 5.8 million, as Goan says, instantly.

It is 5.

Yeah, and Killer makes fun of him.

It's actually 5.8 billion Jenny,

which is basically yen,

which makes it...

what $58

million?

Yeah.

Like, it's not an exact conversion, but usually with that case, you just change the billion to a million, and then you've got the US dollars conversion in a lot of ways.

So expensive.

Going not being able to read like a large number is something that I relate to.

Yeah.

There's some commas in there.

It is interesting that this is, you know, only 100 of these were made and it costs a huge amount of money.

So the

expectation is that hunters are generally just immensely rich.

There is like a direct correlation between wealth and whether or not you are.

Liario told us.

Yeah, like in the 50 billion, sorry, the 50 richest people in the world, half of them are hunters.

Well, this is the sort of interesting.

This is the sort of funny thing, Dre,

about

what you,

we've already talked about it a little bit, but also what you have here in the doc about,

you know, people

sort of generalizing their own opinions on what a hunter is out to every hunter.

But then the flip side of of that is that it's always kind of true.

Like, it isn't, no one is right because they're kind of all right.

Yeah.

They kind of do catch criminals and stop poachers, and they kind of do do it for the money, and they kind of are selfish, and they kind of like every

evil.

Yeah, they kind of are good.

They kind of are evil.

Yeah, it's very, it's very funny.

Like,

you know, I guess it's sort of like, yeah, like, like

how the hunters are such a diverse group that it is diverse in the way that any group of,

you know, thousands question mark of people are diverse.

But the hunters are so,

they're such forces in the world that it's like, it sort of like magnifies that out, like, in a bizarre way.

Anyway.

Yeah, turn over any card in the major arcana and you go, oh, that's a hunter.

That's a hunter.

Yes.

Yeah.

Then there's a lot of business that happens that we don't really need to go into business with computers, business with games, consoles, business with online auctions.

They try and request it and immediately get a bunch of counterfeit offers because this game is so real.

It is very funny watching them deal with all that, though.

It's great.

It is great.

There's two things I want to bring up.

The first thing is that

when

Kilua is sort of talking about having uh someone that he can get information on the game from, and he calls uh uh

uh Goto.

Oh, oh, yeah, do we want to move on to this scene?

I was just thinking about the bit where they get the counterfeit stuff, but yeah, the backup says that's super interesting.

I, I, I thought we, I thought that I think I just misordered these in my minds, but um

uh, yeah, if there's anything to say about that other stuff, that's uh, just that Kilua is very serious about cybersecurity.

Oh, yeah, I haven't written.

I said Kilua

has great OPSEC.

The cassette thing,

the not using the home computer.

And then there was a third thing.

Oh, and the memory card was the other thing, I think.

The thing is, though, it is, it's really funny.

And then it's also, there's a set, like, you take a second, the thing, and it's like, oh, it's because his family has done this to murder people.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, and

the phone call where he's like, you got to make sure this is a cure line.

Because otherwise, bad guys will come here to Whale Island.

And I'm like, do you mean your dad?

Do you mean your dad?

He probably means Illumi.

Yeah.

Genuinely, probably.

Like, I'm like, I bet he doesn't want a Lumi to know where Ghon lives.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Because Illumi has said, I'm going to kill him.

Who do we know who's into gaming and the internet?

Says Kilua.

And then he calls someone who he doesn't want to call.

First, he calls Goto, the head butler from the Zaldex estate.

Did you have something about Goto, Keith?

I did.

So when he talks to Goto and then asks about his brother,

Gona's just sort of listening and they provide for the viewers' benefit.

And it's just a great little piece of like Hunter Hunter being like really good at giving the viewer information and like not really being picky about how it does that.

We talked a little bit about this during Trick the Trick Tower

tournament

with the prisoners, where they like would some when they needed to, they would just put everyone's name and information on the screen as text, but when they could fit it in through dialogue, they did it that way instead.

With this, they just like have Goan being like, oh, Goto, and he just like thinks of the guy, a picture of Goto's face.

And then, like,

Goan talks about his brother, and then he pictures Geecheraker taking out a pin and then turning into a Lumi.

And it's like,

this is great for someone who doesn't remember

who these characters are.

Like, very useful,

you know, viewer-conscious information giving.

And then there's the call with

Miluki, who he's actually talking about.

And he does call him Piggy.

And he does have a lot of pictures of Pig in a hoodie.

We should talk about the way that this show does not handle Fat Bodies well at all.

It's gross.

It's really gross.

It really sucks.

Well, the first thing that we learn is that anime exists in Hunter Hunter.

Not only does anime exist, but

what else exists?

Keys?

Chips?

What else exists?

Key?

What am I missing?

Fucking real dolls exist in Hunter Hunter.

We're here.

Okay.

Yeah.

So Millow Keys in the Goon Cave.

Is that what Tim?

I didn't think any of those are real dolls.

No, there is one of them.

Yeah, they are, bro.

Hold on.

I don't think the one who's standing up.

I don't think...

I believe it's...

I looked up because I remembered some of the...

Hilua does call them figurines, but come on.

Well,

so one of them is a Yu Yu Hakasho character, I think, and I don't think that's

the one that he's been doing terrible things to.

Sure.

That's good.

The one next to it, though.

That's like sitting.

Look at how that's posed okay that's i i see i don't know i see where you're getting it from the other one looks like it's a static thing that's always there

and then the blue-haired one i'm like i don't want to know oh i don't want to know what he he does to that i bet also what it's wearing yeah yeah oh it's like titties out for anyone not watching it's everything yeah it is the stringiest of string bikini yeah they are very much doing the um look at this fat nerd living in the basement with his ankle figures looking at that in like every disgusting way, every neat um stereotype that they can uh kind of come up with and they just put their foot on the pedal of that uh as hard as possible and throughout this throughout this entire scene we keep coming back to this like type close-up on Maluki's hand going into a like a bag of chips um and like putting them into his mouth.

Um, the shove

is so

um

uh

lurid.

Lurid, right?

It is painting Miluki in such a specifically unflattering light as it relates to his fatness and as it relates to

ugly stereotypes of fatness and excess and fatness and deviance.

There is no moment in this scene that the show.

This is the least interesting depiction.

When we first saw Milumi, he was

torturing Milumi?

Miluki.

Miluki.

When we first saw Maluki, he was torturing Killua in the dungeon.

And that was just an incredible introduction to this character who we know is just deeply mean and vindictive and violent.

And then for him to be reintroduced here in what could have been a really fun scene.

And

there's a nice moment later that I want to talk about, but of like, oh, he is calling in a favor from his brother, who we last saw torturing him.

That's an interesting scene, and so much of my goodwill towards it is just squandered so fast

by the way that they choose to depict Milo Gi here.

You were right, Sylvie.

There is a Kurama figure in the background.

Okay, cool.

Shout out to Kurama.

Love Kurama.

Free her from the cave.

So something fun does happen in this conversation, which is it is two people who hate each other very much talking about something that they both have an interest in in this moment.

And the way that Killua is able to sort of kind of genuinely draw Miluki into this conversation is really fun.

That sensation of like, we don't like each other, but

he's genuinely drawn into this conversation.

He is interested to hear that Killua is interested in Greed Island.

Especially because Killua makes him a deal.

He says that Kilua has made a copy of this memory card.

Killua, learning from his past success in making a previous copy, says, Well, I'll give you another copy of the card, and you are skilled enough that you might just be able to reverse-engineer the game from its save data, which you can't do, but this is Hunter Hunter.

And in return,

Miluki will offer him two leads on where he might be able to find a copy of the game.

And Kilua says very seriously, when sort of questioned on this, I never lie, not when I'm making deals.

Do we believe this?

Yeah.

He's not lying.

He's not lying.

Yeah.

I would believe that Kilua would like disguise the truth or like obfuscate things.

But I think he's telling truth when he says that he doesn't lie when he's making deals.

It's interesting, right?

Because we know that Kilua is someone who will absolutely do whatever it takes.

to

get what he needs.

That seems to have come from Zelda family training, right?

Of like get get the target no matter how.

And it is notable that there is a kind of, maybe a kind of truce of some kind being drawn up between these two assassins who each know that they would be able to outwit the other, but would get caught in it, kind of going like, all right, look, we don't want to prison this dilemma ourselves into a bad situation here.

You get me the card, I'll get you the leads.

Because we have two leads.

Yeah, and I...

To build on that, I think, like, Kilo is the type of person who probably only makes a deal when he thinks he has to.

And so if he's at a point where he's like, you have enough leverage on me that I need to make a deal, then I shouldn't fuck around.

Yeah.

I want to be real here.

There is this, like, sort of,

while he's sort of underhandedly manipulating Maluki into agreeing to do this,

he adopts this, like, very funny tone that we last saw during the torture of, like,

kind of like condescending,

full of shit kind of flattery.

It's a little bit like you said, but he just like the tone of voice is like, oh, Maluki, but you're so smart.

Can't you, you can't do this?

It's, it is really funny.

I think part of why it works so well for me is that I don't think Maluki buys it.

He buys it on some level.

He feels himself getting baited into this.

But when I feel like did that to him, he fucking thrashed him with a whip.

Yeah, this is, this is like, this is fully like

abusive assassin family pantomime here.

Everybody has fallen into this kind of like

Kayfabe moment of like, we have to adopt these characters in these moments when we're talking to each other to stop ourselves from just murdering each other.

It's great.

I love the Zelda family.

It was so funny.

It is so Hunter-Hunter to be like, we have this terrifying first encounter with the Zeldix.

And the second time we meet them is that Killo has a question about a video game called Greed Island, a hunting game for hunters.

So he telephones his brother.

Another funny note about this,

the way that his eyes are drawn changes.

The whites of his eyes and his pupils totally change shape and color when he goes into condescending voice.

It's really funny.

Very cartoony.

Back on

stuff.

Looking at the eyes of characters in this show again.

Especially Zeldix.

Especially Zeldax.

Here are the two leads.

The first is a website only accessible to hunters.

www.hunters.com.

I don't know what that is.

Huntersonly.com.

The puzzle word is hunting.

But Miluki is not going to give Killiwa this address until Killiwa

gives him the card.

Okay, fine.

The second is that there is a rumor that someone is going to auction off dozens of copies of Greed Island at the York New auction, where Gon and Killiwell were already going to meet Karapika and Leorio.

So Gon says, I guess it must have been my destiny all along to go to the York New auction.

It's good.

I like that it's like a

another way to get them to want to go there besides just seeing their pals again.

Yeah, definitely.

Miloki, meanwhile, back in the cave, learns that

the game is worth a huge amount of money

and kind of menacingly says, I'll put an end to this legend myself.

And it's not terribly clear what he means there, at least to me.

But we'll see.

Everybody has a big D, a big, oh my god.

Everybody has a big meal because Mito is saying, you know, you might not be able to sit down and have a big meal for a while.

Thanksgiving meal.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's like a full-on turkey there.

It looks great.

Oh.

I was jealous.

Oh, yeah.

And then the next morning, they get on a big boat and they leave.

This is presented as an absolute setting off on adventure again moment.

This time it has a lot more sort of bombast than when we saw Goan running away down the hill after having done the Pinky Promise with Mito.

There's a real sort of like

a call to adventure thing happening.

Yeah, they have a full bon voyage moment.

They have a full what?

FBVM?

Yeah.

Yeah.

A classic FVBM.

Full bon voyage.

Mito's waving.

She's got a little tear in her eye, but she is, she looks resolved and proud of Goan.

And Goan promises he will find Jing and then return.

And I think that this is, yeah, do you want to kind of come back to what you were talking about earlier, Dre, in terms of the way these different departures are kind of presented?

Yeah, I again, I think it's just that, like, Mito

has

made peace within herself, at least as far as like the stuff with Gene when it comes to Goan, right?

Like, I think she's probably still not very happy with Gene and probably very hurt by how all that went down.

But I think has like come to realize that Goan is a different person, and I can't hold what Gene did to me against Goan and like and what I want him to do.

I have to let him be his own person.

And this is, you know, this kind of imagery is often deployed in service of that feeling, right?

I feel like a cross-fiction, the like person with a tear in their eye waving off

someone leaving in a FBVM

is like really associated with a sort of

giving over of autonomy or trust to a person going on an adventure, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's the end of the episode.

Good apps.

Really good apps.

Great episodes.

Great Hunter Hunter there.

The thing that is like so

good about Hunter Hunter, and this I think comes through

in

Tagashi's other big manga, Yu Yu Haka Show, is like,

and the split is different.

Like, Yu Yu Haka Show is more about

action.

It's more of a battle shounen than

Hunter Hunter is.

But you can see

Tagashi trying to like burst out of the seams and like kind of wasn't able to do that.

And by able, I mean allowed

until that show had become a success and become a successful

anime and is maybe given more leeway and more

sort of

creative control over Hunter Hunter and the direction that it goes in.

But you can see this in both shows where,

like

the

characters are so good and are bouncing off each other in such interesting ways.

And when they get a chance to,

you know, break from the fighting and kind of dig into

like what each other are about, they really shine.

And sometimes it feels like the

other stuff, like I would never, you know,

I would never accuse Tagashi of not being being interested in the action parts of Hunter Hunter.

And I think that he has a real love for Nen and the way that it works.

It seems like he really enjoys

not just

the action aspects of it, but the sort of like puzzle aspects of coming up with powers and stuff.

But it does feel like

the thing that

really makes those shows shine is like

learning characters learning stuff about each other and like revealing things about themselves uh yeah which is common in shonen like that but it's usually so tied to the the the the fighting like yeah sure the fighting is the way that we reveal each other uh to uh or reveal ourselves to each other um or find out more about somebody uh and like uh the way that we uh create boundaries or erase boundaries.

That is,

to me, a hallmark of the genre.

And

Hunter Hunter is so good about

taking those moments and removing them from the action and just being like,

we're just having a conversation

by the cliffside at night, telling each other that we're best friends.

Building that building a structure that allows scenes like that to

work.

And then at the same time,

yes, not just the battle, right?

Sitting that alongside this mystery of this box that opens up.

It's just great.

Is there anything else we want to make sure we hit this episode?

I think I've got everything.

Yeah, I feel like we covered most.

I got my fucking freak stuff all out.

I'm sure.

Fuck that guy.

He's got a good horse, though.

He has a really good tall horse.

Yeah.

His horse has a cool horse, too.

His horse has a really cool horse.

And that horse's horse is the world.

Whoa.

Wow.

Do we think that the world of Hunter Hunter is round or flat?

I know the answer to this.

Oh, my God.

Yeah, me too.

I don't.

I'll send you a map.

I think I've seen the map.

I guess you'll send Sylvia.

Don't send Jackson.

Don't send Jack a view.

No, no, no, no, no.

Jack cannot see the map.

It's very important to not see the map.

Yeah.

You'll see the map eventually.

For anyone out there who's watching along and you care about spoilers, it's very important that you do not see the map.

Yeah, there's multiple things, actually, that I'm thinking of that this would spoil now that I think about it.

The show rules.

Yeah,

I'm such a huge maps fan.

Maps in games, maps in books, maps in shows.

My favorite thing to do is open books.

The song

that goes, oh, that song's really good.

Yeah, I like that song a lot.

Great song.

My favorite thing is to open a book and see a map in the front page and look at it for five minutes and be like, I'm going to internalize all this information.

And then turn to page one and just forget it just completely.

Just like

no utility whatsoever.

Um,

yeah, what are we watching next time?

The next thing that we're recording is going to be uh

uh uh, I think two bonus episodes where we watch some original Dragon Ball from season seven.

Exciting, very excited to watch those.

Uh, those I mean, they'll probably people listening to this probably already know about that.

Sure, they'll definitely already know about it, but it's worth saying again that if you go to the Friends of the Table Patreon and sign up, you'll be able to hear those.

And who knows, by the time this is out, probably some other bonus episodes maybe.

Yeah,

we might be cooking a little bit.

I think we might be cooking a little bit more.

I think we might be cooking.

Yeah.

So stay tuned and enjoy.

So next time, we are going to be watching Wish and Promise episode 39, episode 40, Nen Users Unite, and episode 41, Gathering of Heroes.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, we got some.

We got some heat coming.

We got some

heat coming.

I know it's like been.

I've barely concealed it, but coming up might be my favorite arc.

It's yeah, it's probably my second favorite.

I think it's your favorite arc, Sylvie.

I think I can feel them on the horizon.

I think they might be approaching.

We know that they are a number of them.

They're freaks.

Not all freaks.

Not the next set of episodes, although there's some really amazing stuff in there, too.

But the two

or three

or four or five sets of episodes following the next set of episodes,

unbelievable.

Oh, I straight.

Yeah, no, I straight up think like after we get through,

but that's it.

There's a little bit of setup, and then it's just like 15 episodes of bangers.

But there's all guests.

Hey, but do you know what we're going to see in the next episode?

The next set of episodes?

Oh, yeah.

Jack, do you have any guesses?

Yeah.

Ape dodgeball.

No,

but the other two screenshots.

Whoa, whoa.

Yeah,

we're almost done with the screenshots.

Yeah.

Wow.

Exciting.

Exciting.

Very good.

God, imagine if all the screenshots have been from the first episode and you've just absolutely

get to the end of episode one and I break back where I started.

I wish that

ape dodgeball, ape volleyball was in

the first episode.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much for listening.

This is...

Oh, oh, oh, oh.

I'm going to read a five-star review.

Yeah.

Oh, fuck it.

We do not.

We need to remember to do that more.

You do.

You explain why we're doing this, and I will look up a good one.

Who's you?

Is me, you?

You, the three of you.

Okay.

So.

The SEO.

That's it.

SEO.

Yeah.

To put it as bluntly as possible, it helps people find the show.

It helps people find the show.

One of the most important things about a podcast is that it has people to listen to it.

Yeah.

We don't want to be a tree in a forest, you know?

Right.

We want to be a forest.

Damn.

We want to be one of those forests that has like it's all like the one tree, like underground, you know?

You know what I'm talking about?

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's like the kind of trees that are just like, oh, every single outgrowth of tree is from the same root system, so it sure counts as one tree.

We want this podcast to be a rhizome.

Yeah, we want to rhizome this.

And, you know, we don't do any, we we don't advertise or anything.

So the only way that people ever hear about this or about Friends of the Table or about Run Button

is, you know, when people tell other people about it.

And one of the sort of

the most active ways to do that without actually going and telling a friend about it is to go on Apple Podcast and leave a five-star review.

Ratings are great.

Reviews are really great.

Yeah.

I don't even care if it's a good review.

Like,

well, it just has to be well written.

It just has to be there.

Yeah, no, just any.

You could just write, hey, cool show.

I think there is like a 30-character minimum, but besides that, you could write, hey, really cool show.

Really, really, really cool show.

You could write

and then copy-paste it, and that'll be great.

Yeah.

This is a five-star review.

From Patrick Murder.

Good name.

Murder.

Worth it even if you're not a friend at the table fan.

Wow.

I've been a friend at the table fan for a long time now, so jumping in here was an easy decision.

However, I didn't expect to get as deep into

Hunter as a result, nor did I expect to look forward to these episodes as much as I do their main feed.

The media literacy is so high across this crew, and that makes watching along even more fun.

If you like good discussion and anime, you found your podcast.

Excited to see what show they pick next.

Thank you, Patrick Murder.

Thank you for taking some time out from your murdering.

I'd like to give a quick shout out to Balsamic Thomas.

Great.

Here's the name.

Hiller names in these reviews.

Hey, yeah.

You guys got to just leave reviews so we can see your usernames.

Who says, what is a hunter?

Question mark.

Listen to find out.

Exclamation mark.

Brackets.

Question mark.

Not yet.

You know, we're trying.

We're trying.

We are desperately trying to get to the bottom of this.

People will have some sort of answer by the end of this we won't be able to you know

it's fine i am glad like like i don't think at least

the question of what is a hunter is something that didn't occur to me until the prospect of doing this show

uh like really started to reveal itself like it's something that we introduced to you, Jack, as a concept in that screenshot stream.

And it has been, to me anyway, a really, really fruitful mine.

It's like, isn't something that was on my mind when I was watching the show

initially?

And it's something that I only barely considered, you know, like the second time I watched it.

Like, oh, it's very funny that like no one really knows what a hunter is for like a really, really big chunk of this show.

And I'm glad that we got to introduce it so early because it's been a ton of fun, you know, teasing that out.

Jay Wheemsical.

Jay Wheemsical, or Dreamsical

says, rating five stars to keep them from euthanizing Sylvie and Dre.

I have to imagine because we might have threatened Sylvie or Dre.

Yeah, I threatened Sylvia.

I don't remember that.

I'm in the saw trap.

I've got one of those shotgun collars on, and if anyone ever leaves a review that's under four stars, my head gets blown off.

Oh, no.

Oh, so

no one tells Sylvie about the one three-star review that we have.

We do have an average of five stars, but we do have one three-star review.

Jay Weemsical says, The hunter is,

according to this podcast, um,

wait, hold on, I have it here somewhere.

Okay.

Oh, God, Sylvie's Discord is.

Oh, God, no, Sylvie's going to be a little bit of a cost.

They blew up Sylvie's collar.

Oh, no.

to

get my jing song.

Yeah.

Anyway, so, of course, if you go and leave a review on Apple Podcasts, that's a big help.

If you tell a friend, make a friend listen to the show with you.

If you have a hunter, hunter-loving friend or a friend who you know would love Hunter-Hunter, because who wouldn't, honestly?

Yeah.

Let me say this too.

I'm watching the show with my partner.

She has seen one anime ever before.

Well, she's watched Sailor Moon when she was a kid, but like, really, this is, she's watched some episodes of Laid Back Camp with me.

This is the first, like, ever, like, shonen anime that she has ever watched.

Um, and really, like, one of the biggest, like, anime she has ever, the first big anime she's ever watched.

Um, and this show is so good at getting people to, like,

understand

the language of like anime and shonen.

Like, the moment in episode 37 when they pull out the box, as soon as my wife saw it, she goes, Oh, they're going to have to use Nin to open that.

And I'm like, Yeah, you fucking, yeah, yeah, you fucking get it.

Let's go.

She's figuring it out.

It's really great.

I introduced someone to this show

thinking that they would be vaguely interested in it.

And they have now read, I believe, all of Hunter Hunter.

Blaze through it.

I mean, it was really a matter of weeks.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

I had a few friends who were like, I'm going to watch and listen along at the same time.

And now they are like

dark.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A lot of good show.

A lot of people that I've seen like talking online about the show have mentioned

trying

to keep show pace and then accidentally watching the whole thing.

And hey, you know when a great time to start watching Hunter Hunter is?

Right after you finish watching Hunter Hunter.

So, hey, start it again.

Watch.

Now is your chance to watch at show pace after you've just blazed through again.

And, you know, I mentioned this earlier, but hey, if you're like in an anime forum or if you're on the Hunter Hunter subreddit or something, go post about this show.

People there might like this show.

That would be great for us.

Is your uncle Yoshihiro Tagashi?

Tell him our kind wishes.

That would be so cool.

And also if he is stressful.

Yeah, if he is, tell him that

he does cool things.

Don't tell him I said Goon Cave.

No, tell him.

Tell him.

He knows.

He knows.

He knows.

He knows.

He knows what he did.

He drew it.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

One of the bonus steps I really want to do is some Yu-Yuhaka show.

So I'm very looking forward to potentially doing that.

Tell him that.

Yeah, tell him that.

Tell him that.

All right.

Good night, everybody.

And tell him that's our show for this week.

That's our show for this week.

That's our show for this week.

Is it funny?

Is it really funny that we consistently talk about Hunter Hunter for about double the runtime of the episodes I've watched?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

That is the nature of this.

We know what we drew.

We know what we're doing.

I mean,

this one is the thing we're talking about is good.

You know?

Yeah.

This is almost quadruple of length.