Kevin's Arena - Hunter x Hunter ep. 34-36: Media Club Plus S01E11

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

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

This season, we're watching 2011's Hunter Hunter based on a 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.

With me today is Jack Takeet.

Hi, I'm Jack.

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

Sylvia Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet, and you can check out the show's TikTok at friends underscore table.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey,

you can find me on Twitter at Swandre3000.

And special guest, Austin Walker.

Hi, Austin.

Hi, I'm here.

You can find me on Twitter at Austin underscore Walker and at Austin on Co-Host.

You haven't been here since the first episode,

which we recorded so long ago, but which actually only came out like two months ago.

Yeah,

have you uh kept up with the show, or did you just watch the surrounding episodes of this?

I mean, you've seen the show, so you don't need to watch it.

It's a mix.

I did a mix of that, right?

Because I was gonna come on on an earlier set of episodes

and then didn't, the schedule didn't line up, but I'd kind of like jumped ahead a little bit to watch,

you know, so I've watched basically from the end from the Zoldic arc to okay, yeah, okay that's what I've watched um so so you know yeah it's a show Hunter Hunter y'all

to be clear I've watched this before people somehow forgot that in the first episode I've watched the show before people still trying to tell us that this isn't a show it is it's a show it's a show hunter hunter is real you can go watch it

and you should I would argue you can listen to this show which you're already doing and then you can go to Apple podcast and rate and review the show you can rate and review the show You should tell someone about it.

Tell someone about it.

Are you a big hunter-hunter?

Are you like hanging out in forums or on Reddit where people are talking about anime or hunter-hunter?

Go tell us, tell someone there about it.

That would be great.

Put them on Tumblr.

Yeah, put them on Tumblr.

People on Tumblr, like put them in there.

Are you reading the church announcements?

Yeah.

Are you just showing you?

I know you like anime because I saw that Dragon Ball Z thing.

Are you a D connected anime?

Hey, are you the person who runs the Twitter account?

Hey, it's Goku.

If so,

I saw a boy practicing none the other day.

That's funny, Joe Perra.

That's a good Joe Perra.

Thank you.

This is something that struck me about these episodes is it is the most fighting by far that we've seen in this show.

This is like we are in a battle anime.

We are in a battle anime.

This is a shown-in-ass shonen.

All of a sudden, we're in a battle anime.

They have been like teasing and denying fights this whole,

and it doesn't even occur to me that like we hadn't seen a lot of fighting.

We've seen like a lot of posturing.

We've seen a lot of like

this looks like it's going to be a fight and then it's over in one second.

Or this looks like it's going to be a fight, but actually it's just an adult ninja beating the shit out of a kid for four hours.

Yeah.

Or we think it's going to be a fight, but then Goan teaches everyone about the true power of friendship and they decide to dig through a wall.

Yeah.

Or you think it's going to be a fight, but you actually smell these two different, like, wear creatures, and they become your best friends.

That's part of why the end of episode 35 is just like one of the hardest things ever.

It's just like, oh, like, we're hooping, like, we are fighting, we are doing it.

Yeah, yeah, and we will, I can't wait to get to that because it's phenomenal.

Uh,

we get, but this is this is what we get: we get uh, Ghon's rematch with Guido, uh,

and Kilo's fight with uh, Raoul Raovelt,

and Goan fighting Hisuka.

But before we get any of that, we are learning about Nen for a period of time.

Specifically, Hatsu, the final of four Nen components, which is basically like a personality test

that they immediately then go, yes, this is basically a personality test in the show.

We get a lot of Nen Expedition and paying off training, showing Gon and Kilo was like Nen progress, immediately complicating that, which which is fun.

We get a little more hunter talk kind of for the first time.

Like, they hadn't, yeah, almost haven't said the word hunter in 10 episodes.

And they tease

maybe a little trip back home at the very end.

I like these episodes.

There's some, we talked at the very beginning of this arc, like that my first time through

these episodes, I was like, This is so taking so long and is so

slow.

But every other time I've watched it, I've been like, what was I talking about?

This is 10 episodes.

It's totally fine.

And I think a lot of that is because they pay off a lot of the stuff that's going on here later in such big ways.

But

I don't know.

How did other people feel about these?

Oh, I think this is a really good chunk of episodes that we've got this week.

I think in particular, it's the episode 35, the middle episode we watched.

Oh, it's like Yeah.

One of my favorite we've seen so far.

I'll say the moment when we get there.

But there's two moments, and this is not typical behavior for me.

There's two moments in the show that, and people who listen to Run Button and Friends of the Table may have heard me tell this story before.

There's two moments in the show where when the moment happens, I stood up out of my seat with my arms in the air

and yelled, Yes.

One of them is in episode 35.

Yes.

Yeah.

And one of them is in like episode 100 and something.

Yeah.

Yep.

I'm so excited to talk about this, especially because, so I found 34,

the way we sort of go into this, to be...

There were some points during this chunk where I was really sort of forcing myself to watch the episode.

Yeah.

And I have a pretty high tolerance for

a slow burn,

but as we were just oscillating between fights with people I didn't really care about, that is to say, Guido and Revealt, and exposition from Mr.

Wing,

I just longed for something like, for example,

Trick Tower.

Where which was a similar sort of arena setup, but almost every combination of sort of opponents in that arena presented some interesting new problem to rotate our heads around, rather than

just a much more classic sort of slug off in the ring.

But all of that sort of, there is this moment as 35 develops where, yes, it's halfway through 35

where Ghon has set the date for his fight with Hisuka, and the show knows that they are building up to this moment that everybody's been waiting for for a long time.

And there's this great tense little montage of like people going out and buying tickets and like taking their seats in the stand and like just the sound of the they they pull the music out and you just hear like the crowd noise of everybody getting ready to watch this fight and from that point uh you know onwards i really enjoyed this chunk of episodes you know once we'd sort of got the business with um

Guido and Rio Veldt out of the way and to a certain extent once we got this Hatsu stuff out of the way although we can talk about that a bit more um

it was off to the races.

You know, this is Gone versus Hisaka.

We've been waiting for this.

We've honestly been waiting for this since the first time those characters met.

You know, you see them

and you're like, oh, a fight.

This is going to be a big fight in the future.

And the show really puts its foot down in terms of the way it animates that fight, the way it paces it.

It's notable that you earlier, Keith, talked about how we haven't really seen, you know, Capital F fighting for a long time.

And the show is clearly aware of that and it's sort of giving us what we want,

while also having these horrible little lacunas in the middle of the fight where Hisuka talks.

We can't, one second, we can't go into that.

We can't just talk about that fight right now.

No, no, no, no, no, we got

it.

You're dropping a bunch of things that we all want to respond to.

We can't get there yet.

We have to get there naturally.

Big teaser.

We've blown up a big water balloon.

We'll pop it in,

Let me tell you, the cup is

speaking of the cup.

So you're an enhancer, huh?

So let's go all the way back to the very beginning where we're not even thinking about fighting.

We're like doubling back to see more of

Kilua kind of intimidating the

little tour.

These three goons who sort of go back on their word and kidnap a nine-year-old boy in order to force the 12-year-olds into fighting them in an arena.

Yeah.

And, and killing.

To be fair, a lot is on the line.

A lot is on the line for them.

We learn what it means to be a floor master.

Yes.

We do learn what it means to be a floor master, which is you get a private floor to yourself.

Yeah.

You get, you basically just, it's the rest of your life is set up for you if you can be a floor master.

I train people to do, right?

Unless you lose it, right?

I think at some point it's like

opening like their own martial arts school.

Can you lose your floor mastership?

Well, if you, I guess, if you get beat, you do, but I guess it's also like once you're a floor master, even if you lose it, when you go tell someone, yeah, I was a floor master at Heaven's Arena, they're like, Oh, yeah, yeah, it's enough to have a successful school, you know.

The way they talk about it makes it is very similar to the way people would talk about being a hunter in the early episodes of the show.

Yeah, totally, that's when you become the thing, you're just set for life.

It's just like a whole other violent avenue to being like having the easy life, which is what feels like there's a lot of those in this world.

Get fight quick scheme.

But it's funny because what they're doing, you know, we talked about this a little bit on the last recording is that they're, they're using, they're, they're using like cheap tricks in order to squeeze wins out.

And it's like, this is not the way to be a floor master, not...

not out of some like sense of honor and respect for the title, but just you're going to hear your fucking ass beat.

Yeah, that's that, yeah.

I was just about to say that, Keith, because it's like, okay, once you get up to fight the floor master, you're still gonna have to win.

You've got to beat the floor master,

but you only have to fight when someone gets their 10 wins.

But there's already a floor master that's gotten 10 wins waiting for you to get your master.

No, you get a floor.

You think so?

That's the rule.

The rule is you get a floor.

Right?

I sort of, I sort of understood it as, and I think that this maybe is, is a little vague.

i don't think this is a misunderstanding really but my understanding was like you get a floor but i think all the floors are filled in order to to be a uh a a floor master you've got to beat the person that's already got that floor that was my understanding as well keith yesterday elite floor yeah yeah yeah totally but that's my point once you do that if you manage to pull that off yeah which you're right maybe guido

nothing but but here's the thing are you doubting the abilities of the tornado top technique?

The tornado top technique might be better than whatever the previous person was because that other person may have also tried to game their way in.

Sure.

Yeah.

I guess it is also worth remembering that these three who are seemingly not thinking about the consequences of their actions are also famously the people who showed up to the 200th floor without knowing anything about Nin.

Right.

Well, we know two

people like that.

We know two very talented little boys who also showed up.

Right, because they got initiated, right?

Yeah, they got initiated.

Yeah, that's why that that's why they're like portrayed as like scary and uh deformed is like yeah we talked about it last time that like they get called the nen initiates on top of the uh unfortunate like you just said the unfortunate way they're presented yeah

uh so the the one speaking of them the one with the melty skin whose name i don't know

so yeah yeah

um sadaso i think at the end

at the end of the last episode and the start of this one we sort of get like two halves of this scene of Kiloa sort of basically kicking him out of town.

Like, you're gone.

You don't live here anymore.

It's real sort of either like Wild West or Roman exile.

Just like, get out of my town.

It's a loser-leaves home match.

It is, yeah.

But there's also much wrestling going on.

It's a loser-leaves-home, it's a loser-leaves-home conversation.

Yes.

Because if the match were to happen, you're fucking dead, buddy.

You're fucking dead.

Yeah, don't be a loser,

a loser leaves life match.

L-L-L.

Sorry, go ahead, Jeff.

Killua has these conversations, and the thing that Sadaso specifically sort of brings up, and this is something that we hear Rielvelt talking about later, is how frightening he found Killiwa's eyes.

Sadaso says, you know, like, I looked into Killua's eyes and there was nothing there.

I have the quote written down.

Yeah.

His eyes were of someone who lives in the darkness.

And I think he says, I was overcome with fear when I looked into them.

Which is

notable, I think, specifically because of the way that Ilumi's eyes have been talked about and have been portrayed.

And the way that eyes

Mikkei, as well, the guard dog at the Zeldix, there's like a lot of eye imagery.

Also, Kilua's mother with her visor, her single red visor.

Yeah, absolutely.

There is this real align.

You know, we're seeing Kilua basically constantly going through an internal dialogue about whether or not he should move towards or away from his lineage and the skills that his lineage have brought him.

And I think that, you know, seeing all this reference to Kiliwa's eyes in this moment is like, oh, this is him turning his Zelda training and the kind of fear that he knows he can command to

looking out for Gon and Tzushi.

Yeah.

I would add, Jack, to that list of like eyes we've seen.

I mean, a lot of the Hiseka Hiseka like bloodlust stuff is also framed around his eyes being like wide and bloodshot and haggard.

That's true.

Extremely narrow and like...

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of eye stuff.

In anime in general, there's a lot of eye stuff, but this is like very booed.

A lot of other shows that we'll do is

a lot of eyes stuff.

You've left important eyes off this list from the show.

Karapika.

Karapika's?

Yeah.

Well, that's what I was going to say is that a lot of other shows have very technical eye stuff, like Karapika,

but they're also doing mood eye stuff with

any other person.

Take in?

Technical eyes.

Technical eyes.

Yeah.

Technical eyes, any eyes, technical eyes, technical eyes.

Any eye that someone might want to steal from you is a technical eye.

I see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry, Jackie have some.

No, just that

Saraso doesn't show up to his match with Gon, so Gon beats him by default, much how it has happened with Kilua.

And tries to warn the others.

It's like they commit.

I'm going to call Shonen's Folly.

It's like he isn't just some normal kid.

I think anytime you describe anything as like a normal person wouldn't do this, and it happens five minutes later, too, they do it a second time.

Yeah.

This is constantly, no, a normal human could do.

And it's like, okay, well, this is a show about, do you know where you are?

This is, yeah.

this is what I was again back to, there are so many fucking murder children in this world, and yet everyone is shocked when they meet a murder child.

Yeah.

Like, you're still, you're just finding out that Kilo is not a normal child.

The kid who knows Nen is at the 200th floor of the battle arena.

Get out of here, man.

Go home.

It should be safe for you out here.

It should be

like just the fact that a kid is even around, you should know.

Like, not only is this not a normal kid, but just by him being a kid, I should be really careful because a kid being here means something is wrong.

Very careful.

Kids are already scary.

Right.

You know?

Kids don't, they'll do whatever to win.

And then kids being where they're not supposed to be, that's scary.

Have we met a normal child in this show yet?

Zushi.

Zushi's pretty good.

No, Zushi is one in 10,000.

That's regular.

We've had Zushi like that.

It's comparatively regular.

Like defeating giant muscular men.

That's true.

Zushi's not a normal child.

You're right.

I know.

The clothes.

Zushi

has the brain of a normal child.

That is what he is.

Zushi campaign.

Leorio then?

Is Leorio a normal child?

No.

No, we saw what he did in Trick Tower.

Yeah.

I think

we probably saw a normal kid on Nicholas might be the best answer, actually.

Yeah, Nicholas might be the normalist.

Nicholas is Nicholas from the capital.

Nicholas is the best computer.

Kid with the laptop computer.

Yeah.

He's not normal either, though, because he could run like 50 miles.

Yeah, but Zushi probably could, too.

Yeah.

Yeah, but Zushi's not normal either.

I think

it's 100.

All right, I have to read the genetic freak.

He's not normal.

That's what I mean.

Is it like Zushi is a regular kid the way like the best Pop Warner quarterback is a regular kid?

You know what I mean?

Or the best,

but he's still like afraid of his geometry homework.

I have one counterexample to this is that when he fought Kilua, he made Kilua afraid of him like twice.

That's true.

Here's the thing with Zushi.

Zushi is, I think I'm on team.

Zushi is a normal kid because Zushi is a Shounen protagonist of a different series.

Yes.

And this is like also the second arc in whatever series Zushi would start.

My zero academia.

I mean, kind of.

My zero.

Hey, yeah.

Listen.

That's a salt.

Zushi like that by telling me he's going to be in my hero academia.

Put him in a good show.

Like, he feels like the lead of a 1970s karate banga.

You know what I mean?

For little boys.

He's fucking...

What's the boxing anime?

Hachi no Ippo?

Is that what it's called?

Hachime no Ippo, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's the karate version of that.

Like, we kind of, it's more towards the end of these episodes, but there's, like, like you mentioned, the one in 10,000.

conversation that they have.

I want to say, I was right.

It is 100,000.

I don't want to tell him short.

Okay.

It is one of those things where it's like, there's a very common trope in Shounen anime of the

protagonist who is

not as naturally talented, but through hard work, they become better than the geniuses that they know.

And Zushi is very much presented in that way, but is like very much not the main character of this.

And I think that's a fun thing.

You're saying it's five years, he's Rock Lee.

I'm saying he's not.

Zushi is Vegeta.

That's what I'm hearing.

Wow, just the silence after I said that.

Vegeta is the Prince of Osan.

Vegeta's the Prince of Osama.

Vegeta is Killer.

Yeah.

The only thing stopping Vegeta was that he didn't know that you could train until he met Goku.

Yeah.

That's true.

The thing that, like, you know, all these shounen comparisons, I feel like, have never been more appropriate than in this set of episodes, where it is the most in that set of battle shounen

tropes and characters and fight stylings.

And eventually we'll get there

kind of

power meta structure

lore dump that will explain why everyone can do all of this stuff.

All of this is so deep in this particular genre of shounen, which is like, this is already just in the hunter hunter we've watched so far.

We're exploring what can a shounen be?

And the same way there's like what is a hunter?

What is shonen is a question I think you can ask that hunter hunter tries to answer across its many arcs and and so far i think we're still really tight on a certain subset but as the show continues i think you can continue to come back and see it do its

its versions and it's not doing like

it's not always doing deconstructions you know sometimes it is yeah um sometimes it's playing it straight or it's it's doing the thing of a deconstruction where you have to play it straight long enough to establish what the thing is so you gotta build a deconstruction

yeah exactly and so i think it's really in the build mode of battle manga, you know?

Yeah.

This is like definitely something that I think at least once every arc will be coming back to talk about.

This, I mean, feels nice.

What is a shonen and what is a shonen thing and like how

Hunter Hunter kind of like moves through the different flavors of it

in different ways?

But there's also this other thing, like there's this like mirror image of that idea of like, okay, you have to set up the battle shown in order to show like how it's like playing with those.

but then the flip side of it is that we just had like 30 something episodes of like really playing with the expectations of a normal audience who's like reading or watching this and is

is like having expectations subverted in a lot of weird ways like austin in the episodes that you you weren't on we talked a lot about how they kept implying that there was going to be a tournament arc and then like cutting ahead of the tournament and then flashing back.

Yeah.

Like, they tell you who wins.

They just like totally destroy all of the tension of what you would expect

from a tournament arc, which is like, how is the fight going to go?

Who's going to win the fight?

And instead of the tension, is like, how are people handling

what we learn immediately happens, like with Kilua

not passing the Hunter exam or with Goan getting

all fucked up?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so then it's like, all right, we've had 30 episodes of it, 33 episodes of that.

Let's do normal show.

We need to give people a little bit of normal show.

Let's make him fight this guy with

a fishing rod.

Yeah, let's make him throw a big piece of the stage.

Do we have anything else to talk about with Kiloa's thing at the beginning?

I do.

I do.

Because

I was going to otherwise be like, we should get into that fight.

I have only a couple things.

I just want to highlight a couple moments.

So there's a really phenomenal moment where

the two remaining, Guido and

Ryalvault are like, we're definitely going to keep cheating.

And then Kilo shows up in the shadows, like, are you sure about that?

And they're very scared.

And they look, and he's not there, and he's behind them again.

And it's a very, very great, intimidating moment where, like, he's proving.

the other guy whose name I can't remember right.

Satiso?

And then he's immediately...

Yeah, yeah, Satatso.

And then he's immediately immediately like, I'm gonna be wherever you are, whether it's sleeping or taking a dump.

And he totally ruins

that, yeah, dooming these men to never have a normal BM in the rest for the rest of their lives.

And then he says, Maybe the coolest thing, it's so good, it's a great moment, especially coming like right on the heels of them being like, We're definitely not listening to our friend.

Uh, he says, uh, without the rules, the only ones benefiting would be us, and then just leaves.

It's very good.

Because presumably, I'll kill you.

If you break the rules, the rules are what's preventing me from killing you.

Which, of course, we'll wrap back around to at the end of this.

This is also one of the first moments in these sets of episodes that is a...

I don't know.

I read it as a callback to the Hunter exam where Kiloa is basically doing what Netaro does.

Yes.

He approaches them on the airship, which is the, you think he's in one place, then he's in the other.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And what the

doppelganger guy did to Kiloa when Kiloa went to go check him out.

Right.

There's a couple of moments in this of Kilo doing techniques from other people that he's seen before.

It's nice, especially because

we watch him notice what Netaro does.

He goes a little bit confused, and then Kilo is sort of like implies,

I don't know what you did, but I know you did something.

Yeah.

So that's very cool.

Or maybe he knew it all along because of being an assassin i don't know um

uh we will we'll get a little bit back to this uh maybe uh during the gone fight but uh they show us again

kiloa not telling gone that he has

sort of avenged zushi and also intimidated these uh guys into not showing up for their fights i'm pretty sure that's how this happens he just like doesn't say that he's been doing this um

and so when we get to Gonz's fight with Guido, he's just like, doesn't know.

He's like, yeah.

He's out to get his own kind of revenge.

And that's the tone of the fight.

Is that where we are now?

Or do we have to...

They have a little.

There's like a little bongo nen montage with the really good, like, they do that a couple times in this set where they get the bongo track play.

Oh, yeah, the bongo track.

The bongo track goes.

So that's

great.

They let it run for the first time, really.

That's really, it's really interesting because that's, um,

I looked it up because I was like, I know this track.

It starts with like a really standard sort of like rock beat that then goes through the bongos.

But that's actually the second half of a song called like Stalwart something.

Stalwart's glaring.

And it's normally used like in the middle of a battle.

It is.

it is uh it's normally used in the middle of a battle and they totally repurpose it here to do like a montage sort of like a tense sort of training montage it's very interesting if you go if anyone goes to listen to stalwarts glaring you'll go oh this is that like fight song that i've already heard two or three times uh and then they totally repurpose it for this um yeah did anybody notice this might have been in the previous episode but i i only noticed it this time that uh in Wing's apartment, he's covered up the broken wall with like a tapestry.

Oh my god,

that's gross.

So funny.

Of course, that fucking loser can't fix his goddamn wall and just has to put a blanket over it.

Damn, how many times do you think he's trained some kid that has punched a hole in his own wall forgetting?

Yeah, yeah, because he still hasn't learned how to draw a wall.

He really did.

He really did.

He went into it going, watch this.

It wasn't like, you know, a sort of Adam Driver and Marriage Story moment where he did it just out of.

He's running out of walls to break.

And I use them.

But it really is like just the way this show is just so invested in these little moments of characterization, right?

Hanging the breaking the wall in a demonstration and then off-screen hanging a tapestry over the wall is an extremely Mr.

Wing maneuver.

God, and then also like crying, apologizing to Zushi for breaking his juice and that other.

Oh, yeah, I forgot about that.

Yeah, so

Gon versus Guido.

Gon has brought his fishing rod.

Oh, hell yeah, he has.

And

he gets right into the fight, yeah.

Guido does his usual trick, spins around like a big, like a big top.

Gon blocks all the tops.

He shoots all his tops at Gon like a shotgun.

Shotgun blues.

Shotgun.

Shotgun blues.

My favorite dashboard.

Anytime you're...

You're naming attacks.

Yes?

I love it.

Is it...

Oh, all right.

I thought you were about to say something like, oh,

it's bad news for you.

But no.

No,

I just like hearing it.

It might be bad news for the character, but it's great news for us.

I just like hearing what people come up with for their

little attacks.

They go like,

I've got my topic.

Guido's got kind of like a musical theme because he's got battle waltz and then he's got shotgun blues, but then he doesn't carry it over to Tornado Top, so it's just Tornado Top.

I wonder if Tornado Top is named something else in

the manga.

Oh, okay.

I'm wondering.

I have no idea.

Oh, yeah.

Wait, I'll look it up.

Look it up.

Let me just Google Tornado Top real quick.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You go ahead and do that.

You

can do some safe search on.

So while you're searching that,

I noticed during Dancing Tops.

Dancing Tops.

Okay, there's Dancing Tops.

It was, right?

So, oh, no, I guess it is still called.

It is still, that other one is...

It's both.

His overall thing is Combat Dance or Dancing Tops.

But then, yeah, it is.

This says Tornado Tops.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Damn.

You know, I'm going to take that as a little bit of characterization.

Guido cannot stay on theme.

Just like it's not, doesn't have what it takes to win in the ring, doesn't have what it takes to come up with three moves that are all on theme.

These three are very thin characters that are almost exclusively trading on their character designs.

We've talked about their character designs in the past.

They are at least visually interesting.

I think Guido may be the most.

But really,

we don't know much about these people other than that they just deeply want to cheat children.

They're just there to hustle.

Yeah, they're just like horrible and resentful for having been maimed when they came up.

And they're just like, we are now out to be the maimers.

By any means necessary.

Pulling the ladder up behind you and then hitting them with it.

Goan develops a new tactic almost immediately.

Using his fishing rod, he pulls up one of the floor tiles in the arena and flips Guido because he wisely figures out that he can't really mess with Guido when he's in spinning top mode.

So

he's just going to upend the whole Beyblades table.

Gun likes flipping the tile so much.

He does that so many times.

It's not that he develops this technique in the battle.

He came in with this plan.

Oh, yeah, he went.

He tells Wing, I plan to use this, and gestures as if he's holding the fishing rod.

And it's just just like, you know, he was laid up in bed, recovering, thinking, how do I beat him?

And his thought was, I could flip the tiles over.

I could destroy the ground.

It is a very funny moment, too.

Wing goes like, yes, I understand to the hand motion that sort of, like, looking back, I'm like, yeah, that was definitely a fishing rod.

I don't know how Wing under it is just very funny that Wing understands.

It's like, he's going to be a show for two objects Gone has, you know, okay,

Maybe I'm giving Wing too much credit and thinking that he knew that not only was it the fishing rod, but that he was going to use it to flip the tiles.

Right.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't remember how Wing responds to this like during the fight itself either.

So

he sort of stares contentedly.

Sure.

This, to me, I had a thing when I watched this where the...

Do you guys remember during the hunter exam, there's the scene where Gon is watching other people hunt and Pakle does the thing with the arrow and then he's like, I expected you to dodge that.

There's a sleeping paralytic agent in the arrow.

And this felt like that, like Gon trying that out.

Yeah.

Gone being like, that's what a feint is.

Let me try it.

And this is like his interpretation of that.

And I don't know.

That's great.

And it really is his only experience being a hunter, too.

So

I

like...

It was just something that I kind of got caught onto early in this set of episodes and was really really enjoyed watching was like

there's already like a lot of very blatant callbacks to the Hunter exam, but including some stuff that is kind of open to interpretation as to whether it's even an intentional callback does make it feel like they learned a lot of stuff through it.

Something I caught onto early and was really enjoying was Kilua psychoanalyzing the fight,

sort of taking Karapika's place because there's no Karapika, so we need someone who's like sitting and analyzing everything and trying to figure out why people are doing what they're doing.

And it was really fun.

Like, okay, it makes sense that Kilo is doing this, but also there's no Karapika.

Someone has to.

We get someone doing a Karapika PowerPoint.

We sure do.

Yeah, we sure do.

What do we think about Goan's anger here?

Yeah.

Yo, it's, I feel like this is the first time we've seen Goan like this, right?

I think this is the first time, Yeah, like this is this is in my mind.

This is like cruel and vindictive almost.

Yeah, so what happens?

Um Boy, I forget how we get to this point.

Um, I guess it just goes really well, really fast.

He's like right after he flips the tile and Guido's like on the ground, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Goan just like kicks his prosthetic leg and breaks it.

He doesn't kick it.

He punches it so hard that it he first of all, he like pulls back to hit him and Guido is terrified.

Yeah.

And instead of punching Guido in the face, he punches and breaks the prosthetic with such force that it causes himself to bleed.

Yeah.

And tells him, if you're willing to do whatever it takes, I won't hold back.

And if you touch Zushi again, I'll smash your face in.

And he's shaking.

His fist is shaking.

It's covered in blood.

It is a promise.

It is sort of like the way that they frame it at first is

like, I think visually, is they're

showing you, like, oh, he's gonna punch him like in the stomach or in the face, and then he punches, and then you're like, Oh, I guess he didn't.

Did he like choose to not do anything?

And then the sort of combination of he took out his leg and also is like almost uncontrollably angry

sort of brings it right back to, like, oh, this felt almost like kind of like a mercy or like a like gun's holding back, but kind of, but it really isn't.

Yeah, i mean it's he's doing the same thing kilua did yeah yeah because he doesn't know that kilua did that yeah uh

the other moment that i think this is sort of in conversation with is when ghone um goes and threatens ilumi at the end of the hunter exam

um which is you know another moment in which uh i mean obviously it's a moment in which gone is uh looking out for someone that he loves very much you know someone that he cares deeply about and is prepared to take

angry, violent action for them.

But it's also a moment, I think, where Goan is.

Goan is regularly characterized as experiencing multiple emotions simultaneously, which is, of course, something that everybody does, but I think in this sort of like broad anime sense, you know, the narrator and

Gon and Killua will often talk about, like, oh, I was feeling excited and I was feeling scared.

I was feeling this and I was feeling that.

And I think both in this moment with Ilumi and in fighting Guido and in a moment later during the fight with Hisaka that I want to make sure we talk about then, we see Goan at like a bright flame of clarity in his own emotional state.

The thing he is feeling is fury.

Goan

feels so big.

Which is to say,

not that he feels big, like large to me, but his feelings are large.

He feels in a large way.

And I think so much of what makes him move is the thing in children that hasn't been, you know, burned out of them yet.

That is, why don't we just make the world better for people?

Why don't we just fix the thing that's broken?

And in this moment, he is in the exact one place where through force of will and power and emotion, he can do that.

And it fixes the situation in his mind because he can go beat these guys and fix people and, you know, and help his friend Zushi from ever being hurt again right or ever being threatened again and in some ways it's like damn we all need a little more gone in us right to like we have to carry that I wish we carried that energy more forward but also it will be interesting to see how this develops for gone as the show continues and it's not in the battle manga anymore you're not in the tournament arc can you do this when you're not in the tournament arc what's the way with a lumi how does that end up coming back because that's not the you know

again, the beginning of this episode is

Killer was saying, the rules prevent me from doing more, right?

At the end of this arc of episodes, again, we'll come back to the rules, stop this from being something else.

And what happens outside of the rules when you feel big and decide I'm going to help people no matter what, you know?

Yeah.

Being in a tournament arc gives Ghan

a vocabulary of choices.

Yes.

That he, that he.

Because the thing is,

he threatens Illumi.

There's that great image of him holding Illumi's wrist.

Do you remember?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But Goan does not take violent action then, in part because I think he recognizes that he is outside of this heightened space of a tournament arc, and Illumi might just kill him.

Right.

Violent action apart from breaking his wrist.

Does he break it?

Oh, he does break it, and Illumi is just like, oh, this is fine.

Ilumi no-selling it had made me think that Goan didn't break it.

But yeah, it's a really, it's a really interesting moment.

And then the show

sort of, it's got other stuff to talk about.

I feel like we don't sit with that anger in Goan.

But the name of the episode is Power to Avenge.

And obviously, partly that is Kiloa's Power to Avenge at the very beginning, but it is also Goan's with both of these combatants.

You know?

Do we have any

ideas of why Goan or Kilua

hides slash doesn't reveal what he's been doing to Goan?

Yes, and I would like to present two pieces of evidence to the court.

One, Hanzo beating the shit out of Goan at the end of the Hunter exam.

Two, Canary beating the shit out of Goan as he tried to enter the Zaltex.

I think Kilua has learned that Ghan has such a particular kind of obstinacy and such a particular kind of

desire to do things capital R right or the right way

that I think that were he to say to

Goan that he had taken this action, Goan would just continue to throw himself into like situations that he would get deeply harmed in for the sake of wanting to do things right.

Yeah.

But what about after it's done?

Go like, hey, I did that.

This is what happened.

I figured out they kidnapped Zushi and then I threatened them and that's why we won both of our fights because retroactively, it would poison it, it would sour it.

It would sour it.

You ever played it sour it like he's a good giving the badge back?

Yeah, I think that's a good comparison.

I think it's absolutely it's also like you know, you're ever playing like sports, you're playing soccer outside as a kid and you like absolutely bash your shin on something and you're like, oh, I don't even want to play anymore.

It's ruined the whole thing.

You know, the whole

evening of play is now sour to me.

Or like learning that someone, you're playing something against someone else and you realize that they're like going easy on you.

No one wants to know that you let them win.

Yeah.

No one

retroactively.

Yes.

Yeah.

It is interesting to see,

you know, reading into it only a little bit, like

so early in the show, Kilua being like...

aware of this and being like, I have to manage this situation and part of managing that is like managing Goan and not telling him about this

yeah

but this is something that killua has had experience with uh being surrounded by powerful weirdos with uh uh uh complicated and sometimes um counterintuitive responses oh to to to the way he might act right kilua has been managing people around him his whole life um i think the first time is that this is the first time that he's managing people around him that he loves in a way that he he doesn't love his family yeah compared to Ilumi and his mom and

Miluki, guns are probably pretty easy.

Yeah, no, I mean, what Kiloa has done up to this point is to manage other people's actions in order to protect himself as opposed to manage other people's actions out of a like place of affection and care.

Yeah.

Do we have anything else about the Guido fight?

I think I'm good.

Yeah.

Is the next Riel Velt fight?

We go straight into Kilo's fight after this.

Oh, yeah, we do.

And this fight has bonus snakes.

Oh, I apologize.

Yeah, I did think that when

I was watching it, being like, oh, gosh.

I didn't realize those whips were snakes.

Those were snakes.

Well, so he.

Real Veldt sort of begins with.

So first,

Akilo leaps right over Real Velt.

Real Velvet uses his wheelchair's rocket boosters to shoot him out of the way.

Really great animation on these, like, the blue flame from these rocket boosters.

And then Rio Velt sort of moves into very similar tactics to Guido.

He pulls out these two maroon-colored whips and creates a sort of

corona of violence around him, such that if anybody were to get close, they'd just get.

Sorry, any normal person.

Yes.

Because

Guido says no normal person could withstand this and flings his whips at Kilua.

Kiluavelt, not Guido.

Realvel, sorry.

And Kilua in a real

Lord of the Rings, I can be beaten by no man type move, says, well, I'm not normal.

Yeah, in the dungeon he says, yeah, well, I'm not normal.

Sorry about that.

It's great.

Classic.

Classic Shonen's Folly.

This isn't my favorite Kilua line in this fight, which comes later.

This is a Kilua line that just destroyed me in one second because the the whips reveal themselves to actually be two snakes or possibly robots that look like i think they're sort of a robotic yeah very like weird magic machine snake things yeah and they bite killua and they they put one million volts into him and at this point i paused the episode and looked up what is one million volts i wanted to know great question i wanted to know and of course this is very difficult right because voltage is is actually a very uh um

fickle measurement for electricity.

You know, you obviously don't want to fuck around with a million volts, but a million volts could be harmless and could just cause your hair to rise slightly.

It could just set you up.

Yeah, it just depends on if the current can pass through you or not.

All the cars and stuff.

Right.

Friends at the table does not endorse you electrocuting yourself.

No.

Please don't take what we're saying.

But

if you want an endorsement for that, you can go to Run Button.

Killer is getting electrocuted mega big time, uh, but he grabs the

whips and pulls Realvelt straight out of his chair and then delivers this unbelievable lane.

He says, I'm trained to withstand torture, beat, but it isn't like it makes me happy, beat, it still really hurts a lot, and everything.

Beat.

That's why I'm a little pissed.

Yeah, it's

really

it is almost as if he is talking to like a man on the street like

hey how how how do you feel about like you know this thing that annoys you it is like this is this is something that might air as part of a compilation on the local news it's like tiktok is going up to people and asking them what they think of electricity

i feel like the

specific localization writing of the line, it still really hurts a lot and everything as you are being electrocuted with a million volts.

It's just lovely character writing, it's great.

Uh, and then, of course, uh, so he, he, he, Guido's, uh, oh my god, I did it again.

Real Vault is like, I'm gonna fall, and Killer is like, I'm gonna catch you, don't worry.

He whips him in the air.

Did we mention that he whips him into the air?

Like, oh, yeah,

he flicks him into the air.

There's this great moment of Revere, like, laughing maniacally at the one million volts, and then instantly we cut to he's a hundred fifty feet in the air.

Yeah,

But he catches him with his lightning still running through him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Guido doesn't show for his match with Kilua.

Kilua wins by default.

We get Kilua leaving and doing the one fist up victory walkout

cool guy pose.

This is also the

this is barely a fight.

This is the most that we've seen Kilua fight at all in the whole show.

Just to echo something from earlier.

The only other thing that compares that would count as more fighting than this would be the tag team fight

or the netaro on the airstrip or the dodgeball or not dodgeball but the tags.

Wait, it's not really a fight.

I'm glad you mentioned because he does start this the way Gon starts the netaro thing.

Which is jump really high to

yes.

Doesn't hit his head though.

Yeah.

Because there's a higher ceiling.

Yeah, higher ceiling.

Yeah, Yeah, if John did that in a place where he wasn't going to be able to do that.

Yeah,

if that had happened in Heaven's Arena, they would have won.

They would have won.

Straight up,

Netzero.

Oh, it was great.

Killua is, you know, it's...

It goes without saying.

Killer is extremely cool.

Has not gotten less cool over the course of the show.

I have to imagine it's only going to get cooler.

Or will he plateau?

I don't know.

Is it sort of like terminal velocity, where past a certain point, Killua can

no longer get cooler?

That happens in Shonen a lot.

That does happen.

That's true.

You know what?

I think there might be a point.

I don't kill it.

Genuinely, yeah.

I don't even want to say.

Actually, I don't know.

No, because the conversation

is way late in the show.

Yeah, that's true.

Are you right, though?

I get what you mean.

There's a yeah, it's like a power.

It's like, you know, Dragon Ball Z is like the touchstone for me because this is the one that was big when I was a kid.

I am not an Aruto, you know, girly.

This is just like not my generation.

I got you covered.

Thank you.

But in Dragon Ball Z, they like, it was the most 90s thing it could be because there was, they introduced, after Dragon Ball had already run and there was a really like broad range of power levels by the end of Dragon Ball, but it was never specific.

Dragon Ball Z immediately introduces this idea that these aliens show up with scouters with these little like, you know, this, you know, Calvin Bryan has one of these, Jack.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know,

Fames Revolutionary Territory.

Yeah, Calvin Bryant has one of these things.

It's like a little like monocle single lens thing that hovers in front of your, your eye doesn't hover, but it, you know, it rests in front of your one eye.

And it just tells you how strong someone is.

It just says their power level is 5,000.

Their power level is 6,000.

And the thing that just happens with cool characters in Dragon Ball Z is they don't, their power level like does not exponentially increase anymore when Flames does and like they might still go from a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand but go's at five hundred thousand and it just doesn't you're not gonna hang anymore you know how many numbers do the alien scouters account for They break really early.

One of the jokes about the scouters is that they only really show up to be a device that lets them underestimate Goku.

Yes.

Because one of the Goku's, the first thing Goku, one of the first things Goku ends up learning is you can, not just Goku, the whole like Earth Defense Force crew learns that you can, the Z fighters, apologize,

learn that you can hide your power level.

They learned that which is which, yeah, they learn exactly.

Yeah, they learned that, like,

that I think is something that like is intentional in this.

I'd have to look at the release, like, how it's undeniable, but I know there's no way it's before Dragon Ball Z manga.

There's no way,

right?

Yeah, I don't think so.

No, no, I don't think so.

No, you're right.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah, Dragon Zunter Hunter didn't start until 95

six 98 oh 98 really later yeah oh wait we looked this up because i was like it was surely it couldn't have been that close to the 99 anime but it totally was and that's why it wasn't

that's why it wasn't finished whereas dragon ball z the manga starts in 89.

Okay.

So, like, is what I mean

in the, it's in the, it's 100% referential to that.

Yeah, okay.

Um, but but yes,

it's all based off of, you know, not all of it, you know, there's like this sort of

this sort of

root of the this like the martial arts chi thing of like we're building power, we're suppressing, we're channeling, moving things around,

uh,

and, you know, different shows do different things with this, and it, it's, you know, largely all doing Dragon Ball Z.

But even that is doing kung fu movies, even that is doing, you know what I mean?

And it's doing martial arts epics and is doing, you know, which we'll we'll talk about when we start talking about nen a little bit and look at charts and shit so

um

time for gone to fight realvelt

very quickly i did just want to point out that like this fight with kilowa and realvelt is the most like typical like shown in aesthetic fight we get i think up until we get with the fight with isaka later yeah um but this one has this one felt like so naruto to me in a lot of ways especially with the like music choices and everything the Toshado Kilua has Gara's eyes.

I don't know if you picked this up, but while Kilua's getting electrocuted,

he has

the under-eye

thing that Gara has.

Yeah, yeah.

Just waiting until we hear what show I think the Hezekiah reminds me of.

It's going to be very funny.

I'll post it in here so you can see what I'm talking about.

Oh, yeah, just like a minor note on that that I wanted to get in before we moved on.

Oh, yeah.

He does look like Gara.

That's he looks like Gara here.

Like 100% he has the eyeliner.

Anyway.

But I'm not an Arito guy.

I love Gara.

I love Gara.

Shout out to Gara.

They should have named that series Gara.

It should have been about, it should have been called Gara and it should have been about Gara meeting, you know, plucky underdogs and turning them evil.

It sounds great.

Yeah.

What?

What's wrong with that?

That sounds great.

Yeah, it does sound great.

Instead of Borato, they should have gone back and just done an AU about Gara,

making the world worse.

All right, so we go with Tagline.

Making the world worse.

We get the same fight, just redone with Gone.

It's almost equally as fast.

It's faster, I think, even.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

Oh, there's like less faster.

There's less pattern.

I guess guess that's.

There's definitely like back and forth.

There's less talking.

There's a real element of, let's just get this guy out of the way.

This is a mid box now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We've already established that these guys are nothing.

He should just run.

He should have just not come back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know?

But again, he really wants to be a floor master, so I get it.

And he can.

I mean, they say if he loses one more time, he has to.

Yeah.

He's got to start from the beginning, and a forfeit is still a loss, right?

Well, I can't remember.

Had he already, like, hadn't they already signed up to do their fights ahead of time, like, before Goan, like, beat up Guido and all that stuff?

I think so.

I think you're so.

Okay.

They did sign up for a number of fights.

I don't know.

I don't remember which ones exactly were already planned, but if he's going to run away, he's going to lose no matter what.

So he might as well just run away because

he lost.

He lost bad.

It's true.

Oh, go ahead.

You go ahead.

This is kind of a creepy fight.

This has a creepy ending.

This has gone.

I'm more

going being mad.

Yeah.

It's played for laughs, but I'm glad that I wasn't the only person who was like, that's a little

gone Joker moment, you know?

Go introduces his new tactic,

mess around with the floor tiles,

and

disarms Rio Velt and gets his whips and threatens to electrocute Rio Velt.

Oh, he does the wrist break again.

He breaks both his wrists like he breaked Ilumi's wrist.

Yeah, he does.

I didn't think I missed it.

That's how he gets him to drop the blips.

Yeah, that's right.

And then he says, yeah, like a joke, like, oh, how high can I turn these things up?

Yep.

And then says, only joking, but it's too late because we cut to Riel Velt just like passing out in fear, foaming at the mouth as Goan threatens to electrocute him.

And I just wrote down victory, period.

This is also the fight where we get Husuka doing a little PowerPoint presentation.

this.

Yeah.

It cuts back and forth between Kilo and Hisuka doing this.

Basically, it's just Hisuka explaining the technique, the way Gon's specific rock throw works in this fight.

I was like, basically, it's just Hisuka.

Kilo doesn't do anything.

I would, listen.

How dare you?

Yeah, it's not really like a plot important thing.

No, but he's doing like the Telestrator.

He's doing like the

absolutely, yes.

He's like,

see, when you do this,

it makes them move this way.

And so they're open for attack.

And it's real, like.

It's very fun.

I love the diagrams.

The fight diagrams are fun.

Hisuka's the Tony Romo of the United States.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah.

God.

Tony Romo, don't stew it.

Also, Tony Romo, don't do most of the other things that Hisuka does.

Yeah, don't.

We just mean in this one regard, Mr.

Romo.

Yeah, 11.

Sunday Roman Hisuka on Sunday morning football sees Josh Allen and goes, Schween.

Oh my god.

Oh my god.

I forgot that the Schwing was in these episodes.

Oh,

I didn't.

I can't believe I was like...

No, I don't want to do the earlier episodes of Heaven's Arena.

I want to do these ones.

I want the leaf.

I want to be there with the Schwing.

I want to be there for the Schwing.

I wanted to be there with the full Hisuko

orgasm episode.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

I guess that's technically next episode.

Sorry, I jumped.

in.

It's not this episode.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

It's bad, though.

So, if you're doing a weird thing where you're listening to each segment of the episodes, then going to watch the next episode, we just spoiled something for you.

And we've never

seen it.

Can you send me the work print?

Because I want to hear what it sounds like.

Yeah.

We have never had good demarcations between episodes.

This is, we have, we, the, the point where the episodes change is, I like to think, a very fun little blur that we have here.

Yeah, we do tend to say, and now we move on to X.

Have you considered

making it so that everyone's voices become watercolor and then

like a Dio song starts playing?

Because that's what the show does.

Yeah.

Oh, we need the little subtitle at the bottom that just says Hunter, Hunter.

Media Club Plus.

Then as Gone leaves, Hiseker is in the tunnel clapping.

He compliments him creepily, which Isaka has never delivered a

non-creepy compliment in his life.

Get away from her.

To be fair, Goan just did some Hisoka shit.

Oh, he absolutely did.

It's not him.

He should have done Hisoka shit.

Yeah, we told him.

Don't put how to be the Joker if you don't want the Joker show on the show.

No, Joker.

Maybe this should have gotten Gohan to think a little bit.

You're doing stuff that Hisuka admires.

This is what I'm saying.

Yeah, I mean,

Goan goes from being

basically like, I mean, he's living in the woods.

He's little Goku.

He doesn't know about fighting.

He just knows that he's really strong for no reason.

He knows about his dad.

I guess that's one up on Goku.

On Goku.

Who only knew about his adopted grandfather.

Shout out to Gohan.

And

then all of a sudden, he is, unlike Goku, thrust into the most horrible violent world of all systems full of adult psychos who barely even notice that you're a kid,

let alone treat you like one.

And now he's a little freak.

It took 34 episodes, 35 episodes, and now Goan is a freak.

We've talked in the past about how the show

likes to draw lines between Ghon and Hisaka as sort of like,

if not mirror images, but two planets orbiting around each other.

And I think, yes,

the thing I picked up in this moment was Goan is being scary between the breaking the leg and the

electrocution threatening.

I didn't draw that line straight to meeting Hisuke in the tunnel because then the thing Hisaka says is, You've met the grade.

Set the time and place.

I'll take you on anytime.

Which is like, yeah, I feel like we can draw that line

ways in which Goan and Hisaka are becoming similar.

And the show's about to draw that line so explicitly, also.

The show is about to draw that line literally as explicitly as it can.

And weirdly, though, weirdly, them drawing that line so explicitly,

to me, it's so obvious that they're actually drawing a different line,

which we'll get.

They're like using

the fact that they're using Hiseka drawing that line as a way to suggest something different, which I think is really interesting, which we'll get to.

I thought just kidding is really funny.

Just

kidding.

I thought that's funny.

I mean, it's

just funny out.

Yeah.

No, it is funny, but it is also.

It's, you know, Joker's kind of funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It sometimes is funny to be evil.

It's true.

EK Carberry.

Before we go to the second episode, super important question.

How many Coco's are there?

Good question.

Did you not watch the postpedia?

Yeah.

The Hunterpedia.

I didn't see the hunterpedia.

I forgot that that was the thing.

I watched one of them.

Please tell me

what happened.

The hunterpedia this week is Coco.

Does everybody remember who Coco is?

Coco is

an extremely fun announcer.

She is basically a character entirely through her vocal performance.

The actress playing her is doing a great job.

Yeah.

So

Goan is like, we're introducing Coco.

She's the one who does all the fights that she announces all the fights at Kevin's or Kevin's arena.

oh yeah hey everybody got

my place this is kevin's arena grabbing

fight uh kevin is the name of one of the floor masters and kevin's arena is his martial arts school if they're just staying on the seat it's dry don't worry about it

i tried to get it up with lemon juice it only made it worse

Killer is like, oh, she's the one who's always talking, right?

And then Goan goes, I wonder how many of her there are.

And Killerwood gets like,

like, uh-oh, eyes and goes, there's just the one.

But I think Goan is right.

How is she announcing all the fights at 200 different levels at once?

Oh, that's a good question.

I think you just get assigned, you know, every every

boy gets assigned to.

No.

No.

This makes sense.

Listen, listen, listen.

It's Nen.

It's Nen doing it.

She's hurting an ability.

She's a.

She's a conjurer.

Conjurer.

She's conjured.

See, it's all paying off already.

You hate it, but it's paying off.

But she can't see none.

Maybe she's pretending.

You're right.

I'm a wrestling fan.

I should know this shit.

And you want to know the real thing?

It's a shoot, brother.

And this is, you can go on, you can read my fanfic about this.

You might think, which one of her is the real one and which one are the nen projections?

The answer is, all the announcers are nen projections.

And when you get to floor 253,

then you meet meet floor master Coco, the real

it's the sleepy lady at floor 200 who's some action.

That's why she's so sleepy, yeah, yeah, because she and she's that's why she's an announcer because she's like learning people's tactics

that she then

you know, because she sees them all come up,

you know, yeah, I'm in love with the Coco.

I can't believe that she introduced that sleepy girl, but never brought her back.

The sleepy girl was great, um, because that's me, I'm the sleepy girl.

What a mood.

Biggest unanswered questions.

Why was she so sleepy?

Why not?

I bet it's hard to work there, man.

Yeah.

Having to deal with people progressively.

I'm not doing clerical work for Hisoka.

Like,

come on.

Everyone's letting out their bloodlust around you.

You're just trying to file papers.

Yeah.

I'm just trying to get you to sign this iPad that says you're going to fight.

Can you not?

Hisugar is creepy to everyone, right?

Not just to Goan.

I'm trying to think.

We've seen

this.

He's especially creepy to Gohan's co-worker.

Weirdly, he has taken a special interest in Ghana.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But he's not like a chill guy to other people.

No, I think the closest we've ever seen him to being a chill guy is when he interacts with Ilumi, right?

It's a little

bit of a girl.

It's a little in his nenstitches girl.

Yeah, the nensstitches.

He's still a freak to her.

He's real weird to her.

He's real weird to her and

asks her out on a date, and she says no by just leaving.

I should have asked this then.

Do you think he was actually asking her out?

No,

I always interpreted it as him being like, I want to fight you.

Okay.

I think that it's...

I think it's ambiguous.

I always read it as legitimate.

The way those scenes play for me is about,

and I'm putting such heavy inverted commas around this word, humanizing Hisuka.

You know, we see Hisaka in his apartment, we see Hisuke in the shower, We see him in different outfits.

And so the thought of him asking someone out on a date

is consistent with the way that scene played for me.

Of like, we're seeing Hisaka in a different fucked up mode.

But like, this is the thing, is like, it's humanizing so that he can be actually more of a monster.

Yeah,

that's exactly what we said last year.

I'm listening to the episodes as they come out.

I'm not getting early cuts of this or anything.

And so, like, the most recent episode, someone raised, like, is Hisuka even a human?

Is Hisaka?

Oh, yeah.

It's like

Jack.

Which I think it was Jack.

Yeah.

And the thing is that, like, they show you, yeah, he is.

And that's why that way you don't give him that out for being the way he is, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very

well-established choice of how to vilify this dude is to make him like have to get surgery, you know?

Yeah, the lines specifically.

No, it's magic surgery, but yeah.

The line specifically was, quote, I don't know if Hiseka and Gon are the same thing.

Yes, that is exactly how, yeah.

It's such a good sentence that we should just keep in in mind.

Yep, that's what I have here.

That's the kind of definitive statement we should keep in mind.

See if it's affirmed or refuted.

Yeah.

And you know what?

Can I say something?

Because, like, this manga is still going.

I guess neither do I.

I don't know shit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well,

yeah.

I don't know anything about either of these motherfuckers.

We just know 120 episodes more of nothing.

Right.

Episode 35 begins.

You can tell because my voice has gone into watercolor.

It's time to study Hatsu.

It's time for school.

After which, Wing says, our heroes will be able to develop their own nen style.

And this was a really nice moment for me because I've talked about this in the previous episode.

I have such little interest in nen theory, and I love seeing weirdos do weird magic.

And so as soon as Wing was like, oh, you're actually going to start to be able to express yourself in the way that we've seen like Hisuka express himself with his Nen.

Good.

I'm excited about that.

And here comes a PowerPoint about Hatsu, because it turns out that

in addition to sort of

doing like a

categorization of the world into magic through Nen, Nen is also subdivided further into six different sorts of Nen user.

They are, we talked about them earlier as being personality tests.

They're also almost like star signs.

This sense of like, oh, you a Capricorn, that means that you're like this or whatever.

And there are six types of Nen.

And I'm just going to run through them really quickly so that if you are not watching along, you can get a sense of what we're talking about.

Enhancers strengthen and reinforce their natural abilities.

Emitters, that's a weird...

Okay, wait, wait, wait.

Important.

Because that's what it says in the dub, right?

That's what it says in the sub.

Okay, no, because it's important they enhance themselves or objects uh in maybe it's in the sub versus dub that wing explicitly says in one of them that they enhance objects and themselves is an object but this is it's important that it's not just run fast jump high you know what i mean this is why the water

moves right in the subtitles it's enhancers are able to strengthen objects is what he says

so yeah it is also run jump run fast jump high uh but yes exactly exactly, Keith.

It's why there becomes more water when we get to the water test.

Transmuters change the quality of aura from one thing into another.

Conjurers create things out of aura.

This is how Coco,

in my award-winning multi-kudos fig,

runs Heaven's Arena.

Manipulators control things with aura.

And then specialists are those with a, quote, unique and distinct aura.

You skip one.

Two?

Did you skip two?

One, two, three, four, five, six.

I thought I said six.

Did you say emission?

Emitters.

Yeah, I said emitters propel Aura.

I thought the one that you skipped was transmuter.

No, that was just the other thing he said that right after Enhancer.

Well, good job.

You got all six, and I'm a bad listener, and so is Austin, I guess.

Yeah, terrible.

Wing highlights that it's very important to find an

ability that suits you.

Yeah.

And

then you're like interesting.

You're born into it but also it can change yeah the the premise is is a little star sign it's a little it's a little you got to find yourself as you're growing up and and to get make sure that you assign yourself the right then type yeah based on your experiences the example that they give is like hey you know

gon's naturally has these great senses Goan can hear and smell

his springy muscles.

And then he grew up in an island.

He grew up on Whale Island where all that stuff was being put to the test in the wilderness, you know.

And so he has this deep connection to nature that kind of like, you know, it further enhances.

It enhances his answer.

And this is fascinating because it comes right back to what we just talked about with Hisaka.

It stops us from having the easy out of like, oh, well, Hisaker was just born under an evil star, or Hisaka was just born under a magician's star.

There were circumstances that made Hiseker go.

Yeah, it's really like nature plus nurture plus myers-briggs

yeah

kind of yeah including that they say it can change later in life it can just you just say that yeah they do say

um

and he draws a a six-pointed

what is this shape called a hexagon

that is a very that is very funny

given uh the print of the table season palisade uh huh that's a hexagon look no uh um march named that That wasn't right.

Right, right.

And these,

they are

ordered around this hexagon sort of deliberately,

in the sense that the ones that are closest to your own, so the categories that are closest to your main category, will be easiest for you to learn, and the ones that are further away will be harder for you to learn.

Right.

You could like do a little dip in the in the parlance of like an RPG.

An enhancer could dip into into an emitter skill set more easily than they could jump across and try to use specialization or even the the slightly closer conjuration or manipulation ones right yeah so i when this arc first started i warned that my first time through this arc it felt so much longer than it actually is 10 episodes but some of this net stuff really dragged for me in a way that re-watching it i really appreciated.

But something that I loved

from the very, very beginning is this explanation, this graph, and then the specifically the illustration of why

that guy that Jesuit fights, whose name I'm blanking on right now with the white hat.

Castro?

Castro.

Yeah, yeah, Castro.

Why Castro was so easy to beat despite having been very strong.

And they go, not only, he was an enhancer.

Not only was he trying to master a manipulator tactic, he was also trying to master a conjurer tactic.

It made him like even more of a punk.

It made him seem like the dumbest guy who's ever lived.

It's so funny.

Like, I called him Yamcha last time we recorded.

Yeah, damn.

Yamcho does have luck out of him.

He does have Wolfang Fist.

Thank you, and they say,

thank you.

They say, Wolfang Fist is good.

He should have gotten really good at Wolfang Fist.

He should have just gotten really good at Wolfang Fist.

Yamcha fucked around with that spirit ball, too, and it didn't work out for him.

Yamcha has one thing that no one else can say they have, which is the brain.

He's a good ex-girlfriend, or I don't know.

He had the good sense to just stop training after the Frieza arc.

He just goes, nah, I can't hang anymore.

He's retired.

He retired.

He goes back to baseball.

He goes back to baseball.

He goes,

I got extremely cucked harder than anyone's ever been cucked in the world.

My girlfriend went to another another planet to bring me back, and while I was coming back to life, she got knocked up by the guy who killed me.

And

my best friend is one million times stronger than me.

I'm going home.

Wait, Goku's best friend.

Who are you calling his best friend?

Goku.

That's not his best friend.

Goku is not his best friend.

It's not Goku's best friend.

Oh, isn't his best friend the little guy?

Okay, besides...

No, that's his husband.

Okay, yeah, no, you're right.

They love each other.

that's different

okay you sure you're not thinking of t uh of tien and uh and chow tzu yeah they definitely love each other i think i there's an argument there but there's a part where uh puar sees yamche again for the first time and puir is like i

the sun didn't look the same since i last saw you

uh yeah i things i did not to expect Keith J.

Carberry to say cucked and knocked up.

Oh, I loved it.

I've I've not been thinking about that for a week.

We're living this world now.

Anyway, here we are.

Six different types of nen.

Yes.

And

now,

all this talk about personal nen

abilities and, you know, learning that our characters might have the, or do, but we don't know what they are yet, do have these kind of fields of nen.

We're seeing them get put into RPG classes really does speak to the possibility of like getting to see our characters do distinct and interesting Nen activities.

And that's exciting to me.

On the other hand, there is something flattening about the way that all the magic in the world that appeared in the Hunter exam as this outlandish,

regularly, deeply surprising sort of maneuvering first gets boiled down into Nen and then further boiled down into six Pokémon types of Nen.

Yeah, feels like it.

I don't want to be out here just being like, oh man, why does everything have to have like a label or whatever?

But if

the ways that I am being guided to think and talk about this world

are

if I am being pushed towards, oh right, I need to think about this person as an enhancer, rather than, oh, this is Goan and Goan is Goan behaves this way or whatever.

Right.

Um, I feel like I am watching, uh, um,

I feel like I'm running into mirrors in a mirror mace, you know, and just being like, what I thought was a door is actually a mirror or something.

Uh, it's it's funny because this is like this is why I want to be on this episode, right?

Which is that this is the episode where I came to understand how you could get 160 episodes out of this show.

Um, because this is for me as someone who's a lot of world building, the forward-thinkingness of this is so it's a relief in a way, because I have tried to do settings where the magic is unfettered, and it hurts because eventually you do a thing you can't take back.

And you can't conceptualize why it worked that way and something else doesn't work that way.

Or why does the rule apply here and not here?

And the, you know, the screenshot that I sent for the screenshot episode is the test that they're about to take to reveal what type of NE user or like Nen variation they have the most affinity towards or whatever.

And it's because the way that this stuff ends up working is one of my favorite things about the show.

Without getting, I don't want to get deep into like the hows and whys.

Really just looking backwards, what I would say is it sets the show up to do what you just said kind of over and over again, which is like, okay, now we understand there's a world where everything, everything, where there are rules that apply.

And then people are going to keep doing weird things.

And it's going to, you're going to find yourself surprised again in a way you wouldn't if the only thing you knew was everyone can do special powers.

You know, it's one thing for someone to go learn how to do a special power in a world where there's a bunch of other people who can already do special powers.

I think it's something else to be like, oh, they're learning how to do this special power because this is the type of thing that they are or they don't know how that's not not what they are and they're learning the special power anyway right or they have one of the six that is like well i don't know this is i don't know what this is i don't know what that is or you spend a hundred episodes thinking you basically understand what the gist of enhancement is and then you meet a character who's an enhancer who does something really surprising um and it's not there is a there's kind of two reasons i like this one is that as a writer having those boundaries and those are it's also having prompts um as soon as you have this stuff you can start playing with it.

As soon as you have that language, and I like it when a story gives the language to the reader or the viewer or the player, rather than keeping it in a secret Bible that only the writers get to have access to, right?

The second thing is,

this is a show for children.

And children like to look at things and go, ooh, I'm a transmutator.

Ooh, I'm an enhancer.

I'm going to write my OC, who's an emitter, but they can also, they can shoot an energy ball, but then they can use manipulation to control the energy ball and turn it into a guy and then it's an energy ball guy who fights next to me uh and i love when you know the kind of genre media gives the reader especially the young reader the language to start playing in its world directly um there's a reason we have five stelles in in principality in in uh uh partisan and palisade right uh in the divine principality right is because and right we have a compatibility wheel and it's why we have a compatibility wheel between them all um uh but like that helps suggest a sort of like uh identification um uh play with the reader right like ooh i like that the apostolicians have mechs that have moving parts and they're they have like these cool like this cool relationship with their self with their selfhood and pronouns and someone else is like i really love the sort of like uh bulky mechs of of the the orion you know of stellar ryan i love the kind of like battle tech vibes that are going on over there and someone else really likes the religious themes of Stell Nadeo, right?

Um, you're you're giving people the sort of playground materials that and the rules to then begin play with and undercut.

Uh, and do I think that this is an episode that like presents all of that in the most exciting way possible?

I'd say no, except that like the episode doesn't end 15 minutes in.

You get the rest of the episode.

And I think that that is and and the secret of the rest of the episode is you don't see anyone use any fucking nen techniques, right?

Yeah, they're powered by nen, but we'll come back around to what that particular fight is, but it spends 20 minutes or 15 minutes or whatever being like, Here, here are diagrams and you know, uh, split screens of you looking back at Castro fucking up, and here they're gonna go do this water test.

It's the cringe compilation, it's the criteria,

and at the end, you get like, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, fuck all that, it's time to box, you know?

Um, and, and that structurally means that this episode pulls itself out of any sort of like,

you know, the, the, the stuff, Keith, you keep talking about being like, it's a slow arc.

You remember it thinking that it was a slow arc, you remember this episode feeling like it was slow.

And I think that there is a slow act in this three-act structure, you know?

Um, but really, it's like a slow four minutes, you know?

Yeah, the real slow part for me was the at the towards the beginning of this, the first time that they learned about Nen, but

oh, yeah, early on when they're going through, where he lies to them

to him, and then he's grounded.

Yeah, that, that is like, and none of that lands the same because we're not speaking, we don't read or speak Japanese, yeah.

And so, like, I don't know if y'all talk about this in that episode or not, but like, he's doing, there's a gag happening in that episode, which is that he has, he's, the kanji are incomplete or modified.

Oh, so yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

I wasn't sure, I haven't heard that episode isn't released.

They explain it, they don't put it in that exact terms in the show, but you watch Wing like change the word on the board to be like, look, it was like a pun.

Right.

And then, yeah, and then that leads into like the actual explanation of Nen, and then it leads into Goan like being grounded for

like two months.

And it's fun.

And I watch it now, and like, I appreciate what's happening.

And I, and I like Wing, and I think that he's like a really interesting kind of mentor figure.

But I do remember being like, right off of the hunter exam and then the Zoldic stuff and like, like, we're supposed to be in the battle tower and we're like at school.

But now I like all that stuff.

But I always liked the graph.

I always loved the graph.

It plays with, for me, one of the things that this show does well is it's giving you an information.

It's like not consistent at how it gives you information.

It is totally willing to give you tons and tons of subtext with like watching one character watch another character or watch a character notice something or watch a character not notice something but it's also willing to just tell you to your face like like i'm a wing direct to camera you let there you gotta remember emitter transmuter enhancer manipulator conjure and specialist you gotta remember that well this is this is interesting because it's like, so something that you've missed on previous episodes, Austin, is that a lot of the rest of the cast's response to me saying, I'm sick and tired of men, has been, I understand why you are saying this the first time around, but

this is going somewhere.

You will feel differently about this later.

And on the one hand, that's stories.

You know, the story at the end of it is different than the story.

And that's part of why it was important for me at the start of this to tell you that i felt that way when we went through this but it's interesting that that that is consistent with what you are describing austin in terms of this being

although it might be being presented as a flattening or a foreclosing structure actually being the bottom tier of a pyramid that we are about to see open up.

Yeah, I want like if you've seen this show before,

which is everybody else on this podcast except for Jack and probably a lot of people listening, I want you to close your eyes and think about some of the powers that get used by the end of this show and think about like those fit into this categorization still.

And how that is like unimagined.

There is stuff unimaginably interesting and innovative and cool and weird.

Beyond your wildest dreams.

Beyond your wildest dreams that is being, and in some ways I'm undercutting that by saying this out loud, right?

I understand that, but like, I say that because I I think that that is what's so exciting to me about anytime I'm reading a you know a fantasy book and someone presents a magic system it's like all right the thing I'm actually interested in is to see why you needed this to where where are you actually going with this because it ain't magic missile you know what I mean like the the you're gonna do some wild bullshit with this or or and if you fail to then that's on you you know what I mean but like give me the systems that you're playing with so that I understand and can be hyped when something wild happens down the road.

And something else that I really like is, you know, one of my favorite shows of all time that I loved growing up that I watched way, way before I saw Hunter Hunter was Yu Yu Haka Show,

the previous manga and anime written by Tagashi.

And that's a show that does have like a really squishy...

magic system in it.

Like they don't explain a lot of the rules.

Like there's like little rules like you've got a gun that you can only fire once a day.

But as you get stronger, you can fire it more times stuff like that uh but there's it's a spirit gun to be clear right it's a spirit gun it's a gun that fires kamehameha um it's not a gun that has the little timer on it that i use to turn my christmas lights on and off No, you have a gun for that?

No, but that sounds like an ability that can show up in...

That sounds like a gun, an ability that can show up in Hunter-Hunter to me, Jack.

Here's the thing, right?

It's like,

I think I'm getting a sense of what you're describing, which which is that I have been shown six things.

And I have been reading those six things as like, all right, fine.

It's a banana.

It's an apple.

It's an orange.

It's a kiwi.

It's a grape and it's a melon.

And you're looking at those six things and saying, all right, over there is fruits.

Over there is

I'm looking at those and going, well, what the fuck is bungee gum?

Because it's one of these.

It's in one of these.

And what's next to it?

Like, if bungee gum is transmutation, what else could be transmutation?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Please say that.

That's not me spoiling anything.

Bungee gum is transmutation.

Yes, because we learned.

It's the properties of rubber and gum.

It has a property of rubber of rubber and gum.

God, every time they say that in any context, I lose my mind.

I love it.

The crowd goes wild.

Also, because Hisaka loved this brand of gum when he was a child.

It's so good.

But who even knows?

That could just be a total lie.

Yeah.

How did I

think it is scars?

Except, how did I like this gum?

Which gum did I like?

And so that gum Hisaka likes is coming back in the sky.

Okay, we got it all.

We can move on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there's a method for finding your aura's type.

And in the way that I feel like this show just has a really good instinct for cutting from one scene to another, not just cross-cutting from scene happening in place A and then place B, but saying we're moving on from one scene to another in this same room.

So this, so Wing's, they say, is there a way to find your aura type?

And Wing says, yes, there is.

And then we get this close-up of

a glass of water almost overflowing, like with a meniscus of water on the top, and a leaf falls on the glass of water as we go into it.

And I said, here we go, the screenshot.

This is water divination, and your ability will be revealed based on what happens.

Wing gives a little demo and reveals that he is an enhancer, because a bunch of water comes out of the glass.

And that's, to me that's a plot twist.

I'm like, Wing's an enhancer.

Clearly, Wing is a conjurer based on his personality.

He's the teacher, though, I would say.

Now, here's the thing, Keith.

This is not the personality bit.

Personality gets involved with

Nen.

What are these things called?

Nen archetypes?

Something like that.

Yeah.

I think they just call them types, nen types.

I think maybe archetypes are totally fine, I think.

So I wasn't really thinking of it in terms of their personality.

I was just thinking, oh, Wing is a teacher.

And this is like learning what your university professor did their PhD in, or whatever.

It's like, oh, Wing's, Wing's PhD is in making a bunch of water come out of a glass.

Goan is an enhancer, but and it's very sweet.

He can't produce as much water as Wing, but he tries.

This is a great example, just really, really quick.

Look at Wing.

We've never seen Wing fight, but like Wing and Goan are the same thing on this list.

Yeah, that's weird.

Well, and also like by doing that, there's definitely they're inviting you to like draw comparisons between the two of them and look back at some of Wing's like

sort of punching the wall when punching the wall

sloppy.

Yeah, true.

I was gonna say like how he slices through the juice without thinking.

Like he does act on impulse the way that Gone does sometimes.

And it's not to be like all enhancers are like this.

They're one-to-one, but there are definitely like, they're like, oh, yeah, well, there's the similarity.

There's like,

you can do that now.

Can I tell you another thing here that this is?

What do they say that enhancers do?

They enhance themselves or other objects.

Oh, like a wing is a teacher.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yes.

Damn.

Damn.

We just got Austin Walkard.

Boom.

Makes you think.

Makes you think.

Yeah, enhancers, when they're teachers, make you think.

That's right.

I feel like also I would believe that he's lying.

I think these are real.

But what if he's faking it?

Because he's good enough to, right?

Yeah.

Wing is a skilled enough

men user to.

Is this the scene where it's?

No, it's at the very end of

36.

I just threw my...

We'll get to it, but I just...

Okay.

But yes, he could be lying.

I think that the whole he's a teacher and he's enhancing other objects is too good.

That makes me think he's really one.

I think it's real.

Zushi is a manipulator.

The leaf moves around.

The leaf moves around.

Just a little bit.

There's something so simple about this

test.

It really does.

They call it water divination.

And it really does feel like the divining for water with divining rods or sticks or something.

It's just that, like, almost folk magic, you know.

Nothing happens when Kilua tries, bless the soul.

And for a moment, I was like,

Killua can't do it.

But no, the water has gotten sweeter, because Kilua is a transmuter.

And I think, you know, it is.

I don't think that the metaphor here is particularly subtle, but I do think that there is something interesting in Killua making water taste sweeter.

Something becoming sweeter attached to Kilua is notable.

I mean, I think also just straight up, like, the

change is going to be a big thing with Kilua.

Yep.

And, like, transformation out of, like.

you know, it's, it's a bit of, maybe this is a bit of a reach, but, like, the thing with the water is, like, they expect it to taste the same, but it tastes different now, right?

Where it's like, Kiloa is expected to be this assassin, and a lot of his plot is

not like him fighting against that and wanting to be something else.

And, like, I think, I think, you know, I think that's something to keep in mind.

Yeah.

Well, I think that's, I think, super interesting is, like,

the

there's no work done to, like, retroactively put killer's abilities into this schema like what's the the rhythm the assassin rhythm rhythm echo rhythm step is not like they're like oh and that was an enhanced ability you were enhancer ability that you were doing back then like no that's just some weird assassin shit that he knows celtic family stuff yeah

um but it's not but it's certainly not uh transmutation you know

Yeah, so it's fun to have that like he has this set of abilities that are his family's abilities but now we found out he's this whole other thing.

We've never seen him do anything that I would call transmutation.

So, uh, exciting to see what that might look like.

Which is that the

recognition that you are more than the abusive environment that you have, right?

That you have a capacity.

Oh, I never realized that I could do these things.

Yeah.

Or that I was this kind of a person.

There is a kind of patience and reserve here from Tagashi.

Tagashi has already shown himself to be really good at telescoping into a really tiny moment.

We've seen this in, you know, the way he shows characters' interiority, this kind of bouncing perspective.

But there's such a beautiful little reserve to these deeply consequential discoveries and realizations about sort of selfhood being focused down onto tiny changes to a leaf on a glass of water.

That kind of like collapsing of scope is just a really nice little scene here.

And then to have this scene end with Goan setting the telephoning Isaka to tell him that he is setting the date for the fight to July 10th.

You know, just like

coming crashing out of this moment of focus.

I'm looking at my notes.

I was wrong, Austin.

It's not the end of 36.

It is after

this scene.

It is after the ass scene.

Oh, it's after,

yeah, it is.

You're right.

Because it's like,

there's a picture of him who shows up.

So, yeah, we get the call.

Killer.

Killer, Jesus.

Ahsoka, you know, radiates murderous intent.

AKA casts a spell, as we know, as we know.

Happens to be nude for the call.

Happens to be nude for the call.

I like this.

I like nude Hisoka.

I think for exactly the reason that we're not.

We're seeing you make it a lot recently.

Yeah, we are.

I think for exactly the reason that, well, I think it does two things, right?

Like, Hisoka has this horrible psychosexual thing going on.

I think that's sort of coming up.

We'll talk more about that momentarily.

We'll talk more about that momentarily.

But I think also it does what we talked about in the last episode and what Austin, you were talking about earlier.

We can no longer say Hisaker is not a person.

Well, I mean, I don't know.

I don't know.

Well, human is up for grabs.

It's a person.

He takes showers.

He takes showers.

He takes clown magic to clean himself or something.

And he is reduced down to like a naked state standing in his apartment or whatever.

He has people that seem like their friends that he admires.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially because

this is, I suppose, a brief moment to talk about it.

Hisuka has this really, I mean, very distinctive costume.

Um, and one of the elements of the costume.

Did you save the costume change, by the way?

We did.

We did.

We did.

I didn't know.

There's a little flashback later in this

chunk of episodes to Hisuka in his first costume.

I think I prefer his first costume.

I like the novelty of the black costume, but the pale blue of his sort of bodice when you first meet him is great.

Yeah.

he has this pink sort of undershirt that he wears below his either the black sort of bodice or the or the pale blue one that is shaped like a ball.

And it almost looks like he's got this ball joint instead of a torso.

And it's very interesting because until we had seen him naked, I had no idea whether that was like the shape that his body was or whether he was like two components clicked together like a top like a toy or something.

Isaka's a gumpler.

Right, Right, right, right, yeah.

That'd be fun.

But nope, he's not.

He's just a guy.

Bunchyka.

Sorry.

Okay, and then.

There's a special property to that.

All hell breaks loose because we're ringing the hunter bell again.

But by God, that's the hunter exam.

I was so happy.

Oh, it's so funny.

It's so funny.

How did you feel, Jack?

I want to know your...

Because we knew this was coming, but how did you feel realizing that all of this was part of the hunter exam?

Exhaustion.

Here's what it felt like.

It felt like you're doing the dishes and you've been doing the dishes for an hour, and then you turn around and there's still dishes on the stove that you forgot about.

Because Wing says.

Actually, Jack, it's more like if you were doing the dishes and you're doing the dishes and then like an egg timer goes off and it says dinner's done.

And actually, you haven't been doing the dishes.

You've been making dinner.

The alternate oh god, I was making...

Ah, these words, this was other dinner.

Because Wing says Gona's passed, quote, the other hunter exam.

One cannot be a fully-fledged hunter without learning to use Nen.

Then he says something fucking bonkers.

Why?

Why did you?

Yeah, I'm going to explain the reason.

I have a whole quote here.

Do you want to say it, or can I read the verbatim?

Please read it.

So, oh, I just want to say the dub calls it the secret hunter exam, which is fun.

Yeah,

the sub calls it the other hunter exam.

Yeah, the sub, yeah, the sub calls it the other hunter exam.

Uh, you are required to learn nen before becoming a hunter, as professional hunters are

expected to be exceptionally strong.

One of your basic tasks as a hunter will be apprehending evil poachers and criminals.

Somewhere, Krapika's ears are ringing.

You must be strong enough to be able to.

Somewhere Hisoka's ears are ringing.

Bad news, but black dynamite.

Well,

this is, I mean, this is a deeply ideological statement statement from Wing.

So we're going to have, this is another thing like, will this bear out?

Will any of the, will this.

He says, you must be strong enough to fight crime.

Wait, are hunters cops?

Is that it?

Is the answer just cops?

However, this power is highly destructive.

If used for the wrong reason, so if used for wrongdoing, revealing the existence of Nen during the exam would be dangerous.

Every single person.

every single person we've met who is powerful and without fail, every single evil person except Tompa has literally been radiating Nen.

And he also says this as if the Hunter exam is not dangerous.

Yeah.

Hundreds of people died.

No, no, but it would be dangerous for society if he called Tonpa Nen existed.

Sure, sure.

Is what he's saying.

So this test is only administered to those who pass the public exam.

The public exam?

Where the costs millions of geni to enter?

And

also, wait, no, it doesn't cost millions to enter.

Millions of people enter.

Isn't it also very expensive to enter?

I think

it's not going to be a good idea.

You have to do it.

You have to find it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um,

hey, yeah.

The idea of a societal responsibility is so funny because the I don't know if society is real as far as the hunters are concerned.

To say

one of your duties as a hunter will be attempting to apprehend evil poachers.

Okay, I'm going to train you for this by throwing you through the sword game.

They're really evil poachers.

Well, but it doesn't even work, Austin, because are they more evil than Hisuka?

No.

Well, Hisuka nosed in before he gets to the hunter exam.

That's the first thing we we see Hisuka do is obliterate someone's arms with pain.

This is the thing, right?

Is that like it's it's he goes through and he goes to this list, right?

He says, you know, hey, well, they say, what about everybody else?

And Hanzo and Karapiga found different teachers.

Yep, uh-huh, from other teachers.

Is it Pacle is still struggling with it, right?

Struggling with Ren.

With Ren.

Oh, Pacle.

He'll get there one day, bud.

Leorio has been in med school.

He's studying for his medical exam.

He's never looked hotter.

Hot Leorio is here.

He just

looking like this.

This is the example.

Yeah, if you look in the credits, this is the like they have him in this like sexy reading pose.

But top button down.

Well, they say some buttons, too.

And then they say Hisoka and Illumi already knew Nen, right?

So they didn't, they don't need to do this.

They already know Nenen.

I think that's the.

That might be the first time you get confirmation that Ilumi knows none.

Yeah, I think that's true.

Yeah.

Well, they heavily imply it by saying that Hisuka's Wren feels just like, oh and wing's wren feels just like and species when yeah when when Kino is intimidated by his brother is like it's wren that's what that's what it's hinted at it but this is the first time it's just been a

bit yeah you're right so like those are people who know about it and who didn't go through the hunter exam to learn it you know so imagine if you're just out here teaching anybody who shows up

What's the point in the hunter exam before now that feels like the right time to tell someone about Nen?

I'm gonna say the Hunter Association.

This is where the justice

is.

This is where the Justice.

It seems like the Hunter Association is not very well run.

No.

And who's the chairman again?

Netero, who is also wings

the master of the comfort school of the school.

Yeah.

So

great cut-in from Netero giving the peace on.

It's so good.

Your goofy grandpa.

That's the thing.

That's the thing about Netaro.

You know, everything that we know about Netaro, even to this early stage, is suggesting that, you know,

things are operating a-okay as far as the people who are in charge are concerned.

This is what

they want.

It is funny to pretend, and it is like...

like

it feels right for Wing to have this like very sort of high-minded Karapika-esque description of what a hunter is supposed to do,

paired with the like, the sort of like social concern of like, well, we can't teach Nen to anybody because it's so dangerous.

And then the like reality of what we've seen of the hunters, which is like phenomenally anti-social

organization that is anti-social, anti-society,

anti-life.

Yeah, so these are the three things that the hunters are.

And tax leeches.

Well, that's what makes the

fact that you go after poachers or something is so goofy.

Is that

in some ways the hunter, from what we know at this point, I'm doing my best not to think forward.

And honestly, even thinking forward doesn't change much about what I would say here.

I think

the stuff said here and the stuff that we've seen before, it feels like the hunters believe that without them, or they believe that like the world is fundamentally uh a place of you know evil competition and conflict that there is like a state of nature wherever you know it's all against all and it's up to us the hunters to get out there and protect people from blah blah blah that's the way wing is describing this right um and so the irony of being like and one of the ways we have to go do that is just to literally protect the natural world from poachers is like i don't i is that what you need to be doing couldn't you just be like investing in schools like i i think there's other ways to address the more, the deeper societal problems here, man.

Two things here, right?

First is that this is absolutely sort of consistent with that great joke at the end of, I mean, at the time, it's deeply sad.

At the end of the Hunter exam, where they're like, and you get free bus passes, and the banks will talk to you, you know, the sort of like

a

major corporation

at the end of just this death game.

And then at the same time, we know the show is aware of these kinds of questions about how a society works and operates because Leorio's backstory, right, is that he was friends with his best friend died because he was unable to pay for treatment.

His family was unable to pay for treatment.

Meanwhile, Flash cut to Wing, we've got to stop the poachers and you can plug your bus in and you'll get milk in the morning for free if you get it from the hunter's milk spot.

It speaks to the priorities of the hunters and to like

how I think

the stock that maybe Tagashi puts in their opinion of themselves.

We haven't seen a poacher.

We haven't seen one poacher.

No one's poaching.

We haven't seen one poacher.

We haven't seen any poaching people's eyes.

But the idea.

Right, yeah.

But I mean, that in and of itself is, um,

they're sort of the uh poacher.

They are a a force of such spectacular bounty hunting evil and malice.

But also seemingly, none of the hunters are doing anything about them.

Well, that's something I think we should carry forward question-wise is, okay, let's say there are hunters in the world.

Who deploys them to go stop the poachers or to go stop criminals?

Who do they end up working for is a great question.

Again, we are in the battle arena right now.

We're in Heaven's Arena.

We're hanging out in Kevin's Arena, and that gives us certain affordances where being a hunter makes sense.

And

25.

Exactly.

You can get justice in the arena by winning a fight, whether that's justice for your friend being kidnapped or justice for that time that the asshole

let you win in the hunter exam.

And now this is the place of pure combat where you can make that right.

The battle arena is a place where the hunter seems to make sense.

But out in the regular world,

carry this question forward of like, if we now know what a hunter is, and the hunter is someone who fights poachers and criminals and uses and they have to know nen because you're not a hunter.

Otherwise, if you don't know nen, what's that actually leave you as?

Who do you end up working for?

What, how often are you, who is directing that power?

towards good ends.

I'll say one thing.

I don't know if that I wouldn't, I won't necessarily say this is in support of hunters, but this is like

this is like like evidence

that like all we have for all these other, like it's a suspicious lack of evidence is what we're dealing with.

We do have one bit of actual evidence, and it's from Satots, who tells Goan the only thing we know of any hunter doing anything is

Goan's father going around and like restoring

like cultural sites with his own money and then like turning it them into free local museums

philanthropy this is like the one thing that we've heard a hunter has done yeah um and he seems famous for it he read about it satosh reads about this in a book and is inspired by it um that's like our one bit of and that's like that's i guess that's not so far off from hunting poachers but it also doesn't seem exactly like something you need nen for yeah i'll give you another thing that we know hunters do okay they put on on hunter exams.

Yeah, they do.

They do run prisons.

Yep.

Although, we don't know

that that guy's a hunter.

But

I think it's weird.

We support prisons.

Yeah.

I think he's implied to be a hunter simply by being a proctor in the hunter exam, at the very least.

I think so.

Well,

that's the thing I was trying to get at before, right?

Their vision of the world is one where without us, everyone who knows Nen would be like hysoka or the criminals in the tower uh they or or you know whoever or or illumi right that like oh no we need to put up we need to protect this secret that is nen and the best way to do that is to have this establishment that you know effectively scares off or kills anyone who is power hungry but who isn't disciplined enough to succeed at this test and they seem to believe that to become disciplined enough to succeed at the test means to on average become more like Gonan Kilawa, or even more like Hanzo than like Alumi or

totally.

He's already known then anyway.

The call-out post for the Hunters Association, they're gatekeeping the extremely powerful magic.

This is, yeah, we've talked about this a little

before, and it is, it's like, yeah, that's exactly right, where it's like the

the evil hunters, like that is seen as like a fatal flaw that will keep them from succeeding in the way that they need to.

And even if their evilness makes them a massive danger, a weaker but gooder person

will just counterbalance that in a way that is somehow desired.

It's really doesn't make it make sense, but I don't think it's meant to make sense.

Sure.

Yeah, they're, they're, they, yeah, I, we,

I think, I think that we are not not supposed to be asking that many questions about the Hunter Association at this point in the show.

I think mostly we're supposed to be watching a fun Shonen

show.

I think that's what Tokashi expects from us.

But for the close reader, I think there are lots of open questions about like, hey, what is this world?

How does it run?

You know,

and who has access to what?

And I think

that will continue to be raised.

I don't want to like

introduce like the false hope that this is going to become like a leftist show that's interested in power dynamics in

contemporary world cultures.

But it is

contains power dynamics.

It just contains power dynamics, which is to say, like, I mean, that's, that's not nothing.

You know what I mean?

That is something.

And it thinks about those things.

It does think about where do people come from?

You know, a thing I think maybe we're thinking going forward is like, I think we have a pretty good idea of where Alumi maybe got, learned how Nen exists and stuff, but I have no fucking idea where Hsoka does at this point, right?

Yeah.

How does someone like Hisoka learn Nen?

Who teaches it to him?

You know, where do other people learn what Nen is?

What's the surgeon's name?

Oh,

she hasn't been named yet, but

she's not named by a subtitle.

Her name

is, oh, yeah, this has come up a few times.

Machi.

Machi.

Machi, right.

You know, if Machi knows Nen, who taught Machi Nen?

You know,

I think those are interesting questions.

So,

speaking of Hisaka, the time has come.

And

in a brilliant piece of music supervising, the soundtrack drops out of the show.

We have spent a lot of time with Hisaka.

Hisaka,

much like Ghon, Hisaka has sort of one character theme associated with him.

It's this great piece of flamenca guitar that we heard all through the Hunter exam.

And then the first time he fought Castro in the arena it got sort of upgraded to this full-scale um terrifying orchestration uh but now as uh him and goan get ready for their fight goan lacing up his boots isuka notably absent uh in the getting ready montage uh the crowd getting getting ready um no music at all uh silence crowd noises people taking their seats it's people are yelling things like how much longer people yelling things like gone where's your fishing rod how are you gonna catch Isuka without it?

Because this fight begins like a

full-on big-ticket wrestling match.

There's fly up injections.

This is the fucking Tokyo Dome.

Yeah, this is the Tokyo Dome.

Kisuka's obviously a big deal.

Goat is becoming a really big deal.

He's like famous here.

How could he not be?

Not to bite the classic Idol thumbs.

If Max Payne was real, it would be the only thing on news 2027.

But if Goan existed in the world, it's all we would be able to talk about.

We also, like, there's a plot point in the earlier episodes where they, like, talk about Gone as, like, when he's climbing the tower, they have those moments of it's like, it's the boy who wins with just a push, yeah.

And, like, people are, like,

betting on him and stuff.

Like, there's some dude in that crowd who bought a house because he bet on Gone.

Oh, my God.

And that's an absolute fish.

And he's on Twitter all the time being like, yo, where are my freaks?

Freaks.

You know?

Like,

he he is the...

It makes sense to me that at this point, he's got a crowd behind him.

And it's not just Goan.

The matchup is incredible.

Even setting aside the fact that the crowd doesn't know about Goan and Hisoka's sort of history, this is the clown pervert, whom everybody loves to see fight because most of the time he kills his opponent.

Yeah.

Going up against the Wonder Boy who got Jim his house after he won that bet.

Right.

This is brilliant.

Red fire bursts and Goan appears.

He's standing there.

He doesn't have his fishing rod.

Where's your fishing rod, Goan?

And this is notable because Goan's last big matchup with Hisaka was sort of predicated on the fishing rod.

The thing that Goan

went into

Zevil Island thinking was, I can't beat Hisaka in a fight, so I'm going to have to snatch the badge with the fishing rod.

So I think it is just sort of

there is a power in the image of seeing Gohan squaring off against Hisaka without the fishing rod.

I can do it, and I can do it without the trick.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

It has to.

He has to do it without the trick.

If he doesn't do it without the trick, then he didn't do it.

What's the purpose of this fight?

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

He has to do it his way because that's the only thing because this wouldn't.

To a normal person, this wouldn't matter.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Blue fire as Hisaker appears and Coco tells us that if he wins today, he can challenge Floor Master.

Right, there it is.

Yes.

This is when we get Hisaka's sort of psychosexual gambit.

As Goan narrows his eyes and steps forward, Hisaka says, Don't look at me like that.

It's really turning me on.

And we zoom into Hisaka's crotch with the subtitle Shwing.

Shwin?

Shwin.

So worst.

You know, this is maybe the most famous image from the show, by the way.

I think that's true.

It continues,

but in a, I think, in a much more interesting way, in the next episode, actually.

Oh, is that the next episode?

The big, like, yeah, the psychedelic orgasm.

It's probably.

The psychedelic orgasm is next episode.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think that's the one.

But like, the swing is next episode, too, actually.

No, it's here.

No, it's this one.

Because the Hunterpedia of this episode is Goan and Kiloa doing a double schwing.

They do a double swing at each other, yeah.

Oh, man.

Oh, my God.

Oh my god.

It's bad.

You know, the psychosexual peril clown

is not an original invention of Tagashi.

Oh, absolutely.

It is, of course, you know, and

there is a version of

the thing that's happening, right, is Goan is the pure boy.

Goan is the pure big feels boy who wants to protect his friends and wants to do things the right way and wants to be honorable and wants to be strong and wants to find his dad and wants to find out what was so good about being a hunter that his dad dad never came home right and

he is also when this is it and this and this is the ant thing is he soka knows what it is and it's the feeling of breaking a person um which might not be what you know who knows what other hunters believe the what they think that they're doing is wing thinks it's stopping poachers he's okay probably thinks that wing actually also likes to break people fundamentally what you like is breaking people and you might break people different ways but he'soka has this sort of like classic corrupt nihilist perspective slash hedonist perspective, right?

Like, hey, the people you like to break are poachers.

That's none of my business.

That's none of my business.

You break whoever you want to break, buddy, right?

But it is, and that is the thing.

Like, it is not just the threat of harm.

It's not just the threat of psychosexual harm.

It is the threat of psychosexual corruption.

That the pure boy could be corrupted by this homoerotic, pedophilic, you know, clown monster man,

and could be, could become someone who likes to to break people because he's gotten to close.

Like breaking someone's prosthetic legs, breaking someone's prosthetic legs so they can't walk exactly, or doing a little trick on, and not zapping them, but threatening to zap them.

Which, of course, catches all this stuff up also in like a bunch of like, you know, Hisoka is not just the like queer peril threat clown, but is also like the SNM threat clown.

So it's, there's other ways to get here than Shween.

But, you know, I I get why the core of it is our pure boy is under threat

is the core of what this story is.

And he's not under threat in terms of damage or harm or direct assault.

The real harm, the actual stakes are

will Jesse Pinkman break bat

is the actual core of the question, right?

Because Walter White already broke bat.

That's not up for grabs.

What's up for grabs is will our pure boy get corrupted, Right?

Jesse Pinkman would also be an enhancer.

I think so, too.

We know that.

He cooks good.

He gets the object.

I think that

who would work better in the other person's show?

Walter White in Hunter Hunter or Hisuka in Breaking Bad.

Except for Isaiah Take.

Oh my God.

He could sell the drugs and then bungee gum them back.

Oh, shit.

He would name it after his favorite rock candy from when he was a child.

Christ.

Okay.

And then Hisaka's, is it called Ren?

The evil, the purple evil that Hisaka makes.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Hisuka's evil purple aura appears.

This was like genuinely very exciting for me.

I think in part because

as we said over and over again in this episode, this is what we've been wanting to see for a long time.

You know, this is the hero and the villain squaring off, and the fact that it is wrapped in the apparatus of a arena battle just brings that feeling up.

It was, it was really exciting.

And the fight begins straight away.

Well, also, it feels like the episode's over.

This is the classic next time they fight.

But instead, there's nothing happened.

Seven minutes of sinister violins and really fast, up-close combat.

This fight is so funny.

I don't know if anyone caught

those violins sound like they're from a horror movie.

Yeah, so the way that they've orchestrated this is really cool.

It's almost ambient.

So there's no music as they fight.

And this is a show that loves to have music as people are fighting.

And there's a great moment of that later.

Yeah.

Here, it's this like very dynamic sort of like rushing sound, almost like blood rushing in your ears,

or the sound of winds moving for the most part.

And then the sound of their feet on the floor or Gon's feet.

Hisuka hasn't moved at all.

He's just been dodging.

And then, like Keith said, these tiny little

tiny string cues.

They're not even a melody.

There's no real sort of like consistent rhythm to them.

They're just these little sort of emanations of violence coming up through the violins.

It's really, really lovely.

And yeah, this fight is just gorgeously animated.

If they were saving time and saving animation budget on the early fights with Guido and Rielveldt,

the complexity of what is happening here, and sometimes it's

sort of classic Hitchcock cutting of like

we are filling in a lot of gaps of what is happening, but there's also just a lot of stuff happening on screen, punches being thrown, punches being dark.

They're showing it.

Gone is moving in a way that we haven't seen him move before, not just like through fidelity of animation, but literally his posture,

his, like the way that he's moving, like

the feints that he's choosing and the punches that he's taking.

He looks,

he looks, there's two things.

One, he looks desperate.

Like immediately, he's just like

on the,

it's like a desperate offensive.

And he looks to me like Pikachu from the Pokemon anime.

He does look like Pikachu from the Pokemon anime.

He is like a cat.

He's fighting.

Yeah, he's fighting like a Pokemon.

Like, he's on all fours.

He's jumping to the side, making big leaps.

And the camera is doing special things here, right?

There's a lot of

sort of like handicam style.

The camera's trying to keep up with the action or it's moving down and up to support.

You know, when people are watching, like jumping out of their seats, the camera has to move with them.

And it's like a split second delayed.

There's a lot of the camera being seemingly attached to a character.

So like when he's like a uh like i think he does like an overhand hit to or he has a kick to gone that causes him to spin in the air the camera is locked on gone's collar looking at his face so the world is spinning to the right of the frame but gone's face is locked upright on the left of the frame there's all of these tricks that we have not seen the show use before they also

communicate what the action the dynamism of the action They do a lot of work to make Hisuko look so much bigger than him.

Like, we know the size difference between them.

Hisuko's an adult, and Ghan's a kid.

There's like half his size, even including the hair.

But this is like,

there are shots where Hisuko looks like four times the size of Gone.

Yeah.

And this is, we have seen fights that have been.

This fight is choreography.

The fight choreography is just brilliant in terms of, like Austin said,

making a fight feel good in any medium is about giving your character, or is about bringing your characters' personalities out through the way they're fighting, and then just giving the fight interesting visual and emotive stages, you know, moving from one stage of the fight to the next, moving from one move to the next, making those things flow free.

I mean, this is wrestling as well, right?

Yeah, this is we're talking about wrestling again, but the fight choreography here is just lovely.

And we again can lean on some rules, which I think is so important for this fight, which is they've set up early on in this arc what you get points for in a fight.

And there are ways to get hit without it counting as a point against you because it's on a clean hit or because you recover more quickly and get back into the fight before the ref can assign a point.

And so this opening, you know, salvo is

you know, Goan coming in with a lunge or a punch and missing or a series of punches and Hysoka dodges them all despite not moving at all

and and countering.

But before the ref can say anything, Goan is back up and back on his feet, giving attacks.

And so there's a real like you're rooting for Goan to just keep getting up and moving quick enough that the fight can't take up.

You're holding your breath.

The whole arena is holding their breath.

The ref is holding his breath.

What's this opening salvo going to turn?

It's like a tennis match more than anything else almost.

They break this in a really great way too.

We've referenced it a couple times, but the moment, I don't, there's two moments.

I don't remember which one exactly comes first.

I think it's Coco comes on is like I haven't even said anything

And then it cuts into he's gonna be like I haven't even moved from this spot like aren't you gonna come attack me and then goan is just like very frustrated but like in kind of like a very like a surprisingly childish way like he's been so desperate and so um

uh like kind of

like vicious in his attempts to do any amount of damage and it just totally breaks and he's like ah are you kidding God damn it.

It's a very bizarre way to break like what

is like

the moment of the show to this point.

Like, this is the most important scene in the show so far.

And I'm saying that I think the show is saying that.

I'm not, I don't, I'm not, I don't know if I think that's true.

Yeah.

I think it is true, but not yet.

Not yet.

The next bit of it is.

The next bit is.

Yeah.

And so they, and it's not the only time it gets that like these periods of intense fighting gets broken up by like casual conversation and jokes,

which is kind of funny.

The break the tension stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

We also get a moment inside of Goan's head.

It might literally be the first time that we hear Goan thinking.

Goan hasn't.

This is the first time he's done it.

It is?

He doesn't think during.

No, I said that can't be right.

Isn't the first time he fight Guido?

Isn't he like, oh, no, I can't do blah, blah, blah.

Maybe.

I was just making a joke that was the first time he's thought.

That's what Keith said.

It's close.

If it's not the, if it's not the only time.

I'm pretty sure we've done it.

Maybe during the Guido.

Or when he's doing like the fishing stuff in the, in the hunters exam.

He's trying to

perfect his cast.

There, anyway, there's, we've spent a lot of, we've heard a lot of inner monologues.

We've heard more characters.

characters, yeah, but we do we do get him like kind of strategizing to himself

and then

the

violins kind of get slowly replaced by the normal battle music of the show, and they go like right back into

this really intense volley,

and then they do The Last Jedi.

What

which part explain this to me on Star War.

So

I don't remember the beat-by-beat action of this.

I only remember how the soundtrack plays it, which is like Ghon gets his footing.

He's sort of strategized to himself.

He has like this funny moment of like, let me think.

And then he goes back in.

Once he's figured out, oh, I should just like,

I should be fainting.

I shouldn't be attacking so hard.

I should be thinking thinking better about what I'm doing.

The scary violins drop and the battle music fades in.

And then as it's going,

Goan's stone flip, the big attack.

Oh, it's so good.

Goan, the apotheosis of Goan's tile technique.

He uses the tile flip technique and launches a big hail of rubble at Hisuka.

Sorry, he launches the tile and then breaks the tile.

Yeah, that's the thing.

That's the important thing.

That isn't what he's ever done before.

No, he's, yeah.

It's the third evolution of his attack.

Right.

He's iterating.

He knows Hisoka has seen the previous attack.

He knows.

Yeah.

He so freaking knows.

He knows.

Does he know?

It's the coolest shit.

He flips over.

He flips over the tile.

He does all these fake, faint attacks, then slips, like bounces off again, flips up the tile, jumps behind it.

Hisoka is like, oh yeah, here we go.

He's doing the tile thing.

And then Goan kicks it and destroys it.

And Hisoka gets worried.

And he's like, ah, shit.

He's like, there's all this rubble.

I have to start breaking the rubble.

And we get this incredible shot of Hisoka's like, where is he?

And then from behind Hisoka, there's like a piece of rubble that just like, we just get the shot of Hisoka with the rubble falling behind him.

And then from behind the rubble, where you didn't even realize it wasn't actually a background element, it was a foreground element.

There's Goan's face sneaks out from behind the rubble.

And now he can get the clean hit in.

It fucking rolls.

He hits him in the face.

We got a three-time instant replay, which we sure got when Gone broke the glass, too.

Oh, yes, true.

And I fucking love it.

The music just like cuts,

cuts out.

And there's like total silence as it cuts from like character to character to character with zero, not just no soundtrack, no audio at all right that moment yeah yeah yeah

and then the end theme kicks in the

it's very good

i'm that causes him to bleed he makes him bleed i'm in like 2016 i'm in my office with my headphones on uh lights are low

the hit connects i'm standing with my arms in the air out of my seat this was unbelievable yeah i feel you

What was the specific delight?

Was it the catharsis of like we've been wanting this to happen for so long?

It was like so improbable.

It was a it I think it's part of it was the improbability.

You know, I didn't know how this fight was going to shake out.

And I think it was just like a massive like, he did it.

He got.

he got his one.

He wanted one.

It's like the same thing on the ship with Netaro where he's like, I'm just trying to make him use his other hand now.

Like, like, he set the, he set his term.

He set a re an ambitious but realistic goal.

Um,

and it was still crazy to get there.

And it was still like, is he even going to be able to do it?

And then he gets it, and it's so good.

And the execution is just so good.

The fact that

the memory of how mad and sad he was when Husuka saves him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And being like, I've cast that off.

I can cast that.

I'm like, physically, I can give you this back now.

Which he does.

Which he does.

In this episode, is it the beginning of the next episode?

It's the very beginning of the next episode.

Okay.

But yes, the end credits music kicks in.

And as the narrator says, the narrator comes.

Oh, so we get this great shot of Hisaker looking up with blood on his face and like a typically sort of opaque Hisaka expression.

It's not opaque.

We can see His Seeker.

He, oh my God.

We can see Hisaka is feeling four emotions simultaneously

as the narrator comes in to end the episode saying, you know, Gon has landed a clean hit on Hisuka, but it won't be long before Gon experiences Hisuka's true power.

What a great way to end an episode.

Middle ends are a fight.

The villain's about to show his true power.

This is television.

The narrator's always given you exactly what

you're supposed to be getting.

Love it.

My favorite thing is when the narrator asks questions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beyond just like, what will Gon do, but I like when he asks like, what could Gon be thinking in this moment?

We've heard him do that a couple of times.

That's always very fun.

Episode 36 begins and we actually jump back just a moment.

We open in triumph, seeing Gon land the punch again.

But Hisaker is fine.

or seems fine.

And so there's a brief sort of discussion from Coco as to whether or not this counts for points.

And then a weird thing happens.

Uh-huh.

What happened?

We smash cut to a white-haired, green-eyed person in the

with his hand on his chin like Hisaka, saying how the referee is perfectly entitled to award points how he pleases.

And then Coco looks at him and says, Who are you?

And he doesn't appear in the rest of the episode at all.

But I think someone has a note about this guy.

I know who this is.

I also know who this is.

I did research on who this is.

Yeah, I looked this up.

Who this weirdo is?

Because he has like sparkles on him.

He's like, the camera is picking him out as an important character.

Before Sylvie tells you exactly who this person is, I want to say that this is a joke that

Tagashi has done before.

Yu Yu Hakasho also has.

Guy who shows up during the official announcement of a tournament and just becomes a second announcer to the kind of annoyance of the actual announcer.

It's really funny.

It's very funny.

It is even funnier in Yu Yu Haka Joe because the bit lasts for like multiple episodes.

But it is very funny.

It's a double dip.

No, different guy.

It could have been this guy, but it wasn't.

Okay.

Who is this guy?

Okay, I'm just going to read my note here, which is partially, I wrote this down after looking up who this guy was.

Some of the exact dialogue, exact wording is lifted a little from Wikipedia, but I think it's funny that way.

The commentator questions the referee's decision, and Prince Baka, that's a

question mark there, from the Tagashi comedy sci-fi manga Level E, two question marks,

interrupts.

He's the effeminate prince of the planet Dogura.

Three question marks.

He has an exceptionally high IQ and has little interest other than using it to torment those around him.

Four question marks.

Should I watch this?

Five question marks.

The effeminate prince.

He's 4,000 years old.

yeah.

Uh-huh.

Love this guy.

Um, everyone refers to him solely as Prince or Prince Baka, but his full name is Baka Ki Eldogra.

Huh.

This guy's name is Prince Dipshit.

Yeah, dude.

I know what we're all like.

Baka OG, stupid prince.

Yeah.

Spoken of Baka OG.

He appears and leaves.

But as Hisaka approaches Gon silently, Gon reaches into his pocket and takes out the 44 badge to give

Hisaka so much.

This was great.

This got me more than lamping the punch.

But the two went together.

And so

the pacing of this moment is great.

Hisaka walks towards Gon.

Gon takes the badge out of his pocket and gives it to Hisaka.

Hisaka takes the badge and dashes away, with the implication being he approached Gon specifically to collect the badge.

The moment of focus here being like, okay, you hit me.

We're going to pause in the fighting.

We need to make a trade.

We have made a trade and I need to take this back.

Turns out that's the first killed.

Yeah, this is the reason you want to fight me.

This is the actual purpose of.

For Gone, this is the purpose of what this is.

It's such a good moment.

You get those little flashback shots, too, which is where you.

This is where I saw him in this nice outfit.

Yeah.

Really quick, I want to jump back to the to the to Prince Baca or whatever.

Oh, shit.

Because also in the wiki

for that character, it points out that in the earlier anime, I guess that's the 1999 anime, right?

Is that when that came out?

The character is actually a different character, and the character is a long-haired person called Tagashi.

Oh, this is the 1999 anime.

Tagashi just shows up to have that.

This is Kajima showing up in every game he's ever made to offer some.

Totally.

This is Sam Levy.

I wonder if that's who shows up in Yuhakasho.

Oh, I wonder if it is Tagashi just showing up.

It is

a non-human creature.

Oh, okay.

Okay, sure.

Okay, sure.

And not the little dawn face thing that Tagashi uses, right?

And then Hisaka just in like a...

I like Hisaka's little magician flourishes.

You know, we talked about him as like the

pervert clown panic and the queer clown panic.

But one of my favorite Hisaka modes is he's a funny little magician.

He is.

And he just like he makes the badge like

triple in his hands.

You know, he suddenly has like six badges or whatever, and then they all disappear in a puff of smoke.

You know, it's, it's sort of like he, he was, he was willing to offer Gon the kindness of like, well, I understand that this is a trade and I'm taking the badge back.

But then as soon as he dashed back to the other side of the arena, he was like, this is nothing to me.

I can make six of them.

I can make them disappear, you know.

It's nice and easy for me.

Um, and then he lays out his Myers-Briggs test, yes, because now it's time

the vacuum

of Karapaka

in the show has meant that people are now just giving PowerPoints left and right.

Come on, bring my boy back.

We need

him to reassume.

I want the restoration fantasy for Karapika returning to give PowerPoint presentations because Hisaka has a PowerPoint presentation and he says there's a way you can tell someone's aura type from their personality.

Enhancers, that is Goan, are simple and determined.

He's right.

He's right.

He's right.

He's right.

He's right.

Who is it who keeps saying he's right?

So, yeah, so they do it for Goan, and it cuts to Kilua and

I think it's Sushi.

It cuts like Zushi and Wing, I think.

And like Zushi's like, oh, he's right.

He's right.

And then they do the same thing for transmitters.

Transmitters are whimsical liars.

He's right.

He's right.

It fits exactly.

Emits is a short.

He says that about himself, too.

He's like, we're whimsical liars like me.

And then everyone's like, yeah, that's fucking true.

He is a whimsical liar.

It is true.

Is he much of a liar?

Serious question.

Is he much of a liar?

I feel like Hizako has been very honest so far.

He's been very cruel.

But

he's definitely been manipulative

if like

not honest during his manipulating.

Yeah.

One of my malicious clowns always lies.

And one of my malicious clowns always tells the truth.

And they're the same clown.

Oh, and they're the same clown.

And they're conjurers.

Emitters are short-tempered.

Specialists tend to be independent.

Conjurers are high-strung and nervous.

I'm thinking of Castro.

He's right.

And manipulators are argumentative.

And then, and we are really just deep in Maya's Briggs zone here.

Hisaka says that he and Gon are compatible.

Opposites attract, which is, yep, awesome.

What else does he say?

He says, but be wary.

Transmuters are known to be fickle.

What was once treasured can easily become trash.

And there are two things happening here.

The first is that this is just sort of classic abusive manipulation tactics from Hisaka, right?

Of like, you are in the warm sunlight of my good graces until I decide that the shadow will fall on you and then you're done.

He's also talking about Killiwa, right?

He's psyching him out.

He is saying to Gon,

look, buddy, your best friend and the one you are staking your optimism about the world on

might just leave you behind.

He's like me.

Hisuka really does sound like some people who tweet about BPD sometimes in this movie.

Jesus Christ, you are so right for that, Sylvie.

Like, it really, like, the pop psychology is off of the charts.

It is so funny.

Say more.

Say more.

Well, it's just, like, it's the, it's the, the way he talks about the, like,

what's his specific phrasing?

Something about things that are one day seem golden will turn to trash.

And it's like, if you've ever experienced this, you probably have this.

I don't know.

It's like, the internet's stupid, is one main point here.

But

I don't know.

I found it particularly insidious of Hisuka to go after Kilua and Gon's friendship.

How did you do that?

It's the targeted thing.

It sucks so bad.

Yeah.

It's, I mean, like,

it's terrible, and it also is very consistent with Hisuka.

It's like...

Like, doubly so, because you know that Hisuka and Illumi have the connection.

Yeah.

Right?

So it's like, there's, it's not like Hisoka is like a third party.

Hisoka's already involved in the family politics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think

we still don't know.

No, that's not true.

Never mind.

Take it back.

I think Hisaka can tell that

I meant what I said earlier, right?

In terms of like Gon staking his

sort of nascent view of the universe, his optimism about the universe on his relationship with Killua.

You know, Gon looks at Killua and says,

there is brightness in the world,

and I know it, and I can show that to you.

You don't have to be Zelda assassin Killua.

And I think that Hisaka has spotted that.

I think that, you know, it's so similar to what you were talking about earlier, Austin, of like the moral question.

You know, or the, yeah, the moral question around Hisaka and Gon is, will Gon get dragged down into Hisuka's sort of violent nihilism?

And I think that kind of central to that is Hisaka's

Hiseka has already spotted the other way that it can go.

You know, Hisaka has spotted the way Gon is spending time with Killua.

Yeah.

Cruel.

I mean, it's, you know, I feel like it is.

This is.

I think the show goes a lot of the way to make these things explicit, but it's also the value of being able to talk this out in this podcast, right?

You know,

you see Hisaka and Gon, and you're like, ah, right, he's an abusive clown, uh, and this is a

unpleasant relationship.

And then the more you talk about it, the very specific vectors of his manipulation kind of rise to the surface.

I mean, another like classic, you know, abuser-manipulator tactic, right?

Of like, oh, you can't trust your friends.

That's exactly what I was going to say.

Yeah, and this is an isolatory move.

This is

pirate.

Also, wrapped up with this is what is the first thing almost that Hiseka ever says to Gone is like, you should be out there making good friends.

Yeah.

Oh, right.

He does say that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Creepy.

What a well-written character.

Nasty piece of work.

He is

gross.

And we're going to talk more about how he's gross.

Very quickly, though.

Just going off of Hisoka's personality test, I like to say I think I might be a conjurer.

High stronger, overly serious, stoic, and nervous.

Oh, let me see.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Let me go look at these descriptions.

This is the fun BuzzFeed quiz.

I was going to, I looked for a quiz.

I couldn't find any good ones or ones that didn't have spoilers.

A lot of the quizzes have spoilers.

I also looked for quizzes.

The problem is the good quizzes work like this.

I'll tell you exactly how they work.

It'll give you a...

question and have you rank it one to six on how much you uh agree with a statement, and they have ordered like, well, a one on if you answer a one, you're an admitter, if you answer a two, you're an enhancer, and that produces a really um

uh like a slingshotty test where, like, oh, if you just happen to say three instead of two

on something, you can like totally bury something that you otherwise would be scoring really high in.

Uh, so the tests are very rarely uh made well.

Um,

enhancers are simple and earnest.

I don't think that's a enhancer.

That's you.

That's you, Jack.

I think you're

simple as rude, but like.

Oh, no, I'll take it.

I think I'm a transmuter.

Fickle and dishonest?

Whimsical?

Whimsical.

Sorry, I'm reading the fickle.

I'm looking at the one that we have in the

middle.

We have one of the working groups.

Yeah, if you scroll down to the additional notes.

I see, I see, I see.

Which, like,

I don't know.

I'm not sure.

Here's the problem.

Specialist is designed for almost everyone to want to be, want to say specialist.

Well, yeah, it's Sigma male.

I think that's a trap.

We don't have a specialist character in the show yet, right?

No, no, not as far as I know.

Not that we hadn't noted.

And, like, I think that's a trick.

I think you're going to fall into that.

Because, like, when I think about specialist, I think about a thing, you know, when I was a kid, I liked the X-Men a lot, but then I learned about what mutations actually are genetically and was like, if they're really mutants, then like, it's super lucky that, like, you know, Cyclops can shoot laser beams.

It's not laser beams, I know, but he can shoot laser beams from his eyes and not like his knees.

Because the way mutations work is you just get, like, laser knees.

And, like, oh, that didn't help me at all.

Because mutations, the mutations that are useful get passed on, but people don't, you don't, the mutations aren't good necessarily.

Do you know what I mean?

This is the world.

This is the world that My hero academia supposes like sometimes you get yeah sometimes you get like super flame blast powers sometimes you're a fish man and that's what i think especially a goldfish

what if you're just a goldfish i don't you know what i mean yeah i don't know i don't want to be a i don't want to roll a specialist and wind up with with laser knees

i'm gonna have to wear cutoffs all the time i live in michigan it's cold you're gonna be cold all the time

um

because i i guess laser knees would be a mitter i guess but i'm a little impatient i'm not detail detail-oriented, but I don't really have a short temper.

And I'm not really volatile, I don't think.

Maybe a little volatile.

Yeah, you're not like volatile until you like scream and go off to handle it, people, but I think like you're a person who's like,

This is why I wanted this conversation.

Yeah, this is the type of stuff.

Yeah, no, we should not say what we think we are.

It should us keep telling each other what we are.

Like a nickname situation.

Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think I grew up a manipulator, and I've tried to get away from manipulator and towards conjurer.

I've started argumentative and logical when I was like

in my upgrade early 20s.

I didn't upgrade.

I don't know if it's an upgrade.

I think it's a side grade, and I don't know that I'm like good at the conjurer abilities necessarily.

Do you know what I mean?

Keith's a transmuter.

I am a transmuter, yeah.

I think he's prone to deceit and fickle.

I don't think

Keith has done well.

I don't know if fickle, but like Keith has been.

He's deceitful for a bit.

Yeah, absolutely.

I knew, wait, I knew what?

I think more impatient, not detail-oriented, quick to read.

Well, see, I think it's the, I think the, I think, I, I think I leaned more emitter, and now I'm more transmuter.

Keith's fake laugh bit was a transmuter moment,

right?

Sure, sure.

Also, can make any sounds

that feels like something.

Yeah,

that's a mission.

That you're omitting any sound.

Yeah.

You're detaching your orb.

But I'm not transmuting my voice.

Hey, here's the thing.

Write a five-star review of the podcast and tell us what none type of thing.

Yeah, this is great.

Great idea, Selvie.

I'm a manipulator, because I just did that.

I'm just manipulating our audience.

You're omitting the audience, yeah.

Controlling animal controlling animals and inanimate things.

Oh, control anime.

Animate and inanimate things.

Animate and inanimate things.

Sorry, this is very tiny on my oh my

it is small i didn't want to ruin that actual stuff that we have here i got you i got you that makes sense um

dre enhancer

i'll dre enhancer

enhancer feels great

yeah yeah yeah yeah

enhancer conjurer enhancer or conjurer

We all have some degree of anxiety, so can we all have fun?

Well, it's Myers Greek, so everyone's going to be like, well, I'm sometimes all all of these.

Yeah.

I feel like it's important for me to say, just briefly, hey, fuck the Myers-Briggs test.

Let's go.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It comes up a lot.

Fuck the Myers-Briggs test.

But also, like, you know, fuck all the other things that are like that, too.

Oh, for sure.

But the Myers-Briggs one is the one that I think is fun to do.

It's fun, but it's not like you shouldn't put any stock in it.

No, I don't put any stock in it.

It shouldn't be used to say decide whether someone gets a fucking job or not.

No, obviously that's insane.

It's like deciding that you get a job or don't get a job based on your astrological sign.

Yeah.

It's just that I don't find astrological signs fun.

Hisok is definitely a Scorpio, though.

Oh my god, yeah, of course.

I don't know.

I genuinely don't know what any of them mean except for cancer because it's the good ones.

I know what a Pisces is because that's what I am.

Yeah.

I was going to say, can I have my

moon sign for the other type chart?

Hey, what time were you born?

I think that's what you need to know your moon sign.

Can I dox myself by saying what time I was born?

We don't want people getting our charts and being

able to move.

I don't believe any of this shit, but don't get my chart.

My chart's my chart.

Don't worry about what's on my chart.

It's my chart.

It's my chart.

You don't need to know my charts.

Someone's going to learn what time Jack was born and find out they're British.

Hey, write a five-star review and tell us what you think our sun, rising, and moon signs are.

Yeah, there you go.

God.

I uh.

Hey, write a five-star review, please.

Please write a five-star five-star review on

probably Apple Podcasts since they all

power it up.

I think that's the only one.

I don't think you can review it.

You can rate it elsewhere.

Give it five stars and we'll...

Do they not have that on Spotify?

Think about it.

The reviews.

I've started saying this on Run Button.

I don't care how good your comments are on Run Button videos.

I don't care how good your review is on iTunes, but it's really a review is very important, not just the rating.

So just type in whatever it is.

begins again

the fight begins

yeah hisoka launches tons of attacks uh and gone dodges about four percent of them gone just getting slapped around the arena although to a certain extent gone has um

got what he wanted he's given the badge back yeah uh but the fight is continuing and i wrote this down uh

I noticed that there wasn't a lot of Nen being used up until this point, but I hadn't really put it together, Austin, with how interesting that is, that we spend the first half of this chunk being like, all right, listen, fuckos, it's Nen.

And then the first half of this fight being like, that won't help you

if you are well.

Except, Nen has been being used, hasn't it?

Would you like to see the most obvious visual metaphor in history?

It begins.

Are you suggesting that

he's manipulating Goan, that he has Goan on a string?

Hisuka has launched some bungee what's this thing called a bungee bungee gum it has the properties of rubber and gum it has the properties of rubber and gum

there's oh my god there's a moment in here where he just thinks that in his own head he just thinks like i've used my bungee gum i'm it has the properties of rubber and gum he loves it

he loves it no he's a freak he loves it

is bungee gum flavored yes of the gum that he loved when he was a child.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

It's bungee flavored, yeah.

Gone shouldn't have

been.

It's gum, a bite, chew.

That does seem like a very gone thing to do, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Power up like Popeye after he did it.

In case you're wondering what the flavor of bungee tastes like, it tastes like the feeling of falling 400 feet.

I was going to say rubber, but yeah.

He's like a

little bit of that.

Gone,

elastic love, elastic love.

He says, you will never escape me now.

Gone is on an

is not just on a leash, he's on an elastic leash, which I think is interesting.

There's something about the

freedom of or the perceived freedom of movement, the freedom of movement within someone else's parameters that an elastic leash sort of gives you.

You will always come back, no matter how far you think you can get away.

And then Hisoka does a little quiz because he's a freak.

I just want to really emphasize the, like you said, it's a very clear visual metaphor.

But the,

if Goan thought it was over now, oh, you got your badge, you had to turn the badge back, well, you have another thing coming.

I've got you leashed to me, right?

This is not over yet, um, is, I think, a really important way that Hisoka is thinking about it.

Like, that's what the visual metaphor partly is, you know.

And then we get a really, we get a really sad resolution to that metaphor in what

Ghan decides to do about it.

Yeah.

Which is run straight at him and stay close.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

And then it ends this fight.

I want to be brief because I don't want to jump too far ahead.

Ends the fight having accomplished his goal, but is immediately thinking of like, how can I beat Hisuka?

How can I like get one over?

And it's like, why are you thinking about this?

This guy, you're, you should, I thought this was it with this guy.

And he's like, nope, now my new thing is that I want to win.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Hisuka asks Gon when he attached the bungee gum, and if he answers correctly, he'll get a free hit.

Hisuka cheats.

He gives Gunn like a ABC multiple choice, and it turns out that it was D.

And it was when he gave him the aura personality analysis.

This is notable because

it's sort of extra to the fight.

Hisuka attached, Hisuka got his hooks in outside of combat,

which I think is consistent with this whole sort of broader metaphor being drawn out to like

this meeting has been long foretold.

You know, way before this, way before these fights, Hisuka was already planning these kinds of manipulations.

It's very consistent that he would attach the bungee cord during a time when he wasn't like quote-unquote fighting Goan.

But yeah, Goan presses forward.

He is trapped and he still decides to move forward towards Hisuka.

And this is when we get this really

well-animated, unsettling.

Hisuka has like a psychedelic orgasm.

It's like

really impressive color work as we just like zoom in.

There's a lot of like elastic imagery with Hisaka, I think probably consistent with the bungee cord, but like his limbs are stretching.

It's almost like there's a fisheye lens as the camera's like passing over his body.

It's this real sort of like nightmarish fever dream psychedelia sort of like apotheosis.

He's spacejam Michael jordaning yeah he developed the properties of rubber and gum oh yeah yeah and like black light led zeppelin posters yeah and he's lifting his lips and he's rendered in like a jojo style at one point you know what i mean like they give him that kind of visual a lot yeah the like jojo thing there is um there's a lot of dio brando yeah there's a ton of that absolutely he's a violence pervert right like yeah that's what he is

but they also they do very much do the like oh you're walking towards me thing.

That's a very, like, iconic moment in JoJo.

And, like, I feel, like, I don't know, I'm going to be that guy on the show where it's, like, that's a motherfucking JoJo's Bizarre Adventure reference.

But, um, this in particular, like, like, I don't know, worth mentioning some of the characters that he's a archetype is in conversation with.

This, I mean, they are doing different things.

I really think that the, like, the swing bit earlier was played as a kind of a horrible joke and this is played as much more of this sort of like actual thing.

I mean, it's literally right out of Wayne's world.

Right.

But like this scene,

if we are settling in for a show about Hisako's psychosexual feelings, this weird moment worked for me so much better than the like, look, we're zooming into Hisako's crotch that we got last time.

It was at least visually interesting and it was scary and it worked well for me.

Hisako willingly takes a load of punches

because of the classic like what does he call it unripe fruit thing.

You know we're back to Hisaka's sort of classic game here.

Then we get Goan sort of

like pulling back and this is what I talked about earlier with Ghon's clarity and his emotions.

He says I'm scared.

says Ghon's internal voice, which is notable because in the past, when Goan has been explicitly asked how he feels about Hisoka and fighting Hisoka, he said, oh, I felt excited and scared.

And I think to have that emotion just ring out like a bell in this moment is notable.

Yeah.

The other plot line happening here is, you know, there's a moment where Hisoka pulls Godan for a huge heavy punch, and Goan manages to block it and stand up.

And then the ref awards points anyway.

Oh, points to Hisoka, yeah.

To Hisoka anyway.

Even though God just laid into Hisoka with like a dozen punches, none of those got points because they didn't knock, you know, Hisuka down, and they weren't counted as clean hits for whatever reason.

And the people in the crowd are like, the refs, I swear,

it's scripted, you know?

The ref can tell, like, we can tell Hisuka to win.

The ref can tell, like, we can tell, that Hisuka's taking these punches on purpose.

Yes, yes.

Yeah, there's a great punchline to this little subplot that comes right at the end.

But yeah,

the crowd is turning against the ref, and then out of nowhere, in a very similar way that

Goan came out of nowhere behind the sort of the

chunk of brick to hit Hisuka, Goan is just taken out by a chunk of brick attached to a bungee cord.

It's the final point.

Hisuka wins.

We get a lovely cut to Killua letting out this like relieved breath that the fight is over and Goan is still alive.

And then we see Wing is like, you know, pleased with this.

I get it sort of from a like, oh, he didn't go too far and he didn't die, and he did what he wanted to do, so I'm proud.

He did just get absolutely beaned in the head with a 20-pound piece of car.

But he's already buttoned up, he's already back.

I mean, we've established that Gone is immune to CTE more, much like how Kiloa is.

It's kind of like how Kiloa is with electricity.

Electricity, yeah, yeah.

Where it's like, it still hurts.

But he's immune otherwise.

Yeah.

Yeah.

His brain has the properties of both rubber.

Rubber and gum.

Yeah.

Simple and determined.

I should say, just in case anyone caught this,

I didn't realize until just now.

I remembered.

during this last bit that Gone did get two points for all his punches.

It's just that Hise got five points.

Yeah, they each got a critical hit, or yeah, critical hit, and then Hisuka was awarded a knockdown, even though Goan wasn't knocked down.

Yeah, it ended up being 9-4, and then 10-4, and so it's over.

Yeah.

And of course, you know, what Hisuka says is like, you know, if we had 10 more fights, then maybe

you would stand a chance against me.

At least if those fights were in Heaven's Arena.

Wasn't it like if we had 10 more, we'd have a good fight?

We'd have a good fight.

Yeah, exactly.

And then he's like, and that's why I'm not fighting you here again.

We're going to fight somewhere where they're in the real world without any rules or restraints.

Where I can kill you if I decide that that's when my lives will be on the line.

Yeah, exactly.

So, you know, Gone leaves in good spirits

after hearing that there's something secret in the fight.

And they all sort of

never, as far as I know, I could be wrong.

They were, did they tell you what that is?

I don't know.

I think I know what it is.

I think, like,

it's, it's just a little bit of context from the fight.

I don't think that there's something really specific

unless someone is going to DM me and say, you've forgotten something obvious.

But I was like, something secret.

And I re-watched it and I was like, I kind of see what, I kind of see, but I don't know.

This does not come up in these next episodes.

no huh um i could be wrong i could be wrong um

yeah

but then we get a little goodbye you know the life of a hunter is one of meetings but it is also one of partings um

wing wishes them well and says look buddy you gotta figure out your own style of men that's your real goal zushi says that he's really glad that he met them and that he hopes to surpass them someday

What does Killua say?

What does Killiwa say?

I don't know.

He says, he won't.

He never will.

A little freak.

Wing also gives Zushi the world's worst backhanded compliments.

Is that at this point?

That actually was at the end.

I was waiting to bring this back up until we got here.

That was actually at the end of last episode or near the end of the...

Sorry, it was between the

hot su stuff and the start of the fight is when it was.

And sneakily, it was also in Hunterpedia.

It was like the third Hunterpedia, Gone and Killiwa.

Oh, it was, yeah.

I remember that.

Yeah, Wing says to

Zushi.

Who's very worried?

He's like worried and anxious about being not a good student.

He's like, look, buddy, you're one in 100,000.

And Zushi's like, that's great.

Thanks.

Thank you so much for saying that, Mr.

Wing.

And Wing looks at the retreating backs of Killier and God and is like, and they're one in 10 million or something.

He starts sobbing.

Zushi starts sobbing and he's like, he has

an internal line.

I can't remember what it is.

It's like, how does it make me feel any better?

Once the current manga arc ends, Togashi's going to start.

The Zushi returns as a villain.

Yeah.

He's the most powerful.

He trained so much.

He's the most powerful non-user ever.

That's you.

I would absolutely need to be.

I need it.

I need it.

Dark Zushi.

Goan is...

Ghun's got a plan.

He's going to go back to Whale Island and show Aunt Mito his hunter's license.

Because now he's given his badge back to

Hezuka's badge back to him.

He feels like he's, you know, he's a real hunter.

And Killu is going to come too.

They're going to go on a little road trip.

And they turn and they wave Heaven's Arena goodbye, and I wave Heaven's Arena goodbye, too.

Yeah, that's that's Heaven's Arena.

I guess that's technically that is the end of this arc, right?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Yeah, the next two episodes are like kind of floating in between.

It's kind of hard to, but yeah, I think it really is.

They set up something,

so

yeah,

exciting.

What are we watching next time?

Was that who was that?

What?

I think Sylvie was coughing.

Oh, okay.

I think Discord like

tried to half-mute it, so it sounded like

it sounded like you like

that was Kevin.

Okay, you know, thanks for coming to the arena.

I hope you had a good time.

My arena.

My arena.

Thanks for coming to my play.

This is actually a house show, so just make sure if you could clean up after yourself.

Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

We're going to Julie's next weekend.

We had Julie's.

Julie's Arena.

Julie's Arena.

Julie's Arena.

What are we watching next?

We're We're watching the next two episodes.

Those are episodes.

Yeah, just a little one because they really don't go anywhere.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with them.

I think there's some stuff to talk about.

No, there's definitely stuff to talk about.

It's just like it doesn't fit with like we can't do three because we do the be we'd be doing three is weird and then we're going into like four or five episodes or we just do two episodes is the cleanest break we can have.

Yeah, it's just the easiest way to put it.

Yeah.

Yeah, so those are episodes 37, Jing and Gone.

Yeah.

And episode 38, Reply from Dad.

Whatever.

They're no big deal.

It's not a big deal.

No big deal.

No big deal.

Whoa.

I wonder whose dad they're talking about.

Leorio's.

Oh, Leorio's dad.

Twitter username Leorio's dad.

Let me see.

Hang on.

iTunes user review left by Leorio's dad.

Leorio's dad, this account doesn't exist.

Oh,

he got banned.

Yeah.

All the posts when you search for Leorio's dad more about Leorio being someone else's dad.

Oh, sure.

Oh, Leorio's dad banned for Tweet to get the Sea Lions.

Oh my god, wait.

I searched for this and I got the hot Leorio that we were talking about.

Like, hold on.

This is what I'm talking about.

It's a good one, too.

Shout out to Roy Du Soleil on Twitter.

Roy of the Sun?

That's it.

That's the most.

We only got two likes, so.

Damn, blow it up.

Yeah, I'm going to retweet this three-year-old post.

You should.

Anyone's allowed to.

It's you.

No, I'm not doing it.

They're not even on Twitter anymore.

It's true.

Okay.

They're like not posting.

They haven't posted in years.

Yeah.

Okay, sick.

That's all I care about then is upset, is making them feel weird yeah i literally just saw the one retweet appear sylvia is you you're welcome hell yeah i'm doing my part

but the two years ago they had a post on march in 2021 and a post in december of 2020 and that was about you haka show so

you know

shout outs Thank you for joining us on this episode, Austin.

Yeah.

You now know what was going on in that picture.

I do.

This is my first.

Well, here's the thing.

There is one picture that I can extrapolate.

I don't know what is happening in it, but I have seen the Phantom Troop.

And so I can confidently say

that is the Phantom Troop.

But

what's the context?

They're all gathering around a glass with a leaf in and they're trying to figure out their Nen styles.

The Phantom Troop doesn't know their Nen Styles yet.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

We bet the Phantom Troop is going to be.

I don't know what this is.

It just happens.

I've got to go back and double check

what...

Because we talked a lot about that one, and you had a lot of guesses for what was going on there.

I'm very excited.

The Leaf one was great.

We had a lot of discussion about the Leaf, but there was just like

if there was a Leaf.

Oh, right.

You didn't know.

I'm calling it the Leaf.

Jack did not know there was a Leaf until.

Was not sure.

Yeah.

But just because of the sheer volume of people in the other one,

there was like a lot of supposition about what might be happening in that scene.

So I should go back and see if anything tracks because I don't really remember.

Anyway, anything, anything else before?

I think that we hit everything.

Was there anything else that we missed in these episodes that someone wants to say before we go into plugs?

Oh, I really liked it.

I did watch the One Hunterpedia about Gone, and it's really cute that Gon just sort of looks around the whole time while Killewa talks about him.

It's a really cute one.

It's a very like, yeah, that was from the 36.

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, anything else I could add is

there's like fun stuff that you can notice in the opening and ending themes now, I think, with the context of Heaven's Arena, but I'm not going to point it out.

You can go figure it out yourself.

Go figure it yourself.

We don't have time for that.

You said it like, go tell it to the birds.

Go tell it to the birds.

Go watch it.

Tell it to the birds.

Any plugs before we go?

Austin,

you're a guest here.

Do you want to plug anything?

What's the thing?

I mean, people are no friends at the table.

Palisade's been really good.

Palisade has been outrageously good.

It's been very fun.

I don't know where we'll be when this comes out.

Who knows where we'll be?

Oh, yeah.

Months from now, yeah.

We're going to be done Palisade.

Palisade finale coming up, folks.

Who could say?

Good luck to everybody.

I hope it goes well.

More civilized age has probably, by the time this comes out, nearing the end of KOTOR, or if not nearing, we were done.

Nights of the Old Republic, that was really fun.

And Shelf by Genre will have finished its run of Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolf.

The first season of that was really fun.

We're not actually done recording it yet.

We're finishing it up in the coming weeks.

But by the time this comes out again, that will be over.

And we'll be on Door Whatever Next Thing is, which I don't, I'm not 100% sure what it is, but I bet it'll be good.

So go listen to that.

That's people who don't know.

That's me, Cameron, Kunzelman, kunzelman and uh michael lets doing genre fiction read-along podcast it's been fun is he a wolf have you figured that out yet gene yeah gene yeah gene jing wolf is a wolf it's actually jing freaks and gene wolf combined they did the fusion dance um and

yeah they're uh they are transformation types and they're transmutation types and they turn into a wolf that's right what um what nen type is severian the torturer enhancement right well probably.

Are you listening?

I can't say anything about spoiling because I know you're not going to be able to do that.

I started listening along, and then I started listening, and then I bought the books, and I'm pausing until I read them.

Until you read them.

Yeah, I will not spoil.

Because some stuff happens.

There's some stuff that happens.

His name type changes, okay?

I think his nen type changes.

I think his n-type changes.

It's tough to do.

It's tough to do.

It's tough to do.

Here is actually a specific plug that I want to give.

Austin talked briefly about Palisade, but I want to address you, the listener, who has been enjoying Media Club Plus,

but has not necessarily dipped a toe into Friends at the Table, which is the show that we all work on together along with a bunch of other really talented, incredible people.

It is an actual play podcast focused on critical world building, smart characterization, and fun interaction between good friends.

We've been doing it for a long time, and I think it's a pretty good show.

We tell

long-running stories in really interesting settings, really interesting characters.

And we have two places that you might want to jump in.

You can jump in wherever you want, but there are two we would sort of guide you towards.

The first is a dark fantasy series called Sang Fiel.

If you are interested in Bloodborne or in Book of the New Sun or in what are some other nice touchstones for Sang Fiel?

That's the secondary.

We talked about Sang Fiel and a train showed up in the background.

A train, if you're interested in trains that are haunted.

If you are interested in Cormac McCarthy,

check out Sang Fiel.

It's got goat people, it's got vampires, it's got a cursed desert.

The other place you might want to join in is the show Partisan, which is the story of a holy moon far out in the middle of a

vast galactic empire,

and the burgeoning rebellion that begins to brew in unlikely circumstances on this tiny holy moon.

They're both really, really good shows.

They have great music.

And you might want to check them out.

Hey, who made the music?

Oh, I couldn't say.

I know that they're a very handsome enhancer.

Yes, I did it.

I made the music.

Deceit.

I see it though.

Whimsical and tricksy.

Any other plugs that people want to give?

Go to our Patreon if you like this show.

Yeah, go to friendsetable.cash if you'd like to support it.

This show is technically a stretch goal that we reached for our Patreon, and that's why we're doing this.

But if you want us to, you know, keep up the good work and also like afford rent and food and stuff, that's a good way to help us out.

Yeah, not wrong.

Not wrong.

Also, I don't know, can we tease that we're thinking of doing some Patreon bonus stuff for this?

Is that like, we don't even know what you're doing?

That might even be out before this, even though we haven't recorded it.

A reverse tease.

Reverse tease.

But if you didn't know,

you should let people know about that when the episodes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, we will.

For sure.

Yeah.

The episodes that will tease that is probably coming out in a week from today.

Okay.

Great.

Or is today Tuesday?

What the fuck day is today?

It's Thursday.

It's Tuesday.

Today is a Wednesday, my friend.

Three, four, five days then.

Okay.

Which means nothing for anybody because this is like four months ago, right?

Yeah.

So, yeah, people will be alerted to that we are watching some Dragon Ball, some original Dragon Ball.

If you didn't know, we've been watching, we watched some original Dragon Ball.

We will have watched some original Dragon Ball.

And more importantly, we'll have met Jackie Chun.

Maybe we'll meet Jackie Chun.

God, the Jackie Chun stuff is great.

Season seven of Dragon Ball is where we're going to watch a handful of episodes.

So, hey, if you want more of us talking about things related to Hunter Hunter, then also go over to FriendsLease.cat.

Deeply related to Hunter Hunter.

I mean, yeah, Dragon.

Like, I think our plan is to just think anything that sort of intersects with the themes and discussions of Hunter Hunter.

But Dragon Ball is, like, the primordial ooze that Hunter Hunter climbed out of.

Right.

Yeah.

And in a very interesting way, sort of sidesteps Dragon Ball Z, which is the primordial ooze that a lot of other shows

can come out of.

Not that there's no Dragon Ball Z, but stuff.

We can get into that.

We'll get there.

This is a three-hour recording we've done.

Oh, yeah.

It sure is.

Just on my end, real quick, again, this will be old news, but last week,

Kyle and I recorded an entire Sonic Superstars Let's Play.

Oh, hell yeah.

So those have started coming out on YouTube.

And

the entire thing should be out by the time this comes out.

That was a very fun day where we did it all kind of in a row,

which is something we haven't done since like Dreamcast era

Sonic when we did our 20 years of Sonic Let's Play.

The game is not very good, and they want you to pay $60 for it.

Yikes.

So just watch Run Button.

Just watch Run Button play it.

That sounds great.

Yeah.

So yeah, you can find that at youtube.com/slash run button.

That's it.

Thanks for joining us again, Austin.

Love to be here.

And thanks, everyone else who joins us every time.

And goodbye.

Bye, goodbye.

You really sounded like you had more there, Keith.

I got distracted.