Magic Is What A Witch Does - Hunter x Hunter ep. 30-33: Media Club Plus S01E10

Hey everybody, Keith here, head of the episode.

Just to remind you that our first ever bonus episode for Media Club Plus went live on the Patreon three weeks ago.

You can go to patreon.com/slash friends underscore table or friends at the table.cash to find that.

We talked about five episodes of Dragon Ball from season seven of Dragon Ball.

And

next week,

next Tuesday on the 16th, we're going to release the next episode of that two-part bonus where you watch five more episodes of Dragon Ball.

It was a great time.

Uh, you should sign up and listen if you haven't signed up already.

And we will have more bonus episodes in the future.

Uh, we may even have one in February, but I'm not 100% sure yet.

Uh, anyway, stay tuned for more bonus news, uh, and uh, definitely check out friendsatetable.cash.

Bye.

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

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

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

And this will be old news by the time this episode comes out, but we just finished the Digimon World Let's Play that we've been doing for almost 11 years now.

Oh my God.

Sometimes with a dozen episodes coming out in a single year, and sometimes we'll go a year or more without releasing an episode.

It is a very funny episode, or let's play, a very weird game and just a bizarre experience overall to watch someone live a third of their lives playing Digimon World.

So, if you haven't gone and watched Run Button for some reason, after however much Friends of the Table you maybe have listened to or this,

maybe go check some of that out.

It's fun.

It's good.

With me, as always, is Jack Dakeed.

Hi, I'm Jack.

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

You can follow me on co-host at JDQ.

Swandre 3000.

No, that's not your name.

That's your

head.

That's your part.

Andrew.

Andrew.

No, that's fine.

Hey, this is Swandre3000 from Twitter.

You can find me in real life and call me Andrew.

You can find me in real life and call me Andrew.

That's that full-sided song, huh?

Someone's going to use that as a defense.

I was hanging out.

I have a friend who was visiting town recently, and we were hanging out.

And she went to introduce me to a person she was traveling with.

And she looked at me and was like, I've called you by three different names in the time that I have known you, depending on the context.

And now I have no idea what to call you.

Wow.

Andrew.

What's the third one?

Is it Swandre?

Yeah.

Swandre.

Oh, okay.

Okay, okay.

That makes sense.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hi, I'm Sylvia.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And you can check out Friends of the Table at friends of the table.cash.

That's our Patreon.

It lets this show exist.

We've also got a shop that you can go to, friendsofthetable.shop.

We've got some stuff up there

that all has to do with the Friends of the Table show.

But if you like that show, then check out that shop.

And if you don't like that show, check it it out.

Fuck you.

Check it out.

Either check it out or fuck you.

Today, we watched three.

Hey, it's the look.

If the popular, if the soaring popularity of Run Button has taught me one thing, it's that you need to regularly and freely insult your fans.

Sure.

Yeah, you know what?

Yeah, that's fair.

This week we watched episodes 30, 31, and 32, Fierce and Ferocious, Destiny and Tenacity, and a surprising win.

These episodes are really good.

I really like these episodes.

Last week, we started to ask the question, what is Nen?

This week we asked the question, what can Nen do?

And it's abroad.

In these episodes, we watch Gon see if his self-taught nen abilities are going to help him win his first nen fight

before getting seriously injured/slash grounded.

And until Hisek is battle against the seemingly powerful Castro, Killewa was reconsidering his desire to fight at all.

Gon, of course, is literally shaking with excitement to fight again.

Speaking of Hisek, I've never seen a character in all of fiction no-sell limb loss so effectively.

And

then it's back to training with Zushi

after Guns Grounding that Kiloa sort of self-imposes on himself as well.

And they catch up to him in about four minutes.

He was upset.

Any broad strokes, things we want to fill in before we jump back to the start of episode 30?

We only watched three this week?

I thought we watched four.

No, we watched four.

Nope.

Okay, cool.

Oh, no, no.

You're right.

We watched four.

We watched four.

I didn't make a miss.

I made a mistake telling you which ones we watched.

Oh, no.

I started deleting my episode 33 notes because I was scared that I was going to spoil something.

No, no, no, no.

We also watched

Power.

No, an Empty.

Fearsome French Threat.

Destiny Tenacity, a Surprising Win, and an Empty Threat.

There we go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was having a heart attack for most of them.

And even that recap contained things from all four of those episodes.

Yeah, it did.

It did, but I couldn't keep it straight.

Because before we started, I was talking to Dre about how I take notes for the whole swatch of episodes.

That's

really delineate men on between.

Yeah.

I think the only thing we missed is that in the final episode that we watched, episode 33,

three

villains

sort of simultaneously managed to botch and succeed attempts to draw Gone and Killua into fighting.

They botch and then succeed and then botch.

Yeah, and we'll get to that without a moment.

We'll be in about three minutes.

It was some kind of very interesting screenwriting.

Yeah.

You know, the plot just sort of clunks into place one after the other.

I would like to begin by saying that I am sick and tired of Nen.

Oh, yeah?

Oh, wow.

Wow.

If we could please, please can we get back to cool monsters and like

killer assassins and like

exciting cave system i wonder narrator the narrator man who begins each episode or who began each episode by saying wondrous creatures deadly mysteries he has he has gone away when we've gone into heaven's arena and he has been replaced at least for this bunch of episodes by him talking us through fucking nen again yeah reminding me

of the anatomics of nen basically

this does not do it for me um and i am prepared to try and kind of unpack that over the course course of this episode.

My suspicion, based on what I know about Shonen and based on the kind of the way that

reminds me listeners is essentially nothing.

You did not know who Naruto was.

Well, you sort of had incepted who Naruto was before we started this.

But I can sort of puzzle my way through negative space.

You know, that's not Naruto.

This is gone.

Etc.

My suspicion is that all this Nen stuff is, if not building towards something, going to be a kind of operating foundation that the show is going to play the themes and variations on over the next hundred episodes or so.

But I feel like right now, as we're essentially receiving like

uncut Nen directly,

I have gotten to a point where I would love it if we

like, do you remember Mika, the dog with eyes?

I do remember Mike the ghost.

Yeah.

You want a little more Mikke flavor.

Yes, and I will say that the stuff stuff kind of in the middle of this chunk of episodes in which Hisuka engages in one of the weirdest fights I ever

ask.

Just like, you know,

I was...

I'm fairly patient when it comes to watching TV, so at no point am I like, and therefore the shovel sucks.

But I sat up in my chair and I was like, all right, this is interesting.

I'm really curious to see where this is going.

But yeah, a lot of this NAN stuff.

vis-a-vis, you know, training or abstaining from training after you get your ass handed to you by a man who turns into a spinning top.

or lots of like the meditating, the visualizing, the

Gyo is what it is called when

Ren goes into your eyes.

Yeah.

This is a special sort of, you know,

Nen, et cetera.

It's not really what I come to the show for.

And Jack, you're actually a little bit talking about what I was talking about last week, if you remember.

I mean, for us, it was last week.

For everyone else, it was two weeks ago.

Where I was like, yeah, the first time I watched this season, I was kind of like not into it.

Right.

Yes.

And it could very well be that this is the process of going through it the first time.

But I'm, I think so.

Yeah.

I don't know.

This was something I actually wanted to talk about anyway, because I've been really enjoying Heaven's Arena going through it this time.

And it is definitely one of the arcs that I feel like has the, like, gets a bad rap with a lot of people.

And I think it is kind of because it's a lot of table setting and a lot of

like info dumping.

We've talked about Karapika's PowerPoint presentations.

And there's, it, sometimes

it feels like there's, like, full episodes that are that.

And that, I do agree, drags.

But I also think that...

Especially the stuff with Hisaka in this chunk

recontextualizes enough of the things that happened during the Hunter exam to make it totally an interesting watch for me.

Um, I also think it pays off

some of the Akilua stuff from the previous 10 episodes where, like,

we see him during the final hunter exam.

He kills the person.

Was he under hypnosis?

Who knows?

Uh, goes home, is kind of resigned to like being back with his family when Goan shows up and like leaves with Goan and then is sort of actively being like, I don't want to kill people, I just want to hang out with my friend Goan.

He doesn't really even want to fight anymore, he's like not really interested in climbing the arena, the Castro's like taunts of like, oh, I'll see you at the Battle Olympia.

And Killer was like frustrated by this.

He's like, No, I don't want to do that.

I think that stuff is all.

I really liked

the Zoldec family mini arc there.

And so it's fun to kind of see

them paying attention to what Killer is going through.

Which is like kind of babysitting

for being too reckless.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, we should probably start here.

Goan loses his fight after sort of demonstrating his fight with Guido, the Spinning Top Master, after demonstrating a use of Nen that Mr.

Wing did not anticipate that Goan would have learned by now.

Of course, it was all for naught as Goan gets just obliterated by spinning tops.

Yeah, it was also great to see that recontextualized because

we saw him learn that in the Hunter exam.

That is what he learned to do when he was following Hisuka for the first time.

He taught himself Zetsu.

And we didn't have a name for it.

And now we have a name for it.

He was doing Zetsu.

And the other thing is he also closes his eyes and sort of senses the nen of the tops, which is like

this is kind of another thing that like he really wasn't taught how to do that.

Not a lot of attention is paid to it by the show, but like Goan like being able to sense and visualize the tops around him is like something that he invents for himself during that fight, which I thought was cool.

There's some lovely animation.

You know, I've seen it.

I've seen almost this exact beat in other showers, but Goan with his eyes closed, dodging the tops very nonchalantly.

It was just animated really nicely.

But, you know, it doesn't really

work.

We do Togashi's trick again, where we kind of cut

suddenly beyond the end of the fight.

We don't actually see Goan get completely obliterated until later.

It's phenomenal.

He like he tells you through the just the timeline of the show that like

the actual action of this is unimportant.

Next time you see this, you will have known exactly what happened.

Goan got hit in the arm, broke a bunch of bones, and lost.

Okay, I wanna I want to push back a little on it being unimportant because I do think that it's not to diminish the

end like the

way that we get to the end result.

It honestly, when I was watching this episode, I was like, Tagashi really likes Colombo-style storytelling where

you know what the end result is.

It's just how do they get there that you like want to figure out, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's a different method of doing it, but it's still, it's effective in the same way for me where I'm like, well, shit, what happened?

How did Gon's arm get fucked up specifically?

I sort of see what you mean, but they like, once they show it, once they cut back to it, like,

you're right, it is about

show, it's not about showing

how Goan loses because we already know that he loses.

It's more about like showing what happened during the fight that was important anyway.

Which that is what I'm saying is, like, it's not about like the a normal tournament would be about, and we sort of see this with Hiseka's fight, but I still think it's wrong.

It's still a, it is still a fake

fight, really.

But instead of it being about the push and pull,

like the, you know, a Shonen fight can be like a chessboard where you're like

sort of taking,

taking the fight piece by piece and sort of pushing and pulling, or it can be.

like really straightforward, just like a

like

a sort of one versus one assault.

like a yeah uh but like that is the part that the show is consistently telling you it's uninterested in showing by skipping to the end like there's no push and pull to see who wins there's no surprising move that that there's no like oh i've been reminded of my duty or my friendship or my whatever or you know to all of a sudden shrug off all of the damage I've taken and become more powerful than ever and win the fight.

None of that happens.

It's just like

we see that gun loses, and then we have to go back and color in, like, okay, what do we still need to know that happened?

Yeah, okay.

I think we're coming at it from the same angle.

Yeah, I don't think that we're disagreeing with that.

We're not doing that.

That's a semantic thing

I messed up on there.

No, I do like seeing it as

Columbo.

Like, he's going to go back and investigate

the fight.

Colombo in a way we we here at Media Club plus God Media Club Plus Colombo there's so much Colombo and it's so long I've seen most of it

by the way the announcer in the uh in the dub is uh the voice of Misty from Pokemon oh hey the announcer is a woman called Coco I believe yeah yep

and she's great.

We'll probably get more Coco stuff when we talk about Hisako's fight, which I suspect is going to form the bulk of this episode, but I want to sort of make sure that we've got got the other stuff out of the way.

I will say that I think the the best version of Togashi's trick that we have seen was

the end of the hunter exam was was Kilua killing the

the guy Bodero.

Bodoro?

What was that guy?

Bodero, yeah.

Bodoro.

In part because

he used Togashi's trick to get us this this spectacular moment of violence and mystery and deflation as we know that the hunter exam, you know, that we've been waiting to end for so long sort of ended off-screen.

Gohan is wondering where Kilua is, you know, what's the deal with this body,

who has Gitaraku turned into, etc.

Here, Togashi's trick is mostly employed so we can have more time thinking about Nen, which is, you know,

it's, it's,

here is something that that was interesting, which is

Goan wakes up in bed, and Kilua comes in and is just furious.

It's kind of a real moment of sort of

you described it earlier as Kilua's babysitting gun.

And it really is this, like, I'm more senior than you.

You made a mistake.

You screwed up here.

You could have died.

Yeah, in my notes, I have it written that Kilo is Ghun's mom here.

Yes, and then

Mr.

Wing shows up and

first slaps Gun across the face, which I think is really interesting.

Just this

very specific moment of like a violent reprisal of sort of how dare you think that you could have done that.

You know,

it really brought to mind the sort of stuff you were alluding to in the last recording, Sylvie, about the way in which Mr.

Wing's position as a teacher is

sort of a parallel to other adults' controlling influence on Gunn and Kellya's life.

You know, Mr.

Wing coming in here and this guy with a bunch of broken arms just slapping him across the face.

He has one broken arm, not a bunch of broken arms.

He had 20 broken bones though.

Yeah, okay, a bunch of broken bones, but one arm.

I broke my arm when I was five and I still talk about it.

Oh no, I've broken.

How many bones have y'all broken before?

My arm.

One, two.

Five, baby.

Wow.

Whoa.

Whoa.

So what if four times that amount?

That would suck.

I mean, I never had it all at once either.

The most I've broken at once is a couple toes.

Ow.

Oh, oh, that was bad.

I don't want to.

We shouldn't talk about that story.

I mean, it's kind of funny, but

why that?

What have you broken?

I'm now I'm just curious.

Okay, I've broken both arms.

Sylvie!

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I broke my, like, my right arm when I was

with my family on vacation in Ireland visiting like my uncle and stuff, and they didn't, they thought it was just sprained when I was there.

Classic.

They didn't x-ray it.

Yeah.

Well, no, the doctor we went to thought it was

a mistake.

Uh-huh.

Oh,

this guy.

I think that's a doctor's mistake.

I remember all he did was like squeeze it a bunch and be like, nah, it's probably just sprained.

It was a lot.

So I had to fly home with a

like hairline fracture in my forearm.

I broke my wrist.

And I broke at the same time, I broke two toes, one of which had to be reset.

And...

We should cut all this, but it's just good to have some context to go.

Hey, you know what?

We'll put this on the Patreon.

$5 and you learn about my weak points.

I broke both of my feet at different times.

I broke one.

Wow.

What injuries are the fucking worst?

I broke the arch of my foot.

When I was like 15, and then I broke the arch of my other foot last year.

Okay, since we're cutting this, I will tell the story of how I broke my wrist and toes at the same time.

That's that story.

It's a very short O.

Henry.

I'm allergic.

I've never had O'Henry.

Oh, no.

Oh, no, no.

Yeah,

those candy bars are named after the short story famously.

Is this a short story?

I don't.

O'Henry's the author who wrote Gift of the Magic.

Who wrote Gifts of the Magic?

Oh, shit.

I didn't know he was a real guy.

He was a real guy.

You're going to get real fucked up when I tell you what baby Ruth is named after.

Hold on.

That's the football player, right?

Oh, you nailed it now.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Let me figure out.

The one that the sand lot's about.

Yeah.

Is this unlocked good?

I have had friends, American friends, who are like, I used to watch that movie a bunch when I was a kid and had a good time.

Yeah, I feel like that's one that was probably, if you watched it as a kid, the nostalgia probably carries it for you.

I don't know if it's

good.

I haven't seen it since I was a kid, but I know what happens to that movie.

It's not good.

I saw it when I was a kid, and I thought it sucked shit.

I don't know if you listen to Pitch Perfect.

Yeah, Pitch Perfect,

The Sandlot, Little Rascals.

I'll add it to my Let's Box.

Two and a half stars.

One star, Repugnant.

They got that song where they sing about having a dollar, you know?

Yeah, oh, right.

Yeah.

God.

Get off

out of here.

Let me figure figure out where I want to come back in.

Yeah.

Young Sheldon-looking ass motherfucker.

Put a little note here.

There we go.

Thank you.

Sorry.

Just label it gore.

Yeah, but after Wing has slapped Gone across the face and chastised him, the scene kind of wraps around in a way that Hunter Hunter does regularly, from a fairly grim moment to a joke, as he chastises Gone Goan almost word for word in the same way that Killiua did.

And I thought this was just a really good beat of like these two people who at least I can't speak for Wing so much as I can.

Killua, you know, hold Goan in really high regard and want the best for him.

But the most they can muster...

It's fair to say for Wing.

It's different.

This method's

different.

It's very different to the way Killua expresses it.

But I think that

that's why it's especially funny to me that they say functionally the same thing.

And you're just sort of like, oh, give the guy a break.

And I think Killua, in fact, says, I just told him that already.

Yeah, yeah.

Basically, yeah, he's like, I told him.

And we get a great Killua moment as, so Killua has determined, or maybe Killua's, maybe Gunn's doctor has said it's going to be four months, really, to heal.

And Gon says it'll be four months.

And then when Wing asks, Killua says, he said it's going to be two months.

And then turns the camera.

We have Kitty Cat.

Great cat.

Kitty Cat Killua.

Who has ears and a tail this time around?

Is this going to be a recurring like a Killua frequently?

I think.

Yeah.

Like, it happens a couple times in this run where Killua does a little cat face.

I think one of them might have been on a encyclopedia at the end of an episode, but yeah, there's been a few already.

Well, it's fun, right?

Because I don't think of Killua.

Killer is such a weird character.

I love that little freak.

I don't think of him as particularly, like, mischievous a lot of the time.

He is disaffected and violent and either genuinely bored or affecting boredom and nonchalance to kind of mask another emotion.

He's not to me, that's exactly what he's doing.

That's what he's an actual cat is like.

Yeah, that's very cat-like.

But when he has these little mischievous moments and sort of does kill a kitty cat killua to punctuate them, it lets Togashi

highlight

these little moments of kind of impishness in Killura's character, when so often the thing Killura is doing is going, oh, well, you know, okay,

I guess I'm going to have to kill you.

Can I make a proposal?

Yeah, go right ahead.

It's not a proposal,

it's more of just a

point.

Kill young.

Is this anything?

It's something.

You kind of, you needed a killing ya.

Kill me.

Kill you.

Killing ya.

Yeah.

Killing ya.

But it sounds sort of like killing ya.

Which he does.

He does.

Well, actually, he probably does not do in this one.

Yeah.

And he finds it very hard and boring.

Yeah.

I mean, if you were really good at killing people and you had no moral qualms with killing people, I can see how it would immediately make navigating through problems much harder for you.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love to play Dungeon.

Does Tillio have morals?

Let's table that for, I guess, future episodes.

I think so.

I think every character has some set of morals in some way.

Kilo definitely has morals.

He was even before meeting Goat, he already didn't like killing people.

He just is he just

has a much lower bar for crossing that line because of his

horrible family.

How much of him not liking killing people was the same way that you don't like the Spice Girls because your little brother listens to them.

And then later on in your life, you're like, oh, the Spice Girls are actually great.

And it was just because I was being petty to a sibling.

You know how much of not liking killing is Killiwa going, you know, oh God, that's what my family does.

And I know why I was happy.

It's so embarrassing when he murders people.

Yeah.

I don't know.

We'll figure that out.

I feel like we are in a.

We're in Nen territory now, baby.

But let's see.

This is Nen country.

This is Nen country.

Wing says, don't practice Nen.

Me, smiling, delighted.

Kitty Cat Jack, they won't talk about Nen.

Yeah.

He ties us.

It's almost sort of like a self-punishment because you can tell that really what Tagashi wants to do is to never stop talking about Nen.

Yeah, Tagashi loves this.

I mean, we've been talking about Nin since the Hunter exam.

We just didn't know.

And this is kind of something I love.

And I want to dig into this when we get into Killua's fight.

Because, you know, Killua really demonstrates...

Killua.

Oh my god.

I do this in my own notes.

I confuse Hisuka and Killua.

And, you know?

Interesting.

Interesting.

Although in this one, you might be more forgiven for comparing or for confusing Gon and Hisuka.

I suppose, maybe.

Yeah.

We get a really interesting mirror early on where Hisuka is creepily shuddering watching

Goan's fight, but then we see Goan doing the exact same thing, basically, learning about Hisuka fighting and getting excited about watching that.

Yeah, really, really interesting.

Even just when he knows Hisuka is fighting and he can't watch.

Oh, yeah, yeah, it happens then too.

We specifically get talk of.

Should we talk about the Guido fight?

Because this kind of like goes into that stuff a little bit with like Gon's excitement.

Like what Gon's.

I guess we did talk about it, but the thing that Gon, like, the rush that Gon gets out of this is the spinning top man fight.

Yeah, Guido, the spinning top man.

I was trying to think of a rattly.

Rattly spin mannelly top man.

Spinnelly top man is better, I think.

During that fight,

I think it's we get the visual of Gon sort of like doing his dance among the tops, dodging them all.

And something about it's either him talking later, or it's Killowa talking about how the

he thinks that him,

the risk of losing his life is what excites Gon.

This might come up when Wing talks to him about what their intentions are.

The timeline's a little fuzzy in my head.

It's because they go back to the Guido fight twice.

It makes it hard to keep it straight.

Sure.

Yeah.

But I mean, even that is, that's a throwback also to Hunter exam, right?

Where like Goan is talking to Karapika after the Hisuka confrontation and Goan is like, I was scared, but also so excited.

Yeah, no, it's a Karapika that was like, hey, what the fuck?

This is the feeling that Goan learns during that fight is what being a hunter probably is.

Yeah, this is why my dad left.

This is why my dad left.

It's for them.

So it's also pursue.

Another part of that fight that I just wanted to highlight is like where Wing is watching it and he's like, ah, Goan will quickly realize he's over matched.

And it's like, my guy.

You know,

I know that's killed.

Well, he sort of learns it during that fight.

I think.

Dre, it was you that last week had in your

notes

about

Wing sort of being kind of afraid of Gonenkilo and their

potential.

Yeah, you said Wing is the first person to see Gonakila's potential and is close to understanding how terrifying it is.

At the end of one of the episodes in the last episode,

Wing says, like, they're amazing and terrifying or something.

And this is really, these four episodes kind of play that out.

It's not over, but you really like, he really dives deep into like kind of worrying about what he's done by unleashing them.

He calls them monsters at one point.

Yeah.

And yeah, we get a lot of scenes, like the realization that Go never meant to win this fight.

He only meant to do, to like, he meant to lose, really.

He went in going, I accept my loss.

And that is also very scary to him because like the stakes have been set.

He could easily die.

He is facing something he doesn't really understand or know how to defend against.

For Tigashi, Nen seems a lot like,

you know, in a lot of shows like this, in a lot of like battle anime with a

sort of energy,

power kind of setup, a lot of them are a lot like

a lot like Mech Assault.

And this one is like Chromehounds or

Elaborate for people who might not have played either of those.

Okay.

If it's hard to know.

Smack Brothers Street Fighter?

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sure.

Um

Oh, now you're speaking.

Wait, wait, here's, here's, this is the best one.

Mario Kart Forza.

Okay.

So, like,

like, in Dragon Ball Z, you just have energy and you can shoot it from your hands.

You learn how to do it.

But, like,

Tagashi is like, do you want to see all the fucking insides of this car?

Do you want to see the engine?

You want to see all this stuff that I got in here?

That's true.

Yeah.

26 times.

And,

you know, like

this is the first time you're loading into Forza.

And so you want to, you know, tinker around with all the stuff and see what's going on.

And

there just is a lot of it.

And Goan doesn't know any of that.

Goan is just like...

He doesn't think about Mario Burnett.

Goan thinks he's playing Mario Kart or like knows that he's moving from Mario Kart to something else, but he doesn't know what that is.

And he's never heard of Forza.

And he doesn't, he's never seen a

racing wheel.

Ugh.

Ugh.

Wing gives Goan a promise.

What does he call it?

A promise.

A promise thread.

Rope?

Yes, thread.

He ties around Goan's left pinky to sort of help focus the promise that he has made to not practice Nen and instead work on his his meditation.

And just as I was getting sick of Nen, we cut suddenly and genuinely kind of startlingly to a semi-ruined city made of

like dark clay material.

We've not seen this place before.

And who should show up?

It's my boy, Karapika.

I was delighted.

Yeah.

I didn't know Karapika was going to be in this episode.

In fact, I had so sort of not resigned myself because I like Gun and Killer a lot.

I had gotten so into my head that we weren't going to see Karapika and Leorio until everybody meets up again that the thought of cutting to them off doing their own stuff was kind of unthinkable to me.

So it was

similar to seeing Hisuka in the tower.

I was like, I did not think Hisuka would be involved here.

So it feels like he's breaking the rules when he shows up.

It was such a delight to see Karapika, who is having difficulty getting a job.

He's gone to see an extremely cool-looking lady in what we learn in the world.

She's the best.

I'm in love with her.

I'm fucking...

Sorry.

I'm not

going to describe what this lady looks like.

She fucking rules.

Yeah, she's got like purple hair covered in tattoos and facial piercings in this like dilapidated city that's built out of on the side of a mountaintop.

Like the establishing shot for this is so cool.

It's it's just this like city built on top of it like

built on top of a hill just on top of itself over and over like this like elevator terraced buildings almost yeah i was struggling to get the accurate words out there um

and she basically just like laughs at karapika for not being she's like i can't give you any work here because you can't see this and the audience because we've had our nen awakening we get to see this like spooky face that she summons from her fingertip.

But Karapika is like, I don't know what

that face does.

I know, right?

Yeah.

See, that's once you're once you're once you're properly nen-brained.

Well, you're like, here's the thing.

I had not, I'm so excited to talk about this Hisako fight.

The moment that Nen starts getting interesting to me is when you see people using it beyond just the mastery of the techniques of the four of the four

exercises.

Because

I can hear about Ren, Ren, Hatsu,

Zetsu, and Ten.

Yes, that's it.

You nailed it.

Yeah.

For, you know, until the cows come home.

But I want to see weirdos doing crazy stuff.

That's what I have.

You want to see the weirdos using Ren 10.

You know, at the start of this episode, I was a little bit worried.

I'm not worried anymore.

Yeah, no.

Yeah, so I had not even thought.

But here my heart sunk a little bit because I was like, ah, fuck.

We've cut to Karapika so that he can learn about Nen.

And I was right.

Because Karapika meets a sort of murderous

vagabond, I guess, in the woods

who shoots an explosive acorn at him and then handily takes away his hunter license and gives it back and says, basically, I'll train you in Nen.

He's a sort of violent, shabby Mr.

Wing.

If Mr.

Wing is a kind of placid, shabby Mr.

Wing.

He kind of looks like

a

non-copyright infringing Ryu knockoff.

Oh, he sure does.

Oh, yeah.

Uh-huh.

His gear is just brown instead of white.

And he's got a little bit more stubble.

Though there was that one Street Fighter where they gave Ryu facial hair and everyone went fucking insane on the internet.

Was that both the last two?

Or did he get rid of the gear?

So I think it's an alcohol.

I don't know if he still has it in six.

I don't know if it's an alt costume or not anyway.

Oh, he has it in six.

Never mind.

That's what I thought.

I thought that was one of the times everyone shrieked about sex.

Are they shrieking because they like it or are they shrieking because they don't like it?

Oh, they really like it.

They like it.

And sometimes they like it for reasons not related to the gameplay.

I was going to punch so hard with that beard.

Wait, hold on.

Is that okay?

I just realized why people talk about Overwatch so much.

Oh, we did get, however, the

woman at the Hunter Agency officially said to Karapika, your exam isn't over yet.

They actually did both say it, which is great because I know it's Tilly's favorite.

Oh, yeah.

Fake Ryo says it.

Or Fake Ryu says it too.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Isn't that where he explicitly says, like, yeah, this example is just a real hunter test is learning Nin.

Which prompts me a question.

I guess to Jack, because you all both know the answer to this.

I kind of forgot the answer to this.

How's Leorio going to learn Nen, do you think?

Oh, God.

Well, so here's the thing.

He's got to, because of how the show is structured.

Yes.

I feel like part of the playing the themes and variations on Nen is that we get to see the team, you know, use it in their own way.

And we can already see this a bit in Pozushi's different approaches to Nen than God and Killiwa's.

So it's.

Yes, Leorio has got to then.

I think he is going to get his aura.

What are they called?

Paws?

Aura pause?

What are they called?

No.

What are they called?

No, it's.

It's paws.

I can't make a cat, Leorio.

No, no, no.

Paw.

Poor.

Sorry.

No, his paws.

Pori.

He's going to get Leorio.

Hey, check out my cat over you.

He's got the cutest little pawns.

Big cat, Leorio.

Pre-loaded to that from being from Boston, I totally got

this exact thing.

Leorio is going to get his aura nodes blasted open accidentally.

He's just going to be studying at med school, and someone just comes up right behind him.

And

a lot of people blast their big white aura all over his back.

Well, no, hold on.

Now, hang on.

It's going to be like when Dr.

Manhattan gets made in the radioactive chamber.

Someone pushes him into the NEN room.

Someone pushes Leorio into the NED room.

March 15th, Leorio appears by the

back watch.

Screams for 10 minutes.

I don't know.

Leorio is not going to learn.

You know, it's like...

It's like...

He's not going to be happy about it for a long time.

He's not a.

He's not a patient chap.

And I think it's kind of definitely Gonunkiliu's sort of ability to be still that has really helped them with Nen so far.

I don't know.

Maybe this can be like a hot girl involved.

That seems like a way you could motivate Leorio into figuring out.

Also,

we've seen Leorio be Leorio.

But theoretically, he's trying to become a doctor, which I think trying to become a doctor requires a lot of patience.

So he must have some sort of secret patience that we haven't seen.

I mean, I'm sure

he's trying to be a doctor.

Jesus.

Um,

uh, yeah, I don't know.

I can't Leorio being a doctor is is is, I don't know.

I'm trying to think of a of a good sort of

Leorio being a doctor is like

trying to be a doctor.

Yes, Yes, sort of.

Like me trying to be a doctor.

Yeah.

Well, no, I don't think you're a very good doctor, Sylvie.

I don't think any of us would be good doctors.

I don't think anybody on Friends at the Table would be a good doctor.

I diagnose people all the time.

Yeah, me too.

Well, that's.

Yeah, you're probably the closest to like a medical doctor among us, Dre.

No, I think it's.

Yeah,

I got to get my COVID shot early because of that.

So there you go.

Damn.

Are you squeamish?

Like, in what way?

Of like doctor violence.

Like needles?

Doctors see like blood and stuff all the time, right?

Sure.

Like, I'm not afraid of needles.

But when you say doctor violence, I think of like something like software.

I think I am squeamish.

Doctor Violence is actually one of the floor masters.

Yeah, when I hear Dr.

Violence, I hear a guy that needs to say, don't worry, before he he introduces himself a lot.

Don't worry, but I'm Dr.

Violets.

All this is to say that I don't think Leorio is going to be great at night.

Is this a sufficient answer for you, Dre?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, no, I was just curious.

So we're on episode 31.

Have we.

Because that was the

Karapika stuff is the end of

episode 30.

It's kind of brief.

I was saddened by how brief the Karapika diversion was.

But we come on in on

Goan is healed.

It was one, took one month, not four, not two.

Goan's doing push-ups, and

Kilua's like

is impressed/slash jealous.

It's like,

we have something that like Goan is naturally better at than Kilua, which is like, oh, yeah, when I get hurt, I'm just almost instantly better.

Unexplainably so.

Here's my question, though.

I don't know if that does feel like that's what the show is saying, but I'm also wondering if this is also a, like,

another, like, implicit example of Goan's, like, rapid grasp of Nin, because I forget, I forget which one of the principles it is, right?

But it talks about it being the one that like slows aging and like significantly like improves your life.

That's true.

That is 10 that does that.

Yeah.

And so I'm wondering if it is also because was Tin the one that he was allowed to practice while he was

criticism.

Sorry, Sylvia, you can explain.

Yeah.

No, so the thing he's allowed to practice is the philosophy that Wing explains to them.

Okay.

Right.

The

flame.

The fake one.

Yeah.

The fake.

Yeah, the fake one.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not like,

we see that.

We see that Wing is

not

right about the thing that he says where the two nens are connected and that the slow way of practicing nen diligently, the meditation nen,

is a way to

exercise your spirit in a way that improves your sort of actual nen.

It's almost like the theory side of it, honestly, like is the way I've been thinking of it.

Where it's like, this is how you study it.

And then

when you're engaging in the actual use of it, you're practicing it.

Yeah.

When Goan goes to get his practicum hours.

But it is confusing because they don't really go

what he's doing.

They sort of gloss over the 10 that he's allowed to do as the other 10.

Because then it's like, study 10, but don't study Nen.

And it's like, okay, well, I can't.

Yeah.

But anyway, yeah, I wasn't sure if...

Because it definitely does seem like the show in Kilua is saying that this is just inherent to Goan.

But I was just, in my head, I was like, is this also

Nen's stuff?

The stuff that it reminded me of was like the other times that Goan has been hurt and immediately recovers.

Well, that's true.

Poisoning, where, yeah, like, or when he got fucking tranquilized.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

That's what I mean.

By the, what was that guy's name?

Or not by Hisuka, but by the Hunter.

Yeah, yeah, the Blow Dart guy.

And I can't remember how long that guy said it would take to recover.

Hisuka was like, you'll be good in three days, hopefully.

And Ghon stands up.

And then it was like, no, Goan stands up in that scene he stands up that's true yeah and then he goes and he like crawls back into the room yeah yeah yeah um so we've it is sort of established that for whatever reason gun can heal uh absurdly fast this is another uh sort of shonen trope that is just just i think sort of simply played into like there's no you know interesting twist on this it's just like yeah he's the main character he gets hurt and then he's fine one second later it's fine

in part, for sort of the economics of the show, right?

It's like we need Goan to be doing stuff.

Right, but if that's your goal, then just don't have him get as hurt.

No.

No, the show is about him getting hurt.

I would prefer it if he got hurt all the time, says Tagashi.

Yeah, Goan is fine.

And Killua has brought him a little gift, which is a set of tickets to go and see Hisuka versus someone called Castro.

Everyone is so excited about Hisuka's match.

And Killiwa says to Hisuka.

Oh my god, Jesus Christ.

Killiwa says to Goan, Hisuka is the real deal.

And he kind of breaks down his fighting record as if we wouldn't know this already.

Hisuka is the most frightening murderer in a show full of frightening murderers.

So I don't know why it's a surprise that he regularly just kills people in the ring.

Is that how we're to understand it?

Yeah, I think he said that, like,

all of his wins are close to all of his wins.

No, he had six out of eight of his wins were KOs.

Okay.

And of his six KOs, five of them were fatal.

Right.

And then Castro, who we meet, is the one who wasn't, who was the KO, but didn't.

I guess it doesn't

say necessarily if it was a KO or points victory with him.

But it's usually bad when you fight Isaka.

Okay.

It is notable that Hisaka has this very,

and we've talked about it a lot, this very twisted philosophy of like sort of cultivating a kill, of

you know, deliberately sparing somebody so that he can more effectively take the kill later.

This does not necessarily seem to apply in Heaven's Arena where he just is murdering people.

No, no, he straight up says

he says

towards the end of his fight,

towards the end of his fight, he was like, yeah, I let you live so that I hope hoping that you would

fulfill your potential, but you didn't.

Sorry.

So with these people that he's killing, do you think that they are people that he just doesn't see any potential in whatsoever?

Yeah,

I think it's like a mix of three things.

One, he can't lose four times or he gets kicked out and he wants to go higher.

The second thing is that he doesn't want to fight people that don't interest him, which is is why he has three losses and all of them are no-shows, but he has to sign up because there's a deadline.

Yeah.

The Coco says,

talking about Hisaka's no-shows, he says,

she says, Hisuka the magician is the Grim Reaper who's prone to taking days off, which is such a lovely Tagashi line.

It's so good.

And then the third thing is, yeah, I think it's finding people that he actually wants to fight.

So he wants to fight some of them.

Some of them he has to fight and he can't keep losing, or he'll get kicked out, and that's a bummer.

Now, of course, he could just not kill the people, he could just KO them.

Sure,

yeah, if he was a chump, but

yeah, come on, does that look like a chump to you?

I don't know.

Just murder clown, he's not just called regular clown, he's not called KO clown, he's not gonna wimp out and go halfway unless it, I guess, unless it serves him for later.

Unfortunately, it does really seem like murder is kind of the norm at level 200 of the battle tower.

They did spend all of that first section being like, yeah, these freaks up here will kill you on purpose.

I mean, that was the whole thing when like all weapons are allowed.

Yeah.

Like part of their the trial is like,

if you don't know nen when you come up here, we will shoot to kill outside of a match.

That's exactly it, right?

With because the nen initiates that they refer to, Sataso, God,

Sataso, Guido, and we learned the other guy's name in a Hunterpedia, Real Velt, I think it was.

Yeah, yeah, something like that.

Those three that I'm going to just call the Neninitiates because it's what they used to call them in a couple different episodes.

Oh,

they're not the new Blowjaw Brothers?

No, no.

What?

Come on, we got to keep things moving.

Can't live in the pandemic.

That's a title that's been bestowed already.

These guys can be the Brothers 3 despite not actually being related.

We don't know that.

Good point.

But it was pointed out that it was exceptional that they survived without having none, as opposed to dying like other people who have arrived without none.

Yeah.

And I am.

There is only limited interest or a kind of critical value in sort of going, but what's the deal with this world?

I am so curious what the deal is with this world.

Death games are not

allowed.

They're not legal

in our world because people would murder each other in death games, and that's something that we try and avoid.

Whatever government or organization in this does seem to sort of be saying, well, look, if you've signed the waivers and you've entered Heaven's Arena, even if you're a 12-year-old,

good luck, I guess.

Yeah.

Hey, fuck legal rights for children.

For sure.

You're right.

To get obliterated in Heaven's Arena.

Yeah, it is.

In a world like this, it does make more sense why you might be drawn towards the hunter exam, perhaps,

to sort of...

But it's like, well, you're probably going to die in the swamp there, too.

Maybe I would just be like a baker or something in the hunter-hunter world.

Maybe I'd just run a garden center.

I don't want anything to do with those weirdos.

How many conversations do you think parents have to have with their kids being like, listen, if you do this, you're going to die in that swamp?

You are just going to die in this swamp.

Everybody knows six people who've died in the hunter exams.

It sort of reminds me of

one of the sort of interesting things about

the psychonauts games is how the psychonauts are real.

But they also like have this kind of bizarre comic book like slash,

you know, uh uh fiction or semi-fiction wing to their thing where it's like oh yeah i it's like if the if america's cia had a comic book that detailed the actual exploits of the cia

uh like it's very odd that they both exist and also have comic books about them and it is it it is like i'm always thinking this about uh the hunter-hunter world, which is like, are these people famous?

Like, do people know about like the most famous hunters?

Like, are people writing comic books about the stuff they get up to?

I mean, Wing in his monologue, I think, from the last set of episodes, talking about like people who know Nin.

I mean, he did, he said a lot of them were like politicians or like famous athletes or writers or musicians or like sages or whatever.

So yeah, that's something we didn't mention was Wing's sort of thing about like some people just have a lot of nin without knowing that they have it and they will they have a lot of artists they'll just become famous like because of that um because they're like secretly nen geniuses that they don't even know that that's what they're doing

very clearly i mean gone is an example of that honestly gone is an example of that yeah or would be if it wasn't for learning it very very young

but also like mentioned buhara as cooks are probably nen geniuses yeah they like do they have like a michelin star restaurant out there somewhere?

A Hunter Michelin star restaurant?

Yeah.

My aunt went to the Hunter Michelin star restaurant and got killed.

You just don't mess with the Hunters.

Don't go anywhere near them.

I don't know.

I'm already a little resentful of like,

are we just going to recontextualize everything that we saw through Nen?

All that Hunter exam stuff?

I don't know.

We'll see.

But do we want to talk about Killua going to visit Castro?

Oh, so firstly, Wing says don't go and see the match.

Seeing the match is studying Nan.

Yeah, they're having a conversation.

They're literally being like, Gone's like,

should we ask Wing?

Like, is he going to be okay with this?

And Killu's like, of course he's going to be okay.

We're just going to watch the match.

He's at the top of the escalator.

No, I will not be okay with it.

Pretty good.

Very funny.

I've never met someone at the top of an escalator like that because I think it would only be read as threatening, right?

You're on the escalator.

There's no way you can go.

But it's hard to wait a little bit further back.

It's It's hard to sneak up on someone that way.

Wing had to have put a little bit of thought into it, probably.

I mean, we probably used uh,

yeah,

um, and was just very lucky that they didn't look where they were going while they slowly ascended the escalator.

Poor Jack, Jack is over here talking about, like, man, I hope we don't just recontextualize everything.

Nah, sorry, we're over here being like, oh my god, you choose in jetsu, right, Jack?

You know,

hey, hey, what do you think Shadowstep was?

Ah!

Yeah.

It's fucked up.

It's fucked up.

You can't say that.

I thought it was going to be...

Okay, fine.

No, no, no.

What did you think it was going to be?

I thought it was going to be like cool Zaldic family magic.

Like the Zaldics.

I mean, basically it is a...

It could be both.

Yes, you're right.

I suppose it could be both.

And that's a bit like saying, you know,

it's like the difference between music as a concept and musical instruments.

You know, like the Zelda's are playing their own musical instruments.

And in that sense, that's pretty interesting.

But it does just come back down to their doing Nen again.

Nen seems to be just a fundamental force in this world, like gravity or...

It's like physics.

Right.

And it is interesting, or I guess it's debatably interesting that this is like a veil.

It is a physical property of the world that has also been fully obscured from most people's daily life.

It's literally a secret and sort of a governmental secret.

Well,

we have to be really wary when we say something like a governmental secret in Hunter-Hunter.

When I don't know what,

I do not know what the kind of political or social structure of this world is

whatsoever.

And I want to be clear.

This isn't, I don't think this is a spoiler.

I think that, like, we're aware that the hunters are some sort of institution enough to

have

political ties all over the world

and they have this thing that is a secret i think that's a that is enough to be at least akin to a government to me

yeah definitely um i i i want to say this could i say

i want to clear it with other i want to clear it with the rest of these with the rest

okay hold on

um let's see.

I'll tell you what I want to say.

Are we typing?

I'm typing.

Yeah, I think that's it.

Okay.

You know,

it could be considered mildly a spoiler.

This is like a negative spoiler.

But the thing I wanted to say to see if it made you feel any better, I don't know what...

the rhythm echo is.

I don't know why it works.

I don't know if it's an end thing.

I have no clue what the rhythm echo is.

Yeah.

That is interesting because.

And I'm sure we're going to get some of this.

And we've kind of been beating about the bush talking about this Husackle fight, so I want to make sure we get to it.

So it's a big thing about the bush now.

It is a large,

violent bush.

Practically a tree.

Practically a tree at this point.

It's definitely a shrub.

Hedge.

Hedge.

Sometimes it is fun to see people do the weird thing.

Yeah.

And it gets less fun to me.

Sometimes, not always, gets less fun to me when I have a scholar character come on screen and then talk me through it, sort of, talk me through what happened step by step.

And something interesting happens at the end of the Hisaka fight.

He's sort of visited by a doctor who sees through his plan and talks through it.

And I'm sure we'll get to that.

But in that moment, it is a little more fun to me because it feels a bit like...

a con being described.

You know, that moment in the heist film where someone says, Oh, here's how you did it.

Here's how you did the trick.

And that's really fun.

But it is a little tiresome for me when it is, bless his heart, Mr.

Wing being like, and here are the techniques that he applied, you know.

And this could just be a personal taste thing.

I think really what it is, is encountering this arc for the first time.

My true suspicion is that if I go through this again, I will probably be on the other side of the table.

I think that the way that I've really come to understand this arc is

Tagashi has

done the sort of like

slow rollout of something like this before.

Um, when he was writing uh Yu Yu Hak Show, this was like very much like you get a piece here, you get a piece here, you get a piece here, you get a piece here

of like, uh, it's much less about like how stuff works and just like collecting new things to do with um spirit energy as it was called in that show and

and i know that

that he had a lot of regrets about how having to write that show went and what he was and wasn't allowed to do and what he did and didn't have the time or maybe budget to do uh and so i kind of see this as like

not a cop-out, but just sort of like a

lost leader that is like, or no, I guess it'd be the opposite of a lost leader.

It's it's sort of like, let me get this stuff out.

Maybe it's kind of blunt and maybe it's a little dry, but I want to get the rules on the table so that I can as quickly as possible start mixing and matching things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And hearing your your your three's first reaction to seeing the woman's cackling Nan's skull and going, I wonder what that thing does, is really exciting to me.

If that is a way that we are thinking about kind of the application of Nen, what weird things are we going to get to see Nen do?

Yeah.

That is fun.

Although that's very similar to the way I've been enjoying the show prior to this point, which was just framed as, what weird stuff am I going to see Tagashi do?

I just didn't know it was Nen kind of powering those engines.

I think another thing to keep in mind is like

you're a very rare kind of person who is like coming to this without a lot of knowledge of other shounen.

And so I think that this episode also has to do a lot of communicating to people who have seen a lot of different kinds of these shows, both people who are maybe interested in this kind of thing, like people who can use powers like this, but also having to illustrate the ways that it's different from other stuff and why it's important,

like how it works, instead of another show, which might not

even try to tell you how stuff works.

It's just part of the show that it works and it's fine.

And so, like, there's this whole audience of people that have certain expectations for how this stuff goes.

And I think that a lot of this is communicating to them specifically.

And it's like,

you needed a pamphlet before getting the encyclopedia, maybe ideally.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And instead, I'm just sort of getting the encyclopedia.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

It's 36 volumes that is called Nen.

Okay.

Before the fight, Killua goes to see Castro.

Castro sneaks up on him through what kind of looks like a weird teleportation.

Killua pretends to be just a regular Joe looking for an autograph and Castro basically says, What do you take me for?

I know exactly who you are.

And Gone, too.

You think that I don't research everybody on Floor 200, you idiot.

I thought it was really cute how he said, Gone's not with you today.

Yeah, that was really good.

That was good.

The two of them, the two of them together, um, and they have a little chat.

Castro essentially says, You're really capable, Killiua.

I will see you at the Battle Olympia.

You know, you're gonna go far.

His influence.

And Killiua.

Oh, go ahead.

Go ahead.

Oh, Killiwa has been affecting this kind of like

nonchalance, this kind of boredom, a desire not to fight.

And it's hard to tell how much.

Killua is so strange that it, you know, how much of this is that he actually doesn't want to fight because he is

regretful of his actions at the end of the Hunter exam and of his kind of movement towards beginning to reckon with his own violence?

And how much of it is that he's like an annoying little snot who is like, I don't want to fight anybody unless they're an interesting opponent.

You know, where have we heard this before?

Well, there's a third thing, three and a half things.

It's that, like, he learned that the secret is that there's just the battle tower and the battle Olympia.

And I think he genuinely didn't care about that especially when the the actual prize opened up to him which was getting stronger and beating his brother

yeah learning then yeah at that point he's like well this is you know why would i why would i climb higher than what is it about then um but yeah it was interesting to see

And we'll see this as we move forward, Castro challenging someone's nonchalance vis-à-vis fighting of saying, I think you are capable of being much more, not just violent, but much more sort of actively powerful than you are letting on.

And I will be ready for you when you are ready to engage with that.

Was kind of our first encounter with Castro.

He comes across very strange to me.

He's very friendly.

He's obviously knowledgeable.

But he he acts like

a celebrity who's like meeting someone who said, Oh, I also want to be an actor, and being like, I bet you'd be an amazing actor.

Like, it's kind of friendly but condescending.

It's sort of like if I had a conversation with Tom Hanks, I feel like this is how Tom Hanks would act to me.

What, Sylvie's bud, Tom Hanks?

Yeah.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

One-star repugnant.

Repugnant.

Evil.

Filmography.

I like Tom Hanks.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

She's much more of a Chet Hanks girly.

I get it.

I'm glad Chet Hanks is falling out of the news.

Who is Colin Hanks?

I do like Colin Hanks, actually.

Colin Hanks starred in one of my favorite underrated comedies of the 2000s, Orange County with Jack Black and John Lifgow and Caitlin, not Caitlin, Catherine O'Hara.

Really, really good movie.

Love it.

Tom Hanks's kid.

He is Tom Hanks' kid.

He's Gus Grimley in Fargo.

He's fantastic.

That is exactly the performance I think of as well.

Oh, interesting.

He's in Farnum.

I love that character.

What a great weirdo to show up halfway through a show.

He also does a lot of comedy directing.

If I'm remembering right, he directed a lot of Always Sunny.

But I could be wrong.

I had no idea that was Tom Hanks' kid.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's really good at Orange County.

Love that movie.

Best thing Tom ever made.

Yeah.

Shout out to Colin Hanks, I guess.

Shout out to Colin Hanks.

You'd be a great live-action wing.

How many.

It's really strange because part of this condescension could be on some level that Castro is like a floor 200 fighter talking to a 12-year-old.

Who's nine and one.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah.

And...

He's not like the chumps who the show really wants us to be interested in.

No, this guy is good.

And I'm so curious about, like,

this is a world in which

it is unusual, but not out of the question, to go to Heaven's Arena and see three 12-year-olds, you know, just destroy a team of capable adults.

And

do adults in this world know how to talk to children, given that they might have that capacity?

I don't know.

I don't know.

I certainly don't think that hunters do.

I don't know literally if Castro's a hunter, but it's the same idea.

And at some point, it's like, well,

if you're a castor, why wouldn't you just go be a hunter?

It's like, yeah.

I mean, if you were in, like,

if you met a 12-year-old and you were like, oh, yeah, this person just kills adults on the reg.

Yeah.

I don't think I'd be condescending, but I would definitely be weird about it, probably.

Right.

Yeah.

He might not know that much.

He might not know about the assassination stuff.

Well, but they're famous.

It's a famous family.

So who knows?

Yeah.

Yeah, people are placing bets on this.

I feel like they got to know at a certain point when people

the child killer.

I was thinking more, oh, Killer was Zoldic versus such and such.

Wait, why is that name so familiar?

Let me look him up on the internet.

Let me Google him real quick.

Zoldic of the Kuckeroo Zoldics?

Actually, no, due to a problem with the social security number

allocation, poor old Kevin Zoldic of the York News Zoldix, a perfectly normal guy, has been accidentally enrolled in this fight.

The fight begins.

This is very exciting.

And it's very exciting to me because,

you know, Castro seems cool.

These senior fighters are fun to watch fight.

Hisuka is basically always fun to watch fight, and we haven't seen Hisuka fight for a while.

This is the closest thing to a real fight that we've seen in a really, really long time.

Maybe in the whole show.

It's fucking great.

And as Hisaka is warming up, his theme starts playing,

and we get a full orchestral arrangement of Hisaka's theme.

being played.

This is the first time we have ever heard it.

It is wonderful.

And it's so strange because, you know, I don't know why you would choose this moment to deploy this kind of orchestration.

I suppose it's because he's on a big stage.

There are a lot of people watching.

You want to sell the kind of.

And I think that the showrunners know that we have been waiting for a fight like this for a long time.

So you want to sell it hard with the music.

But Hisaker has been in more consequential fights in the past.

You know, he's fighting Goan has been a more consequential fight.

Yeah.

But

this is the stage that the show is using to unveil what Nen actually is.

Yes, and Hisaka

performs.

He does a performance as much as a fight, which is wonderful.

So it makes so much sense that we have this just this incredible arrangement of Hisaka's theme.

Hisaka's theme is usually just played on castanets and flamenco guitars.

It's this very percussive flamenco

sort of melodic theme.

And here it is like expanded out to like loads of guitars and horns.

And the main theme is now played really high up on a violin.

It's really, really exciting.

The fight begins, and Castro kicks the shit out of Hisuka.

Yeah, immediately.

Yeah,

it's fun.

He deserves it.

It's good to see Hisuka, you know, take a few punches.

This is Hisuka's only fifth point that he's taken.

He got knocked down once in his first fight with Castro, took three points, and then only one other person landed even a single hit on him.

So it sort of sets the tone right away to see him take like an immediate hit.

And then takes another immediate hit.

Castro is teleporting around.

He keeps saying to Hisuka, you know, it's time for you to get serious.

Come on, really, really, you know, do the business.

Yeah.

Hisuka, throughout this whole fight, is just doing classic, creepy Hisuka witticism one after the other.

Just, he came to the fight locked and loaded with creepy witticisms prepared the night before uh he says something like i think i'll decide when i get serious if you don't mind midway through getting beaten up by castro

um and smiling like he's

well yeah path for the course getting getting hit but also being like haha

he's a real pervert about all of this

he's an asshole yeah sure yeah yeah i will say he knows what his deal is and he uh he really knows what his deal is he really knows what his deal is and he delivers every time He does not seem to have an off day as far as being a horrid little pervert is concerned.

You remind him, though, that you do not, in fact, got to hand it to him.

No.

You've got not going to hand it to him.

Castro says,

I'm going to take your right hand.

He's a curtain and he charges up.

Tiger bite fist.

His move, his nen move.

This is when I knew he was going to lose drastically.

Oh, yeah.

So, tiger bite fist, for anyone who has seen the anime Dragon Ball Z, is basically Yamcha's Wolf Fang Fist.

Yeah.

And Yamcha, if you haven't seen Dragon Ball Z, is famously known as the fella in that crater.

Oh, shit, I know that guy a lot.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So the second this guy, who's also got like the sort of like pretty boy vibe going on that Yamcha had,

he does have huge Yamcha.

He starts doing his like, this is my ultimate technique, the tiger bite fist.

I'm like, okay, he's like, is going to embarrass you.

It's comforting to know that.

Look at that, I'm right.

With the Yamcha comparison, which I think now is,

I think, right there in the text asking you to make the comparison, we now know that

Castro cannot talk to girls.

Oh, no, no, no fucking way.

Sure.

Thinks he can.

Very much.

He in the show can talk to girls because there are no girls, basically,

in Hunter Hunter.

Depends on your reading of Karapika.

I was going to say, Karapika is this baby.

Beauty person.

This is so funny because, you know, I've seen the show three times.

And,

like, the first time I watched it, you know, I'm taking it in the way I normally would take in a show.

The second time I watched it, I'm watching it with Isaac, and Isaac is like, Karapika also is trans, but is a trans man.

Yeah.

And I think that it's funny that everyone's claiming Karapika.

Everyone claims Karapika.

Everyone thinks Karapika.

Everyone gets Karapica's great.

Sees Karapika and they're like, that's the queer one.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Karapika.

They're great.

It is, I think it is.

I think it changes the reading a lot to be like, Karapika's Krabika's an out-trans man and not an versus Krabika is a closeted trans woman.

It is like a much more

so exciting.

Me shaking my head, looking sour, nen, me smiling, pointing at the camera, gender.

This show,

believe it or not, will get back into talking about gender at a certain point.

Whether it means to or not.

Oh,

it's Tagashi.

He has to mean it.

It's so.

There's a lot of stuff that feels like it could be by accident, but I also, you know,

Tagashi trying to talk about gender stretches all the way back into like the early 90s.

That is true.

Huh.

Huh.

I'm so curious, but here we are in the nen trenches.

Yeah.

The ninjas?

Yeah.

They're up in my ninjas right now.

Me projecting a malevolent purple aura.

They're up in my ninjas.

Anyway, all this is to say that Cat Star Charges, Tiger Bite Fist.

Hisuka puts his hand out

to get it cut off.

Like Clan putting out for a handcuff.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is, by the way, this is where I knew he was going to lose.

This is where I thought you were going.

This is also it, but like, I was there a little earlier.

I didn't make the wolf fang fist connection, but when Hisuka is like, Yes, you can take my arm, that's when I was like, It's over.

But Castro does a little trick, teleports behind Hisaka.

But he does cut off Hisuka's right arm.

The arm goes flying into the sky.

Hisuka says, This is all within expectations, as he catches his own severed arm.

And then

nonchalantly scratches his own shoulder with his severed hand.

Earlier, you said

Hisaka is no selling, losing an arm.

And

yeah, it almost looks like an animation era.

You know, it looks like Hisaka's model has come apart.

He is, he is, he doesn't flinch.

There is no visible blood at this point.

He, he, that, I mean, Hisaka is so pale anyway, just sort of this, like, this gaunt white figure holding a severed arm.

Uh, what it really looks like is in like a

fucking

stop-motion animated Tim Burton movie or whatever, you know, when like an arm comes off just bloodlessly and hangs out in the scene.

Yeah.

Hisaka figures out that Castro is summoning a doppelganger, is sort of siphoning off his aura, and a lot of business is made about this.

Do we.

Is this relevant?

Do we want to talk about doppelgangers?

Or is this just a thing Castro does?

This is thematic.

It seems weird that they spend so long on doppelgangers, but this ends up, this is like,

and we learn more about, like, that thing, they bring it back in the next set of episodes that we're going to watch.

Um, but there is like kind of a long explanation to, I guess it's not that long in the grand scheme of things, to Zushi from Wing about like how the doppelganger myth is about seeing someone that looks just like you, and they kind of steal your essence from you, uh, and like cause you sick until you kill them.

Um, and then

like, why are you telling me this?

And Zushi's like, and he's like, oh, nothing.

It's just he has an endpoint.

No, it's just a story.

But yeah, when you put it like that, yes, there are doubles that we are seeing in the show pretty consistently.

And often those doubles are one malevolent or violent or destructive entity paired with a sort of a reflection of them.

I'm thinking of Gon and Hisaka

in a major way.

So yes, I think I was reading it too closely by seeing Castro as like, I'm making an exact copy of myself and neglecting the metaphorical reading of like, watch for doubled characters and themes, one specifically sort of sapping away the energy and power of the other until they're killed.

And there's another thing which is

more

material to the show, which they again we'll get into this next

set,

but we learn

during the explanation of what's happening with between uh uh

uh i believe her name have we have we gotten her name the Nen Doctor?

I don't.

Yes, we have.

Okay.

We got it in subtitles at least.

Oh, which I sort of

considered to be cheating.

It is cheating.

It's not important.

It's Machi.

That's character's name is Machi.

But during the sort of back and forth between Machi and Hisuka about what happened during the fight,

you get the explanation of Hisuka to Castro, like you spent all of your time making this second version of you that you weren't strong enough to fight anymore.

Yeah, also interesting if we sort of like expand that metaphor out.

I'm so curious to see

how that will play.

Then, of course, Castro is, you know, Castro is now getting a bit, getting a bit tired of this.

And he powers up true tiger bite fist and he says, now I will sever your left arm, if only to see if you can maintain your appearance of disinterest.

And again, this is like, I feel like a direct,

we're being invited to draw a mirror there with Killua, right?

Killua's disinterest in fighting,

especially with Castro as kind of the

linking character there.

You know, Castro is trying to sort of urge someone into

breaking through an affected disinterestedness.

And

although there is, this is like

sort of misinterpreted by Castor, I think.

Like the, it is affected,

but Castor thinks that he's affecting disinterest because

Castor has grown so strong and he wants

sort of desperately wants to be acknowledged for his growth.

But really, the reason why he's affecting disinterest is because he is like doing a bit.

Hisuka?

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And as we move into episode 32, it's Hizuka's time to shine.

Yeah.

Now it's just magic tricks.

Have I talked on the.

I know I talked to you about it, Sylvie.

Have I talked on the show about a really disappointing film I watched with Jamie Lee Curtison called Terror Train?

No.

Oh, yeah.

Terror Train was disappointing.

Keith, this is what it...

Okay, let me tell you the premise, and you'll be even more sad.

So, this is from the late 70s.

It's just after Halloween came out, maybe the very early 80s, starring Jamie Lee Curtis.

She's a fucking great actress, obviously.

I was excited.

The premise is a bunch of high school students or college students, freshmen, board a New Year's Eve costume party on a steam train, and a masked slasher also boards the train with them.

And slasher villains his way through the cast, trading costumes every time, so that, like, you don't don't know who on the train is the slasher villain, etc.

How do you fuck up this premise?

And the answer is you cast David Copperfield, and a full two-thirds of the movie is just David Copperfield doing magic tricks.

It's like such a knowledge.

I don't know how you get it that wrong.

But this is the good mirror of that, which is that a lot of this episode is Hisuka just doing...

Magic tricks and it fucking rules.

The first trick he does is he says, now witness my powers of clairvoyance.

He puts a cloth over his seven hands and he transforms it into cards.

Not clairvoyance, Hisaka.

At that point, I was like, you know, that's fine.

Maybe he thinks of clairvoyance differently.

And then he does a pick a card magic trick.

Which I believe, and I didn't actually do this because it was happening too quickly and I was tired, is one of those like classic magic kids' magic book magic tricks where you perform a mathematical formula on any given number and it will always produce produce the same result.

Is that the case?

Yeah.

Yes, it is.

Oh, go ahead.

I just checked afterwards.

I did it with a couple of different numbers and was like, oh, yeah, yeah, no.

This is lovely.

This is one of the most sort of exciting moments I've seen in the show for a long time because Castro is doing this magic trick.

Also, I would just kill Hisaker at this point.

If I were Castro, I'd be like, I'm not.

Yeah.

Why are we pissing about doing all this stuff?

But Castro does the magic trick.

He does the maths.

And the whole audience does the maths.

And presumably the viewer is also doing the maths because there's a little...

Did we skip over something important real quick?

Did we skip over?

Going from two arms to one arm to no arms to one arm?

No, the number magic trick.

This happens first.

Yeah.

Yeah, we have to do it.

This is arm business because there's a prop with the...

There's a bit.

Part of the bit involves the first arm.

Yeah.

So we get this little subtitle across the bottom that's kind of showing Hiseka's formula, the formula he's asking you to do.

So you, the viewer, are also clearly being invited to do this

sort of formula.

And then Hiseker reaches into

the flesh of his severed arm.

And in kind of the first moment of like, oh, this is, Hisaker is, if not mortal, definitely like made of flesh, you get this really gross sound design as he pulls a bloody ace of spades from his hand and holds it up to the camera.

And that's the card that Castro and everybody in the audience and the viewer has gotten.

It only

rules so hard.

And you should be clear: when you say gotten from his hand, what you mean is gotten from inside of his forearm.

Yeah, he pulls it from out of his,

and not like out of the side of his hand.

He reaches it to get in there.

He gets it in there.

He gets gross.

It rules.

It's so thick.

I love this whole scene.

But I've talked in the past about Hisaka sort of being the only character who has,

beyond sort of breaking the fourth wall, quite unquote, breaking the fourth wall,

his ability to engage directly with the format of the show is something that I keep noticing, throwing the card directly through the screen.

That great moment in the last set of episodes where he responded directly to the narrator.

And now we are demonstrating Hisaka's power in such a way that he is able to clairvoyantly read the audience's view, not just the audience, the viewer at times' mind,

is just wonderful i don't think i've ever seen uh

that happen before because it relies on so many different things you know it relies on having a particular showman character who can do this sort of trick it also relies on putting them on a stage where they have the sort of time and reason to do this magic bullshit but then specifically situating it in this like there is a full crowd of people who are all also so excited about his

power there's an announcer you know hyping everybody up there are ticket scalpers that have been, you know, selling the tickets at really high prices.

And then to have this character, like Hiseka, look straight out of the screen and seemingly read the viewer's mind is such a great, like, piece of television.

It's, I, I was, I loved it.

Yeah.

And then it's got all this like weird gore of Hiseka losing his arms.

It's a fucking great scene.

I love this stuff.

And that the whole thing is like

a guys

to set up a like basically one-hit KO.

Yeah, yeah.

So he says

he pulls the card out, and Coco, the announcer, says, that's the bizarre behavior we expect from Isaka.

Not wrong.

Within expected parameters.

Yeah, within expected parameters.

I'd be really disappointed if he just showed up and killed someone with a gun or something, you know?

Then, yes, Castro sort of is starting to get a little flustered and cuts cuts off Hisuka's other arm.

But then Hisuka pulls his arm from behind his back to reveal that his right arm is now reattached.

He says, you'll dance yourself to death to

Castro.

That's so good.

So good.

That's so good.

And then in Hisuka's oldest and best horrible move, shoots him full of cards.

And does he kill him?

Is that guy dead?

Or is he

never saying either way?

I think he's dead.

That motherfucker is dead.

I think the implication is definitely that he's dead.

I did update the Hizaka Murder

child.

Can we get a quick image?

Can we get a total?

Yeah, we are currently at 13.25.

Oh, because of the

starting to worry that we're never going to get a 0.75 to round that out.

That can't be right.

That can't be right.

Yeah, yeah.

I believe in him.

Yeah, he'll find a way.

well we'll have to make sure to keep an eye out for potential three-quarter kills

an eye the math would get so confusing if it

especially because we've now written checks that we have to cash you know by doing uh non-non-full numbers You know, we can't say, oh, we're just going to count the eye as one, or we're just going to count the eye as 0.25 or whatever.

We've got to figure out the math there.

Yeah.

What percentage of a person is their eyes?

Oh, let me just Google this.

Less than

less than a 10.

Less than 10.

I weigh.

How much does an eye weigh?

7.5 grams.

Okay.

Wow, that's less than I thought it would be.

Human weight, whatever that's worth.

Okay, humans weigh, on average, whatever that's worth, about 60 kilograms, which is 6,000 grams.

Do you know what I mean?

You said 6.7?

It was 7.5 grams.

Okay.

So we're just going to, I'm just going to say 0.01 grams.

Yeah.

Wait, 0.01%?

Oh, no.

No, because we're calculating.

Hmm.

I see what you mean.

I was trying to figure out what percentage of a person was their eyes.

0.00125%.

Oh, wait, so that would be 0.12.

Yeah, 0.125%.

Because you're counting both eyes.

Okay.

No, no, no, no, that's just one.

That's just one.

I feel like gone right now.

It's 7.5 into 6,000, right?

Yeah.

Or sorry, well, 6,000 into 7.5.

Yeah, for one.

Right.

And so, yeah, so that's point.

For two

would be

0.25.

Okay, so Hisuka just needs to take out a good number of eyes.

Yeah, a bunch of eyes.

Okay.

I believe in him.

Yeah, and that's the end of the fight.

Just after saying you'll dance yourself to death, he shoots the man full of cards in this like

it's great.

It's really exploitative, but it's shot so well.

Just this, like, slow motion, almost like

slow-mo in a John Wu movie, you know, of Castro just getting card after card shot into him and his body recoiling as he's.

He looks like a zinger before each one, right?

Like, his approach

says something while each

pair of cards, like, I mean, he even gets the zinger, the dance-to-death thing.

That's his zinger.

Yeah.

I'm counting.

He's He'suka's.

Did we get the nen punch to the to the fist or to the face?

Oh, did we mention the punch to the face?

I don't know if we mentioned the punch to the face.

Hisuka punches

Castro.

So

one of the big tricks is...

I think we totally,

maybe I just am memory blanking.

Did we miss Hisuka reattaching his own arm?

No, no, we didn't.

We didn't miss that.

It appears.

We don't really see him reattach it.

It's like

he takes his hand back from behind his back.

It's got a

hand on it.

And then the other thing that happens, the thing that sets up the card throwing is he's sort of stunned by

the

other arm that was still on the ground sort of flies magically to his chin and punches him extremely hard.

And is stunned.

He tries to block the cards with a double, but he goes, You can't do a double.

It requires too much concentration.

You're stunned.

And then all the cards hit him, and then he does his little wiggle and dies.

What a way to go.

Yes.

His death wiggle.

Oh, man.

Oh, buddy.

I'll say, if that was me, those cards wouldn't have killed me.

Guy like me?

Guy like me is dodging.

Different.

No, no, absolutely not.

I am working as a fucking chartered accountant in York, New City.

And if a hunter.

I'm a floor master for sure.

Oh, God.

Back in his quarters, Hisaka meets a pink-haired doctor.

Question mark.

It's not clear.

She is here to fix Hiseka's injuries for a large amount of money.

Dressed like a ninja.

Yeah, sort of a mercenary doctor.

He shouldn't be charged about 70 million Jenny.

Yeah, yeah.

Who my subtitles have spoiled for me is called Machi.

I'm not going to play coy about not knowing her name.

Yeah, that's fine.

It makes it easier for the rest of us.

Yeah, that's true.

Although, God, I wish that I hadn't had Leorio Paradonite.

That was such a good one.

Yeah.

When they finally say his name in a long list of other names, it is such like a bizarre moment for the character, but also is like, wait, that's his name too?

It's such a weird moment.

Oh my god.

She sews Hiseka back together with Nen stitches because it has become clear that both of Hiseka's arms are not actually attached anymore.

And it is here that we learn two of Hisuka's Nen powers.

Dre, I think you've written down your delight at these powers.

No.

Well, Bungee Gum, great name.

The other one.

The other one is text your surprise.

I don't want to text your surprise.

And I hate it.

I hate it.

I don't want to text your surprise.

I hate it.

I hate it.

It's the slop that they serve you in a B movie about summer camp, like an evil summer camp.

It really is.

It's an Invader Zim joke.

They serve this at the cafeteria in the school from Invader Zim.

I just...

This was such a cool moment because...

Okay.

It's cool moments all the way down.

Hiseker reveals that he calls these two moves Bungie Gum and Texture Surprise.

Firstly, the idea of Hiseker naming his moves is wild.

He is such a strange character that him being like, yeah, like other people do, I've named my moves.

You know, I never really took Hiseker as a Tiger Fist, true Tiger Fist

guy or whatever.

What was that move called?

Yeah, Tiger Fist and True.

Tiger Fist Bite and True Tiger Fist Bite.

Yeah.

True, False War.

But uh, so he names them, and he also says that he named bungee gum, which is the technique that he uses.

It's sort of like um,

I'm gonna trade one reference for another, it's sort of like Ultra Hand from Tears of the Kingdom.

He can, like, attach two objects together through thin strands of his aura and use them to like pin objects to walls, or for example, pin a severed arm back onto his body for a short period of time, um, or like create these little bungee cords.

He named them after his favorite chewing gum when he was a child.

Scary.

I wrote down question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark.

Yeah, he seems like someone who children.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, for all

the many

valid criticisms that you could make of the novelist Roald Dahl, one of a really powerful characterization that he made that sticks with me all the time is in the book Matilda, there's this villainous child-hating headmistress

who claims that she was never a child.

Not even that she could never remember being a child, or not even that she hated being a child.

There is something so sort of cold and restrictive and

final about a claim that you were never a child, especially from an adult to a child.

Especially because, you know, when you're a kid, adults are these sort of

mystical, powerful entities entities

that your only link with is that they were a child once.

And to hear this character in Matilda, you know, just say, oh, I was never a child.

There is no commonality between us.

And I hate everything about you.

Can you tell me the opposite of that, real quick?

Oh, yeah.

This is a story from my life when

I was in high school, just telling a story at the lunch table.

And during the story, I referenced one of my parents.

I don't remember what the story was, but my friend John Melman stopped me.

I'll believe his name.

When my friend John.

Wait, John Melman?

Yeah, John Melman.

Or one of the other Johns.

Oh, it was John Melman.

When

John Melman stopped me.

When John Melman stopped me,

he was like.

Oh, he was just sort of taken aback and he explained him being taken aback by saying, you just seem like someone that doesn't have parents.

Whoa, whoa.

What a thing to say.

I kind of love it in a fucked up way.

I know, I know.

Yeah.

It's not, it didn't, it didn't hit me as like, you seem like an orphan.

It seemed like you seem like someone where no one ever told you to stop doing something.

Yeah, okay.

Which is, which is funny.

John Melvin was kind of cooking with that one.

Yeah.

Because I absolutely did

that who told me not to do stuff.

And you did not care for it.

No,

I listened.

I was well-behaved.

I was just also really funny.

You were a well-behaved kid?

I was extremely well-behaved.

Yeah.

I was fairly well-behaved.

I was just

the same.

I just had nothing.

I had nothing misbehaving to do.

Like, there was no, there was nothing that I would have gotten in trouble for doing

that I wanted to do.

Like the worst thing I ever did was never do my homework and other schoolwork.

Oh, who does that?

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

Um,

but yeah, I didn't, yeah, I didn't ever do anything wrong, get into trouble.

I was good, I was just funny.

That's that's great.

And you remain

currently, yeah, you've never done anything wrong, you're just funny.

Yeah, doesn't know what pogas means and didn't then.

Yeah, I definitely didn't then.

Quick sideboard, because you were talking about homework and not doing homework, reminded me of it, Keith.

Um, learning about nen in this way in these episodes feels like being told to practice your scales.

Yes,

Something that I was told throughout my entire childhood and resented and didn't.

And now I'm like

30-ish and I have, when I, whenever I have time to myself to do music rather than like making music professionally, really all I do is practice technique because I'm like, ah, fuck.

Yeah, okay.

I can see why this is useful.

And I feel like I'm probably going to feel the same way about Nan, where I'm like, yeah, you have got to practice the skills.

If it helps, we really only have one more session left in this season.

Get me out of here.

We have a three-episode

thing

next

time.

And then there's a little two-part that is really more of an introduction of the next season.

This is.

We will revisit this.

This is interesting to me.

Oh, yeah?

I'm so curious.

I don't know.

I.

we get a taste of it when um

when his ka is explaining what bungee gum and text your surprise is but nen concepts

the foundations may stop being explained but i feel like nen powers being explained is

not going anywhere anytime soon i'm fine with that that stuff's fun yeah it's much more like what's that weird face that the woman has versus like make sure to practice your wren or like, you've got to, you know,

the, the, like, the fundamental stuff is the stuff that's real, a real snooze to me.

But, but now I look at it and I'm like, oh, it's cute.

What cute beginnings.

Um, but with the first, yeah, the first time I definitely was like, this is math.

What are we doing?

You want to do something fun that we you should cut?

Yeah.

Okay, let's come back in.

Yeah.

Um, where were we?

We're talking about Hiseker and children.

Okay.

But what we get

the other way around.

But what we get is kind of the other way around with Hiseker.

We get this weird void, you know, where you can't possibly imagine Hiseker as a child.

And yet the show asks us to, or

suddenly

affords us that avenue of...

thought where before this point i was sort of like hiseker was born fully formed from the head of zeus you know?

Yeah.

It's just like, he had to paint on his face.

It's hard to imagine him even liking something like a gum.

Like, let alone being in his head.

He's liking anything.

He gets nostalgic, apparently.

He's nostalgic about this gum.

Yeah.

And it is so strange to have this.

It's like we pushed against a door that we thought was locked and it opened and then there was nothing behind it.

Yeah.

You know?

It's something that, like, in another context might be humanizing, but is actually kind of like jarring and disorienting.

Further alienates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, you were a child and you're like this now?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And in an earth world, I'd say, you know, what happened?

What material conditions have you experienced, you know, that in the way that we all experience conditions form us into the adults that we are today?

However, in the hunter-hunter world, it could just as easily have been he sucker found a clown paint and then just became evil.

Perfectly normal child who becomes evil.

As she leaves, Machi passes on a message, which is just our punchline to this scene.

It was lovely.

She says, All troop members are set to be

in York, New City, on the 30th, not just those who don't have anything to do.

And Hisuka says, the boss will probably be...

probably be coming.

And

Machi says, our biggest mission mission yet.

And so we have confirmation, at least for the next 10 minutes, that Isuka is a member of the Phantom Troop.

This is less than 10 minutes.

This is also, I think, our first

confirmed on-screen Phantom Troop member in Machi.

Is that the case?

Confirmed.

I'm sure we've seen some weirdos before, but

we've only seen silhouettes up to this point.

Yeah, we've seen the silhouette of the full troop, I think, right?

At least at one point.

We have, yeah.

Oh, and we've seen

Crowloe's face.

Crowlo in the title sequence.

Yeah.

And then some of those people are in there, too.

Yeah.

But this is our first in, you know, in

show appearance of the Phantom Troop.

And it's a woman doing medical surgery, which is...

It's so cool the way that stuff works.

Oh, it fucking rules.

Did we went over the explanation of how his stuff works?

Oh, he has Bungee Cord, and he has a thing that Texas Surprise lets him change the texture of an object.

And so he basically does sort of like

human papier mache to just hold his hands to his body while he's very funny.

And the implication that I want to get into is that, like, so Machi calls what he did performance art.

And it very much is implied that Hisuka knew that this is what was going to happen the entire time.

He had already told her to be there and that he would pay her.

He's like holding out his arms, like, yeah, cut him off.

Like, it seemed like his point in this fight was to get his arms cut off and then reattach them like a freak and then win the fight.

There's definitely something to it to me that felt like, oh, he knows that Gone and Killow are going to be watching this.

Yeah, that also is true.

And.

And then the other thing is that there's a moment also, he's got no arms.

And at this point, this is when he tells Machi that if he had just stayed composed, he would have had a fighting chance.

Which is, you know, I think if we take him at his word, that's something you should never do with Hisaka.

I don't know.

When it comes to fighting, I think that he probably is right about that.

I think that's what he gave him, he gave up both his arms as part of a freaky show, and then they were on about even ground.

Which is startling, I think.

I think that's I think that's a, that is a, that should be

like a startling thing if you choose to take it at face value.

I think that I do.

Yeah.

I, I, I, I don't know.

I, I, I anticipate that

the full picture of Hisaka

will come into focus when I have finished making this show.

But right now, I am, you know,

trying to figure it out.

I think like,

you know, if you've ever used a camera without like autofocus, you know, you over-focus and then you recorrect it and you go back a little bit too far.

You're trying to find the exact right point.

I think Hizuka is a lot like that.

I think that Hizuka will be coming in and out of focus a lot.

Great.

Cool.

That's a very good way to put it, actually.

Yeah.

And probably deliberate.

Oh, sure.

That's definitely a way to write a character.

There's going to be stuff that's happening that you are not going to believe is happening based on how you feel right now.

What a pitch.

Yeah.

You sound like a movie trailer announcer from the 1940s.

There is going to be stuff on the screen.

You'll think of trains coming towards you.

You fellows are going to get alert of this.

Okay.

Killua responds to, goes back to God and says the fight was boring, but he's only lying to sort of.

Has anyone here played Tales of Symphonia?

No.

No, I haven't.

There's a very famous actually I lied scene where he does it like three times and one in like 30 seconds, basically.

And it just reminded me of that.

We don't need to get into it.

it's the thing that's so striking about it is how quickly he admits to lying and how little he changes from between lying and not lying anymore where he's like

he's like yeah it was boring

no i was lying it was awesome it was actually really interesting

so flat the vocal perform wrong killer is fantastic i think we've talked about her performance in the past but she's she's crushing it.

Oh, there's sorry.

I'm sorry about this.

There's a couple of things from that fight that I missed because I wasn't looking at my notes that I want to hit, just real quick.

One of my favorite lines: when he's actually doing that

little algorithm trick with the number card, the announcer says, There are no points for tricks.

That had no effect on the match.

It's great.

So funny.

And then we get the return of Hacker Hisuka

because

he explaining why

Castro can't beat him.

He basically is like,

you tried to run a two-memory-intensive program and you're out of RAM is basically what he says.

Yeah,

I don't know what to do with this.

And I wonder if Yoel can help.

You'll know in the next session.

Okay, so it's not.

Right.

You can ask a question.

I shouldn't stop you from asking.

Is it coincidence that we've now seen several sort of technology and uses of technology metaphors with Hiseka, or is there something going on there?

Oh, sorry.

I thought you were going to ask something else.

I think it's just

a weird.

It's either a weird bit of characterization that is not important,

or it's just like Tagashi's personality kind of poking through these cracks in the writing.

In the early 2000s.

Yeah, yeah.

In the 90s.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

Yeah, because it is weird.

We've had Hisaka cyber-stalking people, and then we've had Hisaka breaking down how a 90s computer is.

It's definitely something that I didn't notice about the writing of his character until Dre pointed it out last episode.

I'm not missing something, right?

There's no clear link between murderous clowns and computers.

Uh, let's see.

No, not really.

I mean, it's a Hisaka is talking about procedure and a sort of mechanical or computerized procedure.

He's viewing a person's

life through the lens of a computer.

But

I don't think that's related to Hisaka at all.

Yeah, I think there's a.

There is one avenue here that I can see, and it has to do with sort of Hisuka as a sort of watchful judge of the people around him.

And there's a there's

there's a point where we've used, Jack, you did in a very early episode use a video game analogy for how the hunters operate.

And I used a similar analogy, sort of forgetting that you did that in like episode one or two,

like in episode like

seven or something.

And

this is, isn't really a spoiler, but Hiseka goes on to continue judging people the way that we've seen him do.

But he will apply like a number score sometimes.

And I think that there's like this little bit of like Hisuka playing an RPG thing that's happening.

Sure.

Where

like.

Oh, Jack,

I know you played some Starfield.

You know how the ship engine works where you're allocating energy to different parts of the ship?

Oh, yeah, sure.

I I think that

there's a thing here where he's like, I beat you in the fight because you had the points in the wrong spots is like

the vibe that I'm going to be.

And that kind of focus, that kind of flattening of personhood down to those criteria.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's a power scaler.

He's a power scaler.

He kind of is, right?

Yeah.

Didn't we talk about, oh, someone was being a power scaler a while ago.

Maybe it was us.

We definitely have discussed power scaling before.

Yeah, I wish I introduced me to the concepts.

I lived in a beautiful world.

Yeah,

but power scaling.

Power scaling is when people erroneously tried to say that Hisuka could beat Goku in a fight when obviously he couldn't.

I mean, he could trick Goku, but he couldn't beat him in a fight.

Right, yeah.

Goku's now.

Could I trick Goku?

Yes.

You could trick Goku.

Yes,

absolutely.

But I couldn't trick Hisuka.

Maybe not.

Probably not.

Definitely much more immune to tricks.

Man, here's the thing, though.

I'm real, right?

And when I close the streaming platform, Hisaka stops.

That is a kind of trick.

That is a true trick.

That's the kind of power that I.

You're constantly making his whole world appear and disappear.

Yeah, that's true.

He causes me no problem now.

He causes me no problem when he's on television other than that I have to write notes about his awful antics.

Speaking of, shower Hisaka.

Right.

An antic.

Yeah, buddy.

This is also weird.

I guess I never really thought of Hisaka needing to take a shower.

Hisaka is so.

Yeah, he's a human person.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It is very strange.

This reference to him being a child once and then him doing something as normal as like

it's like very it is very weird.

Just like he's like this awful specter that is haunting the main characters of the show and then all of a sudden they're like he's an awful specter that had a childhood and has a shower

and he's like ripped right the camera is kind of oh yeah there's awful

real

lascivious like look at hisuka in the shower he's he's he's got all his muscles his hair is like wet down over his head it is uh on the one hand kind of weird but on the other hand hisuka himself is this lascivious lens through the show yeah so on some some level, I can understand, not in the sense of like,

he's getting a taste of his own medicine or whatever, but this is the grammar by which Hisuka operates.

So it makes sense that, and I think Togashi has this kind of lascivious interest in Hisuka as well.

It makes sense that we would kind of get this camera angle.

But the really startling thing for me was, oh, Hisuka has a body rather than just being like a weird...

mannequin almost who loses you know we saw him lose both his arms earlier without flinching i wrote down in my notes and i think i've written it down several times now in different contexts, like, what is Hisuka?

You know, is he a person?

Is he sort of like a lich or a ghoul?

Is he like a guy?

I call him a ghoul, but I don't know if it's literal.

Much like Leorio, Hisuka is just a guy.

He is just a guy.

And there was something so...

disconcertingly disarming about just seeing him take a shower.

Yeah.

As Machi, and I think this is so deliberate, this feeling is so deliberate, because over it we get Machi walking away.

Yeah.

After Hizuka unsuccessfully and sort of clumsily asks her on a date.

Yeah, yeah.

And she is having absolutely none of it.

Yeah.

She says some of the coolest lines about Hizuka we've gotten.

He says,

he is a mystery.

He never talks about his past.

It doesn't interest him.

He doesn't belong to anything or anyone.

He's his own man because he's absolutely convinced that he's the most powerful.

It's also a really funny thing to say right after he was talking about his past.

This is exactly it.

You know, setting that monologue against these

very intimate images of more intimate images of Hisuka than we have gotten so far is a real choice and produces a really odd affect.

And I'm curious if you all felt the same way.

This feels like a...

not like a turning point, but like a really weird pivot with Hisuka.

And did you feel the same way when you saw it the first time?

Or what's your takeaway in terms of these kind of reveals that we've gotten?

This is one of those things where I wonder if me having seen the show has affected my perception of things coming back into it.

I'm trying to recall without being colored by

watching it through this time, it didn't actually feel that

out of

like it made sense with my idea of Hisuka as a character.

Um

like there it the the

The things that it Machi?

That's her name, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The thing she says that stands out to me is like he's never thinking about the past.

He's always looking at the future, which comes into play a lot with how he looks at the like people that he wants to fight and stuff.

But then the fact that he's named his power after this after candy that he liked when he was a kid does sort of

to me it was just like oh this accentuates the like childish nature that he approaches all this stuff with like this is something that really emphasizes the like this is a game to me right i'm the funny clown

yeah

yeah it's like his famous line i'm the funny clown

i'm the funny clown He doesn't really have a catchphrase, does he?

Well, his catchphrase is just like creepy noise.

It's yeah, it's make a creepy sound um don't

nobody on call make a creepy sound okay no nobody that guy's hard uh although he does reveal that he has a gigantic phantom troop tattoo on his back or uh or

i have a question about this first uh

why does the tattoo have a four in it

oh Can we answer this?

Is this something I forgot?

Okay, cool.

Right.

I just remembered that, like,

didn't Magitani claim something about phantom troop tattoos?

Magitani claimed, like, phantom troop people mock their tattoos for the number of people they've killed.

And then Karapika said, you're a fucking idiot.

Yeah.

Yeah, because they've killed too many to, like, count.

So my suspicion.

That was the.

So I don't remember what Magitani says about the tattoo.

I do remember he says that the wrong number of people are in the Phantom Troop.

Karabika knows how many people are in the Phantom Troop.

I think that he says,

should I say?

I think that he said, I don't think it really matters.

It's not a huge.

This is Jack's discretion to me.

Let's hold off.

My guess is that Phantom Troop members are...

My guess is that the Phantom Troop...

All right, here we go.

I think that Matani was kind of right.

I'm theory of crafting here.

Well, so the people that he kills, those were the tattoos that he had, the teardrops that he had.

Oh, sure.

Not the number from the tattoo.

From the spider.

I think that that phantom troop tattoos have numbers and that indicates the position on a kind of seat that you are in in the phantom troop i think the phantom troop is a one-in-one out gang of murderers uh and much like the um oh god the um

the spies the curtain spies in partisan who are like oh i'm the lace and i'll always be the lace and if i die then this person will replace me as the lace or whatever i think phantom troop there are like seats and I think that the four in Hisuka's

thing, along with being Hisaka's, you know, four death number theming, is representative of him in the fourth seat in the Phantom Troop.

That's my guess.

However,

it's texture surprise.

It's just texture surprise.

He pulls it off and he doesn't seem to be in the Phantom Troop at all, maybe.

Machi seems to think that he is.

Machi absolutely thinks he is.

In fact, the narrator says Hisuka is masquerading as a member of the Phantom Troop, but to him, the troop is just another target.

This is...

Oh, yeah.

This is fucking wild.

So Hisaka says, I've found some new toys to play with.

As we see Gonan Killiwa, he sort of imagines...

He flashes back to them walking through his wren.

And then he says, time to start the hunt.

And I was like, oh, he's going to hunt Gonan Kiliwa.

But then the narrator says, to Hisaka,

Hisaka has been masquerading as the Phantom Troop member.

To him, the troop is just another target, which is really cool.

I mean, the thing we know about the Phantom Troop is that they are the

murderers, murderers, you know?

Yeah.

And so if Hisaka is...

The comedian's comedian is like they're.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Like a real Mitch Hedberg type or, you know.

Andy Kindler.

I don't know who that is.

There we go.

That's why

he's a comedian's comedian.

Yeah.

Never try to give Hiseka a receipt for donuts.

No, no.

No, we don't need to put ink and paper here.

So if he's going to try and kill them.

I don't get that.

That's a Mitch Hedberger.

Oh, okay.

He says, I don't need a receipt for donuts.

It's one donut.

We don't need to bring paper and ink into the situation.

His delivery is better than mine and Treasure because he is Mitch Hedberger.

Yeah, no, of course.

He's a Mitch Hedberger.

He's a

pour one out.

Pour one out all the time.

Where was I?

Sorry, Chief.

One and one out.

Hiseka, fourth seat.

Yeah, but Hisuka has clicked on.

Organization 13.

He has been masquerading as a Phantom Troop member for long enough that Machi believes that he is a member of the Phantom Troop.

This raises the question: what is the difference between pretending to be a member of the Phantom Troop and actually being a member of the Phantom Troop?

I'm curious about that.

Not having to get to get a tattoo not having to get a massive spider tattoo yeah i suppose well i mean i guess i read that as like he did get the tattoo it's just he got the tattoo on oh

surprise sheet that he attached to it well because he can have he can change the the look of the things i just assume that he just did the whole tattoo with nen oh

but maybe it's a thing where they watch you get the tattoo but i don't know but again i mean what this really is is it's just drawing the orbits of all these characters back together.

We've done so much like talking about the Phantom Troop.

Like, we know all these little bits at this point, and like now we know this huge bit of inside information that Hisuka's a fake member of the Phantom Troop.

And we're like, but what does that even mean?

What does it even mean to be a member of the Phantom Troop?

Like, yeah, totally.

Like, all this weird, these weird little bits of information.

I know that I remember at this point of the show, I'm like itching to meet the Phantom Troop.

Yeah, well, and I get to see them at the end and beginning of every episode, too.

So, yeah, they tend you.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um, and all I can think about is the stupid screenshot stream with the Phantom Troop in.

And I'm like, was Machi in that stream?

She was, right?

She was in that screenshot.

Yeah.

Well, actually, I don't know for sure.

I tell you who wasn't in that screenshot.

Who?

Isaka wasn't in that screenshot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

That is interesting.

I'll say that if that, if everything was the exact same and Hisuka was in that screenshot, I wouldn't have given it to you.

Yes, in part because I'd have just been like, who the fuck is that?

That guy looks like a real nasty freak.

Actually, I don't know.

If I saw Hisuka in a lineup with the...

The Phantom Troop's aesthetic is very goth.

Well, that's not true.

Krillo Lucifer.

He is very goth.

And the short little guy who's facing him in that screenshot is also very goth.

Yeah, there's a few goths, but then there's also the there's the

mummy

star character.

There's the brave little soldier boy.

Yeah,

there's the like samurai guy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

I'm so excited to meet the Phantom Troop.

And we can't be that far off because they're going to York New City.

You know, they are in the opening and closing credits of this arc.

It's already been like three of the six months.

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll get there.

Yeah.

Episode 33 does not have a lot in it.

It's a fairly thin episode by my calculation, but I'm curious to see if there is stuff in it that is sticking out to other people.

Yeah, I think that for me, the biggest thing is like a kind of change in what Kiloa will go out of his way to do.

Um, like we are a far cry from

uh Kiloa sh like like, telling Gunn to forget Leorio back in the first phase of the hunter exam.

Um, in this one, he, like, goes through kind of a lot of effort to make sure that Zushi is safe, bring him home, make a deal that is bad for him to help Zushi and Ghan, kind of at the same time, and then, like, take kind of drastic revenge on Ghan's behalf, which is that, that's not that surprising.

Um,

uh, but uh, I think it's sort of interesting to see, like, especially compared to like

Kilo being annoyed when Gunn was paying attention to other people and was like kind of putting himself at risk for Leorio to seeing what he's willing to do now for a character that he has not spent that much time with,

in all honesty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Um,

Wing starts letting them train again and immediately introduces some new nen techniques.

A high-level application of Zetzu known as In, which lets Isaka hide his aura.

Go lets you put your own Ren into your eyes to see it.

They have taken us for absolute fools.

Well, you can always see the big stuff, but it's the little stuff that's hard to see.

Oh, this is a huge, this is huge to me.

When you use a camera,

you can fix.

I'm holding it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

This blew my mind.

You can record an end onto a DVD.

This is...

Cameras can see aura.

Cameras can see aura, but they don't render it onto the screen.

Right.

You have to do the same thing that you would have to do as if you were there.

I don't know what the implications of this are.

Actually, there's a line that's really, that really makes me think of this.

Let me find it.

It's fucking great.

It's at the beginning of

31.

Killer is shocked that Gon has recovered so quickly, and he says, What is your body made of, by the way?

To which Gon says, I don't really know how to answer that.

Which is so good.

Something to tell.

Yeah,

I feel the same way about learning that cameras can see Nen, or it's like, I don't really know what to do with this information, but it's it's it's really cool.

It is, it's cool.

Um,

and we'll see if there's any other ways that Nen interfaces with technology, I guess.

I guess.

Can you send someone Nen in an email?

Can I send malicious Ren to someone in a Discord message?

I bet I can.

I hope so.

I'm going to send you all some malicious Ren now in Discord, and you have to tell me if you feel it's malicious energy.

No, don't worry.

Don't worry.

Don't worry.

It's because I'm not putting my full malicious spirit into it.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Ah!

Oh, there we go.

Yep.

Turns out I'm weak.

That really hurt me.

Oh, no, Keith.

Yep.

What have you posted, Sylvie?

You've posted three scary images.

That's Hisaka's Bloodlust.

Yeah, that's Hiseka's Bloodlust.

Oh, yeah, there he is.

We have a Hisaka emoji.

That's just one that I have personally.

You have a personal Hisaka emoji.

I have a personal hisaka emoji.

Persical his

person.

Another thing that we get is we have, we actually are, we mentioned this already, but I just want to highlight Wing sort of demonstrating how the two nens are in fact related.

And I think it's sort of like a proof of concept.

It's really easy to get wrapped up in Gon and Kilo's enthusiasm and like desire to press forward and their sort of general ambition for learning and growing and be like, come on, Wing,

pedal to the metal.

Let's teach these kids some nen.

But,

you know, especially when his only other student is Zushi, who is like progressing so slowly

compared to Gon and Kilua.

But we do get...

He's trying to roll.

Yeah, he's doing his best.

We get this sort of like proof that Wing knows what he's talking about, kind of.

Kilua and Gon are both like kind of concerned that they won't be able to do 10 because it's been two months because Kilua decided to...

We didn't mention this kilowa decided to also be grounded alongside gone so that he wouldn't get too good um without his friends he doesn't want to leave gone behind it's adorable exact wording yeah i love it these two are perfect and uh uh

so they do 10 and it's like oh they've actually like drastically improved their 10 while you know doing this sort of uh the flame den practice um so i just like that they kind of prove that if

Gona Kiluwa had like the patience and like weren't the subjects of a television show and a manga, if they had just been able to like live a sort of normal nen life and studied at a regular pace under Wing, they'd probably be

doing really, really well.

Maybe a little bit more slowly, but they'd probably

be extremely excelling.

uh in that kind of environment and maybe more chill and maybe more chill

And then we get a good quote from Wing.

Train with all of your might, play just as hard and enjoy life.

I think that would be

something that they should both remember.

He gives some genuinely good advice in this.

Some advice applicable, even if you don't live in weirdo, fucked up Hunter World.

Because Killiwa says, hey, can I do all that shit?

He's like a bit please.

Yes, can I have weird rubber nen?

And Wing kind of gives two answers.

He says yes and no.

He says, look, if it's, if, if,

if nen is being worked, you can learn how to do it.

But everybody's nen is specific to them, and people's nen grows and changes, and the style of it changes in different ways.

And you can very easily learn how to do nen just like someone else, but I would really discourage you from just trying to follow that and instead think about what it is that you like.

And he gives this really great

advice about developing your own sort of personal style.

It was really strange hearing Wing say that.

And, you know, having heard that about how to make music or how to write stories or whatever.

You know, when you are younger or getting started, you feel this real excitement and temptation about other people's work because you're so moved by these other people's work.

Like, for example, cutting off both your hands and pulling a magic card out of your wrist.

And then as you mature as a creative person or as an artist and you

sort of start to think to yourself, what is it that I actually like to make?

You know, what might I actually end up making?

Rather than trying to find your own style sort of by brute force, you eventually get to a point where you're like, oh, wait a second, I think I do actually have my own personal style.

I've discovered my own personal Nen now and it's tearing off both my arms and pulling a playing card out of my wrist.

And I thought that was kind of sweet hearing Wing work through like actual creative advice on a television show about Nen.

And we also sort of get, because of this, we get the answer to Wing sort of enigmatically acknowledging his master in an earlier episode.

Yeah, Wing says, what have I done?

My master.

He's so woken up.

And also weirdly has a smile in his face.

It's very reminiscent of how Gone feels when watching.

hearing about Hiseka's fight and stuff.

Like it has that same energy of like, this is scary, but I'm excited about it because it's scary.

Yeah, so he mentioned this master.

We don't know who they are, and then we finally get the answer.

It's

Fleetwood Mac, go your own way.

Fleetwood Mac are definitely Nen users.

Yes.

Yeah.

Can you be a Nen user, or are you just a Nen haver?

Nen ha.

Well, everyone is a Nen haver.

Yeah.

Well, everyone's an R, everyone has Aura.

Right, right, yes.

Yeah.

Well, if the aura is Nen, you know, the Nen just escapes through and it doesn't affect you.

I think you're a nen user, whether you're intentional or not, once the nen starts, like, changing the course of your life.

But yes, Lindsey Buckingham, Stevie Nicks, Christy McVie, Mick Fleetwood.

Yeah.

Nen users.

All nen users.

Yeah, they wrote Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.

That's a great one.

That is a great one.

I think it was very overplayed when I was a kid.

I heard it so many times on commercials or whatever.

And it was only in the last couple of years that I was listening to rumors front to back.

And I was like, that's so fucking whips.

That's a great song.

For me, it's Landslide, is the one that I like, but was like as a kid way overplayed.

Oh, sure.

Landslide is brutal.

It is.

It's brutal.

It is brutal.

You ever hear Landslide and are like, well, the next three and a half minutes of my life are some deep introspection.

I spent most of my time hearing that song being eight, so no.

What does an eight-year-old think landslide is about?

A landslide, probably.

I think that I got it.

I just

don't think I had the capacity to treat it properly.

It's much like learning men too quickly.

Yeah, well, back to the show.

Okay.

Bringing it back, yeah.

Now the three,

what did you call them earlier?

You had a great name for them.

I can't remember who called them.

Oh, the nen initiates?

The nen initiates show up.

Oh.

No, yeah, I called them the Hand Job Brothers.

Sure.

Bleep them.

Sorry, I thought that's what you were saying.

I thought you said that was a great name.

My bad.

Yeah, so the three Nen Initiates, which is someone described as a person with one arm and a face like a mask, Guido, who is a spinning top person, and then

Reovelt.

Realvel.

So the names are Saraso is the guy whose face looks like a mask or is described as having a face that looks like a mask.

And then at the end of one of the episodes, we get a Gone and Killowa's Hunterpedia where I believe,

yeah, the man in the wheelchair is named Real Veld.

R-I-E-H-L-V-E-L-T.

And then, yeah, Guido is

Spinny Top Man.

And these three are very much sort of solidifying themselves as not quite as powerful as your Castros or your Hisakas, but they are coming to represent the destructive power of Nen.

Yeah.

These are people who.

Destructive and self-destructive.

Yes, definitely.

Although I'm always a little leery of these three in that

they are people who have

severe physical disabilities brought about by the violence of Nen action against them.

And there is an extent to which the show is not quite fetishizing, but definitely lingering on the way these people's bodies have been transformed by the weight of the nen attack.

Definitely leans on some stuff that reminds me of things where it like

it's a common problem in Star Wars where like the more robotic you someone is, the more the less human they are.

Like Anakin's arm and stuff.

Or like...

There's a lot of cyberpunk that plays with that idea.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

It reminds me of

B-horror movies and creature feature stuff where it's like, there's a gross thing that's dangerous and looking to get you, is what it reminds me of.

And the way that it has walked us there is through the path of saying, you know,

the more injured these people have become, the less human and more evil they have, you know, sort of.

These three are caricatures.

And they're caricatures in a show full of caricatures, but they are

pretty, pretty active caricatures in a way that feels kind of uncomfortable sometimes.

As they begin to demonstrate by immediately kidnapping Zushi.

What they want to do is set up a fight with Goan and Killiua, who they believe are soft targets.

And they are sort of rookie crushers in the language of the Hunter exam

oh yeah but Ghone and Killua don't want to fight until early June something about the way the calendar in this show is just Earth's calendar never stops being funny to me like they're like oh it's March 22nd yeah bud

and I bet it's Saturday or something

But that is too late for the Nen initiates who will get disqualified if they don't register to fight within that time.

So they kidnap Zushi.

Kellua kind of figures out that they've kidnapped Zushi and says, Look,

give me back Zushi

and I'll fight you.

And in fact, I'll let you win.

Would you like a win?

They keep one of Zushi's shoes and use it in the classic sending someone a finger in the mail to Goan to get Goan to fight Guido.

But then what happens?

I think the Zelda assassin has a trick up his sleeve.

Well,

so...

You did skip a part.

Yeah.

Oh, what did I skip?

Well, where

basically after Kilua gets Zushi back, Kilua says, like, hey, now you need to promise that you won't do anything like this again.

Because they're giving them wins.

He just says, we'll lose on purpose so that you don't do anything to Zushi.

Yeah.

And then they're like, well, what's going to happen if we break our promise?

And like, Kilua starts to say something, and he goes, Just don't do it.

Never mind.

Whatever.

Who cares?

Whatever.

Just don't do it.

So, yeah, Smash Cut to Kilua hasn't realized they broke their promise and

breaks into one of their apartments.

And

I guess is using Zetsu's up to completely conceal himself

and

basically

almost stabs one of them through the head.

Yeah.

It's great.

It's classic, just it's classic Kilua

mask off.

Has the eyes.

Has the eyes.

The theme hits.

I love the arrangement of the theme hitting.

It's great.

Yeah.

No, this whole,

this whole sequence rolls.

Yet it's right after.

And it is, you know, it's classic Kilua, but is it classic Kilua?

Would classic Kilua have just killed this guy?

I think maybe.

Oh, yeah, probably.

Because he tells him to go away, don't come back.

Classic Kilo would have already killed.

Yeah, yeah, maybe.

Right?

No, but I mean, seriously, genuinely

would have killed this person because he wanted to.

Classic Kiloa would not care that somebody else got kidnapped, right?

Classic Kilo would be like, well, I guess you suck and that's your fault.

Well, I'll go kill this guy because he's in my way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially like someone who he doesn't have.

Like, we've seen a little bit of him being kind of like not as not caring as much about Zushi as Gon does, or at least being a little, like,

I don't know, jealous of how Gon and Zushi interact.

And like

him going out of his way to help a kid that you kind of get the impression he like has a fondness for, but this is kind of when you learn that he has some kind of fondness for Zushi.

Yeah, I never really got the impression before this.

He feels so sort of like an annoying younger cousin, but from a guy whose family are murderers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

And of course, he says to the guy, you know, don't show your face in front of us again.

And so the time comes around.

Kiliwa wins the match because his opponent doesn't show.

Yeah, the consequence of this was that they that

He was trying to save Goan from having to sign up, and they basically tricked Goan into having to sign up.

But then they, I guess, both.

I don't remember.

Kiloa gets a free win, and I'm actually thinking that

Ghan might not anymore.

I don't remember.

I guess it's not 100% clear who Gone is fighting yet, because it's implied that Kilo is going to be fighting Sataso.

Well, they were both going to fight Sataso because he was talking about like, I guess I've set this up so that I will get two wins in a row.

And then I just have to find some other chumps.

This is also bad tactics on his part because it's made pretty clear that he doesn't feel confident that he can get wins just by signing up and fighting.

So he's intentionally finding weak people to fight.

And if that was the case, it's a really stupid idea

when you have

when the consequence of not meeting your deadline is being kicked out of the floor.

It's a really bad idea to like have your other target

be right after.

Like you'd give yourself some more time to find

next target.

I don't know, just like not a good plan from his part.

Also, what's he gonna do if he gets up to and has to like fight a floor master?

Yeah, I mean, yes, totally.

We haven't seen a single floor master yet, which is kind of fun.

Yeah,

people so fearsome that they, in theory, outclass Hiseker.

Although Hisaker is on his way to you know, right, yeah.

Um,

the uh,

so

the next thing that we see is like

he wins by default.

It's the next day they've shown up and uh

uh

wait, did we already do the we already did the Gyo scene where they both learned Gyo, right?

Or was that, am I wrong?

I think that's the very last thing.

We talked about it.

No, because they see uh we talked about the camera.

Yo is when they see

Wing talks them through how Hisaka won the fight.

And I wrote in my notes, oh god, are we gonna go through the fight again?

But with Wing doing a commentary this time, and we sort of do.

But we learned the technique

whereby you can sort of

look very hard.

Yeah, there's the first one where Zushi does it, and then they train with Zushi, and then the next day they show up, and they have both learned Gyo overnight.

This is where Kilo is like, it looks like his net is like made of rubber or something.

And then Wing reveals that Gon had just come in and demonstrated Gyo

himself, although didn't understand.

A thing I really want to point out is how the Zoldic theme keeps playing up until

Kiloa demonstrates that he has learned Gyo.

And like,

yeah, I don't know.

It's just very

deliberate decision, I think, to tie that Leitmotif in with Killoa's sudden, like, sort of anger-induced, like advancement or like learning um

how this sort of incident with Sataso was what spurred him to learn this technique so quickly and it's sad because you can tell he really doesn't want to be doing this

like he doesn't want to be acting that way even though it's still an impulse yeah and it's still natural like he was just talking it like And I think they do a really good job of this, like,

in the writing and the way it's sort of portrayed, where Kilo

had just been talking about how difficult it is to not kill people, like, just sort of matter-of-factly, oh, it's such a pain to not have to not be allowed to kill these people.

It's tough making an honest living, I think, is one of his words, which I love.

After he very quickly made something like 3 million, Jenny,

yeah,

by fighting.

Yeah.

So he says that, and then immediately is sort of put in this position where like, maybe I do actually have to not be honest living here.

And they never like say, they never like treat it like it's this big shame.

And actually the next time we see, like, shame is in disappointment, not guilt.

Yeah.

Next time we see Killer, he's like, he's like in a pretty good mood, but you can tell like, oh, I've got to hurry up and learn this stuff now

because

I'm like,

have to like do these fights.

These people are not going to wait.

They're going to pull some other shit.

But it is just sort of like sad for him to be successfully struggling with not

acting like an assassin and then be like put in a position where he's immediately got to actually go back on that in order to, this time in order to help his friends, but it's still like,

you know, I would rather him not have to do that because I like him.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm trying to think.

Oh,

to your point about the Zoldic theme coming up again here, Sylvie, it's really interesting.

You know, up until this point, the Zoldic theme has sort of been deployed as a villains theme.

We usually see it when it's Ilumi, when it's the other family members.

God, I'm so curious if

we ever got any of the Zeldic theme when Gitaraka was on screen.

I don't think we did.

I don't know if we do.

Ooh.

That's something I'd have to go back to.

My memory is that our first time hearing the Zoldic theme is when they show Kougaru Mountain.

No, we hear the Zoldic theme when he is hypnotizing Killiwa.

Oh, sure, sure.

In the fight.

Is that the same episode, though?

It's like the beginning of it and the end of it?

Oh, maybe, yeah.

Okay.

But I think, you know, that's...

It's interesting in the sense of, you know, it could be saying one of two things.

It could be saying the Zoldic motif is a villainous motif, and in,

you know acting like this, acting violently in this way, Killiwa is, you know, in some way still aligning himself with the motives of the Zeldic family.

It could also be saying, you know, the Zeldic theme doesn't necessarily have to be viewed as a villainous motif.

It is instead a motif about the power and capability of these people.

And we're seeing Killiua sort of use it, use this power for his own ends for people that he cares about, in a way that is not necessarily malicious.

That's the other way of reading the theme.

I think the other interesting thing is that I associate the Zeldic theme with

eyes a great deal, especially because it has this really striking first appearance during that scene when

Ilumi uses the malicious Nen.

And again, we see it with Mika, Mikke's big eyes.

We see Kilua's big eyes when Killua is murdering.

When Killua is murdering.

And so I think it is also very consistent to have the Zeldic theme playing here as Killer is using Gyo and, you know, focusing very intently on the screen to see the see Hisaka's nen.

Oh, it's even playing during that scene?

I don't think I noticed that.

Yeah, it continues.

The Zeldic theme runs through the whole end of the episode, I believe.

Yeah.

It's a great theme.

You know, I noticed something in one of the earlier episodes that was interesting.

It wasn't the Zeldic theme.

It was like a different haunted coral thing.

Yeah, I wrote this down.

Um,

it was uh, as their auras are being awoken, as their paws are being opened.

Oh, yeah, um,

they play this, this, this, you're right, it's a haunting coral theme.

I wrote down that what it is doing for me there is evoking like a holy rite.

There is something ceremonial

about having their auras opened.

Maybe it's because I missed an earlier time when it was more important, but the thing that struck me was there's a scene in episode 30 where it's after the after the sort of meeting with the solo one-on-one with Wing.

Kilo comes back to tell Goan everything that happened.

He comes back and finds that like Wing told Kilo to tell Goan to do, he was already meditating and practicing his 10.

And instead of stopping him and explaining, he just goes and just sort of like sits down near him and also starts meditating,

which is I think a very nice moment, very interesting.

And it was like very odd that the music accompaniment to it was the haunted chorus.

Yeah, but it wasn't the Zelda chorus.

No, it was kind of

like choral montage.

I guess I just, I've been thinking of that.

like that chorus that like haunted choral as you're talking i just think of that as like oh yeah that's the that's the nin theme.

That's the music that plays when we're talking about or showing nin.

Yeah, there is, there is some of that.

Like, it goes, it's like,

it's like very odd.

Any noise, any sound.

Any sound.

I'm bowing right now.

You can't see it, but I am bowing.

Yeah, and I think that, you know, we're sort of left with this image of Killiua alone in the ring and the crowd kind of a little confused and hard done by as they don't get to see the fight.

Someone yells at me.

Killiua chalks up the W.

Yeah.

That would have been me.

I don't think that you should pay money to see children fight.

And I'll leave it at that.

Wow.

Strong stance from Jack here.

This fucking woke culture that we're living in these days.

Back in my day, you could go watch a couple 12-year-olds beat the shit out of each other, but the PC police

ruining it for everybody.

I don't know what this bit is.

It's actually the regular police that are ruining that.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Well, PC stands for Police Constable.

Police Constable.

Ponstable.

Police Constable.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, break it up.

All right, break up the episode.

We got anything else to talk about.

Or should we see you next time?

Briefly.

I should have touched on this earlier.

But I think that some...

we can kind of talk about it now because I was waiting for us to get through everybody's different,

all the nen powers that we've seen in this chunk have been mentioned.

Well, no, because I want to, something that I do think this episode does well, and is something that I think a lot of these battle animes have to do, is set the tone for what a conflict between.

two of the like practitioners of whatever their ability like in Naruto, it's ninjutsu, and Dragon Ball Z, it's just martial arts and stuff like that, like etc.

Jojo's it's stands.

I'm gonna I mentioned JoJo's for a reason.

I'll get back to it.

In Yuhagajo, it's spirit energy.

Yeah, and in this it's nen.

But you need to lay out the rules for the viewer and like sort of give some sort of precedent for what confrontation between two users of this are is gonna be like.

And I think this does a really good job of

showing the unorthodox abilities that Nen can like encapsulate.

Like, because when we first see it introduced, it very much just feels like it's an energy you build up and you can blast it out of your hand.

Wing shows us, like, this is Hatsu and

destroys the wall.

And, like, last, the last episode, we talked about that.

And in this, we've got some more standard stuff like

Guido's tops and depending on how you want to.

Oh, I wanted to call it Wolf Fang Fist, Tiger Bite Fist.

That might be Nen.

I don't know 100% sure.

And those are more like standard, like, this is for fighting.

This is like, this is the same as Dragon Ball Z charging up in a lot of ways.

Then we also get the Nen thread that's used for, that

literally like stitches together the veins and arteries and stuff in Hisaka's arm.

We have Bungee Gum and Texture Surprise, which we've covered and are both very strange things.

We have Castro being able to...

create a double and we have the big invisible hand that Sataso uses that seems to put

Zushi to sleep.

And I think through all these examples, what they've done is

made of, like,

did a good job showing that the nen power is going to be something that is

like unique to the character in a lot of ways.

That there is going to be overlap in the techniques because the

same, the principles are the same.

Like, it's the, it's the, the, it's, um, Ten,

Ren, Hatsu, Zetsu, and then like yo and ian as well and like those are all going to be those are like the thing that's the level playing field and then every then beyond that you have characters who like figure out how to how they want to train with it a big example is like castro's um

doubles and like when wing talks about how much like

time and effort went into learning how to do that

and the reason i bring a i i wanted to circle back to jojo is it is very similar to how conflict goes in Jojo's Bluetooth Adventure when stands are more established, where there's almost a more puzzling aspect of the fights where you have to figure out what your opponent's ability is before you can beat them.

And

I think the Hisuka thing is kind of like the big

example of that.

And it's not an uncommon.

The main reason I bring it up is because it's not...

the most uncommon type of conflict in

Shounen anime.

It's a really good way to like mechanize the trope of like you know characters who like need to explain their powers yes to the viewers um can know what's going on and can like figure out what's happening and it's a good way to like take that exposition and turn it into something useful it's yeah and it's something that's been that's very influential actually um

I know, Jack, you're not super into like popular anime, but anybody who's watching this for the first time but has watched Jujutsu Kaisan, there's definitely like who's that also fan apparently of uh

oh you can tell you can tell

it is extremely plain

yeah um

but uh that also like does a lot of the to the point where in that series your power gets stronger if you explain it to the guy

it's really funny

hilarious it's really good yeah

if i talk you through yeah i like to jump really high up jump high it's like really funny yeah they say it's like it makes you like literally 25% stronger.

If you explain it.

So we're not going to go to that extent, but it is definitely something.

Like fights in this arena.

There's going to be fights where it's just

who's the strongest in a punching contest, but it definitely leans more towards the

sort of...

I mean, I'm going to just go with JoJo as my shorthand here.

Like, we need to figure out what our opponent's ability is to defeat them as opposed to the Dragon Ball ball z i need to have more

strength of willpower and martial power

and how varied that stuff is is like a huge part of that like in dragon ball z uh which is again like the ur shonen uh

everyone's special move is just like a different size shape and speed of an energy ball Yeah, pretty much.

How big is your energy ball?

How fast does it move?

How strong is it?

Like, there isn't really a difference between the,

like, between Big Bang or Final Flash or Command Man or whatever.

It's basically just like, what PSI level of force does it hit?

You know, like, how much pressure does your beam apply?

Piccolo has the special beam cannon, which is probably the most unique by far out of all of them.

And it's just

so thin that it can go through you instead of just explode on you.

And I, yeah, the main reason I just bring that up is because I think that Tagashi does a very good job of setting the precedent.

And like the adaptation team as well does a good job of setting the precedent that the fights aren't necessarily going to be just

whose beam is stronger.

Um,

that there is a little more going on with the powers than just like Bungee Gum is strong because the elastic force of it is really good.

It's no, it's the way you apply your nen ability is directly tied to how competent you are in combat.

And it's, it's also, it goes even, you know, the other layer of that is it's also like

how well can you set yourself up with the power that you have, but how well can you have the right power?

Like, yeah.

Do like this is what they show so well between the fight.

Like at some point, Machi says, like, do you even get how perfect it is that a guy like you has these two powers?

Like, that's perfect.

And he goes, like, yeah, it's so adaptable that even if people know what it is, it doesn't make it any weaker versus what they say about Castro which is like you spend all your time learning how to do this thing and it only has hurt you actually like it's impressive as long as you don't know what's happening But as soon as you figure it out you're done and then he was done.

It's true it that it he was done

And so there's this like

you better use your powers right, but you also better not be learning the wrong things.

Yeah.

Which I don't know if that stands.

Can you just have a stand?

Your stand is just part of your standard.

Yeah, stands are more like this is a

representation of your spirit energy.

There's many different explanations for what stands are because

JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, also an extremely long-running, not yet finished manga series, but the way that it works, for anyone who's not familiar, is it splits up into these separate parts, some of which follow a timeline, some of which follow a different timeline.

And

what a bizarre adventure.

What a bizarre adventure.

It is bizarre.

The only word.

But also, I get worth bringing up because it does predate, the manga at the very least does predate

Hunter Hunter by a few years.

I believe at least a decade, actually.

Jojo's old.

I think.

Jojo starts in 87 yeah wow and i think hunter hunter yeah starts in like 95 yeah and so by the time that the hunter hunter has started like

um

uh 98 i think is oh really oh the manga starts yeah i sort of thought i thought it had to be earlier because of the 99 series being in 99 but no yeah they like adapted it pretty i think so i'm hold on it might be 97.

no march 3rd 1998.

yeah

Another reason why I bring this up is because by the time Tagashi was writing this, Jojo

was and continues to be just like a hugely influential piece of media, especially

in manga and anime.

And like, there is not like, like not to be, there's a bit of a meme

on the internet, believe it or not, where people will be like, Jojo, Jojo fans

will see anything and be like, is that a motherfucking Jojo reference?

But I do actually think that there's a level of this that is inspired by Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

Kizuka looks like a Jojo character.

Yeah.

Oh, there are, like, genuinely, I'll come back to this at different points.

There's like a few different series that I feel like get

referenced a couple different times.

And Hunter Hunter is an extremely referential show.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, absolutely.

It is like living and breathing in the language of other shows and like what other mods are doing.

I mean, okay, I'll, I'll, this one doesn't mean anything to Jack, so I'll say it.

At a certain point, there's a character in this show that is just the protagonist of a Jojo part, but with a different name, basically.

That's funny.

I have no idea who that could be.

I'll, I'll, oh, I know who you're talking about.

Yeah, I'll, I'll send it in our little spoiler chat.

Okay.

Uh, so I don't torture Jack with it.

uh is uh is that all we've got for today i think so thanks for indulging my little tangent at the end no that's no that's okay

no that's okay i you know dre i don't know how how jojo you are but um i am not much sylvie you're the only one that could deliver that information so i yeah i figured i'm a big fan uh for any if anyone's curious my favorite parts that have been animated uh my favorite animated part is part five and my favorite part that hasn't been animated yet is part seven do with that information?

Is that five better than seven?

If seven were animated, would you like it?

If seven were animated, it would be my favorite.

Seven is my favorite thing that Hiro Hiko Araki has ever done.

Um,

and I like the stuff that he's done afterwards, too, but seven is just really cover your bases there.

They're come at you.

I mean, listen, some people get some people get weird about Jojo.

Believe it or not, anime fans on the internet can be like, your opinion's wrong.

Um,

if you're weird about Hunter Hunter Hunter and the Project Media Club Plus, but in a good way, we would love it if you would rate us five stars on Apple Podcasts.

Can I tell you something very funny about that?

And I encourage people to do this, of course.

But for some reason, I wasn't signed into iTunes, and it was giving me like

another region's version of iTunes for some reason.

And so when I finally signed in the other day to do some other related thing,

the number of

ratings that we had changed from like 100, sorry, from 29 to like 180 or something.

And I was like, oh, that is making me feel a lot better about the show.

I thought that we had 29 people who listened to us and went to iTunes or Apple Podcasts and rated the show and reviewed the show.

But don't let that discourage you from going now and doing the same thing that the other 100-something people have.

Yeah.

It means a great deal.

We don't advertise.

It's all word of mouth.

Either way, we also don't take ads.

We don't take ads?

And we don't make ads.

No.

So you can go to Apple Podcasts and review us.

And also, you can go to friendsatetable.cash and patronize us.

Yeah.

The only way I want you to patronize me

with money.

On the podcast.

With money.

And you can be patronizing with your patrons if you want.

If you pay me, you can be patronizing to me.

But if it's for free, it's nothing.

Get out of here.

Yeah, fuck off.

What are we watching?

I'm going to say it again.

Bail, beginning and the end.

God damn.

It's a fuck off sandwich.

That's a fuck-off sandwich.

What are we watching next time?

Next time, we are back

with three.

It is the next three episodes: 34, 35, and 36.

Those titles are Power to Avenge, The True Pass,

and A Big Debt and a Small Kick.

Excellent.

Yeah, should we also mention that we'll be joined next week?

Or am I going to have that?

Oh, yeah.

No, no, we can say that.

Yeah, Austin's going to be on the next one.

Was going to be on the last one, but I got confused at which episode was the thing that he wanted to talk about.

Was on.

Austin wants to talk about glasses.

Yeah.

Are you excited to see the first screenshot?

I'm so excited to see the first screenshot because I have now, you know, fully intuited that the environment in that screenshot that we saw is Heaven's Arena.

And I think you told me as much.

Yes, I said, where are they?

And you said, in Heaven's Arena.

Zushi was in that screenshot.

So yeah, this is this first one's going to come up.

It's going to slot into place, like finding a missing jigsaw piece.

And there's something else that you must have supposed about this that you didn't know at the time.

I mean, probably they're using nen.

Bless you.

Bless you.

Thank you.

Oh, bless you.

Yeah, you called that right away that they looked like they were doing some sort of magic, is what you said at the time.

Yes, but nen is not magic.

That is critical to understand.

And in fact, in one of the episodes, a character says, is he using magic or his nen to describe Hisaka?

Yeah.

This was, I would call this, this is, I think this was kind of a lazy bit of writing where

the character, where Castor was supposed to have noticed that the arm that Hisuka made was

Nen and not magic because it looked too pristine to be magic.

And I was like, why can't the magic arm be pristine?

I don't know why that would be.

Because Nen isn't magic.

Gravity is not magic.

Yeah.

Magic is simply magic is what a witch does.

Have a good night, everybody.

New permanent sign-up

simply comes out Halloween.

Magic is what a witch does.

Happy Halloween.