Rubric For Creating the Devil - Hunter x Hunter ep. 27-29: Media Club Plus S01E09

Welcome to Media Club Plus, a podcast about diving into 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 Kadashi.

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.

You can find the new run button store at

runbutton.shop.

That's the we made a bunch of shirts from like 2015 to 2018 and then forgot to tell people about them mostly.

And so the the store kind of languished.

But since the advent of friendsofthetable.shop, which you should also go to,

I was like, oh, I should move all this stuff from Spreadshirt to

Fourth Wall.

And it's been fun and better than Spreadshirt, which is a mess.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeed.

Hi there, I'm Jack coming to you from Southeast Michigan for the first time.

If you hear any notes of exhaustion and or like echoey room noise in my recording, that is because I am in a not quite assembled yet office.

But I'm here.

I'm on Eastern Time.

You can buy any of my music at notquitereal.bandcamp.com and you can find me on co-host at JDQ.

Not quite assembled, but you've got your mic, you've got your computer, you've got a desk.

Yeah, I got the works.

I got the works.

Yeah, is that true?

That you've got a desk, Jack?

Yeah, Keith.

I have a desk, and I know what desk is.

I'm definitely not on...

Wait, let me.

Hang on.

I'd like to invite...

Hmm.

Ikea glass

table.

So I'm on a glass table.

Okay.

Sitting on.

Let me see if I can just...

No, no, sitting at a glass table in my actual desk chair,

but not at my actual desk.

Okay.

Ah, here we go.

I mean, I'm gonna send you a picture of the of the thing I'm at, and I would like you to score it out of ten, please.

On a scale of how good it is to record a podcast at.

Yep, okay.

I'm excited.

In the media club plus chat,

five, five, three.

It's it's yeah, well, okay, it actually doesn't seem wide enough for like a computer and a keyboard.

It's not, and I don't know, do you have your mic stand on the floor or do you have it clipped onto this underside thing, this little shelf here?

I have my mic in a little tripod.

Okay.

So

three.

Yeah, I'm going to go three with Sylvie.

And Dre, what was your score?

I'm sorry.

What are we scoring this time?

It's one through 10.

10 being the best thing to record a podcast on.

One being the worst thing

to record a podcast on.

Okay.

Yeah, I think it's three.

We all agree three.

Yeah.

Early negative reviews from the Friends of the Table cus moving on.

See if they can do better next week.

Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And you can also check out the show's TikTok at Friends underscore Table.

Yeah, and you can check out the co-host at Friends Dash Table.

And

how about Twitch?

I would like to start doing more Twitch stuff again at

Friends of the Table, twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

And all that stuff gets moved over to youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on Twitter at Swanjerry3000.

These were some fun episodes.

I'm excited to talk about these.

The boys are finally off on their own adventure.

Unfortunately, they live in a world that needs money to live.

Fortunately, they live in a world where kids can play blood sports for money.

Go immediately makes a strong new little friend, who Kiluwa immediately almost kills, not jealous.

Ghana Kilua will

fly through the first 200 floors of this battle tower

while also investigating a strange new power called Nen, which they first hear from

Goan's new friend Zushi and his disheveled master Wing.

It turns out Nen is actually a really big deal and the secret to entering floor 200, where Husuka has been waiting for Goan after literally cyber-stalking him.

How will the voice react to Nen?

Will they respond responsibly and cautiously with their new power?

Or will someone do something rash and self-destructive?

Keith, that was you being the Hunter-Hunter narrator, wasn't it?

It was.

Yeah, you know, I was feeling very nostalgic for the English announcer while watching these episodes because

I have both versions, and it auto-plays the last version that I selected.

And the last time I watched Hunter Hunter was the dub with Isaac.

And so, going through watching the sub again, reselecting the Japanese, I always get 10 seconds of the English VO for the announcer at the beginning.

And I'm like, I just love this guy.

He's so good.

I wish there was a version.

A bizarre thing to want.

I just wish there was a version that had the English announcer and then cut right to the

Japanese VA with the subs.

That feels very 90s to me.

That sensation of like a complete mashup of different languages.

Yeah, yeah.

But do we actually want to stop from the beginning?

Because we have a new title sequence.

We do.

I actually, I was just, that is my first note here on episode 27.

We watched,

oh, geez, what was the first?

Arrival at the arena, Nen and Nen, and then was the last one, Awakening and something?

Something awakening.

They awake.

They go awake in that one.

But yeah, Jack, you want to talk about this new title sequence?

I wasn't sure if you were going to skip it just by default.

Like, I skip intros a lot of the time just by default.

So,

I have sort of been pained of late because I don't like skipping intros in a television show.

Because

I like the

ritual of sitting down and hearing the music and seeing the images, yeah, and sometimes that is a kind of dull ritual.

You know, there are definitely I have watched shows in the past that have intros where I'm like, yeah, okay, fine, but I do it anyway because that's the that's the sound that the television show makes when it starts, and that's that is pleasurable.

I have shows that I always skip the intro on, and then shows that I never would, and then most shows are somewhere in between.

There are some intros to shows that

I skip sometimes.

No,

Yellow Jackets, the intro to Yellow Jackets is extremely cool.

It's this mashup series of like VHS tapes.

And it features some genuinely unsettling shots that

I feel upset that I have to sit through at the beginning of every episode, but I do anyway because of my ideals.

Because of my praxis.

But no, I didn't in fact realize that we had a new title sequence during this first episode because I was doing other stuff.

And I've been moving, so I've had to skip a few to just be like, get to the episode, watch the episode.

This is why it has been paining me.

But this time around, I realized halfway through: holy shit, we got ourselves a new title sequence, and we have a new, um, not a new arrangement of the theme, but the theme has new lyrics.

Um, and I can't speak to the Japanese lyrics, but the um

the uh first theme featured, you know, a few English lines.

Uh, that they said, uh, you can smile, and this time it has changed to you can try,

uh, complete with uh, you know, different choral versions of that in the background.

Um, and yeah, this new title sequence shows uh a lot of faces of various threatening people, including,

and I can say this with console.

Someone who you've only seen from behind before.

Yeah.

So I got to see my first look at the face of Krolo Lulsilfa, a character who, if you have been,

if you missed our screenshot stream, you might be like, why does Jack know about this character?

One of the screenshots in that screenshot stream, which is in the podcast feed, featured a group of spectacular weirdos.

Real weirdos.

You know, Hunter Hunter, weirdos with the dial turned all the way to the right.

I really would like to call it a murderer's row of weirdos.

It truly is a murderer's row, and their boss, which folks gave me the name of as Crow Lusilpha, and I get to see his face for the first time, like many characters in Hunter Hunter, including like many evil characters in Hunter Hunter, he has very nice eyes.

Very sort of,

I don't know that I call them nice, very sort of placid, peaceful eyes.

Which is a little sinister.

Also, I think I'm probably just going to come out and say that I think this is the Phantom Troop.

I think that what we are looking at here is the Phantom Troop.

Based on silhouettes that we saw when Karapika and Magitani were talking, I think I'm making a prediction with fair confidence that Krolo Lu Silpha is the leader of the Phantom Troop and they are the ones appearing in this title sequence.

But yeah, hilariously, the title sequence still ends with Killua and Gun and Leorio kicking the shit out of some people.

Leorio getting hooked with the fishing rod and getting sent into the sky.

Killua kicking someone with his hands in his pockets.

Yeah, and we begin the new arc.

And we'll get to the new outro sequence later, too, which is going to be fun.

So the first thing that happens is sort of the tail end of what happens in the last set of episodes.

Kilua explaining Heaven's Arena as this place where they can simultaneously train and earn money because they're all broke.

And giving some weirdly specific facts about the dimensions of the building.

I don't really know why, but Kilo.

Well, I know why.

He knows.

I don't know why he cares or why we care.

Something...

Well, the reason why we care is because that Heaven's Arena is taller than any building that exists on Earth.

Oh, is that true?

Actually, like, the numbers just sort of went past my head.

I checked.

It's like 900 something, and the current tallest building in the world is the Burj Khalifa, which stands at 828 meters.

It is a huge,

251 floors, I think is what Kilima says.

Huge, huge, horrible.

Very ugly looking tower.

991 meters tall, but the fourth tallest building in the world, which again is why I bring up the fact that it is taller than any building

on Earth.

Right.

So there's three buildings even taller than this one.

I feel like the world of Hunter Hunter is sort of built on the same principle of kids trying to one-up each other with lies in the playground, where someone's like, My dad's the tallest dad that there is.

And the other person's like, well, my dad's taller than his dad.

And Hunter Hunter is like,

this is the tallest building in the world.

No, actually, it's the fourth tallest building in the world.

No, actually, the Hunter organization employs murderous clowns now.

No, actually, everybody rides airships in this world.

Um, this reminds me of uh one of my favorite jokes from I think season four of Arrested Development: is uh, that is the uh Imagine Entertainment has the second tallest um

uh building in Hollywood.

Uh, after I can't remember what it's after, but they wanted to make it taller, but it was against the law to make it taller, so they just made it go further down into the ground

and then raised the uh the ceilings of the top floor to make it seem bigger.

That's very good.

That's great.

Okay, so

we pretty immediately get into these preliminary matches.

They get kind of set up in this

like big arena with multiple stages going on at the same time.

They are being assessed and put

at like a starting floor.

It feels like a gymnastics meet where like you'd see like a bunch of people doing like tumbling routines and stuff, except the tum, it's more they're doing rumbling routines.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, because they're fighting.

Oh, does someone want to talk about what Kilo reveals about his experience with Heaven's Arena before he started?

I skipped right over that.

Dre, Dre.

Well, just that his, it was his dad, right, that dropped him off there there when he was six years old and said, hey, don't come home until you reach the 200th floor of the murder arena.

I guess it's not murder arena.

It's like boxing.

And

do you remember how long it took him to do?

Two years.

Two years from when he was six until he was eight.

I mean, it doesn't roll, but from a TV show perspective, that rolls.

Yes.

From a TV show perspective, it rules.

And then

they go on a little bit later to explain the economics of this place.

You know what?

We'll save that for when we get to it.

But

they do their fights.

Does anyone have anything to say about these sort of preliminary fights?

I really enjoy Killua's advice to Gon when Gon's nervous.

Oh, it's so funny.

Yeah.

What happens is...

So they're given numbers, their numbers get called, and while they're waiting in the stands, Killua, or Gon gets called before Kiloa and gets up, and he's really nervous.

And Kiloa says to him, Like, well, you made it through the testing door, right?

And we got like a little cutaway before we see exactly what he says, which I guess was for a commercial.

Because when we get to the fight, we do see what Kiloa says, and he tells him, just push hard.

And so, Gon does.

He pushes a very, really big man very hard and sends him flying.

And it's yeah, this is like a comically a comical, this is a joke of a person.

This is like an eight-foot-tall, you know, 600-pound wrestler guy.

And yeah, sends him absolutely flying.

And this is the sort of

gone like looks at his hands like, oh my God.

He literally thinks to himself, when did I get so strong?

Because he's been, you know, he's been a fish in this very large pond of the hunter exam.

uh you know slowly getting bigger and then they're like okay let's take you into this much littler

um yeah

and literally doesn't know his own strength it's fun to watch him

have to be around normal people basically again

you sort of get a sense of of why killua is the way he is on some level i mean first you get a sense where he was like my dad dropped me off here aged six and i fought for two years but it's also like if killua exists in a world where

the challenges that he faces are so monumental and he has to rise to overcome them.

And then, like you say, Keith, he finds himself in this much smaller pond and is constantly reckoning with his own strength and has sort of come to terms with that and has this kind of disaffected sort of, well, look, I'm just better than everybody here.

We are seeing the

earlier end of that of Goan realizing for the first time, oh, wait a second, I have actually been in this environment that has caused me to become so much stronger than all of these quote-unquote normal people like an eight-foot-tall wrestler yeah these are they they go to pretty great lengths to show you like

uh

in on earth these would be the strongest people

to around like that that is who that is who gone like hits gone hits someone that would be like a world champion weightlifter or something or like the tractor pullist iron man competition kind of guy.

That's who Goan sort of sends flying in one push.

And then he takes that push thing so literally, he pushes everyone.

That's his whole, it becomes his only move.

The tournament sort of, the tournament announcers are like, oh, here comes Goan with Gohan's special push, a move he's invented.

Patton's great move.

Yeah.

And this is, this is another,

this, this sort of, Jack, you brought this up like two or three episodes ago, like people underestimating going for being a child.

And it's like, well, what do you mean?

Like,

uh, all so we meet so many strong children in this show.

We've met another extremely strong child,

but then also we've met a bunch of people who are like, a child

that I'm laughing that I'm facing a child right now.

And then they get their, you know, skulls crushed.

Imagine if, because it doesn't need to happen very often.

It's not like all children are extremely strong, but imagine you tune in to the Summer Olympics, right?

And in the sprinting, it's nine adults and one 12-year-old.

And the 12-year-old just destroys them.

You would immediately be living in a, you would wake up and you'd be like, well, I guess sometimes a 12-year-old world in which children could do this.

Or yeah, you wake up and you turn on the news and they're like, hey, last night, a small child murdered an army of 250 men that tried to break into the Zoldic mansion.

So the reason we focus in on

Gunn's new friend Zushi is because he is also in their preliminary matches, and he also easily defeats an extremely large man.

And actually the largest of the three

that they have to fight.

What does Zushi look like?

Should we describe Zushi's appearance as he makes his first, as we encounter him for the first time on this project?

Yeah, sure.

I got it.

Okay, go for it.

He's just a little guy with a like

a little brown

ultimate little guy.

He's got a little brown like

closely cropped brown hair.

He's wearing a like karate gi.

Um there's like a he's got like a like turtleneck or like rash guard or something underneath.

And

he's very serious.

He's very humble.

Yeah.

He's very like committed.

He's very disciplined, you know?

Like he really wants to like follow the teachings of his his master.

Yeah.

But he's also like

he learned this discipline somewhere else because

they take great pains to be like, his master is kind of a mess.

Like, Zushi is disciplined beyond his training.

Say again?

He's just a little sloppy with his hair.

Well, he's got messy hair that Kilua calls out.

I don't know.

where Kilua comes off saying that someone else's hair is disheveled.

But yeah, he's got messy hair.

His shirt keeps coming untucked.

He just kind of looks like

he is very serious about the training, but his attitude is very like

he's

kind of,

I mean, he's like...

He's casual and kind of gentle seeming.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

That's Wing.

That is Zushi's Master.

They are practitioners of.

Did anybody write down the name of

their style?

Shingenryu.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Shingenryu fighting style.

That will like weirdly come back up in another, like in basically flavor text towards the very end of the show.

So keep an eye out for people mentioning Shingen Ryu.

But

go ahead, Jack.

So the time comes for kind of our first

less than pushover match.

Because we know going into this first match how Gun and Killua are going to do, right?

The match where Gun

pushes the big guy and Killua chops,

like a hand chop, chops another big guy.

But our first kind of plot critical match is Killiwa versus Zushi.

And he is such a

brat about it, too.

Killua is such a best.

He's not the best.

He turns to Zushi, who they've been kind of hanging out with, because they're like these three children.

They've sort of introduced themselves to each other.

Yeah.

Killua's going up.

But this is that thing that Goan does, where he has other people be around me.

Yes, oh, yeah, this again, huh?

Yeah, um, actually, want to talk about this a bit later.

Uh, this specific feeling that Kiliwa has, uh, but they like

Zushi, and he's nice.

And uh, when their match comes up, oh, can I tell you, can we reach just for a second?

Because there's one of my favorite moments, uh, when they meet uh, Wing.

I almost forgot about this.

Uh, they pick up very

uh

very quickly on Zushi's sort of martial arts affirmation to his

master.

He like sort of slightly bows, puts his fist by his side and yells, oos.

And they pick up on it immediately.

The first thing that Master Wing says to them, they turn to him and then they try and imitate Zushi's little affirmation.

It's so funny that they're immediately like, yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it together.

Yeah, in unison, perfectly in unison.

And they look kind of like,

it's not they look uncomfortable doing it.

They, they just don't look as natural making the motion because they've never done it before.

But they look unnatural in the exact same way as each other.

It's very funny.

It's great animating.

Yeah.

That's really good animating to pull that character out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Zushi turns, Kilua turns to Zushi and says, well, you can't win them all.

Better luck next time.

Yeah, way before the fight starts.

But as the fight begins, Kilua says, I think to himself, I can't tell if this is just a thought he has, and we hear it.

He says, I'm sticking to one chop per match until I reach the 150th floor.

Which is just so funny.

And immediately, well, so there's stuff we don't need to get into.

There's a points-based system for fighting here that, you know,

TKO is worth

one kind of points.

Knocking someone out is worth another kind of points.

This is not terribly interesting to me, unless folks want to kind of dig into what the show is doing with that.

Uh, no, I think that they only set this up to then use it against Kilo.

I think that they

it becomes more important later, uh, but yeah, it is just like there is a way,

depending on the severity of your attack, you can score one to three points per hit, and the first one to ten wins unless there's a knockout.

Yeah, exactly.

Um, Kiliwa chops at Zushi, who goes flying and then gets up

and then takes a stance.

And to Killua's, I think, kind of abject terror,

the same purple glow that we last saw Ilumi use comes rolling off him.

And

Killiwa

is just terrified.

Which means he cuts away from

the very end of the arena.

Yeah.

And we cut to later.

Killiwa is very sour and describing to Gon that he

ran into some trouble, but that Zushi will be great one day.

Zushi is just target practice for me.

Punch is that weak.

I could knock him around easily, but I couldn't beat him.

And what's interesting is Killiwa won this match.

He won on points, but he couldn't knock Zushi out.

And it is so funny and, you know, so characteristic of Killiwa that he's like, well, I couldn't beat him even though I won.

The thing he wanted to do was knock Zushi out.

There's also this really great moment where it shifts from that confidence of being like, he's just target practice.

And you see him like having to stop to admit like,

I was wrong.

He's very proud of his ability to judge how strong someone is.

And also of his ability to be strong himself.

So like he sounds really defeated, but you watch him like decide to admit, like, I couldn't do what I wanted to do, which was just knock him out, even though he tried like four times.

The stance stuff is very classic anime to me.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I linked an old vine from Caleb City where

it's just a parody of the stance has no weaknesses thing.

And I couldn't stop thinking of it when Killoa

sees Zushi do his little pose and is like, oh my god.

So he's fine.

But yeah, this is great.

This is a very good find.

So

I think we skip past it.

What happens when

Zushi does this dance?

There is the.

We get the sort of same screen effect that

happened when Ilumi confronted Kiloa.

Am I right in that?

No, no, you're totally right.

You're totally right.

So after that happens, after Kilo has his sort of reaction to this,

Wing shouts Zushi's name from the stands, just like shouts his name kind of angrily, and Zushi drops it.

And then they sort of continue the fight.

They don't show the end of the fight until later

for

plotting reasons.

But whatever Zushi was doing, Wing stopped him from doing it.

And then we see him reprimanding him after the fight like you're not supposed to do that until floor 200.

And this is what sets Goan and Kilua off on trying to figure out what the hell that was.

Because

every time they encounter this, Kilua was like terrified of it.

Um, it's also more so Kilua that wants to.

I feel like, I don't know, maybe this is my bias showing through.

It does feel like Killua was a little more of the main character

in these couple episodes.

No, you're right.

This is this is something

what what happens is we we come here because of Go needing to get stronger for the Hisaka fight.

But then immediately this sort of becomes about

Kilua and

like the power that Tsushi has and his brother and stuff like that for

most of this time.

And even at the end of this episode, just to jump forward very quickly, at the end of this episode, the narrator is sort of recounting like,

you know, Kilua wants to investigate the mysterious powers of his terrible brother.

And then it says wait to beat his, and Gone also wants to know.

Yeah.

And Gone, too.

It's like, super funny.

And yeah, I think it's pretty clear.

This is like, this is a very important kind of

purse.

This is a person, it becomes a personal issue for Kilua.

Yeah.

Because, you know,

how much of this is Kilua going?

if I know how to I will never be able to overcome Ilumi face to face with no practice.

But if I can meet someone who can fight in a similar way to him, I might be able to, you know, like this is the way in right for Killiua on some level.

Because he doesn't understand his brother's power, and we also don't.

No.

And so how can he fight it if he doesn't even know what it is?

And to do so directly against Ilumi would be a death sentence.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know.

I don't know if Illumi would kill Killua.

I have to imagine that it would be something.

No, I think that that would be really bad for him personally.

Yeah, I think you're right.

It would be the closest thing possible, probably.

Yeah, the Zelda family would do something awful to Killua.

Yeah.

Illumi would do something awful to Killua, but would probably not kill him.

But yeah, so they overhear Wing

telling to an apologizing Zushi that he is not ready ready to use this technique, which Wing calls Ren.

Yeah.

And Killua is like, all right, new plan.

We should shoot for the top of the tower.

Like, that's our goal.

Because previously they've just been trying to get enough money to

they want to train and they and yes, but although it turns out that they would have had to get to the top of the tower to get any training in any way, because they one-shot literally every single person but Zushi.

Yes.

This has been Goan's plan the whole time because Goan cannot see a challenge without thinking, I can do that.

Yeah,

I'll be fine.

Okay.

They just straight up ask Zushi about Ren.

Yeah, there's this cute moment where Kilo comes up with a very bad plan, and Goan's like, we should just ask Zushi.

And then Kilo was like, ha ha ha, yeah.

I didn't think about asking for help.

It didn't occur to me.

Ren is one of four.

Oh, sorry, did you have something, Trey?

I was going to say, and then Zusi says, oh, and tells them all about

Ren.

Yeah.

Yeah, just opens up.

It is one of four exercises.

The exercises are ten, Zetsu, Ren, and Hatsu.

And all of these are sort of pillars of a...

kind of training or metaphysical understanding that is called nen at which point, the show becomes about Nen.

Strap in everybody, it is now the Nen show.

End to episodes.

Ends, Jack?

Yes.

I was going to ask Jack, why do you think this?

Well,

the glee with which the show...

Okay.

Let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Yeah.

This is a kind of formal training, and Kiliwa is not at all happy about this.

And this begins begins to press out one of the tensions that is, if not directly spoken about, kind of latent in these three episodes, which is a contrast between the formal, studious training of

Zushi under the tutelage of his lanky,

disheveled,

but broadly friendly master.

Something I wrote about Wing is that he looks like every e-girl's boyfriend.

He really does.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Also, in a show that is full of like 12-year-olds, I think Wing is probably like my age, right?

Yeah, well, knowing Leorio exists, Wing could be anything from

20 to 40.

I'm going to see if they give an age on the Hunter.

That would be great.

Yeah.

They do not.

Okay.

They don't.

I bring this up.

They say that they tell us his gender, eye color, hair color, and state.

State.

Oh, alive or dead or whatever.

Yeah, Mr.

Guinness there too.

I'm going to get some

super.

Mr.

Wing.

Oh, wow.

He's way up there.

I bring up Wing's age because I think it is notable that unlike the sort of masters we have seen in the past, whether that is someone like Satots or Netero, this seems to be a younger person who is nevertheless...

pretty skilled.

He doesn't seem to be a hunter, or if he is, there is no indication of that.

But he does seem to be extremely knowledgeable about what he does and this is sort of this might be our first non-hunter character outside of the Zaldic family of assassins who's like I have specialized effective knowledge in the world

yes so they uh there there is this this uh contrast between killer and gone who learned their skills either through a

uh cult assassin family or simply being the best little boy in the woodland

and then fighting everybody in the hunter exam and in almost all of their interactions i'm thinking specifically between killua wing and zushi there is this tension of like why do you want me to stand in front of a whiteboard and learn all this stuff uh and you know as the as the arc continues we can see zushi still hangs out around floor 50 or whatever.

He's a competent fighter, but he loses matches.

Whereas Gun and Killiua, with their kind of firecracker nightmare power, are going shooting up the tower

with the sort of implicit sense from the show that there is a consequence to this kind of like burning the candle at both ends.

Yeah.

Ooh, burning.

That is a really great,

I think, visual metaphor, I think, for

a theme that we'll see throughout the rest of the show.

Interesting.

Interesting.

This is

like echoes of this is these are these have I think think when I first watched these I found bits of this arc to be some of the weakest like in terms of um

Consistent interest and pacing but in re-watching it it is so clear how important these episodes are uh and uh foundational they are not just

in the sort of like brass tax mechanics of the world, uh, but also setting up up a lot of,

you know, themes and

like sort of binary questions on like ways to do things.

Is that something that you feel as well, Dre and Sylvie, having seen this through, both in terms of them feeling like the weakest and then

sort of revealing themselves to be more structurally important?

Hmm.

Um.

I should say I never disliked these episodes, but in my mind, you know, coming out of the hunter exam and then going into some really exciting stuff that happens after this, in my mind, this sort of stuck out as kind of like a boring arc.

And I okay, I disagree with it being boring.

Do you mean Heaven's Arena as a whole?

Well, I mean like the end of the thing, kind of like the first

the this set and not the middle chunk but sort of like the beginning and the end of heaven's arena um again it's just sort of like the like uh you know the

like every student gets an a someone's still got to get the worst score in the class you know what i mean yeah

yeah i guess i don't know i i feel

I think that this, especially these three episodes, do a lot of good work in terms of continuing to explore like Kiloa's worldview and what happens to Kilo when his worldview gets like turned upside down in many ways.

Like, I mean, in these first two episodes, basically Kilua realizes that like, oh, actually, maybe I'm not as good at figuring out how strong people are because this guy who seemingly cannot hurt me also immediately made me terrified in a way that only my big brother has.

And I think like watching

come to grips with him both not being as strong as he thinks he is, but I think in some ways, maybe more importantly, that he's also not as good as understanding the world as he thought he was.

Especially, like,

he goes so hard into like trying to be cool with Goan and being like, oh yeah, I've been here.

I know how this works.

Just listen to me and you'll make it through just fine.

This is definitely.

And then it's like, oh, shit, I know as little as Goan does about something that is suddenly very important.

This This is definitely like echoes of what we've seen in like on the airship and in other parts of the last season

where like Kilo is trying to make Goan his sidekick.

This is very funny.

It's very funny.

Goan is just like so resistant to it.

And we talked about this already, but the part where Kilo was like, change your plans.

We're going to the top of the tower.

And Kilo, and then Gohan's like, yeah, let's do it.

And then thinks to himself, I want to do that anyway.

We're already going to do it.

We have to hear that that gone's not being influenced by kiloa actually he was already planning to do that um and i guess i don't even read it as kiloa trying to make gone his sidekick as as so much as that like

like kilua just truly believes it is a fact that in some ways he is just smarter and knows better than goon not in a way that makes gone like inferior to him it overall

but just like in this specific thing kiloa is so confident i think it's that he knows and goan I think that's true, then, but also, like,

Kilua likes Goan and is his friend, and isn't

doesn't have the sort of social skills to

have a friend, really.

Um,

and uh, or or like, like has bad interpersonal instincts for relationships, um,

and you and and so

he ends up treating Goan in ways where like he's

like someone who works for him, which is the, or, you know, someone he can boss around, which is like everyone he knows in his life are either his parents or someone he can boss around, which is why you get things in the, like, on the airship where he's like, come on, Goan, we're out of here.

And Go's like, no, I'm going to stay.

And then Goan's like, ah, all right.

Sorry.

Keel's like, oh, are you supposed to listen to me?

My very low-key request.

And, you know, we'll see how that progresses.

But yeah, I definitely have a much better.

This is not new.

This is the last time I re-watched these episodes.

I

like drastically changed how I value them.

And I like them even more, I think, this time.

But there was definitely this, like, I had these two weird moments where I was like, the show starts off a little slow.

And then there's bits of the Heaven's Arena arc that are slow, too.

And then I re-watched them last time I rewatched them.

I was like, oh, that's basically not true at all.

This show starts off really quickly.

Um,

and uh, Heaven's Arena is like really short and fun and quick and good.

Um, but that was sort of a derail.

Where were we actually?

Uh, Mr.

Wing has said, Okay, look, only knowing a bit about this stuff might increase your ignorance, not decrease it.

And Killu says, Nope, don't care.

I want to learn.

He says, I'll do the the slow training if you tell me.

Yeah, which is really interesting.

And I think that

keeping in mind this tension between these two ways of thinking, I think it is worth keeping an eye out for how that goes.

It is notable here at the end of the first episode we're watching today that Killiwa says, okay, let's do the slow training.

I have to learn.

And Wing, everybody heads to Wing's house in a sort of like a Wing has this like little townhouse.

It's on a street connected to a bunch of other houses.

And the episode ends.

Is there anything we want to talk about here in 27 that we have missed?

I've got a couple things from ages and ages ago.

Editing episode two, I realized that I had promised to investigate something from the manga and never did

because it was in the 99 anime and I wasn't sure if it was canon or not.

It's about Mito

and

it is a huge difference between

the 99 anime and the manga and the 2011 anime.

And I just want to say it now because I'll forget again, because I forgot last time, too, to bring this up.

Jing, in the 2011 anime, leaves, comes back,

you know, gives Goan to Mito and then leaves again.

In the 99 anime, this is a lie that Mito tells Goan.

And actually

in the in the again, in the 99 anime, what she says is, I actually like sued in court for custody of you and kicked him out, basically.

Whoa.

And so I was like, I got to see if this is in the manga.

It kind of is.

In the manga, she doesn't say I sued in court for custody of you.

She just says, made him give you up.

Um,

so just an interesting

such an interesting distinction, though, you know, from the character of Gene who

the gene who willingly leaves going behind and disappears is very different to the gene that,

yeah.

And I, like, what has happened?

I have to assume that the context for this is

that he was he was already sort of an absentee father, and the going to the courts was like official, making it official.

Based on things that we will see in the show later, I think that this is like kind of got to be the story of like either he already wasn't around or was extremely sporadically around or something, or maybe he immediately showed up and she, you know, was like, You gotta go,

you're terrible, give me the child.

Uh, but yeah, that is, I wasn't sure if that was just in the 99 anime or if it was also canon in and the manga.

And it seems to be a little bit of both because the 99 anime specifically says, like, I took him to court, which is a very funny thinking of Jing going to court.

Yeah, because the judge, and court in the world of Hunter-Hunter as well, the judge is like 12 feet tall.

It's a frog.

It's the head of a goat.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The defendant stands there.

The judge just goes, oh.

It follows Phoenix Wright rules, too.

That's how

the courtroom works.

And there's one more thing that I want to mention.

Just the economics of Heaven's Arena.

We get a quick explanation of that after

they make it up to floor 50 and they win.

They get, or Kilua gets $500

or 50,000 Gennie for this win.

Oh, we got exchange rate numbers?

We actually have exact exchange rate numbers.

A genie is equivalent to about 0.9

yen.

So, how much did Kilua win when he was eight?

He was making millions of people.

He won 200 million Genie.

And

it is about $2 million.

Yeah.

Maybe a little bit.

It's either a little bit more or a little bit less than that.

Price of a bag of Doritos.

Wow.

Man, Doritos are expensive now at all.

Yeah.

Everything's coming coming up but the wages.

Yeah, a party-sized bag is let's let's round it up to $5.50.

You said $2 million?

Yeah.

Okay,

I got to do some math.

$2 million divided by $5.5.

That's about 363,636 bags of Doritos.

And that is what Kilo says.

He says he spent it all on snacks.

And

this is horrific to Zushi and Gun, who cannot.

They say

they have a terrified face, and they go, what kind of snacks?

These are the snacks we eat.

You've seen Kilo eat these snacks before when he was.

Oh, God.

Do you remember?

Yeah, he was at the guard house.

He was in the guard house of.

So

I've been moving house now for what feels like, you know,

four or five months.

Yeah, this is, this is, this is just the dream of my life.

I've I dreamt I was a butterfly.

Am I butterfly dreaming?

I'm a man moving house, etc.

I just now remembered.

So the last recording we did, I was also moving house, but I was back in Long Beach and I watched the episodes in a kind of fugue state, in like a kind of haze.

And I literally just remembered that stupid man doing the like find the coin trick.

Do you all remember that?

Yeah.

I'd forgotten about that.

I thought I dreamt dreamt yet.

Yeah.

Goto.

And Killua was hanging out

eating snacks, eating these little snacks that are like a yellow robot.

Yeah, just like the

picture.

He loves these snacks.

I think it's an extremely good Hunter-Hunter joke that

these snacks sort of unfold into a little mech and seem to be Killua's favorite and have now showed up twice, which is great.

Yeah, and the image of it from this episode is just him in a room full of hundreds of these snacks,

just saying, spend it all on snacks.

Did you have a note about this, Sylvie?

Not really.

I just love that Killua does this.

Like, I'll be real.

There's just a lot of Kiloa hijinks in this episode.

Or in this.

We get like a good balance of like serious motivations with Killowa want to be Killua wanting to be stronger and then we also get um kitty cat gremlin killua which is all i can describe him as which is just like yeah man i love candy whatever this is no big deal to me oh

spend two million dollars on candy and eat it all yeah i think it also kind of betrays the um

his upbringing a little bit

Oh, yeah.

The fact that money just doesn't really

matter to him.

Right.

Any money that he could possibly make is just bonus candy money.

Exactly.

He doesn't even need it to buy all of his fashion.

No.

I was about to say we haven't really seen anybody else dress like Killua, but Kilua's costume designs, I think, are right in line with Hunter Hunter's weird freaks.

I think that they probably come from the same high-fashion labels that the weird freaks get their costumes from.

Yeah, the difference is that Kilua has like 15 different

out of them over the course of the show.

Everyone else gets one, basically.

Yeah.

Are all the straps on this outfit from his yeah, yeah, from the backpack?

Oh, that's his backpack.

There's like eight of them.

God.

It's sick.

It's great.

It's very good.

Huge Kingdom Hearts aesthetic.

All right, so is that the

end of 27?

I know I spent a lot of extra time there in the end.

Yeah, I think so.

So

28 begins as the narrator explains the rules and reveals that above floor 200, there's 250 floors in this tower, 215, 251.

251, I was wrong on both counts, they will fight fearsome floor masters.

And at this point, I sort of began to suspect that we haven't really escaped the hunter exam, really.

I mean, we might have escaped it, like, narratively.

I don't think that this is the kind of thing that Satots was talking about when he said, oh, the Hunter exam isn't actually over.

You know, I don't think that there's a twist coming up where it's revealed, these are all, this is all still the Hunter organization or whatever.

But I think in terms of the way the show structures

sort of

problems and puzzles and games and

sort of quests for the characters, it is done so transparently.

And of course a show is going to put conflict in the way of its characters.

That's how stories work.

But I think that something about saying, you know, climb the floors

10 at a time, and then when you reach 200, you're going to start facing fearsome floor masters.

It's like, we are fully back in the gamified, you know, blood sport of the hunter exam.

And this is so interesting because

something I think a lot about is when you were like,

This show is Togashi taking a real swing at

how Shounen tends to function and pulling it apart in some ways and interrogating some bits of it and leaving other bits intact and sort of

what's it called in like fancy cooking like a deconstructed shounen like yeah yeah yeah he's presenting to us a deconstructed you know uh uh uh

chicken and waffles and this is explicit tagashi actively talks about his desire to be deconstructing his characters and his the shonen tropes way back when he's still writing the Yu Yu Hakasho manga and being stopped from doing so by his editors.

And so going into

oh, just just so this is something that's been on his mind, and specifically in the context of like

kind of being unsuccessful on a personal level or unsatisfied in writing a successful long-running series, talking about like how

this is something that I think we can go over in more detail, like in a bonus episode or something one day.

But talking about how he, like,

he, he, he has, he doesn't have a lot of success

when he has to stick with the same thing for a really long time and he gets bored and he wants to end things, but his editors are like, please, for the love of God, don't end them, but also don't do these interesting things you want to do.

Um, and uh, that sort of uh is like what causes him to kind of intentionally crash and burn Yiwaka Show.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Anyway.

And so

I was sort of primed to

weird a really interesting point because we have come out of one essentially very long tournament arc in the form of the hunter exam.

And then we have,

you know, fooled around with the rescuing killer for a few episodes.

And then we suddenly find ourselves right on the precipice of another tournament arc.

So the question that I had kind of going into episode 28 is like,

is this going to get deconstructed?

And if so, how is it going to get deconstructed?

Or, you know, are we just going to spend the rest of the arc watching them,

you know,

slowly learn how to slowly train, slowly figure this out, climb up the tower bit by bit, like you might expect?

And that turns out not to be what happens.

Because as these two episodes kind of continue, it is sort of revealed that

this tower is really just sort of

a side thing to what is actually happening here, which is Goan and Killua and Zushi and Wing learning about Nen.

And the tower is the sort of little side arena that they dip into occasionally to practice what they have been doing in

pursuit of their goal.

We watch watch um

two full fights really and well i guess the fact that the their fights for the first hundred or first 200 floors take one second each uh in any other show

uh not any other show but in so many shows this would be like it would be luxuriating in these uh tournaments like this is like where characterization happens in a lot of shounen is like put them in a fight test them against someone that like understands the world differently in a way that challenges them and also fights in a way that challenges them and then like tie how they understand the world with how they fight together and sort of

make this like one it was sort of like a a uh turn slowly turn the clashing of their physical strength with clashing of their like

world views.

And this is like the kind of recipe for

you know, uh, like a traditional shounen.

And this is now the second time that, um,

in the in in in 30 episodes that Tagashi is like, no, the tournament is, is essentially unimportant.

They skip it.

They basically skip it both times.

They, they show it in montage and flashbacks, and it's very funny.

They do a really good job of playing with expectations because they build up the getting to the 200th floor thing a couple times and then it's basically done in five minutes.

Like it is genuinely like it really brought a smile to my face remembering how they paced this all out.

And Kilo's mad about it.

He's like, when I was here, it took me two months to get to floor 150 or something.

And then Ghan's like, but you were six.

And Kilo was like, well,

that doesn't matter.

There's another moment where, where they talk about Killo's past here, and Gunn's like, you were, oh, I think it actually is this conversation.

Like,

Gunn's like, you were only six.

And at first, it read to me like Gun kind of empathizing with having to do this at only six.

And it was like, no, you were only six.

Of course you were weak when you were six.

Yeah.

Weak child.

So Wing is like, I'm going to try and train you.

Yeah, Yeah, they're at Wing's pass.

And

he breaks down the kind of the four exercises,

which

briefly involve sort of focusing your mind on a single point,

putting into words your goal, identifying your resolve and making a kind of resolution to not lose, and then releasing it.

And Wing says, for this demonstration, I would like to kill you.

Is that all right?

And Killiwa says,

Yeah, yeah, okay.

Yeah, whatever.

It's Tuesday.

At which point, Wing immediately sort of enters this Wren state,

this

purple malice that we have seen from Ilumi.

And also, I think we have seen from Hisuka before.

I believe this is the

awful purple miasma that rolled off Hisaka when he didn't kill Kurapika and Leorio.

Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Definitely represented similarly, yeah.

Yeah, and of course, as soon as

Wing does this,

Killu has the same response.

He leaps backwards with such force and terror that he wedges himself in the upper corner of a room like a demon-possessed child in an 80s horror movie.

And he just looks down,

he is not at all happy.

He's afraid.

Wing claims that the plan with Ren is essentially to

bluff so hard that your opponent backs down.

Am I understanding that correctly?

Yes,

it's connected to bluffing, but yeah, it is like bolstering and projecting your willpower.

And then, notably, he says it requires a matured soul to execute correctly because,

and he explained this in one way, and I didn't quite catch it down in time.

But I think he's saying if it's not executed correctly, it can cause a bad soul to stick, like a sour face when the wind changes.

You know, in that like old saying, you know, if you frown, the wind will change and your face will get stuck like that.

It's like if you have a bad soul and you do Ren, your soul might sort of solidify bad

intense.

Which is interesting because, hey,

souls are real in the show, I guess.

Yes.

So, well,

the way that they use it is more like the way that they use

Ki or Chi in other shows, or like they use

Chakra in Naruto, where it is sort of like...

Is this a Shonen's staple?

Oh, deeply, yeah, yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely.

Um,

foundational spirit energy in the Yuhakasho, function versus Z in general, just like the idea of Chi is like very energy, and Dragon Ball Z is kind of like

a very uh archetypical um

example,

yeah.

Shounen again, like the more traditional line of Shounen is like deeply involved with manifesting your life energy into

offensive power in some way

that is like, you know, very loosely tied to,

you know, old school martial arts.

But like, Jack, have you ever seen?

Have you ever seen Goku charge up before?

Like, just a GIF of it or anything?

That's when, like, his, his, his hair goes all fiery, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That is random, basically.

Basically, yeah, they were very much playing with the visual language of that.

Specifically, the like, um, I'm trying to get a decent GIF of it.

Um, specifically, of like when the aura starts swirling around them and stuff like that, I think it really looks like Dragon Ball Z.

Um,

uh, I don't, it's obviously not the only thing that they're going for here, but like, I kind of keep bringing it up as an example because it is the most broadly known

series in the genre space.

So, I'm hoping that the listeners also have that as an easy touchstone.

Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z are like very casual with this.

Like this stuff just exists, and that's kind of the end of it.

Shows like

Naruto

similar are so chakra works so similarly to Nen because of how inspired that show is by Hunter Hunter.

But they even, you know, they talk about nodes across your body for how it works in the same way that this does.

But yeah, it is, you know, lots of shows dealing with ways of accessing your life energy, amplifying it into offensive and defensive power.

And this is, you know, rooted in real-world traditions of martial arts and thinking about the body, right?

Yeah.

Except

it sounds like what you're saying is in Shonen, those

real-world roots are turned so explicitly towards...

You said offensive.

Is it almost always combat?

It's like this understanding of yourself and your soul to fight people?

A little bit.

There's some different aspects of it, but like we're like

most of these are also termed as battle anime, and it, you know, it also kind of, like we said, ties into martial arts stuff.

So it very much tends to be a combat thing.

Yeah.

It's so interesting that this didn't come up at all in the hunter exam.

Not at all.

It's so funny.

Why would it?

Yeah,

it is really like.

I mean, these

this arc is really like, you know, like lifting the veil on,

you know, hey, there's like the secret part of the world.

Do you remember?

It was in this same part.

I think it might.

Is it a little later?

I think it might be the next episode where,

because Jack, you sort of

alluded to this.

After this quick explanation of Nen and the demonstration from Wing,

they kind of like leave in a hurry.

Killua leaves, like, drags Gonaut in kind of a huff,

and immediately accuses him of lying.

about

his explanation of how Nen works.

Does anyone have like a good handle on that?

that, wants to talk a little bit about it?

Yeah, he accuses him of lying in a really classically Killiua way, which is he's like,

okay, so Wing says people's power is based on their strength of will, but I think there's something more.

There's something additional that he's hiding.

Because Zushi couldn't have caused me that much trouble if it was just strength of will.

It's a real sort of like backhanded compliment from Killiua by being like, well, you know, in order for that guy to have caused me a problem, there must have have been something more to it because otherwise, I'd have just walked all over him.

And this is where they show the flashback of the end of that fight where Kilua hit

Zushi with the intent to kill him, essentially.

And then you kind of watch the panic on his face when he realizes that he sort of impulsively attacked Zushi with lethal force.

And then Zushi's like right back up almost straight away.

He's hurt and, you know, covered in dirt and scrapes and stuff, but is

largely unharmed.

It's a really good moment because it also shows that Killua, a lot of this stuff is still second nature to Kilua.

It's not like it's just solved now that he's away from his shitty family.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Even though he is trying to sort of like contain that nature a little bit.

Well, and there's something else happening here too, which is, I wonder if this is the first time Killua has ever made a friend who then subsequently makes a friend because

Karapika and Leorio and Gon kind of came as a package.

And so I think on some level, and you know, they're all slightly different ages and Goan and Kiliua bonded really quickly.

And so I think that on some level, Kiliwa doesn't really see Karapika and Leorio as a threat to his friendship with Goan because he's like, well, they all kind of came together.

But this is probably the first time in his life that he has ever gone through the experience that you do as a kid of of being friends with someone and then your friend making another friend.

Right.

And you're thinking, well, hang on.

I'm that friend.

And I think that especially that the friend that Gone has made or is sort of making overtures of making.

in Zushi is such a studious and careful and good-hearted person who has a responsive and kind mentor figure whom he looks up to.

I think it's just this real, like, uh, uh, melange of complicated feelings.

Yeah, Africa.

He really is the opposite character to Killua.

Yeah.

And so I think Killua is thinking, you know, actually, hmm, I don't know if Killua is able to sort of form these thoughts, but I'm sure he is thinking of it in one way or another.

Who's this fucking guy?

And I think that some of that comes out in him

deploying lethal force against the child martial artist.

But it's also deeply sad, right?

This is the sadness of Killiua as well, is that, you know, we get to see

there are a couple of lovely moments, and I'm sure I've written them down, but I can't call them to hand.

We get to see the ways in which Ghan

opens Kelliua up to the experience of childhood.

of running around, of being goofy, of being a 12-year-old in the way that Goan knows how to do so sort of totally.

But what Goan also opens him up to are all the

frustrations and tensions and confusion of being a 12-year-old.

And I think it's really nice storytelling that we sort of got that first with, oh, isn't it great to be a 12-year-old?

And then, oh, actually, 12-year-olds are having lots of complicated feelings about themselves and the world that they're in,

that Killiwa is completely ill-equipped to address in any way

other than through violence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, Goan is also the first thing Kilua has ever had in his life that is like, would actually be really sad for him to lose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're right.

Um

it was much easier when I was a child assassin and the only things I needed to feel were malaise and terror.

And boredom.

Yeah, and boredom.

Malaise and

boredom.

Ennui.

It was ennui and terror.

Because he wanted to be friends with Canary, right?

We saw him asking Canary and then Canary realizing, oh, no, no.

But then when that doesn't happen, it's sort of like a shrug of the shoulders.

It's sort of like,

okay, like, whatever, back to missions.

Well, he's making a bid, and that bid is rejected, right?

Shut down.

And I think he is in.

I'm about to say he is in a formative point in his life, but I don't just mean because he's a 12-year-old.

I mean because he's a child assassin exiting his family and into the world.

It's a tough time for a career in a much broader sense.

It's a tough time for a career.

But I think he's definitely at a point where making that kind of overture of friendship and then having that bid rejected is going to have a consequence and is going to produce the kind of

shoulder shrug, disaffected Kilua that we all know and love.

Yeah.

Bless him.

I want the best for that little weirdo.

Do we straightaway get sort of Zushi's side of this

accusal from this is Tagashi's trick as well.

Drifting the perspective again.

Yeah.

Oh,

get this interesting moment.

This is very quick.

In that fight between Zushi and and Kilua, first of all, the show is getting more comfortable.

I made a note in like episode four or five that like we've never gotten inside Kilua's head the way we've gotten inside other characters.

Like even Rando's like Tonpa, or we get whole episodes that are where they're the main character.

But Kilua has been around, you know.

10 episodes right now, like so far.

We've never gotten that sort of that sort of breaks down at some point.

I don't remember when the first time was, but I think it was an episode or two ago from of this show.

The fight between Zushi and Kilua, we get inside both of their heads during this.

We get internal monologues from both of them.

And I think that's the first time that happens where we're hearing from both characters kind of simultaneously.

Is this a shonen thing too?

I mean, I've encountered it in the past of like often in a fight, cutting to a character's face and hearing their inner monologue.

But I think specifically this thing that Togashi does, where

protagonist characters will pose a question or will wonder about something else, and then we jump to a secondary character and then, following their perspective, have the answer revealed, often over a long period of time, has happened enough times to be notable.

And I'm curious if that in itself is also a hallmark of Shiny.

No, I think this is very unique to Togashi.

It's definitely fairly common to get to get it from the main character.

Or the character, the protagonist of focus, like you'll get, you know, if we're, if we're watching Naruto and we're, we're watching Rock Lee fight, and he's, like, the good guy of the fight, so we get inside his head for a little bit.

I think that happens, like, fairly common.

But

the, the ability for

Tagashi's writing to, like, get inside people's heads, hear their thoughts, jump around.

bring in the narrator and for it to all feel like one big thing.

It's something that, like, he's really good at, is sort of unique, I think, and also kind of expands as the show expands.

This is like something that grows with the show, I feel like.

That's great.

Yeah, so we see

Zushi say, Wink,

why did you lie to these people?

And it turns out that Wink

has been truthful about the four exercises, but has lied about what they mean.

Which is classic hunter logic of like

one

what you see is not actually the truth, and you need to sort of dig deep.

What appears to be one thing is always actually another thing.

If you look closer at it, the real path is just slightly obscured rather than completely obscured.

He redraws the nen character to mean mind force, and then he does the classic teacher thing where he says:

If the true nen were taught to someone who wasn't one of of my pupils it would be a terrible weapon

well okay i i sort of interpreted this a little differently i i heard him saying like because nen is a terrible weapon you have to be careful who you teach it to and i don't know them

we've heard this before haven't we we've heard the hunters say

Being a hunter is a spectacular privilege and affords a great deal of power.

So we need to make sure that only really good people become hunters, something that they fail to do at literally every turn.

And structurally, actually enforce kind of the opposite thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's sort of like set up to be.

We've talked so much about this.

If you're bad, you better be really strong.

Yeah, if you're bad, you better be the worst and capable of beating everybody.

Good people can get by on teamwork and cooperation.

The bad people better better be so talented that they're able to do it all on their own.

Netzero is out there, like, I've invented a kind of rubric for creating the devil.

Would you like one to hear about it?

Aren't I the nicest, friendliest old guy that you just want to hang out with?

Aren't they so fun and funny?

Notably, Wing demonstrates the kind of evil power of

Nen by tearing a page from a book that Zushi has not finished reading and forming it into a blade.

Like, for example, a weaponized playing card.

I know.

And I think that as this has been going on,

and this sort of becomes extremely apparent in 29, actually, no, towards the end of this episode.

Yeah, we're going to get to this.

The implication is that Hisaka knows Nen.

Full.

Yeah.

And a lot of what we consider to be Hisaka's magic is just Nen weaponized.

Which I think

is so cool.

I love

it.

There is something really satisfying and

hmm.

The idea that your nemesis has gotten to the technique before you is a really cool piece of storytelling, right?

This feeling of like Goan and Killu are hearing about this for the first time.

They're getting the wool pulled over their eyes by Wing.

Wing and Zushi are discussing whether or not to actually teach them the true thing.

Hiseker has known about this from the word go.

You know, before the viewer even heard about it, Hiseka was weaponizing Nen.

And I think it sort of embeds it in the world in a really great way that not just the Nen masters are out here knowing it, but like people who we have encountered in the past were out here using this technique that we have only just now learned about.

It's really neat.

This might be something you've thought about, or maybe it's self-evident, or maybe this is a good question.

But, Jack, who else

do you think that we've seen that knew about and can make use of Nen?

Illumi.

Right.

And that might be.

Oh, hmm.

It's Hisaka, it's Ilumi.

It's it's probably Natero, but I don't have any evidence for that beyond he's just very powerful.

You know, and that might be it from my guess.

It's two awful nightmares and a third awful nightmare in a different way, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The jolly old man.

Okay, well, that'll be the one.

Do you think that the gorilla from the screenshot stream can use Nen?

It's that is such a funny question,

and I won't tell you why.

It is it is an outrageously hilarious question.

Oh that's so good.

Wing says anybody can use nen if you

sure you know with enough work anyone can use nen which is why you must be very careful who you teach it to.

The tournaments

this is the I Jack are you also sort of confused and

because I know how little experience you have with the

genre, are you also confused and have a barely activated understanding of what people mean when they talk about stands in Jejo's Bizarre Adventure?

Here's what I think a stand is.

I think a stand is a sort of

soul power that you call upon

that is like, what if my true self

could be turned towards creating a guy

who fought for me?

That's what I think it is.

So I think I would say, oh, my stand is,

you know, a man with axe that fights you.

And then he would appear behind me and then kill you.

Okay.

Ask and answer.

That's all I had.

You know what?

Yeah, actually,

not the worst.

No, no.

And I haven't seen enough of the show to know, to have a better definition than that, Jack.

I just know enough to know that I want to draw

a line between what that and what we were just talking about.

And that's all.

Yeah, I mean, I will say that between my unfamiliarity with the jest, with the genre, and the fact that I am moving house, all this Nen stuff is sort of like a fever dream for me.

I think obfuscated by the fact that Wing lies about it the first time he teaches the Mitt.

So the show actually kind of presents two sort of models of Nen.

And there are these four steps that, you know,

I could say, oh, this is the one about, you know, sort of conjuring your aura.

This is the one about sort of stilling your aura within you.

This is the one about sort of projecting it out to defend against another attack or whatever.

I could do that stuff fairly fine.

But it all sort of slides around in my brain like vegetables in a pan with too much oil in.

And I'm sort of content with that.

I don't.

I get what I need to know here,

but I will say that the experience of this like very sort of like nen teaching section has been a fairly confusing one.

Yeah.

I think eventually those veggies will crisp up nice and be extremely delicious.

Delicious.

Yeah, my favorite thing to do when I am watching a piece of media is go, I don't understand what's happening, but I'm just going to kind of keep watching and figure it out.

I can't be 100% sure sure if this is new music.

I think it is new music, but this section has some new music.

It has these like these sort of ominous sort of synth pads that I think are like the Nen song.

It's like, it's like,

wow, really good synth pad noise.

Thank you.

Keith, you had like an attack on that?

You figured out how to make the envelope with your mouth.

It's just volume.

an envelope just describes the the electrical process of emulating your voice

so you just you really just skipped ahead yeah you on the whiteboard crossing out electrical process and writing

actually my voice that sounds like an envelope it's an envelope that sounds like me

Okay, Killer.

Let me see.

before this episode ends.

We get a couple good thing lines from uh Wing.

Oh, no, no, no, no.

Sorry, I skipped, I skipped four.

We have this whole

ways to go.

We have this whole hallway scene.

Well, the tower continues.

Floor 190.

Gon and Killua.

Fight a kung fu guy and a wrestler.

Lots of big talk.

This is just an extended gag.

It's funny.

Yeah.

In which the kung fu guy and the wrestler are specifically like, your chop won't beat me.

I'm too sturdy.

Your push won't beat me.

I'm too fast.

And then you go.

Slippery like a snake is what he's saying.

Slippery like a snake.

And then he makes his hand look like a little snake.

Yeah, exactly.

And then how many chops and pushes does it take to beat them?

Well,

one.

One.

Both win and advance to one.

200.

Gon and Kilua are

200.

Zushi is still pissing about on 50, I think.

Every single person on these 200 floors that Gon and Kilua encountered would have died in

either died in Swindler Swamp or would have flunked out just getting to Swindler Swamp.

Yeah, I wouldn't have made it through the running.

They wouldn't have made it through.

The run.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Am I remembering right, Dre?

You asked us where we would fail the hunter exam, right?

And we would all fail during the running?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, I think so.

Yeah, we'd all fail during the running.

Yeah, step one.

And every other human on Earth would fail during the running.

Sure.

I might might have even failed with the Kiriko.

Oh, yeah.

I'm just assuming that we teleport to the start of phase one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

That was the spirit of it.

Yeah.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, sure, sure.

Yeah.

I'm getting on.

Honestly, I'm getting on the wrong bus.

I'm getting on the

you lose bus.

Wing notices Gone and Kiliua reach floor 200 and says, hmm, I have no choice.

I'm going to have to teach them.

Because as Gun and Kiliua enter floor 200.

And

this is Wing's big failure: of like not having been paying close enough attention to them.

Because he ends up having to do something that he describes as very dangerous about this, where if he had been paying closer attention,

could have easily, easily taken the one week that he said that it would have needed to do this the right way

instead of

what ends up happening here.

A bad energy comes out of a hallway,

terrible nen energy hallway.

Uh, gun and kill you are head down the hallway and are uh

interrupted by a young woman who works for the place.

The negative energy subsides, and she lets them know that they have to register to fight within four hours.

She looks so

don't, she is the most tired person.

I love her.

Do you think that it's tiring?

Because I think it's sort of revealed that it's not her energy.

It's

Hisuka's energy.

Oh, can we say for certain?

No, we can't say for certain.

I can't.

Exactly.

The thing that I imagine is happening is that,

like,

her job is to sit there waiting for people to come up and it's just constantly being bombarded by the lunatics that live here by their malicious men.

And it's just like

spiritually drained by this job.

That is sort of what I imagine is happening.

On the 200th floor.

Okay, so if you don't register in four hours, Goan will be sent back to the bottom of the tower again.

Fine.

But because Killiwa got to floor 200 but didn't go any further than that, because that was kind of the terms of his awful agreement with his dad,

Killiwa will have sort of flunked out of registering twice, and he will never be able to return to the tower.

He will be banned permanently.

On the 200th floor, there are 173 contestants, and you can use weapons.

That's a lot.

That's more than I was, because I was thinking about the economics of this place, and like at first, I was kind of impressed that they were paying so many, so much money

for

these wins.

But then I was like, oh, actually, $10,000,

you know, or $10,015,000 maybe $1,000 for a a win is only a lot when you can win every day and take zero damage.

And actually, it's a very small amount of money if you're fighting like a normal person might fight, where it takes you two, three months to heal up from getting the shit beaten out of you.

Yeah.

Yeah,

but from 200 up, you don't actually get money.

You don't fight for money, but for honor.

And then brilliantly, a three of spades appears behind her as a Flamenca Qatar Q plays, and Hisaka shows up.

He was the source of the Foul Nen, and this is great.

I did not anticipate this at all.

This was kind of like the first twist in this arc that really got me, you know,

it's really good.

It's really good.

I

love it for two reasons.

The first reason is that

going to train to fight a guy and then immediately encountering him in the training ground, saying, Oh, you're training to fight me, is fantastic.

That's just it's scary, it's funny, it's it's it's really good.

Secondly, I thought that the whole we have to train to fight Hisaka thing was pushing Hisuka down the road to be an exciting reappearance later.

You know, it was essentially reappearance.

Well, it's no, it's not later.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know.

Keith, cut this, but this is us doing the stellar combustor at the end of act one instead of, you know, this is like, oh, you, you know, the horrible thing is coming, but the, the, the joy and the terror of it is that it, the trap is sprung way sooner than you thought.

Yeah.

Now I'll say that in a way that you don't have to cut.

No, I'll just beep the thing.

I'll just beep it.

Oh, yeah, great.

Great.

Nice.

Hey, if you want to know what that's about, listen to Friends to the Table.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so I was just, I was, um, Hisaker is horrible.

He's a real slimy piece of shit.

Yeah.

Um, I was so delighted to see him again because he is a kind of

describing

experience.

Oh, really?

Is this the universal?

He's a piece of shit.

He's a slimy weirdo.

Uh, he's horrible.

He's the worst, least likable character in any show I've ever seen.

And every time he shows up, I'm losing my mind.

This is a new

outfit as well.

He is wearing a black bodice this time, I believe.

He wore a pink one in his first appearance.

Yeah, I'm completely making this up.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's how.

He has black and red.

I actually didn't notice that it changed.

Me neither, but now that Jack has said that, you are absolutely right.

Does he have new suits painted on his face as well?

Oh.

Um, no, no, those are the same, I think.

I'm gonna check.

Because he has all four.

He has two on the.

Oh, maybe he, maybe they swapped.

Maybe the ones that are on the shirt are now on his face, and vice versa.

But I don't know.

Um,

do you think Hisaka paints his makeup every day, or do you think that it is special makeup that lasts?

Or do you think it's nen?

I think it's real makeup and I think he does it every day yeah do you want the answer about the the face yes please

the symbols are the same but they change color okay

during the hunter exam the star was like a pinkish magenta and the teardrop was like a cyan

and during the heavens arena the star is yellow and the teardrop is like a different moods just feeling different they're not suits they are symbols oh sorry on the shirt is a suit but But the

symbols aren't.

I said suits earlier, but yeah,

he has card suits.

That's how the brain works.

Yeah.

I've watched lots of this show, and I thought that

they were card suits on his face this whole time.

They are not.

Hey, you know, maybe in Hunter Hunter World, it's hearts and diamonds and stars and teardrops.

Yeah.

And close.

No, it's not true because we see him make a spade later.

But anyway, then Hisuka does something.

This is like the exact sort of kind of terrible, terrifying guy that Hisuka is.

What is the.

I mean, it's sort of a threat.

What is he?

Oh, well, first he admits to cyberstalking them.

He found out that they were killing him.

Do you have a note about this, Trey?

Yeah, I know.

He's the lead hackshort.

God,

he's, yeah,

he basically traces their flight.

He, like gets out of the hunter exam

goes, what are those, what are those little boys up to?

Hacks them, finds out that they took a flight to,

are they in, is Heaven's Arena in York New City?

I think it is, right?

I don't think

it's a different place.

It's in this

Zaban city.

Well, he finds out where their flight went and he goes, probably going to Heaven's Arena.

I I should go to Heaven's Arena and menacingly wait for them.

Goan, you didn't buy your tickets using the signal app so I could track you over the internet.

I love your Hsoka voice, Trey.

Thank you.

Also, yes, his suits did change on his outfit.

Okay, okay.

It's very consistent with the way that the show has talked about the internet, right?

With the kind of simultaneous glee of you can learn things on the internet and the vague malice of like, but bad stuff can happen on the internet too.

It's got real sort of

gone is just your grandpa on the internet.

It's also got this like weird little again.

This is like this.

There's a lot of

anime that like

is like feels so anachronistic.

Like, you know, if you, if you've seen

like Demon Slayer or whatever is a more recent example where

it feels like it's taking place in 1815, and then all of a sudden, like you realize, oh, there's like cars and this is like 1955.

Some of my favorite things.

I love that feeling.

And really looking at the Heavens Arena building itself, like really solidified something to me that this

parts of Hunter Hunter really remind me of old like Sega Genesis fantasy stars.

Yeah.

Oh, totally.

Yeah.

Very, very like kind of like weird future but also the woods and yeah it's very weird and yeah this like you know Dragon Ball we've talked a lot about about Dragon Ball having dinosaurs and samurai and also

uh spaceships and flying cars uh and yeah this show just reminding you that it has the internet feels like a joke every time it comes like isn't it funny that they have the internet

and that hsoka of all people is like fucking on the dark

he has a uh what are those like like funny mac laptops with the the colors the clamshell oh yeah the clamshell the i

that's like

um

yeah that's what that's what he's a good uses um

uh so what so what is the what is the the the this kind of threat that he'suka makes and then i want to talk about that a little bit

i mean he basically says, like,

you are not allowed on the 200th floor until you can handle my,

you know, my malicious Nin energy.

Which

Wing shows up and describes as, like, if they were standing with no clothes in a blizzard, like, it'll just kill them if they don't be careful because they are completely unprotected against Nin.

They have literally no defense for it.

But it's, it's, again, it's one of these like weird

this weird thing about Hisuka, who's like

a massive threat to them,

but is

so in control of the way that he's a threat to them.

And is also like a protector?

Yeah, that's exactly the thing.

He wants, or at least what he was doing.

He's a predator.

He's a predator in

that, like,

you know,

he is,

you know, he is a farmer who is like protecting his crop from

pests.

Until in the harvest.

That is the...

And so, like, this is like the weird thing about how Hisuka presents as a villain is that...

At every turn,

he's like making things easier and less deadly.

Like, really, he's protecting Gon and Kiloa from the literal immediate danger of hazing from other people on the 200th floor

to the ends of like being a nasty creep who wants to kill them later.

Yeah, when like the

I have trouble with the even just like

defining it as protection when the entire end goal is, oh,

I want to be the one to fuck these kids over.

Like, I want to be the one to kill these kids up, kill these kids, and like beat them up and see their full potential.

The reason I bring it up is because or have these kids kill me.

It's so, yeah, I think there's an undertone of that also, um, of like a sort of kind of,

you know,

a homicidal slash suicidal

drive for like a bizarre fight.

But it's just like such a repeated thing where, like, Hisuka's, it's, you're right, it's not protection in like a literal sense.

It's like

in any other way except like an immediate

thing as you know, a farmer protecting crops until he can then harvest and eat the crops.

There's um

there's a lot of like gamer moments in this, and honestly, Hisoka sort of functioning as a skill check also feels like one.

Like,

yeah, and this is sort of this is sort of what I mean.

mean like the the threat is the the threat is

is you you will lose if you come into this area because you haven't leveled up enough

um he is the he is the enemy that has the little red skull next to his name in an mmo because you're not a high enough like you just can't deal with it right now but it's such a with um

like your current skills it's such a powerful and just like in old mmos if you can't if you lose then you lose all your xp and you have to start over at floor it's such a powerful and and unique use of sort of like uh narrative and flavor to like

to be able to so accurately color who isuka is what his whole deal is uh why he's a dangerous person why he's a threat to these children uh uh

but also be able to like

put him in these situations where he's able to like control how the things happen around them.

Like

in

a, and Sylvie, you said as a skill check, like in kind of like this video gamey way of like,

you know, giving them opportunities to level up.

Like that is like his whole MO.

And it is like a very unique kind of way that he is a villain.

That I don't can't think of any

any character that that functions in this particular way, like in anything, really.

It's very

it's he's terrible, but also very unique.

Yeah.

I guess the I left off like the stakes part of

why it is so especially bad that Hisuka is blocking them from going down the hallway, is that if they don't register before midnight at the registration desk,

they Gone will get disqualified and have to start over.

But Kilua, because Kilua hadn't made it this far before and never checked in, I think the wordage that they used was like that Kilua obviously isn't like, isn't taking this seriously or something like that.

And so, because he isn't taking this seriously the way it deserves, they will banish him forever.

Which is, it's very funny when they do, they do a very funny gag when they get to actually get to the registration.

Should we blow that now or should we wait until cryogenic?

Let's wait.

Yeah, let's wait.

Let's wait.

Win at the end.

Yeah, go ahead.

Wing encountering or realizing that this is the case.

Wing sort of steps in and says, okay, look, I'm going to teach you how to do this.

I was lying to you about how Nen works.

Nen, it turns out, is the ability to sort of control your aura.

Everyone in the world has this aura or this energy, but most of it sort of leaks away.

And the four steps the sort of the the the big practice of nen is about the cultivation and mastery and control of this aura and he gets into some of the details but um

i think the only thing that you need to know here is hmm

only one thing says wing can protect you from a nen user uh using it yourself and protecting yourself with one of its kind of four pillars a thing called ten which is like a

sort of a shield.

And he demonstrates what would happen if you didn't use 10.

He turns around and he places his hand gently against the wall.

And in an extremely cool moment of just like, you know, it's good television, a big circle kind of shatters on the wall.

And Wing says,

While Wing

would be shattered,

like, he really doesn't move.

It's very cool.

Your body would be shattered beyond all recognition.

I don't know if that's the same thing.

And then in comes the narrator.

This is wild.

In comes the narrator, who says,

as we pan down the evil hallway towards Hisuka, who is just sitting patiently on the floor at one end, the narrator says, you know, Gon and Kellua have to learn

Nen to get up this hallway.

Will they be able to pass Hisuka?

And then brilliantly, Hisaka turns to the camera and says, Not yet, responding directly to the narrator.

This is like a callback to something I noticed early in.

They've stopped doing the cute little hunter encyclopedia.

They've stopped doing the hunter dictionary definitions.

They've replaced them with the thing that we'll probably talk about maybe at the end of this episode.

And I missed those.

But in Hisaka's one, he threw a playing card through the screen and it shattered.

You know, sort of setting up the not even the viewer is safe.

Hiseker is able to manipulate the kind of ephemera of the scene outside of his story.

And we see this again as Hiseka responds to the narrator, asking if Gon and Kellyua will be able to pass him.

It's a really cool, cool little moment.

Yeah, I really like that.

It was really good.

I think in mine,

what he says is it's too early, which is not quite as good as not yet.

Yeah, it's kind of the same feeling, but Wing destroying his own wall is hilarious to me.

It's so funny.

Wing just kind of keeps doing a lot of unforced errors, huh?

We got

the book and then the juice and then the...

Can you imagine what it's like to be Wing's neighbor?

I would say.

Yeah, should we talk about Mr.

Wing for a bit?

Because I feel like we've sort of we've talked around him a little, but

I'm so curious about what it was like seeing this character

this time around for people who are familiar with the show, kind of seeing his introduction.

When he arrived, I

hmm.

I have several moments in my notes where I'm like, I don't know about this wing guy.

I don't think I trust this man.

And as the episodes went on,

I sort of became more and more on Team Wing in the sense of like, I think this guy's just kind of a weird goofball who is also extremely powerful.

It's not so much that he's a goofball.

He's just...

His hair is always messy.

His shirt is always untucked.

Like Sylvie said, he shreds Zushi's book.

He destroys a soda can, he knocks a massive hole in his wall.

He's not quite the absent-minded professor archetype.

You know,

he has a real calmness.

He's the absent-minded grad student.

Yeah, he has real grad student vibes.

He's got a kind of like shabby diligence about him and a shabby calm or patience that I think is really fun.

There are several moments where Killua and Gon talk about how Wing

sort of expressing his aura out into the world does not feel bad in the way that it does when Hisuka does it or when Ilumi does it.

And this is explained by Wing having no malice

in him sort of outputting this aura.

Whether or not he has malice remains to be seen.

I'm still, you know, I am reluctant to take what that character says at face value.

I think it's important that malice is like an ingredient.

It's not like it's not a

personality trait.

It is like something you can put into your Nen, not something that your Nen, I mean, your Nen can reflect it in like the Hezekia scene where after he doesn't kill

Kropik and Leorio can reflect a malice that you're feeling.

But it's more like you can choose to put it in there or not if you're in control of yourself.

Yeah.

God, characterizing Wing as a grad grad student is really funny.

I've not thought of that.

He absolutely has PhD grad vibes about him.

And I think that

I hope we get to see more of this character.

I think he is fun.

Yeah, I like Wing.

I was excited to see Wing again.

I think Wing ends up looking really good in

a broad view of this show.

Interesting.

Sylvie and Dre, do you have Wing thoughts?

Um,

he's a great guy.

I don't know.

I don't know.

Wing, kind of.

There's something about Wing that always rubs me the wrong way a little bit.

Though I don't know if it's,

I don't know how intentional it is, but the whole like constantly reminding everyone how dangerous Nen is and then also training like an eight-year-old to to use it from like childhood uh feel at odds with each other like

um he is someone who lives in the hunter-hunter world but I do see what you're saying

yeah I don't know it's just like

I don't know there's something sinister about it

sinister in a in a sort of the the way that we have seen adult characters yeah sinister in the same way that Netaro feels i guess is the best way to put it i think that the that's really interesting the thing that is interesting well that that'll probably that'll definitely come up again um

the the thing that i that i think

reflects well in wing

is that

you know we end up seeing a lot of adults who

like are teaching very dangerous things to children but never saying how dangerous it is and never reminding them to be careful.

That, like, the person who's like, slow down, take your time, be responsible, don't use this for evil, ends up being like the most reasonable voice of reason in a show without a lot of voices of reason.

Except

they don't do this slowly.

This is really interesting.

That's true.

29 begins.

And we get another one of Tagashi's tricks, as he immediately slams a hammer into subverting the sort of long arc of learning that is not just a shonen trope, but is like, you know, a classic storytelling trope.

The character studiously focuses on a thing.

And he telescopes this into Gonan Killua have to learn how to do this in one night.

Less than one night.

It's like three and a half hours three hours yeah

they

like we see the clock multiple times it's like when they're in the hallway with hiseka i think it's like eight o'clock and then when um at the end of wing's explanation of what 10 is it's like 8 45.

it's great it's uh it's so funny it's like i need to learn to play the piano

Okay, well now listen learning to play the piano is I

think I'm gonna give you two options.

Either it takes a lot of dedication and effort over decades of practice, or I can teach it to you in 45 minutes to about the same level.

Which do you choose?

I want to know what it feels like for Zushi seeing this

shortcut.

It's going to be awful.

It's going to be awful.

I mean,

Wing says...

Oh, say, sorry, go ahead.

Wing says...

Wing says this method is a cheat and is highly frowned upon.

But he doesn't say that it doesn't work.

You know, it's dangerous.

I think he also says, yeah, he says it's dangerous.

Yeah, yeah.

I think that what he says is that one, it can kill you if the person is untalented or untrustworthy.

And

I missed it this time, but I had it in my head that he also says that, like, it can accidentally shock you, shock your

nodes closed closed instead of open like it can keep you from ever being able to do that but maybe i'm wrong or maybe that's something that like gets mentioned later uh i don't i don't think that came up but

um

maybe i'm just totally misremembering this

and and wing

hmm let me think about how i want to come at this There's something so speaking of how bad Zushi would feel watching this.

There is something that Wing says to Zushi that is heartbreakingly sad.

Like, it's so horrible.

What does he say?

It's not in this episode.

I'll tell you the quote.

They actually do say it in this,

but

it's not really in character,

but it happens in character somewhere else.

Should I say it or should we wait until it comes up?

Let's wait.

Okay.

Everybody above floor 200 knows how to manipulate Nen.

And when you enter floor 200, it is a sort of rite of passage that you will get blasted by Ren.

Uh, and three people,

let me make sure I'm understanding this right.

Three people who didn't, usually this just kills you if you don't know Nen and protect yourself.

Three people who didn't know Nen have survived it and have become sort of like

lauded figures above floor 200 and are called the chosen.

Have I got that right?

I think so.

Yeah, they do refer to them as

the ones that are chosen

to

have the

upper floor.

And I feel like at some point Wing references saying that like, you know, being blasted by a nin if you couldn't...

if you didn't know how to protect yourself from it could make you end up like you know those those those three but i'm trying to remember if it is as explicitly said as like those three didn't know how to use nin and they went up there so they that is definitely true is that that is why that they're they're the three of them each have different sort of severe injuries old injuries um

what i don't remember them is is them being

complimented uh in any way.

I sort of remember them kind of being about to like flunk out of the floor.

It's not really like, I don't know if it feels phrased like a compliment.

It's more just like they're allowed to, they were allowed to join, and like it's implied that they were able to learn what Nen was because they survived being attacked by it.

Okay.

Um, at least that's how I read it when I was watching these.

Yeah,

I'm with you, Selby.

Thank you.

Love Wing blasts them with his aura and unlocks their auras.

Choral music plays, kind of giving this the feel of like a holy rite almost.

And as he's doing it and as he's realizing that this has worked, Wing is like super impressed by Gonan and Killiwa, who sort of perform the necessary next steps, you know, containing their aura so that it doesn't escape basically instantly.

And I wrote down, this was very easy.

Maybe too easy.

Surely there won't be any consequences for this.

And I don't know.

I genuinely don't know if

doing this fast

is going to cause a problem, or if it is a piece of expeditious storytelling to get our characters to floor 200 quickly.

To be like, oh, it is actually interesting.

If what if they do just skip it, you know?

Or if we are supposed to go into this feeling uneasy, that they might have gotten a power that they

that they did not earn, as it were.

Um, yeah, I think it's,

I mean, to me, that's kind of what the end of um what's the last episode we watched?

Is it 28 or 29?

29.

Yeah, to me, that's what the that's what the end of 29 is starting to gesture towards, right?

Uh, and it's it's I

think it like um

I think that

like Wing's concerns are

based on like

like

you want to build your tower.

Like, it is basically, I'm teaching Zushi how to build a tower out of wooden blocks, and you're asking me to give you a tower out of cards that you can slowly apply glue to.

And it's like, eventually, this will be structurally sound, but like, you don't know how to do anything.

So, to get you from like from step zero to step five is like you don't know how to do any of the stuff that's important.

Like, Zushi can use Ren like really good, um,

and you know, maybe isn't super strong or anything, but like is like steadily building a solid foundation

and

uh

you know

the

consequences to not having a solid foundation don't have to present themselves immediately.

Yeah, that's true.

That's true.

So they re-enter the tower and they pass straight through

Hisuka's rent.

And Isuka is a little sour about this, but sour in a very Hisuka way, where he's sort of saying, I'm not owned, I'm not owned.

He says,

there is still much to learn about Nen.

And he sort of summons a flame, a sort of malicious Ren flame on his finger.

Oh, that's actually a man of the clubs.

Oh, it's a plane card.

You know, say what you will about Hisuka, and there are lots of things to say.

Good branding.

That man knows a theme.

Yeah.

Very consistent.

Very consistent branding.

He says, if you manage to win one single fight on this floor,

I'll accept your challenge.

Adding a sort of a side goal to the, like, I need to beat Hisuka to give him his badge back.

We now have to win one fight on floor 200

to

be able to enter that fight with...

Hisuka.

And as they leave this conversation with Hisaka, the three chosen ones that Wing talked about earlier are revealed.

There is a man in a wheelchair with two, four huge double-wheeled tires on either side.

There is a sinister smiling man.

And then there is an extremely cool-looking sort of hooded figure

with a...

a tube sticking out of the hood.

The hood covers his face completely, and he has one leg and a

walking cane.

And these are the people who survived a Nen attack.

Yeah,

I do have the words or the thing about this, at least from what my sub said.

Oh, yeah, what's it saying?

Everyone up on floor 200, up there, everyone knows how to manipulate Nen, and they have a special greeting for any newcomer ignorant of Nen, a Nen attack.

In other words, they do what I'm about to do,

but without restraint.

They don't care even if people die.

Only those who survive are allowed to pass.

However, they pay a steep price.

Oh, to say they are the chosen, however, they pay a steep price.

And

yeah, I don't.

I guess it isn't.

It is weird to call them the chosen because the thing they're chosen is to

be allowed to keep fighting, but severely injured.

Anyway, that is the.

I am glad that I read that because now because I was like, the chosen, that totally changes how I feel about these three people.

XCOM 2 War of the Chosen, but it's these three instead of the alien.

Oh my god.

That'd be great.

The one who cackles, the one who makes villainous sort of remarks, and the one who has the cool two double-wheeled wheelchair.

Then we have an extended gag where they register and are treated to basically the terms and conditions sheet on a cruise line.

Someone want to talk about what happens here.

I would love to describe this joke.

This is so funny to me.

Yeah, go for it.

While they're checking the boxes and probably saying, I, you know, I relinquish any

right to

suing if I get extremely hurt or killed here, blah, blah, blah.

They're checking these boxes, obviously, without reading any of it.

While

receptionist

is so hard trying to wow them with all the prizes that they could win if they become a floor master and fight in the battle arena, they have to win 10 times, but not lose more than three.

And then if they get points, if they become the champion at the top floor, then they get a chance to fight in the Battle Olympia.

And everything that she's saying, they're like totally no selling.

And she's becoming increasingly desperate to impress them.

And then Kilo just looks at Ghana's like, now that I know the secret of the top floor, I don't really care anymore.

Isn't that, don't they also,

she says something about the view from the

Battle Olympia and

the top floor has like a thousand meter view.

And Kilo is like, I live way higher up than that.

Yeah.

You know, Gona was like, wait, Kilua, don't you live like three times as high as that?

Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.

It's very good.

It's so funny.

Yeah, they don't give a shit.

So like all of this work that they put into getting here and then the extreme risk that they took to save one week of training

all for them to be like, oh, I actually don't even care.

This is real.

This is Tagashi attacking the structure again, right?

This is Tagashi going.

Oh, completely.

We don't even need to do the tournament arc at this point.

We have a goal, which is fight Hisaka.

Hisaka has given us a sub-goal, which is win one fight on this floor.

Okay.

Yeah, that's it.

That's it, I suppose.

Yeah.

It would be like if your goal in Pokemon was to get a coffee from the vending machine at the Elite Four.

And you were like, I've gone all the way through the Victory Road or whatever, and I got there, and I'm like, well, I'll just get the coffee.

I think I'm done.

It's nice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very funny.

It's so funny.

This poor woman.

The three chosen register immediately after Goan because they are hoping to

real Goan's mistake coming up here.

They are hoping to fight Goan.

Yeah.

A useful rule that you know is that on this floor, you have 90 days.

90 days

to prepare for a fight.

Now, keep in mind that Wing said that he could teach the boys nen comfortably in about a week.

Of course, he had to do it in about two hours so that they could meet the registration deadline, but now they have 90 days to play with.

And Goan is like, I will fight Murray.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's so ready.

He's so excited.

And then we get a flashback.

Oh, sorry, Jack.

No, what's the flashback to?

Are they going to flashback to Wing being like, please, please don't register for a fight for two months.

Give me two months.

And then it cuts to go back to the future.

Going, sorry, Wing.

I got to figure out what this shit is about.

This is the.

Once again, just the the only thing playing in gon's is his theme song yeah yeah yeah yes absolutely this is this is the killer and gone versus zushi and wing school of thought as well right gone is like gone knows he's going to lose this first fight but he's like i just want the experience you can lose four times on floor 200.

um

he wants the experience wing and zushi slowly working their way through the lower levels are like we're gonna do this carefully we're gonna assemble the tower out of brick instead of cards

And, you know,

but Gohan's sort of pedagogy is such that he's like, I can learn so much just by going charging into the fight straight away.

Goan is the one who unpacks the Ikea and just starts building.

And Wing and Zushi are the ones who like read through the instructions carefully.

And I think it's really

illustrative here.

Like, Kilua doesn't sign up for a match.

Killua is like, no, let me, I'm going to learn about this stuff.

Like,

we're starting to see now that

we've found ourselves somewhere that kilowa could be encountering trouble like

that he's not being when he's not being surprised with being weaker than someone uh he's actually pretty cautious uh and uh

it and like

hasn't even talked about setting a date let alone set one even for three months from now.

Like didn't just go like, I'll just sign up for the last day then.

Didn't sign up at all.

To me, I have something to do with how Ilumi, when Ilumi confronts him and he's like, remember, you don't fight an opponent who's stronger than you.

Oh, yeah, or something along those lines.

And it feels very much like Kiloa sort of internalizing that.

There are more moments where, like, stuff that gets said to Kiloa becomes more explicitly, like, um,

like, referenced within the actual dialogue and stuff, but I think it's also worth keeping an eye on at, like, the, like,

I don't know, less overt moments where Kiloa, like, reflects that behavior.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, Don is like charging ahead, you know,

you know, eyes of the ground, marching forward.

You know, like, I don't care what I bump into, it'll be an experience.

Yeah.

And what he

what he bumps into is Guido, the uh, hooded man with the

tube sticking out of his hood and one leg.

And as Guido begins to fight,

we hear Wing's voice reminding Gun that 10 is only defensive and can offer no attack.

Ten, if you are, if you don't remember, is the branch of Nen where you sort of

form your aura around yourself into a shield.

Yeah, the sort of opposite of Ren.

But yes, but physical attacks will also do damage to it.

If you, Keith, are practicing your 10 extremely hard and I come over and hit you on the head with a stick,

it will hurt.

It will be exactly the same as if you weren't doing 10.

Right, yes.

So you've also got to

be tough physically.

You've got to be ready for any sticks.

That's where I think Gone is already covered, having a hard head.

We have seen Gone

get what would kill multiple people in terms of blunt head drama, like blunt force drama to the head.

So

I love Go.

It's also, it's interesting how, like,

how convincingly little

ego he has in his desire to

like take on this challenge.

Like,

he really does seem okay with losing.

Uh, he really doesn't seem like he's doing this out of any s kind of confidence.

Like, all the reasons why you'd think that Kilua might sign up, like,

you know, devaluing his enemy's skills, valuing his own strength,

you know, assuming that he can win,

you know, none of that, you know, none of that is why

Goan's signing up.

It's this kind of bizarre combination of, you know, ambition to be stronger.

zero ego and a reckless disregard for your own, you know, well-being.

Yeah, he's got four losses.

It doesn't matter if he loses the first one, but he could lose like

two legs or an arm or

his life.

Goan is absolutely that great joke from the nice guys where Ryan Gosling's character says, I don't think I can die.

I think I'm immortal.

And Guido

starts using his nen.

Well, yes, he presumably presumably has Nen now.

He starts using his Nen to produce a bunch of dancing spinning tops.

And at this point, I wrote, we're back, baby,

Weird Hunter Freak Season.

Because I feel like we've kind of been missing some true weirdos with like Beehive Man, Snake Man, Shrafty Pin Man.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Did anyone catch the Spinning Tops, man?

Of the

move that he used?

I believe the move is called.

He's saying Spinning Tops, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I think that he calls it his Battle Waltz.

Whoa!

Pretty sure that's what it said.

I'm looking this up.

Oh, my God.

I love it.

Yeah, it's

really good.

I'm misremembering, but I'm pretty sure that it said Battle Waltz.

Either, I know that it said something on the screen, and then also he said something.

I don't know which one is which, but Battle Waltz is what I...

I'm looking at the Hunterpedia, and one of his abilities is the Battle Waltz.

There you go, Battle Waltz.

Goan is now stuck in a Beyblades fight.

Yes, yeah.

Uh-huh.

As these little spinning tops bounce off each other and bounce off Goan and hurt, and Guido laughs and is like, You, you, you can't predict the movement.

Yeah, he says their movement is so complex, even I can't predict their movement.

Wow.

Which is odd.

It's a weird brag.

To be fair, I don't think God has

a real

intuition for a lot of things.

Yeah.

This could fall under usually.

Yeah.

But Guido's out here like, I don't know what my guys are doing.

Yeah.

That's true.

That's oversized.

That we end up getting kind of a cliffhanger.

The episode basically ends right here.

I didn't remember that.

I thought that this fight ends and then the episode ends.

But no, we're going to figure out what actually happens here next time.

Yeah.

Very exciting.

Do we have anything?

Anything else?

Any final

we should

probably talk about Gone and Killua's Hunterpedia.

Oh, we should.

I'm gone.

I'm Killua.

It's great.

We're little papercraft boys now.

So at the end of the closing sequence, which is really cool, shows a bunch of new faces, has a new closing song, which is fantastic.

There was, I think it's fair to say, some disagreement in the Discord earlier as to whether the first closing theme was any good.

Yeah.

I won't name names, but Keith thought that the closing theme wasn't very good, and Sylvie Dre and I liked it.

Yeah.

I always thought that the first ending theme was not that good.

And it's the only one of the six closing themes that I feel that way about.

But I think we all like this one a lot.

This is great.

To me, this is like

the

hunter-hunter closing theme.

This is like the one that I think of when I think of the hunter-hunter closing theme is this one.

Is my favorite one.

Yeah.

Hunting for your dream is absolutely my favorite hunter-hunter ending theme.

I just also need to defend the

good name of

poor fear and loathing Loathing in Las Vegas or whatever.

Yeah.

I can't remember the name of the song, but that is the band that does it.

Yeah, the.

Oh, fuck, what is the name of the.

I don't have it in front of me right now.

I have Hunter, Hunter, Ending Songs.

Let's see.

Just Awake.

There we go.

Yeah, it's fucking good.

By Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

And this one is Hunting for Your Dreams by Galnarius.

Galnarius.

Yeah.

I.

This closing sequence is very colorful.

It has a really nice moment where we get to see sort of like

the characters' faces get drawn together in a sort of geometric shape with them sort of positioned on various points on the geometric shape as the music swells.

It's really nicely done.

There are people here who I don't recognize.

There's people that you don't recognize.

I will.

Yeah.

And hey, what is that?

Did you catch the side shot of Krapika next to that big ominous spider?

What do you think?

What do you think that could be?

I don't know.

I'm not sure.

And then we get really studious Leorio reading books.

It's very good.

It's really good.

Yeah.

Yeah, really, really good.

I will say this.

I miss Leorio and Krapika.

Yeah.

Not just in the sense of like they are fun characters, but they provide a kind of counterbalance to Goan and Killua that is really enjoyable and is noticeably missing here.

You know, we have really zoomed in on Goan and Killiwa in a way that I think is working well for this arc.

But it means that the kind of storytelling that having Leorio and Karapika around

opens up has been sort of removed for us from the time being.

So I'm hoping we get to see them see them again.

Yeah, I'm...

I mean, they're in the ending thing.

I'm sure we will but

i think i think the two of them not being there helps add to the atmosphere of um

i remember something i wanted to talk about when we i was listening to some of the episodes that we've had out and this ties into my point don't worry um jack what you describe expecting the hunter exam to be is a sort of like they go to hunter school where they have to learn things

the stuff with wing is kind of the closest we get to that And I think by removing Harapika and Leorio, the more like mature, closer to adulthood characters of the

group, and adding Zushian, who becomes this sort of like little brother figure to the two of them, it really sort of like enhances the atmosphere of that and the sort of like...

tone of this is the this is the the training arc this is the coming like

it's all a coming of age arc that's just how the show is But you know what I mean?

Yeah.

Yeah.

God, I would love to see Leorio reacting to everything in these episodes, though.

Just losing his goddamn mind.

We need a Leorio react stream.

Yeah.

Do you imagine Leorio trying to grapple with the concept of like or?

This is a question just for

Adre and Sylvie.

This does not need an answer, but does anyone remember what

the scene, what the conversation is about the next time we see Gonakilo talking to Leorio?

Yeah, I do, actually.

I think so.

It's extremely funny.

I'll message it to the chat that Jack isn't in, that has spoilers.

They also will regularly, and by they, I mean the other people on Friends at the Table who have seen Hunter Hunter, will post things in spoiler tags in other tags in our other channels in our discord

someone will be like it's no I love it it's very funny someone will be like this reminds me of that bit in Hunter Hunter where there's a spoiler block and then Jack don't click this yeah I must say parentheses all caps Jack don't

It's great.

I feel like I'm in a secret club that

I'm not allowed to be in.

And that you're very diligently not peering behind the curtain.

Yeah, you're not.

You're hazing.

You're being hazed, you know?

Oh.

Well, at least you're not bombarding me with malicious Wren.

Oh, I would never.

Right.

And if they might.

I wouldn't even know.

Keith, do you remember we did like a Crusader King stream once or something where you made a joke about how you were constantly like wishing ill on me or something?

Do you remember this?

Yeah, I vaguely remember that you were talking about having

There was

a clap cast or something where you talked about cursing people or something.

And then I was like, well, I'm cursing people all the time.

And you're like, who?

And I was like, you.

Or something like that.

Yeah, yeah.

That was Malicious Ren.

And

at that point, you were.

Yeah.

But fortunately, your 10 ended up, and it didn't affect you at all.

Oh, my 10 is really good.

And I definitely don't get distracted constantly.

Yeah.

At the close of this nice ending theme, we cut to the Hunterpedia, which is just so cute.

It is about 14 seconds long.

Goan and Killua show up in a classroom as papercraft sort of drawings of themselves.

They introduce themselves to the camera as Goan and Killua, which is really funny.

And then they just do a little bit about a character that we met, which we see on a little projector screen next to them.

What are the ones we've seen so far?

The first one is about Zushi, and the second one is about Wing.

What do they say?

They're like, Wing's all disheveled.

His shirt's always untucked, but he's sure it's powerful.

And then the last one is Guido.

And they like do a little explainer about his powers and stuff.

And they're like, we'll go and be able to beat him.

It's lovely.

And I think it's just such a demonstration of having fun with these characters that you can take them out of the context of the main story.

There's a kind of lack of preciousness about it, of preciousness about the sort of sanctity of your characters to just be like, no, they can bop around in the margins of this story and have a good time.

And then there's, did you talk about the whiteboard behind them?

Did you mention that?

The whiteboard that has the images on it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just spaced and wasn't sure if you said it.

No, no, no.

It's just got the little.

Yeah, each one has different little drawings on it.

The first one has

like an apple and some words in Japanese and a sun and a little sort of drawing of Hisuka and then something else.

I don't know what.

But then the next one, there's one that has, it's like labeled some of the things different.

Oh, you know what?

Maybe it's because I have different

subtitle settings on.

And actually,

this is always in English when I have subtitles on.

Let me see.

Oh, yep, there we go.

There's my, there's the change.

It's just a picture of an apple, and next to it, it says unripe fruit

And I don't really know why

oh God, no, that's scrape.

That's that's hijacked

Oh I didn't understand.

I didn't see the hizuka.

I mean I saw it but it didn't connect clusters.

I thought it was

I thought it was yeah, it's actually gross

That's funny.

Yeah, I thought that it was just because I didn't notice the hizuka until now, but I noticed the apple labeled unripe fruit earlier and I was like, oh, that's funny.

Why is this apple unripe?

Now I get it.

Because he's disgusting and a monster.

Yep.

It was a jump scare from.

Because the other reminder is just a reminder to brush your teeth.

So it's like, this is all innocent.

It is important to brush your teeth.

Yeah, and you shouldn't eat unripe fruit.

Like, literal fruit.

I'm talking specifically about fruit.

Right.

Well, it's bad.

I mean, it's varying degrees of how bad it'll go, but yeah, you should just not do it in general.

I like green bananas.

An unripe pear.

It's horrible.

That's weird.

You don't like fried green bananas?

Okay, you didn't say fried bananas.

You just said green bananas.

Well, sure, yeah.

You know, if I...

I think if you cook an unripe fruit, I no longer think of it as an unripe fruit.

That's fair.

We got an apple tree in my front garden now, which is so exciting.

And I have not yet figured out if

they are eating apples.

Very likely,

most likely they are not

cider with them, which will be nice.

I'm looking forward to that.

I thought they're eating apples for whatever little critters you got out there.

Oh, yeah, we got squirrels and we got

chipmunks.

Good luck.

Which I've never

seen before.

You've never seen a chipmunk?

We don't have them in England, and I only lived in Los Angeles, where...

Is that true?

What, that we don't have chipmunks in England?

Yeah, no, we don't have chipmunks in the world.

Squirrels, they're cousins.

Or best friends or something.

No, we have squirrels, but we don't have chipmunks.

They're cousins, I think, Keith.

And I mean this sort of familiarly, not genealogy, not biologically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There are apparently Siberian chipmunks in Britain.

You're kidding me.

Where?

They're not very common.

They're basically a species that people kept as pets and then they got released.

No, and they look just like regular chipmunks, too.

They don't look any special.

Chipmunks are just the cutest.

They are so cute.

Look at that.

Look at that.

That's great.

They're lovely.

They bop around.

It's always a bit of a surprise when I see one at this point because I'm like, what animal is that?

It's a silhouette.

It's not being stored in my brain yet.

It just looks like an unfinished squirrel, which is very cute.

Oh my god, Adam.

Yeah, this squirrel that the details of Delphine

added up to.

That's great.

Okay.

Oh, my God.

This baby chipmunk is unbelievable.

We're done after I link this baby chipmunk.

Do we want to close on any plugs?

I mean, the big one, as always.

Good friends of the table cash.

Please support.

Keeps this thing going.

go ahead go ahead oh uh obviously uh you know people who were keeping up with the sort of initial conception of the show and the fundraising to starting it um remember us passing that goal and uh

uh then we started production on the show and then it took three or four months or something and during that time we slipped back under that goal but we're still doing the show obviously i would love to get back up over that goal um Um, so if you've if you've been liking the show so far, this is episode

this is episode nine.

There's only three episodes that are actually out right now.

Um, but if you've been liking the show, go to friendsofthable.cash, sign up, maybe check out friends of the table if you haven't yet.

It's a good show, yeah, it's very good.

Yeah,

oh my god, the episode we just recorded is outrageous.

It'll be long released by the time

it'll be long released by the time uh this comes out, uh, but it is the downtime after

the Stellar Combuster.

It is the most.

Like, Keith, your character doesn't do that much in the downtime, but it is the most Keith-driven episode.

I say this as a compliment, not as like a negative thing.

I want to ask what you mean, just because of

how the dominoes were lined up.

Your mind.

Your mind, Keith.

Your mind.

Not just how the dominoes were lined up, but how you set up the dominoes for all of this.

Well, I'm very excited.

I'll say I'm glad that's how it comes across.

Yeah, no, I thought it was awesome.

I was just, I was doing all the memes of people being aghast in a gift was me.

But just like how large your brain was.

Yeah.

I'm starving.

I'm glad.

I'm glad.

And,

of course, giving Allie a ton of credit.

That was great.

Oh,

so

yeah, if you haven't listened to Friends of the Table, check it out.

I'll figure out a way to cut that so that makes sense.

Keep an eye on twitch.tv/slash friends of the table, youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

Check out our merch page.

Maybe by the time this is out, there'll be more.

Excuse me, there'll be more than one design in there.

Right now, it's just a Palisade episode 25-related shirt.

But by the time this is up in

four months or something,

there'll be more stuff up there, maybe?

Friends of the table.shop.

Any personal plugs real quick?

No?

No, I got it at the beginning.

We got it at the beginning.

I like plugs at the beginning and the end.

Tell people what.

I mean, okay.

I make money by telling people to go listen to Run Button and go to Run Button.shop and go to contentburger.biz to go to the run button Patreon.

I almost never tell people of that.

You're such a pro, you just did it.

I know.

Like, wow.

That's what they write.

That is incredible.

Yeah.

I need to get better at mentioning you can find me at Sylvie Bullet on all platforms, basically.

And that you should go give this show and also Friends of the Table five-star reviews on your podcast platform of choice.

That's a huge one that I keep meaning to say

in the thing is that, yeah, go to iTunes

and rate the show five stars because I know that you've been enjoying it.

You've now listened to hours and hours of it.

Each of these episodes is basically two and a half hours long.

So give us five stars and leave a very important.

I think it's very important.

Just write something in there.

Even if you only have a couple words to say, write something in there.

I just came up with a slogan for a podcast.

I don't know if it's ever been done before, but

five-star podcast length, a five-star podcast.

Does that make sense?

It sounds extremely original.

I feel like it's a little too wordy, but you know, we can figure it, we can workshop it.

I think it might work better if you make it even longer.

Okay.

Let's find a way to make it even more five-star amount.

This audio product

is worth a five-star rating on the podcast platform that you are listening to it on

because it will make us happy.

If you put the length of podcast on a scale of zero to five and

correlated that to a five-star review system, this podcast would be a five on both scales.

Printed, printed both.

Those are both going on a t-shirt.

Okay, bye.

Yeah, first table left shot.