Keep Killua Strong - Hunter x Hunter ep. 17+18: Media Club Plus S01E06

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

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

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

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me on Twitter.

Can you?

At Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me on co-host at

the beginning of the year.

Yeah, that's true.

We don't know what state that's.

It's already also x.com.

It's not?

No, to me.

Oh, I'm never in the eyes of God.

I think it's important to acknowledge what it's become.

Sure.

I think it's important.

Just in the eyes.

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That is the

that is

what is that?

That's where we

what is that?

Hold on.

What is Patreon?

Oh, God.

Oh, geez.

Man.

Keith, what's going on?

It's almost like we're recording this like two hours after we planned to.

It's very almost like that.

Not quite.

But no, it's more that I just had a bad start to the sentence.

I had no out.

Patreon is where you can go to support the show.

It's the Friends of the Table Patreon.

This is a show that is related to Friends of the Table, and that's why that's the Patreon for it.

Yeah, we're all from that.

That's our main thing.

This is

the fun thing that's extra.

Yeah.

It's the fun thing that's extra because of Friends of the Table.

Because of the Patreon, yeah.

Because of it, yeah.

Because of viewers like you, listeners like you, viewers like you.

Viewers like you.

You can also find the Let's Plays that I do at youtube.com/slash run button.

Sylvie Bullet, where can people find you?

You can find me

on most social media at Sylvie Bullet.

And by most social media, I mean like pretty much all of them.

Like you got your Instagram, not threads, but I am on Instagram.

Right.

I have a Tumblr again.

I have Blue Sky.

I have co-host, but I still don't really know what I'm posting on there.

You don't know what you're posting or you're not.

I don't really like know what to post on there.

Right.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Anyway.

Just search Sylvie Bullet.

No E in Sylvie.

Some people spell it with an E, and I think that's cute, but it's not how it's canonically spelled in my usernames.

Yeah, that's it for me.

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Lots of stuff happening over there.

Andy Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me.

I guess I'm on Twitter and I'm on...

Yeah, I'm also on Blue Sky.

The most anyone can do these days is guess that they're on Twitter.

I guess I'm on Twitter.

Yeah, it's still the one I use the most, even though I don't feel good about it.

But

Saundery 3000, that's me.

And Jack DeKeed.

Hi, I'm Jack.

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

short couple episodes.

I mean, it's short because it's a couple episodes, not because they were shorter than any other episodes would be.

Um, this was this is a weird group because this these two episodes were originally part of a four set that we were going to do.

We were going to watch this two and two of the last three together, um,

which I think still makes sense.

I do like these two just kind of on their own.

They do kind of feel like they're on their own.

Before we start the recap, is there anything anyone wants to say in particular about these episodes?

Yes, okay, great.

Setting these two episodes alone, they have a core theme, and that theme is snakes.

Uh, now, you had mentioned that there might be some snakes sort of in the

arc.

I didn't realize that we forget the extent.

What you had set up was not just some snakes episodes of Hunter-Hunter.

We're in the snake arc for this for this podcast.

This This episode.

Chimera snakes.

One of the things I've written down to talk about snakes.

This is notable because if you have listened to any friends at the table property, you will know that I am very afraid of snakes.

There were some people who were like, you can skip these episodes.

Absolutely not.

I'm being paid to do it.

You're brave.

And you know, I feel like recently you've been sort of in that mode of like, I'm stealing

myself to view the snakes.

It's true.

Because this is not the first snake thing that you've intentionally gone through with recently.

No, I think.

I don't remember what the other thing was, but I do remember that.

Is it the fiasco game, the Bluff City Zoo, where you were the snake keeper?

That's true.

I, you know,

there was that.

So maybe there was a game that I wasn't sure.

That's the one that I thought of.

Because I thought it was a V-show or a movie in the Tri-Snake area over here.

Talking specifically to you, the listener who thinks it will be funny to send Jack a picture of a snake, engage engage in snake content.

That shit won't be funny, and I will block you from everything we make first that you can blink.

Yeah.

With that in mind, should we do the recap?

Yeah, we're finally back with Kilua.

It's been a while.

It's been several basically Kilua-less episodes.

I missed him.

I know.

Everyone missed Kilua, and it's great.

To see him again.

It's fun that he's on his own.

I think we get like a really good kind of mashup of going on on his own having to train and work really hard.

And also he's failing in some really critical ways.

Karapika and Leorio immediately team up to tackle this thing together and then go back to Kiloa on his own being extremely chill about everything.

He gets into a fight with multi-exam takers, the Blowjub Brothers.

We've seen how dangerous.

Yeah.

Show favorites.

Friends of the show.

Friends of the show.

We've seen how dangerous Kilo can be when he's very quickly murdering an unsuspecting foe.

But how will he fare in a three-on-one actual fight with experienced fighters?

Surprisingly well.

Or maybe not surprisingly well.

I was about to say, why is this surprising?

Well, I guess it's even thinking, well, obviously, Kilo is going to wipe the floor with these guys.

I think it's even still surprising how well he does.

We make it back to Leorio and Karapika just in time for Ghon to show up to sniff out Ponzu.

Fortunately, Ghana is able to use his Super Smeller to find her in only one montage.

Unfortunately, they fell right into a Rube Goldbergian farce turned saw trap.

It is another saw trap.

It is a saw trap.

It's another saw trap.

Wow, I lost my place.

Edit this out, me.

Where did I, where did I, I wrote more intro.

Where did I write it?

My notes have just gone.

Fortunately, there wasn't a lot more to say.

We spend the first half of the second episode

watching the gang sort of

formulate their escape plan from the saw trap.

It goes

very similarly to how Jack predicted a saw trap was going to go if if Goan was to be trapped in one, like in episode two, or maybe even episode one of this podcast.

And the second half, we spend watching them sort of wait out Netero doing his big-time interviews, making some sort of bracket that is, for some reason, surprising and concerning.

We don't get to see the bracket.

I don't know why.

No.

And the bracket that Notero is making is specifically for the final trial.

Yeah, he's for the final trial.

He's ad-libbing the final onto trial.

Anything that I missed that we want to make sure we get?

There is the scene where we see that Hanzo is tailing Kiloa.

This might have been one of the things that threw you off in the episode 17.

Hanzo's trailing Killua and the Blowjob brothers, because one of them is his target, and Killua, after he gets the

tags from everybody, he throws the two that he doesn't need in,

because one of the brothers was his target.

He throws the two that he doesn't need in opposite directions really fast.

Hanzo dashes to go get one.

He's talking about how smart he is.

He feels great about it.

He catches up to it, grabs it.

It's the wrong one.

And Hanzo's so funny.

Hanzo's really good.

Hanzo is Hanzo being funny now.

My favorite thing about Hanzo is.

We've talked about Hanzo before as being extremely funny because he is a extremely skilled ninja who also just like shouts and yells and gets all worked up.

Yeah, and is kind of

like he's both easily flustered, but also has very high resolve.

Yeah.

I love when he is second or third, he's third place at the end of the trick tower and is like, all right, I'm first place.

And then sees the other two and is like, God.

It's like, you didn't even look before you said, all right, I'm first place.

He's like the talented Leorio.

He is.

I found, I did find the rest of my intro.

Perfect.

I'm going to read it so that I can drop it in.

Yeah.

And the next episode, the gang spends most of the time devising a solution to their snake-filled catch-22, and the rest of the episode waiting on the airship while Netaro devises a bizarre and apparently shocking bracket that we don't even get to see.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Spots on.

It's the only, it's the world's only cliffhanger bracket.

That's true.

It's true.

It is.

But we'll get there.

We should probably start with Killiua, who, like you said, reappears in the story after some type of way to such an extent that my notes, the thing I wrote was, oh, right, Kilua.

Yeah.

Because not only had he gone, I was

whatever the opposite of worried was for him.

There's no secure.

You were secure in the middle.

He's off-screen.

Yes.

Because I'm like,

he'll be fine.

And it turns out that he is.

He gets into this scrap with one of the brothers.

We know their names.

They're like Imori, Amori, and what's the third one?

Umari.

Yeah.

The Amory brothers.

Amory, Umari, and Imory.

Yes.

Is that what they're...

Do they have a name that's the X Brothers that's spelled the Blowjob brothers?

The Amory Brothers.

And then just one of them is also called Amory.

Oh, it is the Amory Brothers?

Okay, cool.

I didn't know if that was a Keith's name.

I think canonically they're called the Blowjob Brothers.

I believe canonically

that Takashi has said in multiple interviews that they are.

Okay, I see.

I see.

Blowjob Brothers, yeah.

There's some great little bits at the beginning, like before this fight starts, that are really funny.

Yeah, such as.

So the first thing is like Kilua is walking toward.

Kilo's like calling out, like, I know you're following me.

And then we get the

interior monologue of one of the brothers, of the

brother that refers to himself as the cautious man.

Sure.

Going, like, I'm not going to go out and fight him, even if he's just a kid.

I'm going to play it safe and hide.

And then Kilua's like, well, I'm just going to come to you then and starts walking directly towards him with his eyes closed.

It's so funny.

It's so funny.

And then we cut back to him having the exact same reaction to Kilua that Magitani had to Karapika upon realizing, like, oh my god, the child isn't scared of me.

And might actually be murderous.

I had forgotten to use my context clues that were in the last stage of the hunter exam.

Right.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

The uh, yeah, we get this thing where the show kind of drifts perspective again as we drift over to this brother, the cautious man.

And in fact, it happens in a very similar way that we've seen with the other sort of non-hero characters where the screen will get this kind of purple tint on it to indicate that we have moved into their perspective as we hear

his monologue.

But before Kilua can give him trouble, the other two show up.

And that also doesn't really bother Killua.

There's a really funny visual gag when you get the wide shot of the two brothers, the

cautious man and Kilua all together, and you realize that he's still hiding in the bush, even though Kilua is just as close to him as his brothers who popped up behind him.

Kilua is three, maybe four steps away from this guy.

Probably saw him the whole time, barely ducked down behind this bush.

Yeah.

But pretty quickly, we get the sense that, and this is something I wanted to talk about specifically as it relates to Killua, we get the sense that

all is not well in this family.

There are some pretty fucked up, or these brothers are organized in a hierarchy amongst themselves.

In fact, the cautious man says, you know, my brothers are going to be mad at me if I don't get this thing from Killua.

And almost immediately we see kind of like the other two brothers lording it over him, right?

In terms of like,

you're sort of nothing and we are the, we're the real brains of born brothers.

In the sense that only two of them consider themselves to be the real Blowja brothers.

Sure.

Sure.

And something we know about Killiua is that he has a very

conflicted relationship with his family.

And I wondered if there was something deliberate in the sense that we know that

Basically, you can't kill or hurt Kilua in a meaningful way

if you are in this show.

And so one of the ways that they can make his stakes interesting are to throw him into situations that are resonant with

other aspects of his character.

And so I wondered if there were ways in which you felt that specifically seeing the brothers act here was intended to be some sort of a reflection of Kilua's relationships and concerns.

That's a good question.

I had only ever considered it to be like

a kind of inefficient way to get Kiloa in a three-on-one fight.

Right.

Like, yeah.

Be outnumbered.

Like, hey, we have three characters that are have been with each other the entire game.

That's a great way to game.

Uh, game.

Yeah.

Game.

Yeah.

Uh,

uh, that's a great way to get Kiloa at a disadvantage.

I'm thinking, can uh Dre or Sylvia, is there like a dynamic in Kilo's family that feels like

I think that there isn't.

I don't think there is really.

Kilo's family dynamic

is it's odd.

It's very unique.

Something.

Yeah.

I think that there are things that we could like we'll come back to in this arc.

I'll say that he is not the

Bush brother

of his family.

The cautious man.

Yes, he is not the cautious man.

Although there will be a point where I could map out who the cautious man is in that family.

Say again.

I believe there is a point where I could map out who the Blowjob brothers of Kiloa's family are when we get to there.

Yeah, I think that at least I know who Bush Boy is.

Right.

Yes.

Another way of looking at this is, so it's interesting

that that dynamic doesn't match up.

Another way of looking at this is like functional and dysfunctional units in the show.

The brothers as a dysfunctional unit against our crew, who are really the only problem in our crew is Leorio is an idiot and

Tompa keeps getting involved.

Right.

But other than that, Tompa's gone now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Tompa is an animal.

Tompa is tied up in front of a group of prairie dogs or whatever.

In front of the Hamhambretto, yeah.

They do kind of look like

a The hammer heartbreak is happening over there.

So it is just Leorio is an idiot.

And that won't come into play later in this episode, I'm sure.

No, but here's the thing, though.

We start episode 17 with Lorio actually having a good idea.

Hmm.

That is interesting.

I did note this.

There is like a little funny thing that happens with Karabdika and Leorio.

Do you want to tell everyone what happens, Dre?

Well, yeah, Leorio says they're like basically talking about like, oh, God, we only have a day left.

We have not found anybody.

And if we, if we don't find anybody else, Leorio is going to fail.

And Leorio is like, I bet a bunch of them are already back there waiting by the boat pickup area.

And Karapica goes on like a three-paragraph screed why that wouldn't happen and why it's a bad idea.

And then Leorio is like, yeah, you're right.

I'm pretty dumb.

And then Karapika's like, actually, I think it's a great idea and we should go do it.

Karapika

takes a turn on seeing that he's hurt Leorio's feelings.

I don't even think it's that.

I think it's that

one of my notes is that I bet Kuropica loves overly verbose logic puzzles.

I think Kuropica just likes to explicitly talk everything out in detail.

I think that you're totally right, Dre.

I also do think that he had to double back and go, like, oh no, I accidentally called Leorio stupid again, but I didn't even mean it this time.

And I have to tell him, like, no, actually, not only did you have a good idea, I even would be doing what you said.

So

I mean, listen, I've, I've been there, I've done, I've done the like, oh, this is our dynamic, ha ha ha.

And then, like, wait a minute, no, this invalidates what they're saying when I'm talking to the person I'm in the yaoi ship with.

Um, sure.

Is that what just is that just what we're calling relationships now?

I mean, I just thought it would be fun.

Anything else on this Killua fight?

Oh, yeah.

We should talk about the actual fight for what it is.

It's so funny.

Do you want to play by play?

I mean, if you could even say there's two plays.

There's two.

I mean, yeah, I have two bits, I guess.

Killua just sort of, like, with no effort.

Like, dashes behind one of the brothers,

kicks him in the back of the leg so he falls to his knees, and then just puts his super sharp fucking acrylic nails to his neck.

And it's, I want to point out specifically,

it's almost a tap, the kick.

It's almost like what they do in like middle school where they like kick out the back of your leg so your knee buckles.

It's basically that.

It is literally that.

It is not even meant to hurt.

It's just to like get him on his knee because Kilu is short

so that he could reach his neck better.

Weirdly, that's not actually the first kick.

The cautious man gets the cautious man is like, well, guess I'd better fight him, and turns around, and this is prior to the acrylic nails move, turns around and kicks Kilua in the stomach.

Kilua has his hands in his pockets and remains so unconcerned about this that we get an extremely funny slow-mo shot of Killua going flying backwards without taking his hands out of his pockets.

And then, yeah, gets up and attacks the guy.

at which point i forgot that killer just completely no sells it yeah he does take he takes what is sold as a really big kick to the chest falls on his back and then just like uh does a little kip up he does a kip up with his hands still in his pockets yeah yeah it's really really funny I love orange.

This is when one of them thinks to one of the brothers thinks, this is no ordinary kid.

And it's like, why did she think there would be an ordinary kid here?

At this point in the hundreds, man.

Right, right.

Like, come on, man.

You had to run 120 kilometers before the game even started.

There is something really nice about the way this Zevil Island

Zevil?

Is that what it's called?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Zevel Island game has been structured in the show, beginning with Gon, a kind of like really well-meaning character who is very skilled, but ultimately needs to practice a lot.

And this extremely long sequence of Gon

practicing with the fishing rod.

And then the way the show holds off showing us the person who would play this game the coolest until very late in the arc feels like it's really earned.

You know, if we began with Killiua

bloodlessly threatening people, threatening three people in the forest, and then went to Gon practicing with a fishing rod, it would feel really unbalanced.

But by this point, we've seen the full exciting arc of how people play this game.

And it's like our dessert is watching Killua wreck three idiots.

Very quickly.

It's like going from

like playing

like a battle royale with your friends, and then all of a sudden you're in a game with that dude who can hit the dances perfectly to any beat.

In Fortnite,

this is Kilua.

I have no idea what you're talking about.

No worries.

If anyone knows about it, that's great.

If not, I just sound like a crazy person, which is also great.

When I was in undergrad, I had to read Robinson Crusoe, which is one of the first novels.

And I'm sure it was, I was like in 18 or 19 when I read it, so I can't offer any particular interesting criticism of Robinson Crusoe.

But what I can tell you is that a large part of the early portion of that book is essentially a how-to guide on how to make clay pots, assuming you know nothing.

It's like it was written in like 16 whatever, and hundreds of pages are spent showing every step needed that you might use to make clay pots on a desert island in order to survive.

And I feel like the gone Killua arc of this few episodes is like gone is the guy making clay pots for hours and hours and hours and hours, and Killua is over there on the other side of the island with a jet ski being like, I'm fucking fine.

I'd love to be Robinson Crusoe.

It's great.

Have we seen anything that could threaten?

Not could.

I imagine Hisuka would be a problem for Killua.

Yeah.

Have we seen anything threaten Kilua?

Kiloa has yet to be put in any sort of physical peril.

Yeah, I mean, Kilua is consistently talking about how bored he is.

Yeah, the only time that Kilua has ever had any sort of stuff at stake is just when we've been doing like Trick Tower and it's less.

Fighting Magitani.

Yeah, like, and he's always been a supporting character in that stuff and less the person actively dealing with the problem.

Oh, yeah, he ripped out that man's heart.

He ripped out that man's heart.

Yeah.

Even if you miss a beat.

Right.

I mean, literally.

Yeah.

But no, I think that is actually something very worth pointing out is that,

you know, if we were, if I was being a bit of a wrestling nerd, I would say there's good booking here.

They keep Kilua strong throughout all these episodes, you know?

But like, I do think that it is effectively written to be like, yeah, no, like

what it makes you curious more about what Kilua's deal is because just

like

laws of storytelling, you know, his luck is not gonna fucking last forever.

He's not always gonna be the super.

Like, if Kilua was OP for the entire show, I don't think we'd be as interested in talking about it, right?

Um, so then uh leorio and karapika uh

and gone all show up oh i do just briefly want to say for some reason the person writing the subtitles in the version i was watching gave everybody surnames i think

yes yeah yes

well you

took kilua's surname from The stream that we did.

I believe

I had

forgotten it.

Right.

Kilua's surname is Zaltic.

Yeah, that is correct.

Spelt with a Y.

Very cool.

Great.

Very good spelling.

We also get Hisoka's surname, which I won't say because that might be a spoiler.

I don't know.

I don't think it is.

No, they just say it.

I feel it at some point.

But it's not.

Hisoka's surname is Moro or Morrow.

I believe it.

Yeah, Morrow.

Hisuka Moro.

I've always said Moro, like Tamaro.

I don't know if it ever.

It's never a plot point.

It is.

I was surprisingly unsettled to learn that Hisaka has a

last name in the same way.

Came from a family.

Yes, in the same way that it is

frightening to be reminded that, you know, a murderer has a bank account or like a keychain or something.

You know, it's like these trappings

or a little pet cat.

Yeah.

Someone looked at baby Hisaka with the tiny little diamond and the tiny little club already on his chubby baby face and

this baby is called hisoka and the and then the baby killed him yeah he said pick a he said pick a card

wham threw the card um pick a quad i'm a little baby

no he's always had that voice it was very unsettling came out of the womb with the bloodlust blaring

uh and then we get leorio's son

yeah no this is one that they really don't reveal until the very last autumn.

I was actually really excited for that to not get revealed until

episode like 135.

Literally, like

within the last five episodes.

Oh, no.

I mean, I'll say it.

Leoria's surname is Paradonite.

Paradigm?

Paradonite?

I think it's a nice name.

He's like a joke of a night.

I was going to say it feels like it's a portmanteau of Paladin and Knight.

Oh, yeah, I bet that's what it is.

The characters

translating becomes.

I just want us to keep in mind that you wouldn't know his last name normally.

I don't know if it's different in the manga, whether like it just says his name on the back of the book or something.

But I just want to, when the, when the show has his last name,

like in the show,

just keep in mind that when you're seeing it, it would be the first time that you see it.

I'm sure Gail both bring it up when it gets there.

But I wanted to bring this up because it was very fun to have the kind of the trappings of the show,

the meta stuff of the meta text of the show in the subtitles coming out and be like, that guy's name is Paradonite.

And sort of being like, well, okay.

But...

I'd like to introduce a new segment that I suspect we're going to see more of based on what Dre said earlier about what Karapica likes to do.

I call this segment, Karapica gives a PowerPoint presentation.

We've already had a few of these segments unofficially.

We have already had a few of them unofficially.

A fun little game for you, the listener, is to go back and

figure out when.

Karapica's PowerPoint presentation here is basically pitching that Gon can track Ponzu.

by using his nose.

The whole crew is now aware that Gon has this ability, and Karapica gives a little thing of like uh well if she is stationary if she's not moving she's either dead and we could just take it or she's like lying in wait or something but in any case this is the way we get the badge we we we follow gon' snows

oh yeah yeah when when when he lays out like these are all of the possible options uh and it's like she can be fine and it's very funny because it's like they're so cute it's it's all it's all information that essentially like doesn't matter uh like it's not it's not actually helpful to to have this in mind ahead of time uh but he's just like yeah she'll either have her badge and be fine have her badge and be hurt not have her badge and be fine or not have her badge and be hurt

but like he took a minute and a half to say that

you can eat food at primarily three different times in the day you can eat food in the morning and then it's called breakfast if however you'd like to eat food in the afternoon a larger meal might be called lunch.

Although, I think it's sort of like, you know,

this is like, you know, Leorio teaching Karapika how to treat him.

Like, I don't know what I need to say in front of this guy for him to get what's going on.

Let me just say everything.

I'm going to have to Robinson Caruso everything that's going on.

Here's how you make pots.

Karapika's love language is people listening to him give a PowerPoint presentation.

That's very true.

Yeah.

I mean, listen, who doesn't love a good info dump?

Yeah.

Who doesn't love a good info dump?

And Karapica will give an info dump about.

This will not be the last time in the arc that it's a PowerPoint presentation time from Karapika.

And the second PowerPoint is very funny.

We will get that.

We get a little montage, a really lovely little musical montage as Gon walks around.

And remember in the last episode when I got really mad about God's theme being played in the minor key?

Yeah.

Well, this time we get Gon's theme played in like, I've written down Gon's smelling music.

It's just like that.

Sure.

yeah.

Uh-huh.

It's just like a really gentle, lovely little adventurous piece of music.

Yeah, it's like a very

well here.

It's a very sweet going for a walk music set to

images, a montage, a fairly long montage of the three of them kind of wandering around the field, the various fields of the island happily and gone sniffing the air.

Yeah, like that.

It was a really nice scene.

It was a really lovely little scene.

I think that the music might have been new.

There was one thing that was a little bit more.

I think the music was new, yeah.

Where there was definitely new music, and I didn't write it down.

Very cute little flute theme.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

it grew out of a theme that we've heard a lot before.

It was like a rearrangement of two themes.

There's this kind of like adventure theme that has this rattling drum part.

Well, it's a little bit like how they use the minor theme of Goan, but only for like eight seconds to then lead into kind of a somber sort of piano riff.

It is

quite intensive composing.

And I don't know the process by which this show was composed for, but doing stuff like that is time consuming and relies on really open lines of communication between the people putting the show together or writing the show and the people making the music.

So the fact that they are able to do these kinds of musical things, you know, stuff that in a movie movie would be sort of path of the course, but in a show where they're going to make 140 episodes or whatever, and you're working with a very tight schedule, having this kind of detailed music supervision is really, really notable and I think works really nicely.

Then they find a cave.

Yeah.

I wrote down, I'm getting ready.

to be very brave about snakes.

I'm prepared.

You're doing the fucking article.

I've get ready stands.

Get ready.

Because this is an extremely ominous cave.

And Leorio says, look, I'm going to go in, and I don't want you to help me.

Very cute friendship scene here.

Yeah, it's a very cute.

He says, basically, leave.

You go and get ready to be picked up by the boat.

And they say, absolutely not.

They don't offer to come in with him because then the story wouldn't work.

Narratives aren't going to be able to do it.

He says he'll come in after 30 minutes.

Yes.

Which is so long.

He knows Leorio, and he says,

he says, doesn't look like there are any traps, says Leorio, the smartest man in the world.

Well, he pokes around a lot, you know?

He pokes that stick up against the wall like two times, and he pokes the ground, and then he throws it, and then he throws his stick and is like, well, I'm good.

And then he takes a knife, which I have recently realized looks different every time we see it.

This time it looked like a saber, like a mini saber.

It looked like a cuckree knife.

It really did.

It really looks like a kukuku.

You should look as if I'm going to look a pirate's scimitar or something.

But tiny.

But tiny.

Yes.

Yeah, that's what it looks like.

You can continue.

I'm checking this, though.

And then immediately from outside, well, after a bit, he shouts, don't come in.

No, don't come in.

And of course, telling us everything about their characters, what did Karapika and Gon do?

They immediately run in.

Run right in there.

Run right in, yeah.

When they find Leorio, who has been bitten by and has fought, he's like cut up a bunch of snakes.

Yeah.

And he is lying on the floor, and sitting against one wall is Borbin, the sort of snake man,

and sitting against another wall is Ponzu, Leorio's tugging.

And did we mention that in addition to the cut-up snakes, he is covered in what looks like 90 snake bites?

Yes,

fucked up.

He has been

super, super fucked up.

Gone immediately tries to suck the venom out, which I think is that's gone through and through.

Being like, yo, okay, I'll take on the venom.

Yes.

And I think that we're just assuming that

this is an error

on the writer's parts, that that's not a real thing.

I think that it's meant to be a real thing that Gonz actually knows about, even though I don't think that it is real.

What is?

You can't suck the venom out, it just goes through your bloodstream so fast.

It's you know, the second it's in there, it's through you.

Your blood moves right quickly.

I've seen so many cowboy movies where Sylvie, this knife is not that weird.

This is a pretty normal knife, you guys.

This is like a pretty normal folding knife with a little bit of a straight-like.

It's different than the last scene

than the last one.

I will give you that.

It's shaped like a saber instead of like a normal pocket knife the way that it had been.

Before it looked like a sort of like hunting knife, like a like a grandfather-style knife.

Yeah, and this is more of a kookery-looking.

Yeah, that looks like something you'd get at,

I can't remember the name of the company, that cold steel.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Yeah, that looks like a cold steel knife.

I got a cold steel knife.

Yeah, is it is it does it look like a sibitar?

No, it looks like a switchblade, but it isn't one because those are illegal here.

Yeah,

oh, fair.

Um,

okay,

So

this episode ends with a really fantastic twist, which is Ponzu seems to be pretty chill,

very relaxed, or very resigned.

And when the crew are like, all right, well, time to get Leorio out, and they pick him up and they turn to the doorway, it is suddenly filled with...

hundreds of snakes all coiling against each other in a kind of almost like a wave of snakes.

Yeah, it's like a rat king, but it's like a snake.

It's like a rat king.

Yes.

But they

back them back into the room.

And Ponzu explains that they are caught in Borbun's trap and they will not be able to leave.

And so I think Karapika maybe is just like, well, okay, we'll just get...

Borbun, who appears to be sleeping, to get us out of here.

And Ponzu explains that Borbun is dead.

I love this.

This is some real.

this is some saw trap as well which is uh several times in saw movies people uh fuck up a trap in a really weird way that makes things way worse for them it's so good it's um

both saw and this it's great they are stuck in this room that they cannot leave because the only man who could essentially disarm the trap is dead and the snakes are believing that he is still alive and are protecting him.

Because they're snakes.

Because they're snakes.

What a great cliffhanger.

And the episode ends.

It's lovely.

Yeah.

I thought,

good.

Well,

they can't get any more snakes than this.

But they do.

But they do.

I would briefly like to shout out a video game that I really like.

It is from.

I want to get the exact year that this game was released.

This game is from...

I believe, 2014.

It is by the Arcane Kids, which are our game design collective, and it is called Room of 1000 Snakes.

Oh, Jesus.

Room of 1,000 Snakes is a game in which the

Room of...

Because

I want to make sure I get this right because it was all I could think about during this stupid episode.

Room of 1,000 Snakes begins with a title card that says,

They told you not to enter.

You, an explorer, didn't listen.

Quotes, I will find out the mystery of snakes.

And

you enter this sort of like underground chamber that has little holes in the walls and a single button in the middle of it.

And when you hit the button in the middle of the room, thousands of tiny low-poly ridiculously animated snakes pour out of the holes in the wall and get you and that is the whole game um wow and i think that that that they have arrived in the room of 1000 snakes

here

in hunter hunter i i

i don't know how many snakes there are but the implication really feels like there's as many snakes as there need to be to stop people from leaving Yeah, it's like you cannot see the cases.

There's a

knowable number of snakes.

It's my nightmare.

It is literally like

what I would envision as hell for you, Jack.

Like, if some cosmic being was punishing you, this would be where you're going to beat yourself.

I think it would be hell for a lot of people.

I mean, yeah, but Jack specifically has the snake phobia.

I just like me, I know he's getting out of there, no problem.

I can handle a bite or two.

Well, okay, episode 18 begins.

God damn it, Sylvie.

Wasn't even.

Okay, whatever.

Episode 8.

In episode 18.

It begins with one of the greatest misunderstandings of what a bee allergy is that I think I've ever seen.

Let me tell you, as someone who lives with a risk of anaphylaxis, this whole episode is a treat.

Yeah, what's going on here?

You want to talk about this?

So, the way that, I mean, like, Ponzu sort of just explains what happened to Bourbon, uh, which is that also

she explains how her

technique goes.

And, um, well, the first thing she does is refuse to explain,

right?

I forgot about that.

So, I'm not looking at like super precise notes here.

No, that's okay.

I just

want to get in that Karapika sort of doctor houses this one by looking at Bourbon's sort of swollen hands.

Yes, and then like that.

And then like maths it out, like,

this must have been done by neurotoxic bees.

Really gross image of the

hands are so sholly.

Yeah, really gross.

We've had this a couple of times.

And yeah,

Bourbon's hands are all swollen up from the neurotoxic bees.

And then Karapika delivers a PowerPoint presentation.

The theme,

bees.

The way Karapika explains it, to my memory, memory, is that

people,

one bee sting, fine.

But if you get stung again after a bee, you could go into anaphylactic shock, which is not how that works.

You would need to be allergic to bees to go into anaphylactic shock.

This might be like sort of missing context.

Like, they actually mean this specific kind of fantasy bee that doesn't exist.

That is what I assume is much.

Yeah, the way that they say it, it just makes it seem like getting bit by two bees kills you if you get stung.

And Ponzu's like, how was I supposed to know he'd been stung by a bee before?

They're your bees.

They live in your hat.

They live in your big beehive.

Do you want to explain to illustrate

Ponzu

takes her bees out?

Ponzu, I believe, just sort of like asks them to, or does she do a hand movement?

She taps on her big, stupid hat.

And then they just sort of like

no clip out of her hat.

They just

portal to the B dimension.

It very much is.

And they just sort of, oh no, she sends them back in with like a little like twirl of her finger.

And yeah, they just listen to her.

This really is animal handler versus animal handler.

Yeah.

Snakes versus bees.

I kind of wish we saw the fight.

This is the Rube Goldbergian farce.

Is

he sets his trap, which is the snakes.

She sets her trap, which is the sleeping gas.

She then accidentally

calls in the bees, which then instinctively bite Bourbon, who then anaphylactically dies.

Yeah, he does die very anaphylactically.

Yeah, she's setting up a sleeping trap because she's like, Bourbon's in the cave.

I'm going to make him go to sleep.

Very nice lampshade moment of like, oh,

the snakes were like too hidden up in the cracks of the cave to pass out when Bourbon passed out.

That's why he was asleep, but the bees still got me, or the snakes still got me.

Also, look, based on the amount of snakes we see in this and the next episode, I wouldn't be surprised if, like, Mushroom Mycelia, the entirety of just below the ground on Zevil Island was a roiling mass of snakes.

As far as I'm concerned, she could have sent, you know, she could have sent 5,000 snakes to sleep, and Bourbon would have been like, no problem.

I brought the big bag of snakes today.

There's something to these two fighting, which is like, which would you rather?

It's like one of those Instagram memes where it's like, which would you rather have on your team?

50,000 bees or 10,000 snakes?

Like,

there's a real energy to it.

Meanwhile, Leorio is dying.

Leorio is very fucked up by the Viper Bites, and

we get a really thick gone moment.

Is there something between...

Yeah, very briefly.

Firstly, Tonpa, classic Tonpa L,

he said that Ponzu uses chemical weapons.

No, bees are not a chemical.

Sleep gas?

Sleep gas is a chemical weapon.

Bees are not a chemical, and I would say she's primarily defined by the bees.

She doesn't have sleep gas in her hat.

To be fair, she uses the sleep gas twice, and we never see her use a bee.

Bees are a kind of bug.

That's true.

Unequivocal.

Her plan is actually,

I'm just going to sit here and wait.

And after a while, the exam committee will come and rescue everybody in this.

Yeah.

She's basically like, I, listen, I know that I fucked this, but I'm not going to die and...

like trying to get out of here.

Very much the,

we kind of got got a comment of it in Trick Tower where it's like from the Blowjab brothers about that guy who died.

Where it's like, doesn't he know it's better to lose and come back next year than it is to cheat and die?

And we know that Ponzu's not a rookie.

Yeah.

This doesn't seem to be her first.

Oh, yeah.

She's done it a couple times.

Yeah.

Would this count as a loss, even if you have the right number of badges when they come and rescue you?

I think so.

It would, but she didn't have the right number of badges.

Because you've got to go

make it back to the starting point.

and uh they were far enough away from the starting point that um

uh

gone and uh karapika and leario almost missed it they like barely make it back into oh yeah that's true okay then what is the metal thing that gone does this was the moment i'll let you describe it sylvie but

I was watching most of this episode through my fingers and this was the this was the real when I was watching this with Lyra and my girlfriend we both were like oh this is gonna be this this part here is going to kill Jack.

There is one other very small thing that happens before this happens, which is like Karapika is like listening to Ponzu's, like basically being like, well, we're fucked, so whatever, and is formulating a plan.

He's like, ah, there's like one thing that could work and we have a pretty good chance of it working.

And like without...

Him saying anything Gon's just like wonderful.

I'm going to solve this.

I'm going to solve this now.

Yeah, this is going in the soul trap.

It's so good.

What Gone does is

there's like a moment of hesitation.

I was going to say no hesitation.

There's a he psyches himself up.

There's trepidation.

Thank you so much, Keith.

That's the perfect word for it.

Before he just reaches in and starts digging through

Bourbon's cloak, but we kind of can only see it for a second because very quickly.

He gets some new clothes.

He is fully immersed in snakes.

Uh-huh.

Everyone has seen the bee beard guy.

Yeah,

yeah.

Hansu's dad, yeah.

It's that, but snakes all over.

It's the snakes.

Yeah, no, he's got the snakeskin shirt, snakeskin boots, snakeskin hat, all the snake guns.

Snake skin is all alive.

It's a skin snake brains and snake blood.

Yeah.

But what we find out Gon is doing here is that

he figured out that there were two anecdotes in there.

The way Karapiko Kurapika explains it is, oh, yeah, poison's not that good as a

tool if you can't negotiate by having the antidote.

And also, most people who use chemical weapons or poisons would want to have anti-venom in case they needed it.

So, Gon is able to get two

syringes and a little vial of the anti-venom.

And they're able to, Koripika is able to

sort of administer it

in one of the most screenshotted by trans women sequences I've ever seen when Garavika is pulling the

fucking needle through the like pulling the anti-venom out into the needle.

Just need to give a shout out to my girlies there.

Is it actually regularly screenshotted or are you saying it was in the manga?

In the manga,

I've seen, I have multiple friends who, when they're reading, have posted this before, and I have also done this.

Yes.

Because it is when it's in the

show, it is like a red tint, but when it's just black and white, you're just like, oh, yeah, this is going to further the transgender agenda.

This is perfect.

And yeah, he injects Gun and Leorio,

and they are both fine.

Awful.

Horrible.

Really good horror photography.

or like

animation, but I don't just mean animation in the sense of like

making objects move.

The shot choices in the way that they shoot the snakes and the way that

these kinds of like deeply horrific images are framed as being

claustrophobic and nightmarish is really well done, really nicely done.

Kind of the opposite of that beautiful montage earlier when they played gone smelling music.

It's a lot of really tight shots, a lot of like close-ups on two people where you don't get like all of anyone.

Regularly, there'll be snakes in the foreground.

There'll be snakes in all the depths of the frame, you know, an out-of-focus snake in the foreground looking back onto another mass of fucking nightmare snakes.

Menacing.

Generally menacing.

Yeah, and the plan

becomes this.

Ponzu has one more dose of sleeping gas.

If they could somehow use the sleeping gas, which takes about five minutes to take effect, send all the snakes to sleep, they could get out.

But unfortunately, humans can't hold their breath for very long.

Luckily, we have a freak with us.

We do have our lovely boy.

And how long can he hold his breath for?

Nine minutes and 44 seconds.

I have a fun game.

Do we all hold our breath?

No.

I mean, we could, but I'll lose.

What do you think is the world record for someone holding their breath?

I think it's even longer.

I think it's like 14 minutes.

Oh, yeah.

I was going to say like seven.

I was going to say 12 minutes.

Well, Guy Rush Treeport can hold it for about 10 seconds.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he does in one of the games.

Yeah.

It is 24 minutes and 37 seconds.

Wow.

Wow.

Underwater?

Fucked.

Yeah, underwater.

Wow.

That's wild.

Holy shit.

He's 55 years old when he done it.

And he's from Croatia.

His name is Budimir.

Good for Budimir.

What a feat.

It's a shame what those orcs did to him.

He was the best of us.

I've heard this.

Oh my god.

Same F, said Budimir.

God.

There's a

brother Fartimir is going to be crushed.

Budamir offers three tips.

If we want to.

No, I want to talk about Fartimir some more.

Come on.

Oh my God.

Wait, he has to break the news to his dad.

Tree diving is first of all a mental sport.

Disagree.

He says, if you can be stronger than your mind, you will succeed.

If you ignore the fact that you are depriving your brain of oxygen, you'll be fine.

You'll be fine.

Tip number one.

Never skip the training.

Okay.

Tip short.

Tip number two.

It's better to be over-trained than out of shape.

Tip number three.

Don't just do it do it right no matter what

i three basically harm will wait what was the second one

uh don't just uh the second one was it's better to be overtrained than out of shape

okay

sure man

I mean, this sounds like something that someone that holds their breath for

almost half an hour would say.

Yeah.

God, almost half an hour.

He could go underwater with a TV and watch a full no ads episode of Hunter Hunter and still have like two minutes left over.

Yeah, and maybe that's what he does.

Yeah, and I think that's Prots how I would train if I needed to train for this.

Wow.

Wow.

It's very impressive.

So the next thing that we see after everyone basically agrees to this plan, Ponzu doesn't like it because she doesn't trust Goan.

And Goan is like, the first thing that he does is like, I can, you can trust me.

Krabika supports him, being like, Would he really have covered himself in snakes for Leorio if he was untrustworthy?

And she basically buys this.

And then he seals the deal.

He's got the tag that she was looking for from Bourbon and is like,

If you set the thing off, I'll give you this tag.

And she's like, Okay, deal.

this is a very new flavor of gun's trick

because

wait gun's mistake no it's she is going to lose anyway yes

because

he's not gonna take her out

well no because leorio is she's leorio's target But she doesn't realize that for some reason.

No,

I think she knows that.

I feel like Leorio has told her that she is his target.

So she's basically like,

I'm not letting you use my gas.

I'm just going to lose and wait for the judges or the examiners to come rescue me.

And Gonz is like, if you use your gas and let me carry you out, I'll give you this ticket.

And so you can have, you'll have six points then.

And she says, yeah, okay.

And then while she's still passed out, he takes the other one and goes, you can have bourbons, but you can't have your own.

Not that.

And then literally does the winky tongue stick out face.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Yes, I see.

I got a little, there's like a lot of badge maths in this.

Yeah, there is some badge maths.

The thing that I think makes it confusing is that it's almost out of character for Goan to do this.

I don't know if he could have done this before the Hunter exam.

Yeah, that's true.

He's getting, he's, he's becoming

corrupted.

He's being corrupted.

Halfway through the episode, this episode is called Big Time Interview.

No interview.

Presumably, we have moved on from the snake portion

on to the interview portion.

No interview yet.

Oh, sorry.

I missed the

moment.

Have we had even a moment of the netaro stuff yet?

Has that like

even been a scene of it?

Okay.

No, it doesn't happen until this episode proceeds pretty linearly.

where like

the it we don't really get any of the netaro stuff until um until exactly right now yeah until they come back to the boat and we get the little scene of killowa wondering if they were gonna make it or not and then they pop up at the last second because that's like their signature move i guess yep

we get this really nice confirmation of the first thing really that we learn about the hunter exam this year, which is that there's something going on with the rookies.

Netaro is like very excited that six of the nine contestants who make it are rookies.

Six.

Yeah, and he says, and this is interesting.

This happens sometimes.

Yeah.

Sometimes there will be like

a big period where it's just veterans over and over again, and the rookies are all useless.

But he says like a whole crop of promising newbies will show up.

This has happened five times before in Netera's tenure.

I'm wondering if there's like something.

I'm so curious about why this happens.

We probably won't get an answer for this, but is there something about the way this world is set up that

every so often a bunch of really skilled people join the hunter exam?

I do wonder if this was also supposed to be a nod to

Gon's dad

at all.

Like, if is Jenga supposed to be part of one of these classes where this

happened?

Sure.

That was where I went to.

I don't think it's ever a thing that, like...

We do meet a bunch of hunters that may be around his age.

That's the thing.

Yeah.

In one of the arcs.

That's really interesting.

Yeah, I hadn't thought of that.

And Oni Natero knows what the final stage is going to be.

This is very funny to me, the fact that

this elaborate death game that seems to involve a massive amount of logistics gets to the final step, but it's just like, he's going to pick it right now.

Well, there's something he says where it's like, usually only one or two people makes it here.

Like, right?

Isn't that, it's not just rookies.

He's like, usually we don't have this many people for the last phase of the exam.

Yeah.

Which makes sense if you think about like even just

the group of four.

That's that accounts for almost half of the nine.

And if they weren't working together, only Kiloa would have made it that far.

Yep.

Yep.

And he'd have been fine.

It'd have been okay.

Yeah.

Kilua is going to get his hunter's license.

I have no question about it.

Unless he kills Notero or something.

But he's already decided that he's not going to do that.

Notero organizes these.

He says, I want to interview them all, presumably for

some cruel game that he's planning for the final phase.

But before the interviews, we get a cute little Yorio scene.

What is the Leorio scene?

Yeah, wait, which do you mean?

Leario is talking to Karapika, and he says, Oh, I really fucked it during that last game.

I'm so sorry.

I will pay you all back.

You're all in my debt.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And I thought that was really sweet because Leorio has not been, I would say, the strongest link in the team the whole time.

No.

I'm thinking back to Trek Tower, for example.

But he did get bitten by 5,000 snakes.

So I do think he deserves a little break here.

And it is interesting that for all his bravado, for being

the most

making upper type of guy to get mad at person in the show,

this little moment where Leario is like, I've fucked up.

I'm sorry.

I'm going to make it up to you all.

I thought was a sweet scene.

And also, he only really was a liability one time.

And he was only a liability because Tompa threw his match instead of trying to win.

I think that's true.

I mean, Leorio was a liability because he was way too horny.

That's true.

He was a liability, but I just mean, like,

his match basically wouldn't have mattered if

they had a teammate that was, like, not the rookie crusher.

Yes.

Yes.

Well, Ripped eaten by those little fuckers from Hamtaro.

Yep.

Yeah,

they do, in the manga, they show that he does get eaten alive.

Wait, for real?

No, no.

Okay.

I wish.

Yeah,

it shows.

It does

the Odd World.

I just remembered something, yeah.

It does the Odd World thing where they look all cute and cuddly and then they open their mouths and they've got, they're full of teeth, horrible teeth.

Never in Odd World, Ken.

I'm sorry.

Oh, wow.

And the fuzzles?

You don't like the fuzzles?

I'll just leave.

The fuzzles.

The fuzzles.

What?

The fuzzles.

Yeah, I don't know either.

It's like a little, it's like a little ball of fuzz that looks really cute, but they are basically like piranhas that look like fluffballs.

Land piranhas.

We might need to pause a sec.

I think Jack might might not be with us right now.

Uh-oh.

In the Media Club Plus chat.

It's time for the interview.

It's time for the big-time interview.

So

they're on the airship.

Netero's been having a meeting with

all the proctors that aren't the prison guard.

Yeah.

That freak isn't allowed to come on the airship.

No, he is.

Oh, he is there?

He never says anything.

I forgot that he was there.

He just looks a bit scared when Netero says a very peculiar fight, which is a really funny reaction shot from the man who did the peculiar fight.

Yeah, the most peculiar fight.

So, yeah, so they're all talking.

They're talking with the rookies.

They're having a good time with explaining how good all the rookies were this year.

And then Netero's like, I got to go talk to everyone, ask them some questions.

First up is Hisuka.

That's great.

Very cooperative kind of guy.

Sylvie, you told me when we were, when Jack was gone for a minute, that you have all the answers to all the questions.

I do.

You have the questions?

Well, so the question is

basically the same thing to everybody.

It is, who do you have your eye on that's left in the hunter competition is how it's phrased.

And who would you least want to fight, I believe, is the other one.

I love how intentionally ambiguous

the questions are because the reasons why you would have your eye on someone are so different

and the reasons why you would want to fight someone are so different for everybody yeah it's a very interesting way to get at what next time we will learn what he's trying to do each character just kind of has like they'll they at most you'll get like a sentence maybe two of explanation of their reasoning hsoka we get a bit more this husoka scene,

first we get his answers, which are he has his eye on Gon and Kilua.

But mostly

405.

He says at this point, mostly Kilua, but the one

I least want to fight is Gon,

sort of implying his like wanting Gon to become stronger before they fight.

He's less ready.

He calls Gon 405 throughout the whole conversation.

He says Kilua's name, but he doesn't actually say Gon's name at any point.

Does he say Kiloa?

Oh, interesting.

I didn't know he said Kilua's name.

Most of his people

are just referred to by number.

Even like Gon later gives his name.

I think he says Kilua's name.

Okay.

I trust you on that.

I might be wrong.

He also mentions, and I want to get this in before we move past it, that the person he wants to fight most of all is Nethero, and he gives off his intimidating aura, and Nethero continues to just be

silly old man.

He goes like, yep, good.

Like, scratches his ear and then writes down the answers.

And he's like, okay, that's everything.

You can go.

And we get this really cool line from Hisuka, which is,

he left himself so undefended that it caught me off guard or something like that.

That's really good.

Oh, sorry.

Go ahead.

No, I was just going to say it's a great little bit of characterization for Netaro.

What do you want to ask Jack?

I'm curious.

What is your sort of gut feeling on that as a fight, potentially?

What, Notero Hisuka?

Yeah.

If he's a good guy, he's there.

Notero.

Oh, oh, no.

Actually, so what is really narratively interesting, right, would be Notero is set up as this extremely powerful figure, who I'm sure he is, who after all these years finally takes a fall to Hisuka.

It's like,

I was unbeatable for so long.

And everybody knew I was unbeatable.

And now something has come to my door that I cannot overcome.

So I think the interesting answer would be Hisuko wins.

I think the answer that we are supposed to be imagining is

part of the reason that Natero is so unbothered is that he believes that he could take Hisuka.

No problem.

For some reason there's something so satisfying to me about asking Jack

sort of like

Shonen's Smash Brothers questions and getting every answer.

Do you mean it's like you're asking me like who would win in a fight, Christopher Nolan's Batman or Michael Keaton's Batman?

Yeah, it's like that.

It's a little bit more, yeah, it's a little bit more like they are two characters from the same show that are literally talking to each other.

Who would win?

Naruto or go to the window.

It is.

I just I just really, I don't know.

I just get a kick out of

the whole idea of who would win.

We we need to get a power scaler on the show at some point to talk to us about

different power levels.

I'm no power scaler, but.

You think you could do it?

I think that I could, I think I could stretch into that.

Okay.

What is power scale in you?

Power is a term that's sort of given to like

so-called experts and fandoms.

And so-called is not me being like,

it's just like, I don't know what qualifies them.

People just are like, yeah, these are power scalers.

It's people who liked these kind of conversations and are annoying.

That's what.

Yes, very much.

It's just like, oh, here's, it's the guy who wants to always prove why Goku is the strongest, right?

Or

and

they are right about that one.

Well, yeah, but that's like, listen, it's that's Goku.

So the idea of it, Jack, I think, you know, is that because they're different like properties, you've got to, you've got to take the things that they do in their respective shows and try to apply them to each other.

You've got to do a kind of currency conversion.

Right.

You have to do, you have to do a sort of currency conversion.

And as such, it is deeply, deeply subjective and deeply pointless because it it fundamentally is an unimportant thing.

Okay, I'm gonna name someone, and Keith, you have to tell me if you think Hisuka could beat them.

Okay.

Wario.

Yes.

Yeah, I think Hisuka could beat Wario, yeah.

Um, I do briefly want to say that Hisaka gets a bonus question at the beginning of this.

At the beginning of this, right, yes, I didn't write that down.

And it's, we're going back to this show's favorite fucking question from the beginning of the show.

Notero asks Hisaka, why do you want to be a hunter?

And Hisaka says the most upsetting thing.

He says,

look, I don't really want to be a hunter, but being a hunter gives me access to certain things.

And Notaro says, oh yeah, like what?

And Hisaka says, well,

a hunter license often allows people to kill without any fear of prosecution.

At which point, Natero goes, okay,

the next question.

Yep, check my box.

Check my normal guy box.

Notero.

There is a degree of responsibility that Notero in any other world would have to be like, I don't think I'm going to give this guy a hunter license.

You know, cross his name out.

No, not happening.

But Notero is in charge of the search committee, the same search committee that sent you through the forest where the

what's that thing called?

Trap frog?

What was that frog called?

The toad?

That they got.

Right, the toad.

Wait, we wrote these down on our dog.

Yes, it is the

non-waiting.

No, the frog in waiting.

Oh, frog in waiting.

Frog in waiting.

That's Netero's whole game.

So I don't think he's too worried about Hisaka.

And then we get the montage through and through.

I also just love this thing about Netero where

there's just something so

discordant between the reality of the hunter exam, of what the hunters as a thing seem to be, and how sort of like, sort of like

affable and amiable he is, how like tickled he is by Goan and Kiluwa, specifically Goan,

and like how much fun he seems to be having with his little sport.

The thing that I have sort of learned in our quest to understand what a hunter is, is that to be a hunter, you just got to be just the most fucked fucker you can find.

Like,

you just

ring the bell.

You got to be the most fucked fucker that you can find.

Yeah, like,

they're all a little bit twisted, and that's why there's some people I don't have much hope for

who aren't quite as twisted.

We should also, I think we should ring the bell for

the line that Jack quoted earlier.

Hunters usually can't be punished when they kill someone, which is what my,

that's the language that my sub used for that line.

Yes.

If being a hunter is being the most fucked fuck you can find in any given moment, Gitaraku just is just winning the hunter exam left and right.

No question.

The weirdest motherfucker we have met is Gitaraka.

Through and through.

I can't wait to learn just a bit more about Gitaraka so that we can see how that statement holds up or doesn't even.

I cannot make any predictions about where Gitsurako's story is going.

No.

This would be, it would be easier to win the lottery than to guess that, I think.

Yeah, he is like one of those little beans that have a bull bearing inside, and so

different character.

Beans are yes, you're right.

Oh, we get little beans here.

He doesn't have any lines.

He just sort of looks around.

I think

we could get you a new job as someone who writes spec scripts of where the Gitracker plot goes and give you a full-time staff of helpers, and you would not arrive at what is going to happen there.

Is Gita and you can you can say pass on this question and we're saying

yes, but go ahead.

You can say pass because you think the answer isn't actually interesting or whatever.

I am curious about whether Gitaraka's storyline is

something that we are going to be thinking about for the next 10 episodes or for the next 50 episodes or for the next you know 110 episodes.

And part of what I mean when I say I can't predict where we're going is I don't know how many of these characters we are other than the core crew, we are going to be thinking about further down the line.

Is Hisaka an act one and two villain that is going to be superseded later in the show?

Ditto Gitaraku.

I don't know the answer to these things, but it is kind of shaping how I'm viewing this thing, where I'm like, I don't know how long we are going to be with these people for.

Yeah, I'm going to have to say pass to that.

Yeah, fair.

No, no, I think that that is definitely something worth thinking about.

Like,

the nature of this show, having characters that they will sort of flesh out for a smaller arc, Tompa is kind of the one that comes to mind that we've seen so far, where, like, Tompa feels like a supporting character in the cast that you could see going for a little while longer, but is pretty much just for the hunter exam.

And so, like, I think that is something to keep thinking about as we go forward, especially as we get to the we're nearing the end of the exam I think it's just to add just like a note about Gitaraker is like

it's such a compelling bit of character and design and like animation all coming together we've essentially seen him do nothing but he is like magnetic

every

episode

we

dug a hole in the ground yeah that was that was

That was episode 17, and it was really the first time we've seen him do anything except jitter about.

The thing with Gitoraker is that there is like

the reason why that design works so and like why it makes such an impact is this is like something that I remember hearing a lot about on like like people talking about like movie monsters and like prosthetics and stuff, which is like the very strong silhouette and the very unique way of moving.

And it just sort of it catches you.

Like, Jack immediately was like, Who's this Radley pinhead man?

Yeah, and like, just having any sort of affect, and then the way they slowly sort of

start giving

they start revealing more connections with Isuka and stuff, like that, yeah, is enough to keep the viewer interested in what the fuck this guy's deal is.

There's also a very elegant bit of script at the beginning where we're listening to Tompa tell himself how sort of scared scared he is for some unknown reason of Gitaraka.

And that is like, and then that's when we see his face for the first time, basically.

Like, we see him in the background, but yeah, we really get an up-close view for the first time simultaneously with Tompa being like, this guy is bad news.

I have not been able to stop thinking about when I asked a couple of episodes ago who is more evil, Hisuka or Gitaraka, and the three of you, without missing a beat, said Gitaraka, Gitaraka, and we can't say any more.

It's fucking great.

Sylvie, did you say Hisuka?

I said that Gitaraka had connections to Hisuka because we saw

Hisuka calling him on the phone and was walkie-talkie.

I didn't, for some reason, I didn't remember us all three having the same answer, but I could be wrong.

I could be just misremembering.

But yeah, I think it was

a pretty quick answer.

I love Gitseraka.

No Gitsuraka in this episode.

He appears very briefly, but, you know, that's it.

He appears at the end.

And he appears in this interview.

Yeah, Sylvie, do you want to talk through the interview answers?

Yeah, if you want, what I can do is I can go through everyone's answers.

And when you want to talk about the answer, you can stop me, or should we just do one by one?

Because I feel like I like that here.

I think it's that first thing since we're

late.

So to recap, Hisuka's answers are Kilowa and also a little bit of Gon for keeping the eye on, and he least wants to fight Gon right now.

Next up, we have Pacle,

who the one he has his eye on is Kurapika, and the person he least wants to fight is Hisuka because he doesn't think he could win.

After that, we have Kilua, who has his eye on Gon because they're the same age and they're buddies.

That's how he explains it.

And he does not want to fight Pacle because that would be boring.

That's

the answer.

Totally roasted it's great he's like i don't think it would be a very interesting fight his words exactly yep um next up we have uh bodoro who is that sort of like um

he's got like a swordsman vibe to him i don't know older martial artist he's the older martial artist looking guy yeah uh and he has his eye on hisoka and he does not want to fight gon or killua because he would not strike against a child um

we after that have gidorakur who does not explain either of his answers, but he has his eye on Kiloa and is least interested in fighting Ahsoka.

Yeah, his bud.

Yeah.

I'm going to pause this here.

Jack, what did you think about finding out that Gidorakur has an eye on Kiloa?

It was curious, right?

Because

we have not seen them.

I don't...

Hmm.

We have not seen that expressed much in the show up to this point.

Is that fair to say?

Well, like, Guidoraker Acker hasn't expressed much at all in the show, and he hides in a whole

curiosity and sort of friendship, I guess, with Hizuka.

Yeah, like there's something going on with it, they're helping each other get through the exam at the very least, is kind of the impression between

them.

I wonder they have these walkie-talkies that they keep

they are coordinated in a way that the other people aren't.

And I wonder if

I wonder if Hisaka has been sent into the Hunter exam

to get gone, and Gitaraka has been sent into the Hunter exam to get Killiwa.

Maybe not directly, probably certainly not directly, not in the sense of like, go in and get the boy in green and the white-haired boy who can't die, but in the sense of like

you are hunting for specific individuals within the hunter exam, and you are going to work as a pair.

Do you mean they are looking for people like talent, like

people with potential?

Okay.

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, we know that at least Hisaka is looking for people with potential because of the way he talks about cultivating foes.

Yeah, right.

No, absolutely.

I think that's a pretty good inference.

But I wonder if Gitaraku is to Killiwa, what, or similar to what Hisuka is to Gon.

I just want to

talk about

the Wagitakis.

You know what?

We can do a whole debrief at the end of the hunter exam arc.

Yeah,

I think that that makes sense.

After

Gitaraker, we have Gon, who is keeping an eye on Hisuka, and he doesn't want to fight his friends.

He can't pick between all three of them,

which I love.

Hanzo is is keeping his eye on Hisuka and also does not want to fight Hisaka for probably similar reasons.

Kurofika's answers are he's keeping his eye on Gone, and this is, I wrote positive and on Hisuka, and I wrote negative

because that very much is the vibe there.

He says it explicitly.

He's the only one that says explicitly positive and negative.

Yeah, he's the only one who really elaborates on that the keeping an eye on is a positive or a negative.

You can kind of infer it with some of them.

With Kiloa, it's like, oh, yeah, of course,

when he says keeping his eye on gone, it's like...

Karapika's anxious about being misunderstood, is I think the implication.

I like that about Karapika.

Karapika,

a little autistic coded, and I'm here for it.

The answer to who they would least like to fight is that they would just prefer not to fight if they didn't have to.

That's not quite what they say, at least in my vision.

They say They would fight, no, sorry, they would fight anyone if had if they had to, anyone if they had to.

But they would prefer to avoid it, I think.

I wrote these down very quickly.

You're right.

That is a very important detail to include there.

And that was showcased in the episode where he was about to, he was like getting ready to attack Hisuka if he didn't accept the deal.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, Karapika's determination is like a very running,

like

is kind of the constant of their character right like that they have this goal this like revenge that they are driving towards and they like

have a way that they would prefer to move through the world but they will throw that away if it means getting to what they see as their goal um which i like a lot yeah um and leorio's answers are both gone uh his answer for he's keeping his eye on gone because gon's his buddy who helps him out and he rules and then he also says And for that reason, I would not like to fight Gon because he's my buddy and he rules.

Very sweet from Leorio.

I love it.

It's Leorio has such fucking like proud dad vibes, and it's mostly just because he looks like he's older than he is.

But it's

very cute.

I really like

when the

interviews are over, Netero sort of talks like, oh, very lopsided results.

I wasn't expecting that.

But I think that, like,

this is a really good way of showing just how Gon has kind of stolen the spotlight of the hunter exam and how like

Hisuka is also like the other side of that coin.

Because those were by far the two that got named the most, right?

Either with Gon, it was always like, oh yeah, I like started, I like

forged some sort of relationship with this kid and he's really resourceful and like

has a just like an indomitable spirit.

And then, also, everyone's like, Yeah, I don't want that clown anywhere near me.

Please keep the clown away, please keep the clown away.

Great point.

Great point.

Why does he look like that?

No, we talked about that at all.

Have we talked about why he is a clown?

Yeah.

Listen,

sometimes people just want to be clowns.

It's not.

He doesn't do any clown.

I think it's that he's

a bit of a hatchet man.

He's like a magician-y clown.

Yeah.

But he's never a master.

But he doesn't actually.

It's as though he's just got the outfit, and that's it.

It is very much like.

He does kind of what if the dumpus was a person is the way I look at it, which is why the sleight of hand magic and stuff is there.

But he doesn't express being a so it really would be like Keith talked about Anton Sugar from

No Country for Old Men.

It would be like if Anton Sugar was dressed like a clown and his character was functionally the same.

Maybe he should.

I mean, that's the Joker.

Oh, God, I would actually watch a heavy bad damn Joker.

I think that would be great.

Oh, listen, they need one for those Robert Pattinson movies, right?

Oh, shit.

They do.

They shouldn't.

Actually, no, they don't.

Barry Cohen, right?

Yeah.

Which wasn't good.

I don't know.

I like Barry Cohen a ton, but I didn't like what they did with the Joker in that movie.

Fair enough.

Do I have to know if I know who Barry Cohen is?

Barry Cohen is in The Green Knight.

He's the.

I mostly know him as the fucked up kid from Killing of a Sacred Deer, but

shit, he is.

Yeah.

Spaghetti scene kid.

That's one of the most unpleasant movies I've seen.

It's weirdly funny to me.

Well, it's a miserable.

It's miserable.

It is.

He was also in Banshee's Vinarian.

It is Vinisheran recently.

Oh, I didn't see Banshee's Vinacharin.

This is going to release.

Not

we've done.

Keith, bleeping.

You need to do not cut that.

Keith, you need to cut this.

It is Barry Cohen.

100%.

Oh, I see it.

I see it.

Cut that too?

Cut that.

Yeah, cut.

Okay.

Because we forgot.

And that it's a secret.

Yeah.

We forgot

deliberately.

Um,

what do we want to hop back in?

Have we done all the questions?

We have done that.

Why does he look like a clown?

No, okay.

Let's

keep moving.

I don't know.

It doesn't feel that weird to me.

Maybe I've just seen so much of it, but it's just like he's an evil clown.

He's dressed kind of like, or he's an evil magician.

He's dressed sort of like a clown.

I think evil magician is close enough to like weird clown it is he does

oh he does two spells that's the problem i mean in the manga he doesn't do any he's got the card trick he's got the telescope thing

oh that was just looking through his hands no there was like a magnification that happened oh was that yeah there was like magic magnification i think the thing that they're actually trying to do with hiseka is more of the sort of like

cunning gesture thing like sure or a a tarot figure almost yeah yeah i think that like

i don't know there there is definitely something that's where you're like why is this guy wearing a clown outfit but then it kind of just ends up feeling more like a symbolic part of his character over time at least to me where it's like

oh yeah of course this fucker dresses like that why wouldn't he yeah yeah yeah

And just stuff like, are the marks on his face face paint, or is that what Hisaka looks like?

You know?

Yeah, it just really feels like the like the Joker meme of like he's doing evil stuff and he thinks it's funny.

Like, that's really how it feels to me.

A fantastic piece of character design.

Yeah.

Um, I don't know if I said it on the show, but uh, why is he crying recording?

But why

Keith, why?

But just before recording episode one, when I clicked on it and the streaming platform, I was like, oh, the streaming service has revealed another character to me from Hunter Hunter, and I'm excited to meet them.

And it was Hisuka, who I met immediately and who has become the sort of focal villain of this first arc.

But there was a moment where I was like, is he going to show up in like 56 episodes or whatever?

No.

But it is lopsided in the sense that

Gon and Hisuka are kind of being drawn out as two opposite players in this kind of game.

You know, we had all this language during Gon and Hisuka's last fight, where they were almost like

Romeo and Juliet style fated.

Like, they were constantly being drawn together.

This is something that Hisuka definitely feels about: like, oh, Gon, I'm going to fight you again, and when you're ready to be fought, or whatever.

But then the flip side of this is that, like, Hisuka's the obvious

antagonist, like,

but

he's rarely ever been pitted against

the protagonist in any meaningful way.

Like,

it's almost more like he's the antagonist in vibe only,

where like he's sort of like a

slumbering giant that they're like, everyone's trying not to wake up.

They've definitely built, like, I don't know, it's

because the lack of like active.

I don't know.

I don't think I agree.

Cause there have been moments of like active malice against our main characters.

Like there's the stuff, there was the like test or whatever.

Yeah, I mean,

that is Leorio

attacking Hisuka and Hisuka defending himself.

I guess.

But like, how do you watch that and not be like, oh, this guy's real fucked.

He just killed a bunch of people and Leorio's fighting himself.

People were all attacking him.

Yeah, they started.

And he was defending himself.

They tried to hunt him down.

Okay,

I guess we've got the Hisuka defender on the show.

It's on defense.

I just think it's interesting that it's so obvious that he's the villain because he feels so much like a villain and he's playing a villain character

and he's like a gross freak.

I think the thing that comes up is his villainy is felt more in the way that he treats

the gun.

But that is kind of the main thing.

There's this knowledge.

Extremely predatory.

There's this knowledge that

he could kill them.

He, he poses this extreme threat, but he's not acting against them.

And actually, a lot of their encounters have been kind of helpful.

Like,

could we talk about the conversation that Gon and Kurapika have?

Because it actually would really help me

sort of communicate why I think that they do a very explicit job of showing that Hisuka's a villain.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So

Go ahead.

Karapika said.

Karapika is

just such a sweetie.

Karapika's hanging out with Gon and says, did something happen

in the fifth phase, the fourth phase?

The fifth phase?

Something happened a while.

The most recent phase.

Yeah.

And Gon

says what happened.

You know,

this attempt to steal Hisuka's badge and how Hiseka essentially, you know, both outsmarted him and put him in his his debt, put Gon in Hisaka's debt in a way that made Gon

feel just terrible.

We have

three absolutely incredible Gon lines.

He says, I was just so mad at myself.

I was helpless against him.

When he was gone, I got so miserable and lonely.

And so that's why he sought out company in Leorio and Karapika to find somebody that he could help, which is there's some really sharp writing happening here with Gon

to

kind of talk around that last encounter and fill in more detail there.

The

way that God talks about it gives the scene a sort of like coloring where it feels like someone talking about being abused by somebody.

Yeah.

And I think that is very like

kind of key to the...

to Hisoko's ongoing interactions with Gon is that Gon is kind of

like

I hate using this word now because it is like become a buzzword and has lost a lot of meaning for a lot of people and is mostly used as a dog whistle but there is definitely a grooming narrative happening with Hisuka wanting Gon to become more powerful and like

doing these things so that he stays sort of within Gon within Hisuka's orbit like the you until you're you need to get strong enough to punch me to return this um

as a way of doing just sort of like lasting psychological damage and sort of like last, like getting it, like I said, getting his hooks in gone.

And I think that this scene is like a really

understated and well done way of highlighting that.

I think it's one of the more emotionally resonant parts of the show so far, at least for me personally.

Yeah.

And I think they handle it really well.

Like, I think it's really, I think it's really beautifully done.

I think that like, I like that the thing ends up being like Gon going, like, Gon sought out his friends after that, and that helped.

Um,

even though this has still made like an impact, and like, I like Korapika's reactions to this stuff.

I like that we get, we don't get, like, we've gotten a few times where Korapika and Gon have like meaningful interactions, but it, I, this does feel notable as one of the few times they've had just a one-on-one conversation.

Yeah, and it's initiated by Karapika, who is like,

you seem like we should talk about something,

which I thought was really interesting.

Karapika makes space for Gon to talk in this way.

It's a really tender moment between the two of them on a in a lot of ways.

Like, it is really like you can tell that Karapika cares for this kid and wants to make sure that he's doing okay

after dealing with something really horrifying.

Because when you get down to the

also just the literal laying out of what Gon went through of being paralyzed temporarily, having to

deal with

like being at the mercy of Geretta, and then having to be at the mercy of Hisoka after he fucking killed Geretta is like

it's already a lot, and then you get on top of the sort of like metaphorical or like symbolic nature of what it could be.

Yeah, it's also a really good follow-through on the visual metaphor of the butterflies from the last

absolutely uh the last group of episodes where hisuka's like crushes the butterfly and it turns into like a hundred butterflies yeah

the butterflies that are drawn to blood specifically right and the butterflies that are drawn to blood which then we see get caught in the spider web yeah

yeah

it's it's interesting as well to have this this conversation with uh Karapika specifically because you know

you talk earlier about Hisuka wanting to make Gon more powerful, but it's very much a case of wanting to make him more powerful within Hisuka's framework or within Hisuka's understanding of Hisaka's entertainment more than anything.

It is purely just like, I want this kid to be able to give me an entertaining fight someday, and so I'm going to just mold them into the fucking perfect opponent, and then I'm at

In my mind, Hisuka's end goal is, yeah, and even when they're strong enough, I'm going to kill this fucking kid.

Even if it's a fun fight, I'm going to win because that's what makes it worth it

yes exactly

what did he say uh people with hunter licenses can kill without any fear of prosecution yes or repercussion it's one of the two and it's sure fucked

uh i know that there's there's stuff from after

uh the um

Anime ends, but the manga continues that deals a little bit more with this stuff than is available in the anime.

And I'm very curious to see how that stuff plays out.

I had

a pretty decently big thing spoiled for me, but eventually I'll get there and see what is going on there.

The only thing is that I wonder sometimes

how committed Hizuka is to definitely winning those fights.

Like, there, this is like an archetype that you see sometimes.

Of, like, I don't think this is, this is not like a correction.

This is just a note of like even an even weirder strain of character.

Uh, of like, you sometimes meet these characters in fiction that are like, I want to find the fight that will also kill me.

And it's like, I want to kill everyone except the person that kills me.

Um,

and which is, I think, part of what makes Hizuka feel so dangerous is this, this, like,

uh,

kind of

the

like this, this, this feeling that, like,

he would throw it all away for that fight in a way that is, like,

more, farther than someone should go on something.

Yeah.

Definitely.

And I want to be as clear as possible when I talk about Gon and Hizuka being drawn together as these kinds of, the example I used was Romeo and Juliet, not because I'm talking about a beautiful or

what's the word, generative love story, as we all know Romeo and Juliet is.

I think what I was specifically getting at when I said that was the way that Star-Crossed is used in that play to talk about a kind of bleak, unpleasant fate that draws people together.

Yeah, but there's a destiny to Romeo and Juliet, which is why it opens with their death

in an atypical way for Shakespeare.

I don't think that he does that.

I mean, I'm not a Shakespearean.

Listen, buds.

And in this way, we keep seeing, you know, I keep coming back to that image of the butterflies that seek blood being the way we cut between Gone and Hisuka's overlapping stories, that episode, as though nature itself is drawing these fated lines between these two people.

Or rather, not just nature, but a particularly violent and unpleasant kind of nature, drawing a line there.

And yeah, again, in Netero saying, wow, these results are kind of lopsided, and the two names that keep coming up again and again are Gone and Hiseker.

Really, really interesting.

I also think it's, I think we should go back to the sort of first moment of

conflict with Hiseka when he

punches Ghon in the at the

beginning

or at the beginning of the the swamp um

and

ghone is like talking about like not understanding how he feels about this and it's similar but different to the excitement that he feels before

the uh battle royale game um but we talked a bit about how like he's literally trying to figure out what being a hunter is uh and is like get being given a bunch of options and like increasingly those options are terrifying

yeah

um

is there anything else because this is how the episode ends they've done a couple of these uh having episodes end on

um

gone in a moment of introspection

This is this is a real mirror of the end of episode 16,

which was gone in the tree, crouching under the tree,

feeling these very negative feelings.

And here we end pretty much in the mirror of that, of Gon having spoken these to Karapika and

beginning to talk through how he was left following that encounter.

Is there anything else that we want to hit before we sign off?

I think that's everything.

That last thing was the big thing I wanted to hit on this episode before going.

So I think that's everything for me.

Is there anything else that you want to talk through there?

No, I think we did a good job.

I really do.

I don't know.

I just kind of wanted to bring it up.

It's kind of a recurring theme in Gan and Hisuka's

relationship.

Totally.

And like something to keep in mind, especially because I think people tend to think of it as something that comes a little later in the show.

But we'll see.

It becomes more explicit later in the show.

But I think it becomes more explicit?

Okay.

Listen, there's some become more expensive.

It does become way more like straight up.

This is going to be a recurring thing, and I want us to.

I figured flagging it earlier is better than doing a retrospective on it.

Later on, I will say when we do these conversations, I will try and.

I don't want to get

really like

explicit with like things that are like could be implied or anything i hope we did a good job talking about it today um i'm by no means an expert about this sort of stuff but um

i think i think

as long as tagashi is working in the world of metaphor and representation we can just talk about it like that and then gesture at what it's supposed to or what it seems to be uh the underlying thing with isuka there um

yeah yeah i don't know i've been thinking about it a lot leading up to this recording specifically.

No, absolutely.

I appreciate you bringing it up.

Not always working in the realm of metaphor representation.

Representations

straight up, but like when like I think I just it all it mostly is.

It mostly is.

And I don't want to like

I feel like if we do talk about it in heavy terms,

it will probably you'll probably have a warning of some kind in the description or something.

This is just me basically

promising you all that we're going to try and do this with as much tact as possible because that's one of the points of the show.

Absolutely.

I would like.

Oh, gosh.

It is I, Chairman Natera.

And I would like to ask you first,

Dre,

who in the Hunter exam do you have your eye on?

And who wouldn't you like to fight?

Boy.

I'm trying to remember who's left.

The person I have my eye on is Gitoraker.

And

I guess the person I would least like to fight is...

You said least, right?

Not most.

Yeah.

Yes, least.

Yeah, we're doing Netara's questions.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Hisuka.

1A and 1B, Hisuka and Gitoroker.

Oh, wait, no, Gitoraker was ion.

Never mind.

Yeah, I thought you said Hisaka twice for some reason.

And then this is parentheses negative and parentheses negative.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry, Dre, why do you want to be a hunter?

Um,

oh boy, I almost said something.

Um

to kill with kill without repercussion.

No, I almost said something that would be a big spoiler.

Oh,

okay.

Um, to see

Strange Beast and all the other stuff that they talk about.

Yeah.

Keith, why do you want to become a hunter?

Who have you got your eye on?

And who don't you want to fight?

I want

to be a hunter for the money.

I'm in it for the money.

I have

my eye on Leorio.

Because he needs another eye on him.

Positive.

This is positive.

And I would least want to fight Gitaraker.

Sylvie, why do you want to be a hunter?

Health insurance, mostly.

Yeah.

Sure.

Fair.

They have a really good plan.

Oh, I bet.

Listen, I hope so.

I'd never have to pay for surgery in my life.

Or they just kill you.

Yeah, or they're all independent contractors and have no health insurance.

It's one or the other.

It's either great or non-existent.

There is a portion of the show where we see someone get really phenomenal phenomenal healthcare.

That's true.

That's true.

I have my eye on Kiloa because he's a cool.

I'm like, damn, how's that kid so cool?

So positive.

And I at least want to fight.

Who do I at least want to fight?

Pockle because it wouldn't be interesting.

You know what?

Awesome.

Pretty good answer.

Yeah, fair.

Possibly true.

The fact that there's no girls left means I can't do a joke where I'd say

I would never fight a girl.

I'd never raise my voice even.

I think the person I least want to fight is

Karapika.

Whatever you say, beautiful.

So I kind of got it around there.

Anyway.

My name's Jack.

I would like to be a hunter because the branded luggage set that they give you is really good.

How much?

I have got my eye on Karapika

positive and I would least like to fight Gitaraka.

Gitraker would definitely just kill whoever

he's fighting.

Oh, I mean, they'd kill me all.

All of them would kill me, no problem.

Sure.

This is the thing.

I'm

deathbait.

It's the like, it doesn't say that it's a deathmatch, but I think that it's, I think that, like, the deathmatch is implied when you're fighting Gitraker.

I think Edmundio fights and Kizuka.

Yeah, those two for sure.

Well, we saw him in the thing not deliver killing blows to that guy because he was like, you're not worth it.

We did see him killing him.

We also saw him not kill Gone.

And we saw Gijaraker kill the sniper.

Oh, sorry, Gijaraker.

And the other guy.

So Gietraker killed those two people.

And

we see Kizuka not kill a bunch of people.

Also kill a bunch of people.

But I think you just, I think, you know, we're talking percentage chances of not being murdered i think that geecheraker is more likely to murder me in cold blood

yeah

i think so well and on that note what are we what are we watching next time

uh next time we are watching episodes uh is it 1920 and 21 that is correct wow we are finishing up this first arc we really are literally finishing up the first arc well okay that's not fair that's not true we We kind of are.

I mean, I think...

We have two EPs left in this arc.

Two recording

because it goes until 25.

So we have 19, 20, 21, and then 22, 23, 24, 25.

I think I'm splitting it the way that the wiki does.

Oh, the wiki has.

The wiki includes the thing that you're thinking of as part of the hunter exam.

and not part of the next thing.

That's weird.

Okay, never mind.

I don't know what's going on with my brain uh it's almost like it's almost midnight yeah

sleep for everybody

yeah you sleep for everybody and we'll all stay up we're

gonna start sleeping gas in this cave everybody um

it should be fine the examiners are gonna come pick us up eventually i need a good night's sleep

someone let off some sleeping gas please for the love of ponzu please give me can you please mail me some of your magical sleeping gas yeah i need a good i need to get a good night's sleep so I'm going to be taking afrin.

I'm going to be using afrin

or I'm not going to be able to sleep.

Good night, Keith.

Don't use afrin.

I don't know what that is.

Sorry, Duray, what did you say?

Isn't it like allergy medicine?

Yeah, afrin is a nasal steroid that you are only allowed to safely use three times a month, or you get like blowback symptoms from it.

You're off to see the Hat Man, though.

I don't, I don't.

Luckily, I think this is not a Hatman issue.

Okay.

It's more, it's more of if you, it's like

it, it, it makes the blood vessels in your nose smaller so that you can breathe better.

But then, like a hose that you've sort of blocked off and let go, when they open back up, they open way back up and it makes you even stuffier than you were before.

So if you do it too much, then you can get stuck in a cycle of.

like the affrin is what is making your nose stuffed so then you're using affrin which releases symptoms but then it makes your nose stuffed.

And then, yeah, it's bad.

So don't use affrin, but I'm gonna.

Don't be like me.

Don't be like me more than three times.

Don't be like me.

Yeah,

I had a bad two or three months of affrin blowback a couple years ago.

Now I only use it once or twice a month.

Good for you.

Yeah.

Good.

Good for you.

Yeah.

And good for our friends who finished this Leg of the Hunter exam and will be continuing on on to the final test.

Congratulations.

Oh, and also good for

the next