The Stupidest Man In The World - Hunter x Hunter ep. 10-12: Media Club Plus S01E04

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 Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

You can find friends at the table in your podcast app of choice.

You can find the friends of the table Patreon, which is the Patreon that makes this show possible at friendsatthetable.cash.

Sylvie Bullet?

Oh, hi, I'm Sylvia.

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

Jack Dakeet.

Hi, you can find me on Twitter at.

No, I'm not doing that anymore.

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

I would also like to shout out our incredible cover art by Annie Johnston Glick.

You can find her website at anniejg.com or you can find her on Twitter at DancyNru like Teen Detective Nancy Drew, but the letters are swapped.

That's funny.

Why are you talking about that today?

Why are you talking about that on episode four today?

Because the process of making a podcast means that we don't exactly know who is going to be doing things for the podcast until we are some distance into it.

And we are having a lot of very exciting conversations with Annie.

Yeah.

I'm also not really using Twitter very much.

I'm looking at it, but I haven't posted.

I've been posting a lot on co-hosts.

It's very fun.

So you should follow us there.

And the show there at Friends-Table.

Almost all the stuff that you would expect to find on the Friends of the Table Twitter has been coming out on the Friends of the Table co-host, kind of.

I'll get better about it.

And Andrew Lee Swan.

Hey, you can find me on our Twitch channel most Monday evenings at twitch.tv slash friends at the table.

How are you all feeling about this set of episodes?

These episodes fuck so hard.

Yeah, they're pretty.

They're pre-RA.

These are pretty RA episodes.

Jack?

Yeah, this is great.

I mean, we have three episodes that

it speaks to the quality of the show, and I am so interested to see how this kind of structural idea is developed.

That we are still in this fucking fight in this tower, and yet each episode introduces some new fun wrinkle to the fight.

A less interesting show would have just been like, fight someone hand to hand, then it's a new person each episode, and we're going to be here for five episodes.

Yeah.

But the fact that

has done that before, and it's thrilling.

Oh my gosh, is it good?

It is thrilling, yes.

The fact that we, um, every time we come back, we are viewing this this problem from a different angle.

It's great.

And we get several problems sort of per episode in this chunk.

And they are each overcome in really fun ways.

Yeah, I like these episodes a lot.

There's a lot of stuff that happens in these episodes.

Like,

the stuff per minute is pretty high.

It's dense.

These are dense.

But we start off with Leorio sort of continuing to be the main victim of Trick Tower

by

at every turn refusing to keep his cool and exploding at every little thing.

In the last episode, or in the last set of episodes that we watched, Karabika absolutely destroys the blue freak Magitani.

And in this episode,

Leorio's new opponent, who is a gambling weirdo, who reveals herself to be a girl, and that doesn't cause any problems at all,

she says they can't proceed until it's until the deathmatch is decided.

Eagle-eared view, eagle-eared viewers will have noticed that actually, Machitani did give up.

He literally says, I surrender, I give up, or something.

But they're literally doing everything they can to stall for time.

They're tricking, they're lying.

That's part of the thing, I guess, whatever.

Anyway, Karabika refuses to kill an unconscious person, so they spend hours waiting until Leorio sort of heroically forces the issue with a couple of really well-placed bets, and it seems like it's going so great.

And then he absolutely throws it all away in a couple of massive blunders, and revealing himself to be kind of a creep and kind of a weirdo and the worst guy in the room.

And everyone's mad, uh, everyone except Goan, who didn't really understand what was happening.

Um,

uh,

oh, yeah, did I say that the thing they were gambling with was the hours that they have to complete Trick Tower?

Because that's what they were doing.

Um, Leario loses them 50 hours, 50 hours 72 hours.

Uh, in turn, the the

prisoners receive 50 hours off their sentence, 50 years, 50 years.

For every hour, it's one year for them, yes.

So, he loses them 50 hours plus the time it took to play the game, and then minus, and I'm being very fair here to Leorio, minus whatever time that he saved by forcing the issue

at the very beginning.

Matchitani's unconsciousness, yes, right, yeah, because they they really did wait for hours and hours for some sort of change, and there was nothing.

Oh, he was faking it, of course.

Next up in the tournament, because it's now two to two, and this is their last chance, is Kilua.

Great last chance, I think, but Leorio vocally and repeatedly doubts him.

Kilua is up against an extremely vascular, sad-looking serial killer/slash mass murderer.

He looks like a poet

to me.

Yeah,

that's that is very good.

That's very true.

Yeah, he looks like such, he has the most sensitive, kind of empathetic face I've ever seen in a cartoon.

Uh, but he it has killed 150 people.

Uh,

I'll give someone else a chance to describe what happens in this one later.

Um, but with 60 hours remaining, they have to go into a small apartment to chill for about 50 hours.

They win.

We'll talk about how.

Right, yes, they win.

Kills.

Right.

They spend 50 hours being sort of weirdly domestic and having a good time in this little apartment.

Well,

obviously.

Some people have a good time.

I think everyone's having a good time as long as they're okay with fulfilling their role,

where

obviously Kropica and Leorio are going to Kilo's mom and dad.

And

Tunp is their weird, weird uncle that everyone hates.

But they have nine hours left to pass the final task or pass the rest of the tower.

They

spend almost all that in a very quick montage where they hit the final task a three pass or they all fail sort of scenario.

It's more complicated than that, but we'll get into it.

They make a really big deal of this and get into a big fight.

And we'll talk about that when we hit it, I think.

Yeah.

Yeah, but we come to the conclusion where,

and we'll talk about how as we get there,

all of our team have escaped the Trick Tower and reached the bottom.

Yeah.

Yeah.

With seconds on the clock, I should say.

Yeah.

Like, I think they really had like 12 seconds left or something.

And after Trick Tower, 24 remain.

25 made it down, and one of them dies.

Literally died as he walked out of the

exit.

Does anybody remember what the Blowjet brothers say?

They said

better to quit and survive than

succeed and die.

Something like that.

I don't have the exact words.

Yeah, they say something like better to quit and try again next year than pass and die.

You know what?

I think I agree with that.

I think I agree from the brothers who are

multiple time losers at this point, but they seem like they're happy in life.

They're alive.

They have a good sympathy.

And they're alive.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No sympathy for the dead.

No sympathy for the dead is shown by anybody in this show, and I think this is a great place to start because...

Karapika will not kill an unconscious person.

Karapika is much where we left him at the end of the last series.

He slouched against the wall, having dealt with this, you know, stressful and traumatic

encounter with a fake

phantom troop member.

I didn't put it together that he was still sitting from having sort of collapsed after the fake phantom fight.

And Leorio comes over and says,

go in there and just

kill him.

Just kill him.

Just kill him.

Just break his neck or something.

Be in a big baby.

Yeah.

And Karapica says,

I'm not going to do that.

And Krapica, as usual, seems to have their head screwed onto their shoulders, right?

Their

reason for not doing this does seem to be:

I'm done, I'm exhausted, and I don't want to go and kill an unconscious person.

Right.

And not only does Leorio disagree with this, he shows no reaction whatsoever to the thought that

killing an unconscious person is bad.

And neither does Killiwa, who says, yeah, I'll kill him.

Just, yeah, I'll go go in there and kill him.

No problem.

There is a moment where Gona is sort of gently complaining when Kilua offers to kill Magitani, that is very sad

and also

very sympathetic.

He's just like, Kilua, don't kill him.

Come on, man.

But it is notable that we have two out of our four sort of protagonists are

really

they completely no-sell the thought of executing an unconscious person.

So, just to be, I should say, I don't think that you should kill an unconscious person, but let's do a minute of devil's ambition here.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, absolutely.

Wait, Keith, let me.

I'm just grabbing my little egg timer.

Okay, oh, great.

I'm glad that you have only a minute here.

Great.

You ready, Keith?

Yep.

Your time begins.

So, this for the blue freak, Magitani specifically said, Let's do a deathmatch.

It's It's true.

And

then had absolutely zero to back it up with.

But I would not put it past this guy killing any one of these people if he actually could.

He is pretending to be passed out, and he is a piece of shit.

None of them know that.

They all think he's genuinely passed out.

But, you know,

a deathmatch is a deathmatch.

Don't agree to a deathmatch then.

Like, none of no one this whole time ever.

Not just agree to, but propose it.

Oh, did Karapika propose it?

No.

Much Tommy did.

No, no, I'm saying Karapika should not have agreed to a deathmatch if, like, this is the, like, I know, Karapika's, you know, playing 4D chess over here.

Yeah.

You know, if you're, if you're not prepared for this scenario, which is, I think, kind of, if you, if you run it a couple times in your head, this is kind of an obvious scenario for

sorry, time's up, Keith.

Okay, let me finish my sentence here.

It's sort of an obvious scenario for this kind of setup of the trying to waste time thing.

And it's something I think they clearly learned from the mistake of the first guy who allowed Tompa to surrender.

Yes.

So I think that they have, I think that the prisoner sort of learned that this was a tactic.

And so for Karabika to have not learned that this was a tactic, to agree to, without argument, a deathmatch, and then to not follow through on it.

You know, I can see why,

in the middle of Squid Games, I can see why this would be very frustrating for Leorio, who's already been sort of needled by Trick Tower over and over.

Yes, yes.

It also reveals something interesting, which is that it seems that Karapika has not killed a person before.

But his life's plan has a lot to do with killing a lot of people.

Which is fascinating.

Which is fascinating.

And I think is a fulcrum that these kinds of righteous revenge stories often move around, right?

Where like the.

I don't think it's an unusual sort of facet of this kind of plotline.

And I think the reason that we see it so often is because it works well.

You know, you have a character who

has turned the whole focus of their life towards violent revenge on people people

who killed people they love.

And part of that step is they have to come to terms with the fact that they are going to have to enact

similar violent acts.

And I think that the place you put a character to make that interesting is either doing violent acts is nothing to them.

So how are they different from their opponent?

Or they have not acted violently and they have to come to terms with this.

And I think that we absolutely should be keeping that tension with us, with Karapika, this sort of thing of like, I don't like the violence, but I'm setting myself up for a life of it because

I think it's no big shock that this will come back up.

So they propose a vote.

This is so funny.

Oh,

and then no, there's no they.

There's no they propose a vote.

L'Oreal screams, well, fine, we're gonna do majority rules.

Yeah, this is so great.

And he tries to use his little watch, and what happens?

Doesn't work.

Nothing.

Yeah.

Doesn't work.

Why does nothing work?

Because only the prison warden can say when it's majority rules.

Yeah.

At which point Leorio says, well, okay, fine.

We'll vote with the weird bracelets that God gave us out of human hands.

Time to remember.

We've got democracy built right into these bodies.

The vote goes exactly as you would expect, which is it is a 4-1, don't make Karapika kill this guy.

Well, with Leorio being the kill.

I think that you're right, but there is a slight twist on the 4-1.

It is, because it really, what it feels like is one person votes and no one else engages at all.

They just ignore that the vote is happening.

What happens is Leorio says, raise your hand if you think basically Karapika should go and kill that unconscious guy, and then raises his hand and nothing happens.

There's a real

lack of

moving even one step ahead of

what happens when you force by vote Karapika to execute someone.

Yes.

Yes.

But I do think that this is...

So these episodes really do show.

I want to talk a little bit about this vote because something kind of incredible happens.

Tompa, again, reveals himself to be a super interesting character.

Yeah.

But oh, the Tompa set is phenomenal.

Just like full exposition sort of psychoanalysis.

At the end of the last episode, you said to me, the three of you said, Leorio is up next.

How do you think this is going to go?

Nice set.

I think he's going to win, but he's not going to have a good time.

I think it's going to be a real trial.

Do you remember the very funny joke that I made after you said that?

I don't.

What did you say?

I said something that would only make sense if you had remembered exactly what happened, which is, or it could be the opposite where he loses, but has has a very good time.

Right.

Yeah.

We'll talk about that as it happens, but I would like to say that these three episodes

reveal Leorio not just to be a stupid man, but maybe the most stupid man.

Yep.

Maybe

the extent to which Leorio fucks up in these episodes is so monumentally entertaining.

It's monumental.

It's monumental and monumentally entertaining.

And we kind of begin to enter this zone here as he proposes a vote and then loses it and makes himself look like the goose.

And then

Tompa turns around and we get a little

bit of a

fame got me honking like a goose.

We drift over to Tompa's.

Yeah, we jump back into Tompa's head.

He offers a fucking treatise on democracy.

A treatise on democracy and a psychoanalysis of group dynamics.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

Does someone want to break down kind of what happens here?

Because I do think that what this ends up doing is like governing Tompa's thoughts for the rest of this arc.

And governing the relationship.

Because we've seen this.

This is the first time that Tompa sort of makes it explicit.

But just to set this up is like

Tompa is the villain.

Everyone now knows that he's the villain, but he has like...

He early on identified Leorio as the weak member of the group,

one who cannot like rally someone around their ideas, even when they're reasonable ideas, and who is willing to make himself the villain when they already have a villain.

Tompa's actually the villain here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, Sylvia, yeah, go ahead.

I was just going to say, Tompa has this whole like

internal monologue about how the true curse of the path of majority rule is

that it basically talks about voter alienation to put it like sort of get to the root of it where it's like if you keep finding yourself in the minority you're gonna feel like everyone's against you and he made the classic mistake of asking for a show of hands so it's a visible vote instead of an anonymous one so we all know he knows that nobody had his back and that's what leads to the group like that's what in theory what would lead to the group fracturing you know

yeah it's wonderful and And it is such a good demonstration of, and I point it out every time this happens, but this show's readiness to

stop treating our protagonists like point of view characters.

You know,

the four Karepica, Leorio, Gone, and Kilua remain our visible protagonists, but the show is so ready to cut hard away from their interiority to somebody else's.

That is a big part of the show and will continue to be.

And in fact, in what felt like a really wonderful moment, and maybe is

the shock of it is lost, I imagine, if you have seen this arc already.

But something happens after this, which I was not expecting at all, which is after all this time in the fucking test chambers of our characters, we suddenly cut hard to Hisaka,

which is incredible.

I love this scene.

Yeah, this is great.

Uh-huh.

This is a wild moment because I had been lulled into a false sense of security of like, oh, well, well, you know, we're with our team now for the time being.

And so just to move in a cut, not even a, there is no big deal made of this cut.

It happens midway through the vote.

You know, the tension of is Magitani,

Magitani needs to be killed, is dispensed with for a moment as Hisaka enters a room to meet

who I imagine to be the examiner he wounded last time.

Because we have a scarred fellow in this circular room who basically says, I've been waiting for this chance for revenge for these wounds you gave me.

And Hisoka and this guy fight.

This guy wounds Hisoka, which is interesting.

This is the first time we have seen him wounded.

He gets a bloody slash on his shoulder that he remains through the rest of these episodes.

We see him with this wound on his shoulder.

But after a short period of time, Hisoka cuts this man's head off with his own weapon after catching his.

I wrote it down.

What does he say?

Infinite quad wielding

weapon.

He eventually catches these swords and decapitates this man.

He doesn't just catch the sword.

He stops the sword by letting two of them actually hit him.

And he's just like, oh, yeah, this is fine.

I was really annoyed that you were.

Wow.

Yeah,

that's where the slash in his shoulder came from, I thought.

He gets caught when he dodges them, but when he catches them, it looks like he's getting stabbed.

That's how I read that scene.

We see him in cinematic.

Now I gotta go pull this up.

Hold on.

Make sure I'm not crazy.

Keep going.

Yeah, we see two blades in silhouette, much like how we saw Killua kill that guy with his vampire hands.

We see two blades kind of strike him in the middle, and we think, oh my god, he's been hit.

And then it is revealed that he has his hands in front of his chest, in his abdomen, and has caught the two blades.

Does anyone remember what the

former examiner says when he catches the blades after about 15 seconds of dodging them.

No.

The examiner goes, like, in his own head, he goes, ah, it took me six months to learn how to catch those blades.

Yes.

Oh, okay.

You're right.

I see why I thought he got hit by them.

I thought he got hit by them intentionally and then just like was like, I'm such a badass, this doesn't bother me.

But it's because of the shot of his shadow.

It makes it look like he got hit by the blades.

Oh, okay.

It's a great, it's a great scene.

And it's just this little fight that comes out of nowhere.

Lovely little production design detail in here.

This room has like a

good screenshot here.

A circular staircase running up the inside of it.

And each stair has a red wax candle on it.

And when the fight begins, the candles all light, which is really cool.

I love 16-bit JRPG moments.

It really does have.

Oh, and Hisuka says, I appreciate your futile efforts.

What a cool character.

What an awful smile, too.

Another kill, another Hisuka kill, put it in the thing, of someone attacking Hisuka, and then Hisuka sort of mercilessly killing them.

No, no murders yet.

We did mention that this is the this,

sorry, we mentioned that this was like a revenge thing for this guy, right?

Yes,

I do love the, I love that someone hated Hisuka so much.

They were like, that motherfucker almost killed me last year.

I'm coming back unofficially and i'm getting that guy yeah absolutely uh and here we have hisoka as uh sort of the archetype of and i think this has been developed through conversations with satots earlier the archetype of the nightmare pupil you know uh the the relationship between the examiners and the candidates is sort of this thing of like uh we uh have the skills and the power and we are assessing our trainees power or our pupils power and hihoka is the entity who looks that dead in the eye and says i am going to to turn this towards malice and violence and turn that against you the the

evil chaotic pupil that kills the master which is consistent with what Satot said last time of like hey sometimes the hunter exam just produces like nightmare people

hey where's Hisoka's team

there is no team There is no team.

No one else had a team.

Yeah, I think the majority rules are the only people who have to do this as a team.

Okay, that's good to know.

Everyone got their own trick path.

So there's like 20 other people out there doing their own trick tower.

Yeah, it's majority rules.

It's papercroft.

Someone has to do a papercroft one.

Yeah.

Someone is basically playing Dynasty Warriors.

They have to kill 50,000 people.

And then the other one is just the cooking the pigs again from the previous trial.

I want to, before we get back to the main crew, I want to rewind real quick and then jump forward real quick for two little details that I don't want to miss.

Number one is going back before we cut to Hisuka,

one of my favorite

soundtrack bits.

I think it's the first time that it plays.

I called it mystery music, but it's like these like midi horns that are kind of like playful and mysterious that that's playing like while everyone's talking out to the should we murder Magitani thing.

I don't know if anybody else picked up on it, but it's great.

I think I wrote down...

What did I write down?

Yes, I wrote down this goofy jazz music.

As Kiloa suggests, you will go out and kill this unconscious person.

Yep, yep, yep.

That's what I call the mystery music.

It's really great.

It's one of my favorite bits of soundtrack in the whole thing.

What do you think the music supervisor told the composer to write?

Mystery music.

Dungeon investigation, but kind of happy.

That's, yeah.

That's pretty good, Keith.

And then the second thing from here is during the arguing,

Lario goes into a corner and starts doing a goblin voice.

He starts like talking like a little goblin or like crouch into the corner.

Yeah, it's so funny.

It's hilarious.

I think Karapika or maybe Gon looks at him doing this and says he's sulking, which I thought was just so good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's sulking.

Oh, he's sulking.

Yeah.

God understands what it means for an adult to sulk.

And then, yeah.

And then jumping forward after this Hisuka fight, I'm pretty sure this is where

he finishes the Trick Tower.

He's first, obviously.

But we get a name.

I think for the first time, we get a name.

Oh, yes, we do.

We got a lot of names in this episode, actually.

Each person who finishes the exam gets a noun.

Yes.

So we got

the

pinhead's name for the first time.

Rattly Pin Man.

Rattley Pin.

Does anyone remember his name?

His name is Gitaraku.

Yeah.

Great name for this guy.

Great name.

There's a couple of good moments of him.

Yeah, he has a really funny moment later that I would love to talk about.

Am I wrong that that's where this happens?

No, that happens a bit later.

That doesn't mean

that it happens at the end of the next episode, actually.

We got a lot of cuts back to the people who have finished the exam waiting as the timer ticks down.

Yeah, yeah.

So I just got confused where that happens in my thing.

Tiny nice moment that I love.

There are two really funny moments in these little commercial bumpers, which we talked about a while ago.

If you've forgotten, they show a word in

the script, the hunter script, the language of this world.

And then as we come back in from commercials, they show the Katakana translation of it.

And

Hisaka appears for the first time in one of these.

Previously, it's just been kind of members of the main crew and maybe Tonpa.

And I think we are seeing Hisaka's name written down.

And then as we come back in from the credits, he smirks, spins around, and throws a playing card at the screen, which cracks the screen between us and Hisaka.

And there's always been this nice sort of

these little moments have been

these little meta moments where we get to see the character act out a little.

You know, Kiluwa will glance over at the word and be like, huh, that's what it means when it comes back.

And so for Hisaka to be so dangerous that he has the capacity to break the screen between him and the viewer, it's like you made the mistake of letting Hisaka onto the commercial screen and he is going to take a violent act against the person watching.

Just is more of this like, oh, Hisaka is a maniac out here.

Bad man.

Yep, trying to kill the viewer.

Evil Clown.

So, says this

hunter.

Sorry, this prisoner.

Why don't we make a bet?

Who actually proposes this initial bet?

Is it this gambler or is it Leorio?

Begins his

steel campus.

So they have basically said, the prisoners have said, we have to wait.

Everybody starts getting suspicious that maybe it's maybe.

Actually, no one suggests that maybe Magitani is faking it.

They all suggest maybe he's already dead and they're lying that he's alive and just unconscious.

So Leorio jumps in on unconscious for so long.

It's like, well, he'd be dead if he was actually unconscious for this long.

Right.

And so it's Leorio who's like, I'm going to sort of break this stalemate by just starting the betting.

Like, I know that that's where this is headed.

I'm just going to start doing it.

And it works.

Like,

he is able to sort of

start the match around this sort of undecided match.

Yeah.

It's, I, I don't know if we made it explicit, but this prisoner is introduced as uh

her name is Larut.

Uh, and uh she is in the jail for 112 years years for trafficking endangered species and engaging in illegal gambling.

So, yeah, we know from the start that this next thing is going to be about betting.

I also, I love just a small detail about like what the show is willing to, that the show is like willing to present the information that it wants you to know, however it can.

Every other person got a little splash screen that said their name and what they were in for and how long.

But

LaRut had the doesn't get that because the

exam proctor says it like in a scene that he's just in.

And so they don't have to show it.

And it's just like, yeah, well, the other stuff wasn't in this, there wasn't a scene where we could say it.

So we just showed you.

So I like that they're just willing to give you the information, but they'll clean it up if it works better in another way.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah.

This shows, so far, this shows

like Trump card has always been the the way it controls information.

Right.

How it tells you things and when it tells you things has just been the thing that

keeps me going.

So the first bet is, is this guy alive?

I don't remember how this, who bets what, but we established that this guy is alive.

Leoria makes a safe bet

by betting that...

correctly that he's alive even though he believes that he's dead so he he basically puts like a feeler out that he's like minimizing his losses by betting that he is alive because if they find out that he is alive, then they can just finish the fight.

Yeah.

Halo 3 is a good thing.

Make a note of this.

This will be Leorio's last successful bet.

Ooh, there is one more successful bet.

There's one more.

Oh, that's true.

I will say this is Leorio's last clever bet.

You don't think that the

Standard Max one is clever, too?

Yeah.

I think that's clever.

Oh, that one is clever.

Yes, that is.

I think of that less as better than more threatening to kill a guy.

Because

what happens then?

Potato, potato.

So, Lario's like, okay,

this guy is clearly faking it.

We find out in a few minutes that he knows because he's a doctor.

He looked at his eyes.

His eyes were the eyes of a conscious person, not someone who's been fed a drug to keep them unconscious, not someone who's actually unconscious, not someone who's dead.

These are the eyes of a living person.

Probably his pupils dilated or something when he looked, he like looked at

Leorio.

So Leorio stands him up, knowing full well that he's faking, and says, I'm going to drop him.

And if he's really unconscious, he'll fall to his death.

And if he's, or sorry, if he's

Yeah, if he's really unconscious, he'll fall to his death.

And if he's alive, he'll stop himself from falling to his death.

And so he

does that.

He lets go.

Oh, there's a, there's a thing.

There's a thing here.

She changes her bet.

She switches from he's doing it.

He's he's

because Leorio's original bet was, I bet that he's faking it.

And in the middle of this, she says, actually, I'm betting that he's faking it.

Yeah, that's

very well defined.

Why is she allowed to do that?

So she...

Yeah, she's evil.

Right, but he didn't even complain.

He didn't say, wait, but I'm, I already know that you're right.

So

I don't want to lose this.

yeah

there's a there's a lot of uh i feel like this is where the rules of this are like stretched the most and are kind of like yeah least believable yeah am i getting confused did he actually lose this bet

no yeah no he did he because she bets that he was actually alive yeah or that he was that he was conscious yeah right and then the way he's like i'm fine with that is because um he's like at least we'll know and we can like get the win and we can just keep it moving

uh magitani reveals himself to be alive just before he's dropped off the side in the world's slowest and silliest uh fall magitani

nearly falls off he's a loony tune he it really it's like a loony tune 100

and the the scene goes on for so long that of him falling it is you know like it's like 20 seconds of this guy teetering on the edge uh it's really funny and eventually magitani says

I am.

I'm actually fine.

And yeah, Leorio has this great line.

I'm pre-med.

I know that he's,

which, God, I don't want Leorio to be my doctor.

I do.

He's a really good doctor, according to the

Kirikos.

We have unfortunately established in the lore that Leorio is actually a good doctor.

Yeah.

Yeah, but he just bad jokes about manner.

Boy, does he.

Hey, Keith, why do you think Leorio has bad bedside manner?

Okay, so next episode, we're in episode 11, unless there's any lingering things for episode 10.

I would like to say one thing in episode 10.

So I believe that the betting was now over, that

by engaging here, Leorio has sort of used his turn.

So I thought Killua was up next, and I wrote down.

Why are we still wagering?

Game's over.

But now it's Killua's turn.

Hit the the answer button a couple of times.

This is going to be an absolute mess unless they keep going with Leorio.

Now,

Leorio remains, and it is an absolute mess because

we move into episode 11.

Okay.

So the first thing that happens is that LaRut, who has been wearing a big cloak, takes it off.

And I swear to God, an instrument in the soundtrack goes, wow.

What?

No,

that is a person's voice, I think.

Well, it is a person's voice, but it's like,

it is a non-diegetic voice.

This voice does not belong to someone in the cast of the show.

That's true, though.

Maybe it was Magitani in the background.

Maybe, but

I think they all knew each other.

I know.

This just might be like a thing.

They might just be friends.

But it is, it does feel, it feels like a gag where all of a sudden sudden this girl is actually a pretty girl.

Yes,

yes, yeah.

We have an anime pretty girl here.

She has incredible hair.

Her design's really cute.

Yeah, massive.

Yeah, she looks great.

We are now two for two.

Two women have appeared in the show.

That's not true.

More than two women have appeared, but two sort of main women have appeared in the show, and they both have really cool designs.

Three speaking roles, I believe.

Yes, we have

Aunt Mito, and then we have Menchi, who has the great

pale blue hair and the shift.

I love Menchi's.

I didn't really get into it, but I love Menshi.

And the what, Keith?

The Janties.

Oh, she does have Janties.

Yes.

And then we have Larut, who is sort of got like a shock of pink hair.

Bright, bright pink hair.

It's split into two ponytails on the side of her head.

This pink is...

Very fluffy pigtails.

Yeah, very, very fluffy.

Unlike anything we have seen in the color palette in this arc.

It's just like this shock of pink.

Yeah.

Okay.

Here we go.

So

Leario immediately is bright red.

It is

stammering.

It's just an absolute buffoon.

Listen.

Is this, is this the, is it, the bet happens like right after this right this is this is this is the moment okay bet one bet one root says let's make a wager this is this is sort of her first sort of her first move Let's make a wager on whether I am a man or a woman and

Sylvia

I I just

This whole scene had me dying, but like you know and not it because it's actually that funny No, But because

of my whole situation.

The look.

The look on Kilua and Krabiga's faces is so disappointed.

Because they know.

Because they know.

Immediately.

Joan doesn't know.

Well, because then LaRut says something else, which really seals Leorio's fate.

LaRut says, let's make a wager on whether I'm a man or a woman, comma, I will let you examine me thoroughly.

And he does, like, he asks, like, well, if I say you're a man, how will I behave?

How will I know?

Yeah, and it's like, well, I'll let you examine everywhere.

And there's like a real like close-up of her, like, the lower half of her face, and she's being very coy about it.

And he's all, he's full, he's one.

Leorio is just fucking done.

This is, yeah, this is the end of Leorio.

And on so many levels, this scene is gross.

This is just a gross scene.

Yeah.

It is also delivered in.

There is a shot here as Leorio is like, yeah, absolutely.

I'll go for this.

As he ascends to heaven, dressed as an angel.

I really need to take a moment to just talk about his internal monologue while he's trying to figure this out.

How does this work?

And you have several internal monologues to talk about?

So I checked.

So, well, the Crunchyroll version of the subtitles does in fact use a slur that I'm allowed to say, but not go into on the podcast.

I just need to put it out there that if I did, it would be fine.

It does, yeah.

It does.

In the Netflix subtitles, it says transsexual, and then the dub, they say cross-dresser.

But Leorio's like, well,

there's no way she's trans.

She looks, she's all female or whatever.

Yeah, Leorio can always tell.

Leorio can always tell.

He's

a little known fact, Leorio's English.

A British tough.

But there is a moment where it led to me writing down in my notes, transphobic Leorio?

Chaser Leorio?

Dialectics.

Because there's also a moment where he's like, oh, but maybe I want to be wrong.

And I'm just there like Leorio.

Does he say that?

Yeah, he does.

In one of the in the dub version, I believe he did.

And then I think in another subtitle, he's like, maybe it's okay if I'm wrong.

This is why I check the different translations.

Because now we can understand that Leorio was localized to be a chaser and not originally one.

Yeah, this is fascinating, right?

Because it's like the scene was written one way.

The scene was written one way in the manga, and then it was written one way in the adaptation.

And then we get to see.

Three different localization teams look at this scene and go, what the fuck do we do with this?

And come to three different conclusions, which is

kind of a horrible gift, but a very interesting gift in terms of thinking about how you would localize it.

Did you check the manga as well, Sylvia?

No, I have not checked the manga.

I have not changed it.

I did not check the manga.

Now I'm extremely curious what it says in the manga.

The premise of this man is so horned up and is so stupid that he is going to tag

this

for everyone.

On purpose.

Don't get me wrong.

What is going on here is not quote-unquote good television.

I mean,

it might be the world's stupidest man.

Fuck it up.

And in that way, it is exceptionally entertaining.

I mean, I just like, I can't, you know,

let they who have not pissed off their friends for a pink-haired baddie cast the first stone.

And I can't.

Sylvie, as we have established

i love i love saying things on this show that gets people to yell my name sylvie he

okay no it's bad it's bad i'm not condoning it's bad and this is a this is a this is a famous uh uh tagashi pattern this is like the groping is a thing that happens in yuyuhaka show several times and specifically the transphobic groping is something that happens in a famous scene in yuyuhaka show the part that takes it, like, it's already bad.

The part that takes it beyond the pale is he sniffs his hand.

He does sniff his hand.

Yeah,

we are fully in the space here of, like,

we are going for the most

eyeballs popping out of Leorio's head, his jaw is dropping.

You can see his heart beating.

Yeah, he's the cartoon wolf, he's howling.

None of this makes this sit together well in conversations of like sexual assault, especially around transgender people.

None of this is

good

or bad.

But we do get to see Leorio, the world's stupidest man.

He has tried his whole life to become a hunter so that he can

help people.

He has met Karapika, a man he knows is trying to avenge the deaths of his family.

He has met Killua, a mysterious child who's involved

in violent things beyond his nature.

He doesn't know that yet.

No, he doesn't.

And he's met Gon, a brave and lovely boy.

He has run 80 miles in a tunnel in the dark.

He has watched people fall into violent spike traps and be ee by a giant branchaurus thing.

If he doesn't know how lucky he is to be with these people, he's even dumber than I think he is.

and then he is given the opportunity to assault a woman in a fight and he runs straight into it jesus christ leorio well uh la root has figured him out thoroughly uh because this goes exactly as you expect and leorio uh

loses and in an well in an embarrassing loses this bet there's still one more bet uh which is like it it is really rubbing salt in the wound here.

It just makes him seem like the biggest, dumbest idiot of all time, which is that he gets thoroughly trounced in a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Oh, also, before they even do that, Goan says, hey, you should have her bet whether you're a teenager or not.

Yeah, and he just throws away that bet idea.

Yeah, he just throws it away.

And it would have, and it would have worked.

And it would have worked.

Goan gives him two pieces of advice that would have saved him.

And he discards both pieces.

The second one was this so they're psychoanalyzing his rock paper scissors.

They play two rounds of rock and paper scissors and it takes seven minutes.

Yeah, we get a little PowerPoint presentation from Karapika about how rock, paper, scissors works.

Every time Karapika gives a little PowerPoint presentation, it's great.

We also have a line in here that is such sharp, funny character writing that I think

my heart sunk when I saw how this episode was beginning and I still do not feel good about it.

But the way this show is in the middle of this deeply gross

conversations about bodies and

interacting with bodies will throw in a line like this is just like, yeah, this show is doing something.

Leorio won a vacation as a result of playing rock, paper, scissors in a mall.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, he's brand new.

He has really good line skills.

The dub has a really good line where he says he won a gourmet vacation, which I guess.

It's taste.

Something about the fact that Leorio played rock, paper, scissors to win a vacation, comma, in a mole tells us so much about

stupid idiots.

It is everything you need to know about Leorio.

Just still.

It is, because it's sort of the thing where he's a regular guy, but also he lives an insane life, like all wrapped up into one bizarre sentence where it's like, oh, I've been to a mall and I can imagine there being a rock, paper, scissors competition, but the idea of like being the guy who is at the ball when they're doing a rock, paper, scissors competition and then you win and go on a, I assume, an all-expense paid vacation off of that.

Like that is the sort of like regular guy who is just not regular enough to be slightly carried in the hunter exam.

It's great.

Yeah.

Meanwhile, everybody is very open about the fact that Leorio is very stupid.

Right.

They have just seen Leorio get rings run around him.

It's sort of a carousel of everyone explaining why he's about to lose to Ghan.

And then Ghon's mind is blown by the fact that Karapika and Kilua...

We go into the whole psychology of Ruck, Paper, Scissors.

It is basically meaningless because LaRut has a complete psychological hold over Leorio.

But Ghon is seemingly hearing hearing for the first time that Rock, Paper, Scissors is not just a game of luck.

And it blows his tiny mind.

Yeah, so they've basically figured out the game that Larou's playing.

And then Gon's like, oh, well, we should tell him that if he doesn't vote, if he votes anything but scissors, he'll lose.

And so Gohan shouts out, hey, Loyorio, vote scissors if you want to win.

And then he's like, ah, I'm going to vote Rock instead.

And then he immediately loses because

because he didn't listen to his friend who has good ideas and is better than him

fucking idiot

at which point they lose the time gamble uh and this was a surprise to me i thought that they were going to overcome this somehow but so they make a massive time gamble they they bet

they end up 50 hours

yeah

the bet eventually comes down to 50 hours and this is just all leorio's fault and this will become important as we continue to talk but i cannot overstate how how how much this stupid man has fucked it up for everybody.

They'll lose the time gamble.

Time to move on to the next.

I think there is an interesting thing there where Leorio walks back and basically Tompa says, wow, you really fucked that up for everybody.

And Lorio, like, at first

reacts like he's going to tell him to go fuck himself, like he has been the whole time.

And then he, for once in his whole fucking life, takes a beat and says, yeah, I guess you're right.

I did.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

And Tomba will not let him forget that moment.

That was a

mistake, actually.

Like, as it makes him a better person, but in the game of trying to not be sort of bullied and,

you know,

psychologically tormented by Tomba,

it was

actually an error.

Because that is, Tomba seizes on that and sort of chews on that fat for the next,

you know, 59 hours of the Trick Tower.

Okay.

Evil music.

Evil

music.

Here comes this piano.

Oh, this piano music is so great.

God.

So this piano music is like a sort of a rolling mobile notes played deep in the left hand,

the bass notes of the piano.

And they are recording a live piano, or they have a

a really good digital piano and you can hear their overtones ringing off this piano.

You know, you have these bass notes that are like ringing like bells.

They're whatever the opposite of flat is.

Really good, sinister music.

I think this is the first time we've heard this cue because I specifically wrote it down.

Yeah, it is.

Yes, so we are introduced to this man.

His name is

Can I say it?

Joe.

Yeah, go for it.

It's funny because the 99 and the 2011 dubs spell his name differently, which I think is funny.

Jonas the dissector, who is serving a 100

name, sorry, 100, 968-year sentence for mass murder.

Yes.

He is the most notorious.

He's described as a monster.

And we cut to the examiner, the sort of the Mohawk guy with the

eating graham crackers.

And he says, he basically says,

this fight sucks.

I don't want this child to have to go.

Yeah, the horrible prison warden is feeling slightly guilty about making a child go up against

Jonas.

If you die in the Hunter exams, you die.

Sorry to this small child.

This is just them's the brakes.

Yeah.

Oh, the difference here, by the way, in the spelling.

In the dub that I had, it's spelled John, J-O-H-N-N-E-S-S.

John S.

In the 99,

it's spelled Jones.

Oh, interesting.

J-O-N-E-S.

Yeah.

Just a localization thing.

I think probably to make it more clear what it actually is pronounced like.

Yeah.

I like it.

I like the Jonas spelling.

So the first thing that happens, the shackles come off of this guy's arm.

And you see, oh, this guy

is huge.

His arms are huge.

He's extremely vascular, way more than any other character that we've seen so far.

The prisoners are now scared.

They're like scared of this guy.

He stands up, and it is a phenomenal shot of him standing.

Like, he goes from looking like

a combination of like a really buff but really sad poet and like maybe a shepherd.

Maybe like he lives in the

Viking shepherd.

Yeah.

And then he stands up and it's just like it's just like distorted enough to make him look

like evil.

Like same face, same sad eyes, same

like face, but he's just like huge and towering over the camera

as he walks forward.

Everybody's terrified of him.

Majatani is like...

Wait, actually, am I not terrified of him?

You can see that he's afraid at first, and then he's like, hold on, maybe this guy's a pushover.

He gets ground into the wall.

He gets pushed into the wall.

And then, does anybody want to talk about what else he does to the wall as he walks towards the ring?

He reaches his hand into the wall and just sort of like pulls out a straight, like while he's walking, he just lets it like drag through and rip the brick out.

Right.

As he's slowly walking, his arm is still, but just,

you know, brick and dirt and debris shooting out.

It almost looks like he's scooping, like the wall is fake and it's made of like mud and he's scooping it out.

Yes, at which point we get a little we get a little sort of cutaway as we learn that this man is the most notorious killer in a place called Zaban City or Zaban City.

I don't know how you pronounce that.

Have we seen this place before?

Is this where the buses were?

Yes, Zaban City was where the buses were going to, right?

Oh, they were going to

the town.

Yeah, the fake place.

Or they were listed to be going to.

I think the steakhouse that they end up going to to start the exam is also in Zabon City.

But I could be wrong about that particular detail.

I know that the buses were listed as going to Zabon City because that was where they were told the first phase of the exam would be.

Anytime this show gives me the merest crumb of information about the world outside of the Hunter exam, I seize upon it like someone starving on a desert island.

But as far as I know, there's a man who killed 146 people at random in Zaban City with his bare hands.

He has an extremely strong grip.

Leorio is so afraid of him.

Leorio knows who he is, and he is so afraid of him that he suggests that they drop out of the Hunter exam right now.

Yeah.

That they just quit.

And he already doesn't think that Kilo can do it for some reason, even before they introduce

who the opponent is going to be.

He's like, ah, we get this dumb random kid is our last bet.

Just quit.

Who cares?

He's also feeling sour about how he fucked everything up for everybody.

Yeah.

Yeah.

God.

Okay.

But Kiliwa just walks up over to the stage with his hands in his pockets, extremely slowly, totally nonchalant.

Now, the way this has been framed,

I thought I had a pretty good idea of what was about to happen.

Because we know that Kilua is

an assassin

and is exceptionally

strong and violent,

prone to violence.

He was going to kill Notero if he didn't leave, and then he just killed two guys.

I was not worried about Killua losing here.

I thought that we were about to enter a big fight, and that is not what happens.

It's so fucking perfect.

Do you want to explain what does happen?

Sure.

Out comes Jonas and basically says,

We don't need to set terms for this fight because I am going to tear you apart with my bare hands.

And as he is saying this, midway through a line, we go into Killua is doing magic vision that we last saw when he did that weird assassin step.

Yeah, around Natero.

And we see him

completely calmly

walking.

We don't even see what he's walking towards.

We just get this shot of his upper body in motion, walking calmly.

And then we get a shot of Jonas's eyes widening.

And then he sort of trails off as we cut to Killua, now on the other side of the arena, holding Jonas's heart in a bag.

With a wicked grin on his face.

With an evil grin.

And the bag is still in the

bags not moving at all.

The bag is beating.

The heart is beating as Jonas is still alive.

He turns around and says, Give that back.

Yeah, he's mine.

That's mine.

He heard weakly, that's mine.

So, so sad and dead.

And then

we see his heart beat slower and slower it's uh it's almost and then he dies it's almost um

uh supernatural like the way

because there's no real way for him to know that the heart like to me the series of events does not lead to uh Jonas looking back at the heart in a bag and recognizing it.

But he seems to know.

Like he seems to feel that his heart is gone.

He does have a hole in his chest, but he doesn't know that he's got a hole in his chest.

Maybe he can feel that hole, but it's such a

cold.

It's such a bizarre thing that you know, you've definitely never felt what it feels like to have your heart ripped out of your chest before.

And it's kind of a hard thing to guess might have happened to you.

But it's like, it's like weird and creepy in a good way that he recognizes it.

Like, it just is so bizarre.

And then just the way that he says that's mine.

Like that's such a weird way.

It's such a weird response.

Like it's so good.

I love it.

It's such a like shell-shocked reply to everything.

Like I think it really nailed it.

Like we've talked about Killilla having a dreamlike quality in a lot of things that he does.

And I think that this also is that, but it shifts it from being dreamlike to being a nightmare.

In the 99 series, the hardware.

Oh, wait, ding, ding, ding.

Sylvie's manga minute, because I think you're about to spoil what I was about to bring up.

Okay, that's fine.

Yeah.

In the manga, he does.

It's not in a bag.

He looks even sadder in the manga.

Yeah, no.

This is why I wanted to bring it up because the manga is great

for multiple reasons.

One, Jonas looks really pathetic while he's reaching for his heart that is just rendered in full detail.

We get a close-up drawing of it by Tagashi in Killowa's hands.

Yeah.

We get Kilowa's glare.

Less rigid.

Less wicked of a glare.

It's more like a

smile.

I find this one more menacing, if I'm being real.

He looks

kind of like Hisuka here.

He does.

Yes, that's why I like it so much.

That is one of the reasons why I like it so much.

And instead of

what Kilo does in the 2011 anime, when Jonas falls over dead, is he puts the bag back in his hand.

It's

amazing.

It's actually, I think,

when I watched the manga and the way that, sorry, when I watched the 99 anime, and it plays out like it does in the manga, where he, it's the, the actual, the anatomical heart beating in his hands, and then he sort of crushes it

after letting it beat for a few minutes or a few seconds.

Um,

I was like, oh, that's crazy.

Uh, but then I re-watched the 2011 series, and I was like, actually, it's even crazier that he puts the bag, he just like sort of gently crouches down and places the bag slowly into Jonas's dead hand.

It's way more serial killer.

It's crazy.

So much more cruel.

It rules.

Like,

I saw people back.

Yeah, I saw, I was looking up to like see if it was different in the 99 version and finding out that it was basically just the manga scene again.

Yeah.

And people being like, oh, they made Killo as such a baby boy, such a nice boy in the 2011 one.

Like, I don't know what you guys are talking about.

Yeah.

This guy is twisted.

It's they sell this moment so well.

Also, I

did

I mean this is

the fact that this is the back half of the episode where we began with the bullshit with LaRut is really spectacular.

We are still in the same 23 episodes of animated television.

It's the same episode.

The

effort that the show expends

to shift from LaRuth to like, hey, everyone, it's time to be terrified of this serial killer monster

is so monumental.

They, I mean, it's really like, I don't know, two or three minutes of like,

like, sinister texture that the show sort of gives off in order to change tone and get you ready, to get you ready for what is essentially not a fight.

It's so good.

And then they put this beautiful coda on the fight.

Some things happen in sequence that are just brilliant to kind of get us out of this scene.

Dead silence after Killer has killed this guy, and we cut suddenly to the little

scoreboard that is showing

the win.

And yeah, it just

increases from two to three,

you know, meaning that our team has made it through.

They've beat the best of five.

We get this great reverb on the little beep of it going.

Killua then invites the other prisoners to come out and die.

He basically says,

Bendo.

Bendot?

Yeah,

our first guy.

Yeah.

To which Ben Dot says, absolutely not.

Yeah, he's like, hey, you didn't get a turn.

Do you want to come out and play with me?

He's like, yes, he says, do you want to come out and play with me?

It's wonderful.

Killua is fucking great.

Then we cut back to our group.

Leorio says, what is he?

And Gone is is like, Oh, I know the answer to that.

Very interesting.

You guys didn't know.

Yeah, yeah, he's from an elite family of assassins.

I forgot to tell you,

uh, yeah, he's from a family of assassins.

Uh, and then uh, Kilua just uh trips back across the bridge and says, I'm back, which is so good.

Yeah, Leorio like almost jumps into the pit.

He's so scared of Killer.

Yeah, and then he sort of like timidly goes, like, aha, nice work.

Yeah,

uh, and then we cut away, we cut out of the scene.

That is the end of that scene.

It was wonderful.

I had a lovely time.

At this point, Rattly Pinman comes through, and yes, he is introduced as Gitaraku, Rattly Pinman.

And then in comes person number three.

It's Hanzo.

He comes out and goes, yes,

I came f oh fuck.

Yeah.

And

he is a Zoolander.

Still, yeah, still just so funny.

The way that they are playing Hanzo as like the ninja who is both really good and is also constantly

the most excessive in his reactions to stuff.

It's so funny.

He's a very serious, very competent ninja and also kind of a dopey jock.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it.

He's a meme of the guy celebrating too much at the Olympics, getting the medal, except he's in third place.

That's

excessive.

That is just him.

I've seen that.

I don't know what that is.

Oh, it's really funny.

It's like he celebrates, he sprays the champagne, he kisses the woman putting the medal on him, and then we pan out to reveal he's standing on the third place.

Good, it's hey, I've there's a lot of people have a lot of trouble coming in third place.

I think it's great that.

Oh, absolutely.

I think it's great that he's so happy about it.

At which point, our team enters the little break room.

They get given a little.

It's very weird.

The production design on this show is great.

You know, we've been in these sort of like stone chambers all the way, and we are now let into what I would describe as an office break room.

Uh-huh.

It's got a little mini fridge.

It's got couches.

It's got like a pot plant.

It's got basically a college dorm.

Yeah, it looks like a dorm.

College dorm.

No bed.

There's like they just sleep in bags on the floor.

And they are told, you are going to be here for 50 minutes.

Sorry, 50 minutes.

I was reading the quote that I wrote because we get an absolutely incredible quote from Killua.

Killua shows up his vampire hands to everyone and says, I manipulated my body to make it a bit easier.

Right.

What the fuck is Kilua's kids?

Kilua said, or Karapika asks him what that technique was.

And he's like, oh, it wasn't a technique.

I just ripped it out.

I just ripped his heart out.

Yeah, not a technique.

And my dad could have done it way cooler.

My dad's even better at it.

He'd do it without spilling a drop of blood.

I don't think that's possible, Kilua.

You know what?

I'm not going to question this kid.

You're right, man.

Your dad can totally do that.

Stay away from my heart.

Yeah.

Yeah, and he does the vampire hand thing that we talked about at the airship thing he can just turn his nails very pointy and sharp uh he becomes vascular too why he does become vascular yeah

why does why can he do this why is it not a technique i don't know i don't know why that's not a technique uh i don't know uh

yeah i'll uh he says I love this line.

The actor playing Killua in the

Japanese version, the sub, is so good.

Yeah.

They managed to deliver the line, even though he's a serial killer, talking about Jonas the Dissector, even though he's a serial killer, he is an amateur.

I used to be a professional.

Yeah.

Just fucking wonderful.

This kid is 12.

But he says it like he's just talking about his Pokemon cards.

My dad is a lot more skilled.

And at this point, I wrote down, gone and Killua's dads, huh?

You know, we have Gene, who, as far as we know, abandons the child, but is like one of the greatest hunters of all time.

And we have Killua's dad, who we know nothing about who is uh a serial killer yeah uh and then right off this line as they go into this room uh gone and killua get straight back to playing they say let's see if there's anything in here to play with uh can we just have a fun time during these 50 hours it is pillow fight

it is brutally pillow fights yeah

Yeah, even though he's a serial killer, he's an amateur.

It's brutally sad.

Even though he's a serial killer, he's an amateur.

I used to be a professional.

Yeah.

Let's see if there's anything in here we can play with over the next 50 hours.

This poor fucking kid.

Yeah.

Right to the TV, looking under the TV for a video game console.

I noticed that right away.

They don't say that he's looking for a video game console, but you can tell.

He's looking for video games.

Yeah, he's looking for video games.

And then they don't find any video games.

So the next shot is that they're reading books together.

The way this show is able to...

I'll put it this way.

One of my favorite shots in this episode is that shot that comes straight from the manga that we described Kilua looking a lot like Isaka.

So after he has pulled the heart out, he turns and looks at the camera, at the

other

prisoners, and says, does anybody want to come and play with me?

Who wants to come and play with me?

And then we have him saying, is there anything...

Let's see if there's anything to play with in this room.

And a much

less good show would have played that second line sinisterly.

It would have been like, ooh, look how sick and twisted it is that, you know, we know that he thinks of play as murder.

So now it's like, oh, it's all sinister.

Is he going to do some evil stuff in this room?

But the fact that the show is like, this is a kid.

This is a 12-year-old child and he wants to play.

He's bored.

He's stressed.

He is hanging out with another kid, his own age, and they're looking for something to play with.

The way it is able to pull that nuance out from both those lines is great, and it results in you getting to this episode going, Jesus Christ, this is fucking sad.

Well, Jeff's David.

What they're demonstrating is that at such a young age, he has achieved a healthy work-life balance.

Yeah.

He knows that murder is for murder time.

You know, usually he's a kid.

He messes up sometimes, kills two people on an airship.

But, you know, he knows how to have fun.

He, he also, you know, talks about,

he, he, he talks about being an assassin in the past tense, too, which is kind of funny considering.

But

yeah, I'm trying to leave.

I'm trying to leave that behind.

Just play some video games

with my new friend, Pillow Fight twice.

Have two pillow fights with my friend.

Before we move on to episode 12, the last episode, which is on some level a much simpler episode, and I think

is great.

I loved episode 12, and we could talk about that then.

I want to talk a bit about Killua murdering.

Because when he killed people, I have to imagine that this show is on some level about Killer.

murdering.

I feel like that's kind of going to be one of the core topics.

But when we talked about killing the guys on the airship, Sylvie, you said, I don't want to talk about this too much because there are going to be better times to talk about the kind of things that this scene talks about.

Is there anything that you want to talk about here now that we've seen him remove a guy's heart?

Or do you want to save that for a future Killua murder hour?

I think...

I think the thing I was just cheering at there was more to do with Killua's family situation and stuff like that.

I think that talking about Kilua's relationship with murder and the way that Kiloa interacts with the world

will

like

come with time when we learn more about his upbringing.

Because, right, like, we know enough about it to be like,

oh, he had to stab his mom to get away from them.

And he also, like,

is being raised as the heir apparent to this, like, assassin dynasty.

But

yeah, I don't know.

I think that's what I meant at the time.

Right, totally.

What I want to add to that is,

and I'm trying to do this

as sort of neutrally as possible, because I don't actually want to talk about it.

But I do want to, there's, there's,

when you said that, you know,

Kilua murdering, his murders are going to be like a core part of the show.

By the time it will be

the, by the time we reach the best part to talk about that, we will have missed actually what we should have.

So, I want to say now, you know, to just like think about when that is actually present in the show and when it's not.

And we'll, we'll,

when it, when it occurs to you to bring it back up, we'll talk about it again.

Uh, there's not, it's, it's weird because there's not much more else I can say about that.

Um, yeah,

okay, that sounds great.

Yeah.

Uh,

some great killer animation.

Uh, this uh, this is the first time I think we've we've seen him run with his hands in his pockets.

I don't remember that.

I missed that.

He's at a run.

But as we move into episode 12, I would like to talk really briefly about

the title sequence.

I only wrote this down in episode 12 because this was the first time I was starting to notice the details.

So, one of the things that happens in the title sequence is we get to see all the characters fighting.

Gone

sort of saves Leorio from a fight by hooking him with his fishing rod and throwing him over a tree line.

We see like a tiny Leorio in the distance.

That's great.

But there's a Gon and Kilua and maybe Kurapika are fighting some guys.

And there's a really great moment of Killua nonchalantly kicking a guy in the head behind his back.

Killua is like facing away from a guy and lets loose a kick and kicks a guy in the head.

It's just great Killua stuff.

But as episode 12 begins, the 50 hours are starting to count down and everybody is.

Killua is teaching Gon how to skateboard, Karapika is reading, Leorio and Tonpa are irritating each other.

Leario briefly tries to also be reading and fails.

Tonpa, in demonstration that he is the most irritating man in the world, is taking this time to clip his toenails.

Uh-huh.

And then is also taking his time to pretend to be sleeping and then putting his disgusting feet in Leorio's face while Leorio is actually trying to sleep.

I have an important question.

Yeah.

How bad does this room smell after these five people have been in it for 50 hours?

Is this the part where I yell your name really loud?

Maybe.

Do it.

We don't need to talk about how crazy it's stinking there.

How crazy you think it's stinking there?

Let's get into it.

Let's get into it.

These are the same clothes that they ran a marathon in and then ran through a swamp in and then hunted giant pigs and cooked them over like open fires and did skydiving for eggs and then did

matches

anymore it's stink city

uh it's stink city population five it has got to be uh terrible maybe it's really well ventilated in there maybe hunters don't sweat

No,

they'd be sweaty.

I feel like we have seen fight scenes where people have been sweaty.

That's true.

That could have been abstracted stress sweat.

I don't know shit about hunters, so I'm just out here saying maybe hunters don't maybe.

I'm ring the bell.

Jack got it.

That's what a hunter is.

A hunter is someone who doesn't sweat.

Okay.

Oh, yeah.

All right.

End of show.

Join us next time, and we'll be starting our Sailor Moon.

Oh, yeah.

That was the secret.

That was the secret term of the show: is that it ends if Jack can ever tell us what a hunter actually is.

Meanwhile, down in the room, more and more people are coming out.

I will read these names out.

We have Pockle, a hunter candidate who is a little archer.

We have Goze.

He was immediately annoyed that someone else came out right after him.

Yes,

it's

extremely petty.

I think hunters are just generally petty unless you're Karapika.

He says, my number is lower than yours, so I have one.

Goes is the guy who comes out at the same time.

He is a tall, moustached fellow with a green green vest and a big polearm.

And then Sommy is a hunter candidate who has a man-faced monkey,

who we saw earlier.

And the dick and balls.

Yeah.

When we see the monkey.

The dick and balls.

Yep.

The monkey.

You see that monkey's crazy frog style dick.

Yep.

Really?

No one else noticed the very obvious

thing.

No, I didn't notice.

Half of us noticed the dick.

Half of us didn't.

Yep.

But these cowards wouldn't show us the heart in Karapica's hand.

Oh my god, in Karapika's hand?

Could you imagine it?

In Kilua's hand hmm can I imagine it really says something about our society huh damn god people will more readily

that's not true uh americans will more readily show someone getting brutally murdered on screen than uh

phone balls yeah

um it's like that great joke in uh uh

uh

what's the fucking film seven psychopaths uh where they say uh you can't show animals getting killed on screen in hollywood beat only women um

that's the same with uh the heart and the monkey stick and balls yeah um

a little

why would you pass up an opportunity to give your monkey a little pair of pants

that's so true ape escape did it yeah ape escape did it is ape escape the one with the no that's super monkey ball do they live in the balls and super monkey ball no they just like are they trapped in them

no they like it they just like it in there.

Oh.

It's like cars.

It's like if an alien played a video game based on people and it was like, do they live in the cars?

Can they leave the cars?

Do they like it?

Yeah, they just like it in the car.

No, they just do not like it.

I like it.

I like it in there.

I fucking hate being in a car.

A big tray comes out of the wall.

A huge tray comes out of the wall with food on for all these people.

Yeah, they get biscuits and sandwiches and tea.

This show's production design is always so much fun.

The fact that we're in this huge circular sort of like dungeon and they roll out like a cafeteria tray it's really good we get it's weirdly it's i think it's like the only still image in this montage everything else i think is a clip of stuff but the like

uh you know everyone trying to eat lunch except going to killer who are kind of playing with their food yeah is like a still image you know in this series

it's really nice in this series of video clips of you know what they're doing with their time, with their 50 hours.

We cut to the

commercials, and the little script in the commercial says board, which I thought was really funny.

Goan teaches Kilo how to use the fishing pole.

Because

as promised, they trade.

Go and use the skateboard, almost took off Tompa's head.

I love

the shenanigans that these two get up to.

It's like the way this show balances having them do, like,

I don't know.

Killua, it's not borderline.

Gone, it is borderline monstrous things at times.

Or at least in terms of just like capabilities, like that kid shouldn't have been able to headbutt that old man so hard.

Yeah.

Anyway, they balance that with them just being 12-year-olds, which is great.

I think it's really like well done.

Leario's a fish.

They turn Learia Leario metaphorically into a fish.

Yep.

By catching fish.

They catch him.

It is so funny to me that

I thought how naive I was for one little moment.

Oh, Kilua won't be able to use the fishing pole.

And it'll be a nice moment of showing that Gon is strong and capable.

But nope, Kilua can use the fishing pole instantly.

Instantly can use it to catch a big fish.

The big fish is a lecherous idiot.

Lara gets all mad and then Kilo goes like, we weren't going to grill you.

And

that makes him madder.

I do think that,

to your point, Sylvie, the way the show gets away with making these kids weird monsters and then also shows that they're kids is...

I feel like you could get really in your own head about how to balance that or how to depict it.

And you could weaken both sides of it by being like, I need need to find a compromise point in the middle so that they don't seem too monstrous yeah or they don't seem too much like 12 year olds but it seems like what the show is doing is it is just treating both aspects as equally true about these characters and committing to right it just doesn't it just it just shows it it doesn't have to doesn't explain it it just does it Yeah, well, well, well, but how can they deal with sure that that must there must be a real incongruity there?

That must be really a weird tension.

Yes, that is that feels like it is in the show.

Yeah.

We are going to explore this tension.

That is the thing.

Works really well.

Then they get released and we get an extremely funny two-second montage of some trials that they go through.

Representing

hours.

There's a weird thing with mine carts.

There's like a tile game, like a floor tile thing where they have to not step on the wrong tiles.

They get chased chased by an Indiana Jones rolling boulder.

They get chased by a boulder.

And that might be it.

And that is, there you go, that's eight hours worth of time, eight, nine hours, something like that.

And then

final trial.

Well, we'll just spend so long in the prison.

It's like

the show's constant joke about when am I showing you information?

Is being like, I'm just going to show you three trials that would have been really entertaining.

Two seconds.

Nothing worth being on TV happens in those nine hours.

The final trial is this.

You have to vote to pass through a door.

Either you can go through a very difficult path that will take at least 40 hours to complete and all five members will be able to pass.

Or you can go through an easier trial, a very easy trial, but only three people can go through.

The two people remaining behind have to handcuff themselves to the wall of this room that is filled with weapons.

And the implication here is that this is just a saw trap.

This is just

kill each other until, you know, or

you got here fast enough that you don't have to kill each other.

Yes, or you got here fast enough that you don't have to kill each other, but there are weapons on the walls to start fighting.

Importantly, even if

they had flawlessly made it through that first or the

tournament thing,

I think it still would have been like,

you know, they only had 10 hours of wiggle room.

Like, they would have gotten there like 55 hours.

And minimum 45 is what they say for the longer path.

So it's sort of like, okay, minimum 45, they still might not even make it.

Yeah, absolutely.

I would like a brief sidebar here.

Since we've been talking about Squid Game and Saw,

I know Keith hasn't seen this movie.

Dre, have you seen Saw?

No.

Sylvie?

I gotcha.

Oh, Jack, have I seen Saw?

Come on.

Well, Sylvie, I have a question for you.

How would Gone

overcome the core problem in Saw?

Because I have an answer.

Oh, in the original saw in the original saw so he's chained to a bathroom radiator with a handsaw yes break the break the chains just rip the chains off this is uh well yeah that's kind of what i would say honestly what's your solution though jack you've clearly given well my solution more thought My solution here is, and I'm about to spoil the first Saw movie, but I would be done in a second.

He would point at the body in the middle of the room and go, oh, that guy's alive.

True.

And then

you're right, absolutely, or smell him or something.

Yeah.

He'd just be like, Oh, that guy's alive.

Kill him, Killua.

And then Killua would kill him.

And then they would get out of the room.

The core twist of Saw would offer no problems to Gon whatsoever.

Because

this is such a good moment.

We suddenly cut to the end of the trial.

We cut instantly to, oh, they begin fighting.

Yeah.

Tompa pulls out an axe and goes at Leorio.

Yeah.

It is Leorio's idea that he will, he is ready to fight, but Tompa sort of still sort of gets the first swing in.

Yeah,

this is these are well-communicated stakes that pull together all the sort of themes and concerns from this arc.

This is just nice writing, this kind of final trial.

Yeah.

I linked Gunn's very sad little face saying, come on, let's do it together.

Guys, guys, we can be fine.

We can do the difficult path.

Gun, who doesn't understand time,

his music is playing in his head, but now in the minor key.

They start fighting.

The fighting is really lovely.

There is so much movement and dynamism in this fight, despite fairly limited animation.

There are really good choices in camera movement.

We have the camera kind of ducking and weaving instead of being still.

The music is coming together.

Everything is working really well to make this fight feel big and mobile,

even if the actual amount of movement going on is not great, presumably because they've spent a lot of time animating fights in the early part of this arc.

Anything we want to talk about before we make this really startling cut to three minutes left in the trial?

I'm good.

Okay, I think wait, wait.

Okay, hold on.

I remembered another segment I had which is bing bing bing what he watching where we talk about what he Leorio is watching because we get the scene of Leorio while everyone's sleeping watching something on the TV with his head his earbuds in and I just want to know what you guys think Leorio was watching yeah I shared this screenshot earlier and I said me watching hunter hunter

which I don't think he's watching hunter hunter that would be kind of weird He's watching the weather channel

Everyone else is sleeping he's watching something nasty.

I think he's watching us make this show.

Yeah, I don't, I think if he was watching something nasty, he'd looked all horned up.

This is why he looks kind of sour and studious, because he hears about how we keep calling him the stupidest man in the world.

Which is why he tried and failed to read that book, Self-Improvement.

Meanwhile, Karapika has read, I think in the 50 hours, they imply that he's read something like 15 books.

Oh my god, and you could so easily make Karapica irritating.

It could be like, oh, he's holier than thou.

He takes this time to Karapica, could be the irritating parts of the girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider.

But instead, you're like, good for you, Karapica.

Yeah.

Nice, nice one.

Yeah, nice one.

Leorio goes to Jupiter to get more stupider.

He doesn't need even to go.

He shows up and they're like, You, what are you doing here?

So we're already more talented.

Leorio going to Jupiter is like Kilo is stepping up to fight

Jonas.

He is more skilled at being stupid.

Yeah, he's going to no-sell Jupiter on their stupider.

What do they do on Jupiter to help you get stupider?

I've trepidated mostly.

Trepination's huge on Jupiter.

Yeah.

Oh, I see.

Wow.

Bonking, still do a wicked, nasty bonk on you.

I'm pretty sure that's what Gundam F91 is about, is about what they do on Jupiter to get stupider.

Okay, I see.

I think Cleario is watching Naruto, by the way.

That's what I'm doing.

Ooh, good answer.

Wow.

Does he like it?

I think so.

But I think he's one of those guys who's like, oh, Rock Lee should have done more.

Oh, he's a Rock Lee guy.

He seems like it to me, but I don't know.

Maybe I'm wrong.

He is a Rock Lee guy.

He's the guy that can't do anything, so he has to compensate.

That's why he's also kind of a pervert.

He'd either be a Rock Lee guy or he'd hate Rock Lee for those reasons, you know?

Sure, it's one of the two, but I'm leaning more into it for representing himself.

Yeah, you know.

How tall is Leorio?

I think he's like six feet.

I think he's six feet even.

I have Leorio's canonical height.

Holy shit, Sylvie.

Oh, shit.

And by that, I mean

I googled Hunter-Hunter character height, and they gave me a list of

a tape measure.

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

We need to guess first.

Well, no, okay.

You guys can guess, and then I can also give you an additional question,

which is, who do you think is taller between two characters?

Question.

I am fairly tall, and as such,

I would like to thank Sylvie for repeatedly blundering into the not understanding what is an average years ago you guys gotta let me live this one down come on

i also make this mistake constantly sylvie here's the thing i'm saying so i don't know that i i think i think i am taller than leorio wait jack how tall are you i am uh between six and six one wow

uh you are not taller than leorio

are you are taller than Lei.

Leo?

I am the exact same height as Leoria.

I was going to guess Leorio is like 5'10, and then like Karapaka is like 5'8, and then Gona's.

You have not met the canonical 5'10 character on this list yet.

Oh, I think I know the canonical 5'10 character.

So Leorio is 6'3?

Leorio is 6'3, yes.

And my question now is: is Hsoka taller or shorter?

I was wondering about this.

I think that

now,

Hisoka is

shorter, just Hisoka is between 6'1, 6'2.

Jack, you nailed it.

Wow,

this is 6'6'2.

Wow, Hisoka is taller than me, and he would kill me with playing cards.

Gond is four foot

five.

No, I'm going to say he's like

five four.

He's four ten.

Gone?

Yeah.

Gone is five one.

Five one.

Okay.

Is this good radio?

Listen.

Yes.

I mean,

people who are listening to this want to hear this.

Also, Keith, I'm not going to tell you about who that spoiler, about

what that character

spoiler's height is.

However, super wrong.

You're super wrong.

Really?

Yes.

Well, it's the vibe.

No, not really the real height.

I forget his name, but I'm going to guess who it is.

Okay.

While we're there, do you guys want to know Netaro's height?

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Netaro is the tallest.

Netaro is

Netaro is six.

Fuck it.

Six, six.

I think that Netaro is short.

I think Netaro is short.

I think Netaro is 5'5 ⁇ .

I'm gonna say he's like 5'8.

You have all over shot.

Wow.

Wow.

Isaac Netero,

exam leader, is 5'3.

We stand a short king.

Wow.

Wow, we stand a short king.

He is one inch taller than Kiloa, according to this.

I would like to.

I don't think lines up.

I don't think lines up.

I gotta know who you meant is the 510 character can you check my gallery so i'll put it

um i don't think that guy's even listed what

that's fucked up that's

a an allocate like aggregated article here my my spoilered character i cannot believe their height oh my god he's right

Okay,

we gotta move on.

Yeah.

I'll bring this back when.

You know what?

when these characters show up I'll give you their hand.

Yeah, we'll do height.

We're on height watch

and I've put the five

ten in the spoiler height watch.

Oh

I don't know.

I don't I don't I I don't I'm fine with I mean it's the height is fine like I'm not but I don't think that

they feel 510 in the 510 way.

Well, this is this is Hunter Hunter once again making us challenge our preconceived notions.

You know?

If I met any Hunter-Hunter character in the world, I would be afraid for my life, except Gone.

Well, no, sure,

I would not be afraid around Leorio.

You don't have a spider tattoo, so you're going to be fine with Korean.

I would be afraid around Leorio, but we got into the reasons why about that earlier this episode.

One of this episodes.

Okay, Leorio could, with one punch, knock all of our heads off.

Oh, sure.

He's ripped as fuck.

But

I just don't think that he would.

I would also just say, you smell like a stinky poo-poo face, and then he would just scream and fall over.

Yeah, yeah.

He, yes, he would challenge you.

He would be stupid to the death.

Yes, I am not the most erudite in an argument, but I could run rings around Leorio.

We're near the end of this episode, but I do want to jump back just a tiny bit to one of my favorite cute Karapika moments.

Oh, Jack's favorite character update.

After his actions, Killiware is currently my favorite character.

But there was a very cute Karapika moment.

They are all irritating each other and being unable to sleep, except Karapika, who is lying with his eyes shut, but he's clearly not asleep and he is laughing.

He's like chuckling silently to himself with his eyes shut.

Yeah.

Which I thought was a very cute Karapika moment.

Hisoka

hears that there are only three minutes left and he is sitting patiently.

And then as he hears the door open, he cracks a tiny smile.

The implication being that he has been curious and invested in whether Gon's team has made it through.

We know that he has an investment in at least Leorio and Gon.

He said that they passed.

And so it's the impression I got was Hisoka wants to know how this has turned out.

And so do I.

At this point, I have no idea what is going to happen.

What I have written down is the way they are going to do this is either

they choose the extremely difficult one that takes 40 hours and somehow do it quickly.

Or they pick the easy one and get everyone through except Tonpa.

There is no way, I think to myself, only three people will make it.

What if they've been watching this?

His arms in one and his legs in the other and then took the four of them.

Oh,

that'd be great.

So I've been watching this with my girlfriend who's never seen Hunter Hunter before.

And

she called the solution for this like the second

about it.

She also got the like, well, why don't they just throw Magitani off the edge thing like the week before we watched those episodes?

And I was like, babe, I can't say anything about this.

Although we do actually get an answer to that.

That would fail the trial.

If Leorio throws, if Leorio throws Magitani to his death.

That will disqualify them, I believe.

Why?

We say earlier.

Oh, yeah.

It's against the rules, but we do get it explained.

Leorio works this out by being like, I'm still going to make the bluff, but the implication is that if he just kills Magitani, they will be the same.

Yeah, I think they explicitly say that.

It would be because he's interfering with Corapito.

Corruption

would be killing the

competitor in a death match.

I remember why he says that

there's a part where he says, like,

oh, if I knock him over and he was,

I can't remember.

There was a part where he's like, I'm willing to take the risk of losing the last match.

But I don't think it was about that.

It was about something else.

So maybe that just comes up twice.

But the door opens, and out of the door comes Kilua, Gone, and Karapika.

And at this point, I thought, oh, this is really interesting.

Leorio has failed the Hunter exam, and we are going to proceed with

Leorio being a main character, but being essentially out of the running for being a hunter.

And I was like, oh, that's really interesting.

And then down the corridor comes Tonpa and Leorio.

Yeah.

It would be a fun twist to have

someone who fails it.

sort of there the whole time.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing that would mean that they couldn't be a character.

Yeah.

Oh, hold on a second.

How come you.

What's the difference between someone who just says they're a hunter and someone who actually is a hunter?

Couldn't I just lie about being a hunter?

We know that there are false hunters, but why do I need to do all this bullshit?

Maybe you don't.

Maybe you could just lie.

It seems like if you could just.

I'll say this.

If you could just lie,

you'd think that Hisuga would just lie and wouldn't bother with going through with it.

That would be my explanation if I didn't know.

It was a weird freak.

Yes, yes.

Very curious.

But we did learn what Gon has done.

Sylvie, do you want to tell everybody what your girlfriend figured out?

Yeah.

So

in this room where there's the chains and stuff, we have, I believe someone says straight up, it's like the examiner has thought of every possible weapon you could have and put it in this room.

And Tonpa, he starts,

he just starts to fight.

He's like, I'm going to make it through.

I'm not waiting for us to vote.

Let's fucking fight.

And we get these two

these two quick shots of...

One of the axe heads digging into the ground and then one of them hitting the corner of a doorway.

And both of the times, it breaks through, it sort of digs into the concrete.

And we get the shot of gone thinking, and then it cuts away.

And what we find out,

it cuts away to the stuff we were talking about earlier, where it seems like three of them lost.

Yeah, they do something that Hunter Hunter does really well, which is show you someone noticing something

like unspoken.

And then waiting to give you how they used that information that they noticed.

And what they do is they voted to take the long way, and then using the weapons that were left in the voting room, smashed through the wall and took the short way.

Which was a slightly

funny.

It's so fucking good.

This is the most...

What's this?

What's this little kid's surname?

Freaks?

Freaks.

Yeah.

This is the most gone freaks.

Solution on the planet.

This is Gunn's mistake, sort of.

He just hack through the wall and go the easier way.

I wrote down: Gon uses his head and he uses it as a battering ram.

Gon is one of those kids who's he, if he played Professor Layton, he'd do really bad, except for the puzzles that are like trick questions.

He's very good at lateral thinking and quicker.

He's a lateral thinker.

I said it last time.

We got him in a gifted class.

Another quick shot of like Karap.

I love that.

Karapik is always sort of mentally giving Goan credit

and sort of sort of quietly being impressed by Goan, which is, which they do.

They do a great job of showing you how smart Karapika is and then showing you being impressed or showing you Karapika being impressed.

Like, oh, wow, I can't believe Goan thought of that.

I didn't think of that.

And I'm the smart guy.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Although, he says, even under such pressure, you came up with this decision to Gone.

And I don't know if Ghan feels pressure.

I don't think Gon thought.

I think Gunn was just like, tum tea, tumty, tum.

I'm, you know, I'm gonna solve it.

I'm gonna solve this problem.

I think he's feeling pressure.

Look at his face in that last screenshot that I, I mean, the one before the most recent one that I posted, where he's so, look how sad he is.

That's to me, that's pressure.

He's trying to figure out how to keep his friends from fighting, even if one of those people is Tonpa.

He does have big, this sign can't stop me, I can't read energy.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

But he sort of like downplays his ability because the thing that he responds to Kropika with is like well it took me an hour to think of that

no it took us an hour to cut through the wall right oh maybe that's true

still very funny the the idea of like we well we did have to hack away this thing and it it took us a while Yeah, they are.

It isn't like, oh, the wall was super weak.

This was like a planned thing.

It's like, no.

Yeah, they really had to work.

He just noticed that these were super characters.

These are characters who can break through a wall that was easy to break through if it was easy to break through.

Yes, absolutely.

At which point, the narrator shows back up.

I switched over to listen to the dub narrator, and you're right.

He's great.

He's really, really cool.

He's really good.

He's not cool enough for me to want to switch over completely, but I do like him a lot.

Yeah.

Once again, shout out to the dub of Hunter Hunter 2020.

There's a lot of really great parts to that dub.

Yeah.

I'm not a dub.

I don't think the dub versus sub argument carries much weight at all, other than when the dub is very bad.

So, hey, if you're watching the dub,

it's a good one.

Don't feel weird about it.

I watch Dub of Sailor Moon and like it a lot.

I think I just kind of got stuck with the sub here after that scene earlier in episode one when I was like, you know what, I'm going to watch the sub.

I've decided.

Yeah, unfortunately for me, the sub gone is like so phenomenal that it's hard for me to have the dub gone.

But plenty of other characters I think are just as good and are interesting, sometimes in the same way, sometimes in their own way.

I really like a dub when dubs are good, and I'm not a weirdo who thinks that that's super rare or crazy or whatever.

Yeah, no, I think that's probably the good way to do it.

But the narrator comes back and he says, Ghan has yet to face his toughest duel in the upcoming phases.

Phases?

We got more to do?

Phases?

Tompa answered.

I mean, the hunter exam begins now.

So yeah, the real hunter exam does begin now, unfortunately.

Tompa did say that usually the exams are five or six phases.

And we've seen three?

No.

This is phase three.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the end of phase three.

Wow.

Yeah, it is very funny to think back to Karapika in the tunnel saying, We don't know how long we're going to be running for, and kind of blowing out that thinking to the whole hunter exam.

Like, they don't actually, they know roughly how many trials there are, but as usual, Karapika was really onto something when he was like, We gotta, we gotta think about our energy here.

Uh, yeah, it's funny, like, I can't imagine anymore.

I used to be able to imagine it because it used to be my life, uh, not knowing when the hunter exam ends.

Like,

if I, because

of the four of us, Jack hasn't seen it and could go, like, this could be two more episodes.

This could be eight more episodes.

This could be the whole series.

You could, could be the whole series.

You could, maybe you never stop taking the hunter exam.

I mean, maybe, maybe,

maybe you don't.

Maybe you don't.

Maybe the chimera ants are the end of the last trial of the hunter exam.

And as we all know, a chimera ant is

I have a theory about what the chimera ants are, and I do want to think

wrong.

Yeah,

I'll say it, but I want to no one say.

Hey, no one says,

I've spoken about this off

mic, and it's worth saying it on mic in terms of like where our heads are at with this.

I don't want to talk too much about the chimera ant arc because people will start talking to me about it.

And even in the guise of a fun coy spoiler, I want to just hit it in the show when it happens.

Here is what I think of in my head when I think of a Chimera Ant.

A Chimera Ant is a bug that can transform to look like a person.

And it can transform to look like someone you know.

And what the Chimera Ant arc is, is it is basically playing Battlestar Galactic Asylons with a cast of characters we have come to love as we begin to realize people have been replaced by or are switched out for or are being betrayed by Chimera Ants disguised as the main cast of Hunter Hunter.

What a massive guess.

That's a huge guess.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is it.

And that is my only comment.

My only comment.

That is a big guess.

Okay.

And that's all I'll say.

Moving on from the chimera antark we'll get listeners don't say a dang thing yeah yeah absolutely

well we said this before when when did we threaten to curse listeners

oh i don't know i know in the first episode in the first episode yeah i don't remember what they were in front of the table not on hunter hunter we have threatened to hex you if you spoil something for someone oh i remember on the thing where that happened

um but we appropriated that early on in hunter hunter so

yeah we've threatened to hex you before, and we will, and you won't like it.

You will spend the rest of your life suffering misfortune and wondering.

And if that is the curse, and if you're thinking, well, I was just considering spoiling something, I wasn't actually going to do it.

I've already hexed you.

Yeah, that's right.

The last bad thing that happened to you, that was me.

I did that.

Yeah.

And if it was really, really, really bad,

sorry.

Yeah.

I don't control it.

I just, that's why it's dangerous.

I I just cast it.

I just cast it.

Yeah.

I'll block you on Blue Sky.

Take that.

No,

Drink.

I will.

I don't say that.

I'll do something a little less bad and rip your heart out, Kilo style.

Yeah, here's my question.

Would you

do the hunter exam?

No.

I wouldn't.

No.

Absolutely.

I couldn't even find it.

I would walk 10 feet down that tunnel and say, nah,

I'm good.

You would, Sylvie?

If I grew up in a world where I knew that their hunters were a thing, I would be training for this shit my entire life.

Are you kidding?

Okay, that's fair.

Is this the, is this, this is the, like,

Star Wars Universe Jedi question of, like, wanting to be a Jedi.

Where I'm like, I get the impulse, but I also don't want to die.

So.

Well, rip to you, but I'm different.

Yeah, I guess

built different.

Where would you drop out of here?

Don't be Leorio in your exam group.

Where would you drop out of the hunter exam, Sylvie?

Wait, what was that?

Where would you drop out of the hunter exam?

Oh,

or are you passing?

I think.

I mean, I'm passing.

Yeah.

Good for you.

Flipping my hair while I'm saying this.

They'll give you the...

One of my screenshots, I think I saw like a little, something that was described as like a hunter, or maybe I misattributed it as a hunter mark.

Kiloa had something that was like a little bracelet or a necklace or something.

I think that's what they give you when you become a hunter.

Oh,

interesting.

But they might just give you like a fucking...

What if you get to the end of the hunter exam and they give you a gun?

I'm laughing because that's what they do.

They give you a gun.

Big gun.

Yeah, how'd you nail it?

Yeah.

That's why the protagonist is called gun.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gun.

Gun and Kilo.

He's called Gun Freak.

Gun Freak.

I think that'll be us for this week.

Is there anything else?

I like this last screenshot where

Leario, I posted this shot of Leorio praising Ghoan for

having saved everybody and gotten them all past.

And Kilo is sort of looking over, like, huh?

What's this?

What is this positive?

What is this affirmation?

I don't understand.

He looks very confused by positive reinforcement.

Gun has received positive affirmations in his life.

He knows what this is like.

He knows what this is.

I get the impression that

you can see him putting his head forward to receive it.

I know what this is.

This is a pat on the head.

I'm a precocious child.

I understand being pat on the head because I did a good job.

Keela was like, what is this?

What's happening here?

It's the arrested development joke when Michael gets hugged and goes, what are you doing with your arms?

That's so good

god i love that show oh my god

what do you what are you doing what's happening what's happening um

but yeah we will see you next time what are we watching next time keith uh oh so that is a great question

it it might be time to edit in what we're watching because we have edited this down I've already adjusted, if you're hearing this, I've already adjusted the last episode where I said this episode we were watching four episodes.

That's no longer true.

We changed things around for scheduling reasons.

So last episode was three.

This episode is three.

Next episode is either going to be two

or three.

And I don't know.

And so I'm not going to tell you.

And so I'll tell you later and I'll edit it into this.

Hi, it's Keith from the future here.

I do know what we're watching next week.

It's three episodes.

Episode 14, Hit the Target.

Episode 15, Explosion of Deception.

and episode 16 defeat and disgrace

that sounds great yeah this was really fun these were good episodes yeah these are really good episodes

next

four or five eps phenomenal phenomena

we're deep into shonen and i am just gonna say i really enjoy the rest of the hunter exam

yeah

I cannot imagine what the next trial will be.

It feels great to be watching a

show where I might be able to predict some of the small moves, but have no idea where we're going.

Is the next trial a violent trial or a thinking trial?

Do you want to know?

Yeah, just tell me.

Violent or thinking?

Violent.

Well,

but everything else.

Both.

It is both, but it is at its core violent.

Yeah.

Great.

Okay.

Cool.

It's Hunter or Hunter, so they do a lot of thinking during the violence.

Yeah, we get a little cuts away and Karapika breaks down.

You think Karapika's good at explaining things, or do you think Karapika's good at just thinking them?

I think he's great at explaining things.

Yeah,

I think that Karapika would be a really great teacher.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

But in some

path,

you would think.

This is like a germ of an interesting idea, but I'm putting it at the end of the episode, so I'm not going to talk much about it.

You could swap Leorio and Karapika's goals, and it might make more sense.

Leorio could

flighty and angry and could be pursuing revenge.

And Karapika is

a strong interior voice, is thoughtful, is careful, and would be a great doctor.

But if you did that, then they'd both be straight.

Yeah, true.

This is where the queerness lives in the character,

yeah.

You just turn them into two normal-seeming guys,

yeah.

At that point, you've made some normal people, yeah.

Is that it?

That's everything, anything else for today?

I think that's it.

Uh, I think so.

Okay, remember, if you want to keep us going supporting the show, friends with people.cash, yeah, there's no way of predicting

what the

um

Patreon looks like when this is out if it has helped um put money into the into the patreon if nothing has happened uh if just slowly over time things are different because it's you know by the time this is out it's going to be absolute minimum like

three months from now um uh but as of right now we've slowly dipped under our thirty thousand dollar goal for the show which we are of course still doing but we would love to be above that and more um Um,

the

uh

the labor hours that go into making the show are fairly high-you know, three hours per episode basically of recording two to three, I guess, today.

We were short on purpose today, plus having to watch the whole show for all four of us.

That's a lot of work, plus editing it, putting it up.

So, if you appreciate that, you like the show, go to friendsatthetable.cash.

If you like friends at the table, but you're not signed up on friends at the table.cash, go to friends at the table.cash.

Another great way to support the show is by going to Apple Podcasts or iTunes and rating and reviewing the show, giving us a nice five stars.

That's a huge help.

And if you don't listen to Friends of the Table, maybe check out Friendsofetable.net.

There's a distinct possibility that some of you are just here for Hunter Hunter.

Yeah, but we also do an actual play podcast that I like to think is pretty cool.

Yeah, I think it's really good.

I think we make the best actual play pod cost in the business.

Yeah, I think that's true.

That's fair.

I don't think it might not be fair to say, but I think it is true to say.

I mean, listen, if you're making something and you don't think you're doing the best at it, you should keep going until you do think you're doing the best at it.

It's a very gone attitude.

Yeah, that is.

It's a very gone attitude.

Listen.

You're the gone of the thought freaks myself.

I think it says something about our taste that we like this show so much that.

That attitude would bleed into the actual play that we made.

I really thought you were going to say it says something about our taste that we like silly.

I mean, it also does.

Yeah, there's that too.

Yeah.

That's good taste.

Everybody likes it.

Of course, Karapika's approach to that would be, look, everybody makes the shows at different levels and at different times.

I'm sure that there are people out there who are doing things better than we do them.

You know, there are people out there who are great, and we're doing better things than other people.

And that's why Karapika could never have bashed the hole in the wall to win the tournament.

That's true.

Yes, absolutely.

Leorio goes, I don't know what a podcast is.

I don't know what a podcast is.

All I know is

Leorio knows exactly.

Leorio says, I don't know what a podcast is, but I do love Joe Rogan's radio show.

Leorio.

Leorio says he doesn't know what a podcast is, but it's still in my DMs for some reason.

Fucking idiot, Leorio.

God.

Just, what a, what a wild episode.

Episode one,

part one, Leorio, part two, Killua kills a guy.

Well, part three, everyone lives in Little Department.

Yeah, yeah.

I will also say, you should go to Apple Podcasts and you should rate this show five stars.

Yeah, they give you five little stars that you can select.

And

if you don't fill them all up all the way,

you're wasting the opportunity to see.

Well, no, don't say that.

Nope.

Oh, no.

I'll kill Drake.

Listen,

if we don't have a perfect five-star

five-score

five-star, five-score, whatever.

Listen, it's been a long podcast.

I'm just saying, we don't get five stars.

I'm Kiloa ripping out Dre's heart.

That's true.

Sorry, Dre.

No, it's fine.

Think before you leave that four stars, okay?

Yeah.

Well, I'll make sure that we put it in your dead little hand

after we dake it.

I'll give it back.

Yeah.

Yeah, we'll give it back.

Okay.

Just make sure that my share of the Patreon goes to my now widowed wife, please.

Jesus.

Maybe.

I hope Dre doesn't die.

I'm not actually going to kill you, Dre.

I'm sorry.

Way to make us feel bad for threatening to kill you, Dre.

Oh, sorry.

Fine, I guess we'll just murder me instead.

God.

And who should we give you?

Please leave a five-star review because now it's my life on the line.

Okay.

Yeah.

Oh, you should buy very nice microphones.

Just dig my grave up every month and put the cache in there.

Oh, sick.

Very cool.

It'll appreciate.

Yeah, exactly.

Gold standard.

Yeah, Cleopatra style.

I dig it.

That's right.

Okay, that's the real end.

Bye.