The Power of Gon's Mistake - Hunter x Hunter ep. 7-9: Media Club Plus S01E03

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

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

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

My name is Keith Carberry.

With me, as always, is Jack DeKeet.

Hi, I'm Jack.

Keith, you nailed it.

That was a beautiful intro.

Thank you.

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

Andrew Lee Swan.

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

And Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet.

And you can check out everything that Friends of the Table do.

Man.

Keith, you nailed it.

I didn't.

Everything Friends of the Table does is our link tree that Janine set up.

That's linktr.ee/slash friends at the table.

It'll take you to everything.

Some of the highlights from that link tree, of course, are the Patreon, friendsofthetable.cash, the TikTok, uh friends underscore table um and i personally but also friends of the table as a whole uh have been using co-host more in the last week or two i've had it for months and months and months but i've only really started diving into like like regularly wanting to post stuff to it in the last week the friends of the table co-host is friends dash table um we're posting anything that you might normally find on twitter but if you're not using twitter wouldn't see.

So streaming times,

episode uploads, stuff like that.

Re

what is it?

What do we call it when you retweet something on there?

Toast.

Toasting.

Re-toasting?

Okay, sure.

We're doing all that.

We're doing all that there.

Toasting it up.

And we're still doing it on Twitter too, friends underscore table.

So

also, you can find me on YouTube at youtube.com slash run button for the let's plays that I do.

Three new episodes this week.

How are you feeling?

Of Hunter Hunter.

Of Hunter-Hunter.

Yeah.

I'm feeling, we're fucking in it.

We're in it.

We're getting into it.

This is, I feel like,

I don't want to be presumptuous, but I feel like these are the last episodes before

we're in it.

I

disagree.

There's some in it here, too.

Yeah.

There is some in it, but like we are fully in it from here on out

until when until the end?

Until the end.

Until the end.

There's some brief moments of not being in it between now and the end, but they're very short.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Do you want to do the top-level summary, Keith?

So we can start with the digital.

I love digging in.

So the first thing that happens is we get back on the airship that Jack was so worried about last week.

And we spend basically a whole episode there.

It's everyone's first break.

Literally, in days and days with maybe no food or water or rest at all.

Brief moments, maybe, of those things.

But yeah, we see

Krapika and Leorio immediately take the opportunity to sleep.

Gona Kilo decide to train.

Oh, Kilo, by the way, who we briefly learn is a child assassin, no big deal.

They decide to spend their time training with newly introduced chairman of the selection committee, Netaro.

They play a really fun get-the-ball game, and we see Gonan Kiluwa's sort of temperaments clashing.

Not for the first time, not for the last time.

It's not

super like they don't make a big deal of it, but we are seeing more and more how different these two characters are.

And then they make it to their first or their next trial, Trick Tower.

And immediately are confronted with three challenges.

One, Tonepa's on their team.

Two, they have to deal with a voting system.

And three, a gang of prisoners turned examiners in a sick mental game

where they have to win

best of five against a group of life in prison.

Freaks.

They're all freaks.

Who are incentivized to take things as slow as possible because every hour they delay the gang from proceeding is a year off of their sentences.

Their sentences, which I've written down, are extremely long.

So we'll get to that when we get to that episode.

Anything I missed?

Anything that we want to fill in right off the bat?

No, I think we can get into the specifics of...

Okay.

Anything major there.

Like, we're going to talk a lot about Kilua, and I feel like that's just a a conversation.

I have double the amount of notes for episode seven as I do for the other two episodes.

I think it is kind of the

like, I don't know, characterization-wise, it's like the load-bearing one.

There's some really good moments in eight and nine, don't get me wrong.

There's, yeah, those are great episodes, but I, I,

from only watching nine episodes and taking notes on nine episodes, it really feels like the, the, uh, the, the episodes that have a lot of character in them are the ones that I'm like furiously quoting and taking notes and stuff.

How did you feel, Jack, after coming off of the last episode, feeling like it was the first kind of break in the action in a negative way and a slowdown in a way that kind of threw you?

I really liked these three episodes.

I really liked, out of the three of them, I would say nine was probably my favorite.

I want to jump the gun and talk about that, but I think

I liked seven a lot and I liked the characterization of Killua, but I did really like the way that the show leaned hard into that feeling that I was having of like, oh,

this is a break.

We get Tonpa trying to...

Tonpa who has been sort of absent in the last few episodes comes roaring back into the show with a classic Tonpa trick.

Make people think that there is

a weird, horrible trap on the airships, so you have to stay awake.

But Karapika and Leorio just do not fall for it.

They don't really even consider it.

No,

they don't really consider it.

Perhaps.

You get a really good.

Oh, sorry, go ahead.

Oh, because they're protagonists and know that they will be able to overcome

it.

Also, literally everyone else goes to sleep, too, besides Gonakilo.

Right.

Yeah.

The way.

Besides Gonakilo, who stay up training and playing.

The way that they they characterize it is very good.

You know, you have this like long scene of Karapika walking down the hallway with Leorio, but you're like tight focused on Karapika's face as he thinks to himself about what Tompa said and how it doesn't really make any sense and how they would have, if, if...

If they really should be paying attention, they would have said this or done this or it would have happened this way.

And during that, they've sat down against the wall and Karapika is like looking over to tell Leorio, hey, I think it's okay for us to go to bed.

And Leorio's Leorio's fast asleep.

He's snoring.

And Karapika gives his signature.

Look at Karapika.

Look at Leorio and smile sweetly.

Which is the main thing that he does in the show.

I, um,

was it at the beginning of this?

We are, what,

three episodes into this project, nine episodes into the show.

Um, I think in episode one, Keith, you said that you hadn't really thought about Leorio and Karapika as a couple, uh, but now it makes a lot of sense to you.

Yeah, it's something that I saw after the, like, Leorio and Karapika ship is something that I hadn't encountered, hadn't thought, it's just not how I watch television normally.

I just don't

ship

ever as a almost not as a rule, it's just as a reflex.

And so I encountered it after watching the show for the first time and I was like, what?

That's such a weird way to watch this show is to decide that Leorio and Karapika are in love.

And then you watch it again, you're like, oh, it's right there.

It's all there.

Yeah,

I also don't necessarily, I don't always have this shipping reflex.

I think that it's it's it's not the way I approach media anyone who's heard friends at the table knows that it is not something that's part of how I process conversations and dialogue and story

But it is just in the show this so far is just the the relationship between uh Karapika and Leorio is fantastic and I am so exc I mean you know I think it's part of the way that this story is structured you know you have these four protagonists and you are playing essentially like a combinatrix game in terms of generating plots by being like, oh, who do we match with whom in these little 20-minute episodes and we get to see them all fire off against each other.

And since we are early in the show, it makes sense for the show to be pairing Gon and Killua as these kind of like

what's the word, like sprightly, I think the fact that one party goes to sleep and one party goes and drains with maybe the most powerful man on the planet tells you a lot.

But I do think that just seeing Leorio and Karapica in scene after scene after scene is brilliant.

Their first scene together,

Leorio does say that he is going to do genocide against Karapika.

But he was just fucking though.

He is back in Xbox.

He's a live moment.

You know, he's a game

Leorio.

That's just how they hang out.

Actually,

how do Karapika and Leorio hang out?

The answer is, right, they bicker, but they

have a real foundation of like, this is the person that I am with, and I'm looking out for this person pretty much.

Instantly, I don't think either of them feels like they are being

threatened or brought down by the other person's flaw.

Right, yeah.

And I think that

they sort of, I think Leorio is sort of a, um,

is sort of a gone in that, like, uh, he's very reactive.

Good.

He's very boy, is he?

Yeah, he's very Leary of stuff to talk about in episode eight, I think.

Yeah, he's very reactive and

is like not super considerate, but he has a lot of luck and he has a lot of charm.

And I think that, like,

that sort of it

they balance each other out because we, we've talked a lot about how Karabik is very sort of internal and uh and you know is very thinky.

um

and

it's just sort of like kind of two of those same relationships it's sort of like go and kill have that relationship and then also leorio and crapa have that relationship in sort of a slightly different way but it's sort of like two different

it's like two opposites sort of tempering each other

yeah

I was really, I had a moment when Tonpo was saying to them, you know, there might be a trap on this, where I realized that they don't know he's the rookie crusher at this point.

Right.

And that was that kind of caught me off guard because we spent so much time in Tonpa's perspective during his introduction that I had sort of, I had made that classic mistake that the characters have the same information that the viewer does.

And so when they were like, oh, we should actually think over what Tonpo is saying before disregarding it, I was like, oh shit, they just

think Tonpo is just another player at this point.

Right.

Another player who happened to have bad juice.

Yeah, who.

you?

That just helped me with the frog.

So, yeah, that's just the frog helping juice.

Oh, I think that's a good idea.

Kilua might have a little bit of information.

Kilua is like, this guy poisoned me.

But I still, I don't even think that translates to Tompa's the rookie crusher.

I think it's just sort of like, hey, we're playing the game.

You did an underhanded thing, but I beat you.

So we're even.

Yes.

And I do suspect

that

the way Kilua sees the world, and I have to imagine that we are going to talk about this a lot in this episode.

I think the way Killua sees the world is probably fucked.

Yeah.

I think that he is looking through a weird lens.

Let's rewind just a little bit to get to that chronologically, because there are a few things early on in the episode that I want to hit.

Number one, beans is short for Mr.

Green Jelly Bean Man.

Green, Green Jelly Bean Man.

Grissy, Green, Green Jelly Bean man.

I was so excited to learn that his name is the same name that I gave him, basically.

Yeah,

yep, that's beans.

And we know Netero's so much.

We know Netero's first name.

Netero's first name is Isaac.

The naming conventions in this show are all over the place.

I love it.

Isaac Netero.

I am Isaac Notero, the chairman of the selection committee, and this is my assistant, Beans.

If you are not watching along,

Natero, as we spoke before, looks like a sort of depiction of the Buddha.

He has got a white beard that curls up.

He's an old fellow.

He's got big earrings.

He's like a wiry old man.

Beans is now then.

A green, green jellybean man.

He's a green, green jellybean man.

He is small.

He's child-sized.

He is wearing a fancy black suit.

Is he wearing a tux?

He's wearing a cita with tails.

Yeah.

And uh he's humanoid uh he has human hands and legs and his entire he has no neck his entire head is a large green jellybean

with eyes and a mouth now can i

tell you what green green jelly bean man looks like in the 1999 series please he looks different he looks different is he not is he not green

He looks exactly the same, except that he is flesh-colored, pink.

No, like, hey, I don't like that.

Get out of here.

Get out of here.

Wow, flesh-flesh, jellybean man.

Get out of here.

Really gross.

That's one of the features in Swindler's song.

I hate this.

Yeah.

Yes, it really is.

One of my favorite things about Beans.

And Beans is an incredible character.

I would watch a...

Whoa!

He looks like a baby!

He looks like a Kirby character.

He does.

He does look like Kirby.

He looks like Karby.

I was trying to find the specific character.

He reminds me of Lololo and Lala La from the Kirby games.

I'm attaching an image for you guys.

Yeah, let's see.

They're like the pink and blue bosses.

Their whole thing is that it's just like a puzzle boss.

I think he looks just like Waddle D, but without the like clothes.

Also true.

There is a real like Kirby design sensibility going on,

specifically in the eye shape and stuff.

I hate this image, Dre.

I hate buck beans so much, though.

Can we get a regular beans in the chat, please?

I would like to see him.

And I don't Google Hunt a Hunter.

Yes, I'll I'm not.

Yeah, that's smart to do.

This image that Dre Linked did give me

does kind of lead to one of my questions.

No.

Oh, no.

No.

Dre has posted photorealistic beans.

There we go.

Dreamed lovely beans.

Oh, someone did put a comparison of them side by side.

Wait, I'm going to pop that.

Is Beans a hunter?

Do you guys think Beans is a hunter or does he just work for the Hunter Association?

Beans is a hunter.

I think Beans is a hunter.

I also do.

I also think Beans is is a hunter.

That's a great question.

I don't think.

I think that the hunter organization is so Byzantine and

stupid that I don't think you could be

Netaro's man servant without being a hunter.

Isaac Netaro's mean beans man servant.

Is this anything?

Is this anything?

My favorite thing about beans that I think is indicative of the show

is that Beans does not have a silly voice.

Beans speaks like a normal human.

He is pleasant and reasonable.

He's this green-green jellybean man who shows up and he's like, hi, welcome to the airship.

I'm Beans.

Please take the time to rest.

There is something so charming about the way this show regularly throws complete visual curveballs at you.

And

these characters present themselves.

It's the gorilla.

It's the unnamed gorilla playing

from

the screenshot stream.

It's just what you said when we first saw Beans was you were like, I don't know if this guy's ever coming back.

We saw for one scene, we saw a green, green, jelly bean man, and I, that might be it.

Yeah, this show would be so much worse if he showed up and he was like, woohoo, I'm beans.

I'm the cookie guy.

You know, the fact that he's just like, hello, welcome to the airship.

I'm a green green jelly bean man.

And it leads to this, it results in this overwhelming sensation that you are constantly going to be shown something that is surprising and outre, and you are going to be asked to take it seriously.

And the show takes it seriously, too.

This is something Austin talks about a lot that I think is very important to the way we make friends at the table, which is...

We are not interested in

deflating or underselling our own show.

If, for example, we have a character show up with a weird name and everybody is like, wow, do you mean to tell me this guy is really cool?

Territory Jazz Jr.

isn't that wacky or whatever?

It means that if the show is not taking itself seriously, you, the viewer, are not going to take it seriously either.

Oh, yeah, no, no, nobody second guesses beans for one second.

Nobody second guesses beans for one second.

And it lets you do great things like this, right?

To just keep introducing characters with interesting names or interesting personas or interesting looks um and asks you to treat them like our protagonists or treat them like gone and kill you

um it's great i love beans and i'm excited will i see more beans or is beans done now do you want us to tell you yeah do you want to know that

no no i don't i want to be surprised when beans shows up okay uh although i will say this i'm if you've i don't want to see any bullshit fan art of beans

send me some nice beans fan art please listeners Thank you.

What counts as bullshit fan art?

The things I've been posting.

Oh, yeah, like not

beans like ripped in a fucking speed-over.

Send me the ripped beans.

Okay.

Hold on,

send me the ripped beans.

I don't like that.

It looks like instead of skin, he has green muscle.

That, well,

wouldn't his skin be green?

Well, yeah, but it just look at his face has skin, but the body is like, looks like sinew, not like skin.

Yeah, I love beans.

Damn, beans is hitting the gear again.

We've got to do some wellness testing for beans.

Thank you, Dre.

Yeah, you're welcome.

Green beans is...

Green, green, jellybean man is so much better than Flesh, Flash, Jellybean Man.

Not just because he doesn't look frightening.

I think that the character art is so much more expressive and fun.

Yeah.

Something worth also mentioning about Flesh, Flash, Jelly Bean Man is at the time they didn't actually have the name for Beans when they made that anime.

So he's just unnamed bald guy in that.

Oh, really?

Actually, I think there's a Japanese pun on

they gave him a name that's not canon.

I was looking this up the other day.

It's like Mamen or something.

Anyway, I'm so glad I got beans just from scratch.

I looked at that guy and I said, yes, and it's

that's good character design.

That is that's great character design.

It's great character design.

We i knew right away that this was a bean man.

I want to shift focus a little bit to Netero.

Jack, you said something interesting.

You said that Chairman Netero might be the strongest person in the world.

Why would you say that?

What is this guy giving off, the chairman of the selection committee?

Well, it's interesting, right?

Because we're not introduced to him as the Hunter boss.

You know, he is not being intro.

Oh, although, wait a second.

There are...

I don't know if I wrote a note about this.

Did someone say that there are seven hunter chairmen, or am I completely making this up?

I don't remember that.

Yeah, I don't think someone would have said that.

Maybe I dreamt it.

I don't know.

Yeah, dreaming about Hunter-Hunter.

Yeah, but you know, it is notable that he's not introduced as the Hunter boss.

He is the chairman of the selection committee, which is clearly very important.

I think what I'm getting at with he is the most powerful man in the world is he is a character archetype that I think you see a lot in

not just in anime, but stories, stories stories more broadly I think he is a sort of a character archetype that you see a lot which is the the wiry old man who reveals himself to not only wield a great deal of institutional power but have a kind of near-supernatural strength

this is borne out in this episode yeah there is a it's

but because of the like timeline of when this anime comes out and also when the manga come out came out it's kind of hard sometimes to nail down like what influenced which um but he did Netaro's definitely in sort of the long line of that sort of like wacky older guy mentor for the main character.

The two that I kind of immediately jumped to are like Master Roshi and Jiraiya from Naruto.

All perverts too.

Also all perverts.

Yeah, no.

I mean Netaro's like one of the first things we see him do is look at Menchi's boobs.

Like they were very much playing in that space.

Yeah.

If I'm right, it's really the only hint that we get that that's what they're doing.

Yes, that kind of gets dropped from him he kind of just becomes more of like a wacky grandpa but they've got to tell you right away this guy's Roshi you can tell because he looked at Menji's tits and I think that's like a very specific decision because also design wise there are some similar similarities to Roshi he's kind of personality wise they're kooky old men uh they're funny and they hide how strong they are behind like being a goofball being like a joker it's like a disarming quality for them and i i love that honestly i love that like yeah yeah me too You get this shot in the first episode of Rec Nethero, where he just drops from the airship, and then we get to the game today, and you get to see, like, even more examples of the fact that this guy, like Jack said, is probably the strongest human in the world.

And there's kind of a freak-like quality to him that we get hinted at early on.

I mean, it takes a, it takes a certain kind of person to jump out of a, uh,

an airship, even if you can do that.

Uh, but then when we get onto the ship and he's talking to Beans, I have the quote here.

He's talking about

the slow trip to the next trial.

He says, There's nothing that I love more than this feeling of tension in the air.

Why does he love that?

I don't know.

But then he just goes walking around the ship looking for people to fuck with.

And he finds Goan Kilua, who has just revealed that he's a child assassin

to Goan, who likes this.

Or no, Goan Goan doesn't like

Kilua likes that Goan immediately believes him.

Yeah,

before we move into Kilua Hour, I want to sort of go at this in kind of like a slightly different order where we

does something interesting in this scene.

He's sort of

creeping around the ship like a nasty person, looking for people to fuck with.

And then he.

It's not clear what happens.

He either teleports or moves so quickly that

only Killua can sort of figure out.

Gon looks and is like, oh, someone was there and is gone now.

He looks where he was.

He does something.

He's not.

And they like notice him.

And then he disappears.

I will push back on Gon not noticing because Gon is the one who says to him, like, hey, weren't you over there a second ago?

Oh, really?

Or he says something along those lines.

Yeah.

He says, Did you see someone that was over there?

Right, yeah.

Yeah.

And I, that's.

But it was, it's, it's Kilua going, like, you're pretty fast.

Like, Kilua is the one who knows it was Netero that was over there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Kiliwa immediately takes a real violent dislike to this.

Kiliua's whole affect changes immediately.

You know, I talked in the past about Kiliwa being dreamlike, but here his eyes narrow, he glowers, he is not happy about.

And I think it's interesting, especially given this conversation that we talk about, it's not clear whether the thing that gets Kiliwa here is being crept up on.

You know, he doesn't like this kind of subterfuge.

Right.

Coming to the

family, right, exactly.

Yeah, uh, he could also be suspicious of the techniques that Netero is using.

Uh, because we get some talk about assassin magic in these episodes going forward, uh, which is fascinating.

And it could be that he sees, you know, like sees like here, and he is like, there is something here that I don't care for.

Because we go into the rest of this episode with rancid vibes between Killiua and Netero.

Could I

rewind for like

you?

What were the words like?

Like, sees like.

Like, sees like?

Yeah.

There's another like, sees like.

Actually, there's a sort of like triangle here, if we're including Kilua in this, because we also do get a little bit more Hisuka at the beginning of this episode that I kind of forgot.

But looking here in my notes.

We should talk about this.

Yes, we should talk about this.

We have Menshi, Buhara, and

Satots talking about

Hisuka.

That's great.

And it's kind of a long long scene where they're talking about this.

We get a reveal from Menshi that it was, it's actually

Hisuka's

sort of violent bloodlust that they could feel palpably that is what put her on edge and had her sort of issue a two difficult challenge that everybody failed.

Nearly failed the entire Hunter exam.

Right.

And then we get a really, really good

monologue from Satos who says, and I will ring the what is a hunter bell here.

We are birds of a feather with Hisaka.

As hunters, we are continually seeking out rivals.

Ultimately, the hunter exam is but a place to find opponents worthy of encounter.

Someone who hits the floor running when we try to, oh, uh, sorry, I skipped a line.

Uh, is a place to find opponents worthy of respect.

And every once in a while, we encounter someone who hits the floor running when we try to slow things down an oddball of sorts which i think is a really light way to describe isuka it's we're just like him except he's a little bit of an oddball he's just i guess a big goober

it's a perspective thing right because when you've got satots and men talking about this it's like ah yeah no buhara seems chill buhara just seems like he wants to vibe out yeah yeah we don't need to go into this.

I don't think there's much to say here, but I do think they were fucking cowards showing Satats pushing some noodles around on a plate, but not eating.

Yeah, Satots, in case you have forgotten, does not have a visible mouth, has a mustache, and talks.

I like that.

I think they're teasing you.

They're like, they're like...

They're like, it's like a big joke.

It's great.

Yes.

I love Satats' design.

I love Satats in general.

I really like hearing which rookies each examiner has their eye on.

Right.

Yeah.

I believe Satats

Menchi.

Was it...

No, Buhara brought up Hisuka.

And...

Someone said.

Oh, someone said Hanzo.

Hanzo, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ninja, yeah.

I think Menshi says Hanzo.

Actually, I might have been getting Hanzo and Kilua mixed up.

It has big.

Sasha does say Kilua.

Yeah.

Okay.

It has big teachers in the teacher's lounge talking about the kids vibe.

And I think there's another great example of the drifting perspective in this show.

You know, the four are ostensibly our protagonists, and they are the sort of pivot points around which the plot moves.

But we do, the camera goes wandering off through this airship, and we do see a bunch of different people.

I want to talk a bit about...

So

during Satot's talking about this great all-hunters want to find a rival monologue,

there is...

It reveals to us that this isn't the first time that someone as evil as Hisaka has showed up in the hunter exam.

The implication is this just happens sometimes.

The hunter exam will produce an individual who, beyond just being ambitious or motivated, they're not surprised to see someone like Hisuka in the Hunter exam,

which is interesting.

This is...

Hisuka's been allowed to compete twice now, because remember, last time he killed someone.

He killed an examiner.

He almost killed an examiner.

Yeah, but it seems even beyond that.

They're not just like, well, Hisuka has done this before.

The Hunter exam occasionally produces people like, or well i don't know i don't know whether it's the hunter exam producing these people or the world in which hunters exist producing these people but this happens sometimes yeah um and i think you've written down a note here dre uh they describe hisuka as having a killer aura did you want to talk about this

Oh, I just, I wasn't sure in that scene if they were specifically talking about Hisuka when they said someone had an aura or if that was like them alluding to someone else.

But if you're saying that they specifically said that about Hisuka.

I feel like he specifically told me that he was a cardio.

I think it was specifically about Hisuka during the little segment where they show him doing the House of Cards thing.

Oh, it's so beautifully animated.

Oh, you're right.

You're right.

While they are talking about Hisaka, and these are very Hisaka-light episodes, much like the cooking trial.

They know we, the viewer, are interested in Hisuka, and they are very careful about how much Hisuka they give us.

I would love to see Hisuka in these episodes, and we sort of don't really, but we do get this beautiful sequence where

he builds a house of cards and then sort of has like an orgasmic delight upon knocking down the house of cards at the end, which is, you know, this is a pretty

metaphorical writing.

Yeah, I don't think this is

I don't think there's anything particularly subtle going on here, or watching someone build a house of cards and then delightedly knock it down.

We sort of all know what's going on there.

But it's a really beautifully animated scene, and it's good Hisaker

writing, I suppose.

And I think it's sort of like a tremendous perspective shift to like

have what we have in episode

episode like six with Hisuka.

Hisaka's murder spree.

Yeah,

the killings and the fight with the encounter with Goan.

Then to like not see him and like wonder what's going on.

I mean, we, Jack, we had you last week being like, what's going on?

Where's Hisuka?

And then

this episode, instead of giving us Hisuka directly, they have the examiners being like,

he's one of us.

He's more like us.

than anyone else here.

And it is sort of like this very jarring moment.

And

I don't think that, you know it's the clearest view from a character on what a hunter actually is that we've gotten like no one that would know has said what they think a hunter is until satot says as hunters we are continually seeking out rivals ultimately the hunter exam is but a place to find opponents worthy of respect that is like our first actual like primary source of what a hunter is in the

it is still opaque it is seen through a glass darkly because it doesn't actually say a lot about the function hunters serve.

It's a very insular reading, right?

It's like...

But, Jack, do we know that hunters serve a function even?

Yeah, that's a good question.

We don't even know that they do.

I think the only thing we've mentioned, they've talked...

When Karapika talked about getting their revenge, there was a mention of them taking on jobs that would hurt their pride.

But that...

isn't really that concrete about what it is.

And Karapika also talks about

hunters protecting animals and stuff like that.

But like that's so that's so vague and also such a not expert opinion.

This is like not that's not even on the hunter website.

This is just like you know, we spent a lot of time with Karapika.

I love Karapika, but for all intents and purposes, he's just some guy.

Yeah, yeah, sort of.

Yes, I mean, maybe the hunter exam is.

I've got a

this is just repeated hour of us trying to guess what hunters are.

Is it just about producing murder kings that you then let them know?

I mean, it's not about

the way I have been looking at a lot of the hunter exam so far, just from what we've got, is that it feels just like

we decided to make the most nightmarish meritocracy and give them like

a weird amount of power in this world.

Yeah.

We are

going to the prison.

Sorry?

I mean, I guess we also don't, it has not been codified, again, what role hunters play in society and how much power they may or may not know.

We do know that they have the ability to,

like, they have freedom of travel, free use of resources.

So they do have at least like this

freedom of movement and of information that is like, you know,

I'll say,

you know, it is, it at least sort of suggests,

you know, like a first-class, second-class citizen relationship.

Yeah.

It definitely like confers a level of like prestige and privilege to be able to.

Except we have never, no, we have seen the world without hunters once.

True.

On Whale Island?

Well, no, sort of, because even that was all about fucking hunters.

This is the one scene that we have had is the cicada in the foreground on the left as Kid Leorio plays soccer with another kid, and then that kid dies because he can't afford an operation.

Everything else has been seen through.

It's the fucking Hallmark movie ice sculpting shit.

It's like everybody does is talk about.

Yeah.

All everybody does is talk about ice sculpting.

The entire world revolves around ice sculpting.

All the questions are about ice sculpting.

Nobody at any point says, wait a second.

What is happening outside the ice sculpting world?

Could I introduce a perspective from the manga and from the 1999 series?

Yeah, please, please.

Okay, so I don't want to get into specifics, but I will say that the first chapter,

casually using the word chapter, not literally,

of the manga and of the 1999 story have gone on Whale Island

not as a 12-year-old, but as a slightly younger boy, not having heard of the hunters and thinking that his father is dead,

and eventually it is revealed to him what a hunter is, and that that's what his father became.

Um, and that's when his world becomes about becoming a hunter.

But there is

a sort of hunterless life on Whale Island, um,

that that you know, I just to just to say something about like the canonical um

uh

rarity of hunters.

At least, you know, you can live the first nine years of your life on Whale Island as a Woods Boy and not know what a hunter is.

What if it was Woods Boy X, Woods Boy?

Oh, wait a second.

We need to take a sidebar.

Sorry.

Okay.

This show is all sidebars.

It's all sidebars.

This is a episode seven is a sidesbar episode, and I'm fine with that.

We haven't talked about the X at all.

And this is something I meant to talk about in episode one.

And every episode that went by, and I think it's notable, I don't actually think it's very important.

But this show uses the letter X not only in its title,

you know, it's Hunter Hunter, rendered Hunter, X, Hunter.

We have these interlinked X's in the Hunter logo.

And then every episode is, we've been calling them things like, you know, Showdown on the airship, except the episode titles, and in Japanese too, are all broken up with X's in the same way Hunter, Hunter is.

Keith, could you?

I don't have any episode names.

Could you read like what an episode name looks like?

Yeah, sure.

Hope, X, and X, Ambition, Hisuga, X, is, X, Sneaky, A, X, Surprising, X, Challenge.

So this is just a stylistic move.

I don't think that there is, I don't think that we can get a lot from

reading it this way.

I don't know.

Maybe Maybe we can.

I am curious about

what is going on here.

So there's a quick answer, but I am not sure it really explains why it's there very much.

And the quick answer is that it's not actually the letter X.

It is the multiplication symbol.

Yeah.

Exponential.

It doesn't matter fucking house at all.

Right.

No, it doesn't.

So, like,

if you were really being a weirdo, maybe you'd say hunter times hunter.

Oh, that might be my new bit.

Please, it's expressed hunter squared.

Okay,

I've definitely, like, heard people refer to it as, like, a cross.

And not to say hunter, cross, hunter, but, like, that's what it means.

But that's, like, what you might say.

PlayStation controller style.

Oh.

Yeah.

Could I quickly be on my Kingdom Hearts shit for a minute?

Oh my God, absolutely.

I have always

never stop once you start.

I don't.

I don't.

Trust me.

It's going to come up so much during this show, and you guys don't even know.

Not just because Ghana and Kiloa have enough stylistic similarities to Sora and Riku, but that doesn't enormous.

The way I have read the Hunter-Hunter title is definitely flavored by the fact that I am someone who knows, oh, yeah, Kingdom Hearts 358 over 2 means 358 days experienced by two people.

Right.

In my brain forever.

No, this is immediately useful, actually.

And so, like, the way I always took it is, like, the hunters in the title are gone and killowa.

Like, this is like, what,

how do these two sort of like affect each other?

And, like, with the multiplication, like, how do they like make each, like, what growth spurs from the two of these, like prodigy hunters?

Like, yeah, yeah, and I feel like

they really start to codify some of that in episode seven with how they respond to Netaro's game.

If we're okay starting to talk about that, this is great.

Do we want to talk about assassins first?

Sure.

Yeah, sure.

I'm going to briefly do the assassin stuff because we did sort of dance around it, but we didn't actually get all the way into that.

Can I have one quote from this?

Yeah, please.

It's a very sad quote.

You know what, Jack?

I think you were going to start earlier than me, so why don't you say your piece and then I'll give my quote.

Killua Killua looking wistfully out of the window.

It's romantic.

He can see the lights of the

I don't know, cities.

I don't know.

I don't know what this world is outside of the hunters.

There's going to be a moment that's going to be so funny in about 10 episodes.

I mean, there is.

There is the city that they almost went to on the bus, remember in the early episodes?

Like, that was a bus.

A trap bus, a yeti-ass city.

I believe they call it the down with cis bus, Jack.

I don't think we can.

Oh, it's worth it.

Sorry.

I was like, I had that junk in my head.

I was like, I can't say anything.

Yeah, but that's why I'm here, baby.

Yeah, thanks for that.

And what does he take this moment to say?

He says, I come from a family of assassins.

So good.

My whole family are assassins.

And I wrote down here, Killer Wallore, period.

His parents are assassins.

Exclamation point.

I watched for 30 more seconds and I wrote, maybe.

He could be lying.

But then as we continue, we do learn that he is not lying.

I fucking love the little interaction they have where he says, my mom and dad are both assassins.

And Gon's reaction is, whoa, both of them.

And he's like, oh, wow.

Everybody just thinks I'm bullshitting.

Like,

you're the only person who takes me at face value and can read me like that.

And I think that is, like...

He says, People only like me because they can't tell whether I'm serious.

And Gon can, though.

and I love that.

And like there's a ways to read it where it's gone's just like a naive boy like who can like who just like takes trusts what his friends say.

But I don't know.

We also know that he's he is supernaturally perceptive.

That is the thing.

Yeah.

And that his version of coming across, when he comes across as careless and like going with his gut and not thinking things through, which is something literally not thinking things through is going to come back up and how often appearing to not think things through really works out for him.

He is just supernaturally perceptive.

He just like picks up on bits of the world in a sort of like

otherworldly kind of way.

Bit of a lateral thinker over here.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Beautiful color work in this.

This show looks really good.

I feel like we don't spend a lot of time talking necessarily just about the art.

So Killua has sort of pale lilac colored hair, almost white,

slightly purple.

He is wearing a grey shirt and I think blue shorts.

And

we get these beautiful shots of him looking out of the window into this blue night.

We get some exterior shots of the blue of the airship.

And it's just that the colour palette on show here is gorgeous, with like everything in this moment coming to match Killiwa's colour palettes as he talks about his past.

It's just great.

His parents, I've wrote down in my notes that they like him, but but I think what I mean is that they

think he is a very capable assassin.

They believe that he can be an assassin, and they think that he's the Beezenes.

But he doesn't want to be an assassin.

The way

he talks about it like they're putting like it's very much like you have to go into the family business, you have to be lay up really high.

An ice sculptor.

Yeah.

I want to be an ice sculptor, but I have to be an assassin.

I think he even says something about wanting to find his own path in this little monologue or something like that.

He does.

My favorite line is when he talks about when I become a hunter, I'm going to capture my family and get their bounties.

Yep.

Here we go.

Here we go.

I'm going to be image ready.

Oh, you have it?

Yeah.

Okay, great.

Because that is completely different art style.

This is like watercolor, saccharin, bullshit.

I wrote down in my notes, Shoujo Kilua, because this very much felt like one of those very flowery, like, romance cutaways cutaways on something like uh i wrote down glossy kilua yeah

uh they do this is not uh unique to hunter hunter and by any means but they they do a lot of really great work of like dramatically shifting uh art style to sort of emphasize how everyone in a room is feeling.

They do it multiple times.

Yeah, there's a great bit of that later.

There's actually several, and we've seen it already a couple times too, but this is the first one that isn't the like, everyone is dramatically underdrawn.

This is like, actually, it's, he's dramatically overdrawn.

Yeah, it's a full-on art style change as opposed to just like a simplification.

Um, there's a line, uh, he says,

uh, I was born to be an assassin, and my mother tried to persuade me with tears streaming down her face.

Uh,

it's a really interesting position to take for a killer.

You know, I do think we are, you know, we're saying this is like the, you have to go into the family business, you need to become a doctor, you need to do whatever.

But it them being killers, you know, them being assassins and trying to persuade your 12-year-old son to follow in the assassin footsteps to such an extent that

you are moved to tears.

And what did he do to her?

He attacked his family and left.

And I wrote down, this will have no consequences whatsoever.

He specifically says he stabbed his mom in the face or

his brother in the side.

Yes.

Fuck it, we ball.

Kiloa, I love you.

Yeah,

it's great.

It's great.

It's great.

I'm so, I'm so

getting into the core reasons of my Kiloa bias is like all this bullshit.

And he has such a proud little look on his face, too, while he's saying this.

Uh, because he just lives in another, he lives in another world than Kilo, than uh, Goan does, just like literally almost literally lives in another world.

Um,

and uh,

Goan is like,

I don't know, I, I, I read him him as being slightly concerned about this,

but

he doesn't seem to hold it against him.

Yeah.

No.

Like, this is kind of a startling thing to hear

your new friend make

or admit to.

Is it as startling as hearing that your dad also passed the Hunter exam when he was 12, and you've now seen that the Hunter exam kills literally hundreds of people every time?

But that's such a slow-rolling reveal.

True.

I mean,

he has seen how deadly the hunter exam can be.

Yeah.

God, I was, I was,

I was a naive baby when I thought about what this exam was going to involve as they descended into

it.

Can you say what you thought maybe it was going to involve?

Yeah, I want to be brief.

I think we should move on to playing squash with an old man in a second.

But sure.

Yeah, what did I think the Hunter exam was going to involve?

I thought it was going to be like

I'll put it this way.

You know the bit in the hunger games before they go into the hunger game itself, where they just do that training to like get sponsors.

And you know, they're in that, like, they're in that gym, they do some shooting, they do some, you know, I'm the best at axes, I'm the best at whatever.

I thought it was going to be that, except it was the hunger games.

It was right.

I was expecting just like...

Tell you what, I was actually expecting.

I was expecting

school.

I thought that the scene

of the screenshot that we saw where Gon makes the spirit appear in the glass, you know?

I thought we were going to go to little boy school.

Go to little boy,

you know, fighting magic school.

I thought we were going to do a little boy magic school arc, and then we got the fucking squid game.

It's great.

But we do get a little bit of magic boy school arc as they begin to play a very simple game with Natera.

And the simple game is this.

I have a squash ball

in my left hand.

I'm zanging it all around my head.

I'm spinning it on my finger.

I can balance it on my nose.

I'm like a little seal.

I'm like a little bark, bark, bark, clapping.

You have to get this ball from me, and I'm going to make it easy for you.

You have nine human hours.

Begin.

And this is, by the way, like just to just to reiterate, this is the only time they've had to rest, not since the exam began, but since the

mission to get to the exam began.

Oh, yes.

Oh, and if you get this ball, he will make you a hunter.

I think that this is the privilege.

This is Jesus' privilege from Notero.

He is the chairman of the Hunters Committee.

Now, yes, the Hunter exam kills hundreds of people, and unbeknownst to these hunters, you are about to make make them play what is essentially uh nine hours nine persons nine doors meets saw in the next trial um but uh why don't we play squash and if you win you can become a hunter uh yeah how does this go down what do we want to talk about here

um

kilo is uh assassin move this is the

This is one of the magickiest things that we've seen happen.

Yeah, what happens?

Dre?

Oh,

Kilo.

I guess it is not that he moves so fast that there are copies of him, because I think Netero,

when Goan asks, like, oh, how do you do that?

Netero says that it's, it's him moving, like, varying his speed at which he moves so much, going fast to slow and back and forth, that it appears that there's like shadow clones of Kilua, like circling Netaro.

Right.

He leaves evil magic.

Yeah, after images, like Dragon Ball style.

And yeah,

Dedero immediately recognized it as an assassin technique.

And I think it says something of like, wow, it is very fucked up that a kid this young can do this this well.

Yeah.

And I and I think agree.

I think I agree.

I don't know.

I don't know what it takes to learn that, but I think probably, yeah.

The game begins.

The game begins.

Oh, Kilo does not get the ball.

No.

It's It's a good first, it's a good first effort.

Is this where he goes for the kick, or is that later?

Yes, no, that's where he goes for the kick, and he almost already breaks his foot.

Right.

He almost breaks.

Yeah, he almost breaks his leg trying to swipe Netero's leg out from under him.

Netero, unflinching, doesn't move, nothing.

He's actually worried, I think, slightly for Kilua in that moment.

And then Goan, proving himself to be a smart little boy once again,

sort of has like a really effective couple feints that sort of netero vastly underestimates his ability to

think on the fly and almost gets taken from above when

Gohan looks like he's coming straight ahead and then jumps, but he jumps too high and he hits his dome on the ceiling of the airship.

And he genuinely might have gotten it if only for the surprise factor of how quick the jump was and how little Netero is expecting.

It's great, too.

Killua's reaction, like where he's yelling at, like, he's

getting reaction.

Netero is just.

Yeah, Kilua's very crouchy about it.

And Netero's just there, like, in awe of, like, the speed of Gon.

And he's like, yeah, no, he's right.

I would have lost if he didn't hit his head.

Didn't bonk his head on the ceiling.

Yeah.

And eventually.

Oh, sorry.

Did you have something there?

No.

Eventually, Killua.

I think this is great.

Killua just gives up.

Killua is like.

No, no, I'll take my chances with the death game.

Please.

He realizes something that's been unsaid.

Oh, it's great.

Which is, he's like, come on, Goan, don't you realize he hasn't even used his left hand yet.

His right arm or left leg.

Right, right.

So, yeah, so he'd be on one leg and using one hand.

It's wonderful.

It's such a nice,

it's such a nice low-stakes twist.

It doesn't really affect anything on the large scale, but it just makes the scene you have watched feel really good to be like, oh shit, you're right.

He hasn't.

And yeah, this is the most powerful man in the world.

Of course, Goan says, yeah, I know.

I know.

I was also here.

Goan just doesn't care.

He has said, yeah, I just decided that I was going to force him to use his other hand.

That's my new game.

I'm not trying to get the ball anymore.

I know that I can't.

I want to make him use his other hand.

And we get,

I wrote it down, but we didn't talk about it.

This is the second or maybe even third time this episode, but not the first time in the series that

Kilua tries to boss Goan around a little bit and is like, he does a lot of like, come on, Goan.

And then Goan just like, is like, no, I'm going to do this.

Like, Goan has no,

he is.

incapable of being sort of peer-pressured by Kilua, which Kilua finds simultaneously extremely frustrating and

endearing.

Endearing.

Yes.

Interesting, at least.

They're boyfriends.

That's familiar.

What do we think is going on inside Guns?

What is Guns interiority?

At all times?

Want, comma, get.

To me, this really highlights like a huge difference in how, again, how Gone and Kilua like see the world.

Like Kilua seems to be kind of a not completely, but like an all or nothing or black and white thinker.

And especially like with Netero, it's like, I can't win.

So like, I don't, I'm not going to waste my time trying.

And Goan is like, okay, yeah, I can't win, but what if I make him use his right arm?

That's almost just as good for me.

So like Goan sees, Goan gets like joy from progress, even if it's not

so much.

Sure, yeah.

But like, to me, that was a very interesting, like, big, big, big contrast between the two of them.

And I think that Goan also does have this goal of like becoming better in a way that Kilua doesn't.

Like, I think Kilo is very confident and like knows how

much he outclasses most people around him and is sort of satisfied in that and in,

you know, whatever training he's had to this point.

But Goan is like,

is coming off of years of trying to get to the Hunter exam by the time that he's 12, something that Kilo seems to have had no problem with, and is still in this mode of like, I need to learn more, I need to get better, I need to like improve, and

sort of is taking opportunities as he sees them to like

very quickly, you know, this is another trope of the genre, but like rapidly training.

Like, oh, just like every minute I spend training is like, you know,

you know, six months of normal people time training.

I'm that.

He's not severe about it, which is no, he's not severe about it.

He's very happy and fun and having a good time.

He's constantly in his head, he's constantly going,

you know, there's a lot of songs in the soundtrack that just gets stuck in my head like that.

But most of the time, it's like the battle theme.

The battle theme.

Yeah, it's like

all the music.

Yeah, with the slap bass.

It's so good.

Yeah.

Now,

there is like a.

Killua leaves and these scenes split.

And I would like to stick with.

I would like to talk about this out of order.

Because what happens when these scenes split, especially with Killua,

we are going to have to talk about.

But I want to stick with Goan so we don't go off piece and then come back to the game.

Goan now has a new game, which is make him use his right arm.

And he is literally trying to fight this man with his head at this point.

We have the most,

the metaphor of how Goan approaches the world just played out as explicitly as possible.

Goan just launches himself.

at Netero with like a flying headbutt.

And then when it doesn't work, what does he do?

He gets up and tries to do it again exactly the same.

Yeah, and does anyone remember what Netero's internal monologue there is?

Or

what you're leading into?

Yeah, he's like, well,

if I don't unclinch and he hits me in my stomach, I will probably kill this kid.

But also, if I do unclinch, he could take me out with this headbutt.

So he jumps and using his right hand, kind of like guides, it's such a good shot, guides gun directly into a wall, like one of those 90s boss fights where you have to make the monster run into the wall.

Ghan realizes he was like, oh,

you used your right hand.

Big smile.

Big smile, and then passes out.

Yeah.

Why is this happening?

Is Kilo doing anything?

He is, but I would just like to say real quick, we get a really cute Natera moment.

Just a real...

The show has the capacity to be really warm, to have a real warmth to it.

We don't see often, but but when it shines through it really does shine through he telephones the captain and he says this is chairman natera how long is it going to be until we arrive at the next location and the captain says something and he says can we maybe slow down a bit uh and he's just trying to give goan time to rest uh which is lovely

i think it's great Yeah, it's great.

And it could, you could just as easily play that as like, oh, he's he's worried about, he's like, oh, God, have I killed Goan?

And he does have a brief line where he's like, is he dead?

The vocal delivery on Notero is great.

It's just this, like, this kid has earned a rest.

Let's give them a little longer.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let's talk about Kilu.

Yeah.

Oh, just a quick shout out to Goan's shoe gambit from when Kilo was still around.

Goan's so good.

Yeah.

I don't remember this.

So he's...

He has leveled Netero into a false sense of security with the

distance that he has on his strikes with his short little arms and legs, but he goes in for like a final kick, but he's moved his shoe down off of his legs.

He wears these little boots to give him like three or four more inches on his kick, and he just about nearly gets the ball.

And

Neteru is like processing this and it's going, oh my God, he gave himself more room on his boot.

That's crazy.

While he's doing this, Goan has used his other boot to fling off of his leg at the ball, kicks it.

They almost get it here together, teamwork style.

It's so good.

It's unbelievable.

And that's where Kilo losing at that point is that is what triggers like the Kilo is sore loser moment.

And it really is a sore loser moment.

Yeah, he's a real piece of shit about this.

Yeah.

He's a very spoiled kid.

He's frequently mentioned, but this is like a good moment that it's shown on screen.

He doesn't like Netero.

He's suspicious of Netero

because I think he can tell that Netero is better than him right away.

And is also, I think, mad at someone interrupting him and Goan,

because Goan is really the only person that he's bonded with.

He is not bonded with Liario or Karapika

at all.

At all.

And then is forced to

confront,

not only did I think that he was better than me, I then had it sort of shoved in my face violently.

In the bowl game.

Yeah.

It's uh

and so the aftermath of his uh sort of loser.

He is walking down the corridor.

He's taking his shirts off.

He's like, it's like the Rocky has lost type scene.

He's slouching back to presumably get some rest.

And two or three guys, two guys

show up and they just do some light bullying, I think.

I don't remember the exact bullying, but it's not

very serious, is it?

I mean, Kilua like bumps into them because he's he's in his own

and the two guys are like, hey, kid, come back and apologize.

You're not going to do it.

We're going to teach you a lesson.

We know what happens when people bump into you without apologizing is that they try to cut off your arms.

Right?

So do these guys try to cut off Kilua's arms or something?

Well, we get a great wide shot.

We get a great wide shot of Kilua turning and walking.

So I say a wide shot.

We are outside the airship, looking in through one of its

corridor of windows.

And Kilua and these two guys are in silhouette.

Killua turns, walks towards them and then blood jets from the back of these two guys head and they collapse killer turns and walks away we cut inside to reveal that killua's right hand or is it both his hands

i'm not sure we probably i think we only see one hand we only see one hand yeah

have transformed into i wrote down sharpened vampire hands yeah they're vampire hands yeah they are sort of vampire hands his fingers have

come on it's just oh

like it's gorgeous.

His fingers have come to his finger shape has changed.

His hand shape has changed.

His fingers have come to points.

He has long white claws on his fingers.

And his hand has got raised white veins on it.

And Killy Wood just walks away.

End scene.

Cut back to on fighting.

Yep.

Now, so.

And.

Sorry, Jack, you go ahead.

Well, so part of.

Part of something that I try not to do when

making a show like this is

treating the response that the show wants me to have as a

notable piece of insight that I have gained.

My immediate reaction to this is like, oh, this is incredible.

What's going on here?

What's Killua's deal?

But that's exactly what the show.

That is exactly the emotion the show wanted me to have.

So I don't feel like I am.

I feel like this is what everybody who watches Hunter Hunter thinks at this point.

You're saying you're not impressed with yourself that you're excited by this.

I am not impressed with myself or really impressed with the show because this is this is the show.

This is just this is the reaction that it's another crazy thing in a line of crazy things.

Of crazy things.

Where I do think it is interesting is that

we spend the first part of this episode getting this real introspective moment from Killua being like, I am an assassin.

I am very powerful.

I come from a family of assassins.

I have specifically tried to step back and step away from my bloodline and my capabilities.

And then for the rest of the episode, we see him

deliberately do the things.

First, he does an assassin move to try and shake out Notero.

And we are specifically told, oh, this is an assassin move, that Kilua has chosen to do.

He was not backed into this in a fight with Hisuka.

He was playing squash with an old man.

Yeah.

To his credit, it was a good technique for the moment.

Yes, but he wasn't.

There is a way of playing this, right, where he is like, I resist these

actions because they push me back towards the bloodline I want to avoid.

No.

He is essentially playing, you know, like pick up football or something.

And he's like, I'm going to do this.

And then he goes even further.

He

summons his vampire arm and kills two men in the corridor because they bumped into him.

There's something that I was doing intentionally in the first couple recordings when we were talking about Hisuka, which is like really clarifying, you know,

or at least asking like, is what Hisuka is doing murdering people?

Because I think that you have like a pretty...

These are fraught situations with Hisuka and the group of people, and uh, with the guy whose arm he cuts off, uh, and maybe even with the uh, the man ape, uh, the man-faced ape.

Um, but there's definitely like a pretty easy route out of saying, like, these are murders versus like Hisuka's killing people.

Kilo murders these people, yeah, on the airship, on the airship, yes, not even in the game.

Uh, yes, uh, notable in the next episode, we uh, let me see, I've written it down.

Uh, not that one.

Yes, here we go.

Uh, someone serves a 199-year prison sentence for robbery and murder.

So murder is something that is frowned upon in this world.

You shouldn't do that.

Uh, and there will be consequences for it.

But, uh, Kilua does do that.

Um, I think it also uh looks us dead in the eyes and says,

this little kid told you he was a murderer.

Oh, sorry,

Fradius Lip told you he was an assassin.

And Ghona's like, wow, cool.

And we as an audience are kind of like, wow, cool.

A story about assassins.

And then by the end of the episode, we have seen the violent transformation.

Here's what it means to be an assassin.

Yep.

And he says, I left because I would have killed that old man.

I wanted to kill that old man.

And you get the impression, and this is even grimmer.

He might have just let that impulse out on these two people.

You know, he wanted to get some murdering in, so he finds any excuse to do some murdering, and then he goes ahead and does it.

It is fucking wild.

And that's all I have to say.

What is your gun instinct on it?

Is that true?

Would Killua have ended up killing that old geezer?

Or is this just a sort of sore loser, sort of impotent rage?

It's hard for me to say.

I think that there is a massive difference between two schmucks in an Airship Corridor and Chaman Natero.

He might have tried, and he might have been ejected from the Hunter exam.

We know that Gisoko got ejected for trying to kill an examiner.

That might have been what would have happened.

But I do think he probably would have tried, which is

something.

Unless there's anything else, this is where we approach Trick Tower.

Oh, I want to see if Sylvie and Dre have stuff to talk about, because I know that

the three of you are big killer of fans.

Right.

Yeah.

Probably my favorite character in the show.

Yeah, probably.

I think mine is.

My favorite character, too.

Yeah.

We were talking about this yesterday.

Dream?

He's up there.

Yeah.

Did you have something there, Sylvie?

I'm just trying to think if we didn't.

Like, I feel like a lot of the stuff we like

kind of covered for the most part from, like...

Yeah.

There's a long discussion that I think will emerge over more episodes.

Yes.

Like, a lot of what I would have to say is like

bringing up more things that happen in the show that we will just get to.

That is kind of the thing.

There is like

in the next couple episodes of this show that we are making, I feel like we'll have a lot more material to work with.

Okay, that sounds great.

Yeah.

So I don't want to, I'm more worried about just letting something slip over the by accident as opposed to

like missing Samuel here.

We can always come back to it.

Hey, guess guess what?

This 140 episode show or whatever, there's a lot of kiloettes.

We are going to talk about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I, yeah,

I wanted to get out that I did have the reaction that the show wanted me to have, and it was a lot of fun.

Yes.

It is a lot of fun.

It's a fun moment.

It's a what the fuck moment.

And it's a great moment.

It's a great thing.

I think it's a great thing to have your show be like, okay, we've shown you the cool skateboard kid.

We've shown you how much fun he has with your favorite new guy, Goan.

Guess Guess what?

Here's him brutally murdering two people for no reason.

Deal with it.

Yes, and no game.

Just it's catharsis for him, presumably.

Right.

Yeah, it's really just a vent.

It's just a, yeah, he's venting.

Two tiny things that I want.

Some people murdered a coat.

It's fine.

Yeah, two tiny things that I want to talk about here.

I've said before that the way the show rolls out information about the world and about the characters that will never not be charming to me,

it doesn't have a consistent pace with which it unfolds information to you.

Sometimes we will have uh characters will remain essentially sort of iconic, uh, uh, uh,

broadly drawn versions of themselves.

You know, here is the spoiled, dreamlike kid, uh, then we learn a little more that he's an assassin, and then eventually someone just comes and hits us in the head with a hammer as we learn that he can transform his hands into sharpened vampire hands.

That's always very funny.

Um, I did have a brief moment here where I was like, Karapika's family were all killed by assassins.

But we learned pretty quickly that I don't think that these things are connected.

I think that this might be a world in which there are multiple gangs of assassins.

Okay, but

that'll be an interesting thing to discover as we discover it.

Whether how many gangs of assassins are they?

How connected or not connected is Kilo's family and the Phantom Troop?

What's going on with all with how why are there so many

roving bands of killers?

Because you fucked the world up, hunters.

You have

poisoned the well of how a society works.

We know Netero.

Netaro's cool.

Oh,

yeah, I know.

Totally.

Could we take five minutes between the episode one or two?

Sure.

All right.

Sweet.

I will be right.

All right.

Bye.

Down comes the airship on top of what I first thought was a large pole in the middle of a field.

And this game was going to be about...

It was a game about a large pillar.

Wrong.

The pillar is a skyscraper.

Right.

It was you immediately fell for the trick of Trick Tower.

The first trick of Trick Tower was how big is this?

And this is the show is full of visual gags and I think that this is a really good one.

Showing you Trick Tower first with no scale reference in it, and then landing the airship on top, and everybody getting out and being like, oh shit, we're on top of this thing, and it's gigantic.

Yeah.

And do we get a time limit from this point?

Or was it?

Yeah, we do.

We do get a time limit immediately.

All they say is, you're at the top of this gigantic thing.

You know, like it's featureless.

Basically, can't see the bottom.

Featureless up top.

Limestone panels.

Almost.

Get to the bottom.

You have 72 hours.

Good luck.

Bye.

Good luck.

Bye.

Now,

are they told it is called Trick Tower?

Because if they are, yes, they are.

They are.

So the first person who tries this makes an extremely stupid decision.

He is a little bit more.

He leans very heavily on the fact that he's a pro-rock climber and not heavily enough on the Hunter Exam's capacity to trick.

And the fact that it's called Trick Tower.

This is our second tricking task, the Swamp of Swindler, Swindler, Swamp.

And he climbs down the side.

Now,

I don't know what I thought was gonna happen here.

I think what I thought was that this trick tower, at this point, my guess was the trick tower.

We've already talked about the film cube on this podcast, haven't we?

Yeah, it came up pretty early.

Remind me.

So, Cube is a Vincenzo Natale movie from the early 2000s.

It is about a bunch of people who find themselves trapped in a series of identical cube-shaped rooms.

Each room contains within it basically a saw trap.

It'll melt you with acid, it'll swing lasers into you and chop you up.

It will, I'm trying to think of another cube trap, burn you alive, something like that.

You know,

I thought he was gonna, yeah, I thought he was gonna climb down the side and like a panel was gonna swing out, or he was gonna get like punched off the side of the tower by a machine.

No,

what happens?

Um,

flying eggs with a baby's face come and chomp him up with their big sharp teeth.

Don't they also have the shots?

And that's not even the trick of the teeth.

How can they have visible butts?

This is not even the trick of the trick tower.

No,

this thing just happens.

Yeah,

this is a tertiary reality of the trick tower, is that you can't climb down it because the egg.

They don't give these creatures a name.

I looked out for the name, right?

I don't think they ever name them.

No, they don't.

They do if you look at the wiki.

Do you want their name?

I would love their name.

Unless anybody wants to guess at the name before.

No, I don't.

I was like, can I come up with a joke really quick?

And no, I didn't.

I shouldn't have said anything.

Flying baby monsters.

You're not.

Chewy cherubs.

Oh.

Chewy cherub is good.

Thank you.

Yeah.

In the wiki, they are called six-legged flying beast.

Okay.

Okay.

Six-legged flying beasts.

Now, notably, these six-legged flying beasts bite and kill and bite this man to death on screen.

But they do not attack anybody on top of the tower.

Are they collaborating with the hunters?

I think they are protecting nests that are

down below.

And so they have a territory.

And

Trick Tower is intentionally built above their sort of danger zone to keep people from climbing down.

So that makes sense.

The way I always thought of it was it's a security measure for what we find out are the...

We've mentioned that there's prisoners in this episode in the tower itself.

And it felt very much like this is like a security measure for you.

Yeah, yeah.

One first thought you might have if you don't know that this is a prison.

We don't at this point.

We don't.

No, we don't.

That's a lot of infrastructure for one year of the hunter exam.

It sure is.

It sure is.

I just want to read two notes that I wrote here.

I thought thought this was when they get bitten and eaten.

I thought this was going to be like saw traps, but it's also nightmare flying baby creatures.

Question mark.

And then I pause and I write on a new line wisely.

There's got to be an inside to this tower, and that's where the saw traps are.

And I was right.

Because at this point, they notice that people are disappearing from the top of the tower more quickly than they could be climbing down the side, I assume.

And Gone,

it is Gone, right?

No, it's Killer.

No, it's Karama.

Killer and Leorio.

No, because there's a great gag here with Gone.

So they discover that there are these rotating secret platforms on the tower.

We get an amazing visual gag as the characters are talking.

We get a guy just treading on a trapdoor and disappearing

down into the tower.

And they notice that there are these, but they only work for one person.

And Gone, in great, just sort of like blithe, gone.

It's just like, oh, there's five of them.

There's one over there and one over there and one over there.

He just points them out.

And they realize that they're all going to go down into.

Oh, sorry, Keith.

Oh, sorry.

Just Karapic and Leoria have been wandering around being like, hey, there's less people.

What's going on?

Meanwhile, yeah, Gone and Kiloa have found like numerous trapdoors that are still working, plus a bunch that people had already fallen through.

While I guess Karapic and Leoria are just chatting.

Yeah.

They figured that they are going to go into separate sort of like

trap paths almost, which would have made for a really cool episode.

And I think what we got was also cool, but I would also have watched this, right?

Which is everybody gets sent down their own separated trap, and we all get to see how the characters would respond alone in different episodes.

There's a very cute moment where Gona's like, no hard feelings if one of us hits a trap.

Yep.

They all say goodbye.

They all tread on the trapdoors and they all fall down into the same room.

Lovely joke.

Beautiful.

Yeah, very quickly executed and well well done leario says uh luck is a skill uh

and he's proof of it uh

what does that mean wow what does luck is a skill mean

well i think it's i think it's i think that he i think leario means it self-evidently

you gotta be good

luck i don't know if i don't know if leario thinks you can train luck but i think that he thinks that there's people who are lucky and people who aren't.

And that is a skill.

And I think that he's lucky.

I think Leorio is a really lucky person.

Oh, Leori's great.

He's so good at this episode.

They all fall down and they realize that

the way this game works is that you are given zero escape bracelets to vote.

on the course of action.

It really is Virtue's last reward.

Like, hopefully, yeah.

Yeah.

You cannot begin until five people arrive.

I wondered who the fifth person was going to be.

My guess was Hisaka, because that seems like the obvious one.

But the actual obvious one, which is the much better decision, is Tonpa returns.

Tonpa is the fifth person, and we are immediately put into just nice

high-stakes plotting where characters have to vote on things, and one member of the vote, we know, is a bad actor.

They all chat, and the game begins.

We know.

We know.

No, we know.

Meanwhile, we are introduced to the master of this facility.

And we don't terribly know what is going on here.

He is chomping away on graham crackers.

And he seems to be watching a big bank of screens.

And I thought that this was going to be sort of a jigsaw type thing.

He watches

what's going on.

He governs it.

But then he says, bring in the prisoners.

And we get...

A really great, terrifying shot, a group shot, of these prisoners with their hands manacled in front of them.

They're wearing these really distinctive cowls, so you can't see really any detail.

And they are shuffled into the room and then sent out into the trick tower because this is a prison.

Yeah.

Ringing the bell, hunters can be prison wardens.

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Well, sorry, Karapika.

What is

going on here?

Is this a world in which there is a state that

arbitrates laws and imprisons people, and then those prisoners are essentially

sort of farmed out to the Hunters Association?

Because we know that by participating in this, they can have their sentence reduced.

We've talked about that.

So is it that the state sends prisoners to the hunters?

Or is it that hunters are given contracts to run prisoners

and they turn them into the hunter games?

Or, and this is the most terrifying answer,

are the hunters the state?

Are the hunters deciding who the criminals are and who they should go out and hunt and doing that and then bringing them here and saying, I don't know, 199 years?

Yeah.

Yep.

Is that it?

And I don't know.

I don't know.

And I think this is deliberate.

The show is so cagey about how hunters fit into the world.

It won't tell you at all.

It won't tell you anything.

Nope.

And it's, you know, something that it reminds me of a little is Pokemon.

You know, Pokemon is a world in which all people talk about non-stop, day in, day out, is Pokemon.

Other careers exist, but they only exist in reference to Pokemon.

Right, it's a world that's set up to totally enable people's addiction to fighting Pokemon.

Yes, except Pokemon is whatever the opposite of KG is about the Pokemon organization.

You know, they tell us fucking everything.

Every piece of information you could want to know about Pokemon is revealed to you in some respect.

This is like what if you were in the Pokemon world, except nobody wanted to tell you what Pokemon were.

Professor Oak comes out, where normally next to him is a Pikachu with the Pikachu censored out.

And it's like, now look, Pokemon,

okay, so hold on, first things first.

You've got to take a test.

Well, no, he just shows up and he says, would you like your beast?

And you're like,

is it going to be?

I have three beasts for you to choose from to tag on your journey.

A Ruse Raven, a frog in waiting, and a hypnosis butterfly.

That's actually funny because I think actually pretty much all those things exist in Pokemon.

There's definitely a hypnosis butterfly.

There's definitely a Ruse Raven.

You go out into the world and half the people in your town have been killed for some reason.

And the other half of the people in your town also have also all just been given a beast and are set out into the world to...

I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't know what the beasts are for.

Well, because, of course, we know that the Pokemon are for killing other Pokemon.

And also labor and also the elite

housework jobs.

We are given none of this shit about the hunters, which means that this moment of

the prison being introduced and not knowing how it dovetails with the hunters is so compelling.

It's like they know that hunters are a mystery and they are testing us with the most frustrating, exciting ways to explore that mystery.

It's great.

Is this...

No, don't answer that.

I was going to say, do we know how the world works?

But I actually don't want to know.

And I think it's also like, you know, maybe a benefit of doing this show that we were able to deliver, and who knows how it would have happened otherwise.

But we were able to deliver that question to you even weeks, even months before starting watching the show, teasing the like, what is a hunter question?

I was not prepared for how complicated the answer will be.

It's not even a complicated answer.

I would take notes if it's a complicated answer or not.

Uh, uh, it's definitely they've made it complicated, uh, but like, I think, watching the show, I definitely think that there's some feelings of what is a, what is a hunter anyway.

But I, I, I wonder how much, because I can't remember, I can't put myself back there.

Uh, I wonder how much it's on the mind of someone who's watching it without that question being sort of prodded at them every week for three hours.

Yeah.

I do feel a little bit more difficult.

It's a fun way to watch this first season.

It's a really fun way to watch this first season.

It's great.

And

I am aware that something I don't want to do is come on this podcast every other week.

And say to you, the listener, what is a hunter I still don't know?

There are only so many times I can say this, and it is interesting criticism.

But I do need to stress to you that I have no idea what is going on and it is a lot of fun uh

test one and maybe we'll test that hypothesis

one you know that there's only so many times that it will be fun

yeah uh okay um

um okay so we made it to the we made it to

hunters can be prison warden wardens we now have fighting against prisoners a sick mental game being played played by this weird prison warden hunter where

with his awful bag of cookies where he munches away he's the he's uh the first uh uh examiner thus far that has not um introduced um himself formally oh in person he is behind a wall of monitors um

We briefly went over the rules of this game, but should I hit those again?

Yeah, let's hit them again.

And then I do want to talk briefly.

This thing ultimately is about a prisoner fight.

There are a couple of games beforehand that are not, uh, I think, much worth talking about.

Um, but let's talk about the rules and then I want to talk about Leorio briefly.

So, there's several games happening simultaneously: number one, reach the bottom of the tower in 72 hours.

Number two, the democracy game, where everyone has to vote on what everyone does.

Number three,

there's a best of five

tournament with these prisoners, and number.

How many was it?

There's an ulterior motive where the prisoners have

one year shaved off their prison sentences for every hour that they delay the contestants.

So if they delay you for the full 72 hours, they get 72 years off their sentences.

If they delay you for five hours, win or lose, I believe,

they get five years off of their sentences.

And so they want to beat you.

They want to win because that would, I guess that would, that's the full 72 if they win.

And then, but they also, even if they lose, want to make it take as long as possible.

Yes.

I think that's all the games happening simultaneously.

Yes.

Oh, there's another game.

Sorry.

Game number six.

Tompa's also trying to ruin it for the contestants.

Yes.

That's the other game.

When we say everybody votes, it's worth being clear.

It's not all the hunters vote on all the other hunters.

You are put into teams of five, and you are trying to get a majority with these little Virtues Last Reward bracelets.

And we get an amazing joke right off the bat here.

They need to vote to open the first door.

It's just a test, you know.

Vote to open the first door.

They all vote yes, except Tonpa, who votes no.

And it's at this point that we reveal that really this is a trial designed to make Leorio mad, the angriest person in the world.

Right.

Something about this makes Leorio, I wrote down, Leorio is such a cantankerous, hair-triggered individual, already impatient after having to wait, presumably, 20 or 30 minutes, for Tompa to fall through the roof, that he is primed to be so angry.

at every possible version of this.

He grabs Tompa by his collar and screams, how could you possibly confuse a zero with an X, which I think is just such a funny line.

And yes, Lero is angry the whole time.

Tompa offers to fight the first man who shows up.

Who is this first guy?

This is Ben Doe.

B-E-N-D-O-T.

Ben Doe, he is a robber and a murderer, and his sentence is for 199 years.

So he killed, presumably.

He did some robberies.

Then he killed some people, murdered them to death.

Then he was caught.

Then he was put in Trick Tower.

And then he says, Then someone said, hey, I have a fun game that you might be playing.

Fun game for you to play.

I only mentioned this because

Killua did kill two guys on the airship.

Right.

Just worth mentioning.

Well, they were.

It's a hunter examined, so even proximity to the hunters, I guess, is some sort of license for certain kinds of violence.

Is it?

Is the game killing you different to the hunters killing each other?

I mean, I think the hunters killing each other is the game killing you.

Yeah, I think that's part of it, right?

Like, the whole thing in Swindler Swamp was like...

I know, there is a very much like a...

We're in a PvP zone now situation.

Yeah.

You know, there's also a sense where, like,

maybe...

Maybe it is like illegal in some sort of technical sense, but Kilo is like, what sort of, what law is going to stop me?

I'm part of an assassin family.

Doesn't make it better.

That's still illegal.

It's not better.

Still illegal.

But I think that maybe he's just like,

I could deal with the consequences of this.

This is not.

But again, I think that it's.

I believe what I said at first, which is that, like,

being even this proximity to Hunterdom is enough to get you

is enough to allow this sort of murder to sort of happen with only

with only with that worst sort of disappointment.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes, it's sort of an inconvenience.

Tompa volunteers to go first to fight this guy and everybody's like, whoa.

He is so brave.

This is so good.

Leorio has shimmering anime eyes when

Tompa talks about sacrificing himself to be the guinea pig to see what they're up to.

He's about to cry.

Leorio genuinely respects Tompa's bravery and seems to really respect bravery in general.

We saw this when he, when he was like, when he was like, I have to go and fight Hisaka because I don't back down from a fight.

This seems to be sort of core to Leorio's.

And

it's sort of the mirror of the cantankerousist because the thing that he gets so mad at is

like

someone refusing to act in the greater good.

Which is...

Also, you get the impression he's kind of pedantic and cranky.

I think, for example, if I took too long putting my shoes on before leaving the house, Leoria would shout at me.

Yeah, there's also the, we learned, we, we've, we have long since learned his backstory, but there was that, the period of like four episodes where, like, I, I think that he uses sort of being an unlikable crank as a shield for like not getting too close to people.

Um, yes, because he's deeply sad.

Because he's deeply sad, yeah.

Yeah.

Uh,

Tonpa immediately forfeits.

Uh, it's a very funny where he does a whole power-up thing where you're like, you know,

Tonpa, I think, probably can fight pretty good.

It takes a lot of skill to just not accidentally die during 30-something hunter exam attempts.

You know, like that speaks to a

real...

a real ability that he's doing.

There's at the very least like a baseline of competence with Tonpa to

the fact that he's been doing this for multiple decades, right?

A baseline of competence in terms of hunter exam,

not just, I mean, he's way above a normal person by leaps and bounds.

Like, we've seen

bodybuilders and pro wrestlers and marathon runners and professional rock climbers like flame embarrassingly flame out because just being a normal, really strong, powerful person isn't.

isn't enough.

It's not what, that's not what it takes to be a hunter.

So like, it says something that he can do this, and I believe that he probably could pass the hunter exam almost any year that he wanted.

So, we get a lovingly rendered like a power-up scene.

They get, they, they, they catch fire, both the murderer and Tonpa, you know, um,

just do a powering up, and then Tonpa immediately surrenders, and we get a beautiful,

it's so funny.

He's instantly a worm.

He turns into a worm instantly.

Yeah, please, I'm just a little guy, and it's my birthday.

I think I just really quickly want to give like props to Madhouse and

I had the director's name up just a second ago.

The team animating this really killed it with the comedy of Tonpo's like getting ready to fight stance and whatever.

It's so good.

It's really good.

It is fantastic.

He has fire coming out of his eyes.

The whole screen turns red.

He looks like he's going KOKEN.

He really does.

And when he surrenders, we cut back to the crew, and they have

been drawn in a really funny way.

It's like,

how would I describe this?

It's like all the line work has gotten much thicker on them.

It's not quite the low-key tail shots that we've had before.

Yeah, it's almost like they've used crayons.

It's really good.

I love it.

Just this one shot.

They're all so mad.

Leorio is furious.

And this is one loss.

They come back, and we learn pretty quickly Tonpa admits that he is the rookie crusher.

Mask off, rookie crusher Tonpa.

Shit-eating grin.

Yeah, I don't care about passing at all, ever.

I just come here to ruin your day.

Me too, Tompa.

No, I'm looking to love this.

Like, I'm just into this.

I just, I love this shit.

I live for this.

I'm the love of the game.

That's what I need.

For me, the rookie crushing is the juice.

It is so good.

and it is the most

interesting moment for the mask to come off because now they're stuck with him and they know the the the fact that we have dispensed with the mystery of tonpa's uh allegiances comparatively early in the trial is so much more interesting than tonpa trying to destabilize them and it constantly being like this will they won't they find out you can play with the stake so much more explicitly if you reveal that to to the characters that he is evil and you can't do anything about it.

And it's during these episodes where they talk about the sort of like the real hazard of the path of majority rule, as it's called, is like the

inner group conflict.

And

I think it's the ninth episode where they mention that, but

I think that this, like, again, kind of just like Tump has got this shit down to a science.

Like, he's like, no, if I reveal this now, they know not to trust me, but now they're going to stop trusting each other too.

But there's a counterbalance here to Tompa's plan that Kilua ends up noticing a couple minutes later, which is that actually

Tompa maybe did

the best case scenario.

If he couldn't beat this guy, him giving up right away after they both agreed to a deathmatch, actually,

and

uh

beno granting him his surrender instead of insisting on killing him uh means that uh they lose but they waste essentially no time and beno would have slowly and agonizingly tortured him to death maybe over the course of 72 hours

this is this is extraordinary the the the moment that the show takes just like

it's like a window opens up and it becomes just cold, bleak horror.

Yeah, into the show, but also into Kilo specifically.

That he's the one that notices.

Yes, yes.

That he's the one that has the same idea that the 199-year murderer has.

Yeah.

Bendo, I believe is his name.

B-N-D-O-T.

Yeah, Bendo, yeah.

B-E-N-D-O-T.

Yeah, it's very much Kilo being like, well, that would have been my plan.

Yeah, and they don't...

I'm going to say what they say because

it is worth making explicit that the show takes this turn.

They say that what the guy was planning on doing was taking out Tonpa's throat or tongue so he can't surrender and then torturing him for 72 hours.

Leave it specifically crushing his larynx.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Could be a dub or so difference, maybe.

It's wonderful.

It's just the most frightening pivot.

And it's a brief pivot.

It's not like the show takes this move and then it's like, and we are now this dark for the next episode.

We just get this, and you're right.

It's the fact that Killer spots this is so cool.

I hadn't noticed that.

The angle that we are looking at the show and looking at the characters and looking at the world in shifts just

so slightly for a second and then shifts back.

It's wonderful.

And that's the end of the episode.

Yeah, we do briefly meet the next contestant, but we don't do anything

with them yet.

We also know that Gone is going to be the one challenge.

Right.

Sedokan, a serial bomber who is in for 149 years, shows up and says, Who will face me?

Sedokan is like a lanky, long-haired person, and Gon puts his hand up and says, Me, I'll do it.

Little fucking bomber twink.

I know that he was sentenced for 149 years for serial bombings, but I did at first read this as

the crime was committing 149 serial bombings.

Yes, I read that too.

I actually had a...

I.

Yes, I had a similar reaction.

Which is so many bombings to do.

It's a lot of bombings.

Yeah, don't do that many bombings.

Episode 9 begins.

Now, I would like very briefly to say that when we finished the last episode, Keith said aloud, the next episodes are called Showdown on the Airship, Majority Rules or something, and then Beware of the Prisoners.

And I didn't understand what you were talking about, and I couldn't understand how we were going to get there.

Didn't know what the prisoners were.

I had no idea what it was going to be about.

This is the point at which I remembered that this episode was called Beware of Prisoners, and I thought to myself, indeed, beware of them.

Lo, they come, because it is revealed that, yes, multiple prisoners are now here.

We begin with a great little conversation between Sedokan, this bomber, and Gon.

And the conversation goes like this.

Sedokan says, look,

I'm not very good at fighting and running around, but I am pretty good at thinking.

And Gon says, huh, buddy, I'm not very good at thinking, but I am very good at fighting and running around.

Two honest actors being honest with each other and putting all their cards on the table.

But

something about like, man, I'm sure glad there's no written test during the hunter exam so uh i think that was in i think that was in episode

the net episode yeah but yeah

no

again

we and we're going

jack i think you're i think the the the the stuff you're going to talk about right now i would categorize as uh i think what in episode one when we were discussing the second episode of the show uh you called uh gone's Mistakes.

I think he's going to make another one of those quote-unquote, very deeply quote-unquote mistakes shortly.

So go ahead.

Yes, the actual name is Ghon's Mistake.

It's like Joker's trick.

Okay.

He's about to commit Ghon's mistake.

Yes.

So we get into a trap, basically.

This guy says, I've got two candles.

We basically are going to play a game to see how long

who can keep their candle alight the longest.

I wrote down, these candles are definitely bombs.

And we learned that there's a trick.

They have to choose.

Do you want the longer candle or the shorter candle?

We get a sort of cute little scene of Karapica and Leorio playing cards in Karapica's Mind Palace as Karapica talks us through the risks of this choice, which is basically,

you know,

do we know that he knows that we know that he knows which candle has been booby-trapped?

It's like that kind of thing.

It's the Sicilian game in Princess Bride.

Yes.

Yeah, it's exactly this.

But Goan

The way they resolve this is so good.

It's so funny.

Right.

Goan very cutely asks them what he should do because he's like, I know this isn't my strong suit.

I'll ask my friends.

Karapika, during his Mind Palace, decides there's actually no point in us trying to figure this out because there is no real way to think our way out of this.

I'll just let Goan decide because I trust Goan.

But

Kilua, who does not really trust Goan in this way,

but loves him,

is like, he doesn't really think things through.

And actually, that is the trick.

That is Goan's trick, is that not thinking things through really, really works out for him.

Why does he pick the longest candle?

Oh, it'll burn.

It'll take longer to burn.

It'll take longer to remember.

He picks the longer one because it's bigger, take longer to burn.

I love my special boy so much.

I love my special

green boy.

He's right.

He's right.

It'll take longer to burn.

Yes,

in this,

if we are doing the Sicilian thing, Goan would pick whichever wine he thinks looks tastiest.

Right?

Whichever glass was more full.

Yeah, I'm not interested in that.

And in the same way that revealing Tonpa's mask-off moment was so much more interesting than holding it back later, this is so much more an interesting way to resolve this than the the classic, can they figure out which one is trapped and pick the other?

This revelation that Goan is not very smart, but you basically can't trick him because he will fall straight into your trap, go, oh, a trap, and then overcome it.

Right.

This is why I can't help but think of Kiryu when I watch Hunter Hunter because Kiryu is like very similar kind of character that like will fall for every trick but can punch his way out of every trick.

So he doesn't even have to be on guard for tricks.

No.

Because he's just like, well,

I'm immune to tricks.

So I can just do, I can just proceed forward on that.

That's fascinating because it's like, oh, you mean immune to falling for tricks, right?

No, no, I fall for tricks.

No, no.

Immune to the consequences of tricks.

Yeah.

And speaking of tricks.

Sylvie, do you want to explain what the actual trick of the candles is?

What is going on here?

I love this.

So we get a review.

I think it starts off pretty standard where they're both holding their candles.

They're lit.

There's a bit of a gust that makes Gon a little worried that it might go out at one point.

And then, suddenly,

right on cue,

the flame on Gon's candle starts burning extremely bright and extremely powerfully, melting the candle very quickly.

Not all the way, but we get this sort of internal monologue from Setokon about how, I believe it's just made of oil or coated in oil.

I can't remember the specifics.

Yeah,

it's oil-soaked.

Karapika

guesses that it is gunpowder-soaked, but we get the confirmation that it's actually oil, and I like that there's just a little mismatch there.

We also get the confirmation that no matter what, he would have been, Gone would have been given the oil-soaked candle because

it wasn't actually four candles.

Yeah, it wasn't actually about

thinking your way out of it.

It was just about, it was a sleight of hand.

And so

the

mismatch of the big candle and the small candle was like a disguise for the sleight of hand.

It was the sleight part, I guess, of the sleight of hand.

And the way that Gon handles this is, once again,

I love the way this implicitly

solves puzzles.

It's great because it's also just like, oh yeah, no, of course you could do that, but you don't really jump to it.

What Gon does is now that the candle's burning strong enough, he just sets it down, runs as fast as he can to Setokon, and blows Setokon's candle out because his candle's flame is strong enough that it can just be left on its own and not get blown out by the wind coming up from underneath the sort of like platform that they're on.

It's lovely.

You can't trick him.

The speed at which he figures this out.

I mean, it's we get like

a long shot of the panic

that I think is sort of like it's it's more to show everyone's reaction to what's happening than it is to illustrate an actual passage of time.

Yeah.

But the but the like actual amount of time between the candle burning at a thousand times the rate that it should be and going just being like, oh, it's so strong I can put it down.

And then just going over, like,

I don't know if this is true, but I get like the mental image of Gohan like standing on his toes and just like blowing up the candle and being like, ha ha.

Shot really beautifully.

It's so funny.

It's really funny.

Oh, I love this show.

Yeah.

yeah, and uh, it's just a really good moment of showing Gon's, like, I think the thing that I always kind of like classify between the difference between Gon and Kilo is: Kilo has got a lot of things that he's learned about like the world and how to handle these things and like you see it and stuff, yeah, the netero fight and stuff.

And Gon is just like so instinctual about everything, yeah.

Um, yeah, kilo's analytical and very cautious, um,

and and that's why he like and he's also so he's sure of himself.

And he's like, at this point, he's such the center of his own world that he finds it difficult to respect Goan, even as he's sort of like magnetically drawn to him.

In a way that a lot of people are magnetically drawn to Goan.

And we see it like kind of over and over.

Right.

But Kilo is coming from a world where, like, he's never been magnetically drawn to anyone.

And so to be magnetically drawn to Goan is like fascinating, even in his resistance to sort of like

to respect someone that he's kind of considers to be beneath him.

And so that's, I mean, it's so satisfying to watch Kilo be like, I wouldn't trust Goan with thinking about things.

And then to immediately be proven wrong again after that really just happened on the airship too, coupled with Kilo's sort of insistence that like, like he's really trying to make Goan be as his sidekick.

And it's not working.

Goan is like not, like, he doesn't even notice that Kilo is trying to do that.

But he's very pleasant about it.

He is pretty pleasant about it, yeah.

Goan is very pleasant about.

He likes Kilua, clearly.

Oh, yeah, he likes Gila.

He loves Kilua.

Yeah.

But you get the impression that Goan likes everybody.

Yeah.

And you do not get that impression from Kiloa.

No, not at all.

And we haven't, we're about to enter Karapika hour, so I don't want to jump the gun here.

But I do love that

Karapika has faith in Ghon to such an extent that even after doing all this Mind Palace card game playing, he is like, of course Goan will figure this out.

And I think Karapika is very aware of Goan's mistake,

of the power of Gohan's mistake.

Right, the power of Goan's mistake, yeah.

Accidentally leading to something wonderful.

So it's just sort of like, okay, look, this is going to be okay.

Do we have episode titles?

We We haven't edited an episode, so there's been no episode titles.

I'm putting a mark here: the Power of Guns Mistake episode title.

Power X.

Yeah, we started plus signs.

Ooh.

One of my first pitches for the name of this show that I discarded just because the SEO was so bad was I wanted to call this show Hunter.

Just one.

Lou dispensing with all this bullshit.

This show's just called Hunter.

What about Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, Hunter?

I thought about that too.

That was another one that I thought of discarding.

Same reason.

Saying the same word multiple times doesn't actually improve your SEO.

No, it doesn't.

Okay.

I love this next thing.

This is

the beautiful

power of...

the like

the of the writer of the ability of the writer to like do the exact thing to do the exact thing.

You just like, hey, what is the perfect guy for Karapika to fight?

We could just make that up.

We could just like totally feed him the absolute perfect opponent.

Yes, I would like to say before we start talking about this that I would like to update my favorite character.

It's an emotional moment for me.

My new favorite character is Karapiko.

From Goan?

From maybe Leorio.

Okay.

I think I am Goan, but I think Leorio was my favorite until now, and I think my new favorite character is Karapiko.

Let us begin.

Okay.

It is such an it's just such an amazing ability to just be like,

like, there's there's

there's just no holding back here.

They just serve this blue freak up on a delicious platter.

Let's describe the blue freak.

Okay.

He has a green sort of, you know,

capuchin monk

He really does.

He has

blue,

you know, sort of weirdly blue skin.

Like, it's not blue like Kilua's shirt, undershirt, or like Karapika's.

He looks like a smuff.

Yeah, he's blue like a Smurf is blue.

He has wires going from his back into his head, like two wires.

He's got.

I don't have an actual picture up, and I'm.

This is my favorite.

I have a link to the picture in the chat if you want.

Okay, great.

Sure, sure.

Oh, right.

Great detail.

Oh, he's got a metal egg on his ear, or instead of an ear.

He's got a black eye, or perhaps they describe a wound on his face.

This might be a wound around his eye.

I don't know.

He's got sort of a Frankenstein face.

He has like bolts in his chin.

He has missing teeth.

He has scars, like

literally Frankenstein-style scars on his face.

He's missing a nose.

He's missing both eyelids, and he's missing all the...

He has no skin around one eye and the other eye, the skin is like blue, like purple, like bruised.

And he has 19 hearts.

19 hearts.

Like he has upgraded Link very single-mindedly.

And there's one other detail that we'll save for a

And he's fucking terrifying.

We've seen this blue guy.

So the prisoners wear their cowls and shackles until they stand up to fight.

So we know that one of these people is a huge blue man.

And the reveal is brilliant.

He shows up and he says, he has a great line.

He says, I have killed 19 people, but I'm rather dissatisfied with that number.

Being like doing the sort of

Undertaker bringing 19 coffins and one,

you know, like the thing the other taker did where he brought coffins to the ringside to be like, and you're the 50th person I'm going to kill or whatever.

I don't remember exactly how it worked.

Does someone want to describe the ploy?

Well, oh, just before

the crew look at him and they say, a serial hunter.

That's fascinating.

This is a new type of hunter that we have heard.

We've heard about gourmet hunters.

Oh, I know.

In mind, they call them a serial killer.

Now we're dealing with serial killers.

Wow.

In the...

No, this is fascinating.

In the subs, they call him a serial hunter.

Oh, my sub called him a serial killer.

The dub called him a serial killer as well.

This might be a time mentioning that, like, this is on several different streaming services, and so titles can vary between them.

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I briefly mentioned this before, but yeah, there is sub-discrepancy

sometimes.

But yeah, my sub definitely called him a serial killer.

Wow.

Yeah, I'm actually surprised to hear that

there's a dub out there or a sub out there that calls him a serial hunter.

Yeah, that's a very interesting change.

It made me sit up in my chair.

Yeah.

Yeah, I bet.

Yeah.

What's the ploy here?

Whose ploy are we talking about?

So there's

the blue man, by the way, whose name is

Majitani.

And he is...

I guess this is the beginning of the ploy here.

He's in prison for 108 years for multiple crimes, including fraud and blackmail.

Very funny.

We have this murderer.

He says something else at the very beginning.

They tip the hand here kind of right away, if you notice.

When

Satokan comes back after his loss, he says, like, yeah, cheap tricks, blah, blah, blah.

Like, if you really want to fool someone, you've got to make some sacrifice.

oh it's great

and you're like what does that mean and what it means is this guy is a loser he's nothing he is a paper tiger

he is

and we get into oh sorry sylphie no i was gonna say i think

i think they actually they do we get do we find out what the serial killer thing

that's talking about

is that talking about him because it's talking about him because he said that he killed 19 people.

And then they go, oh my god, it's lying about it.

But he's lying about it.

Do we find out what his actual crime is in this episode?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Blackmail and fraud.

Blackmail and fraud.

Blackmail and fraud.

Yeah, I want to just mention that because I love that.

Yeah.

That this guy's whole thing is just being

a weird trickster.

Bullshit artist.

So

it's fun watching sort of Leorio is scared because Leorio does not have good analytical abilities or at least not on par with

Gun and Kilua, both of whom are fine.

Kilua is like, What are you talking about?

Karapika's totally got this.

And then they look over at Goan and Gon's like, Yep.

And Karapika takes off his like

sort of

God, how would I describe it?

It's almost like an overshirt that Karapika wears.

Yeah, that has this symbol of the

pajamas for the second time.

To reveal his pajamas.

I love his little costume.

It's great.

Yeah, I love his little pajamas.

Good costume design is just a very simple one-color outfit that looks great.

It's just so ornate when he's got the thing on.

He looks so official, and then he takes off one piece, and it's like, he's ready for bed.

He's got a pajama set on.

Yeah.

Night nights.

And then he says this line, which was part of why I started to make him my favorite character.

He says, how shall we fight?

There's nothing I can't do.

Not as a brag, but as a like, look,

look, I'm flexible.

Dealer's choice.

Dealer's choice.

It's the person saying, what do you want to eat for dinner?

I I can make anything with the ingredients we have in the house.

It'll be fine.

Immediately, we're inside Majitani's head, and he's like, what?

Drifting perspective again.

Like, we get this sort of increasing,

like, cooperative cooperation from Karapika, who's just like, yeah, anything you throw at me, it's fine.

Like, we'll do things your way.

Let's get this done.

And Majitani's increasingly like, why isn't he afraid?

Why isn't he afraid of me?

He keeps adding rule after rule to the fights.

It's really funny to try and psych out Karapika, except he just psyches himself out further and further with each new rule he adds.

And Karapika just like

comfortably is like, oh, yeah, that's fine.

We'll do it.

We'll do a deathmatch.

That's fine.

And we'll try and make it very short.

Or I can't remember what some of the other stipulations are.

No weapons.

Yeah, he takes out his weapons.

He's like, maybe he has a concealed weapon.

Oh, no weapons.

And then Karapaka's like, oh, okay, no weapons.

Takes out his weapon, ties it aside.

And then Imagina is like, oh, you had a concealed weapon.

And then stuff gets real.

Well, not quite.

No?

Magitani,

the fight starts, and Majitani does a big jump and a punch.

And it appears that

with his massive strength, he has

punched a hole in the floor.

But it's yet another trick.

He's actually installed special floor-breaking iron rods in his face.

He's got steel implants.

He's got steel implants in his hands.

To do this, to psych people up by punching the ground.

Yeah.

I don't even know what.

Why would you do that?

I don't know.

It's a punch.

To psych them out.

Yeah.

Oh, they surrender after seeing how strong I am type thing, right?

But it's like a fucking hunter exam.

It also only needs to fail once and you die.

Right.

You only need to meet someone like Karapika, for example.

Right.

This is where it gets real.

I do briefly want to shout out

Killua's pose during this.

It's a pose that I've seen Killua do a few times, and I love it.

He, like, puts his hands up behind his head, like, he's relaxing onto his hands.

Yeah, except he's catching for me.

It's great.

He looks great.

He turns around, and we see on his back

a spider tattoo.

We get the whole little thing about the spiders.

We see a big silhouette of characters.

We see a big silhouette of, I would say, familiar characters.

Oh, maybe so.

Yes, because this is the sigil of the phantom troop.

A shot of the phantom troop, they get the big silhouette.

And I will say that there's a certain, you know, there might be, like, for example, someone who is a mummy there.

There might be a man with long ears.

There might be Crolo Lusilpha, the man we know.

There might be two small children uh you know i'm beginning to suspect that i might have seen these people already and karapaka's eyes turn red for the first time this is so great we've been the whole time

wait really we see it very briefly on the ship in the first episode where he appears

when he is fighting leorio no when when he's describing why he wants to be a hunter to the captain

oh wow

that's so cool do they turn red before we learn?

Yes, we do.

Because we first learn about the they're going to take your eyes and sell them on the black market.

And in fact, they do that to your whole family thing during the tunnel scene.

So that's great.

Right.

So we learned about the Kurda and about how he was the last Kurda and how he wants to hunt the Phantom Troop.

But we didn't learn about the eyes except seeing his eyes turn red.

Oh, it's wonderful.

Yeah.

This is good writing.

Tell the viewer that something cool happens to a character when they're in high emotional tension.

then put them in situations of high emotional tension, but clearly it's not significant enough for them to turn their eyes red, and then have this moment.

It lands so well.

And then the fight begins,

and then it ends.

He just runs up and punches this guy in the oh, well, I was like, oh, he shows himself for a second.

He is going to kill this man.

Yeah, he doesn't.

He doesn't.

He nearly does.

He does punch him so hard that his entire body goes vertical with his head on the ground.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah,

he is for,

you know, for,

as much as we know, he is passed out face down on the ground after a big punch.

And then Karapika says, if you ever mention the Phantom Troops again, I will kill you.

Because we learned straight away that...

Oh, so firstly, this guy claimed that he was one of the four kings of the Phantom Troop.

That's interesting.

Phantom Troop has some sort of organization about four kings.

I don't know.

I don't know if this is true.

It probably is.

And then we learned that Karapika knew straight away that this man was lying and was lying even about being a member of the Phantom Troop.

He even knew that he was lying before he saw the Phantom Troop tattoo.

Because of the

heart tattoos.

The lives have taken tattoos, I believe, right?

Oh, well, so that was part of it.

When he saw the tattoo, he was like, a Phantom Troop member would never

keep keep track of how many lives they've taken because they don't care.

They kill too many people.

And they kill too many people.

And then it was also that they keep their number in the spider.

So your tattoo is wrong.

But

he also tells Gonakila that he knew that he was

not strong right away.

Like he, there was, he never thought that this guy was powerful.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's great.

Really good.

But then he just went into a rage upon seeing the spider.

And yeah, and in fact, goes into a rage upon seeing spiders generally.

Everyone looks nervous, even Kilua.

Everyone looks really nervous.

And in fact, Leorio is like, and this is just another good Leorio and Karapica moment.

Leorio is like,

should we be worried about you killing us?

Basically.

He's like, are we in danger from you?

And Karapica is like, no, don't worry about it.

Really good moment of Karapika just like slumping down, sitting on the floor, shaking.

The proximity of

even evoking the Phantom Troop made Karapika so angry that he might as well have been fighting the Phantom Troop.

By the way, I've got here Kilua's shocked face is really funny.

Okay, so he's still got his hands behind his head, but he just has a tiny little mouth open, like, oh.

Meanwhile, Leorio is like, oh, God.

Karapaka is not hurt at all.

Oh, it's really sad, actually.

So Leorio, I can't remember.

It might be Leorio or Gone says, are you okay?

Asking, you know, are you emotionally?

How do you feel?

Right.

And Karapaka says, there's no single wound on me.

I'm, you know, I'm fine.

It's a weird way to say that, too.

Yeah, it's just like, buddy, oh, dear.

There's no wound on me after this is just good character writing.

And I think you read Ghan's question right.

That's really not what he meant.

Because obviously, you didn't take a punch.

Why would you be hurt?

No, he's looking out for his friend, and Karapika is so

not warped, but shaped by trauma that he's like, I'm fine.

I've not been hurt.

I can't even conceive of the mental and emotional trauma that has been done to me.

There's even a line where Karapika is like relieved that he has that rage still.

He's sitting on the ground, he's slumped over.

It's a very sad position that he's in, but he says, but this means that the rage in me remains as strong as ever.

I suppose I should be happy.

And meanwhile, I mean, just look at this.

This is pitiful.

This is a pitiful face.

Hold on.

Just slumped over, shadow across his eyes, just like, oh, it looks like someone took out like half the bones from his body, just like totally exhausted.

Yeah, what a great character.

You could so easily write this, like, that's such a beautiful shot.

He's got his like elbows resting on his knees and his hands like hanging limp between his knees.

You could so easily write this revenge character as being someone who is just so furiously powered by revenge at all times that they would almost resemble something more like Leorio.

You know, they would be this hair trigger character.

But the fact that we have Karapika, and I also think that the character who is mild-mannered but reveals himself to have a vengeful vengeful streak, is another stock character you see a lot.

Not really, but we've seen someone try to do the Karapika character a second time,

and it I think does not work out nearly as well.

Your favorite version of Goan

Jack, Naruto.

His famous Kilua-style

counterpart is Sasuke, whose

plot is essentially lifted one-for-one from Karapika openly.

I mean, I can't remember his name right now.

Kishimoto, the author?

Yeah, yeah.

He basically is like, yeah, I love Hunter Hunter.

I love Togashi.

Sasuke is Karapika.

Except instead of the Phantom Troop, it's what if it was his big brother?

What if it was...

Well,

they've got the special red eyes to give them powers.

They've got the person that kills their entire clan.

Someone has been

taking the eyes out and selling them.

I mean, it's just really a one-for-one sort of.

It's really funny.

It is wild.

Because, I mean, like, I came to Hunter Hunter after I had watched a lot of Naruto as a kid and being like, oh, okay, sure.

Right.

They got two eyes.

Sasuke is these two characters much together.

Right.

He really is.

Yeah, he is sort of a Karapika with the sort of

leanings of

Kilua.

It's very funny.

I love Naruto.

I would never say Garua.

I'm also a bit of a Kilua.

Now that I think about it, actually.

Gara is also a little Kiluauka.

Gara is also a Kilua, yeah.

It's sort of just they're both

Kilua Karapikas, but with a different mixture.

Because Gara ends up becoming a lot more Karapika as the series goes on.

I will say,

did they say anything about the red eyes actually having...

I think they just changed color.

I don't think it gives power to Karapika.

It's just like...

Well, okay, we did see him.

We saw him be really fast and do a big punch.

I think Karapika's just capable of that, though.

I think the implication we're supposed to take away from that is like

Karapika is capable of doing this sort of things, but only feels the urge to when they're in this heightened emotional state.

And I think that's more of a, it's more of a battle rage.

Yeah, because there's...

There is something to be like, a lot of Karapika's character is a lot of just like simmering anger hidden underneath this very calm, very controlled, like

outward face.

I also love that

when his eyes aren't red, they're gray.

Yes.

And he feels so gray.

Oh my god.

God, Karapica's fucking great.

And

you know that.

Guys, you know that Karapica would just be like a really cool friend to hang with, right?

Oh, yeah.

I think they all would be.

Me just abandoning any criticism here.

I'd like to hang out with Karapica.

I'd like to be friends with all these guys.

I do think that Karapaka would have fucking obliterated Leorio on the boat in episode

instant.

I think that, like, okay, so the 99 series, which means potentially also the manga, is much more willing to give you like a competent Leorio.

But I think it's like, really

interesting how good of a job they do of saying like Leorio can can hang but just barely and just because he's also really lucky uh like he might be but he but also that makes him miles and miles better than just some guy um

in a way that is like

I would say unfortunately underdemonstrated in the show.

Like I wish that they would show Leorio like coming up against a normal person.

Yeah.

Just to be like, look, look, he's not embarrassing.

He's actually crazy.

Yeah.

You know, like, he's beating out, he's beating out people who have trained for years and years and years to be hunters who have like died or flamed out, you know, in this exam and in exams past.

Right.

Yeah.

Though I do think we've mentioned in the first few episodes how a lot of the strength of Leorio's character comes from him just being like the dude of the group, like the regularist guy.

The regular dude, the crew.

At some point, you've got to admit that he ran 100 kilometers yeah no absolutely i mean

okay we can't get i'm poisoned by knowledge and i'm yeah yeah yeah this is a conversation we should definitely come back to though because i i do think leorio gets more shine later but he

one of my all-time favorite moments in a show in any show is a leorio moment yeah leorio does some fantastic stuff in the show um but i do definitely think he kind of gets the short end of the stick when you compare him to the other three protagonists yeah yeah who are superhumans Who are literally just fucking superheroes.

Yeah.

It's a shame because it's like,

it's kind of like,

you know, Batman hanging out with Superman.

Yes.

But they don't, but there's not like...

Batman's chill.

But like Leorio doesn't get his own comic with its own millions of fans.

So you never get to see like the Leorio comic where Leorio is the star and is doing all the cool things on his own without Superman there to sort of like be the one that actually literally has superpowers.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Anyway.

And then I think we're about there.

We are immediately back into the kind of mode that I like this show in across episode breaks, where we cut the episode with the implication that we're going to pick up exactly where we left off in the same room.

You know, none of this messing about on an airship.

We

is this.

You'll be glad to know that we know that we've been in this mode for quite a bit, I think.

It works really well for me.

I mean, something that I love, especially in

longer form shows, like hour-long shows, is when

an episode...

When the episodes are generally quite separate and you hit a two-parter that feels like it is connected very strongly.

I remember in the first season of Succession,

the penultimate episode took place at a wedding and ended in a high-tension place, and then the final episode just picked up exactly where you left off at the wedding.

And that felt great to be like, oh, we are in it.

We are moving with the characters through this.

There's no sort of abstraction of time.

That feels really good.

But are we done with this room of Trick Tower?

We are, right?

All the prisoners have been beaten.

No.

There's one more fight?

There's two more.

There's two more.

What the fuck?

Leario's score is one to one, correct?

Leo hasn't gone.

And yeah, well, we don't know how many fights there are left, but Leario hasn't gone and

Kilo hasn't gone.

And we know at the very end of this, Leario goes, It's my turn.

Yes, yeah.

So, uh, we think Leorio is gonna win.

I mean,

I know, I know what happens.

Keith and I don't answer this.

I don't remember.

You don't remember?

Oh, yeah.

So, I guess Jack and I get to vote.

Okay,

next episode.

In excruciating detail, I remember so much about this that we will, the answer will be obvious why next time we record.

My guess is that it is going to be a fucking

like gargantuan trial.

It's going to be a trial of Hercules, and he is going to win at great personal cost.

Well, no, not great personal cost in the sense of world chattering stakes.

It's going to suck for him, but he's going to win.

Yeah.

Or, I guess the mirror image of that is he's going to lose, but it's going to be awesome for him.

We sort of got that a bit with no, Hisuka wiped the floor with him.

I was going to say he had a real successful fight with Hisaka, even though he lost.

He did.

He passed.

He got a good moment, though.

I still think that's probably one of the best Leorio moments we've had in.

Sorry, which one when he runs up on Hisuka?

He just challenges Hisoka again instead of going away.

Yeah, that's my style.

I love that shit.

And they get knocked out in one punch.

Yeah, no.

One punch specifically designed not to kill him.

Yeah.

Incredible.

Yeah.

But I think that's us for today.

Is there anything else people want to talk about?

Are there any questions or segments that we want to hit?

I just want to double up on saying that I love that airship airship episode.

I love all of the different pieces of character stuff that we get from there.

I love seeing The Bean again.

I love getting some more Netaro stuff.

I love watching sort of the multiple modes of Gone and Kiluwa, of like Kilua kind of being...

you know, trying to be the boss of Goan and it not working, of them being like really playful kids and being friends and having fun, of Goan being really impressive, and of Karapik and Leorio just sort of like hanging out and falling asleep because they're tired because they're not

total freaks like Goan Kilo.

Yeah.

Oh, I'm having so much fun making this.

Yeah.

That's great.

This is great.

Anything else to say before we go?

No, I just think it's worth

one, actually.

I did to because I mentioned the director earlier, Hiroshi Kojina is the name.

I looked it up.

Just so anyone who was listening and was like, Sylvie didn't say the name of the guy.

That's his name.

Obviously,

animated things aren't a work of one person.

Animation teams are massive, but I wanted to point that out.

And I guess the other thing is, like, should we talk about...

I guess other people have closing comments too, but we're doing more episodes than three next week, correct?

Next time is our first four.

Hey, everyone, this is Keith just hopping in to let you know that we actually are not doing a four-parter for the next episode.

We only did three.

So we're doing episodes 10, 11, and 12.

Episode 13 is a recap episode, and episode 14 will not be included in the next set of episodes that we're watching.

Everything else that we are about to say is accurate.

Okay, bye.

Wow, Keith, can you please read the episode names?

Because I did actually love hearing the episode names and not knowing what the fuck you were talking about.

Yes, I can read the episode names.

We have episode 10, Trick to the Trick.

Episode 11, Trouble with the Gamble.

Episode 12, Last Test of Resolve.

And episode 14,

hit the target.

Now this, you got to double check on this because your streaming service or whatever may or may not even have an episode 13.

Episode 13 is a recap episode.

Yeah.

Should we watch it?

I don't think it's a bad idea to watch it.

Like it's.

Yeah, it's not a terrible.

It really is just like a 20-minute recap of everything that's happened so far.

You're free to, including the three episodes that you're about to watch.

There is like a slight framing to it that has a couple cute moments, but for the most part, it isn't a thing that you need to do.

It does have a cute framing.

Yeah, that's the actual show.

I will say, none of these episodes are.

There's no prisoners in the title of these episodes.

They all sound fairly straightforward.

Trick to the trick.

I don't even know what that means.

Well, it's about when you fight, it's like fighting fire with fire, but for tricks.

Oh, I see.

Can I give a little bit

of a warning?

Maybe.

Yes.

Maybe this is unnecessary.

Go for it.

Do your best to avoid the

episode thumbnails.

Oh, that's true.

Actually, I think

11 that has

a big

thumbnail.

I can download those fucking Netflix extensions that blur that shit.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sounds good.

Sounds good.

Yeah.

As always, this show is made possible due to the outrageous generosity of the listeners of this podcast and the other things that we do, you can find that Patreon at friendsatthetable.cash.

Obviously, we all do Friends at the Table together.

If you're not listening to that, you should give it a shot.

It's a great show.

We're in the deep in the middle of a season right now.

But if you're new to the show, maybe check out

the last season we did, sort of a standalone, currently,

fantasy-ish, horror-ish season called Sang Fiel, or the season before that, which is the prequel to the season that we're on now,

Partisan.

Those are both great.

That's a sci-fi one.

Yeah, if you like mech anime, you should listen to Partisan.

Oh, yeah, and it's really good.

I mean, I just love Partisan.

It's so good.

You should also check out our Twitch and follow us on there.

If you're not, we also upload all those videos on YouTube.

Those are both friends at the table, youtube.com/slash friends at the table, twitch.tv/slash friends at the table.

And we're on various social media at friends underscore table on Twitter and TikTok, and friends-table

on co-host.

Any other personal plugs that people want to do?

No.

I think I'm good.

No.

One thing that I do want to say

before we finish is

I'm so curious to see where we are going in the sense of what this show is about.

And I know that like these

long-running Shonen anime is very much more about the journey than the destination, though the destinations can be, you know, distinct and interesting.

But I am thinking about: you know, if I had only watched 10 episodes of Sailor Moon, I would have no idea where Sailor Moon was going, what the wider meta plot is,

what the broader themes that that show is interested in exploring is.

And so I am so excited to be at this kind of like precipice of understanding of this story where I don't, I don't,

I could take stabs at what I think think this show's themes are and probably be correct, but I have no idea the broader plot moves that the show is interested in working through in order to get us there.

Uh, and that's really exciting.

Are you telling me that Sailor Moon isn't just episode after episode of a new evil store coming to town?

Uh, the yeah, well, so Keith, the evil store comes to town and then you get introduced one by one to all the evil shop owners who work in the evil store.

Eventually, they vanquish the evil store and they will bring in

a bigger, more evil store.

But no,

there is a wider plot to Sailor Moon.

There is stuff going on

that develops.

That's good to know.

Sailor Moon's got a cool plot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, put it this way.

What a Sailor Guardian is

is something that the show goes into beyond just like, oh, there are magical girls in the world.

Right.

Yeah, I have no idea what that could be.

Put it this way.

How many aliens do you think are in Sailor Moon, Keith?

Ooh, well, I think that some of the Guardians are aliens.

Interesting.

Okay.

And I think that there's enough for the whole solar system.

And I think that there's probably

like weird other planets that get brought in.

Or maybe there's like a weird altar version of each planet.

Do you think that the holy grail, Jesus' holy grail, is in there or not?

I didn't.

I didn't think that until just now.

That could be Jack trying to throw you off the trail, Keith.

Right.

I hadn't considered that it was until you asked if it was there.

Ain't that the way?

What?

That is the way.

Uh-huh.

Uh, yeah, I think that's it.

I think that's all I've got.

Yeah, these next eight episodes are going to be wild, so buckle in.

I'm very excited.

I might want you today.