Noggin Lugging Tortoise - Hunter x Hunter ep. 4-6 : Media Club Plus S01E02

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 Tagashi.

My name is Keith J.

Carberry.

You can find me on Twitter at Keith J.

Carberry.

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

Carberry.

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

With me is Sylvie Bullet.

Hey, I'm Sylvie.

You can find me everywhere at Sylvie Bullet,

including I got on Blue Sky, and I don't know what to post on there.

Oh, you're a Blue Sky.

If you have suggestions,

I'm one of the elite.

And by that, I mean I'm friends with e-girls.

So I got to suggest that.

So yeah, why can you also not point post on there?

It's just, I don't know what to do.

Anyway,

Jack,

hi, I'm Jack.

I'm not on Blue Sky, and I won't be.

You can find me on co-host at JDQ,

and you can buy any of the music featured on the show, including the music for this podcast at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.

I haven't written any of it yet.

I've been working on other music, but it's out there somewhere.

In your brain.

It's out there in the brain goo still.

It's out there in the brain goo.

The closest thing that I have in the way that

it always is is I do think that it's a very funny image at the end of the last episode when you say, what is a hunter?

We have no idea.

And then Smash Cut to

like a loud hunter hunter-esque outro music that is the the most idea that i have right now that's a great idea i i think that i mean that's a great outro in general maybe we'll maybe we'll say that later today if i if the mood strikes me oh god i got some cool music stuff to talk about today but i will say i think the music use of this show is is deliberately very funny yes um all right andrew okay andrew lee swan

hey uh you you can find me on the bad bluebird site I don't really post there very often, but that's the last one that I'm using.

There's two bad bluebird sites now.

What's the blue sky?

Does it have a bird?

It doesn't have a bird, but it has Jack from Twitter.

That's true.

He is on there.

That's one of the reasons why I don't want to use it.

Listen, the sky is a sort of bird.

The sky is a big bird that all the other birds are.

This is a hunter.

That's a hunter-hunter-ass description of the sky right there.

I'm Swanzeri3000 on there, and I'm also on our Twitch channel every Monday, twitch.tv slash friends of the table uh you should definitely go and subscribe to twitch.tv slash friends of the table you should also find us on youtube at friends of the table uh you can find the show uh on twitter and co-host at friends underscore table or friends dash table for co-host and please if you could follow the tick tock account friends underscore table it's very important to me no reason why

also uh this show wouldn't exist without friendsofthetable.cash so oh yeah that's literally true Yeah, no,

this was a stretch goal for our Patreon.

Thank you, everybody who supported us.

We mentioned it last time, but you know, worth saying thank you again.

Yeah, if you listen to this show or any of the other things that we do, not just the podcast, but of course, including Friends of the Table main show, go to friendsofthetable.cash and consider supporting us there.

Um,

this this is a good set of episodes for me, I think.

Great set of episodes.

Uh, the exam is officially underway.

Phase one is to follow Satots.

He says, Follow me, and they all follow him.

This ends up being kind of a point of contention.

People trying to keep up with his superhuman stride.

And we see Kilua with his extremely cool skateboard, which makes Leorio mad, which is really funny.

We get a lot of character detail in this episode.

Lots of motivations, lots of like

sort of getting a feel for different characters' endurance levels.

And after a,

what is it, grueling

dozens and dozens of miles long?

80 kilometers.

At least 80 kilometers.

Yeah.

Because then they go a lot more after 80 kilometers.

That's true.

I guess 80 kilometers is just the tunnel, right?

It is just most of the tunnel.

Because he says, I think he says 80, it's been 80 kilometers time to pick up the pace.

And then they pick up the pace for an unknown amount of time, get to the end of the tunnel, and then there's more following.

This time, not through a tunnel, but through a horribly deadly forest.

Uh,

it's a leave-in swindler's swamp, yeah,

but it is, it's also

a marshy forest.

Um, uh,

and uh

they so they have to contend with this forest.

They also have to contend with Hisuka for the first time.

We sort of run head-to-head into Hisuka, the threatening

clown man from the last

set of episodes, who

I'll say cut off, de-armed someone for an unknown offense.

We know that he knew it was known.

Well, we know that he turned into him and didn't say sorry, but

we didn't actually see any of that, uh, that interaction.

Uh, so who knows, like, what the, was it just,

was it nothing?

Was it an insult?

We don't feel like we saw him bump into Hiseka.

Uh, I mean, it was very much like, hey, look, this person will just, like, cut off someone's arm.

Almost no reason.

Yeah, I think that the vibe is that it's for almost no reason.

Yeah, definitely, definitely not a justified arm capitation.

And

then what else do we have in the forest?

Just a lot of tricks,

a lot of very funny named animals.

Then we get to phase two, which is Iron Chef Hunter Edition.

When the second phase examiners, Menshi and Buhara, choose to fail everyone, we get a closer peek behind the veil of the now named, I think.

I don't think we ever actually got the name Hunter Association, the now named Hunter Association,

and another chance for people to be impressed by Goan.

And then immediately again, another chance for people to be impressed by Goan.

Should I say how many people remain after this?

I think that's a great idea.

Yeah.

So the last time we were here, there were 405,

right?

There were 404.

404.

Right, God.

The one-armed man, yes.

Right, yes.

After these,

after the end of the second,

42,

many, many left, passed out on the side of the road.

Many, many dead.

Dead.

Just dead.

Many dead.

Many, many.

Many dead.

Well, the game continues.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Yeah.

all right.

It was very funny, Jack.

Last time you mentioned Squid Game

and no one had died yet.

No, no,

we do

so early on.

And I

maybe this is the I want to talk about death in this episode.

I want to talk about the way this show is thinking about death.

Roll up my sleeves, but I have no sleeves, so it's just the skin on my arm and it's a spongy.

Down, kids.

But yeah, no, I think the way into this is to talk about how, you know,

in the first time we all, we

three assembled here, plus Austin, we talked about how

Gun and Karapika and Leoria were warned that the Hunter exam

is very dangerous.

You know, I think that either the sea captain, yeah, I think it was the sea captain, or maybe one of the navigators was like, you know, the hunter exams.

It's pretty dangerous.

You gotta be really careful.

And at the time, I sort of thought, well, you know, it's uh

I know that there's a low rate of winning.

It might be that you get hurt.

Maybe there are a couple of deaths every year.

The death seems to be the point to a certain extent.

Episode four begins with the narrator.

It's such a good opening.

It begins just with these shots of them in the dark running exactly where we left off.

And I want to, like,

you know,

I love the way that by and large, each episode begins exactly where the previous episode ended, often with a little bit of overlap.

You know, we go back about 30 seconds to see what happened.

And it gives this great sensation of like an ongoing

trial that they're in.

And in fact, you know, where this kind of run of episodes began to fall apart a bit for me was when they sort of broke that feeling.

But we see them running in the dark, and the narrator says, it has been two hours.

What a great cut.

The end of episode three, them setting off running.

Episode four begins, it has been two hours of them running in the dark.

It's just fantastic.

We get a lot of narrator in this show.

Certain arcs have more narration than other arcs.

There is points in the show.

Just as I don't think this is a spoiler, but this is things to look forward to.

When this starts happening for you, Jack, and for anybody who's following along, watching the show,

there's points where we are deep in the interiority of different characters, and the show sort of like

in the same way as we sort of we've talked about different episodes being kind of from different perspectives.

Like, episode two is really like from Karapika's perspective, episode three is really from Tonba's perspective.

Uh, there's episodes that we are basically the narrator, like, we are like that's wild, yeah, we are like

watching the narrator talk about the interiority of like a bunch of people in a row, and And it's kind of bizarre.

It's really weird.

Like, I can't think of a single other show that approaches this show in terms of like willingness to lean on

narration for things.

Arrested development.

Yes, yes.

A little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A little bit.

Like, what if there was an episode where

Ron Howard had like,

you know, four times as many lines as usual?

Yeah.

And spent a whole scene just like, like, oh, uh, uh, uh, Gobe

Bluth just

said go.

Sorry, I got it.

I got into the head of other people in that show trying to say Job's name.

Uh, Job Bluth, uh, you know, sitting at a table doing something while the narrator just explains what Job is thinking, and then we cut away, and he never has a line.

That is sort of

so curious to get to that.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

So it's, it's, it's fun that you noticed right away the, I think, sort of integral narration.

Well, he speaks with such authority.

You're watching the dub?

I'm watching the sub.

The sub.

Okay, yeah.

The dub, I think, is even more authority from the narrator.

I'm watching the dub because the first time I watched it, I watched the sub.

So I wanted to do something different.

I think they're both great.

But yeah,

there's a lot of authority and a lot of presence to the narrator.

Like, literally, presence.

He's always around.

Yeah.

I mean, I said that we should talk about death, and I still want to talk about death, but I think probably the best place to talk about that is the death episode is episode

five.

I'm sorry, the second episode from today.

Yeah, episode 25.

In which, if you're not following along, I cannot stress this enough.

People fucking die left and right.

It's like watching.

I tell you what it's like watching.

You ever see a supercut of like

those like Kaiser Mario levels where you see all the attempts played at once?

Yeah.

You get to see like a thousand Marios pour out of the start gate and then like like four fall in love or one gets crushed by the thing and then a bunch of them get taken out by a jump.

That is what episode five feels like.

But what I do actually want to talk about is how this really is an episode about running and talking.

Episode four, not a lot happens.

And what happens mostly is they run in a straight line and then they run up some steps and during that time, they just talk.

Not a lot happens yet.

It's the one I have the most notes about.

Yeah.

Where do we want to start here?

I want to start at the very beginning because it ties up with something that we mentioned a bit last time

in two different ways with Nicholas.

Nicholas?

Yeah, the nerd of the last one.

Yes.

Yeah, that's Nicholas.

The one who outs Tonpa as the rookie crusher and makes Tonpa all mad at him about it.

Because...

So

the last episode ends with a really smart insight from Karapika, get used to it.

Where

he recognizes that this is not just a test of endurance, it's also a test of like mental fortitude.

Where we don't know how many kilometers this test is going to be.

And it turns out it's probably way more than anyone would have ever guessed.

The only person who we see make a guess as to how long the test is going to be is Nicholas, who at the beginning of the episode guesses that it's going to be about a 40-kilometer run and sets up wrong, very wrong, sets up this expectation for himself.

And then is, is, I mean, we see how tired he looks after that 40-kilometer mark where, where, where he was wrong, and the test continues on, but I think it's really, is really like, oh, he set up an expectation for himself and now is like mentally defeated by this test that is at this point less than, well, less than half over, I think.

Maybe about a third over.

Nicholas is going to log on and talk about how it's hard to be like a former gifted kid because of his experience in the hunter exam.

Yeah, being in accelerated class has made him thought that he could be a hunter when he wasn't ready.

And then he gets bullied by three brothers.

The brothers three come in.

Yeah.

I love those guys, by the way.

We see them a little bit more, but

I love the blowjob brothers as I've been calling them.

Who are they blowing?

Do you think?

Nothing.

It's just based on a tweet where

it sees two guys dressed the same.

And And well, well, well, if it isn't the Blue Jump Brothers.

Oh, now there's a third one.

Yeah.

Sorry, well.

Yeah.

And we don't need, I don't think that we need to belabor this unless folks specifically have stuff to say.

I think the way the camera kind of treats Nicholas's body in this scene is pretty gross.

Yeah.

These episodes, yeah.

There is.

And we can talk about that a bit later as well.

Nicholas is a fat guy.

And there is a lot of this

really

luxuriating in his discomfort and in

the struggle that he is having in this moment.

I think the show is being kind of cruel about it.

I mean, we're in a moment where

I think if we said people in this scene are being cruel to Nicholas, it would not be a misread.

I think, you know, on a certain level, this is a cruel scene.

Oh, no, but basically, the point of the scene is showing

there's a distinction between the Blowjob brothers being cruel and the camera of the show being cruel

being cruel.

Yes.

um

but yeah so nicholas nicholas uh

to reiterate also that that nicholas is is also a child so they're like the the show and the characters are really luxuriating in the fact that this child is taking a test that he's not ready for it is like

like you know totally flaming out um yeah

after he's run a marathon

literal marathon

yeah they have let there's a precedent for letting 12-year-olds compete in the hunter exam.

Maybe they don't really care about the well-being of children.

Save it for the death episode, Sylvie.

Well, it does get mentioned in this episode.

Gon does mention that his dad did it when he was 12 as well, and I've forgotten that.

He does.

Yeah, he did.

Jing did this when he was 12.

It's extraordinary.

And then they have to start running up steps.

And Killiwa has kind of prepped for this.

Killiwa is on his little skateboard and Leorio has...

God, I fucking love Leorio.

Leorio has the response that I think any normal human, again, Leario is just a guy would have, which is like, oh, come on, you're on a fucking skateboard.

Don't stop it.

I love this because, sorry, go ahead.

You can tell what happens here for sure.

Well, and so Killio just goes like, oh, yeah, okay.

Well,

guess I better walk and jumps off the skateboard and just starts running.

And the first thing that happens is that, you know, Leario's like, you're cheating.

And Goan from behind goes like, no, he's not.

And he's like, this is a test of endurance.

And

Goan is like, no, Sato just said, follow me.

We're just supposed to follow him and i think that karapika agrees with gone

uh but then during this when a kilua just notices oh hey another kid and slows down a little bit to keep pace with gone and then goes i'm just gonna run beside this kid this is i like kind of i think i kind of like this kid does a very cool flip off his skateboard so he's trying so hard leorio leorio is even more upset that he's sort of being shown up by this cool trick even though he gets exactly what he wants which is kilua starts running with the rest of them but it doesn't bother kilua at all no not at all

very shortly afterwards they have to start going up

this is a fucking nightmare so they're in like basically like a a large wide underground tunnel and past a certain point where satots has already sped up they now start running up a series of like steps in this tunnel curling steps and hills it is it looks like a fucking dr zeus landscape it's it's wild uh underground it really is like kind of like a hall of mirrors sort of uh layout to the steps yeah it's very odd what is this place what is this tunnel uh

not to mario's multi-forest there not to belabor this really is this like first kind of set of scenes that we have but i do want to rewind to talk about leorio running uh because it sort of at the same time as as uh nicholas is flaming out we also are seeing leorio start to flame out.

And I think this is a very important bit for Leario's character because, like, okay, he's just some guy.

But the other thing is, like,

you know,

I'm going to just say, Leario makes it to the end of this tunnel.

He does the 80 to 100-something kilometers.

Leario is a monster.

You know, like, as much as

he is,

you know, outclassed physically by Karapika, who is also outclassed physically by Gohan and Kilua.

Leorio is like,

I think, like, looking at realistically what he is capable of, kind of outrageous.

But we see him sort of like almost fail and then double down and get his second wind and then race up past Gon and Kilua.

There's this really, really cute scene of Leorio about to burn out and

Goan pauses and looks back, just like being like, I know you can do it.

I'm waiting.

Come on, bro, it's great.

Come on, bro.

Did you read it like that?

Because I read it as him being kind of disappointed.

No, I totally read it as Goan, like, waiting for Lario, being like, I'm gonna wait.

I think you can do it.

Like, in a, like, in a, like, pushing you, like the

coach who's an asshole, but I know you can do it.

It was also, it was maybe slightly pitying, but I think it was pitying, like, because you see, then Goan is so excited to use his awesome fishing rod to uh uh pull uh Lario's dropped suitcase up to him and carry it for Lario, which he then carries for the rest of phase one.

He carries Lario's suitcase,

it's really kind of like that and they they they like meet up again, you know.

There are there would have been moments where he could have given that suitcase back.

Yeah, it is Goan's suitcase, briefly.

Yeah, um, I want to talk about the kind of the first of the let me see in my notes here.

Yeah, we have so at this point, the episode kind kind of becomes about two conversations.

The first is a conversation between Karapika and Leorio.

And the second is a conversation between Gon and Killiua, sort of getting to know each other.

Because it's worth saying that prior to this point, Kilua is sort of,

he really only had one appearance

when Tonper was talking about all the.

When he drank the poopy juice.

When he drank the

15 of the poopy juice.

Yeah, and then said,

You can't poison me, buddy.

Killua is great.

Yeah.

But But this first conversation,

Karapika and Leorio get back to their favorite topic.

Why have you become a hunter?

Why do you want to become a hunter?

And I think that they're going to be talking about this forever.

This is my suspicion.

Yeah, we don't get any new information.

The bell is unrung for now.

We don't get any new information about what a hunter is from

Karapika, but we do get a bunch of other stuff.

Yeah, so the first thing we learn is, and this was like one of those moments that

such a bizarre evocative piece of storytelling in terms of what it says about the world that I just sat bolt upright in my chair.

We learn why the Phantom Troop targeted, or why Kurapika believes the Phantom Troop targeted, the Kurta clan.

And this is because the Kurta clan

have a trait.

Members of the Kurta clan have a trait called, I believe, Scarlet Eyes.

When they feel very strong emotions, their eyes turn ruby red.

And so, so far, so interesting.

You know,

that's anime.

That's all kinds of stories.

One of the seven most beautiful

eyes in the world.

Yeah,

the sub describes them outright as one of the seven wonders of the world, the scarlet eyes of the Kurta clan.

However...

These eyes are very valuable on the black market.

These human eyes.

because they are so beautiful.

So the implication is

black marketeers, bounty hunters, the Phantom Troop will descend upon the Kurta clan, slaughtering them to both cause scarlet eyes, you know, in intensity of emotion, and then harvest these red eyes for sale on the black market.

This is fucking extraordinary.

Do you recall

how

it's the first time you saw it?

Yeah.

I wish I lived in a world where I could get some eyes.

Well, okay.

I hate that this is the case.

No, I will not.

I'm going to say,

I take it back.

I'm just kidding.

It just thought it was funny.

I think that

both of the conversations that we have, like

both sides of this conversation, I mean, are like some of like my probably my favorite part of this run of episodes.

So you're saying cropic stuff and then also Leorio stuff?

Also Leorio stuff.

I really like it both.

I think it like really helps.

I don't know.

To me, when I was first watching this, it crystallized a lot of stuff about who those guys are.

Like Leorio.

Like Koropica calls out Leorio for like, we get into the specifics of it, but like

we know that Koropica's out for revenge.

We don't know the specifics of like how bad it was and like how like

I don't know.

I guess what I mean is we kind of get into the point

for

the three of our four main characters now.

We kind of know what the like key trauma that led them to look, like, look towards being a hunter was.

And I think it's handled really well.

And I think it's like,

I don't know.

You feel the enormity of what happened to Karapika.

And like, you like all of Leorio's just like boundless determination clicks into place in a lot of ways.

It's like what lets him...

Because a lot of his stuff is just pure willpower.

And you're like, well, what keeps this guy running?

And yeah, this motherfucker runs on spite.

Yeah, we haven't said what is powering Leorio.

Uh-huh.

Do you want to talk about this, Sylvie?

I want to get back to eyes briefly, but I think we should talk about this.

Let's finish off talking about Karabika and then we can get into Leorio.

Okay, sorry to get distracted.

No, no, no.

I think, no, you make a really good point.

I think that the reason that this eyes stuff works so well for me is that this show is very deliberate about what information it gives you about the world.

Sometimes it gives you what feels like

an absolute deluge of information about vaguely meaningless things.

As we get into the next episode, we're going to get given so many named animals and their weird powers.

And it also, you know, withholds a lot of really interesting stuff until key moments.

Again, we don't really know what hunters are, the core premise of the show.

And so the moment that they choose to basically say,

you know,

we are in a world in which there are these people who perform tasks or perform adventurous lives, and that that is sort of

made an institution in some way.

These are called hunters.

And then at the same time, we have the situation where

you have what initially seems like poaching animals for rare parts, you know, getting like elephant ivory or, you know, getting bones of rare animals, like happens with poachers on Earth.

Except this is happening to human body parts.

This is, you know.

And it doesn't seem like what they were talking about was like organ trafficking, you know, in the sense of like, well, these things are good for people's health.

The implication was you hunt these eyes because the eyes are beautiful and fetch a high price on the black market.

There was something about the three most beautiful colors in the world.

It's wild.

Yeah.

There's something about the way these two sort of things sit together.

You know, this is a world in which there are these things called hunters and people are incentivized to think in terms of whatever hunters do.

And then at the same time, you have people being hunted for their beautiful eyes.

It's such a good moment of like, what the fuck is going on in this world?

Especially like with the hunter thing, it's sort of like

it's interesting how

different of a takeaway, and we've talked about this constantly over the first episode and now this episode, how Leorio and Karapika end up in such different places about what a hunter is.

Because the thing that happens to Karapika is horrible, but there's nothing about that story that suggests

why he feels like hunters, why he feels so positively about hunters and their mission.

Well, it seems like it would be almost the other way around.

Right, right, which is what happens to Leorio.

Leorio has

a very sort of realist interpretation of the world,

where, you know, the terrible thing that happens to him that animates his desire to become a hunter

sort of gives him like a pretty clear look about, like,

oh, why do I want money?

Well, just look at the world and what money can do for you, you know, it can get you eyes, it can do all of these things.

He says it can buy you

like lives and dreams, like, money can get you anything.

I need to find the specific quote because it's really, it's really good.

I wish I had written it down.

Uh, and and while you find that, I'll, I'll just say, and then, uh, Sylvia, if you wanted to get into Lario's story, we could do that also.

Uh, but uh, Leorio.

Oh, did I lose my train of thought?

Oh, my apologies.

Oh, he Karabika sort of misinterprets what Leorio is saying as in him insulting the Kurtas again, which he

has already done and apologized for.

But, you know, who knows?

When he says that you can buy lives by being...

a hunter.

And Karapika.

Oh, and this all sort of comes up because like they spent time together.

Like,

they are the sort of mirror to, um,

uh, they will, they will, they will become sort of the mirror to Gon and Kilua in a way, uh, where, like, they're, they're, they're a, they're a set of four, but it's also two sets of two.

Uh, and you see sort of Gon and Kilua like acting and you see sort of Leorio and Krapica acting.

And Krapika is like, I've spent enough time with you.

You don't seem like the sort of guy who is greedy.

Like, you don't seem like someone who is motivated by money.

Uh, and that is the sort of the thing that I like so much about Leorio's,

you know, finally relenting, sort of basically refusing to relent and to say why he actually wants to become a hunter, uh, where money is the sort of secondary motivator.

Yeah.

Uh, but it's it, it, you really get the sense of like

why, why Leorio spends so much time kind of guarding himself and coming across like an asshole?

Well, even

go ahead.

Well, even the money thing itself is one of those barriers he's putting up, right?

Like, he can't say, I'm doing this to honor the memory of my friend.

Yeah, let's talk about what it is.

Yeah.

And then we can start kind of pulling it apart further.

I found the quote, and it actually translations really well into this.

It's pretty much what he says right before getting into it.

And it's also what Kuropika thinks is insulting him.

He says, for the right price, you can buy not only treasures, but dreams, hearts, and even people's lives.

And Kuropika thinks he's talking about how, like, the Phantom Troop killed the Kurta for money.

But what he is actually talking about is that when he was young, he had a friend who had a

curable, a treatable disease, is how he describes it.

But his parents couldn't afford the operation, and his friend died.

Even though it was something that could, like, be taken care of.

And he, from then on, he decided he wants to cure kids who have that same disease

so that he can.

So hold on.

I'm going to rewind.

He wants to become a doctor so he can cure this disease

for free because he wants to make up for the death of his friend.

But the way he puts it is,

but it turns out the world runs on money and becoming a doctor is really expensive.

So that's why I'm becoming a hunter so I have access to these resources.

I think he might even specifically mention that hunters don't have to pay for school.

Yeah, something like that.

Yeah.

They don't have to pay for like travel, entry into countries, etc.

etc.

So he basically wants to become like

a doctor's without borders by himself in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

So interesting.

And we get.

Crabby, by the way, is very satisfied with this and does

the thing that we see over and over again, which is like being mad at Leorio and then

learning, like, oh, this is actually fine.

I like Leorio.

Leo is a good guy.

Karapika is very reasonable.

Yes, very reasonable.

We get a little cutaway as Leorio is describing.

Oh, and it's worth saying that this is all happening as they're running.

All of this is in motion.

Produces this really weird effect where it feels like the whole thing.

Even at some point, Leorio yells at Karapaka for like, why do you want to talk this much while we are running forever?

Talking wastes energy.

Yeah, yeah.

But we get a tiny cutaway to just some silent shots of, or, you know, with his narration over the top, of Leario as a kid and this other kid first playing and then the other kid kind of succumbing to this disease.

We see them in this sort of like dusty,

sun-bleached town with houses with corrugated iron roofs and things.

I think they're playing like soccer.

And this is just really beautifully framed shot with this Cicada in the

right up close to the camera in the foreground.

It's got that like golden hour lighting to it.

And Cicada's little wings are trembling as in the background we can see Kid Leorio and his friend playing together.

And there is something so

on some level I would love to talk about whether this is a hallmark of the shounen genre.

There is something so compelling about the contrast between

these two scenes put together.

The people in my clan were hunted for their scarlet eyes, which are worth a lot of money on the black market.

And a friend of mine died from a treatable disease, and we were just playing soccer, and he passed away, and now I want to become a doctor.

And something about

the gulf between the sort of the two modes of those scenes is so interesting and sits together so well.

It also, I think, you know, you.

This is not addressed directly, but it does answer some questions about like

what we talked about last

episode was sort of a chicken and the egg question of like what is a world that has hunters?

What does a world that has hunters in it become?

Slash also,

like, what is the sort of world that creates a thing like the hunters, whatever they are.

It doesn't seem, it doesn't seem that great.

Yeah, I wrote down in my notes, operations cost a lot of money in this world, and becoming a doctor costs a lot of money.

We are not in a world where,

you know, earlier when I said that the world of hunters is one that also produces people's eyes getting hunted for the black market, I'm not necessarily saying directly that hunters are out there doing that.

But, you know, we know this is a world in which it's like the opening title sequence says, you know, like great treasures, fearsome monsters.

Yeah, I guess we don't know that hunters aren't doing that either.

Right.

Well, there's one thing that we know, which is that hunters didn't stop it, and hunters didn't arrest the phantom troop or whatever.

Yep, and hunters can go into doctor school for free and can travel for free, but impoverished kids and their families can't get the operations they need to

save each other.

It's wild.

And then we just get a weird joke at the end of this scene.

I say weird joke.

It plays really well.

Well, Leorio is like...

It's really good.

He's already mad.

How does it play out exactly?

He's already mad about having to tell his backstory.

He sort of, I think he resents having to make himself vulnerable in this way, but is

incapable of resisting Karapaka's questioning, basically.

Has to answer finally.

Yeah, I mean, like, he's got like tears in his eyes and stuff.

Yeah.

He is very vulnerable in this scene.

Yeah.

It's great.

And they only sell Leorio because he just wears his heart on his sleeve.

He's alive nerve all the time.

And of course, what happens is Gon and Kiloa catch up and are running by.

Gun very politely says, Because they're in a race.

They decided to race to the end.

Oh, they have.

Yes, which it's great.

Gone very nicely,

see you later, Kuripika.

And then Kiloa says, like, you don't dust old man or something like that.

He calls him an old geezer.

And then

Leorio very angrily says, I'm a teenager just like you guys.

And everyone is seen done.

It's great.

It's such a good joke.

And I feel like a less good show,

we're going to come back to this, but a less good show in that moment would have had a reaction, or they'd have had a line.

You know, the you're not a teenager, or, you know, being specific about an age or something.

I don't know.

The fact that he just says, I'm a teenager, we should get everybody's shocked faces and then cut hard out of the scene.

Because there's a wide gulf of what being a teenager means.

Yeah, and truly is.

And we still don't know how old actually he is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very, very funny of everyone being like, ah, we didn't know.

It's very funny.

Do we want to talk about conversation two?

I think I have a bit less.

This is the kill you are and gone conversation.

The main thing I would like to talk about here is

not a ton about the actual conversation, but just an amazing visual of while this conversation happens, happens, it is a sort of like behind the back, almost top-down shot of them looking at each other, running forward, and

synchronized sort of floating left or right to avoid the tremendous amount of bodies of passed out contestants that they are passing by.

They're just like sort of wordlessly shifting to the left and the right to avoid people.

Sorry to try.

No, no, no.

We learn why, you know, this is the

ongoing segment.

Why are people being hunters?

We know why Killy was doing this exam, and it is for the funniest possible reason.

He thinks it's very easy and wanted to see what it would be like.

Yeah, he thought it was going to be careful,

and he was bored.

It's so weird.

I love him.

It's weird, but it's still.

It kind of sets Killow up as a, and we can get into this when we talk about the next episode a bit.

There's like something going on here where Kiloa and Hisuka have like similar motivations in a way oh yeah yeah um

and i think the way they set that up and the way that they are both drawn to gone is interesting um yeah and they're we they really do highlight that kiloa is drawn to gone in for some reason i mean we've seen a lot of characters be drawn to gone so it's not surprising he's fucking great drawn to gone but but But

but we see Kilo be drawn to Goan in a way that suggests that he's drawn to Goan

in a way that is not typical for him.

He's like noticing Goan doing things.

And the show is so good at communicating these little bits of

feeling of like, oh, we're seeing Kiloa notice this and approve.

So he's like silent, he's just constantly silently approving or being interested in like, and then being slightly surprised by being interested.

Like we see, you know, and Goan is the only person he's interested in.

Like, we see multiple times

Kiloa not caring about what the other two members of this group are doing.

The first time is Goan stops, sorry, Kilo stops with Goan to wait for Leorio, but is also actively being like, come on, just leave him, whatever.

And we get other moments like that through these three episodes where Kilua is like,

is sort of interested in Goan, finds him curious, but also finds Goan's attachment to his other two friends kind of annoying.

Yeah, really interesting.

And Killiwa's affect is.

I don't know what he's, I'd be curious to know what he is like in the dub, because in the sub, the performance is really good.

I think that they're trying to get him coming across as bored.

Yeah.

So he says everything very flatly and at a very low volume, you know, but the side effect is that there is something dreamlike about him, and there's something kind of dreamlike about his animation as well.

You know, he has this white hair and this sort of like baggy white shirt, and he's on this skateboard.

He has a sort of like placid trot to his walk.

You get the impression that Kilua is kind of dreaming his way through all this stuff.

Do you also get that sensation in the dub?

Yes, I think Kilua's performance in the dub is maybe the best performance in the dub.

It's fantastic.

It's really good.

I'm watching the sub just time through, but I love Dub Kilua.

Yeah.

Dub Kilo is phenomenal, and it's also fun.

Hearing Kilua show up in a lot of different things for a long time.

My Genshin Impact party had two Kiluas in it.

Who would they?

Sing Cho, who's like a sort of

bookish rich boy, and

Bennett, who is a sort of disaster,

unlucky adventurer.

Oh, yeah.

We don't know, but we don't know really anything about Killiwell.

We don't really get, he's like a

deep pool of not even necessarily mystery.

Just like, we don't know what this guy's deal is.

We don't know what he likes other than gone and skateboarding.

I mean, there's like, there's things you can kind of like, they do a good job at like gesturing at things where it's like, what that, or at least least things that make you start questioning things, where it's like, what is this kid's deal?

Becomes like more and more of a big question mark, I feel like, throughout these episodes, especially like when he basically says, I'm doing this to test my abilities, it's like, okay.

It's curious.

What's up, kid?

It's curious enough that Goan can do the things that Goan does.

But we sort of get enough of a peek behind that curtain for it to be like

reality to us.

You know, he has this super impressive father.

He's motivated to sort of match his dad so that he can go out and experience the things that his dad had experienced.

So, like, he's like, he lives in the woods and he's like being encouraged by his aunt to go catch this monster fish that lives in the lake called the, in the, in the, they call him the master of the lake in the 2011 thing.

Uh, I think they call him in the manga.

I think that it's called

Swan.

He's called the the guardian of the lake he's like he's basically like a suit a forest demigod

yep um

and so it sort of all makes sense we we we're we're exposed to his prowess kind of slowly the smelling things and the talking to animals the athleticism uh

kilo is just a kid that shows up who also can run a hundred miles

in yeah there's two of them yeah there's now there's two of them and one of them seems like he's looking down on the other one

yes kilo seems like he's a superior he's like i'm curious about this kid that i know i'm better than but it is interesting that he's also able to do these things there's like the real like uh killer is the the kid on the playground whose parents like don't give a shit that he has a lighter and gone is the kid who brings him things to set fire on it's just like, I don't know how to describe it, but it has that dynamic to that.

That's truly the vibe.

And Gone brings him like something that the kid with the lighter is like, hey man, I can't fucking light that on fire.

It'll explode and like hurt us.

And Gone's like, I don't know.

That sounds fun.

Let's give it a go.

Yeah, I have a packed body spray that his dad left before he just ran away.

Oh, speaking of, I have a timeline question that I

just misunderstood something.

Gene took the Hunter exam at age 12.

Correct.

And then abandoned his son.

Presumably he had a son.

When did he have a son?

He was not 12 with a son.

He comes back.

I think this is revealed later.

I don't think it's a spoiler.

No, no, no, no.

He comes back with a baby and then leaves again.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

Cool.

I just, I knew that it wasn't like, oh, Gene has a son at 12, but I was also like, I don't understand how the timeline matches up.

The detail that he leaves for years and then comes back and just with a kid and then disappears again is like so firmly burned into my brain.

It's like a defining thing about Mito.

It is.

Yeah, poor Mito.

Yeah.

There's going to be one in the 99

anime that I'm very curious to see how it matches up with the manga because it you we get a lot more Mito and

and some other stuff that I think is kind of a spoiler

for 2011 that I won't talk about.

Actually, I won't even talk about this, but I will say for anybody who's read the manga or watched the 99 series, there is some Mito detail that

there's some Mitail that is

never brought up in the 2011 series, and I really would like to know if it's like manga canon or if it's one of the things that 2011 or that 99 added, which there was a lot of that, apparently.

So, yeah, I don't know.

I'm very curious.

I'm going to go back.

Next time we record, if it's interesting, you'll hear me bring up again what happens in the beginning of the manga and if it's canon to the thing or if it's just

something that I have in my head because of the 99.

Message me afterwards because I'm curious about what thing you're talking about.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

I've read one of them I know is canon manga.

Yes.

And then there's another thing that is that I'm curious about with

Mito and Jing and that stuff.

Because I've been meaning to try and

not necessarily, I don't think it's feasible to read along, but like if I have a moment, I like to check in at the stuff that we've watched in the manga.

Yeah.

Do we want to cut to the end of the tunnel?

Slash, can I say

one of my favorite things that happens in these run of episodes?

Please.

Okay, so

we get some

internal monologue from Satoz, who is like sort of thinking about the first phase of the exam and how we're coming to the end of the tunnel.

The first phase isn't over, but he's like, time to check and see how many we lost.

And as he begins to turn around, we see the outcome of the race, which is he's like halfway turned when he notices, boom, right past him, Gonan Kilua.

both claiming that they have won this race.

They both yell goal as they simultaneously pass Satos, who is kind of taken aback, I think, by the fact that someone was so close behind him and he didn't realize.

And then also that it's these two fucking kids.

Yeah.

And they are thrilled.

They are so.

The nightmare children.

The little conversation between the two of them where he's like kind of still in shock, but explaining, like, no, you tied, is like adorable.

Right.

I love it.

So they had a lot of people.

Especially.

Yes.

And Gon's solution being, okay,

you buy me dinner, then I'll buy you dinner.

And that's what you do in a drug gone.

You know who this also is, Keith?

Yeah.

This is Milk Bros from Bluff City Zoo.

Oh, yeah.

This is

clapping the ladder at the exact same time.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's what it is.

Yeah, they're going to be happily

happily

eating their free dinners for the rest of Hunter Hunter.

Yeah.

And yeah, we

emerge.

The show is so good at big crowd shots.

And there'll be a few moments in this run of episodes where I will point out these great crowd shots.

Real quick, just

the

remembering the scene of them bursting out of the tunnel, both claiming to have won, reminded me of the sort of counterpoint to Kilo's sort of dream-like quality

as he's sort of kind of not listlessly, but unenthusiastically sort of puttering his way through this way too easy hunter exam

is the moments of like genuine childlike joy he has when he watches gone do something that looks fun and goes oh i want to i want to do that too uh

uh

he is similar as gone was impressed by kilo's skateboard trick uh kilo was impressed by ghones uh fishing pole um catching leorio's thing his uh little uh briefcase and then the moment where they escape the thing and then a few other times in this like you get this sort of these moments of Kiloa sort of lighting up in a way that is is otherwise uncharacteristic so far and it's always it's just so cute the moments where they get to like

behave like kids Kilo is the kid who's trying really hard not to behave like a kid and when you get to see Kiloa behave like a kid it's really like I don't know it makes me light up and that's not just because Kilo is my favorite character in the show

yeah it's great it's really good and there'll be there'll be more of that and more of why it's so interesting also to follow, I think.

Uh, sorry, Jack, you were talking about the crowd scene.

Yeah, so they all emerge out of this, this, this tunnel into a field, you know, like a soft green field with fog kind of like moving over it.

And it you immediately get the impression that this is a sinister place, and yet all of the candidates are fucking exhausted.

They're just, you know, like leaning over, panting, leaning on each other, lying on the floor.

You know, the ones who have made it this far are just wiped out, and they are standing like sitting ducks in the middle of this forest.

Yeah.

This clearing.

At which point, the next task, task 1.5,

is revealed.

Welcome to Swindler Swamp.

Swamp of Swindlers?

What's it called?

Swindler Swampers.

Swindler Swamp.

Swindler.

Numer Wetlands, I believe.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

I thought that there was going to be people here who'd swindle you.

No.

Here, the animals animals will trick you and you will die.

Well, here's something that I have.

No.

Well, we'll say this.

Sorry, Jack.

Go ahead.

Satots explains that he is going to.

The following isn't over.

They're going to move on.

They're going to start heading through the swamp.

And if you lose, Satats, you will be killed.

This is the point at which the sort of imminent threat of death really starts rising in the crowd.

And without a break, the first animal trick begins.

There is no, we are told, watch out, animals will trick you.

And before he has finished speaking,

we get, I don't think we need to spend too long on this because it's a fairly straightforward trick.

Someone who comes out claiming that he is the actual examiner and that Satots is in fact a man-faced ape who is planning on leading them into the dark.

And

does he have any evidence for that yes indeed he has brought

a dead i'm putting inverted commas around dead man-faced ape with him and looks like satots

it sure does yeah it looks like a slightly furry satots uh with no clothes on and sort of you know crossed out eyes and a big long tongue hanging out of his supposedly dead face um

but surely nobody would be immediately tricked by this

Almost everyone is immediately tricked by this.

Anyone in particular?

Leorio and the ninja.

Leorio and the ninja are immediately

tricked by this.

That's so funny.

There is no pause between watch out you might get.

It would be like they came out and they said, you've entered the forest where an anvil falls on your head.

Watch out.

And at that moment, an anvil just takes out one of the contestants.

It's great.

And then

two characters quickly rush over to the sign that says, Anvil's will fall from here.

Yes.

Does this situation get resolved in this episode, or is this how the next episode begins?

It's how the next episode starts, I believe.

Correct.

The end of the last episode, we are now in episode two.

The end of the last episode was the goal

that's going to kill away yelling goal simultaneously.

Yeah.

So

I would like to say we do get a bit of

hunter exam

law.

I hate that word.

We get a bit of an explanation about how hunter exams work here.

We are told that, let me see if I can get this right.

Examiners are high-tier hunters who are paid to act as examiners by the Hunters Association.

They are...

Hold on.

They are not paid.

Oh, yes, they're specifically not paid.

Yes.

Why are they not...

What?

Why?

What?

they're not volunteers?

Sorry, they're well, sorry, by being a hunter, they have they have agreed to be volunteers.

It's jury duty.

Yeah, it is jury.

It's jury.

Jury duty.

It's jury duty.

Yeah, it's jury duty.

Yeah, that is

my understanding of it, the way they've talked about it in these episodes so far, is like

they get selected and then they do this for free.

And it's part of your like hunter duties or like paying dues.

Reading through Dre, your notes on this,

i i have a slightly different take on something that happens here so dre do you want to talk about why uh we know that hunters are or that uh the exam proctors are uh highly trained hunters who are selected to uh be in charge of hunter exam phases sure yeah um hisuka throws um

i guess i don't know if they're extremely sharp cards or they're just regular cards he throws a volley of cards at the person who claims to be the real examiner uh and throws a volley of cards at the

oh, what's the examiner's name?

Satots.

Satots.

Yeah.

The cards thrown at the

fake, the imposter, just impale its chest.

It is dead, and it is revealed to be a man ape.

And Satots very easily catches the cards.

And Husuka says, like, well, obviously, if you are good enough to be a hunter, then you could block that attack super easily.

And I bring this up because we will return to something that you have here labeled ongoing Hiseka murder count.

Yeah.

You have counted.

This is currently one, right?

Well, we have one point two five point two five.

Because

again, Dre, sorry to steal your words.

I think two arms count as a quarter murder.

It's definitely like attempted murder, right?

It is.

I think something characteristic of Hisuka is that he doesn't care whether it's a murder or not.

It is sort of, it is not an attempted murder.

It's just nothing to him.

It really isn't like,

I think that there's like sort of shockingly little ego that goes into,

you know, like

if you...

Let's travel really quickly to Star Wars, A New Hope, where they go into

the bar to try and find a ship to get off of Tatooine.

And there's the guy who is also

maybe going to kill you from bumping into him.

You know, that is a guy,

that is a very sort of egotistical violence that's being shown by that guy who then also gets his arms cut off by the hero of the show, no less.

So, uh, uh,

you know, we bump, we bump into that.

So that guy, I think, like

is offended and disrespected by being bumped into I think there's shockingly nothing there for Hisuko when when he chooses to cut someone's arm off for bumping into oh yeah uh like it's attempted murder maybe by the law but not internally what law Keith the law doesn't exist where I can't our law that's what I that's what I mean hunters can you can cut off someone's arm in hunter world

Well, yeah, okay.

I think we should move on to episode five of the second episode here.

But just real quick.

Oh, yeah.

I do want to interrogate if this counts as a murder, because that thing was a predator.

Yeah, I'm counting it as a...

Well, I guess, okay.

Maybe I should change it to kill count, not murder count.

Yeah, yeah, I think so.

I think so.

It's less evocative, but it is more accurate.

It is less evocative.

Because I will have something to say about the next set of murders also.

Sure.

Yep, they're coming.

In terms of...

You know, what we were talking about in the last episode, in terms of the way the hunter organization invites you to think of the world as a game, I think that the jury duty thing is really interesting as well, in the sense that they don't have professional examiners.

Instead,

new kinds of the game open up when you are made to a hunter.

And sometimes one of those things is, okay, now you have to do hunter trials.

It's like a new set of tasks that you have to complete, rather than that being something that you sort of elect into.

Episode Episode five, Hisoka is sneaky.

That's the name of this episode.

And we get it in the funniest title card gag.

It's so good.

Satots says, Look, if you try and kill me, he basically says, Look, if you try and kill me with cards again, I will disqualify you.

He does thank him for the compliment.

Yes, of being like,

you defended well.

But if you raise a hand obliquely,

very obliquely is doing every other person there a massive favor by very quickly solving this problem for everyone.

And Hisaka says,

I would do nothing of the sort.

I only want to be above board.

All good.

Smash cut, massive flamenco guitar.

So Hisaka's theme is these great flamenco guitar chords, flamenco packing on Spanish guitar is so good.

It's so beautiful.

And so it's such a stylish show.

We have Hisuka say, no, I won't do anything sinister.

Big flurry of Spanish guitar.

Smash cut to title card.

Hisuka is sneaky right back into the episode.

It's just really well made.

It's really the

closest to always sunny in Philadelphia that this show gets.

It's great.

I mean, it's clearly a deliberate joke.

You know, they could pace that out completely.

And off they go.

Off they go into

the woods.

I was wrong.

That stuff is all in episode four.

I take it back.

Oh, okay.

Cool.

Oh, wow.

So now we're now.

Yeah.

I think it replays at the beginning of episode five.

Yeah, it does.

Yeah, that's probably what.

But I have, yeah, I have here under episode four, Liario and Hanzo, and then he's a good one a favorite by killing this one predator.

I want to talk really broadly about this episode, and then we can kind of dial into specifics.

From here to the end of the episode is wall-to-wall death and

mutilation at the hands of the tricky animals, punctuated by two interesting fights.

First, Hisuka is fought by

some people who try to kick him out of the hunter exam.

Basically, they say, like, you're a fiend, and we're going to get rid of you.

And then, leading on from that, a fight, our first fight, between Gon, Leorio, and is it Karapika?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yes.

Fight Hisuka together, and then eventually they arrive outside these big,

beautiful stone walls, getting ready for test number three.

So it looks like Princess Peach's castle.

Or a white castle.

Jack.

Yes.

You skipped the part where

fucking Leorio and Karapika have to fight a creature that's named a noggin-lugging tortoise.

We need to do a creature rundown for that.

Yeah,

I wanted to just be like, here is what happens in this episode, and now we can start digging in.

Because what we have to talk about is

all the animal names in the same so much.

Everybody, who didn't write down all the animal names?

I'm looking at the list.

If we're playing a game, I can't join in.

Okay, no, I was just saying, these animal names are so compelling, and

the regularity with which the show just keeps introducing these murderous animals invites you to write a list.

First, murderous animal.

Now, listen, there's fog everywhere.

Who's this coming out of the fog?

I go into my notes document and I write down murderous strawberries.

Question mark, question mark, question mark.

And then I strike it out and I write something else.

What do I write, Dre?

Noggin-lugging tortoise.

What is a noggin-lugging tortoise, Dre?

It's a giant turtle that also has like strawberry, giant-looking strawberries

sticking out of its shell.

I think they're cheaply being referred to as Noggins.

It's also men.

In the intro.

It is in the intro.

Yeah.

Oh.

And now, correct me if I'm wrong, but this little thing just sort of blunders around.

It doesn't do anything monumentally and on-screen violent.

No, it eats people.

Yeah.

It eats people.

There's giants in its mouth.

You said giant tortoise at some point.

So it's like, what, like four or five feet tall?

No, it's like a bronosaurus.

Yeah, this thing is like 45 feet tall.

Oh, and there's four of them.

And it just lays into the Hudson candidates.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We mentioned last time how this is in conversation with other Shonen series.

And this is very Dragon Ball to me.

Very, very much like Gohan is training with Piccolo, and also there is just a T-Rex there.

Yeah.

You know?

Yeah.

Watch out.

If I don't look at my feet where I'm walking carefully, what do I run into?

Wait, I don't think you're talking.

No, yes.

Oh no,

shit.

No, not yet.

Not yet.

Not yet.

First, you have mushroom landmine.

Mushroom landmines.

Yes, I'll bleep it.

I'll bleep it.

Mushroom landmines, they turn me into mushrooms.

Oh, my dummy.

My dump had it, or my sorry, my sub had it called something different.

It had it, they were called Claymore mushrooms.

Oh, that's even better.

Yeah, that's great.

Well, hypnosis butterfly arrives.

What does that do?

Exactly what you expect.

Yep, you fly under it and you lose the hunter exam, and then maybe you're passed out and someone eats you while you're passed out.

Penultimate animal, we hear in the distance.

What do we hear, Dre?

Oh, I forget what exactly they're yelling.

Oh, they're

mimicking the voice of

the examiner being like, I'm over here.

Hurry up.

Yeah.

Something if you thought for a second, you'd go, the examiner would never help me out that way.

The whole point was to not lose sight.

But no.

These people, it's their only hope to go follow that voice.

And instead, what do they find?

Well, they fall off a cliff and land on a bunch of stakes.

They get impaled by spikes.

They get impaled by spikes to their death.

Curse you, Ruse Raven.

Ruse Raven's my favorite.

Ruse Raven's great.

And they have actually.

Yeah.

And this is just a bird flying overhead and the bird is alternately saying, you know, like, I'm over here.

And also just like, ah!

The double tongue, I think, is a cute reference to

myths about

sort of trickster ravens who, if you cut a crow's tongue tongue or a raven's tongue down the middle, they gain the ability to speak.

Oh, that's great.

Don't do that, but that is a good myth.

Yeah.

I cannot tell you,

dear listener, how in rapid succession these scenes and these deaths play.

This is a nearly montage, basically.

Yeah, it's nearly a montage.

No, it's definitely a montage.

It goes on forever.

It is like five minutes of people getting fucking murdered by the animals.

So we know that between the start of phase one and the end of phase two,

because I said at the very beginning, we have 42 remaining, which means we lost over 350 contestants.

Contestants.

What are the

contestants?

It has against the game show.

Entrance, I think, is actually entrance.

Right, yes, entrance, yeah.

How many of those do you think are deaths?

Do we have a, do we have a, uh, do we like a gut feeling on

what is a death and what is a, what is a just a um

anyone in the swamp is dead yeah i think a lot of the people in i guess they don't specifically mention

there are a few people who just fall asleep right from the butterflies yeah but they're gonna get fucking

they're gonna get eaten by man-phased apes you're right um i think yeah but it's hard we have to what we'd have to do is eliminate the people who lost in the tunnel i actually have i actually i i don't have the number of how many people made it out of the tunnel but i do have the number of how many people oh, I do I do have that okay perfect.

It's 148 so we lose we lose uh 250

is that correct?

Yeah, we lose almost exactly 250 in the tunnel

So so hey so guys less than 50% kill rate on the hunter exam guaranteed.

We did it everyone.

It's a good year

Okay, oh no, I'm wrong.

I'm wrong again.

I'm sorry, everybody.

I'm going to cut that whole thing.

148 is the number after the swamp.

Yeah, I thought it was like 200-something people died in the swamp.

Yeah,

I think.

Never mind.

I think it's probably, yeah, there's probably like 150 or 200 people died.

People died in the swamp.

We did it again.

Sorry, Sylvie.

We killed half of them.

No, we killed half of them.

Okay.

Look, I know how genre works.

I am not.

I don't think if, for example, this was a piece of realist fiction, we would see all these deaths and we would be treating them very differently than if we are in this situation, which is, you know, a shonen and is also, you know, like a heightened piece of work.

Yeah.

So I'm not out here claiming like, oh, wow, we should take this.

I don't want to do the like cinema sins thing of like...

You meet the piece of work where it stands.

And this is a piece of work in which a bunch of people go get killed in a swamp by animals.

And it is played, understandably, often like a joke.

With the

deosex empathy.

What is deosex empathy, Keith?

That's just a cinema since joke about

it's really good because I rolled my eyes immediately.

That is the thing.

That's what Cinema Sense does.

But I do want to talk a bit about how 12-year-olds are doing this.

Yeah.

Well,

to lead into that, what we should say, like just to consider the composition of these people,

just thinking about how many millions of people, according to the fiction,

didn't make it to phase one,

and then how many were cut out in the tunnel,

which was relatively, it seems so grueling at the time, but then the swamp is like, oh my God.

We really have whittled ourselves down to

a very special kind of person that's taking this test and succeeding.

Yes, there's a kind of self-selection happening here.

I guess my question is, does Gon

know that in these trials you might get impaled on sticks?

Probably.

I think, I think

so.

I think that maybe not to the extent, but it's happening all around him, and he's just hanging out with Kilua.

Yeah, and he's walking perfectly happily through the forest with killua again in that first episode in that episode four you know we saw him sort of happily chatting away with his new best friend like while stepping over crumpled bodies of people he had just met

yeah

yeah um so i think i think there is there is a sort of um

uh

like i guess you could say like he does not understand the gravity of what's happening or he does understand and totally accepts the reality of what's happening.

It's especially notable because the character backstories in the last episode were specifically around traumatic death, you know?

And we bought that.

It was sold in such a way that I think it was effective.

We bought it.

You know, we bought that the Kurta clan were all killed for their eyes.

We learned that Leorio, his friend, was essentially killed by

societal negligence or state negligence, privatized medicine.

And those deaths are

within the fiction treated very seriously.

Or not I don't even want to say that the deaths in episode five aren't treated seriously.

They are just

they have no weight to them.

They are moved past so effectively and efficiently of just being like, okay, we're just whittling these numbers down.

And there's something to be said for like, oh, the deaths in episode four are relating to our protagonists, and the deaths in episode five are the background characters.

But there is something really interesting to me in terms of the way the show is wanting to talk about death by putting these two episodes back to back.

There is something, I think, that

in Shonen Broadly as a genre, that sort of explains at least parts of this.

And I'm going to borrow a line from the next episode.

to help explain it.

It is, uh, did I?

I thought I wrote it down, but I guess I didn't write it.

Oh, here it is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did write it down.

Uh, it takes courage to concede to that.

Is something that it basically ends this set of episodes.

We'll get back to that and who says it and why later.

But there is

something

in

this genre

that

punishes

people

who

like

really drastically overestimate themselves.

Uh, Shonen is very cruel to someone who like thinks that they have the strength of a protagonist, but doesn't.

Um, yeah, we see that in the fight with Hisuka.

We see a group of people who think they have this strength and don't, they are extremely punished.

Uh, we see it, um,

uh,

like in

like how many people passed out in this tunnel because they thought that they could hack it.

Um like uh meanwhile the two 12-year-olds are like you know not even no not even panting.

Kropica's like panting a little bit.

Leorio made it through on absolute iron willpower alone.

This is like not a genre that

like

it also associates that sort of overestimating yourself with like cruelty a lot of the times.

You'll see a character who thinks they're hot shit, but is like is basically fodder tier.

Uh, and they're usually very cruel.

Um, uh, we get that a bit in the next episode, actually.

Yes, we do get that a bit in the next episode.

Um, and so I think that this sort of fits in broadly with Shonen: of like,

there's like, there's a, a, a, uh,

there's a, a complete kind of person who is very strong that the hunter exam is like kind of looking for

uh

and uh this is gonna be talked about a little bit about um the yakuza games the yakuza games do this a lot where like you have

uh this kind of strength that is like legitimate and you have this kind of strength that is like illegitimate and Those people are usually like nasty and selfish and punished.

Actually, it's kind of like the Karapika lens.

Like, there's a lot of people who the show, who a lot of shown and look at through Karapika's lens of like you can't be truly strong unless you're like, um, kind of completely strong in some way.

And one facet of that completeness is like being a good or sympathy, sympathetic or empathetic person.

Um, and if you don't have that, then uh, you'll you will be, you'll have your arms cut off, or you'll be kind of sort of

cosmically punished.

I mean, like Nicholas is a good example of that, right?

Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's kind of rude, and you know,

like they don't, they don't portray him very well at all, even though the only person we see him interact with is way worse.

Tompa is way worse of a person than Nicholas.

What the fuck?

Tompa's deal makes less and less sense Yeah.

The more you think about it.

While we're talking about this a little bit, Dre,

do you want to talk a little bit about Tompa?

Because you have a lot of Tompa stuff in your notes here.

Yeah, I just.

Because, again, I've seen all of Hunter Hunter, but it has been so long since I've watched these beginning episodes.

I don't remember if we ever get more information behind Tompa's whole deal.

Because

I don't, don't tell me.

I won't.

I won't.

But like,

because at first I was like, okay, he's just a guy who likes to see the other people lose.

But then when we get that scene with Nicholas, it's like, oh, he doesn't just want to get people out of the exam.

He wants them to be so

broken that they won't even dare to take the exam again.

When he pays the Blowjob Brothers.

And I'm all in that.

They're bullying for bullying Nicholas out of the match.

And they're like, wow, Rookie Crusher, you really love doing this.

He says, I live for it.

Yeah, I think in the dub, he says, it's what gets me out of bed every day.

Yeah.

And for the love of the game, he's really in it.

For the love of the game.

All three hundred and sixty-four days of the year before the hunter exam, he is prepping for the hunter exam.

Yeah, so I'm wondering, do we ever get Tanpa's origin story?

Right?

Like, does he, does he want, does he think by making these people fall out that he has a better chance of passing?

Or does he just want to crush the bears?

I think he's the joker.

He does not.

He is the joker.

I literally wrote that in my notes.

I think that Tompa could have passed probably a handful of times, if not more, if he wanted to.

There is,

he is very much like

he feels.

I wonder if, like, he's like.

He feels like he's part of the exam itself at this point, the way people talk about it.

Totally.

I have this written down because we talked about this a bit on the last episode about how

not official hunter people and other players and Tonpa like act as like sort of secondary hunter exams within the hunter exam, like that character who was going to leave traps, except they got the quiz question wrong,

uh, the brothers bullying Nicholas, Tonpa's whole deal, and uh, leading up to I think the scene that we're about to talk about, which is uh uh Hisuka and Hisuka's would-be attackers,

and how they sort of like are

um

like it's not just like Leori.

We we see a lot of Leorio and Karapika talking uh about what it means to be a hunter, but you have we actually have like 400 people here who who all kind of have an opinion on what it means to be a hunter.

Some of their opinions are that it doesn't mean anything to be a hunter, I just want to be one.

And some of them are like Karapika, who have like this very sort of like uh you know high-minded idea, like an idealistic uh notion of like what a hunter should or shouldn't be.

And

they, yeah, they really sort of function as further filtering out

people

from, you know, kind of providing this sort of a life-saving service of like

getting people out of there before the parts of the exam where they could die.

Except in Hisuka's case, who did not filter anyone out,

filter them out, actually filtered them out in a much broader broader sense.

Was there anything else leading up to that scene that we want to talk about?

Oh, sorry.

Is there more of this topic that we want to talk about?

I sort of set it up and then moved past it.

I didn't mean to do that.

I don't think so.

Do we want to talk about The Last Monster?

Let's talk about Hisaka first.

Does The Last Monster happen after Hisuka?

I thought it did.

Yeah, it does.

It does.

The Last Monster is the best joke in the episode.

Fucking incredible.

It's so good.

So there's this great moment where we see the camera showing us that something is going to happen with hisuka and then it shows kiloa who didn't see that happen the way that we did also just knowing that something is going to happen uh he explains it to gone as like he can smell it gone tries to literally smell it and is like i can't smell it which means that it was not a literal smell it's something else um uh but they very they very wisely sort of move up um

away in a way we need to we need to get away there is trouble brewing yeah killer has got hisaka's number really quickly and he's right because a gang of contestants in blue coats um

like like uh they're almost wearing a uniform uh have decided as a unit to kick hisaka out of the game and their reasoning is basically you shouldn't be allowed to take the hunter exams and we're gonna beat you up so badly that you you don't come back there's another great joke here where they're where they're like like uh

if we won't beat you up if you promise not to take the exam again and he's because i'm gonna pass this year so i agree to your terms

it's really good

yeah great little joke um there's a good implication here oh sorry do you have something silly no i was gonna ask if we could take a quick five yeah oh my god of course yeah sounds good

Hey, everyone, it's Keith.

Just some housekeeping during the break.

The first thing I wanted to note is that earlier I said I would check up on something in the manga and talk about it next episode.

I forgot to do that.

So when it doesn't show up, it's not because it wasn't interesting.

It's because I forgot.

Maybe I'll end up checking on that later.

The second thing is that now that the show is actually out and on

your podcast platforms, it would be a huge help if people would go and rate and review the show five stars on itunes.

If you have another platform that accepts ratings, that's also fine.

But I think iTunes is really the big and important one for us.

And if you haven't rated and reviewed Friends of the Table, it would be a great opportunity to do both of those things.

It's, again, it's a huge help.

We hate having to say it, but it does...

It's something that just doesn't occur to people to do unless you say it.

So we got to say it.

And then the last thing is that Friends of the Table opened a new merch storefront at friendsofthetable.shop.

We've only got one design on there as of right now,

having to do with Palisade episode 25 and on.

Shirts, sweater, mug,

stickers.

If you're worried about spoilers, then I wouldn't go yet, but we won't sell out because it's print to order.

And I think that's everything.

iTunes, friends of the table.shop,

the manga.

I forgot.

Sorry.

Okay, bye.

All right, so we left out.

We went out talking about

this proposition by by this group of would-be hunters

who think Hisuka doesn't cut it.

They sort of seem to be

Karapika-minded in their sort of ideas of what a hunter is.

Or maybe they're just like, this guy's clearly evil.

Maybe they're much less, lower on this scale than Karapika is,

but just don't want an evil guy to be a hunter and get access to the hunter

But there's this great sort of undertone to this where, like, they have,

they have intentionally sort of forfeited their chance

to become hunters to trap Hisuka and assume that this is true for Hisuka as well.

Like, look, we can't get back to the examiner.

We're done.

We're, this is it.

We stopped.

We gave up to do this.

And He's like, I can get back.

I don't think that they gave up, Keith.

I think that this was their whole thing.

This is why they're all dressed the same.

They have entered the hunter exam to take out Hisaka.

Do you think so?

Yeah, that's my read on this scene, which makes it even, it makes it even, you know, that there is word on this, people know Hisaka is bad news.

And there is something interesting to me about the idea of like entering the game with a different purpose in mind.

You know, being like, oh, we don't want to become hunters.

We are here to get this guy out.

I think that they have a line about like, or maybe it's earlier.

I don't know.

I feel like there's a line around here where it's like, a fiend like you shouldn't be a hunter.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

Which is true.

I don't, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people believe that.

It's, it is explicitly not what the hunter rules say, but people seem to believe it anyway.

Um,

uh, and it doesn't go well.

He took a

Spanish guitar cue, this like uh it doesn't even go.

No, he produces a playing card, a four of clubs or something from his.

I wrote down, he keeps using a four, but I didn't write down the suit.

Because Hisuka is also number 44.

There's something about this number cropping up again and again with Hisuka.

He produces this card.

Let me just get this beautiful shot from above.

They're kind of surrounding him, and we get like

a flash of a circle

scored around them.

Now, this is a moment when I think the show is being cowardly.

Because they just because they crumple.

They crumple.

You know what I would like them to do, Keith?

Cut in half cure crosshouse blood spurt.

I would like them to slide apart like at the beginning of cube.

You know, I want them all top of the

body, the top of their body and the bottom of their body to go in separate directions.

You want it to be like the laser grid and the Resident Evil.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I think it's a laser grid and cube, too, right, Sylvie?

At the very beginning of the day?

I believe it is, yeah.

Cut apart by a laser grid, is what I want.

But no, it was still a great scene, though.

Top marks.

Yeah, yeah.

So yeah, it is like not just a one-hit KO.

It's an eight times one-hit KO.

This whole group is down in one half.

One man remains.

Yes, he calls for help.

Does he throw cards into his brain and kill him?

Into the back, through the back of his skull.

And it means the foley on it is horrible of these

razor playing cards.

He might not have fallen to pieces, but I will say, not so cowardly in that moment.

No, no, that was great.

What are these playing cards made of?

Is this magic?

I don't know.

Frankly, I don't care.

I think that the show is interesting either way.

We know Hisako can make up man's.

I'll tell you that there's

great.

I'll say that when I first saw these scenes, I assumed that these were normal playing cards and that the show says nothing about what they're made except I think that we see him shuffling them.

It could be a misdirect, but we see him shuffling cards, and they seem like normal cards.

That's what he wants you to think.

Right, fine.

But it could be a misdirect.

Who knows?

I'm just saying, I'm just putting it out there that

there's no suggestion except for Hisuka is sneaky, that this is anything but a normal playing card.

You know,

I listened to a little show called Homestuck Made This World, and they do talk about evil clown magic

as sort of a nebulous thing.

And I think for now, we might have to accept accept that.

Yeah.

I don't want to get too into the habit of bringing up the manga because we are covering the 2011 show specifically.

Right.

I think it's almost always interesting to compare.

I posted a couple screens of the way this fight looks in the manga specifically.

Oh, great.

Because

I think it's...

Can you describe what we're looking at?

So,

oh, wow.

I tried to put these in order where

it's the aftermath of Hisoka using his card to slash.

There's a line where he talks about how he just needs one card to deal with this group.

And we see

three guys in the top.

One gets his eyes sliced through.

One gets his head slashed in half, and the other's throat is cut.

You see all the blood.

You see, there's a lot of just like Hisoka, like

they imply a lot of movement of the cards while showing just people actively bleeding out in the manga itself.

And just like

the end, it has Hisoka standing on this battleground

saying, so many dropouts, just you three left and pointing at Play Oreon, correct?

There's a thing happening here in the manga that we don't get in the anime that's lovely, which is when Hisoka speaks.

Also, this is a...

The manga art, sorry, the anime art direction, Hisoka looks like a really faithful translation um sort of looks perfect um yeah when hisoka speaks there are little playing card suits in his speech bubbles uh in the first panel he's just kind of like speaking a

spade symbol into the air and then in his last panel uh in his last one he says yeah just you three left and points and there's the little heart symbol below it within the speech bubble i believe that keeps up throughout the entire manga is like one of these little like details of or at least long enough that i it hasn't stopped yet for where I'm at.

It's sad that we don't get that shape.

Obviously, I understand why we can't.

It's hard to communicate.

Well, we do.

I will say,

they do a lot of smart, like, moves in adaptation when it comes to

adding, like, they know when to add things.

The entire bit with all the monsters is one page that's been stretched out.

The stuff with our lovely frog that we should talk about in a minute,

some of that's new.

The stuff Gun and Kilowa interacting with it, I don't remember happening in what I read.

So, like, they kind of, they may, they have to, like, cut some of these sort of like

some of this flair that Tagashi has

and find like different ways to implement it.

Whether it's, we get more visual stylization later in the show, if I'm remembering correctly.

Um,

I think it is a stylish show in general, but like they do more of this sort of like there are some, yeah, there are some nice moments moments

with Isaka specifically.

I also noticed this we get these little inset shots.

There's some not so nice moments.

Yeah there are looking I have to say I don't support

Wow, Jack very unscrupulous morals this episode.

Yeah with Hisaka we get these unique shots of like his his hand coming out of the screen towards the camera.

We get a great shot of just burning red eyes and I think a smile.

And that sort of seems like a compromise to get these kind of like stylized elements around Hisaka.

In

Keith?

Oh, sorry,

you can finish.

I was not.

No, no, no, no.

I was going to move on to the second fight.

Well,

there's something important about this fight that we missed, which is the Hisuka's framing of it.

So

this is the,

this is, what is this, nine total people that he kills here?

So up to 10 and a quarter.

I believe so, so, yeah.

Right.

So up to 10 and a quarter kills.

I will say again,

this is...

Hisuge is terrifying.

I mean, in this fight and the next, Hizuka is like really kind of almost like a phantom.

He is like...

He's a phantom trooper.

Like a.

Very good, Jack.

But I don't know.

He's like a horrible ghost.

I swear to God, I wasn't trying to do anything.

who is like floating and killing and just way better than you uh and it is terrifying you do not want to be caught in hisuka's gaze uh but the the the thing about this is that these guys put themselves right in his gaze oh yeah they're like we're gonna attack you isuka and uh there is a like very loose definition of self-defense here uh you know like sure he'su didn't have to kill these people to not be hurt by them uh I'm trying to think of what would have to happen for them to be able to actually hurt him.

And I don't know that there's an answer there.

I don't think that these people were anything even approaching a threat to him.

But there is this sort of like unstoppable force

feeling to how they portray him.

And while they're trying to...

judge him and say he's not worthy to be a hunter.

He is also judging them and saying, no, it's you that are not worthy of being a hunter and this is this this attitude he carries over into the next fight which is where he sees uh uh

leorio and kropica standing terrified at the the display here uh kropica insists that they that they run um which they do uh but then leorio does something extremely stupid and surprising if anyone wants it's extremely him it's also extremely him we see him walk out of the fog with just like a stick and he's like running away isn't my style and he has to fight he wants to fight hisuka

this isn't my fight but i like can't let you do this yeah um

again speaking to his sort of like

i don't know

They present Kurupika as having the one who has like a very strong sense of like honor, but like I feel like Leorio is the one who actually has the like most rigid moral compass in a lot of ways.

Yeah, I think it's just that Karapika's is like considered like she has come to this code, whereas Leorio is just like, uh, in this moment, my gut tells me if this is right or wrong.

Yeah, it's very gut-based.

Yeah, Karapika is very cerebral.

Leorio is extremely reactive.

Um,

and uh,

and they, that's why I think they play off each other so well is because that's that's very, it's very intentional.

You can tell how intentional it is.

But

yeah, Leorio charges at Hisuga, who we just saw easily murder nine people.

And

this is where...

Oh, does he get punched before?

Yeah, right before

Goan shows up, who like...

Finally actually did smell something was going to happen

after not being able to smell it earlier.

Smells that something's going to happen, disappears from Kilo aside.

I don't think he necessarily smelled that something was going to happen.

He was just worried and was like, why are Leorio and Karapaka not here?

And then he sniffed them out and went to go find them.

You think so?

You don't think he smelled something?

Like, maybe, I mean, even as

service level is like, just smelled that Hisuka and Leorio were like in the same area.

Maybe.

Like, I mean, maybe.

But maybe.

I don't know.

We do see him smell the air.

But Leario gets absolutely clocked by Husugo, which is interesting because he didn't clock anyone else.

He sliced them down with cards.

So he clocks Leario out in one punch,

makes a passing remark about the look on Leario's face as he's charging him in a positive way.

Yeah, he sort of says, you got the stuff, you know?

Yeah, sorry.

He loves that look.

Yeah, he loves that look.

Someone who loves a lot of looks.

Frog interlude?

Is it a frog after?

Frog's after.

Frog after.

Is it?

No, frog is before.

No, you're right.

Oh, no.

Frog before.

No, you're after me before because Gun and Killer were together.

Yes.

Frog interlude.

Gun and Killio are walking.

Suddenly...

The ground beneath them falls down in a perfect circle.

Almost as if they're falling into a trap.

And I thought to myself, they're falling into like a pit trap or something.

Right.

In a way.

In a way.

Sort of.

Huge frog mouth closes around them.

Camera cuts the top.

So we see the frog from above.

Immense frog has eaten Gon and Kilua in one bite.

Title card says frog in waiting.

Yeah.

This thing is in the frog.

This is like the size of a shed, maybe.

And it just eats Gon and Kiluwa.

It's also like a perfect sphere.

It's such a cute design for this this thing.

Turns out, not a trap.

Ground was a tongue.

Ground was a tongue.

Ground was a tongue.

And the frog walks off.

And I was like,

I don't know where we're going from here.

I don't know what.

You know, they're not dead.

I don't understand what the next move is here.

And it's just a perfect brick joke.

The frog, without any warning, vomits them back up.

And it is revealed that Tonpa's stupid laxative drink that

Killior had been stockpiling uh made the frog sick as well just really good one two punch joke just good yeah saved by talking about the frog

uh oh do you remember jack what uh what kilo says after they use the the drink to make the frog throw up

uh no what does he say gone is like oh thank god you have that drink and kilo's like i could have gotten out of my own

he just used the drink because it'd be fun

i almost read it as that he didn't use the drink, that it was just like he had it in his bag and it like broke open and made the frogs.

Oh, he's now a little sad that he didn't.

I read it as intentional because he had it in his hand, I think, or maybe it was on the ground next to him.

Yeah, it like fell out.

I just read that as like it like popped open in his, like out of his pocket.

Right,

during the eating,

it sprayed out.

Yeah, that's totally possible.

But

regardless, Kilo could have gotten out on his own, so he says.

So he says, and cut back to this this scene or is there anything interesting that happens in between there

um i don't think that i have

i don't think that i have anything written down here um

nothing's jumping out at me yeah yeah so gone and hisuka fight and uh it goes about as well as you would expect what's almost a first hit there does anybody want to talk about that first

Gon launches himself from...

Gon basically goes straight into an attack.

Yeah.

And

fishing rod whips the side of Hisaka's face, leaving a mark.

You know, this is how you know it's serious.

He's been able to leave a mark on Hisaka, who turns around in a kind of shock and admiration.

And correct me if I'm wrong.

Is that the only hit he manages to land in this fight?

Yes.

Yes.

Great.

Okay, bodes well.

Yeah.

This is where the ghost thing

that I said sort of really

becomes becomes apparent he is like turning into mist as gone is like trying to attack him he can't be hit he's like uh uh you know disappearing in a cloud of smoke and then reappearing behind gone he can't really do anything to him um and then until until he suck uh grabs him by the throat Yeah, uh, and is about to choke the life out of him and then stops.

And is,

I mean, he says it outright.

I think it's very interesting he sort of says you and Leorio you and the other one have got what it takes uh uh uh

you're doing good basically and drops him and leaves right leaves with Leorio leaves with carries Leorio to the end of the exam he says don't worry I'm not gonna kill your friend he passes two

uh yeah he passes two he passes two

and at which point I wrote a note is he soccer an examiner?

Well,

to Hisoka, he is.

Yes, right, yes.

To Hisoka, Hisoka's an examiner.

I think that,

you know, I think that we'll see a lot of Hizuka examining in this show.

This,

I like this because it does two things.

One, it really establishes the sort of like

I don't know how quite to describe it, but the sort of like food chain mentality that Hisoka has towards like

people and strength and like

the potential within them to become strong.

Right.

Um, and also

this like baked-in sense of superiority that, yes, like everyone is becoming strong so they can entertain.

And the first suggestions of

Husoka being a sort of sexual freak.

There is, yeah, there's some uncomfortable undertones.

There is, there is definitely a kind of surprisingly gross look in his eye when he's like, when he is deciding that people are passing his test, he likes it.

Um,

we, this will not be the last time we talk about this.

Uh, but he does say to go and when he puts him down, he says, He says, Grow up and become a fine hunter, which is surprising.

And then the second thing he says is even more surprising, which is, it's always good to have friends.

Yeah, I didn't feel good about this.

This was concerning to me.

Tell me what you think about that.

Well, I can't help but notice what you still have pinned at the top of this document.

As of last time, I think it's worth coming back to.

Keith has pinned, I feel like it would be exhausting but extremely valuable to have a gun in your life, which is what I said to Keith after having seen only one episode.

My sense of foreboding only grew when he speaks into a little walkie-talkie and is, I don't know what he says.

He's like, what, moving on to face two or something?

You know, basically being like, I'm going to come and move on.

Yeah.

And then we get

to see who he's on the phone to.

And he's on the phone to the rattly pin man.

Yes.

Other really frightening looking dude that we encountered in the last episode.

The horrible clockwork man who ticks and talks around very weirdly.

Who is, I think, according to Tomba, so scary that he cannot approach him.

Yes.

He doesn't say won't, I won't go near that guy.

He says, I can't even approach him, is what he says.

So at this point, I'm wondering, is Hisaka recruiting like an evil gang of hunters?

Is Hisaka trying to make evil hunters, which we know exist?

You know, rogue hunters have been talked about.

There is this idea that

you have to prevent bad people from becoming hunters, otherwise, you essentially create a very powerful sort of social entity.

So, you know, that's a possibility.

My current working model is he's got his own villainous crew of

hunter folks.

I want to earmark, you know, I want us to just remember that line because I do think we will come back to

like wondering about that together.

It's always good to have friends.

There's a lot.

There's a lot.

Now, this is not just a Hisuka thing either.

Like, I think that

that line will mean a lot of things to a lot of different people as we go.

And that's a Shonen thing to a certain extent, right?

It is.

It really, yes.

The power of friendship is maybe the epitome of genre trope for Shonen.

And you know that a show like Hunter Hunter is not going to just leave that on the table.

Yeah, totally.

Sorry, Jackie.

Oh, also, Shoujo as well, right?

That is also like the magical girl, you know, being sustained by the power of my friends and my capacity for love for my friends.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's the engine that powers Sailor Moon.

I don't think there's anything else about this fight, except we do quickly see Kilo being like, where'd Gone go?

I thought that he was following me because of how cool I am.

Is Dre back?

Are you back, Dre?

I know that you've stepped away from me.

Oh, Dre's still muted, so maybe not.

We can wait.

I'm back.

Okay.

Hi, Dre.

Dre, did you have anything to say that you maybe didn't say because we were recording?

I mean, because you were muted?

Yeah, I mean, I think the only thing I would say about the idea of is Husuka an examiner is I think like he really does seem to think that this test is just a formality.

I mean,

I think in the first three episodes, we learned that he basically was going to pass last year, and then he just attacked the last examiner and was failed because of that.

Right.

Yes.

They decided to fail him for attacking an examiner.

Attacking or killing?

Almost killing.

Almost killing.

Almost killing.

And I think that by now, though, we have illustrated by Husuka himself what it would mean to be able to almost kill an examiner.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And

let's see.

Yeah, I think Husuka Husica thinks himself as an examiner whose

standards are even loftier than that of the Hunter exam.

Because those nine people could have passed the Hunter exam.

Mate.

This is the first time.

He's kind of Tonpa-esque with it.

The only time anyone

can just Tombaesh.

He just will cut you in half with a card instead of making you shit your brains out.

Yeah.

This is going to be a terrible.

I'm sorry for this, but

in the in Kotor 1, a Star Wars message in Pokemon.

Oh, fuck yeah, dude.

Let's go.

There is a bounty hunter, an unequivocally bad guy named Kalo Nord.

Kalo Nord has an obvious shtick.

Spend five minutes with Kalo Nord, and he will reveal his shtick to you, which is that

he doesn't want you to talk to him.

Every time you talk to him, he will count.

When he gets to three, that's when he decides that you do not get to be alive anymore and he kills you.

This happens several times.

And you, the player, can also choose to take part in being murdered by Kalo Nord.

If you talk to him three times, he'll count to three and then kill you.

Will he kill you

guaranteed, or will you enter into combat with him?

At the point where you can do this, he will kill you guaranteed.

Okay.

Technically, like I...

I don't know what would happen.

I wouldn't doubt that there's some way to cheese the fight, but like he is so much higher level than you that you are meant to die instantly in this fight.

Um,

and uh, uh, he's interesting because he sort of gives off this vibe of like,

like, I'm on my path.

Don't get in my way or I will have to clear my way.

But also this like sort of judge, jury, executioner thing at the same time.

It's a very interesting kind of combo.

Um, that I can't think of a lot of like direct comparisons to.

Yeah.

It is.

It's very very strange.

Yeah.

There is a conversation about this.

Karapika does a little analysis of Hisuka

when

Goan catches back up with the rest of them.

Karapika ran away from this fight and never looked back.

Thank you, Karapika.

Again, very

reasonable.

Very, very reasonable.

Yeah, we do get more of Karapika's sort of ideological

definition of what being a hunter is.

But he also sort of answers answers Ghan's question, which is, Ghana is also confused why he passed and why Leorio passed.

He's like, you, you, he said that we both passed.

Like, why did he say that?

And Karabiga's answer was, I have a quote here,

it's quite common that those possessing special talents are drawn to others with unique gifts.

Killing you would have been a waste.

And then he sort of embarrassingly, or he's sort of embarrassed.

He's like, oh, is that like weirdly mean to say out loud?

And Ghan's like, no, that's fine.

And then says something, I would say, kind of concerning for a 12-year-old to say.

The narrator

calls what Ghana experienced mortal fear for the first time.

But in Ghon's words, he says, I was so scared, I wanted to run away, but I couldn't.

At the same time, I was excited.

Isn't that strange?

Yes, Ghon, it is strange.

You are 12.

What are you doing?

It is really.

This is kind of the last thing I want to talk about in this episode: this specific moment of Gone talking Gone and then the narrator and then Karapika talking about their emotions together because we get some we get some really interesting stuff.

Yeah, the narrator says it was the first time he had been close to death and the show this is the first time the show played that kind of to the hilt, right?

The stakes in that fight were very explicit.

We saw the kind of the danger and the terror played out very directly.

And then, yeah, Gone kind of conflates excitement and fear in that sense.

You know, I I was excited and I was afraid at the same time.

Interesting that he's also like, Gone is constantly in a state of like searching for the meaning of Hunter, which is the same thing that we're doing.

Because he's trying to relate to his dad.

And so, like, everything that he's feeling, he must be going like, is this it?

Is this the feeling?

Is this the feeling that I'm looking for that makes you leave your son?

That's a really good way of thinking about it.

Because, yeah, this fits with the narrator.

Oh, it's kind of sad.

Yeah,

it's really funny when you put it like that, though.

It's funny when you phrase it that way.

Gon is confused.

Gon does not describe himself as confused.

He describes himself as excited.

And that is so that is wild.

You know, the thing that Gon is outputting with his mouth, the thing he is saying, does not suggest confusion.

I mean, he says, I felt excited and afraid.

Is that strange?

Right.

You know,

he's being pretty, like, he's making a declaration, a pretty clear declaration about how he's feeling.

And then for the narrator to step in and say, no, he's confused.

What he is feeling is he had a near-death experience and he is confused.

And sitting that alongside him asking himself, is this the feeling powerful enough to make my dad leave me?

It's great.

It's really good

writing about characters having intense experiences and then feeling things.

And I think as viewers of the show, that is something that we should like be wondering with Goan: is like,

is this the is this could this be what it was?

Um, and I think this is like really the first time that it happens where Goan feels the feeling of what being a hunter is like and has to contend with,

is this what is this the answer already to my question?

Did I already find it?

Um, and uh, more of those will come up and we'll, you know, we'll try to tag them as they as they arise.

And that's episode five.

Yeah.

We should move on to episode six, the final episode.

You.

You asked a question, Jack, in episode one.

I believe you verbatim said, can a girl be a hunter?

We have our definitive answer.

Yes.

Girls can be hunters.

Also, chefs can be hunters.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because trial,

what I believed right up until we started recording here was trial three, but it's in fact trial 1.

The swamp that kills you was just a bonus trick at the end of trial 1.

Trial 1.5.

Yeah, trial 1.5.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They do say it.

They do briefly say, like,

after they get out of the tunnel, like, is this phase two?

And he's like, no, we have a way to go still.

Yeah.

But it's here.

I want to kind of work through what this trial is pretty quickly so we can kind of dig into what the episode is.

Oh, this is a a cooking trial.

There is one more thing, real quick, right at the beginning.

I'm sorry for introducing it, like we can jump to it and then double back.

But

really odd, really strange moment before we see the two proctors of the next exam, where

Kropica and Goan show up to the start of phase two, and they're looking for Leorio, find Hisuka, and Hisuka almost sort of sweetly pointing over to the

Leorio over leaning up against a stump.

Like, look, he's over there.

Very odd moment after the last episode.

I mean, what a strange way to start off.

We talked about Tompa as the Joker, but, you know,

there's something about this kind of like lightness mixed with...

It's two different Jokers.

It is.

Yeah, it's two different Jokers.

Yeah, Tompa's the Joker.

Fletcher Joker versus Mark Hamill Joker.

Oh, I was going to say

it's Joker-like Joker's trick, like I'm the Joker now, versus Joker, baby.

Versus any other version of Joker, really, I think it's Hisuka.

I guess Mark, I guess, yes, Mark Hamill.

Unless you were going to say that it was Tompa that was Mark Hamill's Joker, because I think Hisuka might be Mark Hamill's Joker.

Yeah, fair.

I don't know.

It's been a long time.

He's just very cartoony.

Maybe that's really what it is.

I think

Tonpa is Heath Ledger because he's like a dog chasing a car.

He doesn't know what he's going to do when he catches it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Flipping this.

We're flipping the script here on.

Yeah, he's like Keith Ledger's Joker because he asks, where's the Italian?

I need to feed him soda.

That'll make him poop his pain.

Make him shit.

I very briefly thought you said Keith Ledger.

Keith Ledger's Joker.

Trail two is a cooking trial.

You need to prepare food.

It's sort of the great British bake-off.

Or it's Iron Chef.

It's Iron Iron Chefs.

Yeah, talking about it.

It's a very Iron Chef.

Talking about it as a game,

this is like literally a game show.

They're like, this is your required ingredient.

It's pork.

And we meet Menshi, who is the sort of lead examiner here.

She has extremely cool blue hair.

She's wearing a sheer top and a black bra.

She, as we learn later, wields like nine chefs' knives.

It's very cool.

It's very cool.

And she has partnered up with Buhara, who is a huge guy.

He's a fat guy, but he's also like a giant.

15 feet tall, maybe.

12 feet tall, something like that.

And he is very hungry.

And what you've got to do is you've got to go out and you've got to get pigs and you've got to bring them back and you've got to cook the pigs.

And we go pretty much straight away into like a broad slapstick sequence as it turns out that these are, quote, the world's most aggressive pigs.

And what they're called.

Oh, God, did I write it down?

I wrote this one down because it's Brits so quick, and it's almost hard to even realize this is the name of them.

Are they called the Great Stamp?

The Great Stamp.

Yeah, the Great Stamp, the world's most aggressive pigs.

What we get here is basically a reprise of the Trick Swamp.

We get a bunch of people getting killed by

a group of sort of grizzled, tough guys feel about having to do a chef game.

Not happy.

No, they're not happy.

They're laughing at.

When these people are revealed, oh, I'm ringing the bell.

Sorry, everybody.

I'm ringing the bell.

When they're revealed to be gourmet hunters,

they are laughed at.

So, yeah, yeah.

What is a gourmet hunter?

You wrote something down in here, Dre.

You wanted to talk about how gourmet hunters have been introduced.

Yeah.

Here, let me pull up those notes again.

You actually have two things about this, I think.

Because

you also have the heading.

We'll talk about this maybe after the first part of this exam, maybe.

How long is this exam taking?

Yeah.

Let's double back to that one once we get more into how long this one's going to take.

Yeah, so the gourmet hunters, I mean, they say this like after the test, but their whole thing is that they are

so driven to taste the best food and find the rarest and best ingredients that they have to become like incredibly strong to brave the dangers that are required to get these ingredients.

Right.

Yeah.

The the like every when we learn about new kinds of hunters, the like underlying thing is always going to be they had to pass the same test everyone else did to become a hunter.

And so they must have needed to do that for some reason.

again what does what does the existence of the hunters guild tell us about the world and vice versa yeah and what does the what is this we now have like our first evidence of like

uh

a very wide um

not stratification but like

like

nothing that we've learned about hunters to this point would make you assume that there is something called a gourmet hunter.

I don't know.

I disagree.

I think that a hunter can be fucking anything.

I would, you know, I would,

I didn't know what this third trial was going to be.

And when the doors opened and it was a cooking trial, and all the contestants had like this shock reaction, I was just all like, well, yeah, of course.

Okay.

I will say you are about right.

This is a special case because you are part of a show where we have spent the last like three months being like, haha, Jack, what is a hunter?

Isn't it weird that that's so hard to answer?

That's true.

So you are specially primed to not be surprised when something like this shows up.

I think two things here.

The first is that this is actually the closest we get to the traditional term, like hunter.

They have to go out and get pigs.

Yeah, that is true.

And

it is at this point the weirdest thing that they have to do.

To me, it is like, now that they're actually hunting an animal, it is like bizarre because they've really shown you that that's not what they mean by hunter and then quickly reel it in and be like, no, actually, sometimes it is.

Well, and then Buhara says, we've talked about the Great Stamp being the world's most aggressive pig.

He says, ah, jokes on them.

There's only one type of pig that lives around here.

And at this point, I wrote in my notes confidently, an evil one.

And then I was proven right.

Just

straight away.

They're not evil.

They are very dangerous.

They're dangerous.

They're carnivores.

They kill more people.

They kill more people.

More people die here.

And in fact, Satotz, who is watching in a tree.

Is that true?

Does anyone die to these pigs?

Oh, that's true.

I don't know.

I actually actually think because they kick the shit out of a bunch of people.

They do kick the shit out of a bunch of people.

Goan very sort of accidentally finds that their weak spot, which is that they get headaches really easy.

They have a soft forehead specifically.

Because they have a gigantic iron shovel for a face.

The spot of their head right behind that shovel is very weak.

I think a kind of a cute little sort of biological, like, evolutionary game that they play.

That the writer, that Tagashi is playing with how he created these guys.

Um, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's neat.

Uh, then they get all the pigs, and then we just again, just all these group shots are so funny.

Uh, we get two really, really great group shots back to back.

The first is all these big beefy hunters carrying pigs above their heads perfectly, and then we get wham, another overhead shot of all the little cooking stations, each of which has one pig on it, getting turned on the spits.

Um,

I wrote here, why kind of I was kind of sad.

I wrote, why does each attempt need to be a whole pig?

Yeah, which becomes kind of a joke.

Yeah.

I mean, it doesn't.

Right.

Yes.

And it shouldn't have, maybe.

Yeah.

Because what happens here?

How does this play out?

Yeah, Dre, do you want to talk about this sort of gag that they do that takes like seven minutes?

Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, it's basically all of the hunters at first, the majority of hunters just stick their pigs on a spit roast and just like say,

oh, looks done.

And then hand it over.

And the big man eats the whole pig, and the lady is like, no, this tastes like shit.

Or you burnt this to a crisp, or this is too tough.

Or you shouldn't season this.

Right.

Again, not...

Not actually taking a single bite of anyone's pig, but

failing them out of principle, failing them without needing even to taste it.

She's mad because they laughed at the idea of a gourmet hunter at first, but she also is right.

It is kind of insane that no one

tried.

No one tried even a little until Karapika tries.

Yeah, Karapika's like, ah, I see the secret.

The secret is that you have to also use the provided ingredients to go with the pig.

And Karapika makes like

a cake?

She makes like...

Y'all remember the KFC double down?

She makes a KFC double down out of this pig, where it's just like layers of pig with like lettuce in between it.

Yeah,

it looks like pineapple.

Kropica uses he, him pronouns.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah, I'm here for it.

Yeah.

Of course I'm here for it.

Yeah, I don't know why.

I mean, Karapika looks very,

what is the word I'm looking for?

Like a girl.

In miraginess, this is the word I'm looking for.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And so I don't know.

There's like a part of my brain that's just like, yeah, Kropica's a girl.

What's the deal?

Yeah, so, and then Kropica gives that to the judges, and the judge is like, no, you just threw all this shit together.

Like, you didn't think about why this would go together or like what would taste good together.

You just smashed it all together.

Yeah.

And then I forget what Leorio gives.

Just the road.

Just the pig.

Just everyone else just gives the pig.

Oh, there's a little puck flag with a little flag

on the top.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And unfortunately, we don't get to see what Gon and Kilo would have made, but Goan is wearing a very cute little apron.

We see what Gone makes.

Gone makes a pig with a load of flowers on it.

Yes, oh, that's right.

Yes, Goan makes a pig with a load of flowers.

Kilo does something else, maybe puts like an apple in its mouth or something.

It's something similar to the flowers.

Um,

but everybody fails, everybody fails, and that's important.

She fails everybody, she fails everybody, and then says nobody passes.

You know, exam over.

Sorry, go home.

Um, um, can I jump in again quickly with sylvie's manga minute um

where

so this is actually a two-phase exam um two-phase like test the the gourmet hunter bit in the manga um 70 people pass actual the the portion of um

the pig portion uh

yeah um where it most of it just Buhara eats it and it's like she says like I can't I didn't get a chance to taste it you didn't even like,

gourmet hunters need to have a discerning palate.

And then she gives them a second challenge, which is to make sushi.

And none of them know what that is.

Because it's, they specifically mention it comes from a little island

that not a lot of people have heard of, but Hanzo knows what it is.

And so there's just this really good bit of everyone being like, oh, this guy knows.

This guy knows.

Literally, I have the panel where it's just a bunch of people being like, that guy freaking knows.

That's funny because they do have a moment like that in this episode, but it's not with Hanzo.

It's with the way to beat the pigs, correct?

No, well, oh, there is that too, but no, I'm thinking about where they're hanging in

the ravine.

Which we'll get to.

Right, yes.

And for the main reason I bring it up.

Literally, that guy, he knows.

He so freaking knows.

It's one of my favorite panels.

This is why I bring it up.

I thought you were joking, but no, it literally is a chorus of people going, he knows.

He knows what sushi is.

He knows.

Here's what they're given.

They're given rice is a major ingredient and that it's hand-molded.

They don't even get told that there's fish until he lets it slip.

Oh, yeah, and then

he looks upset with himself that he let it slip in the middle.

This is what Leorio makes.

Okay, Leorio has made...

I tell you what this looks like.

You know, in a cartoon when characters fight and there's a big dust cloud and you see like

a hand come out of the dust cloud, this is that with the cloud is rice and just like fish heads and tails.

Oh yeah, they are.

They are

raw, huh?

Two

dots.

This test does end up the same way where she fails everybody for Hanzo eventually talks about like, it's just it's like an oblong shape of rice that you put some fish on top of and it all tastes the same.

And then everyone does the exact same thing and she does the whole like, none of you like care about about this yeah

um

which i think like

it's i think i think yeah i think i like menshi as a character because it makes like what the hunter exam is testing more than just like right physical fortitude and willpower it becomes like a how much

how much um

like

how driven are you for one for the like like how much emotion are you putting into this?

How much like do you care?

Yeah, do you about how much are you interested by the world and by the challenges that the world gives you?

And do you take pride in it?

It's sort of what we were talking about earlier with like the like shonen sort of testing your ability to be like a like a full person like in in multiple ways like more than just being physically strong.

Um like the fact the fact that we get to see everyone

not just fail to be curious enough.

I mean, this is different than in the in the manga, it's different.

This is a, it seems like an impossible test.

They have to make sushi and none of them know what it is.

That's rough.

But in the anime,

like, not only do they not care enough to think about what they should be doing for the test, they don't even change their tactic when they see 300 people in a row fail.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's the same thing.

Like they all turn in the same thing.

That's really that no one does anything different until Karapika, who then also fails

yeah and when karapika tries it's a very surface level thing it is yes it's very surface

so satot who has been watching uh is like

she's she's this isn't yeah back to her old her old bad habits back to her old habits

um

this is interesting he so he calls in help and we immediately get this great shot of an airship branded with the hunter logo uh and inside the airship is the green green jelly bean man who we saw at the beginning i was delighted to to see him yeah i was excited i was excited for you to see that the jelly bean man shows back up uh and uh who is working as an aide to someone we learn is called

what did i write down here chairman notero who is the head of the search committee basically he's in charge of the

of finding hunters uh and down comes this old man he looks like a sort of of, he looks like he's from Avatar the Last Airbender.

You know, he's got

gauges in his ears.

He's got white and blue robes.

He's wearing clogs.

He looks pretty cool.

And he comes down and basically says, oh, yeah.

Oh, sorry.

You hear his shoes before you can see them.

And they're the,

I think they're called Getta sandals.

The like

the

open-toe wooden shoes that have the like wooden box that you balance on.

And to me, when I see a character that's wearing those shoes, I'm always like, they mean business.

No one ever knows

they mean business.

A lot of stuff about Netaro is like

they give enough visual cues that this guy means business, you know?

Like, he had they his design is very clearly influenced by like depictions of the Buddha, um, with the way his ear shape is and stuff.

And like the clothes he's wearing, uh, also kind of convey the, like,

I don't know, just mysterious old man vibes.

And it's a really good introduction because he just jumps down from a fucking blimp.

From an airship, right.

The blimp doesn't land.

He just drops out of the sky.

Yeah, there is, there's a very sort of like

intense vibe around this guy.

Well, and even as he's talking, we get this shot where we just get like, I think a POV shot of Menshi's chest as he's talking.

I'm not sure what this...

Oh, but he got caught.

He got caught looking.

I was going to say, is this?

This is a lecherous old man.

Yes, yeah, yeah.

He has a lecherous moment here.

Okay.

In the middle of being,

you know, we're telling you that this man means business, but he's also a dirty old man.

Okay, fine.

Also, like Dragon Ball, I guess.

Menshi offers to step down.

She says,

he says, look, this isn't fair.

She says, all right, you got me.

I'll step down.

And he says, no.

Her whole life changes very quickly when Netero shows up.

Chemon Netero shows up.

Yeah.

And goes from being like so mad at people not taking.

Oh, that she kicks them into the sky.

Oh, yeah.

Actually, it's Buhara that kicks that guy because he says,

if I didn't kick that guy, you were going to kill him, right?

And she says, yes, I was going to kill him.

Oh, right.

Yeah, Buhara kicks a man so hard that he goes flying into the sky and bounces off a tower.

And when we see him later, he has suffered a nosebleed as a result.

But yeah, Chemina Terra says, look, you should model a dish.

You get to pick the dish, show them what it means to cook,

and then we'll evaluate it again.

And it's at this point that the episode kind of started to fall apart for me.

I felt this exact opposite

episode super much.

This is, to me, the weakest of the ones we have watched.

And

this is sort of where that started kind of becoming clear to me.

Everybody gets into the airship and we fly off to split in half mountain, a huge mountain that has been split in half.

That's very cool.

But something about the the the camera has been following these people pretty much uninterrupted from the moment they go down the elevator

to the moment that they flunk the test.

And that has been really powerful.

And I knew that we couldn't do that forever.

But midway through an episode to be like, all right, everybody into an airship and we're just going to fly you to a second location

felt like such a such a departure from the whole feeling of what had come before.

That's interesting because I feel like almost like mirror image of that where

the actual test

that they have all failed, to me, that was like the slow and boring part.

of this episode.

Like, it takes them a really long time in

human minutes watching the show for them to get the pigs and then all individually fail.

And it's a lot of seeing the same thing happen, which is like sort of a montage of

pigs actually pass.

Oh, sorry, failing everyone without even taking a bite.

And then they do get in the airship.

There is this sort of break

in like

continuity for the first time.

I do agree.

But I actually really like what happens at Split and Half Mountain.

Should we talk about, you want to talk about that?

What goes on here?

Sure.

Yeah, should we just do a quick summary right up until the end of the episode?

I think, yes.

Unless something comes up that we really want to talk about, I think that's the way to do it.

They arrive at Split and Half Mountain and are introduced to spider eagles.

Previously,

we don't see them in this episode, but they build these cool web nests down in Split and Half Mountain.

Man, she dives down, sort of jumps down in to get an egg and then continues to fall, but rises up triumphantly on an updraft.

Everybody's like, okay, sounds good, except a few people who drop out.

Right, including the really angry guy who's been

very dismissive of the idea of gourmet hunters.

I think he's

name, but he's a professional wrestler.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's Toto.

Toto, yes, yeah.

But yeah, he drops out

after seeing this.

After seeing what a gourmet hunter is and what they do and what they're about, is like, oh, that's too much for me.

The guy that is actually too much.

The guy who caused all the problems here, probably.

Yeah.

So then everybody jumps in and they're all hanging from the ropes.

We have another really great

group shot of all these people hanging from spider webs.

There's a great shot of,

but right as they jump, this is similar to the to the race in the first episode that we talked about today, where

everyone is sort of deciding that they don't want to jump because of how dangerous it looks and then we see our four friends uh gona killo dropica and legario already have jumped uh and the the the examiners are impressed netero notices everyone else is like oh well i guess they jumped so maybe we all should also jump um

When we talk about these big group scenes, I think part of what really sells it is that the costume design in this show is both

very detailed and very varied.

Yeah.

And so when we talk about these group shots, what you're often looking at is like between 20 and 50 people all in wild outfits doing some strange thing.

And the show benefits from the way that shows get made, which is like

they know who's going to be around the longest.

And so as people die or flunk out, you're getting a higher concentration of people that they knew were going to be around so that they have like more interesting things about them.

Like they're trying to say more things about who they are as characters because it's more relevant.

And so as these group shots happen episode by episode by episode, we're getting a higher concentration of interesting people.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's great.

The ropes begin to snap and a bunch of people let go early to kind of dive down and fall to their deaths because it turns out that

the updraft is not consistent.

This is another real squid game moment of just like

most of the people on screen die in front of you um the fascinating thing is gone does not at any point look like he's even considered being concerned about this uh he can smell when the wind is going to come and everyone notices that he

is he seems to know when the wind is coming you have all of these people that we're looking at watching Goan for the cue of when to jump, which I think is like a really fun moment of like

Goan being very impressive and being like kind of a unique person.

Yeah, it's a really good shonen hero moment.

Like, it's a really good, like, here is something that makes the protagonist a little special compared to everyone that they're surrounded by.

Yeah.

And when people start to drop, it's because they like panic and like don't think they can hold on any longer and are like, I just gotta go now.

Bad idea.

Should have listened to Goan.

Goan said, Don't go yet.

And they all go together.

And there's this great shot of like one by one by one, everyone plucking an egg and being shot back up by the wind.

It's very fun.

And then they all make these eggs.

They're delicious.

We get another little Goan is a good person moment where he offers one of these eggs to Toto.

That's very cute.

And Menshi notices this.

And I was about to be like, oh, Menshi is noticing Goan's goodness.

But what Menshi is actually noticing is like, this is a moment to explain to Toto.

the value of a gourmet hunter.

And she, you know, she sort of steps in.

I don't think she says anything that we haven't already gone over fucking a trillion times in this episode.

We, we have the, I don't respect gourmet hunters.

Gourmet hunters are important.

Here's why you should respect them conversation over and over and over again in this episode.

But this is maybe my favorite version of it with just like they're on this mountaintop at sunset and they're all eating eggs.

Yeah, and this is where they they they they get that long shot of all the people who didn't jump and we get the line from chairman netaro uh or I think it's, we get the first line from Menshe talking about, like, wow, they jumped.

That's, you know, that's impressive.

Good for them.

And then

Chairman Netero referencing all the people who dropped out, being like, it also takes courage to drop out.

Which I think is like, you know, looping back around, it's one of the one of the first things that we talked about today.

But like, that is what the Hunter exam expects of people who

can't pass is to also know when to quit.

Yeah.

Like, this is sort of part of it.

Like, failing the hunter exam really means not knowing when to quit and then getting killed.

Uh, dropping out seems to be a perfectly reasonable thing.

No one's mad at you for dropping out.

Uh, there's lots of people there who've tried again and again and again.

Toto even says that he's going to try again next year.

Yeah, great.

Um, yeah, but uh, I do think it's like, you know,

it's kind of like this wild thing of like,

we see all of, we saw so many people die in these three episodes.

So many people.

And there is like this kind of

there's this kind of like

sense

that that it may that they try to make out of like, well, dropping out is actually good.

You should like know your limits.

But it is like, it's so chaotic

to be like, and the punishment for not knowing your limits is that you die in the swamp.

Yeah, you get impaled on a spin.

Or you fall to your death in a like bottomless chasm.

So it's so crazy.

It's wild.

Oh, no.

Dre, I think there is a bottom to that chasm.

And I think it is covered in skeletons.

Almost definitely.

And spider eagle feathers.

Yeah.

Oh, and their gross

net or web goo.

Oh, God.

I'm so glad we didn't see what a spider eagle looks like.

That was great.

Really, really good.

Only their, only their, uh, and again, this is, this is only their dream eggs.

Yeah.

This is the whole show.

This is the game, right?

Of, like, what are these creatures?

It remains a mystery for now.

But if you want to find out what why these creep, what you know, what these creatures look like, you are aligned with the people who want to become hunters, you know?

People who are like, so well done.

I love

to go out into the world and discover these things.

But it turns out that that also has a bunch of dependencies and connections that also get you to...

It costs too much money to have an operation.

Or people hunt other people for their eyes.

Or what's the...

Oh, people kill each other or get killed by the environment in a massive game every year to become one of these people.

I did think that there was a big gap in this episode.

There was a very notable absence.

Did anybody think that there was a big noticeable absence in this episode?

Hmm.

Was it...

There wasn't a lot of Hsoka content, but I think that's no Hsoka content.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He's just behaving himself trying to pass the exam.

No, he's not even visible at all.

He's presumably doing it.

But we barely see any Hsoka in this episode.

I don't think

we see Needleman also do the

test either.

You mean Rattley Pin Man?

Rattley Pin Man, yes, sorry.

Rattley Pinman.

I mean RPM.

RPM.

Yeah.

And I mean, is that because they're there or are they off doing some other stuff?

I don't know.

My guess is that they're probably doing it.

But I was really disappointed because I wrote down, hey, how is Hysoka brackets a murderer going to do here?

I love how the tests are all sort of agnostic.

All the weaklings have to do trials for murderers, and all the murderers have to do cooking trials.

And this is going to test all the frameworks.

Yes, yeah.

And that's kind of, you know, seems to be what Chem and Notero's whole deal is in this episode.

But I was very disappointed to see no murderers.

Well, you know, we saw some murderers.

But I was just

cooking.

Yes.

Yes, exactly.

So that was interesting.

I'm going to look at

the wide shot that we get and see if

they're down there or if we see them eating eggs or something.

Let's see.

There's.

we see Leorio.

We see there's this guy who jumped too soon.

Yeah, I'm not saying that they're not there, but they're definitely like not in the frame.

Yeah, it's a missed opportunity.

You know, if the whole bunch of this episode's thrust is the

violent or exploration, the Indiana Jones-focused hunters look down on cooking, I think it would have been really fun to challenge that directly by making the most violent, the most evil character have to do that in one way or another.

And, you know, we get dividends any way you choose to shoot that.

You know, you could shoot it with Hysoka is angry about it.

That's interesting.

It could be that Hysoka flunks out in the same way everybody else flunks out, or it could be that Hysoka actually takes this very seriously.

We get good character stuff any way you choose to play that.

So I was a bit sad that that was missing.

I agree.

I mean, I have to imagine that he's there off-screen doing it.

I do

like,

I don't know.

Does anybody have any strong thoughts about if they had a frame of Hisoka cooking or doing the spider thing,

what that reaction is?

Yeah, I don't, I don't,

like, do we remember seeing him?

No, no, I mean, like, make up in your mind.

Oh, there's the, there's the, there he is.

Look at him.

I'm, this is where, um, to lift another range touch thing.

I am poisoned poisoned by knowledge because I have, like, I know what Hisoka moves like and stuff in future things.

And, like, I can kind of picture.

Oh, here we go.

Here we go.

What is Keep Screen?

I don't know.

This is kind of fun.

Look at that.

What is happening here?

That's the.

Oh, oh, wait, look at him.

RPM is there.

RPM is there.

And he's not hanging on to anything.

He's just standing there.

RPM has dropped, I think.

It has just dropped his arms.

Oh, maybe he has dropped.

Yeah, I guess he's dropped.

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

That's a tiny shot of RPM.

There's also RPM.

Yep, just there doing it.

Bulljob boys are there.

Oh, yeah, there they are.

There's also monkey face monkey man.

I guess that the thing he's got there, given that we, this is the thing from episode four, that's probably a man-faced monkey child.

Yeah, you think so?

Possibly.

You think that guy is like, I know exactly what's up with this

forest, this swamp.

Oh, I know what that is.

That's my pet's dad.

That's my pet's dad.

Yeah.

You can see here another character.

We have not mentioned her at all because she barely comes up at all.

You can see here in the top left of this corner, this is old granny with bushy eyebrows.

I like her a lot.

She looks like a studio Ghibli grandmother.

She's got a sort of like Sophie from Hell's Moving Castle thing going on.

She has big bushy black eyebrows.

I like her a lot.

Oh, I forgot I was going to say about this.

Never mind.

Never mind.

I think all I have on this episode

is,

is this a two-parter?

This is our first episode that hasn't ended super cleanly in leading on to the next thing.

Every episode prior to this has had a moment at the end where we're like, and now we've hit a little break and we're moving on to the next one.

Yes.

And I don't know here.

You know, they've made the eggs.

I suppose this trial is over, but we haven't had what we've had in the past, which is like a tiny little, and here's where we're going next.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Do we get even like a number of people who passed yet?

I like, I know how many.

There are 42

remaining.

I didn't want to mention it in case that was a spoiler that got revealed at the beginning of next time.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I, I, I, uh, I asked, but I revealed it during the intro just in case people didn't want to say it yet.

But we did, we did mention at the very, very, very beginning, 42 remaining.

Um,

I think it becomes becomes much more clear

why this episode ends the way that it does,

Jack.

I see getting used to

the sort of way that we get five, like five extra minutes of the next thing in the

episode that we're watching.

The next couple episodes for me are really, really fun and really, really good.

Uh, and uh, it makes a lot of sense what happens

at the end of this one and uh, with how the next couple episodes take place.

Um, right.

There is one more thing that we we should talk about,

uh, and this is one of Dre's topics here.

Uh,

how long is this exam?

Dre, do you want to, do you want to read off some of your points that you have on your yeah, sure.

Um, so

80 kilometers, so 80 kilometers, right, at least probably, probably something more like a number of 120, right?

right so i looked up okay how long is a marathon a marathon is a little on uh a little bit under 40 kilometers so i just rounded up here and the world record holder for a marathon is about two hours

so assuming that everybody taking the hunter exam that passed is a world-class marathoner which i i think is fair to assume uh they ran for about four hours That's not including the swamp, right?

So let's just tag another, I don't know, four hours onto the swamp.

Because they couldn't couldn't run like neck, like full speed, right?

Because they had to get it.

They were lost.

Yeah, totally.

Here's where things get interesting.

Yeah.

If you cook a whole pig, which is a thing.

Oh, this is great.

I did not realize we were going to pay for this.

If you get a 150-pound pig, that thing takes 8 to 10 hours to cook over.

An open flame if you're cooking it about 200, 225.

These pigs are the biggest in the entire world.

And to me, I saw that pig and I was like, that's like the size of a buffalo.

Yeah, I agree.

Yeah, this is a

14-pound pig or something.

Weighs 1,000 to 2,000 pounds.

This is why.

Why do they give you the big bucks to write?

That's right.

So if we are

just extrapolating out, that would take like 50 hours.

Now, I will say,

the lady specifically points out that

the meat is too tough.

And that is definitely a thing that can happen if you are cooking pork at too high of a a temperature, right?

So, let's say they're not doing it at 220, they're doing it at like 300.

So, let's knock it down to like I don't know, 40 hours.

Well, right?

I'll say, I'll say this: I think the math gets a little bit easier.

I think that the inside of these pigs are fully raw, they have cooked.

But I do, I do agree that this is hours and hours and hours of cooking that they're doing, yeah.

And then we have no idea for how far away that mountain is from this place or how fast that airship travels.

And like, nobody has slept.

Nope.

Nobody's eaten anything.

Nope.

That we have seen.

A little rest on the airship?

Sure.

And they got to like sit for a while

between

getting out of the tunnel and the start of the swamp and then the end of the swamp before phase two.

This is an unpleasant experience, even for the people who are finding this test stupid easy, like Hisuka and maybe Kiloa.

Like, this is just not a pleasant thing to spend your time doing.

No, it looks like it sucks.

Yeah.

And it kills you.

Yes, and for everyone else, it can kill you.

Yeah.

And for the best of them, for the strongest of them, and the most capable of them,

it seems long and boring at best.

Yes.

Two thoughts that I have here.

I've talked about Squid Game before.

This is also Stephen King's The Long Walk.

The Long Walk is a Stephen King short story set in the, I think, future, right, Keith?

Not far in the future, but it's set in a not-now.

Yeah, I think it is an alternate, it is like a not-here

near future, I think.

Okay.

It's like an alternate history near future.

In which young men,

basically boys,

sign up to do a long walk, which is an uninterrupted walk from one coast to the other.

It's a big event.

If you win, you get anything you want for the rest of your life.

If your pace drops below a certain point, you receive a warning.

If you receive a certain amount of warnings, you are shot by soldiers who are riding along in like...

God, like little caterpillar track vehicles by the side.

And it just becomes like a exploitation meets sort of

the internal lives of these boys as they're walking and as they're talking about what has brought them to this point.

And that is fully what we have here in a different genre space, right?

Of like an unbelievably grueling trial that you put yourself into that

very likely will kill you, but that the end goal is

apparently very good.

It's also very funny that it is still not tremendously clear what the end goal is, but you know,

we do now know that there's a hunter association, and they have a logo, and the logo is really interesting.

I don't know how I would describe it.

It's like two interlinked X's.

It's like a black and red.

Yes,

with like a red diamond

where the X's meet.

Where the X's intersect.

We see this at the beginning as well when the narrator says these people are called hunters.

It's very interesting because, you know, I feel like the iconic image for the like logotype of Hunter Hunter is the the

orange and green logo with the big X in the middle and so it is notable that the Hunter Association logo is this black white and red thing that is different to that.

It's these interlinked X's.

Yeah

the second thing I wanted to say is hey are the hunters the Girl Scouts or like the Boy Scouts?

In what way?

In the way that they are an institutional organization that is about providing for people a lot of different avenues of mastery and recognition.

You know, you think about Girl Scout badges, they range everything from like rudimentary auto repair to knot tying to crocheting to cooking to fishing, you know.

And it's very gamified in that sense, too.

And you have, you know,

scout troop leaders who are often, they were often previously scouts who have kind of graduated up through the thing.

And scout troops are sort of set, a series of tasks that they have to overcome to get badges.

And it sort of encourages this way of thinking about the world as well.

You know, like a sort of like a breadth of experience and a breadth of understanding.

The Girl Scouts don't kill you on, impel you on spikes

to join.

Well, and the Hunters Association also isn't like openly homophobic.

So there's that too going on.

Yeah, as far as we know.

Yeah, that's fair.

It is scary.

Well, I mean, have you seen how how many gay people are in this show?

So far, fucking loads of them.

There's loads of people.

I don't think.

Now, let me think.

Have I met a straight person in the show so far?

Leorio?

No.

No.

Okay.

Tonpa?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know.

You're hanging out with three guys.

We're calling the Blowjob Brothers?

That's, you know what?

Giving them money.

I'm just saying.

You make a compelling thing.

You're covertly handing the Blowjob brothers a stack of money.

Satos is definitely gay.

It's a fool's game to name the gay people.

Yeah.

Sure.

Because it's all of them.

Oh, we didn't say, but every time a character is introduced, there's a little pop-up underneath that says gay.

Oh, yeah.

We did forget to mention that.

Yeah, it's sort of like...

Something that's less nice about it, which is interesting.

Sure, yeah.

Yeah, it's sort of like in the manga how Hizuka's got

suits of cards under everything that he says.

In the anime, it just says, reminds me that it was gay all the time.

Gay whenever he was speaking.

Yeah.

At first, it's just when the main characters speak, you're like, this makes sense.

But then it starts spreading out to everybody else.

And you're like, oh, okay.

Okay.

Oh, Green Bean Man, too?

Okay, sure.

Yeah.

Green, green, jellybean man.

Green, green, jelly bean man.

I've really got to keep up with the jacknaming conventions.

My bad.

I love green, green, jellybean man.

I think it speaks to the children.

What he's interested is he has a t-shirt that just says gay on it.

I think the show is so...

This is the gorilla who doesn't have a name.

Again, you know, there is something that tickled me so much during that screenshot stream where you introduced a gorilla man and I asked, is that man important?

And you said no.

And I said, does he have a name?

And you said, I don't know, which is the funniest possible answer.

Then you looked it up and he doesn't.

The Green, Green, Jellybean Man looks like nobody else in the show.

He appeared briefly at the beginning of the the run and then fucking disappeared again.

And then for the show to be like, oh, we haven't forgotten about him.

He's up on the airship.

Yeah, he's approaching.

And he appears for another one second before disappearing again.

I love that little fucker.

He's only been in two seconds of the show, but don't worry.

He is structurally important to this somehow.

Have we learned his name yet?

No.

No.

No, no, no.

I did briefly consider.

I ran out of time today.

I got a late start.

I almost canceled today because I woke up with the absolute worst headache I've ever had in my life.

Oh, wow.

But it went away.

I was like, oh, should I cancel?

And then it just slowly disappeared.

And I was like, okay, great.

Now I can finish watching these episodes and write the

recap thing.

And I was going to, because the names in the show are so good.

But

there's a very fun

section later in the show where we get a lot of people's names all in a row.

And I want to

do that again, but with characters that we haven't that we won't get reveals later of their names because the names are fantastic so maybe look forward to meet these people yeah that's gonna be great yeah yeah yeah um

is there anything else we want to talk about today I think I've hit oh I do really really quickly want to say that the the I love the way the show is unbelievably detailed and is regularly detailed when it doesn't need to be.

The two examples I can think of here is when the apples fall out of the tree onto the pig's head earlier, as Gon learns it.

They're not actually apples.

They're these weird fruits that have

yellow stripes on them.

And just that real hunter-hunter-esque feeling of like, if you're going to introduce something, make it strange and make it notable and interesting, even when it's as small as apples falling on a pig's head.

The other thing here is when

Menshi and Patero are ranking the foods, instead of just saying like yes or no, they both have these cute little like lollipop sticks with a S, you're out or a check mark, you're through symbol on.

Accompanied by a ding and a buzz.

It's so good.

And she was on the extremely loud, incorrect buzzer noise meme years before us.

Yes.

Extreme, sees another pig, extremely loud, incorrect buzzer noise.

Okay, I think that's it from me.

Anybody else got anything they want to talk through?

I think I would like to ask a question of everyone.

If you could define what a hunter is in one sentence, from what we've seen so far, what would it be?

Oh, I'll have to head it in my mind to do this.

Sure.

I'm willing to do that work.

My definition that I wrote down earlier was: a hunter is someone who has a pathological aversion to ever feeling content.

That's a good.

Yeah, there's a kind of restlessness to it.

Okay.

A hunter

is

a hunter is someone who lives for and ceaselessly pursues adventure and discovery

um see okay mine's slightly

the gourmet hunters thing is what leads me to mine which is like a hunter is someone who pursues

like

their hyper fixation to like no matter the ends like cuz men she's got as far as they can yeah men she's doing all this because she wants to have some fucking yummy flavors like

she's a she's the ultimate foodie

like yeah and so like it's hard to just uh lump it all into like exploration and like

bounty hunting it is like right they want to be they want to forge front okay i i already broke the rules i'm doing too many sentences so

you're just you're editing out loud i'm editing this is listen if you want to you want to do a a podcast with Sylvie Bullet You got to get ready for the rambling.

Yeah

Get a lot of good stuff out of it

There's that they all have like a frontier that they're trying to explore I guess is the way to put it right, but it doesn't necessarily have to be something like the Indiana Jones model that the opening intro sort of presents to you can also just be like I want to find the most like off-the-beaten path ingredients and see how they work in food and like make these wonderful dishes.

You know, the most off-the-beaten path ingredients, pig and egg.

Okay, the spider egg.

Spider eats.

Yeah, that is true.

We have to give them credit on that.

And the most aggressive pigs in the world.

Yeah, like it's they're not like, you know, with giant shields for noses.

Yeah, things that we saw basically killing dudes.

Or at the very least,

flinging them like those dudes in Mario Sunshine do.

Oh, they do kind of do that, don't they?

They also are like,

yeah, they're like those guys in Mario Sunshine.

I realized I was thinking of something else and it wasn't what I was thinking of.

Alright, I've got mine.

Can I do mine in...

Can I do mine in first person?

Ooh.

Yeah.

Okay.

As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a hunter.

To me, being a hunter was better than being president of the United States.

Even before I first wandered into the cab stand at an after-school job, I knew I wanted to be part of them.

I knew it was where I belonged.

To me, it meant being somebody in a neighborhood that was full of nobodies.

They weren't like anybody else.

I mean, they did whatever they wanted.

They double-parked in front of a hydrant.

Nobody ever gave them a ticket.

In the summer, when they played cards all night, nobody ever called the cops.

Well done.

Well done, Keith.

Brilliant.

That's what I think it means to be a hunter.

Excellent.

Thank you.

We should just go out on that.

No, we should.

We should wrap friends at the table, probably.

I mean,

really, Leoda, you would have been a great Husoka.

Yes.

So

just for everybody listening and following along, which you should be doing, because the show is really good.

The next episodes are episode 7, Showdown on the Airship.

Oh, no.

Episode 8, Decision by Majority.

There's a question mark there.

That's not me adding that.

And And then episode 9: Beware of Prisoners.

Huh.

Huh.

Yeah, I should not have put it past.

Hunter Hunter could not resist introducing an airship and then being like, well, we're done with that.

Yeah.

No.

No.

Showdowns only.

Yeah, showdowns only on the airship.

Three episodes.

Yes.

I love episode seven.

I love it.

I'm very excited.

Episode seven is really good.

It's not my favorite of the arc, but I think it might be my second favorite of the arc.

Like,

yeah, it's, yeah,

I won't say for sure that it's my favorite, but I do love it.

It's definitely, it's up there.

As always, you can go to friendsatthetable.cash to support the show.

That's very important.

This show was born out of people.

supporting us on that website.

It's very time-consuming to do all the stuff that we do, and we appreciate anybody who likes our stuff to consider supporting us if you can.

We also have a lot of stuff going on on twitch.tv slash friends at the table and youtube.com slash friends at the table.

That's where all the streams go after we're done streaming them.

We also would appreciate you following us on Twitter at friends underscore table, following us on co-host at friends dash table and following us on TikTok at friends underscore table.

I really garbled that one at friends underscore Table.

Anything else?

Anything that I'm missing?

Yeah,

two things.

If you like hearing us talk about stuff, you might like listening to Friends at the Table itself, an actual play podcast in which we play through tabletop games and think critically about what do we say?

We say

smart characterization, critical world building, and fun interaction between good friends.

There's all sorts of places that you could jump in, but the ones we think are the best for you are either

a strange desert horror season called Sang Fiel.

You can start there.

Or you can listen to a story of a brewing revolution on a holy moon called Partisan.

That's very exciting.

If you back us on Patreon, as Keith mentioned earlier, you get access to our secondary show.

It's called Bluff City.

It is some of the best stuff we've ever made.

It is the story of an outlandish, hyper-saturated,

alternate universe Atlantic City and the bizarre cast of characters that live in there.

It's great.

Speaking of Buff City, season one is available for free.

So you can find the audio of that on friendsofthetable.cash and you can find videos of it being uploaded, streamed every Sunday and then uploaded to youtube.com slash friends of the table.

There's a whole playlist of, at this point, I think it's like 15.

episodes of Bluff City.

Season one is great.

Absolutely listen to that.

If you're

not sure about Friends of the Table, that's another great place to start.

Is the free season one of Bluff City?

All right.

Bye, everyone.

Thanks for listening.

Bye-bye.

Bye.