Gon Shows Rock - Hunter x Hunter ep. 72-75: Media Club Plus S01E23
Transcriber: robotchangeling
[“The Boy in Green” by Jack de Quidt begins playing]
Keith: 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 Togashi. My name is Keith Carberry. You can find me on Twitter and Cohost at @KeithJCarberry. You can find the let’s plays that I do at youtube.com/runbutton. [music ends] You can find the bonus episodes to this podcast at friendsatthetable.cash. That’s also where you can sign up—for free, if you want—for the screenshot episodes that go up with every episode, where I take an increasingly ridiculous amount of screenshots and post them. I'm trying my best to stay tame, [Sylvia laughs] but I think the last one was just shy of 200 for three episodes.
Sylvia: “Tame” makes it sound like— “tame” is not— “reserved” might have been the word. “Tame” makes it sound like you're, like, usually uploading really saucy pics of Leorio. [laughs]
Keith: No, they're not saucy. I just— you know, there's— well, the opposite of tame is wild, and I think it’s wild to upload 200 screenshots for 60 minutes of content. And anyway, you should listen to the JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure episodes that we did, 'cause they're really good.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: And if you haven't heard the Dragon Ball episodes we did, we are just about to record some Dragon Ball Z bonus stuff, [Sylvia: Ah.] which is going to be a great followup to that. Uh, let’s see…
Sylvia: That’s so exciting. I don't know what we're doing for that yet.
Keith: I do. I'm excited for it.
Sylvia: Cool.
Keith: With me, as always, is the Dragon Ball Z episode picker themself, Andrew Lee Swan.
Dre: Oh, hey. That’s me. I need to pick those soon. [Sylvia laughs] You can find me on Twitter at @swandre3000.
Keith: They're mostly picked.
Dre: They're mostly picked, yeah. It’s more editing.
Keith: Jack de Quidt.
Jack: Hi, I'm Jack. You can find me on Cohost at @jdq, and you can get any of the music featured on the show at notquitereal.bandcamp.com.
Keith: And Sylvi Bullet.
Sylvia: Hey, I'm Sylvia. You can find me everywhere on the internet at @SYLVIBULLET. Sylvi spelled without the E, Taking Back Sunday style. And check out the Friends at the Table YouTube. Keith and I are playing 999 over there. There's Crusader Kings stuff over there with Keith and Jack. I know the archives of Mech Mondays that Dre used to do are all there.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: There's the Dokapon stuff that I think you're going to do more Dokapon, right?
Sylvia: Yeah. We gotta schedule that.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I gotta win that game. [Jack chuckles]
Keith: Yeah, see you in three years.
Sylvia: Yeah. [Jack chuckles] I'll be ready.
Keith: For Hunter × Hunter, or for Dokapon?
Sylvia: Both. I stay ready for Hunter × Hunter.
Dre: Yeah, don't have to get ready.
Sylvia: But for— I'm doing some of the training that Gon does in these episodes for Dokapon Kingdom.
Keith: Sorry, I'm not ready for Dokapon, because I'm busy playing Fortune Street.
Sylvia: Keith, I would play Fortune Street with you.
Keith: Fortune Street is great.
Sylvia: Can we do that sometime?
Keith: Yeah, totally.
Sylvia: I love Fortune Street.
Keith: Yeah. We should do a Media Club Plus Fortune Street stream. [Sylvia and Jack laugh]
Sylvia: I'd be down.
Dre: Yeah, I've never played one of those.
Keith: We watched, for these episodes, episodes 72, 73, 74, and 75. It’s our first four since, I think, the very beginning of Greed Island. We started with a four. These episodes were intense. This is some of the biggest, baddest stuff in Hunter × Hunter so far.
Sylvia: It’s great.
Keith: It turns out, if Hunter × Hunter wants to stick to a plan, they really can do it, because it seemed like all of this work, all of this arc was leading up to a confrontation with the Bombers, and that’s exactly what happened. We get some last minute training and plan making, and we learn something that Gon can't do, for once. And then we just have three one-on-one fights. Gon takes on Genthru, Bisky takes on Bara, and Killua takes on Sub. These are rough. These episodes have a much different take on violence than we're usually dealing with. This is like a high-stakes real world replay of the Hanzo fight from the Hunter Exam.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And then, afterwards, we see what happens when someone finally collects all 99 specified slot cards and what it really means to win Greed Island. [Sylvia chuckles]
Jack: I started this run of episodes, sitting down to watch them and thinking, “I'm kind of done with Greed Island, at this point.”
Keith: Hey, and the show agreed.
Dre: Hey, good news.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I wasn't sure, going into it, what was going to be new in what I was watching, you know. I knew that there was a standoff with the Bomber coming, with Tsezguerra’s team trying to hold him off for three weeks while Gon and Gon’s team train. We know by the end of the last episode that the Spiders have found Abengane, the exorcist. So, I sort of went into this thinking, “Is it just going to be a lot of getting all this stuff out in the wash?” and, to a certain extent, that is what happens. Where I was pleasantly surprised is that the way it happens is in some of the most direct sort of, like, classic shonen fight choreography we have seen so far.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: You know, if we talked about Bisky’s training, in those early episodes where they were doing that great sort of punch matching game, as already evoking, you know, Dragon Ball-style shonen fights, now we're seeing that in practice.
Sylvia: Oh. They straight up pull moves from Dragon Ball Z in this, Bisky in particular.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Oh, is that so?
Sylvia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have a note that she does the Instantaneous Transmission that Goku is very famous for.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Oh, yeah!
Sylvia: In one of these episodes, where she, like, blinks behind, um, the guy she’s fighting. I can never keep these two straight. Hold on. I'm looking up at the document now.
Keith: Bara has the black hair.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, Bara is the guy that she fights. Yeah. She does, like, when she does the big kick when they first start fighting.
Keith: Yeah, that’s great. But she doesn't do the cool thing where she puts her fingers to her head.
Dre: That’s true.
Sylvia: No, that’s true.
Keith: And she can't go to the moon with it. [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: We don't know that.
Keith: We don't know that.
Jack: I think I was a little disappointed by— and we spoke about this in not the last episode that released but maybe the one before that, where we had this little run of episodes that was fairly weak.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And some of the frustration that we had was about the way that the show was struggling to depict the game, because it had gotten so into this sort of, like, various mechanics of fairly tame trades. You know, when we’d seen the Bomber’s team confronting people without blowing them up, which is entertaining when they blow them all up, but otherwise, it’s like, you line up in a field and get out the binders and then say, “We'll give you this, and then I'll give you that.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And there was a bit of me that was worried that they would make Tsezguerra’s team harassing the Bomber to keep him off Gon just a sort of replay of that, but it doesn't turn out that way.
Keith: No.
Jack: Almost every confrontation—whether or not that’s this sort of one-on-one times three fight that we get towards the end, but also Tsezguerra’s maneuverings at the beginning—have some really fun ideas in the middle of them. There's some really interesting use of cards. It keeps the pace up. In every single one of these episodes, they ended before I was ready for them to end, which was fun. You know, I spent the first five minutes going, [Sylvia: Yeah.] “All right, let’s sit down and watch Hunter × Hunter. Okay, let’s see what’s happening.” [Sylvia laughs] And then sort of a moment came where I was, like, leaning forwards and being like, “Oh, I guess I'm actually interested in what’s going on,” and then I went, “Oh, it ended!”
Keith: I think it’s so funny that almost every week Jack comes in and goes, like, “All right, time to watch Hunter × Hunter, a show that—”
Sylvia: It’s really funny, right?
Keith: Seemingly forgetting that every time you like it. [Keith and Jack laugh]
Sylvia: Yeah, you love this show so far. [laughs]
Jack: Well, and then I have a really great time talking about it. I suppose part of the problem is that I have never been someone who really enjoys watching lots of episodes of TV back to back.
Sylvia: Fair.
Jack: I mean, I understand that’s a way that a lot of people interact with TV. Based on the way that some of you have talked about watching Hunter × Hunter, that’s a way that you also did it.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: It’s never really worked for me, and so, sometimes when I mis-schedule my week and I have to watch four Hunter × Hunter episodes back to back, [Keith: Mm-hmm.] I feel like that Greek guy who pushes the rock up the mountain.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, it’s funny, 'cause I feel the exact opposite.
Sylvia: Oedipus. [laughs]
Keith: If I have to watch these episodes not all in a row, it’s because I've done something wrong somewhere.
Jack: That’s so funny.
Keith: It’s part of my setup is to watch them all in a row.
Sylvia: That’s also how I schedule my stuff.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Wait, so—
Sylvia: Yeah, 'cause then I'm fresh going in.
Jack: Dre and Sylvi— sorry, Keith and Sylvi, you watch them all in a whack, and if you don't watch them all at once, you feel bad about it? Dre, how do you watch them?
Dre: Uh, mostly all at once, but honestly, it has less to do with my preference and more when my wife is available to watch them with me.
Jack: Oh, I see.
Dre: ‘Cause she’s watching it for the first time.
Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: So usually that just means we pick an evening, and that’s Hunter × Hunter evening.
Jack: Mm, mm-hmm.
Keith: It’s especially tough to do them all in a row for the show, because I don't know for anyone else, but for me, I tend to, because of notetaking, it takes about two to two-and-a-half times as long to watch them.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: So, where it’s not that big of an ask normally for me to, like, watch 60 or 80 minutes of television, that does become, like, three, three and a half hours almost, because of the notetaking. And if I was smarter, I'd probably try to do that on two days, but my brain is just like, [Sylvia chuckles] “Yeah, four episodes, let’s do it. That’s fine. That’s nothing.”
Sylvia: That’s just how I'm wired too, yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Even if it does take longer. I just, like, set aside, [Keith: Yeah.] like, three hours in the day, and it’s like, there it is.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: My dream is one a day, and then I record.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: That’s the true spirit of TV, honestly.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, way healthier than what I'm doing. [Jack laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, good for you.
Jack: But it does produce this weird effect, yeah, where every time, I sit down and I'm like, “[sighs] Hunter × Hunter,” and then, halfway through the episode, I'm like, “Hell yeah!” And I sort of feel a fatigue as we approach the end of every arc, where I'm like, “Enough of this already.” And generally the show agrees, although I'm curious to see whether or not that continues as we move into the next very, very long arc. [Sylvia laughs] But yeah, let’s— oh, go on.
Keith: I'm just thinking about, like, the composition of the next arc. Oh, I had a funny question that I wanted to ask about the next arc, and I want to ask it now, because I might forget. Jack, do you think that the ants are good guys or bad guys?
Jack: Bad guys, Keith.
Keith: You think they're bad guys?
Jack: Absolutely.
Keith: Okay.
Jack: Absolutely, they're bad guys. But, I mean, it’s Hunter × Hunter, so, you know, invariably, we're going to make some sort of alliances with the ants, maybe. [Sylvia chuckles] Or maybe the ants are sort of…you know, I've gone on record several times as saying that I have an idea of what the ants are, and as we get closer and closer, it’s like the ape problem all over again. [chuckles]
Keith: Yeah. You're about to learn what it is.
Jack: I'm like, I don't understand how this is about to happen.
Keith: Yeah. Well…
Jack: But they're bad guys. They're absolutely bad guys. I think that the Chimera Ants are, like, a world threatening problem.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: That are about to start showing up.
Keith: Okay. Yeah. We'll see.
Jack: Yeah, we shall see.
Keith: Do you remember what word you said [chuckles] that I— just to make you have to think about what was going on [Sylvia chuckles] in the last episode, I was like, “Oh, interesting word choice,” about how we were going to get to the next arc?
Jack: No. I don't remember. I remember having that conversation, but I don't remember what I said.
Keith: I think you said you don't know what is going to propel us into the next thing, [Jack: Mm.] and I said that “propel” was an interesting word choice.
Jack: [intrigued chuckle]
Keith: And I sort of forgot what I meant by that, and then I watched these episodes. [chuckles]
Sylvia: Yeah. Damn, you even gotcha’ed yourself with that.
Keith: I know, I gotcha’ed myself. But—
Jack: Wait, is there already Chimera Ant stuff happening? Has there been Chimera Ant setup happening?
Sylvia: Uh…
Jack: I mean, Togashi’s all setup.
Sylvia: Not that I noticed. There's been some thematic stuff probably, like, that I think is safe to say is setup.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: No comment.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: I think, Sylvi and Dre, we're going to watch the next episode, and you're both going to go, like, “Oh, that’s what was meant.”
Dre: Ah.
Sylvia: Yeah, probably.
Keith: Yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: So, this starts, actually, not on Gon and Killua or the Bombers but on the Phantom Troupe, and a new song, actually. But the Phantom Troupe and Hisoka are, like, staking out the Nen exorcist, Abengane. It’s Machi, Nobunaga, and Kalluto. And Killua— sorry, not Killua. Jesus christ. Hisoka. [Sylvia laughs] Hisoka is there, sort of just openly [Sylvia: Ohh.] taunting them about wanting to fight and kill the boss.
Sylvia: The grossest shit.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: He’s being very gross.
Sylvia: Do you have the line he has? 'Cause I do.
Keith: I do not have the line. Yeah.
Sylvia: “To calm my arousal, I wouldn't mind ravaging someone I don't know.”
Dre: Ugh!
Jack: He’s talking about Kalluto, Killua’s kid brother.
Sylvia: Yeah, he is. It’s disgusting!
Jack: I mean, we really get, like, the full palette of Hisoka grossness here, not just with the weird predatory arousal towards these kids but also with the, like, “I'm going to kill Chrollo, and there's nothing you can do about it.”
Keith: Well, and—
Jack: It’s like he’s working through a little filofax or a rolodex of all the gross shit that he says.
Keith: And he’s, like— because, for him, and he’s, like, goading them into a reaction that he knows they can't have, because he’s basically their one chance to get Chrollo’s powers back.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: But the fact that they're, like, ready to hunt him down and kill him after he beats Chrollo, if that happened, that’s just a bonus. That’s icing. He’s looking for that, because he’s the worst.
Jack: Yeah. He’s very happy with that. It’s great to see the mechanics of the Spider kick in with Kalluto as our new member of the Troupe, [Keith: Yep.] introduced with very little fanfare.
Keith: Yep.
Jack: There's just a nice moment of, you know, like, Hisoka wonders how they were able to track Abengane, and the implication is that someone’s Nen power did it, and then Kalluto sort of walks out of the shadows. There's a couple of things going on here that I like. First, it’s all the setup again. You know, we know how the Spiders work. We saw a replacement take place— we didn't see it take place, but we knew Hisoka was new, so a replacement must have happened recently. So, why wouldn't we see another replacement? And while it would maybe be more interesting for it to be a character we've never met before, just a new weird Spider shows up, I think it is economical to get a character that we know of but don't know much about, like Kalluto.
Keith: And have questions about and have, like, a relationship to via Killua.
Jack: Yeah. Absolutely.
Keith: This is the sort of question mark sibling.
Jack: I can't help but wonder if there was…there was a real sort of begrudging respect and interest between Chrollo and the Zoldyck assassins when they met in Yorknew City, where Chrollo was like, “All right, Silva and Zeno have come for me. This is going to be interesting.”
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: I wonder if there had been, you know, prior to Chrollo’s exile, conversation among the Spiders of, like, can we recruit a Zoldyck?
Sylvia: There's also, like, the existing relationship with Illumi there too, right? 'Cause they worked with Illumi.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: I think it’s— I like the move to entangle the Zoldycks and the Phantom Troupe more and more. I think that’s, like, a really interesting, like, two groups that can play on each other thematically.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: I also just think, like, I love having a new character to be like, “What’s that little freak do? What’s that little freak’s power?”
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Yeah, we still haven't seen it.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Who do you think we're going to find out first, Kalluto or Phinks?
Sylvia: Kalluto. I don't think we're ever—
Keith: Did you answer because you don't remember?
Sylvia: I don't remember. [Keith laughs] No, so, this is something I— we're going to get into this probably next week, but I haven't, like, really…it’s been ages since I've seen this, the Chimera Ant stuff.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: So, like, it’s a lot…
Jack: That’s really exciting.
Keith: Okay.
Sylvia: It’s a lot looser in there.
Jack: That’s going to be fun.
Sylvia: Like, I'm sure it’ll come back to me as we go. I'll be like, “Oh shit, this is about to happen,” [Keith: Yeah.] 'cause that’s how memory works.
Keith: Right.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: But like, right now? [“I don't know” sound]
Jack: Sylvi is sort of tentatively coming to join me on the other side of the table.
Sylvia: Just for a little bit, 'cause soon, I'll be like, “Oh, it’s that guy.”
Keith: We have a new song here.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, please.
Keith: While Hisoka’s scouting out Abengane with the rest of the Troupe, a song called “Master of Iai” plays.
[clip of “Master of Iai” begins]
Sylvia: This has to be a Nobunaga song, right? 'Cause that’s, like…isn’t that the sword style that he does?
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, it is. Yeah.
[music ends]
Sylvia: Also, confirmed: Nobunaga still alive or resurrected.
Keith: Yeah, didn't die in that boat.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: We do see him.
Keith: I guess when it got blown up, he was using Ken. [all laugh]
Jack: Oh, well done to Nobunaga. He sank. He sank to the bottom of the sea.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: The Ken kept him from having to breathe, [Dre: Mm-hmm.] and eventually he swam his way back up. He has a great time. And then we sort of start getting into some cards conversation, as Tsezguerra starts detailing the plan that he’s going to use. But he doesn't super get into the actual method that he uses. Instead, we just get some nice UI on the screen telling us which cards each team needs.
Keith: Yeah, that was really nice.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: You know, we're told that Genthru’s team needs this. Tsezguerra’s team needs that. They don't bother showing us what Gon’s team needs, because, again, despite being the team most interested in playing the game and having a good time, Gon and Killua have been too focused [Dre chuckles] on being dragged into a death game to accurately play. But seeing this—
Keith: By the way, there is a little bit of stuff before they confront the Bombers of Tsezguerra sort of revealing his kind of hedge in all of this. If you left it at the end of the last episode, his pitch is that he’s just trading time, buying time for Gon’s team to, like, work up a plan, in order to beat the Bombers. But he kind of reveals to his team that he does not believe that that’s going to happen. He thinks that what’s going to happen is that the Bombers are going to win but get hurt enough to have to use Angel’s Breath and thus giving them the Angel’s Breath card that they need.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: Yes. Yes.
Keith: Which is a sort of more cynical take on what was going on than it seemed during the dodgeball thing. Like, he’s got a version of this. His best case scenario is not Gon winning.
Jack: Yeah. It’s great.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Because the game is just getting corrupted, you know, on every level.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Where even a character like Tsezguerra is playing a little more cynically than he might otherwise have spoken about. But seeing these card UI elements on the screen sort of gave me a bit of a flash of how the arc could have gone differently. I mean, the arc went the way it went for a reason. You know, I don't think that I feel that it was a missed opportunity or that I would have preferred it to go a different way, but if instead it had been about playing this game, rather than [Dre: Mm-hmm.] exploiting the weird situation that has emerged in the game—which, again, I think is a really interesting plot point—you could see how they could draw some of this out with, like, on screen UI elements saying who’s got what card, where people have been in the world. There have been these great little moments where we've seen bits of the game, like when Asta revealed those glitches earlier, that feel like little ghosts of what Greed Island could have been if it hadn't descended into a death game, the Hunters favorite method of interacting with the world.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Does anyone want to describe, like, what this, like, kind of confrontation looks like between the Bomber and Tsezguerra?
Sylvia: Do you mean them, like, doing Accompany back and forth? [Dre laughs]
Keith: [chuckles] Yes, yes. I think this is probably the weakest chain of events, until they use Leave.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: It sucks.
Keith: This is, like, kind of lame.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s wheel spinning.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Really it is, like, oh, the game economy needs to be taken care of so that we don't get complaints about how…
Keith: Yeah. It becomes really structurally important how many Accompany cards everyone has.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And so they need to, like, prove— the show decides that it needs to prove how many of these cards they have by, like…
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: I found this really charming.
Sylvia: Really?
Jack: I'm in the minority here.
Sylvia: I love that.
Jack: There was something about, like, absolutely stripping bare how transparently mechanical and mercenary the game had gotten at this point, so late in play.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: Fair.
Jack: Any vestige of exploring the towns, completing quests, even hunting other players [Keith: Uh huh.] had just completely fallen by the wayside as these two teams just burned every card in their binders to capture each other.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: You know, what it really is, it’s not—
Sylvia: I think it’s just silly looking, is my big thing.
Jack: It is silly looking.
Keith: It’s not the concept as much as it is, like, they had to have fucking 45 of these cards to burn.
Jack: [chuckles] Yes.
Keith: Like, they had so many. [Dre laughs] And like, it could have been any number, as long as it ended with, like, six and four. Sorry, six for the Bombers and four for Gon’s team.
Jack: Yes. It was an artifice, [Keith: Yeah.] and it got way better when we cut to the wide instead of just, like, having these little repeated scenes. [chuckles]
Keith: The wide shots are great. I actually really like it.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Every time they use Accompany, it reminds me of flying in Dragon Ball Z.
Dre: Oh, 100%, yeah.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Keith: That like looks really fun.
Sylvia: That is absolutely the, like, visual parallel being made here.
Keith: But they have, like, 12 of these shots of, like, landing and leaving, of Accompany.
Jack: Yep.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And half of them or more, maybe 8 out of the 12 were, like, tight shots on, like, a small bit of forest. Nothing’s there, and then, all of a sudden, Tsezguerra’s crew.
Jack: And then they arrive.
Keith: And it’s a full shot of them, and then it starts, yeah, being, like, these big wide landscape shots where they're leaving. That was fun. I liked that.
Sylvia: I think it’s one of those things that I enjoy, like, I would enjoy if it was at, like, 2X speed or something. [Keith and Jack laugh] I don't know.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: There's just something about it where I'm like, this eats up, like, five minutes of the episode, or at least feels like it does.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: And like, as much as I enjoy the bit, like, I'll— I remembered. This is one of the big memories I have of Greed Island, is them using Accompany back and forth.
Keith: Yeah. [Dre chuckles]
Sylvia: And being like, “Oh, they're griefing each other.” [Dre laughs]
Jack: They are griefing each other.
Sylvia: They are!
Jack: I thought of this—
Sylvia: No, it’s like, really good video game shit going on here, honestly, but…
Jack: But it is silly.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: There's something about where, like, if they had decided to play Greed Island in a way where it was more about cards and using cards and getting into, like, fucking Yugioh battles or whatever, [Dre laughs] where they're, like, actually— and there's some of this in Gon’s fight too, where they're, like, actually using cards in the fight and effectively.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: If the season had become about that, and the thing that they were doing wasn't just, like, they have a set amount of cards and they're running it down, then even the stuff in the background where Goreinu is staking out the card shop to try and buy more cards and is getting blocked, like, even that is a little more interesting.
Jack: Yeah. While we're on sort of, like…because the body of this first episode is really divided into two chunks.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: It’s Tsezguerra versus the Bomber, and then it’s Gon training, and I think we can sort of package them together, because they're intercut. But on the sort of fighting the Bomber stuff, a really cool thing starts happening where the Bomber’s team starts figuring out that someone else is on Tsezguerra’s team. They can sort of intuit that Goreinu is there because of how they're playing, but they can't— they don't know who he is. And so they start—
Keith: He’s the Phantom Menace.
Jack: Oh, he’s the Phantom Menace! [Keith laughs]
Dre: Ohh.
Jack: Whoa!
Dre: He is. [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: That’s amazing. They start staking out Masadora, and—
Sylvia: The gorilla’s name is Palpatine. [Keith laughs]
Jack: Oh god! They capture anybody who comes out of a card shop and then check their binder to see if they have interacted with Tsezguerra’s team.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: If they have interacted with Tsezguerra’s team, they kill them immediately. And if they haven't, they plant a bomb on them and send them out into the world to sort of act as a kind of, like, game thrall for them. And in the same way that I found the Accompany battle, what Genthru calls, “a game of tag we can't lose.”
Sylvia: Yeah. [Dre chuckles]
Jack: I did find this treatment of all the other players— by this late in the game, there are three teams really. It’s Genthru’s team, it’s Tsezguerra’s team, and it’s Gon’s team.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: And Genthru’s team is just instrumentalizing every other player to his own ends.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I thought that was really interesting. I like that a lot.
Keith: Especially because they bring it back up later, making, like, a real important point that, as far as Genthru knows, no one knows what the rules of the Bomber are. Only during the fight with Gon does it sort of get hinted to him that, like, someone lived somewhere, somehow, and has spread how his thing works. So he can constantly go up to anybody, touch them, and then turn them into a bomb and be like, “You're already dead. Listen to me.”
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Dre: Mm. Yeah, it’s not good.
Keith: No, it’s not good.
Jack: Meanwhile, Bisky is training Gon.
Keith: This is great.
Jack: First she does one of those quick, sort of quick hand fight things that they do.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And then she—
Keith: I love how this comes back up later, visually.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: She teaches Gon a new trick, or tries to. This is— she does a one-handed handstand [Sylvia laughs] and then fires enough Nen out of the hand on the ground to shoot herself up in the sky. This is a very silly trick. I like this.
Sylvia: It’s so funny when Gon does— the noise it makes when Gon does it is so funny to me.
Jack: Yeah, 'cause how good is Gon at this?
Dre: [imitates noise]
Jack: He’s a quick learner, [Keith: Yeah.] so surely he’ll be fine, right?
Keith: No.
Dre: No.
Keith: Do you know what this made me think of? It made me think of how kind of embarrassing it was that Tsezguerra jumped, like, 30 feet in the air as, like, the big proof of how awesome he was. [Dre laughs] Like, Bisky can do half that just by, like, thinking about getting high with her hand on the ground.
Sylvia: [chuckles] Damn.
Keith: Like, all she has do is go like, “Be high,” and then it happens.
Sylvia: Eh?
Keith: She doesn't go as high as he does, but he jumped. [Dre chuckles]
Jack: That’s true.
Sylvia: Yeah, no, she’s doing, like…she’s doing, like, crazy one hand, like, pushups into the air.
Keith: Yeah. This isn’t like—
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah. And it’s something where, like, you know, she goes down and then pushes up. It’s like if anybody’s ever done the thing where someone’s like, “Jump without bending your knees.” It’s like that. She’s jumping without bending her elbow. She just sort of, like, pushes off the ground with energy.
Sylvia: Which is even more impressive, when you think about it.
Keith: I know.
Sylvia: Jump without bending your elbow.
Jack: But as far as Gon is concerned, this is like…have you ever tried to do a cartwheel, and you can't do a cartwheel, and you just sort of roll uselessly? [laughs]
Keith: Sure.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Uh huh.
Keith: You ever try to do a Magic Eye, and you can't get it, and it’s like, “What are you supposed to do with your eye? I don't understand.”
Jack: “What is even happening here?”
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Yeah, so, Gon can do a one-handed handstand. That’s amazing!
Sylvia: Yeah, makes perfect sense.
Jack: Imagine if you could do a one-handed handstand. But yeah, Gon, absolutely.
Sylvia: Maybe someday.
Jack: Maybe someday. I can only do a handstand in the pool.
Keith: Sure.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Yeah, I think I can do one of those.
Sylvia: I can do a one-handed handstand in the pool.
Dre: Whoa! Okay.
Jack: I think I could do a one-handed handstand in the pool.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. Can any of you do a cartwheel?
Dre: No.
Keith: I can do a cartwheel.
Jack: Whoa.
Sylvia: No.
Jack: Good for you, Keith.
Dre: I used to be able to do a roundoff. No more.
Jack: What’s a roundoff?
Dre: It’s like a cartwheel, but your legs are, like, bent over. I think. I think that’s what it’s called.
Jack: Oh, sure. Okay. I think I can picture that. I'd love to be able to—
Keith: I used to be able to do a handspring.
Dre: Whoa!
Jack: Oh, whoa!
Sylvia: That’s crazy.
Jack: I was about to say: which one of us do you think is closest to being able to do a backflip? And it’s probably Keith.
Keith: I don't think I'm close right now to being able to do a backflip.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I think I could do it if I believed hard enough.
Dre: Yeah, I was going to say Sylvi. I think Sylvi is the closest to being able to do a backflip.
Keith: If I was on a trampoline, I could do it.
Jack: If I was on a trampoline.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, same.
Keith: Easy on a trampoline.
Sylvia: Easy peasy.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Used to do those all the time. I've got experience doing those.
Keith: Well, the nice thing about the trampoline, besides the bounce, is that it eliminates the fear.
Dre: Well…
Jack: Well, if you go off the trampoline, [Sylvia: Yeah…] it is very, very, very, very, very bad.
Dre: Or if you land on your head.
Keith: Well, but they've all got nets.
Sylvia: That did happen to my brother one time.
Jack: Ohh.
Keith: They all have nets now.
Dre: I landed on my head once, and it was not good.
Sylvia: Well, we didn't have the net up.
Jack: Ow. When I was a kid, I had a trampoline in class, in my P.E. class, and at the end of the year, my report, from a teacher who had never bothered to talk to me or ask me how I was doing, simply read, “Jack seems to enjoy trampolining.” [Keith, Sylvia, and Jack laugh] I thought that was pretty good.
Keith: So, we have a couple things here. Killua notices that this is a much harder exercise than what Gon had just been doing.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And Bisky’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. We skipped four steps. It’s really important that we teach him something that he can actually use in this fight.”
Sylvia: It’s level five, she says?
Dre: Yeah, it’s level five.
Keith: Yeah, level five.
Dre: So we skipped two, three, and four.
Sylvia: As opposed to level three.
Jack: Yeah, I was curious about this. She says “level five” as though there's, like, a Nen rubric.
Keith: Well, she’s a teacher.
Sylvia: I think it’s—
Keith: She’s a known teacher.
Dre: She’s accredited. Yeah, she’s got to follow the accreditation organization. [Jack and Dre chuckle]
Sylvia: I took it like the way belts in, like, taekwondo or karate work, right?
Dre: Sure.
Sylvia: Where it’s like, there's steps to getting the next one and stuff like that.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: And it seemed like the basic martial arts, like, structure that I have in my head, at least.
Jack: Oh, okay.
Keith: Yeah. I sort of took it as, like, they've been on a lesson plan this whole time, and they mostly were teaching Gon, um…what is his amplification thing? What is he actually called? Uh…
Dre: Oh, Jan Ken Pon?
Keith: No, no. Strong— one of the Nen types. His— I just can't—
Sylvia: Enhancer?
Keith: Enhancer, right. Enhancer.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, right.
Sylvia: You said “strong,” and I was like, “Ah, yes. Enhancer, the strong boys.” [Jack chuckles]
Dre: Strong style. That’s what Gon uses.
Sylvia: Yeah, yeah. He’s throwing lariat.
Keith: So, they went from basics to Enhancer techniques, and I think they're just like, yeah, I just had a lesson plan ready to go for this, and this is the— this was chapter five, but we really really need to skip to chapter five.
Jack: Chapter one is trap the serial killer in the pit. [Keith laughs]
Keith: And Killua’s kind of getting frustrated, because Gon— because, first of all, he can't train because of his hands. And then, second, because he can't help make a plan, because he doesn't know what Bisky’s power is.
Sylvia: Oh my god, I love this.
Dre: God.
Keith: There's a really, really funny joke with the soundtrack here. I don't know if anybody else caught this.
Sylvia: Oh, no. Please enlighten us.
Dre: No.
Keith: But as she starts explaining her power and manifesting her Nen to show it, it’s playing the soundtrack “Auras”, which is one of—
Jack: Oh, yeah. Like, Nen music.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Yeah, it’s one of the [imitates song]
Sylvia: [chuckles] Oh!
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: The creepy Nen songs. And then, when she reveals what it is, it basically almost hard cuts to “LET’S BE FRIENDS :)”, the really funny one. [Dre chuckles] I cut this scene out, because I thought it was so funny, and if it doesn't play when I'm editing it, I'll trim it or cut it out, but I'm going to press this button.
Killua: Yeah, but would you mind telling me what your ability is? It’d make it a whole lot easier to plan it all out.
[sounds of Gon struggling to train in the background]
[“Auras” begins playing]
[Sylvia laughs]
Biscuit: Allow me to introduce my ability. Cookie: The Magical Masseuse.
[“Auras” fizzles out]
[“LET’S BE FRIENDS :)” starts playing]
[laughter]
Sylvia: That’s really good.
Biscuit: Her various massage techniques are caresses of pure bliss.
Sylvia: That’s really good!
Dre: I do remember that now, yeah.
Biscuit: They now delay fat deposits and leave you feeling heavenly. [magical twinkling?] Aura is transmuted into special lotion, smoothing and rejuvenating your skin.
Sylvia: I didn't hear this in the dub. [quiet laughter]
Jack: That’s really great.
Keith: It’s so funny.
Sylvia: It’s crazy.
Jack: Bisky’s power is that she summons, essentially, like, a Nen summon.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Sort of like Goreinu’s apes, except instead of what if it was an ape, it was a magical masseuse named Cookie.
Keith: Right.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: The basic—
Keith: In the dub, her name is Magical Masseuse Cookie. In the sub, her name is Magical Esthetician Cookie. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: Okay.
Dre: Ohh. That kind of makes more sense, honestly, with all the services she offers.
Keith: Yeah, it does. Yeah, she can—
Sylvia: Yeah, absolutely.
Keith: She does chiropractic.
Sylvia: What’s her waitlist?
Keith: She will cure your constipation. She will apply lotion. Yeah.
Sylvia: I literally— I wrote, “If I could get a day where I got to have a massage from Cookie and eat at Tonio Trendy’s restaurant, I think it would fix me completely.” [Keith laughs]
Jack: Yes! I also wrote down about Tonio Trendy.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: What did I write? I wrote, “She’s a sexy masseuse who does similar stuff to the Italian cook from JoJo.” [Sylvia and Dre laugh]
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, she can, like, cure your diseases.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: She can, like, fix your cold and fever symptoms.
Sylvia: The line that made me think about it was the constipation one, [Keith: Yeah.] 'cause I remember how he fixed Okuyasu’s poopy tummy. [chuckles]
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: It’s also the funniest anyone’s ever delivered “a cure for constipation.”
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Like, no one usually says constipation like that.
Jack: [chuckles] No, it’s true. And this is baffling, because Bisky is incredibly strong, and I have to imagine that this is— we know that she cares very deeply about her appearance, and maybe it speaks to the fact that she doesn't have to use her Nen ability for her fighting, you know?
Keith: Right.
Jack: She is this strong without that ability.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: The way I've always read this was it’s, like, it’s the way that, like, athletes go in ice baths after competing and stuff.
Jack: Oh, yeah!
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Like, she uses— like, this is for after she fights, 'cause she fights like an Enhancer is the way we've seen it, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, she’s really, like, martial arts based.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: And so, like, it kind of makes sense to me that, if that’s not, like, the school of Nen that works for her, something that would help her with that would be, like, the thing she does.
Jack: Yeah. I was just, I was waiting for the joke twist, right? Where like, at the end, Cookie pulls out a pair of knives or something. [Dre chuckles]
Keith: Nope.
Sylvia: Yo.
Jack: Well, 'cause—
Dre: Cookie has a gun.
Jack: Yeah, exactly.
Sylvia: Yeah, just pulls out an AK-47. [Dre laughs]
Jack: It’s Biscuit, so I was expecting it.
Keith: The joke at the end is that Killua’s furious about this. [laughs quietly] That’s the joke.
Jack: Yes, Killua is like, “How is this useful?” and I thought he’d get punched into the sky, but we really only have one more getting punched into the sky, as a treat.
Keith: We do.
Jack: And it’s in a few episodes.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: With a match cut. It’s really funny.
Jack: [laughs] Yeah, it is a match cut. It’s really funny. And then, you know, this is being interwoven. Gon is trying to do this thing. He’s failing. He can only lift himself in the air less than a foot. That’s gotta hurt your wrist so bad, [Keith: Mm.] to just, like, drop down onto it.
Keith: Well, Nen wrists, so.
Jack: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Nen wrists.
Keith: This is the part with the Bombers recruiting people, which we talked about a bit. I don't know if there's anything else about that, but.
Jack: Oh. I did want to say briefly that I thought it was fun to see Killua and Bisky talking together about Gon’s training.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: It was sort of like a soft acknowledgement that Killua is, on some level, more technically capable than Gon.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: That the two of them were able to sort of sit back and look at Gon and go, oh, you know, “Here’s where he needs to improve. Here’s how he’s working.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I thought that was fun.
Keith: The thing that I think is fun is Goreinu sort of, like, watching the Bombers with a little telescope from the trees, [Sylvia laughs] sort of hidden up in the trees. Especially because Goreinu’s just, like, one of the more normal talented Hunters that we've seen.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: That’s true.
Keith: He’s just kind of, like, a guy with a vest.
Jack: Yeah, and two apes.
Sylvia: Every time he’s on screen, I'm like, “Apes? Can I see the apes, sir?”
Jack: [chuckles] I know. And he—
Sylvia: By the way, may I have some apes, sir?
Dre: Is the one dead?
Jack: No.
Sylvia: No, 'cause they're his Nen.
Dre: I know, but like, I don't know.
Keith: Yeah, he should be able to resummon it.
Sylvia: Like, theoretically, I don't think if Cookie died, Biscuit, like, doesn't have a Nen power anymore. I think she just brings Cookie back.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: It would make something like Chrollo’s power kind of dicey, if that was the case, right? Where it’s like, Chrollo opens his book, produces something. That thing gets killed, and now he can never do that again.
Keith: Yeah. Well, he could always get more.
Dre: Yeah. I mean that more in terms of just, like, Goreinu specifically, not, like, Nen writ large.
Jack: Oh, yeah. Not like Nen Beasts generally. Yeah, I don't know.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, I don't know.
Jack: Here, I wrote down, “I fear for Goreinu.” [Sylvia and Keith laugh]
Dre: Fair. Fair.
Jack: I could sort of sense that a knife was approaching him.
Sylvia: I fear for the lovely gorilla man. May he return home safely.
Jack: Listener, no knife approaches him.
Keith: Here’s something. He refuses to fight the Bomber, which is fair, because the Bomber is pretty good at fighting, it turns out. But I was watching the fight later on and being like, “Goreinu’s power would be perfect for this. He could substitute one of his gorillas for—
Jack: [laughs] No, Keith, you don't understand. They are dodgeball gorillas. You know how—
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: They only do dodgeball.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: Well, here’s how it is, you know? Chrollo has conditions before he can steal someone’s power. The Bomber has to— you have to touch him and say, “I caught the Bomber,” before his bombs disappear.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Goreinu’s gorillas can only appear during a dodgeball match, and he was, like, waiting. He was so excited when the dodgeball match showed up. [Dre laughs]
Keith: So, this is funny. This part’s funny, because the— we're just, like, so deep in plan territory. Like, everyone’s, like, nine levels of plan in, because we sort of watch the Bombers collecting more and more Accompany cards, and it’s like, “Oh my god, they're catching up,” and then it cuts to Tsezguerra being like, “Don't worry. Them getting more cards is part of our plan.” [Jack and Keith laugh] It makes sense, because their whole plan is to run down the clock.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: And it’s going to take them, like, a week or two to get as many cards as they think is necessary. I guess that’s why they needed such a high number of cards.
Sylvia: There's, like, such a high percentage of people being like, “Don't worry, this is the plan,” or “Ah yes, this is the plan,” in these episodes.
Keith: “This is still the plan.”
Sylvia: Yeah, and it’s like—
Keith: “Don't worry, this is still all part of the plan.”
Sylvia: It works out great.
Keith: It does.
Sylvia: But it’s like, honestly, as a viewer, I don't know if they needed to signal it to me as much as, like, they did.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: There is a lot of classic voice in character’s head, “He doesn't know that I know.”
Dre: Yeah. [laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Or “I remember what someone said,” or “He’s dodging towards me with his right hand.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Which is a trope that Hunter × Hunter does sometimes but kind of tends to avoid in favor of either cutting forwards or backwards to people explicitly talking, having people on the sidelines talking, or having characters verbalizing it themselves out into the fight.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Yeah, there's a point where Bisky says it three times and then Gon has, like, two flashbacks about Bisky saying it, and I think, like, two or three of those ones in the middle could have been cut.
Jack: Pick one. Yeah.
Sylvia: I do think that it’s to, one, we have to take into consideration weekly broadcast scheduling stuff.
Dre: Sure.
Keith: True.
Jack: For children.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. Yeah, but like, also just the— it’s a way to keep the viewer reminded of that they did have a plan when Gon starts going off script.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yes, that’s true. It will not surprise you, gentle listener, to know that Gon starts going off script. [chuckles]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And then there's a moment where he goes off script, and then he goes even more off script later, where it’s like, it gets revealed that he’s going off script and then revealed that actually, that was still, like, the worst case scenario part of the script, and now we're really going off script.
Jack: Oh, yeah. [Keith laughs] I would find all this, like, planning and counter-planning so tiresome if it wasn't backed up by a really spectacular fight.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: In the back part of these episodes.
Keith: And some actually good planning. Like, it…
Sylvia: Oh, yeah. I mean, also, when the planning doesn't really hit for me, I feel like I'm at the point in the series, and I was like this when I was watching it the first time too, where it’s like, I kind of just trust them when—
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, I trust Togashi when he’s doing this now, because, like, I think I mentioned— I don't remember if it was last episode or the episode before, the sort of, like, Mousetrap pacing that he likes to do, where he, like, slowly builds up his little, like, Rube Goldberg machine, and then everything goes.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvia: And this has a really satisfying conclusion, I think, so.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: This is something that I think I said, like, three or four episodes ago, but the funny thing— the thing that’s interesting about Greed Island structurally is that, like, normally, Togashi’s building the mousetrap, you know, himself, and the characters are just the pieces. And in this one, he’s building the characters to build the mousetrap.
Jack: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. [Dre chuckles]
Keith: Which is kind of like, you know, its sort of, like, brings the structure more in fiction, in kind of a fun way, because they're—
Sylvia: It makes it foregrounded.
Keith: Because they are in the game, so like, having them doing what he’s doing, like, fictionalizing the game that he’s already playing out of fiction.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: I just think it’s fun.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: Yeah, I agree.
Keith: What’s going on now? Where are we?
Jack: Tsezguerra—
Sylvia: We're all over the place.
Jack: Tsezguerra’s team— I think we've covered— oh, I suppose something that is worth saying here is that Bisky and Killua find an absolutely gigantic boulder.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: However big you think this boulder is, however flawlessly beautifully round you think this boulder is…
Keith: Oh.
Sylvia: Bigger and rounder.
Jack: Picture bigger and rounder.
Keith: I thought that they made the boulder.
Dre: Me too! Me too.
Sylvia: No. No.
Dre: I thought they implied that, like, Bisky made it.
Sylvia: Oh, maybe she did, but I— 'cause she is a jewel lady.
Jack: No, we know that she didn't make it, because this boulder actually is a card, actually comes from a card. So I think that they found it out in the world as part of a quest.
Dre: Ohh.
Sylvia: Can't you put most items into cards in Greed Island, though?
Dre: That’s true.
Sylvia: Am I…?
Jack: Oh.
Keith: Well, but it’s already got to be a pre-itemed card.
Jack: Yeah, it has to have been…
Sylvia: Well, 'cause like…yeah. But it’s like, all the rocks on the island can become cards.
Dre: A lot of items are cards and vice versa. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: What a stupid game.
Dre: It is. [laughs]
Sylvia: I love it.
Jack: Early in Greed Island, maybe as we are approaching it, you know, when we were in the Phantom Troupe arc, and we knew that a video game arc was coming, and I said, “Did they ever make a Greed Island video game adaptation?” and the three of you knowing that, in fact, we were going to be getting 10% video game, [Sylvia: Yeah.] 80% death game, [Dre: Mm-hmm.] 10% weird lady training Gon and Killua.
Dre: Sure.
Jack: You were like, “Well, you know.” [chuckles]
Sylvia: I mean, they could’ve. Like, they could’ve, but, you know.
Keith: And they did, they just all were fighting games and Game Boy Advance games that only came out in Japan.
Sylvia: And WonderSwan games, please.
Keith: And WonderSwan games.
Dre: Mm, mm, mm, mm.
Keith: Thank you. Thank you again, Gunpai Yokoi.
Jack: What is the WonderSwan? [Sylvia laughs] I'm looking up “wonder swan.”
Dre: Oh, you never heard of the WonderSwan?
Sylvia: The WonderSwan, it’s like a— yeah, it was, like, a Japan only…
Dre: Yeah. It was a handheld, right?
Keith: It was a nearly successful rival to the Game Boy.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Why does it look like that?
Keith: Made by Gunpei Yokoi after he left Nintendo and after he made the Tamagotchi.
Jack: Oh, damn! Okay. Wow.
Keith: Yeah, Gunpei Yokoi was a genius and made the Game Boy and, I think, died in a car accident tragically.
Jack: Oh, that’s very sad.
Dre: Oh, god. That’s awful.
Sylvia: That’s very sad. Well.
Jack: Poor guy.
Keith: He was forced to rush the Virtual Boy to market, and then it was a disaster.
Dre: Oof.
Keith: And it was released in— basically in, to him, an unreleasable form, and then it seemed— I think the wisdom, the commonly held belief is that he was kind of unwelcome at Nintendo because of the failure of the Virtual Boy, so he resigned and then made the Tamagotchi.
Jack: Oh, interesting.
Sylvia: Wow.
Dre: Hmm.
Jack: So, they find out—
Sylvia: Then made the Tamagotchi. And then had the biggest springback.
Keith: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Anyway, sorry. Jack, go ahead.
Jack: They find this beautiful boulder, and then Tsezguerra and his team, having sort of done all they can, leave the game. This is interesting, because I had assumed that the Bomber had already infiltrated the mansion, because they arrive and there are no guards.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: This is confusing, and I have a note on this.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And I think I have an idea for what happens. So, if I can—
Jack: No, I think I know exactly what’s happened.
Keith: Oh, okay.
Sylvia: Yeah, go ahead. I think Jack might have— it sounds like Jack’s got a good read on it.
Jack: Yeah. So, at first, I was like, “The Bombers got here already, and this is going to be [Sylvia: Yeah.] scary, because, you know, they're stepping into a trap that’s already been set up by the Bomber.” But it turns out that the head guard was just asleep, and everybody else had been dismissed, [Sylvia chuckles] because Mr. Baterra—the man who, if you remember, had bought the game [Keith: Mm-hmm.] for billions and billions and billions of jenny—has locked himself in his bedroom and is crying and has called the whole game off.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: So the operation has been shuttered. I had no idea what was going on here, and in fact, what actually ends up happening, which is sort of like a little O. Henry twist in our Hunter × Hunter Greed Island arc. [Sylvia and Dre chuckle]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: I had thought…I didn't know if there was something more sinister going on, right? Whether there was— that this is part of what was going to get us into the next arc. Why has this man suddenly called off the game so suddenly? And it turns out to be something a lot more mundane and sad. But this was sort of my first moment of wondering whether the bridge to the next arc was beginning, even though it wasn't.
Dre: Hmm.
Keith: So, Jack, you sidestepped it, but the confusing thing to me was that Genthru’s team also uses Leave, and they kill a guard that was there, and they're like, “It’s fine to kill people here, because they won't leave any cards.” Again, they're talking about the real world.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. [Jack laughs]
Keith: It’s fine to kill people HERE, because there's no consequences. And then I was like, “Wait, hold on.” Battera’s, like, crying in the other room, and Tsezguerra’s, like, pounding on the door, and Genthru’s team is there, and then the next episode, it starts, and Genthru’s [Jack: Oh, yeah.] team is waiting back at the starting point. And then I was like, oh, there must have just been a weird cut, where actually, [Sylvia: Yeah.] Battera doesn't live in the place where the game is happening or where the consoles are, and they just must have cut through Battera leaving where the games are to go into where Battera is.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: That was the part that I found confusing about this.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: Yes.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: I think it was just sort of pretty expeditious cutting that could have been a little clearer.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Also, we're on Togashi and the animation team’s wild ride, at this point.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: And they are going to put the pieces where they want them to be to get the story to work. [chuckles]
Keith: Also worth reminding people that, like, the episode to— the chapter to episode ratio in translating the manga to an anime [Sylvia: Mm-hmm.] has never been so strict. There are more chapters going into episodes than usual for this, so like, there's more cut content than any other season, to this point.
Dre: Oh.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: We had hoped to have Ali on today to talk about how the manga works, but it didn't pan out. But we are excited to bring on our manga correspondent soon [Keith: Yeah.] to talk a bit more about where the show and the manga are similar and different.
Keith: Yeah, maybe we'll do a manga catchup episode.
Sylvia: Ooh.
Jack: Yeah. And that’s pretty much everything in 72. Does anybody have…?
Keith: Yeah, really it ends with Battera crying and then the Bombers showing up. This was what was confusing. The very last thing [Dre: Mm-hmm.] in that episode was Genthru being like, “We're back in the real world! We can kill anyone that we want!”
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And then cut to they're literally not in the real world anymore. It was very odd.
Sylvia: I think this gets explained later on.
Dre: Sort of.
Sylvia: Kind of. Like, it— I'm making a couple leaps to get there, but I kind of, like, backfilled some stuff [Keith: Yeah.] when we find out the situation with Battera.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Well, Tsezguerra kind of makes two— has two versions of the plan. One is where they don't follow them, and they can just wait them out.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And the other is they do follow them, and the guards at the place will, like, help them defend against Genthru? I'm not sure how that was going to happen.
Dre: They die so that he can go do stuff elsewhere, probably. [laughs]
Keith: Yeah. And it’s funny, because he was followed, but then they played it like he wasn't, because the mansion ends up being empty.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: By the time 73 starts, Genthru’s team is spawn camping the entrance, so that Tsezguerra’s team can't get back in. Now, there's a mechanic introduced here that I'm not sure if it was mentioned previously, where if you are outside of the game for a certain period of time—
Keith: It was mentioned briefly.
Jack: It was mentioned briefly? Okay.
Keith: At the very—
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: In our first episode covering this, they talked about it.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: So it’s one of those first three or four.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: It was, like, early Bomber stuff, right? Like, with— wasn't it with Puhat? Or am I misremembering? Am I mixing stuff up?
Keith: Yeah, I think that you're right. I think it was, like, either—
Jack: When Puhat left the game.
Keith: Yeah. Either the first or second episode or something like that, yeah.
Jack: Yeah, because, you know, if you're out of the game for too long, all your cards sort of get destroyed. You know, you can save them in your binder. You leave, and you come back in, and you’ve still got them. But if you're out for too long, there they go. And that ends up being what’s happened. You know. All the cards are lost. This is less of a problem than we think, because it turns out, [chuckles] in sort of our first, “He thought that I was doing this, but I was actually doing that!” twist… [Sylvia laughs]
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Goreinu actually has been holding all the real cards, and Tsezguerra’s team has mostly copies. There are mechanics that would let you discover copied and faked cards. Gon has one of them, in the Paladin’s Necklace. But Genthru’s team is more focused on playing the game like sharks, you know, to try and rush to the win.
Sylvia: That’s a really good way to put it.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Than maybe, like, figuring out whether or not these things are cards. It does put a lot of risk on Goreinu. I fear for Goreinu. [Dre and Sylvia laugh]
Keith: Yeah. They do two interesting things to sort of subvert the idea that Genthru might figure this out. The first is that Goreinu goes, like, “This is the biggest gamble of Tsezguerra’s life,” and it’s like, oh, okay, so this is a really big deal that he gave Goreinu all his cards, which is pretty obvious. Goreinu could just choose to go try and win the game now. Like, Gon…theoretically, Gon could have given Goreinu two cards, and the game would have been over, [Jack: Yeah.] with no interaction with the Bomber, right?
Dre: Well…no, because the Bombers have monopolized Angel’s Breath.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Oh, they needed one— well, I thought that, uh— okay, you're right. I thought that, um…
Dre: ‘Cause that was part— I don't remember if this is here, but that was part of the plan, where it’s like, we've gotta beat up the Bomber team bad enough [cross] that they have to use an Angel’s Breath.
Keith: [cross] ‘Cause they have all of the Angel’s Breath. Yeah.
Dre: And then we can buy one at the store.
Jack: Angel’s Breath—
Keith: That was part of Tsezguerra’s plan. I thought that Gon and Killua had their own Angel’s Breath, but that’s just because they take them at the end.
Dre: Yep.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Angel’s Breath is a rare card that lets you heal injuries. Hmm, interesting.
Keith: Yeah, it’s a full restore, basically.
Jack: It’s a full restore.
Sylvia: Yeah, it is.
Jack: That might be notable to have. Oh well. Don't worry about it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Also kind of the dragon from Dragon Ball.
Keith: Hey, and you could take that into the real world, it seems like. Isn't that crazy, how all these cards can go into the real world?
Dre: That’s super weird.
Jack: Because it turns out that Battera’s lover— and we really are— you know, earlier I described it as an O. Henry twist.
Sylvia: God.
Jack: O. Henry was an American short story writer.
Keith: That’s the twist. [laughs]
Jack: Perhaps most famous for— [laughs] Whoa! Perhaps most famous for—
Sylvia: Wrote “Gift of the Magi”, right?
Keith: The candy bar, at this point.
Jack: —a short story called “The Gift of the Magi”. And the candy bar.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: “The Gift of the Magi” I'm sure we've talked about on this show before. It’s a kind of faintly—
Keith: Well, “this show” being Friends at the Table, yes, absolutely. “This show” being Media Club Plus, I don't think so.
Jack: It’s a faintly mawkish short story that ends in a sort of grim Twilight Zone twist, [Sylvia: Yeah.] in which a man buys a hair comb for his wife, and the wife buys a watch strap for her husband, but of course we learn at the end that the man sold his watch to pay for the hair comb and the woman sold her hair to pay for the watch strap. This is the kind of thing that, if it was 19-maybe-26 and you read it for the first time, it’s the coolest shit you've ever read.
Sylvia: Blow your fucking mind. [Dre laughs] He was cooking with this one, god damn.
Jack: He was cooking with this one.
Keith: Yeah, it’s—
Sylvia: She sold her hair? [Keith and Jack laugh]
Keith: It’s also— you know, this has been parodied and homaged to death a billion times over.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: But yes, it is sort of like that.
Jack: Yeah, so sort of what has ended up happening here is that Goreinu has a lover who, almost like a—
Sylvia: Not Goreinu. [Keith laughs]
Jack: Goreinu?
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Battera, yeah. Battera.
Jack: I fear for Goreinu. [Sylvia, Keith, and Dre laugh]
Sylvia: I fear for Goreinu.
Keith: Oh my god.
Sylvia: He needs his age gap girlfriend. [Keith and Jack chuckle]
Jack: Battera has a lover. He’s a very, very wealthy man. She is not wealthy. She has denied all sorts of fancy gifts that he’s bought her.
Sylvia: It’s a whole thing.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: So that people don't think that she’s just in it for the money. You know, Togashi and co. are just trying to sell us as quickly as we can [Keith: Yeah.] on this nice unfortunate lady.
Sylvia: It’s crazy.
Keith: We have 45 seconds to convince everyone that she’s not a gold digger.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: But also, you could—
Dre: Or that he’s not a fucking creepo!
Sylvia: Yeah, this is the thing, because it starts with, “Oh, is this your daughter?” It’s like, “No.”
Keith: Or granddaughter.
Sylvia: Or granddaughter!
Dre: Yeah. Man.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s like, there’s a lot.
Dre: [sarcastic] Shout out to Bill Belichick. [quiet laughter]
Keith: He’s, like, 74, and she’s, like, a young woman. It’s impossible to know, because it’s a cartoon.
Dre: Yeah. Shout out to Bill Belichick.
Sylvia: God.
Jack: However, unfortunately, she has been mortally wounded in an accident and lies in a coma, and he has been— he has set up this entire operation, you know, to try and gain the Angel’s Breath card. This whole thing was a means to get the Angel’s Breath card—
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: To bring his lover back to life. And of course, she has finally passed away, so this whole thing is, uh, you know, empty.
Keith: Moot.
Sylvia: Yep.
Jack: And, you know, this is—
Keith: He said right at the beginning that he was doing it for love.
Jack: He did say—! In, like, a television interview, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: They said, “Why are you doing this? Why are you spending half your fortune on this game?” and he said, “For love.”
Sylvia: I remembered this, and I was like, “Man, it’s going to be so stupid when we get to that fucking bit.” [laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And it is so sudden and so, like, bathetic that it is almost funny. It is mawkishly sentimental but also disposed of so quickly that I kind of can't be mad about it. You can tell that they might have been batting around ideas, where it’s like, the game corrupts its players, and then ultimately all of this was for nothing.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: You know, the whole purpose of the game from Ging’s perspective was to test Gon. The whole purpose of the game from the players’ perspective was to get vast amounts of money. The whole purpose of the game from Battera’s perspective was to bring his lover back to life or cure his lover. And, of course, it all comes to nothing in the end. You know, he buys the hair comb by selling his watch strap.
Keith: And then the added thing is that the only reason the game didn't end sooner was the bad guys had all the Angel’s Breath, the exact cards that they needed to save this woman.
Jack: Yes.
Keith: And the only cards that they needed to end the game was the ones that you needed, like, a shred of compassion and teamwork in order to get.
Jack: Yes. There are thematic levers that you could work here that, at the best of times, would kind of be mawkishly sentimental. The fact that Togashi and crew decide to try to pull all these levers, like an organist frantically trying to bring the organ up to volume before the choir comes in… [Keith and Dre laugh]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Is—
Sylvia: It’s one of those things— oh, go ahead.
Jack: It is delightful, and it’s also kind of nothing.
Sylvia: I wonder how much of this is, like Keith mentioned, a, like, casualty of the pacing and the adaptation schedule, if they're, like, packing a bunch of chapters in. I can see the way that this ends up feeling like a short story Togashi’s done in a couple chapters.
Jack: Right.
Dre: Maybe.
Sylvia: Versus, like, a thing that takes a couple minutes in the beginning of an episode.
Dre: It does feel a little, like, thematically— and maybe thematically is the wrong word, but it feels kind of appropriate that, at this point, no one gives a fuck about— like, most people do not give a fuck about the game, especially Gon and Killua. I should say: everyone gives a fuck about the game, like, for Battera’s sake, except for Gon and Killua.
Sylvia: Oh, for Battera’s sake.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so it makes sense to me that, like, it’s almost like this weird, like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this doesn't really matter anymore. Like, we are so far past the need—
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: They can dispense with it.
Dre: Yeah, we don't have to justify why people are in Greed Island anymore.
Keith: There's also, like, a top level cruelty to this, where, like, who made the game? Ging. Why did he make the game? As, like, this weird obsessive way to challenge his abandoned son, to make sure that he’s strong enough in the world.
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Which means that, like, the game can't— it has to be designed in a way that it can't end before Gon gets there.
Jack: [laughs] Yes, it’s so artificial.
Keith: And so, like, all of this stuff, like, all of people’s, like, hopes that they're pinning on this game that really has nothing to do with them. It’s just sort of, like, a trap to keep them there as obstacles for Gon [Dre: Mm-hmm.] because Ging is, like, a weird House-style genius who is, like, [Dre laughs] seeing the world in, you know, 4D chess.
Sylvia: God.
Dre: God.
Keith: And like, “I just need to make this game that lasts 15 years so that my son can get here [Dre: Yeah.] and become, you know, the strongest of all time.”
Sylvia: Or so I can kill my son, and I don't have to see him.
Keith: [chuckles] Right.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Or so my gym buddy can kill my son. [Jack and Sylvia laugh]
Dre: And there's also the level of cruelty too, where it’s Battera just literally building, like, a house of corpses in order to try and revive one person.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, right? That story.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: No. Instead, I'm going to spend loads and loads of episodes on just, like, I don't know, fucking card trades.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: This is such a thin arc. There's so much good stuff in it, and like, a lot of these episodes really work, but ultimately, it really feels like, you know…
Keith: I think the thinness of it and the cruelty of it is, like, justified in all of these weird ways, where like, these are all just the machinations of a lunatic mixed with all—
Jack: Brackets: Ging.
Keith: Ging, right.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Mixed with, like, Battera trying to use it for his own advantage, mixed with, like, this weird reality where they're in this game, but it’s actually in the real world. Like, I think that the fact that it’s in the real world is such an important part of it to me, because it sort of, like, it brings into reality the thinness of the veil.
Jack: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Like, there actually isn't a veil. It just IS the real world. It’s not even a game.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: It’s just a town with weird rules.
Dre: Yeah, I mean, the only veil is that you can't leave.
Keith: Right, yeah.
Jack: Yes. [chuckles] Yes. Yeah. You know, I like it a lot. I think it is such a compelling idea, and I think that my problems with it come from the ways it is dancing around that idea sometimes. But yeah, this little Battera coda here I thought was really funny. It’s very sad. The one detail that they managed to hit that is so clangingly sentimental that it kind of ended up working for me was the “She loved this shoddy picture frame I made.”
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: God.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: There was something about the idea of Mr. Battera, like, going to a Michael’s and putting together, like, a terrible little picture frame. [Dre laughs] That was just a really nice fast stupid beat.
Keith: It calls to, you know…two sentences of characterization. “She returned every expensive gift I ever bought her, but she loved this picture frame.” You know, I can imagine this man who, for some reason, you know, has his, you know, 50-years-younger smokin’ hot girlfriend that doesn't want his money, [Jack chuckles] and he’s like, [Sylvia: Yeah.] “Accept one gift of mine, please!”
Sylvia: Ain't that the dream, fellas?
Keith: Like, he’s never had to make anything in his life, 'cause he’s a billionaire, and so he’s just desperately trying to figure out what kind of gift she’ll take. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: It gave me such a different read on the whole thing, if I'm being honest. It made me feel like the whole thing is like, “Okay, so my stalker’s paying for my medical bills, but I don't want any of this shit he keeps sending me. [Jack, Keith, and Dre laugh] I need to accept one so he stops.”
Jack: I'm gonna take the…yeah. Ugh.
Keith: And that can't be it, 'cause then you'd accept the nice one!
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s definitely not what— well, no, you don't— you accept the small one, so it’s like, “Yeah, cool, now you don't have any— like, you have less ammunition to hold over me.”
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Except now, instead…
Keith: I'm saying it right now: if I'm getting stalked, I'm taking a car. [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: Okay, well.
Dre: That’s fair. Make it worth it, you know?
Keith: Don't send me your trash. Give me a car.
Sylvia: Any stalkers out there, get Keith a car. Obviously, my read is super untrue and not what the show’s going for. [Keith laughs]
Dre: It’s kind of funnier.
Sylvia: But it is how I'm choosing to think about it. Oh, yeah, it’s definitely funnier. [Dre and Sylvia laugh]
Keith: Before we get too deep into episode 73, we do have a couple interesting songs going on in 72 that I missed talking about.
Sylvia: Yeah?
Keith: So, one of them I didn't have. It’s called “Intermezzo”. It just is, like, the lead-in to one of the other songs.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: It’s called “Assassins on the Building”, and then it goes right into another new song, “Unasked for Advice”, and this is what happens when the Tsezguerra team is, like, sort of doing hit-and-run tactics on the Bombers to, like, rattle them so that they're kind of, like, overthinking what the plan might be.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And these are important, because these are going to end up showing up a lot in our next arc. These are songs I primarily associate with future content.
Sylvia: Mm.
Keith: Uh, let’s…
[clip of “Assassins on the Building” begins]
Sylvia: Oh, that bass.
Dre: It’s a good bass.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And, like I said, I'll cut these down to size because of the mixer issues. So, this one’s, like, really dark and weird and very cool. I like this one a lot.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: I think this one gets somewhere. This one kind of builds into, like, a weird groove, right? Like a bass groove? Or is that the other one?
[music stops]
Keith: Uh, let’s see. They do play them sort of back-to-back. Let me just double check.
[different clip of “Assassins on the Building” begins]
Keith: Is this what you're thinking of?
Jack: No. [music stops] Let me see if I can find…
Keith: So, it might be the next one. “Unasked for Advice”.
[clip of “Unasked Advice” begins]
Sylvia: Yo!
Keith: Yes.
Jack: It’s this one.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: This is huge in the next season.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: This is everywhere next season.
Jack: This is this groove that I'm talking about. This, like, the bass bending upwards with a little…I’m going to be quiet so you can hear it, but the treble part is playing a line over the top of it.
[music continues]
Jack: Why is the show starting to sound like this?
[music ends]
Sylvia: I don't know.
Keith: I don't know.
Dre: I don't know.
Jack: There is that picture of the fellow that I saw on my streaming platform [Sylvia laughs] who looks very, very sinister.
Keith: Oh, the fellow, yes.
Jack: And he has, like, an army of, like, red-eyed people below him. That’s that kind of music, right? This is creeping music.
Sylvia: [chuckles] This is creeping music!
Keith: This is— it is creeping music.
Sylvia: It is creeping music.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Is it crawling music?
Jack: Whoa!
Sylvia: Oh.
Dre: Ohh.
Jack: Now, look. Here’s the thing. I don't even know if these are going to be fucking ants! [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: That’s my favorite part about all this.
Dre: Uh huh.
Keith: I mean, did you see any ants?
Jack: Did I see any ants? I've never seen any ants, no. On the creepy image, there we're a lot of, like, humanoid creatures with red eyes, but that’s…for the listener who isn't familiar, my theory of what a Chimera Ant is is a sort of shapeshifting entity, so they could be, like, they could be looking like people? I don't know. It’s so interesting to me, Keith, that you say this is the sound of the next arc.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. You don't watch the “Next Time On”s, do you?
Jack: I do not watch the “Next Time On”s.
Sylvia: Okay.
Keith: It’s good that you didn't watch the last Next Time On.
Sylvia: It’s good that you didn't.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Usually it’s fine. Who cares? But this one was a big one.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Anyway, yeah. Those are really big for the next…
Jack: Really dark, and dark in a way we haven't really heard before. There is—
Keith: Yeah. I don't know what Nine Inch Nails really is, but I listened to that, and it sounded a lot like Nine Inch Nails to me. [Sylvia and Jack laugh]
Dre: Yeah, no, I think— yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm definitely not, like, a Nine Inch Nails, like, [Sylvia: No.] you know, huge fan, but yeah, that sounds right. That’s the vibe.
Sylvia: Like, there's some industrial stuff there, but it is also just you saying—
Keith: Yeah, hear hammering on an anvil, but there’s nothing there.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s more the way you said it that made me— that really got me.
Dre: Mm-hmm. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: “I don't know what Nine Inch Nails is.”
Jack: “I don't really know what Nine Inch Nails is.” Or as David Lynch calls them, The Nine Inch Nails.
Sylvia: Yep.
Jack: But no, it’s really cool, and it’s exciting to think of Hirano exploring new textures in his composing.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Mm.
Keith: We have an old texture coming up too. It’s a song that’s played before but only, like, once or twice, that I thought would be fun to include. But yeah, a lot of new stuff and a lot of the very earliest sounds in these episodes.
Dre: Man.
Jack: What are you thinking, Dre?
Dre: I'm just, I'm looking at, like, the wiki page for episode 73, and I just forgot how much stuff is in this episode.
Keith: It’s a ton of stuff in this.
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s jam-fucking-packed.
Dre: Like, we have spent, like, a lot of time talking about what is, like, the first quarter of the episode?
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: There's just so much happening in this episode.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Okay, so, one thing we skipped. Gon’s training his new thing. He was supposed to get it under a minute but hasn't. What is that new thing? We don't know. They don't really say what it— right? This is like, Killua is like, “Hey, Gon—”
Dre: No, it’s supposed to be you have to do it exactly at a minute.
Jack: Yeah, I don't really know what this is.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I don't know if this comes back up.
Sylvia: He’s trying to— the 100— isn't it 100 seconds, or is it a minute?
Keith: I think it’s a minute. I think it’s a minute.
Dre: It’s a minute. It’s a minute.
Sylvia: Okay.
Dre: And then on the stopwatch, like, when Gon is like, “Look, I did it!” it’s like, [Keith: Yeah.] he’s off by, like, a tenth of a second, and Bisky and Killua are like, “No, you didn't.”
Sylvia: Yeah, 13th, yeah.
Keith: But they basically said, “You're not getting this Emission thing. You failed in your task to learn this, so you have to learn this other thing instead.”
Jack: Which is interesting. Gon just, Gon fails. And actually, Killua is the one who delivers the news to him, you know? Says, “All right, this isn't working. We have to try something new.” Maybe because Bisky and Killua were like, “He’ll only listen to me.” [Jack and Keith laugh]
Dre: Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Maybe that’s why Killua has to be so involved with the training, is because he’ll accept the news if Killua delivers it.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Gon thinks—
Dre: Well, I mean, it goes back to Gon only trusts Killua enough for certain things, right? Only Killua could hold the ball.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Only Killua can tell Gon when this isn't going to work.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: And I think Killua’s got a really good grasp on, like, what Gon’s actual limitations might be.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Like, he nailed very early on, way before Bisky admitted that Gon was not going to be able to get this. The fact that it took five days and he made no progress, Killua’s like, “We should stop now,” and they wait another five days with no progress before changing to the new thing. But, uh, let’s see…
Jack: Killua plays a very good Kurapika, actually.
Keith: He does.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: You know, early in the show, when he was sort of coming off the back of fleeing the Zoldycks, he was, like, dangerous and had a bit of an impulsive streak. You know, less impulsive than Gon, [Keith: Yeah.] but could definitely be a wildcard. But he’s really maturing into a sort of War Kurapika.
Dre: Yeah. [Sylvia laughs]
Jack: The War Kurapika, of course—
Sylvia: Warapika.
Jack: Warapika. [laughs] Not Wakurapika.
Keith: Warapika, I'm pretty sure that’s a Digimon. [Dre laughs]
Jack: Oh, wow.
Sylvia: It would be Warapikamon.
Jack: Let’s see. Genthru starts now turning his attention to Gon’s party. Hilariously, he briefly believes that he can just take their cards from them. He says, “Assuming we need to resort to force, this is what we'll do.” He has no idea that they have been planning for three weeks to fight him.
Keith: Right.
Jack: I thought that was a nice detail. It’s a bit like when you are playing, like, an open world survival game, like Rust or something, [Keith: Yeah.] and you come over the hill to find that your opponent has constructed a beautiful three-story base with a jacuzzi spa [Keith laughs] while you were still working on your lean-to against a tree.
Sylvia: Yeah. And then I set the jacuzzi spa on fire.
Keith: Same thing with, like, Starcraft where you build up your first little army, and you're like, “All right, I'm gonna go on the attack,” and then you show up, and their base is three times the size of yours.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: So many pylons.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: So many pylons!
Keith: Oh my god. They already have these? I'm fucked. [Sylvia chuckles]
Jack: This is when— this is the first time I noticed that great cue with the rising bass line that Keith played earlier.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Immediately, there is a lot of fake maneuvering, and that maneuvering never stops, as the team sort of pretends to be impulsive, pretends to sort of split up, but what they're actually doing is, you know, getting ready to fight one-on-one. Gon immediately gets a taste that Genthru might be even more dangerous than he thought, where, as Genthru lunges towards Gon to put a bomb on him and Gon leaps backwards, Genthru immediately figures out that he has somehow learned what his power is and sort of starts to reposition, in the sense of this is going to be a more serious fight than I thought it was. And Gon says to himself, again, sort of shonen internal voices here, “This is the difference in battle experience.” You know, Genthru is already starting to outclass me in how quickly he’s able to think.
Keith: They do a really fun, like, play at having been surprised. I really like this stuff. They do cut in every line to be like, “Nice. This is working,” but I do like them all kind of pretending to be caught off guard. It does work really well.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s a nice little throwback to when they did it earlier in the season too.
Jack: Oh, for the scissors pervert?
Sylvia: Yeah. They scissors pervert this guy.
Keith: They did, yes.
Sylvia: Like, they really do.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: Yeah. It’s true.
Sylvia: Binolt. I remembered it.
Keith: Start to end, basically. The whole arc.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: They just stretch out that whole little bit into the Bomber’s thing. I also like, uh, when Genthru first shows up, he’s like, “Hey, it’s fine. We actually want to cut everyone in on the prize money. We just decided that, uh…”
Jack: Oh, yeah, it’s really good.
Keith: “We had a change of heart.”
Jack: We've gone straight.
Sylvia: It’s so funny.
Keith: It’s so funny, because it doesn't even feel like it’s meant to be a convincing lie. Like, he just likes lying. He just likes— he’s like—
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: A little Hisoka of him.
Keith: It’s almost just for no one’s benefit but his own that he’s, like, telling a bad lie in order to get caught or something? I don't know. It’s very odd.
Jack: Yeah. I thought it was a really charming moment of just, like, the character giving into one of their impulses, because lord knows, we then see Gon begin to give into his impulses as the fight continues.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: It is immediately clear that Gon has learned from his teachings with Bisky, in the way that the fight choreography goes here.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: As they start—
Keith: Despite him not getting even one hit in.
Jack: No. No. But he is able to not just move quickly but the camera looks at Gon with a kind of…or rather, Gon expresses a kind of balletic combat that we haven't really seen him done before. You know, when I think of early major Gon fights, they were mostly defined in terms of the big moves, by Gon doing things like leaping backwards suddenly or, you know, leaping out of a cloud of smoke and launching a punch.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: You know, these sort of singular, unchained together, violent motions.
Keith: There is some of this in his fight with Hisoka at the, um…
Dre: Heavens Arena?
Keith: At Heavens Arena, where I described it as fighting like Pikachu.
Jack: Oh, yes. Yes, that’s true.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: But he’s so much scrappier and on edge in that one and is, like, doing so much more dodging, or like…there’s like a franticness that’s absent now.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the difference between me in Elden Ring just rolling all the time and getting the shit kicked out of me [Jack and Sylvia laugh] and, you know, someone who actually knows what they're doing.
Keith: I also had this note that this is our first time really seeing Genthru fight, because [Sylvia: Yeah.] his ability is so good. Genthru has a really powerful defensive and offensive ability. He has two different major abilities, and they've served him really well. That’s kind of all we've seen him do, and everyone treats him like he’s, like, a really strong fighter, but we haven't [Jack: Yeah.] had any sense of this. And this is the moment where it goes, like, oh, Genthru is just as good if not better as a brawler as he is impressive with his power.
Sylvia: He air juggles Gon.
Jack: Yes.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: He does.
Sylvia: He air juggles Gon multiple times.
Jack: Yeah. And as this develops, we are here again. This is one of Hunter × Hunter’s trademark Gon torture sequences.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: They have now done this—
Keith: It’s almost exactly the Hanzo fight.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: It is.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I wrote that down a couple times, that he’s using the Hanzo strategy.
Keith: It’s also the other thing, it’s the, um…maybe even more precisely, it’s the ball game with Netero.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Keith: Trying to force him to use the power.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: Yeah, and I can…we have talked about these sequences every time they have come up, and I can understand what the show is doing with them. I can understand how they move centrally alongside Gon’s, you know, strengths and weaknesses. The shine comes off them a little more with each one.
Keith: Mm.
Jack: In the sense that I'm going, “Oh, are we doing this again?” in part because I know how they're going to end. They end in very slightly different ways each time, but Gon usually— Gon’s obstinacy and, like, violent impulsiveness almost always triumphs, in greater or lesser scare quotes. And we move out of the thing, and two episodes from now, Gon will be feeling much better. And I feel like the actual conclusion to this one I found particularly galling, in terms of the consequences for Gon playing this sort of game [Keith: Yeah.] are literally handwaved away at the end.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: I will say that the fight itself is so well shot and performed by everybody involved that I had a good time watching a cool fight between characters that I hadn't really had a chance to see fight before. But now that this is the third or fourth game of this happening, I am wondering, you know, how much water is left in the well.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: I think, you know, one of the important things about Hunter × Hunter that I think makes it work so well when it does stuff like this, when it reuses the same thing, is that I don't think there's been a time where we haven't seen Gon reusing these same tricks to pull out a win where the stakes haven't been higher and the consequences haven't been worse. And then the thing about how, you know, they sort of handwave it away is that this is a show about Gon learning how to behave in a Hunter world.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And learning from people who should not be teaching him how to behave in a Hunter world and maybe learning bad lessons about how to win and how to get ahead.
Sylvia: Yeah. Like, literally all of the way— like, every time the way Gon learns or, like, the main, like, driving force in Gon’s sort of growth as a Hunter is being broken down in a lot of ways, right?
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, constantly put through the wringer physically, constantly getting the shit kicked out of him. Obviously we got the Hisoka thing, but like— or not Hisoka. I was going to say the Hanzo thing, but also we had the Hisoka fight. We had the stuff with, um…
Dre: I mean, even before Hisoka.
Jack: Canary.
Sylvia: The spinning tops.
Dre: Yeah, I was about to say, the Heavens Arena first fight, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It’s always like, yeah, he gets hurt, but because of the way he bounces back, he never really learns his lesson.
Keith: Right, but what does—
Dre: Well, and…
Keith: What does accumulate are the reinforcement of his bad behavior, basically.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yes.
Dre: Yeah, it’s that he never learns his lesson, but unfortunately the lesson is that he can only learn through this way, it seems.
Jack: Huh. Yeah. This fight is great.
Sylvia: It’s fantastic.
Jack: I just, I wanted to bring it up, because the thing that it is is another one of these, like, Gon under immense violent stress sequences.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: And I think it is worth flagging those when they come up.
Sylvia: Absolutely.
Jack: Because, yes, Gon is a character who acts with his head.
Keith: Sometimes literally.
Jack: Sometimes literally. And then, almost like these little act breaks, he goes through one of these little transformative torture sequences, which is, you know, it is what it is. I'm interested to see—
Sylvia: So real.
Jack: [laughs] To see where it goes.
Keith: We have one of our big “this was the plan all along” things when he’s getting the shit beat out of him by Genthru and goes like, “Actually, it was our plan to lull him into a false sense— or lull him into a correct sense of security. Like, show him how much weaker you are than him.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Like, the flashback to Bisky is like, “You're going to get hurt. You're going to get really hurt by this. It’s going to be bad.”
Sylvia: Yeah. Straight up says you might have to give up one of your hands, right? Or am I misremembering?
Keith: Does Bisky say that? I don't know.
Dre: I don't think—
Keith: Genthru definitely says that a few times.
Sylvia: It might be Genthru says that.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: There's a lot of monologue.
Keith: Hey, what’s the difference, am I right? [Jack laughs quietly]
Sylvia: Well.
Keith: Because the show, or the thing that these episodes don't ask but they do, I think, suggest, is: why isn't Bisky fighting Genthru?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: I am confident that Bisky would beat Genthru and probably could beat— I think Bisky could solo all three of these guys.
Sylvia: I agree.
Dre: Oh, yeah, probably.
Keith: You know, she beats—
Sylvia: Especially when she’s Bigsky? Like…
Keith: Yeah, we're talking— oh, yeah, I'm talking Bigsky here.
Dre: Oh, you mean when she turns into Ken Masters?
Sylvia: Oh my god.
Keith: [quietly] I don't know who that is.
Sylvia: She does kind of turn into Ken— that’s Ken from Street Fighter.
Keith: Oh, okay. I didn't— I've never knew his last name.
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s Masters. Now you know.
Jack: Listener who doesn't know what Bigsky is: we'll get there.
Keith: We'll get there. We'll get to Bigsky.
Sylvia: We'll get there.
Dre: We'll get there.
Sylvia: It’s kind of what the name suggests. [Jack laughs]
Keith: Yeah, it’s kind of what the name suggests. This is where, uh…there’s a part where, um…there’s a part where Genthru is like, “This kid’s insane, but he’s, like, [Sylvia: Yeah.] insane in a different way than me.” [Dre laughs]
Sylvia: “Not my kind of insane” is the line.
Keith: “Not my kind of insane.” Which is funny, because it—
Dre: He’s Batman crazy. I'm the Joker crazy. [Jack and Keith laugh]
Keith: They do kind of, like, do this very funny seeding for future bits of, like, Genthru, kind of the most cartoonish villain that we've seen, like, by far. I know that Hisoka is literally dressed like a cartoon villain, but he’s not— he’s cartoonishly evil in a different way.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Genthru is like a mustache-twirling evildoer.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And I, you know, Gon slowly, like, scaring Genthru.
Jack: Oh, it’s so good.
Keith: Is really good.
Jack: Yeah, I'm so glad you also picked up on that, because I also found the “You're insane, and I don't mean my kind of insane” line to be up there with Genthru’s…god, he had that ridiculous line about insanity much earlier that just didn't— it felt cartoonish. It felt mustache-twirling.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: It didn't really work for me.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: But over the course of this fight, poor Genthru just gets increasingly baffled and wrong-footed by what Gon is doing.
Sylvia: It rules.
Jack: Such that, by the end, he’s just like, “Why is any of this happening?” [laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: By the end, it’s a horror movie.
Keith: It is. Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, I have notes about how…
Keith: And Gon is the villain in the horror movie. [laughs]
Sylvia: Gon is the Xenomorph!
Keith: Yeah. [laughter]
Sylvia: Like, not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but that’s literally what I wrote.
Dre: No, he’s Jigsaw.
Jack: Gingsaw. [Sylvia sighs]
Keith: So, before we cut to Bisky and Killua and have Bisky and Killua time—
Jack: Oh, no, wait. Sorry. Just before that, Gon says, “I don't want to be on the losing side forever,” [Sylvia: Yeah.] after he hears Bisky’s voice saying, you know, “You're going to get really badly hurt.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: He says, “I'll make him use his power, and then I'll carry out the plan afterwards.”
Keith: Oh, great. This is exactly where I was going, so.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Oh, okay. Cool.
Keith: It’s so— this is where we start to go a little bit off script.
Jack: [chuckles] Yes.
Sylvia: Just a little.
Dre: Man. Remember, like, four episodes ago, when we had that really tender moment where Tsezguerra was like, “Gon, you have to stay in control, because when you don't, it hurts you and the people around you.” I guess—
Keith: And then he goes, “Damn, it hurts the people around me? Fuck.”
Dre: Yeah. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: Well, no one’s here right now, so it’s fine. [Keith and Jack laugh]
Dre: I guess that’s the difference, yeah. You're right. [laughs]
Jack: Yes. I don't understand why Gon— well, okay. I don't understand if there is a reason why Gon wants to make him use his power other than to sort of feel like he is partaking in a real fight. Is there anything—?
Dre: This is…
Sylvia: I think that’s it.
Dre: This is so shonen, I think. Yeah, this is so shonen.
Keith: Yeah. Well, it—
Dre: This is so, like, “I know I can't beat you straight up, but I'm gonna earn your respect and make you use your ultimate attack against me.”
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s also, like, an established trait of Gon’s, right?
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Like, the…again, the Netero fight.
Keith: Well, this is the Netero ball thing. Yeah, totally.
Sylvia: Yes.
Dre: Yeah. And with Razor and, like, it has to be, like, the right victory.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And I think that, like, one of the skills of Togashi in how Hunter × Hunter’s plotted out is how a lot of the stakes of the show come from what is set up in the early episodes as, like, these fun cute kind of moralistic quirks of Gon.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Like the playfulness and the competitiveness and the, like, sort of curiosity. Like, these all kind of show up as, like, shadow monsters later on.
Jack: [chuckles] Yes.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: And yeah, I think that, like, what is it exactly? I don't know. He’s crazy! That’s what is is, is he’s— it’s the same thing that made him want to do the Netero ball thing. When Killua’s like, “Ah, we're never going to win. I'm giving up,” and Gon was like, “No, I'm going to try longer.” He’s in the middle of a battle for his life in the Hunter Exam. It’s the most dangerous thing he’s ever done, and he spends all of his time and energy trying to get this ball from this old man just to prove a point. And they play it off like it’s cute, but it was really dangerous then too.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. And like, not to, like, squash Dre’s mentioning of it being a very shonen archetype thing, [Dre: Mm-hmm.] but I think that is, like…we have to both look at it as Gon the character and also, because of…like, because of the shonen stuff, that’s going to make things— that’s, like, what Togashi’s working with thematically.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, totally.
Sylvia: It’s why this is, like, the deconstruction, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah. And it’s also, like, that turned up to 11, which I feel like is a lot of Gon.
Sylvia: It’s that looking at, like, what— like, okay, realistically, if these fights were happening, and this was a 12-year-old kid doing it, how would this go?
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Like, yeah, Goku is the superpowered 10-year-old, but he’s also from a comedy series, right? Like, when you really get down to original Dragon Ball.
Keith: Well, I think that’s the very, very early on, maybe even as far back as the screenshot stream, I describe Gon as like what if someone took, like, Goku’s personality seriously.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Like, what are the real consequences of, like, a boy who won't give up?
Sylvia: Exactly.
Jack: Yeah. It’s also—
Keith: What are the real consequences of a boy who’s, like, constantly willing to throw himself at a problem violently until a solution happens?
Jack: Yeah. I also want to, you know, as usual, this keeps happening again and again. “I want to fight you properly, so show me your power” is a Hisoka maneuver as well.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, more of Gon—
Sylvia: Because Hisoka also— oh, go ahead.
Keith: Like, getting his bad ideas, like, reinforced [Sylvia: Yeah.] by technical victories, the thing that he doesn't want. He keeps winning, but his version of winning properly ends up, a lot of the time, being winning technically.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: And he goes, like, “No, this is the real way to win. I was taught by Hisoka and by Netero and by, uh…”
Sylvia: Bisky.
Keith: Bisky.
Sylvia: And Hanzo, in a way.
Keith: Yeah, and Hanzo.
Sylvia: His greatest teacher, Hanzo, if you really think about it.
Keith: Yeah. [laughs]
Jack: Yeah. [laughs] The two lines in my notes read: “Is Gon going off piste?” question mark. Quote, “I don't want to be on the losing side forever. I'll make him use his power and then carry out the plan afterwards,” end quote. New line. “Gon getting the shit kicked out of him.”
Sylvia: I will say, I forgot to bring it up originally. The animation here is impeccable.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: It’s wonderful. This whole fight is just gorgeous.
Sylvia: I have…there’s a lot of really good Gon faces here. Like, you can tell that they're like, “Okay, not only do we need to make the movements of the bodies very fluid here, we need to make sure Gon is as expressive as Gon Freecss is supposed to be.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: And so, like, when he’s taking hits or when he’s, like, glaring at Genthru and stuff, it all works really well.
Jack: It’s a very weighty fight.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: People move really, uh, with real weight to them.
Sylvia: And also, it doesn't— it’s, like, really well done at making the two— it’s back to the fight with Hisoka. I think you mentioned this, Keith, earlier in the episode, the fight with Hisoka. And if it wasn't you or if you didn't, don't worry.
Keith: Yeah, yeah. I was talking about that.
Sylvia: Yeah. Where he, like, kind of fights like a little kitty cat almost.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: And like, it’s a very animalistic fighting style. And they have, again, this sort of, like, instead of it being the controlled presence of Hisoka just standing there, it’s more of, like, “Okay, now you have to see how Gon, all instinct, all this, like…”
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Like, more finely tuned, but still like a scrabbly little guy, has to fight against an actual, like, murderer-ass murderer [Keith: Right.] who’s not going to wait to kill him.
Keith: Because Netero was not going to kill him.
Sylvia: Netero’s not going to kill him.
Keith: Hanzo could not kill him.
Sylvia: Hisoka’s gotta groom him more.
Keith: Yeah, Hisoka would not kill him. The point, for all three of them, literally the point was to not kill him.
Sylvia: Yeah. And this is a life-or-death fight that— like, Razor also had this too, but it’s less— it feels more visceral here, because it’s a one-on-one fight. It’s not dodgeball. [chuckles]
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And dodgeball wasn't, yeah, technically to death. It was just to win or lose.
Sylvia: And Gon wasn't the one at risk there. Gon wasn't the one— sorry, and Gon wasn't the one at risk there, right? That ended up being…
Keith: Well, he could have got hit by…
Sylvia: He got hurt a lot, but like, I think the— I always think about that arc as, like, that ends up being more about Killua and Gon’s relationship being tested, [Keith: Yeah.] more than Killua and Gon being tested in terms of their, like, fighting prowess or resolve or being, like, beaten down in the way that this is happening, you know?
Dre: Mm.
Keith: When Razor hits him that first time, he could have died. But.
Sylvia: That is true. That is absolutely true. But it’s not played like that, right?
Keith: No, it’s not.
Sylvia: Like, it is…there’s a different…
Keith: This is the sort of thing that I said in the intro, that like, they're doing violence in a different way than they usually do.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And it sort of reminds me of—I can't remember when we were talking about it; I think it was in the JoJo’s bonus episodes, for anybody that wants to go to friendsatthetable.cash and listen to those—about how shonen so often is full of violence and, like, violence is the way that the plot moves forwards, fights in different ways.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: But different shows treat it differently. A lot of times violence is supposed to be, like, cool or funny in shonen.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And the balance depends on the series. Like, Dragon Ball, the violence is supposed to be funny, like, kind of a lot.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: In Dragon Ball Z, it’s supposed to be cool a lot.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Keith: And when we were watching JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, what was interesting to me was how often the violence is supposed to be, like, disgusting and gory and awful to look at.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And that is what these episodes felt like to me, where instead of [Dre: Mm.] the cool violence from Heavens Arena or from the dodgeball, this violence is sickening. This is disgusting, [Sylvia: Yeah.] and you really feel the hits and the hurt.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Violence is sickening.
Keith: Violence is sickening. Hey, kids.
Sylvia: Oh, no, I meant it in the gay way. [Keith laughs] I was like, “This is sickening!” 'cause I enjoyed it.
Jack: This is sickening to me. I did enjoy it. The problem is that violence can be sickening and also sometimes cool. That is a problem that humans have been trying to wrap their heads around.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Nobody look at my Letterboxd. [Jack laughs]
Jack: The other fights are going pretty well. [Dre laughs] We can knock out Bisky—
Sylvia: Yeah, we should explain Bigsky now.
Keith: Yeah, we can knock out.
Sylvia: It’s not that social network that nobody really uses.
Jack: No, no.
Keith: We can knock out Bigsky by saying Bigsky knocks out Bara.
Jack: Yeah, Bara gets exactly one hit in on Bisky, who transforms into a gigantic, extremely ripped version of herself.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Saying, “I usually let people get a hit in, because I can't control myself when I turn.” And then she punches him so hard that she believes she has killed him and is, in fact, surprised when she learns that she hasn't.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Right, he’s just passed out.
Jack: Bisky’s huge.
Keith: Yeah, that’s it. It’s, like, a 35 second long encounter.
Sylvia: It’s really short.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Like, it mostly just serves to get the visual gag of Bisky being really buff, and then the explanation of “I don't do this, because it makes me feel not cute,” and I was like, “Wow, she’s just like me when I miss my hormone shot.”
Jack: Two brackets. Too buff.
Sylvia: This is how I feel. Yeah, she’s too buff.
Jack: Do you also do it because you don't want to show your hand in a fight? [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah, no.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: [sarcastic] Yeah, definitely. Definitely. That is the— don't let ‘em know that’s the reason why the girls are transitioning. [Jack laughs] It’s to make people underestimate our extremely high Nen levels.
Keith: I also believe— I should just say this, because I've definitely— this is, like, a Hunter × Hunter opinion that I've seen before. I believe she could have beat him without transforming.
Sylvia: Yep.
Keith: This is a “time is of the essence” kind of thing. You know, at the very beginning of the fight, she hits him a bunch of times, including one really nice one to the back of the head, a big kick. This is the— was it, Dre, did you talk—? or Sylvi. One of you said Instantaneous…
Sylvia: Oh, this was me who brought up the Instant Transmission stuff.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Yeah, she warps behind him and just, like, kicks him super hard in the head.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Nothing personal.
Keith: Yeah. [laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah. And then she talks about gender dysphoria. It’s great.
Keith: Yeah. [Dre chuckles] She kind of…she says the thing about letting him hit her and then transforms and gets him, you know, literally down in one. It’s important that I say this, because, again, I really, really believe that she could have beat Genthru and chose not to!
Jack: Yes.
Keith: Chose to have Gon fight Genthru instead.
Jack: Interesting.
Sylvia: Yep.
Jack: It’s interesting. Because she believes—
Keith: As a responsible teacher, you'd at least try, even if you couldn't, right?
Jack: Right.
Keith: You'd not give it to your obviously weaker student?
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: But this is a show that has specific beliefs about teachers, I think.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I think this is a show that believes that, in much the same way that, you know, it believes that, you know, Gon is expressing one thing one way or another.
Keith: Right.
Jack: I think it believes that teachers as a unit are kind of selfish, are kind of exploitative. I think Bisky is like, “Well, this is a good learning opportunity for Gon.”
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: If I could bring up a very analogous show, like, whenever does Kakashi in Naruto put Naruto up against the strongest ninja that they have to fight?
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, no. That is, like, a thing that they frequently don't do. Like, there’s a lot of…
Keith: They specifically do not do, yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: They're always teaming up, you know, where Kakashi takes the big one and everyone else goes and fights— and those fights are great.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: You don't need to make the kid fight the strongest guy in order to make the fight good.
Dre: Pshh. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: Again, actually, it’s another shonen trope, if you think about it..
Dre: Tell that to Goku, yeah.
Keith: Right. [laughs]
Sylvia: Well, like, that is the thing. That is a good point, but like—
Keith: Goku’s never around a stronger person.
Sylvia: There's a very long history of, like, doing the mentor fight, because one, it’s cool, and two, because it’s to show, like, this villain is on such a level that, like, even the person teaching you can't, like, handle them or whatever, right?
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Like, that’s typically how it’s used. Like, I think—
Keith: Gohan doesn't fight Cell until last, when everyone else is dead.
Sylvia: Exactly. Yeah. It’s the— I feel like they've pulled this move, like, 15 times in Jujutsu Kaisen, but I'm not, like, caught up on that, 'cause I…I woke up. [Keith and Jack laugh]
Dre: Mm. I do want to try that McDonalds sauce, though.
Keith: I have to say, again, legal disclaimer: Jujutsu Kaisen is fine.
Sylvia: You like the anime. I've read the manga.
Keith: Right, I haven't…
Sylvia: I know where it goes.
Dre: Yeah, me neither.
Sylvia: Have fun. [Keith laughs]
Jack: It’s time for Killua’s fight. Killua— every single time Killua is hanging out with the crew, I'm like, “What a nice boy.”
Keith: I love this.
Dre: Uh huh.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: “Killua seems great.” Every time Killua is in a one-on-one fight without people around, I'm like, “Frightening terror. He’s just awful.”
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: It rules.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: He gets the best shit.
Jack: He gets into—
Keith: A reminder that he does this fight with two unusable hands.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. His hands are bandaged up. Like, we have that happening throughout all these episodes, that his hands are covered in bandages.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Which makes something that he does soon even cooler.
Jack: Yeah. Like, a lowkey recurring motif that I really like is Killua hasn't really prepared for the fights on screen but nevertheless does really well, because he spent his entire life training in the assassin mines. He can just rock up and give it a go, and he’ll be fine. He sees this as a perfect experiment, fighting his opponent.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: He begins with a classic Killua shadow step. We haven't seen that for a while. That was nice.
Keith: I know. I was very excited.
Sylvia: I know! I was so happy.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: He has his first named move, right?
Jack: Yeah, he has— it’s called Lightning Palm. It’s not very excitingly named, Killua. But he—
Sylvia: It is also— speaking of Naruto, like, there is so much Naruto in Killua’s fight here.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I'm like, Kishimoto probably read this in the manga and was like, “Man.”
Keith: “Man, I should make a character whose whole thing is this.”
Sylvia: “What if I gave both of my main characters different parts of this?” [Jack laughs]
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: And then he reveals a yo-yo.
Keith: He reveals a yo-yo, an armband yo-yo.
Sylvia: Yeah!
Dre: Yeah!
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: How much does the yo-yo weigh, Jack?
Jack: Um, it’s a custom alloy. [chuckles]
Dre: Yeah, his brother made it.
Keith: It weighs 50 kilograms.
Jack: Is that so? [laughs]
Sylvia: Yes.
Keith: Yeah, it weighs 50 kilograms.
Jack: I can't believe I missed that. That’s really funny. Yeah, this is like a Zoldyck device. His brother made it.
Dre: For us Americans, that’s 110 pounds.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Whoa.
Jack: Whoa!
Keith: This thing weighs as much as, like, a fifth grader. [Sylvia and Jack laugh]
Dre: Is my yo-yo heavier than a fifth grader?
Sylvia: Yo, someone recut this so Killua’s flinging around fifth graders. [Keith laughs] He looped that fifth grader around a tree! [Dre laughs]
Jack: He hasn't had any demonstration of this before, has he? Have we seen him practicing with this before?
Dre: No.
Jack: This yo-yo just comes out of fucking nowhere.
Sylvia: No. This is the debut.
Keith: Yeah, it just comes out of nowhere.
Jack: Midway through a fight.
Keith: Okay, so, the—
Sylvia: I mean…
Keith: There have been yo-yos in, like, interstitial material and cover art and stuff.
Dre: Oh, yeah! You're right.
Keith: Like, he is sometimes…
Jack: There have been yo-yos in Annie Johnston-Glick’s amazing Media Club Plus cover art.
Keith: That’s true.
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Keith: That was a— I wanted— I think that— I could be misremembering. I think that—
Dre: It was either you or I, Keith, that requested that, yeah.
Keith: There either wasn't one and we asked for it…
Sylvia: That was a request.
Keith: Or it was always there, and then we had to decide whether to include it, just so that you would not look at it and be like, “Why is there a yo-yo?”
Jack: Yeah, I don't remember, but it’s great.
Sylvia: I know there was yo-yo chat, though.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: [chuckles] There was yo-yo chat. The yo-yo also has Nen, is enriched with Nen.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: It hits a tree with such force that it bites a chunk out of the trunk and the tree falls down.
Sylvia: Rules.
Keith: Yeah, it basically cuts the tree in half.
Jack: And then, of course, midway through a fight, there's just a good “you can't really outsmart Killua Zoldyck” thing. The combatant notices that Killua has a blind spot so exploits it, at which point, Killua reveals that he has a second yo-yo and exploits the guy’s blind spot. He says, “Did I forget to mention I have two yo-yos?” This is just—
Sylvia: It’s great.
Keith: So he fakes a blind spot, in order to get the guy to attack him in his blind spot, so that he can hit him in the back of the head with the second yo-yo. Fight over.
Jack: Yeah, it’s great.
Keith: Oh, almost fight over. He has a finishing move.
Jack: Oh, he… [laughs]
Dre: Yeah, he tazes him.
Jack: He hits him with both yo-yos.
Sylvia: He bonks him on the head.
Jack: And then just electrocutes him in a wide shot that’s really funny.
Keith: It seems like something he might have learned at Heavens Arena.
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: After he got shot by a million volts, and he says, “It’s not like I like it.” Two good lines. Sub says, “You set three traps during that brief exchange,” and Killua says, “Three traps? You must be joking. Every move I made was a trap.” [Jack laughs]
Keith: It’s so funny. Just accept the compliment, you dweeb. [Dre laughs]
Jack: It’s some real, like, he’s a 12-year-old edgelord thing.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: You know, one thing about Killua is that he really does want to get the last word in, and it is made even funnier by the fact that he’ll fight so beautifully and then still just, like, tumble over himself to have, like, a little witty rejoinder or something.
Keith: It’s also, like, can you, like, meaningfully describe, like, more traps? Like, were there that many traps? Like, maybe there is. You could count— you could get, like, a four or five out of it.
Jack: No, it’s probably about three.
Keith: It’s probably about three.
Dre: I wonder if there’s, like, backup traps in, like, the little huts and houses that were around there.
Keith: It’s like when Greed Island starts and, you know, Puhat, like, gives a really accurate monologue about what’s happening, and then Killua intentionally insults that guy to his face [Sylvia: Yeah.] and then goes, [quietly] “He was right, though.” [Dre laughs]
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: It’s really good. I love him. What a little shitter.
Jack: He’s such a well written character. I mean, I think Gon is a really well drawn character, but part of what makes Gon interesting are the broad brushes he’s drawn with, you know?
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Gon is a very stubborn, very obstinate character who will act sometimes unpredictably, sometimes gloriously predictably, in a variety of situations. I think that the writing on Killua is so sharp throughout, in terms of, like, giving him these little moments of overplaying his hand. You know, he was right, but I'll insult him to his face. You know, working through all this old shit with the Zoldycks. He’s such a well written character. You know, we talked about it in maybe not the last episode but maybe the episode before, where I was like, “Is Killua becoming the protagonist?” and the three of you were like, “Come on. [laughs] We've been saying this.” [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah, Genthru. We are now deep in a torture Gon sequence.
Sylvia: Ohh. It’s rough, too.
Jack: Genthru says, “I must crush his spirit, otherwise he’ll never admit defeat. Let me show you that all your hard work and confidence mean nothing.” He’s talking to the wrong idiot.
Dre: Uh huh.
Sylvia: He really is.
Keith: Yeah, he’s totally right, but on the other hand, it’s never been done. I don't know if it could be done.
Sylvia: It can't be.
Keith: I think that Gon might literally die, just like he promised to at the beginning of the fight. Oh, that’s part of it, is Gon was like, “You're going to have to fucking kill me if you don't agree to trade cards to the winner.”
Jack: If you lose. Yeah. [laughs]
Sylvia: He also says—
Keith: Because Gon would never agree to take the cards if Genthru didn't agree.
Sylvia: Crucially also says this is the only time I'm going to pull my book out. I feel like I remember him saying that.
Keith: Oh. Oh, that’s—
Dre: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah!
Keith: That’s true. That is true.
Sylvia: Yeah, which I think is fun to mention.
Keith: It’s funny because of what happens, you know, and it could be a—
Jack: Wait, what have you done? Oh, have you made it in a secret chat?
Keith: No, no.
Sylvia: No.
Dre: No, no, no.
Keith: It’s because taking out his book is actually part of his plan.
Sylvia: Part of the— yeah.
Keith: So it’s funny that he…
Sylvia: He’s laying the trap too.
Keith: He’s like, it’s part of my trap.
Sylvia: He’s making him think…
Jack: Oh, yeah. Yeah, that is neat. But yes, this plan, that is to say, “I will crush his spirit, otherwise he’ll never let me defeat. Let me show him that all his hard work and confidence means nothing.” Wrong guy. Not going to work.
Sylvia: Yeah, not going to work.
Jack: Good try, but you're wasting your breath, at this point. As soon as we saw how it went down with Hanzo, we know how this is going to go, until it goes really incredibly off piste.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Which I wonder if Togashi is— I mean, you know, that is how you trouble this, right? You show it working until it doesn't. And I am curious to see when and how that is going to happen, but until that day, this is not a line of argument that works on Gon Freecss.
Sylvia: Before we get into 74, which is where we left off. We just talked about Killua stuff.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Did we mention…I feel like this song has played before. I think it even played when Killua first went, “Oh, electricity. What if I used that?” back in Heavens Arena. But Killua has a real, like, Sonic the Hedgehog-ass song that plays during this fight. [Jack chuckles]
Keith: I can tell you exactly what that song is.
Sylvia: Please do.
Keith: I don't have it, but it has played one other time on the show, and I don't remember when it was.
Jack: It’s called “The Blue Blur”.
Keith: It’s called “Tell Me”, and it’s his character song, the one that has, like, lyrics and stuff.
Sylvia: Oh shit, that rules!
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Wow!
Keith: You know the song I'm talking about?
Jack: I don't.
Dre: Mm-mm.
Sylvia: I think I might.
Keith: I can link it. Here we go.
Jack: But I can't read the comments to these YouTube videos, [Keith: No.] 'cause they're always things like, “So sad when Killua died to the Grundler.”
Sylvia: Not the Grundler. [Keith chuckles]
Dre: Mm.
Keith: I actually love when the Grundler shows up.
Sylvia: Grundler Ant is really cool.
Keith: And kills three of the four main characters.
Sylvia: Yeah. [Jack chuckles] It’s so fucked up what he does to Leorio.
Jack: Oh my god.
Sylvia: I didn't know the human body could do that.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: No. Wow, after that point—
Keith: And Leorio’s the only one he doesn't kill, by the way. [laughs]
Dre: Mm.
Jack: Yeah, he survives, but they call him “Inside Out Leorio.”
Sylvia: Sorry, hold on. It’s Killua’s voice actor who sings this?
Keith: Yep.
Jack: Whoa!
Sylvia: I love that.
Keith: They all have this. All four of them have this.
Jack: And their performers sing their songs?
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: Yep. Yep.
Jack: If I was one of these voice actors, that would be what I would demand. [chuckles]
Sylvia: Wow.
Jack: I'd say, “Let me sing. I want to have a good time.”
Sylvia: This is wonderful.
Keith: We have another new song coming up, by the way. Yeah, that song’s only played one other time. I wish I could remember when it was, but it’s fine.
Jack: As we head into 74, it was interesting to me, Keith, that you mentioned that, you know, Genthru’s ability as a fighter had been sort of underplayed [Keith: Yeah.] by his use of the bombs.
Keith: Right.
Jack: Such that even, you know, at this point in the fight, I wasn't finding Genthru particularly menacing. You know, he has a large body count, and that was notable. The scene where he blew up the cave full of all the people.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah, he’s, on screen, killed scores of people.
Dre: A lot of people.
Keith: You know, like, 70, 80 people.
Jack: But I never found him particularly frightening, in comparison to some of the other, you know, villains that Gon has squared off against. I think part of that is the cartoonishness, the way he is cartoonish. And part of that is the way that, you know, we mostly see him using his bombs. I don't think his character design is particularly menacing.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: He sort of looks like a scientist.
Keith: He weirdly feels more like a bully than, like, a…
Jack: Yeah, he really does.
Dre: Yeah. 100%, yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I think having Sub and Bara as his sort of, um…
Keith: Toadies.
Dre: Little goon squad.
Jack: His little toadies, yeah. Makes, you know, brings that out further.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This fight gets somewhere pretty menacing. Genthru is briefly menacing, and then Gon is very, very menacing.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: But yeah, Gon’s— Bisky has been training Gon specifically to fight the Bomber. There are ways that she’s been saying this explicitly, and, you know, we hear her talking. There's also ways that she’s been doing it subtly. In the last episode, she was teaching Gon how to knock someone back a good distance, which was presumably a way to counter the Little Flower attack, and it never really—
Keith: Yeah, it was the exact, like, animation thing happening.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: The flurry of hands and then the grab of the wrist, and then he’s supposed to use Gyo. And because I didn't remember the specifics of the fight, I saw it, and I was like, “Oh, I wonder, like, why he’s using Gyo?” and it’s to block Little Flower.
Jack: Yeah, because a couple of times, Genthru will try and explode Gon’s wrists, and his wrists start to get kind of wounded, because he’s able to block them but only a bit, and there's sort of some fight mechanics going on here about not just the amount of Gyo that he’s using to block but also determining whether or not Genthru is launching a bluff.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Right.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: You know, Gon can essentially sense whether this is an actual charged explosive attack or is just a bluff.
Keith: There's a great parallel with Killua’s fight. They do almost the same trick.
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Keith: But Gon’s is way more self destructive.
Jack: Yeah. Throughout this fight, we see Genthru’s hands kind of wreathed in red Ren. Have we seen red Ren before?
Keith: No.
Sylvia: No.
Dre: No.
Jack: Interesting.
Sylvia: I like it.
Keith: I do too.
Sylvia: I like using the color scheme to be like, another, like, oh, this is a malicious, like…this is malicious Nen.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: This is an evil color scheme, very clearly.
Keith: Does Bisky have purple Nen or pink Nen?
Dre: Oh.
Sylvia: I think it’s pink.
Dre: Pink.
Keith: Yeah, I also think it’s sort of pink.
Jack: Pink and white. Yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: But it’s very much like, well, we can't do purple again, because Hisoka and Illumi.
Keith: Because purple’s an evil…yeah.
Dre: What is, um…
Sylvia: We don't want to draw that direct line, I guess.
Dre: Do we know, is Genthru a Conjurer?
Sylvia: Oh, I got no idea.
Jack: Good question.
Sylvia: That’s a good question.
Dre: Okay. Yes he is.
Keith: Genthru might be a Transmuter.
Dre: No. According to the wiki, anyway, he is a Conjurer. And on our Nen chart, Conjurer is red.
Sylvia: Whoa.
Keith: Oh.
Jack: Ooh.
Keith: Look at that.
Sylvia: Whoa!
Dre: And then Transmuter is purple.
Sylvia: Whoa!
Keith: Oh.
Jack: I like this a lot, as well, because when Nen was first introduced, we saw white Ren [Sylvia: Yeah.] or clear Ren like steam, and then we saw the purple malevolent Nen, and then we saw Gon in the gold Nen last time.
Sylvia: Which is Emitter Nen, if we're doing this.
Dre: Yes, it is.
Sylvia: So I don't know if this is 100% accurate.
Dre: It is. It is Emitter Nen.
Jack: And now we're seeing red, and there's something about the…it’s as though the viewer’s eye is getting tuned into the Nen.
Sylvia: Oh, that’s cool.
Keith: We have seen Gon with green Nen, though, right?
Sylvia: Have we?
Keith: I think we have. Maybe it’s just, like, in the opening.
Sylvia: I'll believe you.
Dre: Yeah, 'cause he’s an Enhancer.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: But yeah.
Sylvia: But, like, I didn't— that’s what—
Keith: That’s what I mean, but then the— sorry.
Sylvia: You're good.
Keith: Go ahead.
Sylvia: Well, he uses—
Dre: Oh, you're right.
Sylvia: His Nen in these episodes is very yellow and orange, which is why I'm…
Keith: He has a lot of— yeah. That, to me, feels like less of they're trying to tie it to his class and more just, like, it’s like Super Saiyan Nen, 'cause it’s so strong.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. Well, it’s burning like the sun, right? It’s like gold.
Keith: Yeah. I just realized this makes so much sense, because I was like, “Well, he uses Little Flower, so he transforms his Nen into [Sylvia: Yeah.] explosive Nen. He must be a Transmuter,” but Little Flower is his weak attack. His strong attack is the Conjurer one, where he conjures a bomb. See, it all makes sense!
Jack: [chuckles] Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah, Gon says, “I'm going to be selfish here.” He apologies to Bisky and Killua in his head and says, “I'm going to be selfish here.” [Sylvia sighs]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: There's something about the way that Gon is…it’s not just that Gon is always selfish in the worst possible moments. It’s the way he’s like, the way he phrases it here. He’s like, “I've chosen this moment to be selfish, and I'll try to be less selfish in other moments.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Gon, this is the crunch time. This— you know? [Dre laughs]
Keith: Right.
Jack: You got to stay with it now, Gon.
Keith: Right, he picks the highest risk areas.
Jack: [cross] Yes, and possibly littlest reward.
Keith: [cross] And with often the least reward, yeah. [Jack and Keith laugh] This, by the way, real quick, is right after Genthru has a quick second appeal to, like, “Hey, come on, don't make—” It kind of caught me off guard, Genthru being like, “Don't make me kill you. You're very strong. You should grow up and be a strong guy. Just give me your fucking cards, you idiot.”
Jack: At which point, Gon says, “All the more reason for me to be selfish.” [laughs quietly]
Keith: Right, exactly, yeah.
Jack: To which Genthru has his kind of, like, classic Hanzo “I'm going to break your legs” moment.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: When the role of the Gon torturer is sort of settled into by the character, and they just sort of—
Keith: Almost the same conversation about, like, [Jack: Mm-hmm.] breaking his arms one by one turns into blowing up his arms one by one.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: It’s creepy, and it sets up what happens next. I don't think that this is particularly subtle or clever writing, but sometimes you need to have a villain that kind of just moves with a hammer rather than a scalpel.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: He says, you know, because—
Keith: He likes to be scary.
Jack: Yeah, “Because of the way you are using Gyo to block me, you can only block one of my attacks, so I'm going to blow up both of your arms, and you can choose which one to save, [Keith: Mm-hmm.] and then I'm going to blow up both of your legs, and then you can choose which one to save.” Et cetera, et cetera. “Use Gyo to protect the one you want to keep.” Two things happen at once.
Keith: I think this is the last Bisky flashback where she’s like, “By the way, if he’s going to use both of his arms, that’s the biggest red flag. Definitely, definitely, definitely do the trap now.”
Jack: Yes. [laughs] Yes. There is no easy way out of this, Gon, other than following the plan we prepared.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Genthru blows up both Gon’s arms, seemingly with little effect, and then suddenly finds himself wounded. [Sylvia sighs] Gon, sort of stumbling, launches the Rock attack.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And Genthru trips backwards over a stone, and—
Keith: Genthru is, like, visibly stunned. Like, you see his vision. It cuts to, like, his perspective, and you can see Gon is kind of, like, fading a little bit.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: And they really draw out the question of, like, well, what happened to Genthru?
Jack: Yeah. And actually, what happened was very prosaic. Although, before we learn that, Gon’s Rock attack passes over Genthru’s head, in a really nice mirror of Gon passing out in the dodgeball match.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Uh huh, yeah.
Jack: Here is what has happened. Gon has chosen not to block either attack, or he has allowed both attacks to go through, [Keith: Right.] putting some force into his heels to keep him standing up and a little bit into his left hand, and his right hand has been completely blown off. I was really interested by this. I was like, “Wow, serious physical consequence on Gon. Gon is going to be a one-handed protagonist until he can either get a Nen arm or he can get, you know, a prosthetic.”
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Jack: I was like, “This is going to be a really interesting inflection point for this character, especially because this moment of violence came as a result of him choosing selfishness, and he has to continue to fight.” You know, I wasn't like, “Is this going to be when Gon learns his lesson?” so much as I was like, “This is a real test for Gon’s lesson.” And to his credit, he keeps fighting. In fact, he fought first by, after having his left arm blown off, kicking Genthru clean in the chin.
Keith: Yeah. They show this as happening essentially simultaneously with the bomb.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: Like, right as the bomb goes off, he does this big kick. And I really like how they choose this moment of Genthru— I think at this point he’s lying on the ground, like, trying to figure out what happened to him. Is this where—?
Sylvia: It’s so well done.
Keith: Is this where they show the little graphic of, like, how Genthru’s Nen moves through his body during the explosions?
Dre: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: I think so.
Keith: Such a funny time to cut to a graphic. [laughs]
Jack: Well, the show loves powerpoints as much as its characters.
Sylvia: That’s Hunter × Hunter.
Dre: Yeah, the show loves powerpoints.
Jack: If you're not watching along, when we call these things powerpoints, we're not doing that just because they're expository but because they frequently cut to, like, little slideshows of what’s going on.
Dre: Uh huh.
Sylvia: Lot of motion graphics.
Keith: And occasionally the character will show up in the image to point at the image and go, “This is what’s happening.” [Jack and Keith laugh]
Jack: It’s really charming.
Keith: I love it. I love it.
Jack: Is this a hallmark of other shows, or is this something specific— that Hunter × Hunter does with a particular verve?
Keith: Uh…
Sylvia: Mm…
Keith: Hunter × Hunter really runs away with it. I would not be surprised if this showed up in, like, Naruto or something, but yeah. I think it’s a particular strength-slash-compulsion of this show.
Dre: Yeah. I mean, I think in— there's a lot of shonen wherein people do long-winded explanations of, like, how their special powers work, but specifically I can't think of anything else that does this much, like, “graphic design is my passion” in order to explain to you how my powers work.
Jack: [chuckles] Yes.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: It’s really, really funny.
Dre: It’s great.
Jack: I love it.
Keith: It’s just, especially, it’s such a— you know, this isn't negative, but it’s such an inappropriate time to start, like, imagining Nen networks.
Jack: Yes. Yes.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: I think part of why I also find Hunter × Hunter’s, like, compulsion towards powerpoints charming is that some characters are better at it than others. You know, there would be a way of doing this where the show’s narrative voice takes on the powerpoint or the narrator takes on the powerpoint, and they're all fairly consistent.
Keith: And it makes a lot of sense. Like, can you imagine Gon delivering one of these ever? He never does.
Jack: No, no. He never does. But they're all different. Shalnark’s feel different to Kurapika’s feel different to Bisky’s feel different to, like, a focus on the villain explaining how something works.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: It’s a really nice little touch.
Keith: They're always very grounded in what a character knows and would want to tell you.
Jack: Yes, deep in their soul, would want to tell you right now.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: With pictures. [chuckles]
Jack: Gon, in his head, says, “This hurts so much. I feel like I'm going to die. But I'm going to go for it.” That’s right.
Keith: Yep.
Jack: Having landed a hit at the cost of his hands, [Keith: A hit.] Gon Freecss is back on the plan.
Keith: Worth noting: this is his first hit.
Jack: Yep.
Keith: He has not hit. It cost him one and a half arms to land a single blow on the Bomber.
Jack: Yep. But he’s got it now.
Keith: Hey, but he caught the Bomber.
Jack: [chuckles] He caught the Bomber, and now he can go back on his plan.
Keith: This is—
Jack: Genthru—
Keith: Sorry. I'm sorry to do this. I really want to talk about this more. Like, the way another show would do this would be to make sure that there was a life or death reason why Gon would have to go this far.
Jack: Oh, right, yes.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: To save someone or…
Keith: To suggest, “Oh, wow, maybe he should give up. Maybe a normal person would have given up by now.” But like, I can't think of another show that wouldn't have had Gon with countdown on him, like, trying desperately to not be blown up, [Dre: Yeah.] and that’s the real reason why he would go this far, is because if he doesn't go this far, he’s just going to get killed with countdown. But that’s not it. He really has no reason to be doing this. It only makes accomplishing the plan harder.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: And is also completely parallel to the plan. It has no— he’s not setting up— the plan’s already set up. There's nothing…he gains literally nothing from this.
Jack: Now, we talk a lot about how much we dislike Ging, but this is Ging’s fault. [laughs quietly] This is…
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Quite literally, this is Ging’s fault, yeah.
Jack: This is…the last fight that Gon came out of and won was with a man who said, “I was a murderer, and your dad hired me to run this game as a test for you, [Dre: Mm-hmm.] and I think he’d be really proud of you for how you beat me.”
Keith: “You monster.”
Jack: “You monster.” [Keith laughs] So of course he’s like, “Well, I gotta get the hit in.”
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: Not just because he’s Gon Freecss, but also, here he is on Greed Island, you know?
Keith: Well—
Jack: What better opportunity than this?
Keith: Two things. The other thing is: he has now sort of, like, cosmically balanced the scales between him and Killua. I don't really think this is true, like, in a, you know, you look at— but I can see how, like, “Of course I can sacrifice my hands. I just made Killua sacrifice his hands. If I can't do this, then I had no business making Killua do it last week.”
Jack: Yeah. But those are not the same thing.
Keith: No. They're not the same thing. But I feel like that’s definitely part of the brew here.
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Keith: And the other part of it is…sorry, this isn't a component. This is just something that’s sad. Whenever— [chuckles] The characters that compliment Gon and encourage him have, like, such varying levels of understanding of, like, where he is. Like, when Razor tells him, “Hey, your dad would be proud,” he doesn't— he didn't see Hanzo.
Jack: No.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: He didn't see what happened on the airship. He hasn't seen Gon getting the shit beat out of him by Canary. He doesn't know that he’s about to go fight the Bomber. Does Razor even— I mean, I'm sure Razor probably knows about the Bomber. But like, this is all stuff—
Dre: He doesn't care.
Keith: Like, the fact that this stuff is, like, in ways, hidden from view or is— you know, Hisoka knows. Hisoka’s really, weirdly, the only one who knows—and Killua—how, like, bad this can go. And then Bisky’s probably number three. But anyway, just very sad how, like, characters who have no clue how far Gon is willing to take this give him a compliment in a way that will send him further down this horrible rabbit hole.
Sylvia: The tragedy of Gon Freecss.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: What a weird character.
Sylvia: It just keeps happening to him.
Keith: Like, this is what Wing saw in Gon’s future, when he’s like, “This kid is scary.”
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: I think that’s the, like, sad thing about Wing too.
Keith: It is. It totally is. It totally is.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: But then you have to go, like, “Do I believe him that it was safer to teach him the rules than to let him die or to let him maybe die?” And it’s like, you can believe him about that or think that he was being…he was forgiving himself in order to allow himself to do this, and I think that I believe Wing that it was probably safest to teach him.
Jack: Where do you take a character like this? I mean, you know.
Sylvia: Well.
Jack: What is the end of the road for a character like this? Either they learn their lesson. [laughs quietly]
Keith: Okay.
Jack: And sort of turn— synthesize, you know, synthesize the varied approaches into something less obstinate. They realize that they value something more than this sort of, like, death drive. [laughs]
Keith: Uh huh.
Jack: Or they succumb to it, and it gets them.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: How do you get to the end of this show and say, “Gon has learned nothing from this, but he’s sort of continuing as he was”? I don't know.
Keith: What’s the, uh…how do you think Killua fits into that?
Jack: [thoughtful pause] I mean, if you refocus the story on Killua, then it becomes a story about loss, right? Where it’s like, Killua recognizing the path that someone is going down and recognizing his culpability in putting him down that path and trying to pull him out of this tailspin that he’s gleefully, you know…Gon is like, “I can make the plane go down in a spiral!” and Killua’s like, “Wait, hang on.” [all laugh] But that would require you to make Killua the protagonist, and it would require you to commit to making Gon’s story a tragedy, which I don't know that this show is doing. I think part of why it’s fun is that we also like Gon a lot. He’s, like, a funny weird naive protagonist. Which, on the one hand, makes turning that story into a tragedy all the sweeter, but at the same time— yeah, I don't know. I feel like, in this moment, I am kind of going through what I did midway through the Hunter Exam, where I said, “How do you trouble a character like Killua?” right?
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: How do you challenge Killua? And then the Zoldyck family was introduced, and it’s like, “Oh, right, I see. This is where we go.” But— and I think that this links to what I was talking about earlier with my increasing dissatisfaction with this, like, torture Gon sequences, is it’s like, where are we going? What is this for? And I don't mean this in the sense of, “Mm, I only want to see a torture Gon sequence if it’s relevant to the story,” or something so much as it is clear that there is a bee in Togashi’s bonnet about this, and I want to know whether or not it’s just going to hang out in there, or if it’s going to be joined by more bees, or if the bonnet is going to be taken off, or, you know.
Sylvia: Oh, he’s Ponzu.
Jack: Oh, it’s Ponzu! [Jack, Keith, and Dre laugh]
Sylvia: Thank you.
Jack: Yeah. I don't know.
Keith: It’s worth mentioning now that the title episode of this one was “Sane × And × Insane”.
Sylvia: Yep.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Keith: Which is— it’s very much trying to be like, “It’s actually Gon that’s the insane one. Genthru is the sane one here.”
Jack: [sarcastic] You know, the Bomber.
Keith: The Bomber.
Jack: It helps that Gon is, for the most part, intensely likable.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I think that this is really one of the ways that Togashi is working that muscle that you were describing, right? Of like, what would happen if people took Goku seriously.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: You know, I saw what, eight episodes of Goku kicking about, and I was like, “This guy’s great. I'd die for Goku.”
Sylvia: What a little cool guy.
Jack: And, you know, Gon is really likable. He is really funny. Pinning this kind of character on someone that the audience wasn't ready to go on a ride with would be trickier. Speaking of Gon being likable, even in his weirdest moments, we're about to get some real top-tier frightening Gon.
Keith: He says, by the way, he gets— after he misses that kick, he says, “At least I gave him a pretty good scare.” [Jack laughs] Not worth it!
Jack: Not worth it.
Sylvia: Did we talk about the way that they reveal, like, how it’s not a kick? Like, you don't know it’s a kick at first? Like, you just get…
Jack: Yeah, his vision blurs.
Keith: His vision blurs, and he stumbles back.
Sylvia: You get this really— yeah.
Keith: And he falls, and he’s like, “What happened? What happened?” Blood is falling from his face.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: It’s really cool.
Keith: I think they go, like, three full minutes before showing you what happened.
Sylvia: Yeah, no, we get—
Keith: It’s great.
Sylvia: I think it’s after the— isn't it? It’s after the reveal that Gon’s lost a hand. Am I right, or am I wrong?
Keith: It is after. Yeah, it’s after.
Dre: No, it is, yes.
Keith: Dre, what were you going to say?
Dre: I was just saying I forgot that, like, I remember this part about Gon, like, sacrificing one and a half hands, but I forgot, like, what they do to actually hit Genthru, and for a second I was like, “Oh, this is where Gon gets the Emitter technique down!” No, it’s not.
Sylvia: No, it’s not. [Dre laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Nope.
Keith: Again, another show. That’s another show.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, no, totally. 100%.
Sylvia: That’s why I love it. I love that it did that. I love that they were like, “No, he does not have it.”
Keith: He doesn't have it. So, after this, Gon is like, “Hey, by the way, I have a card that could kill you.”
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: “I've won.” Gon loses an arm, misses Genthru with the finishing blow, and then says, “This is it. I've won.” And then Genthru sort of comes up with this plan to, like, pretend to surrender so that he can, like, break Gon’s neck and crush his windpipe to keep him from, like, using cards.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: In the gamer book.
Keith: Which is kind of counterproductive, because he needs him to cast Book [Dre and Jack laugh] in order to get his cards.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah. He sure does.
Sylvia: But he’s got Angel’s Breath, right? So.
Keith: But he really did rattle him, I think.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah, no. I mean, that’s been the process of the fight, right?
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Is Genthru getting slowly more and more rattled.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: At this point, Genthru has no idea what is happening.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah.
Jack: He crushes Gon’s throat. He, like, chops him in the throat, and from now until almost the end of the episode, Gon is supposed to be unable to speak but instead rasps out all his lines.
Sylvia: It’s so good.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: It’s a great performance.
Sylvia: Yeah. Shout out to Gon’s voice actor; does a fucking phenomenal job these episodes.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: I'm assuming the dub also had the raspy voice effect
Keith: They're both good.
Dre: Yes. Yes.
Keith: Yeah, they did, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: So, it’s really funny, because Genthru’s big mistake here is that he doesn't really know the rules of the game, because he chops his neck to keep him from speaking, from opening his book.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: But Gon had already taken out the card. The card will become the item all on its own.
Jack: Yeah. That’s true.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: I think he was preventing Gon from casting a card, from casting a spell, but this is the thing [Keith: Yeah.] that we keep coming back to in Greed Island, right? Which is like, the most violent players haven't specced themselves to play Greed Island well.
Keith: Yeah. This is sort of like Ging’s version of, like, the expression of Netero’s sort of wish that, by making the process really hard, evil people won't be able to meet the mark or at least not enough of them [Dre: Mm.] that the good people, because it takes dedication, and dedication is a positive virtue…
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: [sighs] Let’s just check in with how the evil person’s doing. [Keith laughs] Killed 200 players in the game.
Dre: Uh huh.
Jack: Cut off one of Gon’s arms. Crushed his windpipe.
Keith: It’s so funny.
Sylvia: Netero’s the guy who watched Whiplash and was like, “You know, J. K. Simmons, he’s got some points.” [Jack laughs]
Dre: God.
Keith: But it is—
Jack: He was a good drummer.
Keith: It ends up being—
Sylvia: He got results! [Jack chuckles]
Keith: It ends up being like— again, the cost is so high, but there is, like, a shred of reality to, like, the evil people don't have what it takes because they lack, you know, the willingness to do things the right way. Ging is allowed to— it works here, because Ging is allowed to build the rules to this world.
Jack: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: And he has built in this sort of expression of, like, dedication to doing things the right way is how you succeed. We actually see an even more obvious expression of this later. But, yeah, the card—
Jack: [chuckles] “Dedication to doing things the right way is how you succeed.”
Dre: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Keith: Yeah, that’s what they're about! It’s very funny.
Jack: The Freecss boys? Yeah.
Keith: This is— yeah, it has somehow sort of, like, genetically or, like, osmosized itself into Gon who’s like, “I've gotta do things the right way. That’s how my daddy does it.” [Sylvia laughs] And this is the way, by the way. All of this stuff, all of the stuff that Gon’s been doing? That’s the right way.
Jack: No compromise.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: No compromise. [Keith and Jack laugh] But yeah, so, Gon says, “This particular card here, this is what will kill you.” And then, so, he chops his throat, but, surprise, the thing turns into a jar of gasoline, and…
Sylvia: It’s so cool!
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Keith: He throws the jar of gasoline on Genthru, eliminating Little Flower. And Genthru very confidently says, “Well, I can just use Countdown. It’s better anyway,” and Gon punches the ground, to reveal that they've been on a fucking pit this entire time. They both fall into this pit.
Jack: A small, normal-sized pit?
Sylvia: Uh…
Keith: I believe that it’s small and normal sized.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: And definitely not the giganticest pit you've ever seen?
Sylvia: Yeah, no, I think…
Dre: It’s pretty regular.
Keith: [chuckles] Yeah, they— look, I'm just throwing out numbers here, but it’s probably got, like, a 75 yard diameter and is maybe, like…
Dre: Oh, I think it’s bigger than that.
Keith: You think it’s bigger? Maybe 75 yard radius?
Dre: It’s at least, like, the size of, like, a football field, I think.
Keith: Okay.
Jack: Like, 60 feet deep.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: It is at least 60 feet deep. It may be deeper than it is wide.
Jack: Down into stone. [chuckles]
Keith: I believe— my guess is that it’s twice as deep as it is wide. That is my guess.
Dre: Yeah, I would agree with that.
Keith: It was so deep. And Gon’s like, “Hey, by the way, I also have this other card,” and he drops that big boulder. [laughter]
Jack: Drops the huge boulder on him.
Keith: Genthru is— at the time, he’s like, all excited, like, “He fell down here with me. He’s a fucking idiot.” But, no, he has this other boulder thing, and there's one little escape.
Sylvia: It’s so cool. This is the—
Keith: Gon’s already in the escape hatch.
Sylvia: Also acting like a fucking creature. Like, really creaturey.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Sylvia: How he’s moving and, like, how he looks, when he’s, like, squatted down in the little escape tunnel, holding the card.
Keith: And he’s like, [raspy] “Genthru, come in my little hole!” [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: I think he just goes, “Game!”
Jack: Ah, it’s great. Yeah.
Keith: And, yeah, so, Genthru has two choices: get smooshed by the boulder.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Or run into the hole with Gon, where Gon is waiting with a Rock, a “Show me Rock” attack.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: It’s so good.
Jack: Yeah, a rasped “Show me Rock” attack that hits Genthru so hard I was absolutely convinced he had killed him.
Sylvia: It’s so scary, and it’s also—
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I'm not going to lie, I did throw my hands up in the air, 'cause it was so cool.
Keith: It’s very cool.
Sylvia: Like, I was like, I gotta admit, it’s pretty sick.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: The look on Genthru’s face is, like…
Dre: Oh, he’s horrified.
Keith: He’s terrified. Yes.
Dre: Yeah, he’s horrified. Like…
Jack: His glasses break. Gon rasps out, “Osu.” It’s wonderful. Now, quick recap here, Gon. Just let Genthru chase you until you reach the clearing. Rock punch the floor. Drop through the floor. Drop the boulder on him. Rock punch here. That’s it.
Keith: All of this fight—
Jack: I could do that.
Keith: All of this fight, except the very first, like, minute and a half of it, took place at the location of the trap.
Dre: Yeah, but that’s not fun. [Keith laughs]
Jack: [sighs] Gon is spending out of his overdraft, and something is going to happen when the bank realizes. And now the game is over.
Keith: Or very close to it.
Jack: Sub, Bara, and Genthru have—
Keith: Oh, wait. I have to post one more picture from the end of the fight. That’s the real— that’s the cheer moment. That’s when you go like, “Okay, Gon’s crazy, but I am on his side, and this is sick.”
Sylvia: When he does the “osu”?
Jack: Gon’s like a little Necromorph at the end of a tunnel.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the little “osu”.
Jack: It’s amazing.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Everybody’s captured and tied up in that field where we sort of start, where we begin.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: They're all just so depressed. [Dre laughs]
Jack: They’re so depressed. They spend— Sub, Bara, and Genthru spend this entire closing sequence lying motionless on the ground, first because they're wounded, and then, once they're healed, just, yeah, 'cause they're sad. They're bummed out about this.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: They do not want to engage in all the fun that happens. Genthru is genuinely prepared to surrender and give up his cards in exchange for using Angel’s Breath to heal Bara, but they were already planning on healing everyone. They use Angel’s Breath, and a beautiful angel appears. A gigantic beautiful angel appears and heals Gon.
Keith: A gigantic, beautiful, very naked angel.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: As all angels should be.
Dre: It’s very Final Fantasy VII, like, summon-esque, honestly.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yep. This angel— [chuckles] First they say, “Can you heal Gon’s arm?” and then Killua pauses and says, “Actually, can you fix everything that’s wrong with him?” which I thought was a really good line.
Keith: Spoiler: she doesn't.
Jack: She doesn't. [Keith laughs] What she does do, however, is—
Keith: She does fix his physical injuries.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: She fixes his physical injuries so effortlessly, and Gon then leaps up and down with such wild abandon [Keith: Yeah.] that, you know, I see what you mean here, Keith. I know what this is doing, right? Which is that it’s saying, “Yep, he’s learned the wrong lesson again,” you know? He’s fine. He gets healed immediately. But I suppose where I thought that the Gon Freecss train was going to come entertainingly off the tracks and rumble through the swamp, [Sylvia chuckles] it turns out, instead, that the people very quickly built new tracks in front of it, and Gon was like, “Yeah, okay, fine. I guess I can be healed.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: He’s, like, punching the air. He’s jumping up and down. Later, Bisky looks at Gon and Killua doing this last little bit of the game and is like, “They must have been the only people who had a really good time with this game.”
Keith: [laughs] Seconds after Gon had no arms.
Jack: Yep.
Keith: And it’s true!
Dre: Yeah. No, it’s totally true.
Keith: That’s the scary part of it. Like, you know, Bisky has all her own issues that don't get dealt with here, but it is not misunderstanding how Gon and Killua feel.
Jack: No. There's a lot of—
Keith: Oh, the other thing is— I know I've said this a hundred thousand times. Just a reminder that Angel’s Breath is, like, someone’s Nen.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: This is just, you know, put into this card and can be taken out into the real world. This is, I think, Jack—
Sylvia: We meet some people who it might be the Nen of later.
Keith: I know. This is maybe, Jack, I think, one of the things about the hands that, like, never really got me about the, like, kind of pulling the punches, because when his hands got blown off, I had already been thinking about Angel’s Breath because of the Battera stuff. I can't be 100% sure, but I'm pretty sure that when his hands got blown off, I was like, “Oh god, they've gotta do something to fix this. There's no way that there going to have the rest of this be [Dre: Mm.] Gon with no hands.” [Jack chuckles] I'm pretty sure that I had the Angel’s Breath thing pegged.
Jack: Oh, sure. Yeah. It turns out that they can't quite use Angel’s Breath to heal everybody, 'cause Goreinu has one of the last ones and is not as psyched as they are about using it to heal the murderers.
Keith: Fairly.
Jack: And there is a— fairly.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: There is a lot of, I would say, fairly treacly business here, in that we sort of wade through it slowly and kind of saccharinely and don't really get anywhere new with any of these characters.
Keith: No.
Jack: As the trio say— I quite like this line. They were like, “We agreed we were going to use our Angel’s Breath to heal everybody at the end. We don't really know why we agreed that, [Keith: Yeah.] but we all did it.” And I sort of love the “we don't know why we agreed it” as an expression of the effect that Gon has on people.
Keith: Right.
Jack: You know, we all just sort of agreed it.
Keith: I also like that they each give their own answer. Like, Killua says, “I'm a killer too. If you don't want to give them an Angel’s Breath because they're killers, then you can't give me one either.” He’s very facts and logic about it, because he’s an edgelord.
Sylvia: Oh.
Keith: Bisky says, “We're out of the fight, and we stop having the right to decide who lives and dies, because we're no longer in combat. These people have surrendered. We can't kill them.” And then it’s Gon who’s like, “I don't know why. I just think we shouldn't.” [chuckles]
Sylvia: There's something that Goreinu says that I kind of want to, like, [cross] put out there for the rest of this show, which is like…
Keith: [cross] Oh, yeah, sure. Ooh. Should I write it in our little box that I have?
Sylvia: Maybe.
Jack: Yeah, put it in the box.
Sylvia: It’s just, like, something that I think about a lot, in regards to media in general.
Keith: Been a while since I added to the box.
Sylvia: When Killua says, “I've killed more people than these guys,” and Goreinu’s like, “Yeah, but you're nothing like them. I like you, and I hate these guys.”
Jack: Yeah, yeah. [Dre laughs]
Sylvia: And it’s like, well, that’s the only difference.
Jack: I really— I thought that was interesting.
Sylvia: And I think that’s something to think about going forward, 'cause we also talked—
Keith: Say that for me again, Sylvi?
Sylvia: Okay. Goreinu says, after Killua talks about “I've killed more people than these guys,” he says, “Yeah, but you're nothing like them. I like you, and I hate these guys.” [Keith typing] Which I think is already something that we've kind of talked about a little bit with Bisky and Hisoka, 'cause I do love Bisky, even though she’s got some pointed out thematic consistencies with what Hisoka wants from Gon.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: And, like…
Jack: This is—
Sylvia: Yeah, I just think it’s something that, like, in general is worth thinking about when you watch stuff.
Keith: There is a lot of that in this show.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: It is sort of like, why does Gon like Killua but hate the Phantom Troupe?
Jack: It’s the Phantom Troupe too.
Sylvia: Yes. It is that too.
Jack: I was going to say.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Why do we like the Phantom Troupe but hate Illumi?
Jack: Part of this is about the thing that happens to you when you are a protagonist.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: You know? But then Togashi is like, “Well, I can make the Phantom Troupe protagonists.”
Keith: Yeah. Well, that’s part—
Jack: “Do you like them now?” and we're like, “Yes.” [Dre laughs]
Sylvia: I already did.
Keith: In the last episode, I talked a little bit about, like, Hunter × Hunter, like, really punishing the people who give into someone else’s charisma.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: It’s really dangerous to associate yourself with someone because you, for some reason, are, like, magnetized to them.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Keith: And, like, we've seen that Ging has been like that in his travels. Gon is like that. Hisoka is like that. Chrollo is like that. There's a lot of people who, like, do a lot of harm by just having this wake [Jack: Yeah.] of enthusiasm for…it’s like, it’s something that feels innocent or even like a positive attribute that has this, like, really dark side to it, and Hunter × Hunter looks at that a lot.
Jack: Yeah. So, they wait for Killua’s hands. Goreinu’s like, “All right, I'm not really budging,” and so Killua’s like, “My hands will heal themselves,” generally. I was really, you know, folding my arms here and saying, “Yeah, look whose hands aren't getting healed here. Gon’s hands get healed just fine, but Killua has to wait for them to heal naturally.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: They heal Genthru, and then Goreinu’s like, “Okay, fine. You can have the thing.”
Sylvia: “I was going to give it to you anyway, but…”
Jack: But I think it’s notable that, you know, Killua is prepared and is asked by the situation to be the one to, you know, to wait to be healed, quote, unquote, “naturally,” not by the nude angel.
Keith: I just had a bizarre sort of, like, thought about “asked by the situation” as in Mike the Situation from Jersey Shore. [Dre, Keith, and Jack laugh] Mike “The Situation”...something. I can't remember his last name. Like, Sorrentino or something?
Sylvia: I don't know.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Shows up and says, like, “Killua, come on. Gym, tan, laundry.” [Sylvia, Jack, and Keith laugh]
Dre: Can't GTL if your hands are fucked up, Killua. Come on, bro.
Jack: At this point—
Keith: What’s KGTL?
Dre: No, GTL.
Sylvia: GTL.
Keith: Oh, GTL.
Dre: Gym, tan, laundry.
Keith: Oh, okay, okay, okay.
Sylvia: Can't GTL. Bisky and Snooki would get along.
Jack: Oh, yeah.
Sylvia: Or hate each other. One of the two.
Dre: One of the two.
Sylvia: No in between.
Jack: They'd move through arcs, I think.
Keith: Yeah. [Sylvia chuckles]
Jack: Goreinu gives them all his cards, resigning from the game, and also tells them that the game is sort of over. You know, Battera has given up. And he reveals that he was paid four billion jenny, thanks to the broken contract, and Bisky’s reaction to this is so funny. She’s just, like, startled, offended, and delighted that this amount of money is on the table.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And then Goreinu reveals that he will split that, you know, split that among the group, since everybody got there.
Keith: Four ways, yeah. Goreinu is a stand-up guy.
Jack: He is.
Sylvia: I like him.
Jack: He’s very, very, very dull, except for one thing. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: He’s just nice.
Jack: Oh, two things. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah, except for two things, [Dre: Mm.] and they're large and hairy and his friends.
Jack: But, you know, we talked a bit about how Tsezguerra had that— oh, the moon is just visible outside my window. How pretty.
Dre: Oh.
Jack: It’s a crescent moon while we're recording, and if you understand moons, then you can kind of guess when we are recording this, maybe.
Keith: Wow.
Sylvia: Whoa.
Jack: Yeah, there was that lovely little bit of characterization with Tsezguerra thinking about Gon, realizing that he had neglected his fundamentals and everything. And I don't think Goreinu is ever really given, you know, just that tiny little hint of depth of character.
Keith: No.
Jack: But he is given two summonable apes, which means that he’s very likable.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, he’s just a trustworthy guy that showed up right in time for everyone to kind of need a guy to, like, do busywork.
Jack: He is deus ex machina stand-up guy.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: A classic.
Keith: So, they do the work to get all the cards, right? And then we get a little announcement.
Jack: Yeah. Well, so, the only card left is card zero, which nobody knows anything about.
Keith: Right.
Jack: We are lovingly shown—in one of Togashi’s just, like, gentle little completely inconsequential jokes—that the final card put into the binder is Panda Maid.
Keith: Yep.
Jack: “Excellent at taking care of children.” The game is complete. [Sylvia and Jack laugh] Yeah, there's going to be a quiz.
Sylvia: It’s so funny.
Jack: Because there's always another game at the end of the game.
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s time to do HQ Trivia.
Jack: There's always a little sting at the tail. Yeah. [Dre chuckles] 100 total questions about slot cards. Bisky realizes that this was probably incentivized to be weighted towards players who didn't just kill other players. Too little too late, Ging. And as the episode ends, a lot of players kind of teleport in.
Keith: Yeah, this is the other thing of, like, Ging setting up this world to have “people who did things the right way” win.
Jack: Let’s move through this stuff quite quickly, because we are running long, [Sylvia: Yeah.] and we have one episode left. They play the quiz. Bisky looks over at them, being like, “Aw, they're loving the game.”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Killua is—
Sylvia: Cute.
Keith: Oh, they also choose to do it separately to compete against each other, instead of do what everyone else does and do it as a team.
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Did we already say that?
Sylvia: No.
Jack: No, no, we didn't.
Keith: Okay, great.
Jack: Killua is completely stumped by it. Genthru and co. are lying motionless, furious. Abengane walks up to Genthru, in a really nice moment, and touches him and says, “I caught the Bomber.”
Keith: It’s great.
Jack: And we see the bomb dissolve off him.
Dre: It’s awesome. Mm-hmm.
Keith: He just walks up from out of nowhere, touches him, walks away, and Genthru’s just got this fucking stupified look on his face.
Jack: Yeah.
Sylvia: Really good.
Jack: It’s great. Gon, impressively, wins the quiz. He is very bad at thinking and studying, but he is very good at thinking about his dad.
Sylvia: Well, it’s 'cause he did all this stuff.
Keith: Hey, he played Greed Island the right way.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: He got 87 out of 100.
Jack: The card, or rather the thing that follows, is delivered by an owl. I really like this, 'cause it was another one of these little hints of what the game could have been like, you know? Owl messengers delivering cards to each other.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah, it’s really cute.
Jack: It’s an invitation from the ruler of the island, and only Gon is able to go.
Keith: A couple goons show up to be like, “Heh heh, somebody’s got all the cards. We're gonna take ‘em!”
Sylvia: It’s the catboy.
Keith: What’s that?
Sylvia: It’s the catboy from, like, when we first got to the island.
Jack: Oh, yeah!
Dre: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Keith: Oh, yeah, it was one of the first people to show up, the one that waited for his brother. And it’s very funny. They obviously have no clue what’s going on, and they get beaten extremely— like, off screen, essentially, they get knocked out.
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: It’s really funny. Someone was like, “Oh my god, they beat the Pellam brothers?”
Jack: The Bellam brothers, yeah.
Keith: I guess these guys have enough of a reputation, but they just seem like nobodies.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Abengane watches everybody leave. Oh, so, basically, the card is an invitation to a castle on the hill to meet the ruler of Greed Island. Abengane, as he sees them leave, says, “They're much stronger than when I first met them, but they're still weaker than Genthru in raw power,” so realizes that they must have laid a plan to beat him.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: But then he says, “Ha, no matter. I'm going to go back to the real world and make a fortune on exorcism,” and walks into the sunset.
Keith: Yeah, you see a beautiful sunset with Hisoka is there too.
Jack: Yeah. Abengane has, like, been increasingly becoming a kind of sinister character. Initially, he was sort of quiet, and I thought he was going to be, like, one of the deus ex machina stand-by guys, but as soon as that old god crawled out of the fire, it really set a different tone for him. [Keith laughs]
Keith: Yeah, he just seems like a mysterious and opportunistic loner.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. There’s a line—
Keith: By the way, we're moving through this really fast. I just want to, for the listeners who maybe haven't seen this, this is really a wrap-up episode. This is like, this stuff is going by just as fast as we're saying it, basically.
Sylvia: Yeah, genuinely.
Jack: A butler welcomes Gon to the castle as Bisky and Gin kind of— Gin? Who the fuck is Gin?
Keith: A butler, you say.
Jack: Yes, a butler, I say. Bisky and Killua watch Gon leave, sort of wondering about how he’s feeling, maybe perhaps meeting Ging for the first time. Killua is smiling at him. And there's a real pleasant little sting in the tail here at the end of Greed Island, where, you know, we have moved past the climax of the arc being this fight with Genthru and kind of putting the final card into the book, but there is still really interesting little stuff to discover.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Togashi, even this late in the game, is prepared to say, “Let’s go to a new city. Let’s meet a new character.”
Keith: Oh, it’s so funny.
Jack: You know, Greed Island is wrapping, up, but…
Keith: They take, like, 90 full seconds to do, like, a little card juggling, where it’s like, “Okay, you have to use this card to go here [Jack: Yeah.] and then come back, and then we'll both go.”
Jack: New cards.
Keith: It’s very funny. [chuckles] At this late hour, we're still kind of managing cards.
Jack: Yep. Yeah. Gon is led into a room just absolutely full of trash, where a man who is clearly not Ging is playing a games console, who tosses Gon the card very cursorily, revealing that it is, like, a ruler— card zero is like a ruler card. It gives you ownership over the castle and the town and all the people in the town.
Keith: You can come back whenever you want and hang out in Greed Island.
Jack: Yeah, this is a real, like, “the center of the apple is hollow” moment. You know, it’s just a man in a room full of trash playing a video game, being like, “Oh, yeah, you want the card.”
Sylvia: I have a really important image I need to show you guys.
Keith: Okay.
Jack: Please.
Keith: It’s so—
Sylvia: Do you want to know who that is?
Keith: Yep.
Jack: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! I also thought of this!
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: You want to talk about what this is?
Sylvia: That’s a picture of Yoshihiro Togashi in a messy fucking room playing a video game.
Dre: Oh no!
Keith: Is he playing Kingdom Hearts?
Sylvia: I think that’s a Super Nintendo, Keith.
Keith: Oh, okay. Well, there's a couple—
Sylvia: I think he’s playing Mario.
Dre: Yeah. Yeah, it looks like he’s playing Mario.
Keith: There's a couple things. Oh, you know what it is? The, like, the dark bar in the middle is kind of squashed in a way that it looks like the Kingdom Hearts, like, main menu font.
Sylvia: I can see it.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Anyway. This has never really— this is, I think, just something fans found about.
Jack: This might be Togashi.
Keith: It is.
Sylvia: This is a photo of Togashi.
Jack: No, no, no. I mean—
Keith: Oh, right.
Jack: I mean this man in the room might be Togashi, the person at the very heart of the game.
Sylvia: It is definitely, like, an interesting, like, way to picture yourself as, like, this messy dude who just, like, threw together all these mechanics and things.
Jack: And who is fundamentally taunting, because this guy is just, like…
Keith: He’s taunting, yeah.
Jack: He’s actively taunting.
Keith: About Ging too.
Jack: Yeah. He’s saying, “Oh, you thought Ging would be here?” and Gon says—I thought this was really funny—“I never once thought that Ging would be here.” [Sylvia chuckles] You know, because of the way Gon’s brain works, he was like, multiple people have now told him that Ging isn't here.
Keith: Right.
Jack: Why would they be lying to me?
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I'm not going to meet Ging here.
Keith: I was told there was no clues. Why would Ging be here? There's no clues. My dad wouldn't lie.
Sylvia: [sarcastic] When has he ever done that? [chuckles]
Jack: He gives Gon a special case. This is a really nice prop. We see it a couple of times, [Keith: Yeah.] and I think it’s going to come up again. It looks like a sort of plastic cigarette case version of the binder.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: [chuckles] A little bit.
Jack: And he tells Gon that he can take three cards out of the game with him.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And this is something that we've known about for a while, right? Were there rumors that you could take three items out of the game?
Sylvia: Yeah, yeah, no. I think— I don't know if the number was ever explicit, but there was always the “you can take—” actually, it might have been. It might have been “take three cards out of the game,” 'cause I know that was always the plan for the Bombers too, [Dre: Mm-hmm.] was they wanted to bring stuff out of the game, but you can't bring doubles out.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: I sort of remember being surprised that you got three. I thought that maybe they said that you could take one, but that maybe people didn't know?
Jack: Yeah. I think it’s also really funny that it— [chuckles] It really throws into relief how good the Phantom Troupe are at their job, where they immediately intuited the, like, prize for the game and were like, “Oh, no, no, no. We'll just take all of it. [Keith chuckles] We'll just get every item out.” And a thing that we learn later reveals that they could have done that, had they not been caught by Razor. There's not, like, a restriction on the card that would have prevented them from doing that. He asks Gon, this guy, whose name is Mr…Dwun[pronounced: Dwoon]?
Sylvia: His name is Dwun[Dwoon].
Keith: Dwun[Doon].
Sylvia: Dwun[Doon].
Keith: Dwun[Doon].
Sylvia: It’s pronounced Doon, yeah.
Keith: It’s Dwun[Doon].
Jack: Mr. Dwun, yeah.
Sylvia: [imitates music] [Jack and Dre chuckles]
Keith: I cannot wait to talk about Dwun.
Jack: I cannot wait to talk about Dwun.
Sylvia: It’s so funny.
Keith: After this thing that you're about to say, Jack, I think.
Jack: There is one really extremely funny sort of sequence and then one hilariously misguided decision made by the show. [Sylvia laughs] And these two things sitting back to back [Sylvia: Yeah.] is fully the experience of watching Hunter × Hunter.
Keith: Oh. I wonder which is the misguided decision. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: Ging loves doing fun things with letters.
Keith: Yes.
Jack: Okay. So, Dwun asks Gon if he wants the normal generic ending or the ending just for you, and Gon considers it for a second and then decides.
Keith: Again, Gon brain.
Jack: “I'll take the generic one, 'cause I didn't do this alone, and my friends probably wouldn't be able to watch the ending that’s just for me,” at which point, the butler—
Sylvia: Uh…
Jack: Oh, sorry, Sylvi.
Sylvia: I just want to— sorry to— I know we're trying to go quick, but with the Togashi-Dwun parallel, I do need to bring up the fact that Togashi did literally do this on a recent interview tour, being like, “Yeah, here’s— I have a possible—”
Jack: Oh, yes, he did!
Sylvia: “I have four possible endings for Hunter × Hunter. Here’s one of them.”
Keith: Oh my god, yeah.
Sylvia: “If you want to know, just in case.” Like, I didn't think about this parallel that much coming into this episode.
Keith: It’s so funny.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: And now, all of a sudden, I'm like, “Oh, fuck, wait a minute. This is him being like, ‘Eh, this is kind of how I feel making this.’”
Jack: He’s also a really lovingly drawn character, Dwun.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Jack: In the way that he is animated very distinctively. He moves in a way that is unlike the other characters. He is constantly bopping around the frame. He’s like a cartoon-ass cartoon character.
Keith: He’s very, like…he’s drawn like he’s in a comedy show.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: And he does one really good comedy bit that we're going to get to.
Keith: He does a really good comedy bit.
Jack: At this point—
Sylvia: His mannerisms are very funny too.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: I like how he moves.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: The butler has to step in and clarify that he is just kidding. There is no special ending, but there is a message that has been left for him, at which point, these two people—
Keith: It’s so funny you keep calling him the butler.
Sylvia: It’s really funny that you keep calling him the butler.
Jack: At this point, these people reveal that, in fact, this butler person isn't actually a butler and was instead just the person who opened the door. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: The classic butler role in a castle. These are Dwun and List. At which point we get into, I think, a completely unnecessary sequence, but I love it. Is there a reason this is here?
Keith: Just 'cause—
Jack: Other than Ging is a weirdo and is surrounded by weirdos?
Sylvia: I think it’s like— yeah.
Keith: I think there's two things. I think that Togashi’s very playful and wants to make— wants to just, like, tell you about— wants to set up that this guy’s name is Dwun.
Jack: And then the thing that happens with Dwun, I think, is actually illustrative of Ging.
Sylvia: Ging as a character, yeah.
Keith: Yeah. I think there's another thing, which is just that, like, “Ha ha, you thought it was called Greed Island 'cause of how the game is, but it’s actually just a total coincidence.”
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s so funny!
Jack: Yeah, why’s Greed Island called Greed Island, Keith?
Keith: Greed Island is—
Jack: Greed Island has 10 letters in, huh?
Keith: Greed Island is called Greed Island, because they took one letter from everybody’s first name—with Ging being first, because he was the main guy—and just spelled out the word “Greed Island” with those people.
Sylvia: It’s even better, 'cause it’s— well, Ging is the lead guy, so we needed a word that began with G, so we went with “greed”.
Jack: Yes! They just picked “greed.” Yeah. R is Razor. List is L.
Keith: The reveal that the twins— that there's a different entry and exit person, even though they're identical.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: Those are twins.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: And also that they are humans and not, like, Nen constructs.
Sylvia: Nope.
Keith: Right, those are people. These are all people.
Dre: Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jack: Eeta and Elena. Dwun is G— sorry. Dwun is D, and then Dwun gets really angry and interrupts, [Sylvia laughs] calling Ging a horrible jerk.
Sylvia: It’s so good!
Jack: The short version of this is that his name is—
Sylvia: I felt a kinship.
Dre: Yeah, same.
Jack: His name is pronounced “Doon,” but it has always been spelt, I believe, W-D-W-U-N-E.
Sylvia: Yes.
Jack: He’s really angry about this. He spells it out with his fingers, spelling out the letters.
Sylvia: We get the letters on screen too.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: He asks Gon, “How do you think it’s spelled?” and then Gon goes, like, “Uh, D?” and he’s like, “YOU TOO?!” [laughter]
Jack: Yes.
Sylvia: He cuts it off right there.
Keith: Like it’s crazy to think Dwun begins with a D. It’s so funny.
Jack: All his friends also consistently make this mistake, despite repeatedly getting told, and so as soon as Dwun learned that they were going to be doing this letter thing, he was like, “All right, please remember that my name begins with a W,” at which point Ging said, “Well, no, let’s say it begins with a D, and then you can be the D in Greed Island, and, you know, I think your name looks better that way.”
Keith: I mean, see reason. We can't call it Greew Island. That doesn't make any sense. [Jack laughs]
Sylvia: Banana?
Dre: Call it Gweed Island. [Jack chuckles]
Keith: Also, we had a bit of a litigation on, like, how much Razor is or isn't a part of the game. This is the sort of stuff I was thinking of, when I was like, “Razor built the game.”
Jack: Oh, yeah. Yeah, you're right.
Keith: He’s the R in “Greed Island.” He’s not just some guy.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: I mean, in a way, he is some guy, but aren't they all?
Jack: Ging then promptly changed his name.
Dre: Yes.
Keith: [feigned naivete] Sorry, Ging changed his own name? Surely that’s what you mean.
Jack: No.
Dre: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. [Keith laughs]
Jack: Changed Dwun’s name. And List says this in that same tone that some people talk about with Ging, of like, it’s like you talked about earlier, Keith, of like, the danger of someone so charismatic, you know?
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: List is sort of like, “It’s amazing. He changed Dwun’s name immediately.” and Dwun is…Dwun is midway through a, like—
Keith: Breakdown?
Jack: Abbot Costello bit. [chuckles] Yeah, a breakdown within an Abbot and Costello bit.
Dre: Yeah.
Jack: And seems to be the only person who is like, “Ging is kind of a piece of shit.”
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: But he's been here for, what, 15 years, something like that? So, at the same time, he still has to have this…there’s something keeping him here.
Jack: Could he maybe be a death row prisoner like Bopobo?
Keith: No, I think he’s just the smartest guy Ging ever met and was like, “Can you come please help me make this game?”
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. Fireworks as the game ends. There is a shot of the crowd in the street that is the largest crowd shot we have ever seen in Hunter × Hunter. There are, like, 1000 people on screen.
Keith: More than the mafia community?
Jack: Uh, yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: Almost certainly, right?
Keith: Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, you're right.
Jack: It’s a great shot.
Keith: I just wanted to say “mafia community” again. It’s been so long. [Jack chuckles]
Dre: Yeah. Shoutouts to the mafia community.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Shoutouts to whoever—
Keith: They need it.
[clip of “Chain Bastard” plays]
Jack: Oh my god! [Sylvia laughs]
Sylvia: YEAH! [Jack chuckles] Oh, it’s been so long.
Jack: Shoutouts to whoever put Bisky, Gon, and Killua on a fucking carnival float, put wreaths around their necks, and drove them through the street. [Dre laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: In, like, a ticker tape parade.
Sylvia: Do not drive past the book repository, Gon! [Jack and Dre laugh]
Jack: Gon!
Dre: And this is, like, the NPCs in the town, right?
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, they say, like, in addition to the castle, you get a town with, is it 10,000 people?
Jack: Yep. Yeah.
Dre: So you just get a fiefdom.
Jack: You do get a fiefdom.
Keith: You get a fiefdom, yeah.
Jack: Everybody chooses—
Dre: Man, good thing a bad person didn't win the prize so that they could just make 10,000 people do whatever terrible thing they wanted.
Jack: [sarcastic] No, no, no, Dre. No, Dre, you don't understand. Good and evil is like a sort of meritocracy.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: It’ll work itself out, and this protects the evil people from…
Keith: It is simply by winning that you've proven that you're good. [Jack laughs]
Dre: Yeah, you right, you right.
Jack: It is so funny that the show is so dismissive of that as an ideology but keeps putting characters in positions of power who believe that.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: It is funny every time. They get to choose the cards they're going to carry out. Bisky chooses Blue Planet, this gem. If you've been keeping up, this is something that Bisky has been wanting since the start.
Keith: Yeah. She’s losing her damn mind.
Jack: Yes. She is so excited to get this out of here. Killua hasn't decided yet, and Gon has a clever plan to get a card out, and Killua is like, “Oh, yeah, that is a clever plan,” and it seems like Killua is actually going to throw away his card choice in favor of enabling Gon’s plan. Weird how that keeps happening, isn't it?
Sylvia: Weird.
Keith: What do you mean? They're friends.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, that’s what friends do. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: What? They're friends.
Jack: This is when we have our final punch into the sky for fun, as Bisky is like, “Why won't you let me into the plan?” She punches both of them into the sky, and we match cut to a firework. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: It’s so funny. [Dre chuckles]
Keith: I love that these are her two reasons for punching. One is being called a hag, and the other one is she gets frustrated at not being clued in on whatever Gon and Killua are talking about.
Dre: Yeah, she’s just the teacher running up to the kids and being like, “You better fucking tell me what Skibidi means, or I swear to god!”
Jack: Well, I really like this, because this is both the expression of an annoyed elder—you know, don't call me a hag—and a frustrated little sister.
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm. Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Being like, “Oh, the older brothers aren't letting me into their plan.”
Dre: The duality of Bisky.
Keith: Of Bisky, yeah.
Jack: The duality of Bisky, yeah. [Dre laughs] Expressed in a way that— now that we know that Bisky is, like…
Keith: Bigsky?
Jack: Maybe the strongest martial artist we have ever seen, the fact that her running joke is punching Gon and Killua into the sky is even funnier.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: She just occasionally lets loose and punches them into the sky.
Keith: Yeah. It’s a funny twist based on the common shonen sort of, like, non-diegetic violence from women that happens.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Where like, you'll have a lot of— like, Bulma will punch Goku into the sky sometimes or, like, clobber him on the head and leave a big bump.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: And it’s like, she couldn't actually do that, but for comedy, they have her doing that all the time. And then Bisky has the same sort of behavior that happens— it shows up all the time. But she really could kill them.
Jack: She could punch someone’s head off. [chuckles] Yes.
Keith: She really could do that, yes.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: The cards that they have chosen are Strip of Beach. Remember that? Remember when that woman delivered a sorrowful monologue and then transformed into a card? That’s right. The card art is her looking out of the window.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: Where she delivered said monologue before she disappeared.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Blue Planet and Paladin’s Necklace. That’s Gon’s…
Keith: That’s weird.
Jack: Yeah, it’s weird.
Keith: Why do they want Strip of Beach? It’s nothing. What would even it turn into?
Jack: It’s nothing. I was really excited. I was like, “We're going to get to—”
Dre: A lady. That nice lady.
Keith: Yeah. [chuckles]
Jack: “We're going to get to see what Strip of Beach does. Huh.”
Keith: You could buy a house anywhere and make it a beachfront.
Dre: Ohh.
Jack: Everybody leaves, and I think it’s Killua who says, “We're back in the real world.” No, it’s Gon who says, “We're back in the real world. I can't tell.” And Killua reminds him that it’s real.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: This is also the end of David Chronenberg’s excellent film ExistenZ, also a film about going into a weird game.
Sylvia: Oh my god!
Jack: Which also ends with a character saying, “Hang on. Are we in the game? Are we in the real world? I can't tell.”
Keith: They also have a brief moment of seeing Elena as they leave and her being kind of happy that Gon remembered that she wasn't her sister Eeta.
Jack: Yeah, I thought that was really sweet.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: Yeah. Hey, before we talk about what these cards are, would I be allowed to hit two song things that we missed that are kind of important?
Jack: Yeah. Yeah, go for it.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: Please.
Keith: So, during the explanation about when to run from Genthru, when he’s got both of his arms ready to do Little Flower.
Jack: When Gon explicitly doesn't run?
Keith: Yeah. And then that part when he lets himself get blown up and then kicks, we have another song that gets played a lot in the next season, I believe. It’s called “The Puppeteer”, which I believe…I can't tell if the name is about Genthru grabbing Gon’s arms and, like, kind of controlling his body or if it’s about Gon sort of tricking Genthru into…
[clip of “The Puppeteer” begins]
Sylvia: Ooh.
Keith: Falling for his tricks. We've got this here.
Dre: Oh, yeah.
Jack: It’s fucking heavy.
Keith: It’s really heavy.
Jack: Is there going to be any pretty nice music in the next season?
Keith: Uh, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[music ends]
Keith: Yeah, actually, we get a little bit of that when they're all at the starting place. When they're doing the quiz, we get an instrumental version of a future ending theme. I don't remember the name, and also it’s kind of a long name. It’s called “Nagareboshi Kirari” is what it’s called.
[clip of “Nagareboshi Kirari ~ Instrumental” begins]
Jack: Oh, yeah, I like this one.
Sylvia: Mm.
Keith: I love this ending theme, by the way. I think it’s not very popular, but it really, really grew on me.
Jack: Keith, could you play that last one again, the scary, heavy one?
[“Nagareboshi Kirari” stops abruptly] [Sylvia laughs]
[clip of “The Puppeteer” begins]
Jack: And let it run for a little longer. ‘Cause we have this orchestral cue. [music continues, then quiets and shifts in tone] And then we have this. Okay. Now can you play the one with the bass groove?
Keith: Yes.
[“The Puppeteer” stops]
Sylvia: Ooh.
[clip of “Unasked Advice” begins]
Jack: Mm. Yeah, I don't remember where I got this thought from. Maybe it was just when I saw that first little teaser image that my streaming platform showed me.
[music ends]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Are we going to get fucking aliens in this show? [someone sputters] We've been talking about aliens in, uh… [Sylvia laughs]
Keith: Does that feel science fiction to you?
Jack: Yes, it does!
Keith: I can see that. I can see that.
Sylvia: I can see it.
Jack: It feels extremely science fiction to me.
Dre: Yeah, no, that feels very sci-fi, yeah.
Keith: Yeah. I totally get that.
Dre: Jack, I have a question for you.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: What’s the difference between an alien and a demon? [Jack chuckles]
Keith: [voice] What’s the difference between an alien and a demon?
Jack: [laughs] Oh no, Jigsaw! [Jigsaw voice] All your life, you've spent your time wondering… [Dre laughs]
Keith: [Jigsaw voice] What is the difference between an alien and a demon? [Jack laughs] Bleep blorp.
Jack: [Jigsaw voice] This dictionary has been rigged with a bomb.
Dre: Especially if said demons come from another world.
Jack: Whoa!
Sylvia: Whoa.
Jack: Oh my god, the Chimera Ants are from Demon World! Yeah, I don't know. I think it was a combination of—
[clip of “Beyond the Seas” begins]
Jack: [chuckles] Whoa.
Keith: This is the nice— look, listen, it’s Whale— it’s the sound of Whale Island.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: This is “Beyond the Seas”. We get this at the very end of 74.
Jack: I love this one, actually.
Keith: I love this one.
Jack: This rising cue here [Sylvia: Yeah.] is referencing a classical piece that I've been fucking trying to remember the name of for the longest time.
Dre: Hmm.
[music ends]
Jack: It might be in The Planets? It might be one of Holst’s Planets?
Keith: Mm.
Jack: But just those three rising notes with the, like, the pedal note as it moves between those three chords.
[clip of “Beyond the Seas” begins]
Jack: Mm. Is it going to play out again?
Dre: Oh. [music ends] Yeah, I feel like that is— I mean, I don't know nearly as much classical music, but I feel like that is also, like, scratching something in my brain.
Jack: Yeah. It’s like a reference in the same way that a lot of the Spiders stuff was referencing, um…what did they play? They play Beethoven or did they play Mozart, Mozart’s “Requiem” at some point?
Keith: Yeah. Yeah, they played— yeah.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: They just fucking played Mozart’s “Requiem”. [chuckles]
Keith: Yeah. And then they played “Riot”, which is, like, very similar.
Jack: Yeah, yeah, yeah. They were kind of doing that backwards.
Keith: Actually, “Riot” shows up again in 74.
Jack: Is “Riot” the one you're sick of, Keith?
Keith: No, no. Uh, well, okay, so, there’s all of the Spiders stuff kind of bleeds into each other. There's “Those of the Last Midnight” or something weird. I can't remember exactly what it’s called. Then there’s “Man of the Reversed Cross”, and then there's “Requiem Aranea”, and then there’s “Dirge from the Dark Side”, and they all kind of blend into each other, and—
Jack: They have the same sort of palette, don't they?
Keith: They do. It’s very dark and dreary, and there's a lot of, like, choral chanting.
Dre: Mm.
Sylvia: Mm.
Keith: And it’s not that I don't like them. It’s just that sonically it is the least diverse arc.
Jack: But I do think I have a bee in my bonnet about aliens, because when we've been talking about doing more of this Dragon Ball Z stuff and y'all asked me, “What do you want to see?” and the thing that I said I wanted to see was aliens.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: ‘Cause aliens keep showing up in Dragon Ball, and I have not met a single one.
Keith: Hard not to see aliens in Dragon Ball.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Well, you have: Goku.
Jack: I have, but yeah, I didn't know that when I watched it.
Keith: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: Okay. Oh, we also have— so, they're back in the real world. Bisky immediately uses the card to get Blue Planet, which is a sort of marble, about the size of a small egg. And she is delighted by this. I was really worried— not really worried. I thought that she would— I thought that the joke was going to be that she was disappointed by its size. You know, that she was expecting, like, a globe or something, and seeing that it was here…
Sylvia: No.
Jack: But nope, she’s just— I thought it was really sweet. She’s got what she wanted. It delights her. And then we learn— oh, as Gon and Killua sort of begin to reveal their plan, we get a new arrangement of Bisky’s theme. Or it’s not really a new arrangement. It’s just the accompaniment part of Bisky’s theme without the kind of dueling violin melody line played over the top, which was fun to hear. Without that violin part, the theme is a little thin, but I was interested that they chose to deploy it that way, right? To say, “Yeah, let’s do it like this, but actually hold off the part that makes this theme distinctive.”
Okay. Here is what Gon has managed to do. The only cards that you can bring out of Greed Island are the numbered cards. You can't actually bring out any of the lower value, non-numbered cards. But the card that Gon has managed to bring out is Accompany disguised as Strip of Beach. He used a card inside Greed Island to disguise Accompany as Strip of Beach and then used Paladin’s Necklace to reveal that sort of forgery, that fake disguise, once he was safely out. And this has gotten the card out of Greed Island, because I think, you know, Greed Island is not infallible. If you can make the cards look like one thing, it worked just as well in the game, and the game and real life are the same, so why wouldn't it work, you know, outside the island? It was a nice little maneuver.
Keith: Yeah. It worked. And then the, like, you know, the sort of unsaid, like, “Well, what is this going to help you?” Not unsaid. Bisky says it. “Why do you want this?”
Jack: Well, it turns out that when Gon entered for the first— he was the first person to enter the game, but as soon as he entered the game, he noticed that there was a name in his binder. Now, this name, which I am not going to repeat on the air—
Dre: Uh huh.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: —is an unfortunate anagram of Ging’s name.
Sylvia: It’s four letters. You can go through all the different variations in your head, and you can figure out which one these group of four white people can't say.
Jack: Uh…it’s not good.
Keith: Yep.
Jack: But this implies that he has actually met Ging in Greed Island, and this is—
Sylvia: Oh. [laughs] Sorry, I did write down, “Togashi with a secret true-to-life video game experience of the first person you meet in game having a racial slur as their username.” [Keith and Jack laugh]
Jack: He has intuited that he probably came to Greed Island with Ging as a baby, and this is true.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: We get to see Ging and Gon, Ging holding Gon in his arms, looking out over Greed Island, presumably with the sort of, like…what’s that thing that the…
Keith: It’s the fucking Lion King.
Jack: That the lion says in The Lion King? Yeah.
Keith: “Everything you see before you is yours,” yeah. “Everything the sun touches.”
Jack: Except everything you see before you is here to test you. [laughs]
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: [laughs] Is here to fight and test you.
Keith: Everything the sun touches here can kill you.
Jack: Yeah. That’s absolutely what it is. But now, he can use Accompany on Ging, because he’s got the Accompany card out.
Sylvia: Uh huh.
Jack: Why didn't he do this when he was in the game?
Sylvia: I don't know if the game— I think within the parameters of the game, it only takes you to people who are inside of it at the time.
Jack: Oh, are in the game right now.
Sylvia: Yeah, that’s at least how I interpreted it by them taking it out.
Keith: That’s totally it, yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: ‘Cause to leave, you have to use Leave or the ferry.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: But this is…this is clever thinking from Gon and Killua.
Keith: It is.
Jack: To figure this plan out. Demonstrating, once again, that Gon is…steam comes out of Gon’s ears when he’s making complex plans, unless they're plans about his dad or things his dad might be interested in. [Keith laughs]
Keith: There's also—
Jack: And then he’s the smartest man in the world.
Sylvia: His dad is his special interest.
Jack: [chuckles] Yes.
Keith: There's also specific things that he— like, he’s not good at, like, math or, like, he’s not good at concepts. But this is like, yeah, this is a car that takes you where you want to go. I should just disguise the car.
Jack: Disguise the card. Not disguise the car.
Keith: Well, no, it’s a car.
Jack: Oh, I see. Right, yes. Sorry, I was…
Keith: ‘Cause it takes you where you want to go.
Jack: Yes, it takes you where you want to go.
Sylvia: Oh, yeah.
Jack: I loved this.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I thought…
Sylvia: Mm-hmm?
Jack: I'm always wrong-footed by Yoshihiro Togashi. I thought to myself, “Surely they're not just going to use the card.” [Sylvia and Keith laugh] You know…
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: We've got to have some kind of buildup.
Sylvia: That doesn't make any sense.
Jack: This is, like, a really exciting little narrative beat here, so we need to do some themes and variations around it. We need to be prepared to go and meet Ging.
Sylvia: Well.
Jack: No. They're about to use the card. Before they do, they ask Gon why he’s excited— what he’s going to do when he meets Ging.
Keith: Oh my god.
Jack: And Gon is like, “I'm going to introduce him to my best friend, Killua.”
Sylvia: It’s so cute!
Dre: This is very cute. And Killua’s like, “Shut up, you idiot! Don't say that!”
Keith: Yeah, and Bisky’s crying.
Jack: Yeah, Bisky says, “If I stay any longer, I'll get attached to them like a parent.” And then in parentheses, you know, the corollary to that is: because my role is a teacher, and I need to sharpen these gems.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Dre: Yeah. Yeah. I can't protect them or want to protect them.
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Oh, by the way, I don't know if we said, but she— I don't know if this is just in the dub is what I think I had, but she names her jewel, uh…she’s going through a bunch of names, and she settles on Planette.
Sylvia: Oh, it’s so good. Yeah.
Dre: Yeah. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: I didn't get all the ones she says.
Dre: One of the ones she says is Bluey, which is very funny.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Now.
Sylvia: In the Japanese, she does call it Pla-chama, which I thought was cute. I didn't catch the other, the blue one, but it was variations on that.
Sylvia: Bisky’s great.
Sylvia: Which, if you remember, she wanted to be called Bisky-chama by the two of them forever ago.
Jack: Yes. [chuckles] Ah, she’s really, really funny. Yeah, they use Accompany to go and find Ging. They go flying off. Bisky watches them go. This is— I mean, this is— it’s delightful every time Hunter × Hunter ends an arc, because it goes barrelling into the next one at high speed.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And from the beginning of this episode, of recording, me going like, “Oh, I don't really know, you know, I don't know how they're going to make this interesting. We're going to just go through themes and variations of fighting the Bomber.” I was rewarded with a really great fight with Genthru, and now I'm, at the end of this episode, genuinely having no idea what is going to happen.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Jack: Because they fly over a misty forest.
Keith: They're going fishing.
Jack: Yeah. The likes of which we have not really seen before. And they land on cobblestones in the forest, not a forest path, you know. And they look up in shock to see someone with their back to them with a fishing rod out there in the mist, and the episode ends. That’s great!
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: What a good cliffhanger!
Keith: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: [quietly] Wahooo.
Jack: Yeah, exactly. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: Gotta remember the wahoo.
Dre: Wahoooo.
Sylvia: It makes me laugh so much.
Jack: Do I think this is Ging? I don't know. In any other show, I would say, “No, of course this isn't Ging.”
Keith: They ask, by the way. The narrator comes in and goes, like, “Do you think this is Ging?” [laughs]
Sylvia: “Was this Ging?”
Jack: And I have no idea, right? Because in another show, the answer is no. this is a character that, like, links us to Ging in some way, boosts us into the next arc. But this is Hunter × Hunter.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: And I could very easily see them saying that Gon’s quest is to find his dad, you know? So, let’s just resolve that now.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Make that more complicated.
Keith: What happens when Gon is without a quest to solve?
Jack: Probably can't be good. [chuckles]
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: I think it’s such a— you know, when you're looking at something like Hunter × Hunter that is a show I think no one can deny looks on its face like it’s constantly setting stuff up and then throwing it out to, like, do something different. And it’s like, the narrative utility of that is so clear once you have a lot of the show under your belt and you get to go, like, it stops being— you know, sometimes they follow the beaten path, and sometimes they swerve, and when they swerve, it’s like, “How the fuck are they going to swerve?” [Sylvia chuckles] And it really keeps you guessing to not ever really know: is this going to do the obvious thing, or is it going to do the other thing?
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: Because with more— Hunter × Hunter, more than almost any other show that I can think of, it’s a real split.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah. I'm so excited.
Jack: What are we watching next time?
Keith: That’s a great question. Uh…
Jack: This is when Keith reveals. He says, “All right, as we're entering Hunter × Hunter’s longest arc, it’s time to begin six-episode blocks.” [Keith laughs]
Keith: There was a time when I had— I believe we only had one episode that’s longer than four. That’s my memory.
Sylvia: Wow.
Keith: Maybe there's two, but next one is brisk! 66, 67, 68.
Jack: Wow, three. No, that’s not right, Keith.
Keith: I said three. 66, 67, 68.
Sylvia: You said 60?
Keith: Sorry. 70. 76, 77, 78. [Jack chuckles] And just for fun, why don't I tell you what those are called?
Jack: Yeah.
Keith: “Reunion × And × Understanding”.
Jack: Okay.
Keith: “Unease × And × Sighting”. And [chuckles] “Very × Rapid × Reproduction”. [Jack chuckles]
Sylvia: Oh boy.
Dre: Oh!
Sylvia: I have a review to read too, a five star podcast review.
Keith: Oh, great.
Dre: Hell yeah.
Sylvia: ‘Cause hey, if you guys go and give us five stars—I'm reading from the Apple Podcasts, 'cause that tends to be the one where the algorithm favors the five stars the most—I might read it on the show. I really like this one from “Sunfish die often I suppose.” Five stars, as it should be. Title—
Keith: You suppose that’s who it’s from, or that’s part of the name?
Sylvia: That’s the name. That’s the name. “Sunfish die often I suppose” is the username.
Keith: Got it.
Sylvia: The title of this review is “Demon world podcast review format.” [Jack laughs] [clears throat] “Before you sits a podcast review. From its fierce jaws it speaks a single sigil, a skull with twenty one teeth, seven burning lights in one eye socket, sixteen in the other. Throughout your years of podcast review dungeon delving, you recognize the meaning of this cursed language, its true intention decoded by listening to the words found at the seventh minute and sixteenth second of the twenty first episode of the very podcast it describes. Sometimes you wonder if podcast reviews could be stored as plain text instead of arcane wordless riddles within haunted catacombs.” Thank you.
Keith: Thank you.
Jack: That’s a great review.
Sylvia: I do know what that timestamp is, but maybe people should go listen, because I think it’s funny.
Keith: Oh, I would love to know after this.
Sylvia: Yeah. It’s silly.
Jack: This has been a great block.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: What do you think of Greed Island?
Sylvia: Yeah, wait, really quick. Did you like this arc as a whole?
Jack: Uh, yeah. It’s— I think it’s the weakest one we've seen, and I think it is [Sylvia: Wow.] frustrated by being [Dre: Mm.] a really good idea that is often uneven.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Mm-hmm.
Jack: I think it is a really fun concept of going to a broken game, but I think a combination of needing to crack along at a brisk pace and, you know, adapting a lot of chapters into a shorter chunk of the manga and the fact that the thing they are swerving away from is actually a really, you know, fun idea left me feeling…not sour, but there were bits of this arc where I was like, “This isn't quite humming along in the way that I like Hunter × Hunter to be humming along.”
Sylvia: Mm.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: I think that the end that it got us to was great. Do I think this is the weakest arc compared to Heavens Arena? No. I liked Heavens Arena less than I like this.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Yeah. That’s what I was surprised by.
Dre: Mm.
Keith: Though Heavens Arena benefits from being, like, 10 episodes or something.
Dre: Yeah, that’s true.
Jack: Yeah, whereas I think that this could have been longer and with slightly more sort of, like, sharpened focus in what it wanted to be.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: This is so similar, I think, to what we felt that the outcome of watching this was going to be. It’s how I feel about it. It’s got— the highs are just as high as ever. It’s great to have Gon and Killua back in the driver’s seat. There's not, like, a ton more lows, but the, like, low mids, the boring zone is bigger than usual.
Dre: Mm.
Jack: Yeah. Yeah.
Sylvia: We'll be talking about pacing more. [Jack chuckles]
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: Is, I think, safe to say.
Jack: Wait, okay, actually.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: As we embark on it, how many episodes of Hunter × Hunter was Greed Island?
Sylvia: Oh.
Keith: Uh, thr— [sighs] I can tell you.
Sylvia: I thought you were about to say three.
Keith: Three. No, no, I was just thinking of how many episodes we have that were three.
Sylvia: 17?
Keith: Yeah, I think so.
Sylvia: Yeah, 17.
Jack: How many episodes of Hunter × Hunter is the Chimera Ant?
Keith: 60-something.
Sylvia: According to Wikipedia, 61.
Keith: 61.
Jack: Okay. Phew. [Keith laughs]
Sylvia: To put that in perspective, we have 77 episodes of Hunter × Hunter left.
Keith: Although, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong; I just feel like I know this.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: I'm not 100% sure. I believe Chimera Ant is actually more compressed than Greed Island versus the manga.
Sylvia: Probably.
Dre: Sure.
Sylvia: We've talked about how long Chimera Ant ran in the manga, right?
Keith: Uh, no.
Dre: If we have, I don't remember.
Sylvia: Like, year-wise, 'cause didn't it run for, like, almost a decade?
Jack: Holy shit!
Keith: I think it’s something like that.
Sylvia: Due to the production schedule because of— I mean, Togashi’s health is going to come up as we dive into this, I think.
Jack: Yeah.
Dre: Yeah.
Sylvia: I might try and read along with the manga. I'm not committing to it, just because it’s a lot to do.
Keith: It’s a lot.
Sylvia: But I'm really curious.
Keith: It is episode 76 to 136 of the anime.
Jack: Jesus.
Keith: Manga chapters 186 to 318.
Sylvia: Yeah. [Keith laughs]
Jack: My god. [laughs]
Sylvia: It is straight up, like…not the majority of Hunter × Hunter. Like, it’s not going to beat everything added together.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: But it kind of, like, feels like it.
Keith: The first one was released in 2003. The last one was released in 2011, the same year that this anime started.
Sylvia: We can talk about this next time.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: But something I always did when I watched, like, something about how I always conceptualized Chimera Ant was that it’s its own anime series or it can feel like it’s its own anime series.
Jack: Yeah. Interesting.
Keith: Another way is it kind of feels like two arcs to me. There's kind of—
Sylvia: Yes.
Keith: Like, you could make a case that there's two arcs in this arc.
Jack: Hmm.
Sylvia: I feel like we could probably make a case for more, even.
Keith: Maybe.
Sylvia: I don't know. I don't know. Again, it’s been a while.
Keith: To me, there's one very obvious line of demarcation.
Sylvia: Yeah. Yes. Yes.
Keith: But that’s it. That’s it. We've got nothing else to say, and we should go.
Sylvia: Yeah, we're done.
Keith: I have to go finish making dinner.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Sylvia: Oh my god.
Keith: I have to eat dinner. And, uh, anything else at the very end here?
Jack: No.
Dre: No.
Jack: I love making this show.
Sylvia: Yeah. No, great time.
Keith: All right. Bye. We've got to clap, though.
Sylvia: Bye.
[“The Boy in Green” begins playing]
Keith: Bye. Just whenever.
[they clap, out of sync]
Keith: Great.
Sylvia: Do we really not need to sync that up?
Keith: No, we don't. [Jack laughs]
[song plays out]