Gon Is the Imposing Presence - Hunter x Hunter ep. 113-115: Media Club Plus S01E36
Added 2025-01-29 21:53:13 +0000 UTCWelcome to Media Club Plus: a podcast about diving into the media that interests us and the stories that excite us.
The King is already gone, but there's a castle full of ants desperate to find and protect him. Gon and Killua have a brief encounter with Netero and Zeno on their way to find Pitou. Killua especially is having some sort of crisis (crises?). Zeno almost has words of warning for the boys, but instead says "hey man don't look at me you figure it out". Meanwhile, Ikalgo immediately raises everyone's suspicion and Knuckle has to tap in for a thoroughly beaten Shoot. Oh yeah and there's a new entry in the "most paranoid guy" category: Welfin. He sees Bloster hear Ikalgo call Leol "Hagya" and has a sincerely impressive meltdown.
This week we cover episodes 113-115, titled An x Indebted x Insect, Divide x And x Conquer, and Duty x And x Question. Next episode we'll be covering episodes 116-118, titled Revenge x and x Recovery, Insult x And x Payback, and A x False x Rage.
Featuring Keith Carberry (@KeithJCarberry, @KeithJCarberry), Jack de Quidt (@jdq) Sylvi Bullet (@SYLVIBULLET), and Andrew Lee Swan (@swandre3000)
Produced by Keith Carberry
Music by Jack de Quidt (available at notquitereal.bandcamp.com)
Cover Art by by Annie Johnston-Glick (@dancynrew) anniejg.com
This episode was made with support from listeners like you! To support us, stay here! You're already here at http://friendsatthetable.cash
...Or find our merch here http://friendsatthetable.shop
To find transcripts of the episodes, go to http://TranscriptsattheTable.com
Comments
august birthday here—i tried to review y'all on apple podcasts but i couldn't figure out how so here's my review: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ funny & insightful, got me looking at a show i love in a new light. sorry i couldn't make it count but i promise i tried!!
cool horse
2025-02-05 22:18:57 +0000 UTCVery true! Togashi takes it a bit further than I've seen elsewhere, but this separation of semantic meaning and pronunciation is fairly common in Japanese, especially in regards to Japanese people's names IRL. I just watched a show where a character named Takanashi had the nickname Kotori, "little bird" because the kanji spelling for Takanashi used those two characters. Moreover, as you point out, instances of double meaning and multiple possible readings are easy to create in Japanese because of the immense number of homophones, and doing so artfully has been a major aesthetic technique in Japanese literature going all the way back to the Heian era poetry collections that are the earliest surviving examples of Japanese writing, and remains so today. (As an aside, I've been developing an interest in classical Japanese poetry ever since watching the incredible anime Chihayafuru, which Madhouse actually produced concurrently with Hunter x Hunter—they were on some heater in the early 2010s! Anyway big recommend.)
Michael Weems
2025-01-30 19:49:26 +0000 UTC"Gon's great but I feel like it would be exhausting to be his friend" - Jack in the early episodes (the wording is half remembered)
scarlet
2025-01-30 18:26:43 +0000 UTCIf you (correctly) see Killu as the protagonist of the show, it becomes impossible to not contend with how selfish, cruel, and scary Gon is capable of being
TrueLily
2025-01-30 15:44:46 +0000 UTCTo add to that: this is not exclusively a Togashi quirk. He uses it extensively, but this crop up from time to time in Japanese media. Another franchise who loves this trick is Fate where, for example, you will have a sword called "Excalibur" but with the kanji for 約束された勝利の剣 (sword of promised victory). Somewhat less common, but has cause problem in the HxH fandom, is when that same technique is applied in a different context, like when a word in a regular sentence has a 'pronunciation guide' that is a completely different word. I see this a lot in song, where one thing is sung, but if you look at the official lyrics there is a kanji with a different meaning in there. In Hunter x Hunter there is a particular infamous example, the malice/evolution one, that causes a lot of people to think it was a mistranslation but it was the case of the anime following only the pronunciation guide and saying one word, while in the manga there is underline a different kanji for said word.
Heatth
2025-01-30 12:15:29 +0000 UTCJust want to chime in with a note on the name of Welfin's Nen power, why the powers have two names in some localizations, and the weird stuff Togashi is doing with Nen power names generally. It's really super interesting but to get there I have to briefly talk about Jojo stands for comparison. In JJBA, Stand names are more or less all in English. It's a bit of a stylistic shortcut that makes them instantly read as cool sci-fi/fantasy jargon to a Japanese-speaking audience. Japanese people generally have a good deal of familiarity with English because it's a required subject in school, but few are fluent, so Araki gets around the legibility problem using furigana—pronunciation guides usually placed over difficult or unusual kanji. In Jojo's, a character will say for example "My power is called 「暗青の月」" (plain Japanese for Dark Blue Moon) while the pronunciation guide next to it indicates to the reader that the character is pronouncing this by saying the English words "Dark Blue Moon." In Stardust Crusaders these are always direct, literal translations as far as I remember. (Later on in Jojo's the Stand names are all bands and albums and stuff, which are just treated as foreign names and not translated.) Togashi also gives Nen abilities English names. The Japanese VAs are using English loanwords when talking about their powers, and these English names are the ones the subs give when they only give one name. However, Togashi goes a step further by fully divorcing the meanings of a name's kanji spelling and its English pronunciation given in furigana. Welfin's power is pronounced "Missile Man", but spelled with the kanji for "egg" and "man": 「卵男」 Many of the kanji spellings for power names are nonsense compound words Togashi has made up, which have no defined Japanese pronunciation. Pitou's power Terpsichora is spelled 「黒子舞想」 which gets localized as "Puppet Master's Serenity". Those first two kanji indeed form a word meaning puppet master, but the last two don't mean serenity. They signify "dance" and "idea" respectively, don't combine into a valid compound word, and aren't in common use as stand-alone words. Knuckle's power that summons APR is spelled with the wild construction 「天上不知唯我独損」 which totally lacks any of the connective tissue that would make it legible Japanese, and is rather just a series of kanji signifying (in order) "heaven," "ignorance," "only/merely," "I/me" "alone," and "loss," which the HxH wiki renders as "Heaven doesn't know my suffering" but the localization team decided to depart from altogether in favor of "Bankruptcy, Chapter Seven". All of which is to say that since the pronunciations are totally separate, the kanji spellings are free to be wholly semantic/symbolic and not phonetic, and Togashi takes full advantage of that fact to do some wild things with the Japanese language that are very difficult to localize.
Michael Weems
2025-01-30 09:39:09 +0000 UTCAlso came to comment on the exhibition lol. It was so cool! I saw it when it was on tour in 2023. Seeing Togashi's original panels has made rereading the manga and following along to MCP that much more enjoyable.
potatonaught
2025-01-30 06:18:13 +0000 UTC@Jack the "PUZZLE" on that hxh tea towel is just the name of the Yoshihiro Togashi art exhibition that was held in Tokyo a couple years ago where that towel was sold. (thanks always for the episodes! i commented as soon as the tea towel was brought up and I'm excited to hear digging into the rest)
Ryan Gatts
2025-01-30 03:25:33 +0000 UTCIt’s there for me, odd.
Michael Neely
2025-01-30 02:14:32 +0000 UTCWhen I’m discussing HxH with my friends, I am the guy in the group who stands by the idea that Gon Freecss is one of the biggest antagonists of the show. So, very fun to me to hear Gon compared to a villain in this ep
JJMilez
2025-01-30 00:15:49 +0000 UTCHmm apple app is missing ep?
Forrest Shane
2025-01-29 21:57:16 +0000 UTC
