I’ve mentioned this multiple times now, over the last year or so, but I started putting an effort into expanding my podcast selection from just Actual Play podcasts to include some of my other interests. The ones I mostly settled on, thanks to them being adjacent to my favorite podcast (Friends at the Table) in some way or another, both wound up being media analysis podcasts. I studied English literature and literary criticism in college and found them both incredibly fun, so it makes sense to me that I’d enjoy podcasts that basically do that same thing but with movies or TV shows. Which is how I landed on listening to A More Civilized Age and the subject of today’s post: Media Club Plus. I technically started Media Club Plus first, since I’ve been listening not only since the day the first episode dropped, but from the day they streamed episode 0 as a proof-of-concept in order to get people to drive up their Patreon subscriptions to the tier that would see them spin off the Media Club Patreon episodes into their own podcast. The selling point of the show was that the main cast would feature a few long-time fans of the anime Hunter x Hunter and one person who had not only watched very little anime at all but had never watched Hunter x Hunter and had only expressed an interest in it after listening to their friends talk about it all the time. The stream was an instant hit and while it took a few months to get the show off the ground, it funded in less than a month after the stream, thanks in part to a large number of people increasing their pledges (myself included) to help push the group toward their goal. Since then, not only have they put out twenty episodes of the main podcast (an episode every other week), but they’ve also published three Patreon specials with one more imminently on the horizon [which released between writing this and it getting posted], covering a selection of Dragon Ball and Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure episodes. It has been a genuine delight to listen to the podcast go from a rough concept on a Twitch stream to the absolutely stellar analysis and insight that I make sure to never miss when it drops every other week, time allowing.

What really makes it all work is that three quarters of the main cast has seen the show already, start to finish, and are rewatching it as the fourth cast member, Jack de Quidt, watches it all for the first time. This means that you’ve got three people trying to keep themselves calm as the fourth makes wild and sometimes eerily accurate predictions about the future of the show, almost all of which get brought back up again as they either come true or are proven false. Listening to some of the cast members barely keep their laughter in check when Jack says something accidentally insight or that unknowingly foreshadows some great event on the horizon is delightful. It happened at least twice in the second-most recent episode, where the cast just finally passed the halfway point in Hunter x Hunter. Jack is talking about something fairly innocuous, says something that just hits the nail on the head in a way they obviously couldn’t know about, and then poor Sylvie loses her fight to keep herself from laughing at what Jack said. Every single episode of this podcast is like this, flowing between insightful analysis that touches on tropes, the impact of music, the subtle themes of the show or most recent episodes, and the spot-on characterization of the show’s protagonists. Having this podcast to listen to adds so much to my second watch-through of this anime and I don’t know that I’d be enjoying it as much without the podcast making me slow down and really think about what I’m seeing.

The first time I watched the anime, I liked it alright. It got a little confusing at times and the pacing felt weird, but I didn’t hate it. I wasn’t super impressed with it either, though, and I’ve been wondering how I could have felt that way now that I absolutely love the show as I’m watching it all over again. Sure, I’m spending more time thinking about it and engaging with it, which definitely contributes to my appreciation for the show, but that alone couldn’t account for how much more I’m enjoying it. I’m sure some of that missing amount is made up of actually understanding the inner workings of the more complex systems of the anime’s world helps me sit back and relax a bit more from episode to episode, but I think most of that change in my feelings towards the show has to do with who I’m no longer watching it with. The friend who introduced me to the show, someone I’m no longer talking to after he chose nostalgia and a dumb wizarding game over our friendship (pretty damn explicitly) did a lot of hedging and prefacing as we watched Hunter x Hunter. He didn’t spoil anything, nor did he share any details, but he introduced each arc with an explanation of what he thought was wrong with it and what we might wind up fast-forwarding through or skipping entirely, most of which kept me from investing myself in the show as we watched. This wasn’t the only show I wound up enjoying a lot more when I watched it on my own, without him, so I’m not entirely surprised that I’m enjoying Hunter x Hunter more for at least partially the same reason.

At this point, I’m just having a great time listening to each episode as they come out. It is the highlight of my every-other-week, when each new episode drops, and I used to have a night every couple of weeks where I’d watch the episodes of the anime that were going to be discussed in the upcoming episode of the podcast, usually followed by listening to the freshly dropped podcast episode as I got ready for bed afterwards. The only reason I’ve stopped is that I’ve been getting home from work too late to really do that all in a single night, so hopefully I can get back to it sometime soon! I miss having evenings that I could full with relaxing and enjoyable activities like watching anime and listening to an anime discussion podcast. I can’t recommend it enough, to be quite honest. As long as you enjoy discussion of anime, critical analysis, or Hunter x Hunter, this show will have something for you. And you’d better get in on the ground floor during their first year since each episode is two to three hours long (just chock full of great audio) and the twenty episodes they’ve got out as I’m writing this (at least twenty-one as you’re reading this) will take you a while to listen through. It’ll definitely be worth it, though! I promise.