I finished watching Hunter x Hunter (2011) last night. I took a couple months off due to depression since the last arc deals with some family-dynamic stuff that hits a little too close to home for me to deal with if my emotional fortitude is lacking, but I’ve been doing better lately and I really wanted to catch up on Media Club Plus, so I sat down and watched the entire last arc yesterday (a week prior to this getting posted). It was so much better than I remembered. Not just this arc, but the whole entire show. I get why people love it so much. I can also see why the person who introduced it to me spent so much time editorializing and cut some parts out. If you’re not clued in to the deeper layers of the show, the metaphors the author was making in the source material and the depth enhanced by the decisions the adaptation team made while converting the manga into an anime, it probably seems like there’s a lot of fluff. Sure, there’s some, mostly in the form of the dropped plot threads that started showing up once the author started condensing his story in order to reduce the toll it took on him to continue writing and drawing it, but most of the stuff my ex-roommate called “fluff” is important deep characterization, incredibly specific worldbuilding, and the appearance of a narrator in order to help move things along. It’s such a well-crafted story that even the dropped plot threads get at least tidied up a bit, if not tied off somewhere, by the end of what I’ve seen. It’s not perfect by any means, but it’s definitely better than I thought it was after my first watch and I can clearly see why that’s the case now that I’ve watched it again.
Continue readingMedia Club Plus
Media Club Plus Is The Best Hunter x Hunter Analysis I’ve Ever Heard
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.
Continue reading