posted by on December 13, 2025
Continuing drawing hxh characters based solely on the descriptions of them from Media Club Plus by @friends-table. This is Bonolenov, member number 10 of The Phantom Troupe.
It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, but I realized recently that a lot more of the episode transcriptions have been completed than the last time I had looked. As always, I’m primarily bottlenecked by how quickly I can assemble the descriptions.
Jack: On the left-hand side of the image is a embalmed person.Sylvi: [laughing]
Jack: Uh… she is sitting calmly, uh, she is, she is not the focus of this scene, which is so fun. Between the sort of gorilla fellow, uh, uh, in the first image, you know, it turns out not being a main character whatsoever, and this person kind of just framed sideways, you know, in the very edge of the frame. I really like this. Uh, this person has been wrapped, head to toe, in bandages, it looks like. Uh, alternatively, they could be chitinous. They could be, this could be plates, almost like a, like a. Uh, a woodlouse, or a beetle, or an armadillo, or pangolin — [chuckling] the plated animals. But I do think that this is an embalmed person. Uh, she is wearing lace-up, red boots. She is a fashionable embalmed person. And, what looks like possibly sunglasses, something on her face, some sort of, something on her face. She’s got a sort of Brendan Frasier Invisible Man type thing — oh, shit, maybe she’s invisible. Classic way of revealing an invisible person, is wrapping yourself up in bandages. So that’s a possibility.
Sylvi: [giggling]
Jack: Could also just be an embalmed body. Can’t tell if she’s wearing boxing gloves. Do you see that?
Sylvi: Mm-hm.
Jack: She’s got a sort of boxing glove-like thing. That could be a motorcycle helmet. I don’t know.
Jack: You know, we are now so firmly— and after the whole shit in the Heavens Arena, we are now so primed to be like, each of these people are Nen specialists, and each of them is going to do something fucking weird. So, as Togashi is just introducing the Phantom Troupe, like, faster than lightning, you know, one appearing almost before the other has left the screen, all you can think is—
Keith: Very conspicuously using each other’s first names. [laughs quietly]
Jack: Yep. Yeah, exactly. Is, “What is this person’s deal? What is their Nen power?”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Here comes Bonolenov, a mummy who is wearing boxing gloves.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Keith: And shorts.
Jack: [laughs quietly] And shorts!
Sylvia: Yeah. Oh.
Jack: Bonolenov is great. If you are— I know we’re kind of blitzing through these descriptions quite quickly. There are 13 members of the Phantom Troupe.
Sylvia: Yes.
Jack: We will—
Keith: This is how it feels in the show, though, too.
Jack: Yes. We will invariably talk more about them as they— as focus falls on them in later episodes. But Bonolenov is a gangly mummy wrapped head to toe in bandages, bright circular eyes peeking out, and wearing boxing gloves and shorts. They are— what are Bonolenov’s pronouns? He/him?
Sylvia: He/him.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: The Bonolenov-Franklin-Hisoka trio has such Dark Universe vibes. [Keith laughs]
Jack: I don’t know shit about Bonolenov.
Keith: He barely has said anything!
Jack: That’s not quite true. Here is what I will say. I don’t hunt down Hunter X Hunter spoilers, and I’ve been really lucky not to have anything absolutely gigantic spoiled for me ever.
Sylvia: Thank god.
Jack: Very occasionally, and I want to keep it that way, very occasionally I will just see a completely contextless screenshot from Hunter X Hunter in some like, image compilation or something, and I saw an image of Bonolenov and a load of like, really sad faced emojis [Sylvi and Dre laugh] which is one of the funniest context-free spoilers to get, because it’s like either something really moving is gonna happen with Bonolenov and I’m gonna be there, or this person cares deeply about this mummy. So that’s exciting.
Sylvia: You know… [Keith chuckles]
Jack: That is the only thing I know about Bonolenov. I’ve seen an image of him and then a bunch of people responding with crying emojis. Which is, that’s funny to me.
Jack: No, I think I, I think I see where you’re coming from. Brief Hanzo aside, Hanzo, and I realized this the other day, is actually fairly high on my list for potential Spiders, potential Spider replacements.
Sylvia: Oh!
Keith: Interesting.
Keith: You don’t think his, uh, his, y’know, ethics or whatever would prevent him from being a Spider?
Sylvia: For some reason I thought you were gonna say his bald head.
Dre: Damn.
Jack: Is anybody bald in the Spiders? Bonolenov might be bald.
Sylvia: Bonolenov, potentially, yeah.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Anyway.
Jack: And Bonolenov speaks in these episodes.
Keith: Yes.
Jack: And there is… [sighs]
Sylvia: Yeah?
Jack: It is so funny. “What is Bonolenov’s power?” is clearly a sort of a mystery that Togashi has been holding onto, and we get an answer to that. But the way Bonolenov starts talking, it’s as though he didn’t even realize he forgot to give him lines before.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: It’s like, he speaks completely normally. [Keith laughs] He just has a sort of thin little voice, and he talks like all the other members of the Phantom Troupe. He has questions about what their plan is. He bickers.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: It’s as though he was like, “Oh shit, right, Bonolenov has lines.”
Jack: There’s no buildup to this. Or rather, there is buildup, and it was the entire fucking Phantom Troupe arc, of us going, “What’s this guy’s deal? What is going on?”
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Underneath the bandages, Bonolenov is a slim, dark-gray-skinned man with big red eyes, pointed teeth, missing ears, and a pattern of holes all over his body. When I say holes, I don’t mean, like, wounds? He is perforated.
Keith: Mm-hmm.
Jack: He has a big hole in his chest. He has holes in his fingers, through which you can kind of see through them. And as he moves, wind blows through them, and they kind of, like, whistle and scream.
Keith: Yeah, like a bottle.
Dre: Mm-hmm.
Jack: And as he does a lot of complex boxing moves, the narrator appears.
Keith: Yes.
Sylvia: Yeah.
Jack: Who says, “Bonolenov—”
Keith: I have a whole quote of—
Jack: Oh, yes.
Keith: Oh, you have the whole quote? Okay.
Jack: No, no, no. I don’t have the whole quote.
Keith: “Bonolenov is descended from the Gyudondond people, a small tribe that was chased into obliteration by industrialization of their land. When the Gyudondond males reach the age of three, needles are used to puncture holes in their bodies. By performing different movements, an assortment of sounds can be made using the holes of various sizes. Before fighting rival tribes or wild animals, they would play a battle song using their own bodies as instruments. They are known as the Bapu, dancing warriors. They believe the more beautiful the sound, the more powerful spirits are believed to be summoned.”
Jack: This is fraught.
Sylvia: It is.
Dre: Yeah. It sure is.
Jack: Yeah. The idea of making cursed music through the movement of your body is fantastic, and the sound design on Bonolenov is great.
Dre: Yeah.
Keith: It’s really good, yeah.
Jack: Whenever he moves, there are these sort of, like, two toned, like, atonal whistling. Although there’s another sound key that becomes associated with Bonolenov that we will talk about in a second. I know Keith and I are both excited to talk about it. [Dre chuckles] Let me see if there’s anything else I want to talk about with Bonolenov. It’s fun, right? Because, like, this is the first moment in these episodes that a previously hidden Troupe power is revealed and is, um…how do I put this? High concept Nen?
Keith: I should say, really quick: I don’t think that we said that Bonolenov’s power is called Battle Cantabile, Transform This Melody into Strength to Fight: Prologue.
Jack: Bonolenov drops Jupiter on him. This is really, really funny.
Sylvia: [chuckles] “Drops of Jupiter” would be way better if it was about this.
Keith: Yeah. Sorry, drops a train on him? Is that what you said?
Sylvia: No, drops Jupiter on him.
Keith: Yeah.
Sylvia: But my brain went, “Drops of Jupiter.”
Jack: I don’t know what “Drops of Jupiter” is.
Keith: No, that song is by the band Train.
Sylvia: Oh, right!
Jack: Oh, I see.
Dre: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jack: This is really funny, because it is clear that he is not dropping actual Jupiter [Keith: No.] on him, because that would destroy everything. But the thing that he does drop on him is so phenomenally destructive [Sylvia: Yeah.] and does actually look like the planet Jupiter.
Keith: Yeah.
Jack: Like a gigantic marble. This thing is the size of, you know…it’s immense. It’s the size of a space station or something.
Keith: It blows a visible hole in the, like, web kingdom.
Sylvia: Yeah, this web kingdom gets fucked up! [Jack chuckles]
Jack: The, like, effects on this are crazy. The camera is shaking. There’s fire everywhere. You see explosions from the outside. And, yeah, it’s Jupiter. It is the planet Jupiter tumbles on this ant, leaving an immense crater and a squashed ant at the bottom. It’s brilliant. And then, as the narrator says, you know, “The Phantom Troupe has traveled to Meteor City to protect their home from the Chimera Ants,” we get the ongoing montage. It’s really fun, the way that sometimes they will end, like, episodes midway through a fight at, like, cliffhanger moments where it seems like the characters are going to be beaten. Not really. The Troupe are just kicking the shit out of these ants.
Shoutouts to the Friends at the Table Transcription team for their work, which made my job easier with this one: https://sites.google.com/view/fatttranscripts/more/media-club-plus