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Let's Watch JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

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After the nostalgia critic and avgn, I have trouble with listening to reviewers.

It is not you, but the tone that I have seen and heard from many of them left me very cynical.
 
Of the 3 and a quarter parts I've read, SDC was definitely the worst. Also, of the parts that I've both read and watched (1 & 2), the manga was better in both cases.

My main takeaways from the popularity of Part 3 in Japan and the mangling of the story in the Part 1 & 2 adaptations are that Japanese teen boys have shite taste and David Productions either has no idea what the fuck they're doing or that they're deliberately catering to people who enjoy all the dumbest and worst aspects of shonen.
 
Yeah, Stardust is probably the most generic(alongside Phantom Blood, since it's Fist of the North Star with vampires), but I can forgive that since it's also Araki introducing a completely new power system, and he kinda needed to figure out what he wanted from Stands.
 
sahara said:
Of the 3 and a quarter parts I've read, SDC was definitely the worst. Also, of the parts that I've both read and watched (1 & 2), the manga was better in both cases.

My main takeaways from the popularity of Part 3 in Japan and the mangling of the story in the Part 1 & 2 adaptations are that Japanese teen boys have shite taste and David Productions either has no idea what the fuck they're doing or that they're deliberately catering to people who enjoy all the dumbest and worst aspects of shonen.
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Maybe they rushed the first season because they weren't sure if they would get to animate all of Jojo?
According to the director, they stretched out part 3 because they felt bad about cutting all the earlier content.

Sorry I don't have an official quote, this is from a cosplayer who met him at a convention(Warning: there are spoilers for future parts on her account)

Aside from that, welcome back Leila!
I hope you had a fun vacation.
 
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    • Oasis said:
    Maybe they rushed the first season because they weren't sure if they would get to animate all of Jojo?
    According to the director, they stretched out part 3 because they felt bad about cutting all the earlier content.

    Sorry I don't have an official quote, this is from a cosplayer who met him at a convention(Warning: there are spoilers for future parts on her account)

    Aside from that, welcome back Leila!
    I hope you had a fun vacation.
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    Eh.

    It wasn't a vacation so much as I had a scientific publication deadline suddenly thrown at me. And then the hiatus continued for a few days extra due to a medication side effect that neccessitated an ambulance ride, and which I'm still recovering from.

    But thanks for the thought.~
     
    Welcome back!
    I do have to say that I agree with many of the points you've made here. When I first read the manga years and years ago, I found myself disappointed at times as, even though there were good moments here and there, it felt more like a monster of the week thing with the end goal of doing a thing that they are trying to play up as being important, than an epic journey fighting enemies along the way to defeat an evil overlord. Also, it felt like to me that Polnareff was the main character, given how much focus he's given.

    This part is a bit of step back in the storytelling department. However, it does introduce stands, and the mistakes from this part are not repeated, mostly. From what I heard (don't know if I said this before) He wanted to do an '80 days around the world' kind of adventure, but his editors/bosses didn't really understand that.
     
    Leila Hann said:
    And then, by the end of the second episode, Jotaro has perfect control of Star Platinum without having to undergo any sort of training, practice, or self discovery whatsoever (unless that one impromptu punchout with Kakyoin counts), instantly snatching away the main story hook we were given and replacing it with the much less personal and more tiresome and contrived one about Holly. And that's not where the theft of Jotaro's protagonism and characterization ends. Honestly, it's only the beginning.
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    That's a very insightful way of putting things, and is indeed an issue I had with... pretty much everything up to this point. I can be pulled in by the attempts at clever battle setups (Though unfortunately several of these are pretty terrible) and so was able to pull through, but even though I didn't find myself disliking Jotaro I did find myself wondering when we were going to learn more about him or see him make a decision of more direct consequence.

    Leila Hann said:
    ...honestly, now I think about it, Stardust Crusaders Part One probably does a better job of capturing the authentic tabletop roleplaying game adventuring party than any of the direct TTRPG adaptations I've seen or read. A bunch of manic depressive lunatics murderhoboing their way across the land, half of them lacking any clear reason to be with the party and everyone periodically forgetting what the campaign is actually about in favor of just dicking around, occasionally fucking each other and the NPC's over in spiteful and juvenile ways. Like such a D&D party, the characters aren't even remotely believable or compelling as characters, but the players could easily be having tons of fun. A show about the gaming group playing the Stardust Crusaders would honestly be better than Stardust Crusaders.
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    GM: "Goddammit Jotaro's player, stop narrating about your trenchcoat billowing dramatically in the wind. You're inside a ship. There's NO WIND."

    Jotaro's player: "But it's so cool!"

    Kakyoin's player: "Hey, if I kill Jotaro, do I get to loot his body?"

    GM: "But... there's nothing worth looting- no wait, why do you want to kill him?"

    Kakyoin's player: "lol bored."

    GM: "Oh god. Come on guys, I'm feeding you a steady stream of combat encounters with barely any plot crap between them as is!"

    Kakyoin's player: "Still bored."

    GM: "Okay, you know what, let's have a talk in the other room, okay? I have a compromise you might like."

    Jotaro's player: "I hate it when they talk about me like I'm not even there."

    Joseph's player: "You know, I really thought playing an old man version of Joseph was going to be a lot more awesome, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything except senility jokes."

    Polnareff's player: "When are we going to get back to my dead sister plotline, anyway? I put a lot of effort into that! I want to actually do something with it. The GM promised me we'd get to it soon, but nothing is happening!"

    Jotaro's player: "I also hate it when nobody reacts to me talking at all."

    Joseph and Polnareff's player: continue conspicuously ignoring Jotaro's player, discussing how frustrated they are with plot stuff

    (Abdul is, of course, a GMPC who got killed off people because the players kept whining about DMPCs, and ultimately gets brought back because man fuck these players)

    Leila Hann said:
    oseph is still a mostly consistent character, but he's just a less memorable one than his younger self. As Gioia and I discussed in the DrunkJo posts, it also really does seem like the show wants to say something about aging and becoming old with Joseph, but I'm not sure what that something is aside from "old people get lots of debilitating diseases."
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    My takeaway at this point was that, essentially, aging may cause people to 'settle down' or whatever, but that they're still fundamentally the same person they always were. Old Joseph is still a cheeky asshole who enjoys getting people's goat and whatnot, for example.

    I in part took it as something of a contrast with how the first couple of parts played around with older figures who cleaved to tropes about Experienced Old People. Joseph as an old man hasn't become a Wise Old Man like the Hamon master from Part 1, all serene and whatnot. He's still the coarse, rude, wacky weirdo from Part 2.

    Leila Hann said:
    It's been increasingly bothering me that, aside from mentioning that Joseph lost his hand "in battle," the characters haven't mentioned the pillarmen or the stone masks at all. They talk about Dio constantly, but never about the things that actually turned him into a supernatural threat...which also happen to be the things that make him an object lesson in the futility of self rejection.
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    This always felt to me like an odd, inconsistently-implemented 'each Part stands alone' thing. In a lot of respects, Part 3 just quietly ignores major elements -particularly the supernatural elements- from Parts 1 and 2, with Stands having taken center stage. But... we've still got Joseph around, plot-relevant and everything, and in fact he's part of Part 3's core cast. He still has Hamon, too, no attempt to suggest he's gotten rusty and can't use it anymore. We're bringing back Dio, which among other points functions at all due to him being a vampire, not to mention there's the whole thing of him being attached to Johnathan's body being why Jotaro, Joseph's, and Holly's Stands are activating. So... the attempt to quietly ignore a lot of past stuff doesn't really work.

    I personally don't mind the lack of talk about Pillar Men since everybody who knows about them has good reason to believe that issue is truly gone, but that's only in a direct sense. There's still the issue that Part 2 established that the Stone Mask isn't some one-of-a-kind relic, but rather there's an unknown-but-large number of copies left over from an ancient civilization. Joseph, if nobody else, really ought to be concerned about the possibility of Dio managing to find a Stone Mask and restart his prior attempt to conquer the world via vamping everyone up.

    And on a different level, while Dio is personally important to deal with for our heroes -because otherwise Holly's Stand will kill her- there's really no evidence he's actually important on a world stage if you don't assume he's found a Stone Mask or similar. It's not just that, as you say, the original narrative makes a point of illustrating how Dio isn't impressive, that in fact he's a shell built around a need to think himself better than others rather than actually being better than others. In Part 1, Dio was a vector for the real threat: the Stone Mask opening up the possibility of an explosive growth in superhuman horrors that can only be put down by special powers that require an absurd amount of training or one-in-a-million luck to be able to use at all.

    Part 3 is instead putting the focus on Stands and as a result leveling the playing field. The story hasn't hinted that Dio's Stand is particularly more impressive than any of the Stands we've seen thus far, and while they're basically all quite alarming just for the possibility of virtually untraceable killers operating secretly among us, none of them has been anything where you go 'yeah, I'm pretty sure this dude could conquer a moderately-sized country in a month, and keep on going at that pace'. There's also a subtle secondary point that the existence of Stands makes vampirism less significant -yeah, vampires are superhuman, but where in Part 1 you needed to be a Specially Trained Sun Wizard to be able to do much of anything to a vampire, in Part 3 anyone can randomly be blessed with a Stand that lets them fight on even footing with a vampire, not even touching on the possibility of a Stand ending up as a hard counter to vampirism. ("My Stand death rays things with sunlight! Which obviously includes that it murders vampires really well")

    Which would be fine if the narrative was focusing on how Dio's ongoing survival is a death clock for Holly, but as you've alluded to the story is playing up Dio like he, personally, is a big threat.

    When I first read the story, this wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but it was an issue lurking in the background. In particular, while the story could ultimately reveal that Dio's Stand justifies treating him like a Big Threat... this has the issue that Dio's Stand is being explicitly played as a complete unknown. If, say, Joseph and Abdul were indicated to know what Dio's Stand was but were withholding that information for some reason, I could've given the story the benefit of the doubt that we'd get to Dio and treating him as a threat on the world stage would suddenly make sense. Unfortunately... as-is, it doesn't matter whether Dio's Stand ultimately turns out to make him a threat on the world stage, because our heroes don't actually know that and aren't using that as the basis for treating him like this.

    More subtly, if Dio is a threat on the world stage... where's the evidence? Nobody's talking about him having secretly (As in normals are unaware) taken over a country, or anything else. If he is a threat on the world stage, most likely we should already have seen evidence of such.

    The really sad thing is the flesh buds do provide an obvious avenue for treating Dio as a serious problem, since there's the obvious application of using them on world leaders to become a shadow emperor, but... nobody acknowledges this. It's not even implicitly acknowledged by the narrative through, say, a town our heroes pass through being weirdly hostile and it ultimately turning out the mayor/whoever has a flesh bud. Flesh buds are just a way for the narrative to have Kakyoin and Polnareff be bad guys who join team good because they weren't actually bad guys.

    Again: this wasn't a dealbreaker for me, but it was a thing I was aware was extremely unlikely to end up working out pleasingly. I wasn't really invested in our heroes finding and beating Dio, except inasmuch as it would save Holly and unlike you I actually liked her, because I was pretty sure from fairly early on that the climactic encounter with Dio wasn't going to be satisfying. I was sticking around for a combination of Jotaro (Mostly on the basis of his initial showing) and for Stand battles presenting a wide variety of interesting thought experiments.
     
    Leila Hann said:
    It's unfair of me to draw on the original source material here for Phantom Blood when I haven't done the same thing for Stardust Crusaders and then to compare the two stories. But, since my friend linked this to me, I honestly haven't been able to see Jonathan's character arc the same way, and I think I'd have enjoyed the initial three episode arc of Phantom Blood a good bit more if the anime had kept more than the faintest hints of this. Before Dio came into his life, Jonathan was quite a bit more like Dio himself. Self-hating, insecure, pretending to an ideal (the "gentleman") for selfish reasons and in ways that got him into trouble, and a pretty overbearing and selfish kid all around. As soon as he was put in a situation that forced him to defend himself and someone he cared about though, he started growing into that very thing; not because he tried harder, but because he was trying for different reasons. Because he had a good reason to become a gentleman, instead of just wanting it for its own sake. Trying to actually make things better, instead of going out looking for trouble .

    Dio's arc in Phantom Blood was practically made of this. Dio Brando seemed to be motivated primarily by a massive inferiority complex. His constant need to assert superiority, dominance, and independence was born of resentment and shame for his upbringing, and his adult persona was based on a rejection of everything related to that upbringing (the alcohol, the not mentioning his parents, etc). This comes to a head when, unable to keep winning everything forever, Dio rejects humanity itself. Only, rejecting humanity still doesn't give him what he wants, because what he wants is something nonsensical. Jonathan, who has grown into a proper gentleman now, always beats Dio through self sacrifice; by knowing his limits, accepting them, and doing what must be done regardless.

    I talked about this in my review of Battle Tendency, but it's really hard to overstate just how genius BT's opening twist was. A mask removes your identity. When you hate yourself and are unable to deal with your limitations, wiping your identity away can sound really empowering. But that symbolism gets turned on its head completely when we find out that there are hundreds of masks, produced in a vaguely factory-like setting, and that someone made them for a reason. Apotheosis turns out to just be dehumanization, of the most commodifying and exploitative form imaginable. In his quest for independence and dominance, Dio literally picked up a slave collar, placed it around his own neck, and declared that he had crowned himself king.

    The whole point here is that Dio is a bitch. He's an absolute laughingstock. He's self-sabotaging and pathetic almost beyond words.

    And that was good. That had a nice message, and relayed it cleverly.

    The rest of Battle Tendency involved dealing with the pillarmen, who were motivated by an ideology that was, essentially, just a more sophisticated version of Dio's neurotic quest. Kars, like Dio, didn't like what he was. Like Dio, he tried to become "better" by some ill defined and fantastical metric, and always seemed to favor methods that tore other people down. The more I ponder it, the more I think I understand what the show was doing when it had Kars immediately forget about his affection for plants and animals as soon as he could become them. What he has is never good enough. The only thing he cares about is becoming "better," and, like Dio, the first thing he does upon becoming "better" is try to torment and kill someone who has frustrated him in the past. Kars' quest was doomed from the beginning, because he never actually had a destination. Material gains are no substitute for self acceptance. I'm 100% sure that he would have found something else to strive for within days, if not hours, if he had defeated Joseph at the end. The sun he had just admired for the first time would lose all its charm for him quickly. And he's defeated by Joseph, who - while he's not necessarily a likeable character by that point - is nothing if not self loving and self accepting.

    And, this is why bringing Dio back after the defeat of Kars is absolute cancer.

    Forget the Versus Debate shit about Dio being a negligible threat to Joseph after his Battle Tendency feats, and how much Stands might mitigate the power balance, and all the rest of that stuff. My issue was never really about that (although the fact that Dio shouldn't be much of an in-universe threat to Joseph is sort of a symptom of the deeper problem). Dio as a character, as a concept, as something to be taken seriously and feared, was not only destroyed by the previous parts, but stomped under an iron-toed boot and ground into the pavement until there was nothing remaining, and that was part of the point. Dio coming back stronger than ever one hundred years later means...what, exactly? That he was actually right? That Jonathan's sacrifice actually didn't accomplish anything? That the human spirit can't really overcome misanthropy and self loathing? That Dio really always was Hot Shit like he constantly insisted, and not just a disposable rube fit only to be used and discarded by a stronger and smarter asshole?

    It isn't just that Dio is back. It's that he's back and the story is building him up as the Biggest Threat Ever. It's like the author started believing Dio's own narcissistic rants. It's been increasingly bothering me that, aside from mentioning that Joseph lost his hand "in battle," the characters haven't mentioned the pillarmen or the stone masks at all. They talk about Dio constantly, but never about the things that actually turned him into a supernatural threat...which also happen to be the things that make him an object lesson in the futility of self rejection.
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    I'm glad you've brought Dio up in this way, partially because I think that's an excellent analysis of his character and thematic role in the previous parts, but also because I think it's a solid jumping off point from which to continue this subject once you've finished Part 3. He's been pretty thoroughly out of focus in season 1, so there hasn't really been much to chew on in regard to his character yet. For better or for worse, there should be more to discuss once you've gotten through the rest of Stardust Crusaders.
     
    Hot take: DIO is only a credible threat because he's using Jonathan's body. He goes around shirtless as a reminder to the audience that Jonathan's body is the actual antagonist of Part 3 and DIO is a parasite along for the ride.
     
    NormalSightMan said:
    Hot take: DIO is only a credible threat because he's using Jonathan's body. He goes around shirtless as a reminder to the audience that Jonathan's body is the actual antagonist of Part 3 and DIO is a parasite along for the ride.
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    Hotter Take: There is no DIO, only Jonathan pretending to be DIO in order to drive Jotoro and Joseph into destroying the PATRIOT's AI and causing the world to descend into chaos.
     
    Hottest take: the true purpose of DIO's flesh buds is to create 13 versions of DIO across the world to fight 7 heroic Stand Users to create the Σtand (the ur-Stand from which all other Stands are crafted in imitation) in the course of their final battle to open Kingdom Hearts.
     
    We interrupt your regular schedule for an important revelation:

    I just now noticed that, looking at its shape, the stone that Joseph is wearing on his collar is NOT the aja after all. In fact, it's something different that I also mistook for the aja once in the past.


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    Either Caesar had a lot of those, or he kept taking the one back after each of his flings.
     
    Leila Hann said:
    We interrupt your regular schedule for an important revelation:

    I just now noticed that, looking at its shape, the stone that Joseph is wearing on his collar is NOT the aja after all. In fact, it's something different that I also mistook for the aja once in the past.


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    Either Caesar had a lot of those, or he kept taking the one back after each of his flings.
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    Clearly, Joseph engineered Caesar's death so that Caesar wouldn't take back the necklace. It all makes sense now!
     
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