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Let's Watch JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

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Vehrec said:
Oh sure, but even villians like Dio or Kars aren't immune to the winds of 'Fate' even if they don't directly interact with it like Oingo and Boingo. These two are just being jerked around directly by the winds of fate, rather than having intermediaries like 'luck' or the heroes ruin their hard work. I suspect that, in the hands of a more canny and cunning user, Toth would be even more cryptic and misleading.
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More likely, Thoth wouldn't manifest for someone more canny and cunning unless their fate was to be more successful.
 
My theory on Thoth is that it's basically got the same issue as Holly's Stand. The Stand User is lacking in will, and so the Stand is busy trying to get him killed. Unfortunately for Thoth, its ability is less directly useful for that than Holly's. So it's limited to displaying futures in ways that will end in suffering for Oingo and Boingo.
 
So the Oingo Boingo brothers are obviously inspired by the band Oingo Boingo and if one takes a look, you can easily find the songs that inspire and create their character.

And Thoth ability to see the future was inspired by Araki's own concerns about his future as he just got married.
 
Krika said:
In their defense, Thoth hasn't yet been shown to be wrong - everything it depicts does happen, it just lacks in the surrounding context and is in the hands of a pair of dumbasses who don't appear to realize how powerful a tool perfect prophecy can be, even with the limitations involved.
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Thoth's entire gimmick is that it will always tell the future, but it's interpretation by everyone is fucked because it's a comic book that only ever shows the next few pages.
 
Fun fact: in the fangame adaptation of this arc, Boingo is depicted exclusively in the Thot artstyle, even in 'real life'. In fact, this is the only time the artstyle appears, because the comics themselves are described but not shown. I'm glad to learn that he doesn't look like an inhuman gremlim in canon, because seeing him for the first time, right next to the walls of muscle that normally populate Jojo, was a frankly disconcerting experience.
 
Sir Bill said:
I... totally misread that as Dio having a part time job as a street vendor, and I was trying to picture how exactly DIO would handle trying to sell food to passersby.

...

It probably involves a lot of shirtless posing and taking advantage of Jonathan's physique to earn more sales.
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"How many kebabs have you sold today?"

"How many loaves of bread have you eaten in your life?"

"!!!" "DIOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"
 
Leila Hann said:
Here we can see them explaining their powers to no one for the audience's benefit. Which is especially irritating because the intro had already SHOWN them use their powers by this point and made this completely unnecessary and intrusive.
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The opening bit is interesting to me on the level that Boingo interacts with what appears to be a manga-ka apparently visiting Egypt. I've long been curious if Araki based the man on anyone in specific -morbid comedy would point to 'is based on himself, or a male ancestor who would've been alive in this time frame' but I really have no idea- or if it's just a more general depiction of a Japanese tourist/manga enthusiast/manga creator. (That morbidly ends in their bizarre death)

Leila Hann said:
As they do so, Boingo laughs. He has the weirdest laugh in this entire show, which is saying something. It sounds like he's repeating the words "ooky cooky" over and over again while also choking to death. Even Oingo is weirded out, despite presumably being used to this.
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Part of what's weird about it is he's trying so damn hard to do a maniacal laugh, but he's got such confidence issues or whatever that it takes him a bit to rev up and actually do it. It's actually one of his more sympathetic moments, weirdly enough, making it clear that he's not just socially awkward but has some deeper issue that leads into his larger social awkwardness and his psychological over-reliance on his brother.

It makes me wonder what his backstory is. There's gotta be a story there, realistically speaking.

Leila Hann said:
Well, on one hand, it makes sense that they're thinking this way. On the other, it makes little sense that they'd only decide that NOW IN EGYPT is the time to start doing so, given how relentlessly they've been attacked all along the way here. It comes across as way too convenient. Like Araki didn't think of Dio's agents trying to just poison their food or kill them in some other mundane way until now, so the good guys and the bad guys both coincidentally realize the possibility at exactly the same time.
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I think there's a meta issue at work here that you actually indirectly touched on.

See, there's a trend in the last few battles, which Oingo and Boingo's handling is the logical 'endpoint' for: the story has been treating the villains more and more like actual people. Initially, Part 3 did the usual fiction thing of villains being villains and who gives a shit about motivations or even basic thought processes about what their actual objectives are or how they would go about achieving them. The shapeshifter who pretended to be Kakyoin, for example... what was he trying to do throughout that arc? Why did he pretend to be Kakyoin? When and how did he arrange to replace Kakyoin? When a random civilian turned out to be another mass of his Stand that Jotaro stumbled into completely coincidentally... how the heck did he set that up??

There aren't answers to any of these questions because the story only cared about the horror aspects, stuff like 'people you thought you knew turn out to not be who you think they are', with the fact that a human being was ostensibly directing the mechanics not mattering in the slightest.

As the story has moved forward, it's been the case the audience gets to actually see some portion of the latest villain's process. When Enya was trying to avenge her son, a sizable fraction of that sequence was presented from, essentially, her perspective. Death 13 has a lot of gaps (How the hell did Dio recruit this demonic baby in the first place, anyway?), but once again we got to actually see our antagonist trying to figure out how to arrange things. Water-guy trying to kill our crew? Also got presented a lot more from his perspective, with many of the more baffling/egregious elements happening when we're not getting his perspective. (ie the thing with the fish, which doesn't actually make any sense)

So... yeah, actually, I think Araki really didn't think of Dio's agents trying to poison our heroes or the like until somewhere around this point, because the early villains were clearly not being approached as thinking entities trying to figure out how to achieve their goals with the tools at their disposal, but more recent villains have been shading into that territory, which in turn means Araki has actually been thinking about things from the villains' perspectives.

Leila Hann said:
One of the other patrons complains that the cola he ordered is warm. It's not clear if Oingo sabatoged the refrigerator to ensure that the Crusaders would want a hot drink instead, or if this is just a lucky coincidence for him and his brother. The Crusaders decide to go to the cafe across the street, but someone even dumber than Polnareff picked up his still-burning cigarette butt and put it in that cafe's outdoor garbage can.
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It's extremely heavily implied by the manga that the idiot who set the trash on fire is Polnareff, and Polnareff is too stupid to realize he's the idiot and thus calling himself a moron. (For one thing, in the manga it's not a trash can, it's a trash bag, so most likely Polnareff's cigarette was blown by the wind into a trash bag that was lying on the ground)

Oingo and Boingo's 'battle' pretty heavily revolves around comedic stupidity from characters who are oblivious to their own stupidity, our heroes included.

(Also, that's not how you spell 'sabotaged')

Leila Hann said:
And, to make sure it's really Jotaro, Polnareff asks him to do it with five cigarettes simultaneously.
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That's not why Polnareff is doing that. He just wants to see Jotaro do the trick again. This 'battle' is all about oblivious idiocy.

(Also yes it's really jarring that Jotaro apparently has a cigarette trick he's shown off to Polnareff before. I ignore the dissonance because this entire sequence is centered around comedic idiocy to the point of being out of character in general and it's a good 'battle', but yeah I literally cannot imagine Jotaro going 'hey guys wanna see my neat trick')
 
Ghoul King said:
It's extremely heavily implied by the manga that the idiot who set the trash on fire is Polnareff, and Polnareff is too stupid to realize he's the idiot and thus calling himself a moron. (For one thing, in the manga it's not a trash can, it's a trash bag, so most likely Polnareff's cigarette was blown by the wind into a trash bag that was lying on the ground)

...

That's not why Polnareff is doing that. He just wants to see Jotaro do the trick again. This 'battle' is all about oblivious idiocy.
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In the anime the fire thing is kind of confusing. We see Polnareff drop his cigarette butt in the street. Then we hear someone else shout that "a spark from some idiot's dropped cigarette got into the trash," which is such an unlikely event (and how the hell would that guy have even been able to tell that this is what happened?) that I have trouble seeing how you could rightly blame Polnareff for it. Then Polnareff himself says "what kind of idiot throws a lit cigarette in the trash," implying that someone else must have picked his cigarrette butt up and thrown it in there.

The most sensible explanation, based on how it was depicted, is that someone else did pick up Pol's cigarette butt and throw it in the trash, so I assumed the talk of a "spark" was down to weird localization or something.

While they're in the car, Polnareff explicitly tells Jotoingo to do the cigarette trick to prove that he is actually Jotaro in the anime version.
 
The cigarette trick is also about proving he is Jotaro in the manga. Two pages before it Polnareff explicitly asks whether he is a fake or not. A page is then spent on Oingo panicking before Polnareff then asks him to do the trick.
 
Walker Of Chaos said:
The cigarette trick is also about proving he is Jotaro in the manga. Two pages before it Polnareff explicitly asks whether he is a fake or not. A page is then spent on Oingo panicking before Polnareff then asks him to do the trick.
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Uuuuh. Yeah? And your point is?

What actually happens is that Polnareff goes 'hey, you're not a fake, are you?', Oingo does his best to put on a Jotaro act (Among other points invoking Jotaro's catchphrase), and... we get several panels indicating that time passes, this response having apparently satisfied Polnareff. Then Polnareff, apparently bored, starts grinning and pushing Totally Jotaro Man to do The Trick, You Know, That Trick You Showed Me, and completely fails to react to how Oingo has no idea what he's talking about, apparently taking it as more like Jotaro not knowing which trick he's talking about. (Because I guess Jotaro has shown Polnareff enough tricks that it's plausible he wouldn't instantly know which one Polnareff was asking to see again??) Nor does anything about Polnareff reaction to seeing Oingo do the trick suggest he's taking it as proof that it's Jotaro.

Sure, you could deliberately invoke alternate character interpretation and choose to believe that Polnareff knows this isn't Jotaro and is deliberately messing with Oingo (For one thing, it lets you go 'obviously the cigarette trick is something Polnareff made up, and Jotaro never did any such thing', which is a nice bonus), but this runs contrary to the on-panel evidence for what authorial intent is. Ultimately when Polnareff and Joseph meet up with the real Jotaro, they're honestly confused that he's there ahead of them, utterly failing to realize that the out-of-character Jotaro was not, in fact, Jotaro, never mind they've previously run into the issue of Stands being used to fake identities and so should be suspicious that one of their own acting out of character is evidence of an enemy Stand in action.

So no. The cigarette trick is Polnareff honestly wanting to see Jotaro do it again, not a test to prove it's Jotaro.

Either that or Araki did an incredibly bad job of communicating what's supposed to be happening in this scene, which has happened often enough in Part 3 I can't discount it.
 
To be fair to both Joseph and Polnareff, they could have genuinely forgotten about Yellow Temperance. Neither of them were there for that incident and Jotaro probably wouldn't have said more than a few words on it, not to mention that Joseph is probably starting to go senile and Polnareff is Polnareff.
 

I should also note that the subtitles on Crunchyroll were briefly utterly amazing. I believe they've since scrubbed the letters off the book, but the internet has immortalized their shame.
 
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S3E3: Khnum's Oingo and Thoth's Boingo (part two)
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    • Meanwhile, Boingo tries to catch up with the jeep, while reminding us that he has at least two brain cells to rub together as opposed to his brother's 0.5 at best.



    Seriously, Oingo. Just surrender. Drop the disguise, tell them about the bomb, and hope they'll let you live in exchange for information or the like. I'm rooting for you here, just...accept that you can't win.

    This would be really tragic if Oingo was monologuing about how he'd rather die and leave his little brother all alone in the world than disappoint Dio, in an obviously brainwashed and cultish way. He doesn't though, so this remains a morbid farce about someone who just can't bring himself to cut his losses.

    Which, well...actually makes Oingo an awful lot like Phantom Blood era Dio himself. I hope this is intentional, because it gives this generally silly and inconsequential episode a much bigger thematic impact if so.

    Jotoingo next tries to escape from the jeep by claiming to be sick...when they're driving toward the hospital. Seriously, this guy. It's funny enough to make up for the weird, out-of-nowhere misogynistic joke that comes next, in which Polnareff accuses the Joestars of having been women in previous lives based on some stupid fortune teller thing he picked up somewhere, and Joseph actually seems to be provoked by this.

    ...

    You know who I really miss? This character right here:




    I know, this aspect of Joseph's character only existed for three or four episodes. But still, regardless of whether you interpret it as stemming from actual gender identity matters or as Joseph just being very secure and comfortable in his masculinity, this was something cool about Joseph.

    Ah well.

    ...

    After flailing with increasingly incoherent desperation (especially when Polnareff is about to tear open the booby trapped orange, and Jotoingo just barely stalls him by saying that Iggy might have gotten it dirty...through the ostensibly intact rind...somehow), Jotoingo finally convinces the other two that he's about to lose bowel control and needs to get out of the jeep right now unless they want a serious mess on their hands. They let him out, and (after another hilarious fakeout where Jotoingo thinks he's been caught out) toss a roll of TP his way before driving along.

    Thank god, Oingo managed to save himself! Now, all he has to do is run a few meters to get out of Stand range and he can drop the Jotaro disguise (or hell, just drop the face part of it while keeping the hair and hat!) without endangering himself. The one thing he absolutely needs to do as soon as possible is not look like Jotaro Kujo. That panel in the Thoth comic didn't show any context for the explosion, so Oingo has no way of knowing if it takes place in a vehicle or outside of one, or even if its caused by his orange bomb at all rather than a different explosion. What it DID show clearly was a man who looked like Jotaro - with Jotaro's face specifically being clearly visible - getting killed by an explosion. Not having Jotaro's face comes before anything and everything else.



    Due to the concerns that Jotoingo raised about Iggy having had that orange for a while, Polnareff decides to toss it out the window after all. It hits the ground right at Jotoingo's feet, and he steps on it.

    The most pathetic part of this is that the jeep had already visibly passed on ahead a little ways when Polnareff threw out the orange. It's exceedingly unlikely that either he or Joseph could have even seen Oingo if he dropped the disguise entirely at that point. But, well.



    Boingo catches up to his dying brother, and swears to...um..."avenge" him...despite the mangled Oingo's insistence that he not continue this suicidal course. There's an actually kind of touching emotional moment here. But, it's then cut short by the guy that they mugged earlier that Boingo was sure wouldn't ever be relevant again, who has followed Boingo here with a group of his friends.



    What's kind of really, really fucked up here is that their former victim tells his friends that he'll reward them with some of his stolen wallet money if they "beat the shit out of these two." One of the two in question being very obviously severely wounded, and the other being a 12 year old kid who didn't even actively participate in the crime.

    If this is what the general Egyptian public is supposed to be like, then it becomes much easier to root for the Muslim Brotherhood Brothers than it already was.

    Anyway, Joseph and Polnareff reach the hospital, and are surprised to find Jotaro already there, healthy and monotonous as ever, and wearing his stupid coat. As they puzzle over this, an ambulence arrives to bring in a pair of patients in serious or critical condition. Joseph and Polnareff briefly notice that one of their clothes looks familiar, but dismiss it and go on to visit Kakyoin and Abdul.



    Well, they're still alive at least. I guess the hyper-grotesque art style in Thoth made the injuries to Jotoingo look worse than they actually were. While these two definitely aren't nice people, I'm not sure if I can really say that they're worse than anyone else in this story, including most of our designated heroes (they're certainly not coming across worse than Speedwagon did in his initial appearance, and if he can be redeemed then I'm hopeful for these two even if that's another story that we'll never get to see). Between the genuine love and care they seem to have for one another, and the sheer charm and charisma of their bumbling escapades it's really kind of hard not to be relieved at the above image.


    This was hands down the best episode since "The Man Possessed by an Evil Spirit." Better than "Death 13" by a significant margin. Most of the things that bothered me about this episode are just contradictions with previous ones that I care much less about, with only a tiny handful of pretty minor flaws being innate to these twenty-two minutes of animation.

    Aside from the mostly successful comedy, the novelty and charm of these bumbling villain protagonists, and the sheer joy of hearing what Jotaro's voice actor can do when he isn't stuck being Jotaro's voice actor, this episode felt like it was actually saying something. Like some of the better moments of the first two parts, this was a lesson in the importance of humility, and the futility of trying to control fate. It also made much better use of the ancient Egyptian motif than the previous two-parter did, being highly reminiscent of an actual New Kingdom legend in theme and structure (to be fair, we don't know how the Tale of the Doomed Prince actually ends, due to the papyrus being damaged. But I've always suspected it probably ended about as well for the prince as it did for the protagonists of this episode).

    Also, while the MBB never did get a show or manga series of their own to the best of my knowledge, this episode ends with the end credits for a show of that description, complete with a unique outro song sung by Oingo and Boingo's VA's.



    I think my favorite part of this bit is that I've seen enough extremely shitty low budget middle eastern children's cartoons to know that this is, in fact, a convincing approximation of an extremely shitty low budget middle eastern children's cartoon. The character design that I've seen has never been as horrific as the Thoth comic style used here, but it's often mildly horrific in sort of the same way, and the weird sort of incompetently stylized backgrounds and terribly character animation are spot on. Even the song sounds about right; both musically, and in the way that the lyrics are intoned that's slightly reminiscent of Arabic despite being in Japanese. You can see it for yourselves here if you haven't already.


    Next episode is the two parter "Anubis." If it manages something like the quality of this one, then perhaps Stardust Crusaders might still be able to redeem itself in my eyes.





    The next episode does not, in fact, manage anything like the quality of this one.
     
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    • Leila Hann said:
    How did he know they'd stop in that town?

    How did he know they'd decide to get shawarma instead of buying groceries?

    Do we really know that there was only one shawarma stand in that town anyway?

    He just happened to be working in the one exact restaurant along the entire goddamned India/Pakistan highway route that they'd be going to?

    Did Dio know that there'd be enemies approaching through that specific vector when he recruited Dan however long ago?
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    ...Maybe Oingo and Boingo told him?

    I mean, if he has an (iffy) oracle on payroll, maybe he's taken advantage of that before?

    [I think I'm joking]
     
    Simon_Jester said:
    ...Maybe Oingo and Boingo told him?

    I mean, if he has an (iffy) oracle on payroll, maybe he's taken advantage of that before?

    [I think I'm joking]
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    I mean, DIO also has oracle stuff in that Purple Hermit-lookalike he's used all of....once?

    So like...in theory, between that and Thoth he can maybe do a decent job of knowing where the Gang will go before they do?
     
    Though, if that were the case, I kind of wonder how Dio reacted to how he was portrayed by Thoth.

    The comic book... isn't the most flattering, and I'm not sure if we've seen it, but I don't imagine Dio looked great.
     
    Leila Hann said:
    It's funny enough to make up for the weird, out-of-nowhere misogynistic joke that comes next, in which Polnareff accuses the Joestars of having been women in previous lives based on some stupid fortune teller thing he picked up somewhere, and Joseph actually seems to be provoked by this.
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    Joseph doesn't come across as offended to me, just... confused, among other points asking what the way you hold your hands has to do with anything.

    Though maybe I'm just projecting because Polnareff confuses the hell out of me in general anytime we get to see him outside the context of fighting bad guys. I'd be more offended by the stupid crap he says but the series so consistently treats him like he's a funny idiot that I'm inclined to suspect we're kind of meant to be cringing and rolling our eyes at Polnareff's antics.

    Leila Hann said:
    (especially when Polnareff is about to tear open the booby trapped orange, and Jotoingo just barely stalls him by saying that Iggy might have gotten it dirty...through the ostensibly intact rind...somehow)
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    It's a 'we don't know where that orange has been' thing. Like maybe Iggy pulled the orange out of a ditch and so it's covered in germs.

    Would you want to eat an orange a dog had pulled out of a toilet, even if the rind had no blemishes?
     
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