Private Lee O'Malley
Easygoing Egoist
- Location
- Gensokyo
Let's Watch JoJo's Bizarre Adventure
- Thread starter Leila Hann
- Start date
- Anime
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
Fuck you don't talk shit about Diesel
Fucking beautiful.
Real talk though, the level of blatant plagiarism on display in that comic is the only thing more insulting than the art, and both are equally emblematic of Rob Liefeld despite the comic not being made by him. The man inspired a very special blend of laziness and hackiness that you just don't see nowadays (insert RWBY joke here, laugh, then please move on because one mod intervention sparked by an off-topic dead horse is too many already).
Basically.
Again though: By that logic, this is going to end with Dio turning out to be the good guy all along. Though yes, Fire Emblem is distressingly blatant in indulging in "Good = Beauty," though there are at least several more rugged characters like, in the very game referred in this comic book, Dorcas, a bandit you recruit who is handsome, but in a very masculine, scarred way rather than the typical bishounen.
Private Lee O'Malley
Easygoing Egoist
- Location
- Gensokyo
Yeah there are exceptions to that rule, e.g: Narcian who is only second to Oliver in terms of beauty is fucking evil and Gonzalez, while not very handsome, is still a good guy.
- Location
- New Delhi, India
There are few JoJo protagonist casts that don't look like supermodels in general.
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
Will A. Zeppeli, a.k.a. "Sexy Monopoly Man."
More like the sweaty lovechildren of supermodels and lumberjacks.
- Location
- Space
Is it spoilers to argue that point? Because I've got some arguments about why certain parts are incredibly charming but ridiculous as beautiful protagonists.
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The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
But Dio is attractive in a more effeminate way than the hyper-masculine protagonists, which in shounen usually means he's the rival and/or archnemesis. The Aztec-brain-spike mask is filling in for Char's mask from Gundam.
I'm pretty sure it is.
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
Probably best to either wait until the appropriate Part or just take it to the JoJo threads.
- Location
- in the trash
Throughout the entirety of Jojo part 1 to 3, there are only a handful of villains I can think of who are actually ugly looking. Part 2 in particular is full of GLORIOUS ABS.
Well, the zombie mooks tend to look like the shambling corpses they are.
Well, the zombie mooks tend to look like the shambling corpses they are.
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
God I can't wait for the Part II memes.
- Location
- Wherever
I don't really see it as derogatory. A bit condescending, maybe, but more paternally condescending than 'haha you worthless scum you thought you could ever match up to me' condescending.
If anything, calling Johnathan a pup is actually kind of building on what he's already said. There's an element there of sort of implicitly explaining Johnathan's expected defeat as not being a matter of worthiness or competence or whatever but just an unfortunate inevitability from the difference in their respective experience levels. If Blueford was viewing Johnathan as just fundamentally less capable, less honorable, etc, there'd be no need to essentially say 'Johnathan, you're going to die, but know that you're going to die because you're inexperienced, and if only things had been a bit different you could easily have been a match for me'.
A comparison could be made to RPG level mechanics, particularly in regard to online competitive stuff: if your character is Level 10 when you duel a Level 99 character, you dying is just sort of a given and is not a commentary on how good you are at playing the game, it's just a commentary on how much time has gone into developing that particular character. Johnathan has The Right Stuff as far as Blueford is concerned, and it's just unfortunate he hasn't ground out another fifty levels or so.
(And then Johnathan wins anyway)
I honestly took Tarkus' hugeness as 99% cartoonish exaggeration. It's maybe a bit of a misstep inasmuch as like more modern anime and whatnot tends to outright shift art style and otherwise signal that what you're seeing is meant to be representative of the emotional experience instead of the physical experience where JoJo's Bizarre Adventure-at-this-time-not-talking-spoilers-ohmygodthisisapain art style just consistently holds to a relatively matter-of-fact approach to visuals (In the manga: the anime's usage of crazy colors and whatnot is a clear break from the manga in this regard, and probably for the best) that makes the default interpretation of anything you're seeing being that it's more or less literal a representation.
But I'm pretty sure it's meant to be conveying the emotional experience of having an ancient warrior who has seen far more battles than you and is better-equipped than you and is an utterly fearless undead monstrosity looming over you, always watching, etc etc, rather than 'yeah Tarkus is just a literal giant'. I don't recall the manga having any actual battle plotpoints revolving around his size being a thing? Though I barely remembered them before you got to this point so it's possible my lack of memory in this regard means nothing.
Oh right! I'd forgotten this plotpoint! I actually really liked it because like you get a lot of stories that go 'the undead feel no pain' and combine that with 'zap them with holy healing energy that feels good for the living and it BURNS THEM IT DOES' and instead of really building on the thematics at work it's just a death ray of life energy and it's really boring. JoJo's actually taking the healing aspect and having it take away undead traits such as feeling no pain as a result makes not only surprisingly sound logical sense but further has a great thematic element to it.
I think that's less cynicism and making some questionable assumptions about the likely consequences of being wrong. They had their literal life-and-death struggle between a superhuman monster and a solar-powered boy go on for several minutes, with the initial chunk having little effect on each party. In a strictly real-world universe sure your general chain of thought is a good point, but while JoJo's has more realism to it than you might intuitively expect from the name and all it's still fundamentally a story operating on its own terms. Based on what we've seen so far, Johnathan being wrong was a risk, but more like 'why did you let the boss do 20 HP damage out of your 200 HP when you could've finished them off on your turn' and not 'he stabs you through the heart and you die'.
Like yes Johnathan is holding to his ideals and there is some potential unfortunate consequences here, and JoJo's has already shown it's willing to eg have his father die as a fairly direct consequence of idealistic behavior, but I think you're putting the scene into a framework that doesn't reflect the clear dynamics of the story itself.
English is actually a mandatory class in Japan and has been for decades. The main thing that's impressive about JoJo's is how often its use of English actually makes sense to native English-speakers without needing to know some weird bit about how English phrases have been adopted to mean totally different things from what they mean outside Japan. ('Dandy', for example, is a fairly badass English word in Japanese usage, where for native English speakers it's more likely to be used as a way of not quite calling someone effeminate/gay/wimpy)
It's really more 'actual characters are usually pretty'. Like, one-off bosses who have no plot relevance at all are often pretty bizarre-looking, fat, strange facial shape, etc, but outside of the recurring Sickly-looking/Ugly Evil Priest that goes back to like the SNES games anybody who is plot-relevant for more than one chapter and/or recruitable is likely to reach a fairly high minimum bar of attractiveness. (Egregious example: the recruitable Barbarian in Fuuin No Tsurugi, who's supposed to be so hideous people literally think he's a monster, and he's actually pretty decent in appearance, just not an anime pretty-boy) And there's some surprising exceptions, such as the one ugly evil priest in the Telius games you can actually recruit in Radiant Dawn, which I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in having been completely and utterly shocked to learn was a thing.
And I mean there's a certain logic to making it so the faces the player has to look at most regularly are all easy on the eyes. Imagine having to spend literal hours of dialogue staring at a throbbing sore because of all the times your old mentor or one of the villains was talking. I think Fire Emblem does go a bit too far in the opposite direction (Again: 'hideous' Barbarian that isn't), but broadly speaking there's a perfectly sound motive behind it.
- Pronouns
- It/They
I thought we weren't supposed to talk about other parts.
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
The crazy colors are taken directly from the covers of the manga and other art that Araki has put out in artbooks and the like, and more recently the digital colored versions of the manga based on those covers and artbooks. They aren't really breaking from the source material so much as combining elements of different parts of the source material.
- Location
- Patriarchova
Are you sure about that? I've been making jokes about JoJo's apparent indestructibility, but the show SEEMS to have been suggesting throughout this fight that if Bruford really did get to bring his sword down on JoJo's neck, it would kill him. And that's what JoJo was letting Bruford do in the hopes that he'd get ahold of himself at the last second.
I mean, if JoJo's neck actually IS swordproof then you're right, and my jokes to that effect are rendered completely unironic. But is that really the case?
- Location
- in the trash
Jonathan has Standard Shounen Protagonist Quantum Durability. Things that should kill an ordinary man don't, unless it's blatantly obviously kind of thing no one would be able to survive without explicit supernatural fuckery, like getting your head chopped off or getting ripped in half, then suddenly they revert to the durability of a normal human and promptly expire.
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Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
But Jonathan himself doesn't know that, so that isn't a valid argument for him in-universe deciding to stand down and let things play out. You're essentially arguing that he's the Shounen Action Manga equivalent of Deadpool and is fully aware of his invincibility due to narrative demands.
- Location
- Wherever
If I'm entirely and completely honest based on my larger experience with JoJo's, yes I believe Johnathan taking a sword to the back of the neck would fail to chop right through the spinal column and instead be a Serious Injury that would seriously impair Johnathan, require Hamon help from Zeppeli after the fight to fix, and just generally be a pain in the neck, but not actually kill him.
And to be fair, chopping through a spine for a clean kill is actually really hard, so that wouldn't even actually be as unrealistic as you might think.
(Unless it was being depicted as an attempt to slash the throat? That's not how I remember it or how you described it, though)
You mean 'then suddenly they get to monologue for five minutes and go gently into a peaceful death'.
People all over routinely poke fun at how long it takes people to die in anime, manga, JRPGs, etc. Sometimes it'll take fifteen full minutes of dialogue for someone who has taken a rapidly lethal injury to actually, you know, expire, such that it ends up feeling like they're faking to milk the drama!
- Location
- in the trash
When did I argue that? I'm just pointing out that Jonathan follows the standard shounen trend of being able to shrug off basically anything that wouldn't be almost immediately fatal or crippling, not that he knows he's invincible due to plot shields.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
But that's an entirely metatextual argument. Anime protagonists never die of seemingly-fatal wounds, so JoJo won't, either. But JoJo doesn't know that he's an anime protagonist, and has no reason to believe that Bruford's sword strike won't kill him.
- The carotid artery, jugular and/or windpipe are on the way to the spine from every angle except from behind, so even if he fails to penetrate the vertebrae at all, the odds of survival are slim.
- If he makes it only halfway through the vertebrae, then JoJo's spinal cord is still severed and he's just as dead. The only up side is that Bruford's sword might get stuck in his neck.
- Bruford is ostensibly a highly-experienced swordsman, who probably understands what edge alignment is, and swinging a fairly heavy sword designed for this kind of work. Also, he's a swordsman in anime, so I'm guessing he could cut down a tree with that thing if he wanted to.
- The above was before he became a superhumanly strong zombie, one of whom demonstrated the ability to decapitate a horse with only either a knife or his bare hands.
- Location
- Wherever
???
Okay seriously on what basis are you assuming Johnathan actually believes he would die if hit? Because to the best of my recollection there is absolutely nothing suggesting he believes that, and there is no reason to assume he believes that. In fact, his habit of face-tanking so far rather implies Johnathan functionally does 'know' that he's an anime protagonist, inasmuch as his behavior is in alignment with the story he exists in.
The only metatextual part is the part where I'm saying 'yes I think JoJo's actually works this way, based on what else I've read of it'.
You are the one who is making an argument that's not based in the show-so-far, but instead is based on this weird idea that Johnathan's expectations of his own durability are magically lesser than what he has already personally experienced repeatedly.
So... you didn't notice the part where I indicated I was under the impression the strike was to the back of the neck? Because otherwise I have no idea why you would make a statement that can be summarized as 'unless it was exactly as you believe, your statement would be wrong'.
I'm also frankly baffled as to what kind of point you're trying to make. This is a story in which vampires can freeze people with their blood because of super bodily control. My primary point in saying 'surprisingly difficult to cut through a human neck' isn't 'surviving a sword chop to the back of the neck and continuing to fight is perfectly realistic!' My point is 'doing so is well within the bounds of JoJo's propensity to operate at the outer edge of realism with periodic flying razor blade hats that give no fucks about realism'.
I mean, if you want to die on the hill of making sure everybody knows that a hypothetical scenario of how JoJo's would probably operate is not how reality would operate (Never mind that we have magic solar zombie vampires as part of this scenario, making that kind of obvious), you're free to do so, but it seems like a poor use of time to me.
The Narrator
Disembodied Voice
- Location
- Somewhere Offscreen
...I'm sorry, are you seriously saying that your argument is that JoJo fully believes that he's immune to death by decapitation?
And you believe that this the reasonable position to take, and are implying that the contrary position is the baffling one?
Hmm... it seems that I did miss you implying that strike would be coming from behind. It's been a few weeks since I watched the episode in question, so I don't recall what angle the sword was coming from, but "from behind" seems the least likely one. I would expect a shounen protagonist like JoJo to be looking at the guy who's about to kill him.
Then why did you bring it up in support of your "JoJo would live through it anyway" argument in the first place?
Daniel Estacado
ZA WARUDO
Eh, Diesel could have been worse with its plagiarism, after all it didn't rip character designs straight from the source like Incarnate did*.
*a comic that was super plagerism on Bleach, made by Gene Simmons' son.
- Location
- West Michigan
Assassin's Creed traditionally does this for named antagonists, since the very first game, and it isn't even a Japanese property. Ubisoft... *checks* Montreal developed just about the entire mainline series except Rogue, Syndicate, and the new one.
Leingod
Immaculate Blooming Lotus
No, just the plot lines, the power system, and the actual role of the characters. Though yes, Incarnate is also disgusting in the fact that it plagiarizes not just from Bleach but from all kinds of sources, down to and including DeviantArt accounts. And the worst part was that Nick Simmons was a weaselly piece of shit about it and refused to admit it even when the book was cancelled "until the matter is resolved between all concerned parties" i.e. never.
Though at the very least that produced the immortal hilarity of Tite Kubo professing on Twitter that he was a lot more interested in the fact that Gene Simmons' son was making comic books than the fact that said comic was an act of shameless plagiarism, largely of his own work.