#bepis censorship

[eleooooooo]

Oooooooh it’s so hard learning new things :,) but I try

[twilidramon]

My JoJo (anime) Thoughts

So I got caught up on JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and finished the Part 4 anime last night, and I just felt like writing down some of my thoughts. I’ve never read the manga so this is purely about the anime. There will be spoilers but I’ll make it as brief as I can!

tl;dr - I liked the series and can’t wait for Part 5, I am now in JoJo Hell

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Subbing / Censorship

I just wanted to put a quick, tiny note of this. Obviously with a series like JoJo, where characters are named after pop culture icons/songs, there’s gonna be some censoring of their names. Thankfully, most of these instances were spoiled for me due to the Best Friends’ Eyes of Heaven playthrough, in which they just spew spoilers for all Parts from their mouths like crazy. I don’t really care about spoilers so this wasn’t an issue for me, and it actually helped. My ears were able to pick up on the characters’ real names that weren’t spoiled for me (because I was expecting it) so I was able to autofill them in.

Some of the censored violence bothered me to a degree - it was annoying seeing those black bars everywhere; but most especially in scenes containing nude little boys running around with impunity with no censorship to be seen. Like, what? 

Part 1, Phantom Blood | Part 2, Battle Tendency

Just gonna lump these two together, since they’re pretty much lumped together on Crunchyroll, and I don’t have too much to say on them. 

Phantom Blood was a great introduction to the series, illustrating the conflict between Dio and the Joestars which would last a lifetime. The characters were... good: watching Speedwagon narrate and freak out to Literally Everything was hilarious and Zeppeli was fun, but Johnathan felt flat and very Typical Protagonist - there wasn’t much else that seemingly piqued his interest in the show other than Honor, Erina, and Killing Dio, aside from his majoring in archaeology which barely came up except for the Mask. The fight scenes were gory and great and the show did a good job at showing how frightening of a creature Dio was and became.

Battle Tendency was fun and full of humor, and I really like young Joseph Joestar. The characters were much better this time around imo and the dynamic between Joseph and Caesar was Good Stuff. Also each time Joseph said oh no it gave me a year of my life. Lisa Lisa was badass but I wish we’d gotten to see her actually fight Kars or the other Pillar Men, who were great villains as sort of stand ins for Dio. The final battle felt perilous and exciting, and Caesar’s death (though entirely preventable, because come on Caesar think for two seconds) was heart-tugging. Especially Joseph finding out. I didn’t cry, but that hurt.

I liked both these parts, but I liked Battle Tendency more. I might give Phantom Blood a re-watch, since my boyfriend joined me mid-BT and never saw that Part. We’ll see.

My boyfriend’s favorite joke by the way: “How did Joseph lose his arm? In a Kars accident.”

Part 3, Stardust Crusaders

Okay, so, there’s a bit to say about Stardust Crusaders.

Firstly, the negatives - characterization kind of takes a backseat on Jotaro and Kakyoin, and Avdol for pretty much the entire show. Avdol probably gets this less due to his importance to Iggy, Polnareff, and Old Joseph. But Jotaro being the main character... he doesn’t get much. Which sucks - because Stardust Crusaders ends up feeling more like its about Polnareff than a JoJo at all, until the end that is. Also the villains are more one-note and flavor-of-the-week because there are so many villains. They have to be in and out in the span of an episode or two (or three, in rare cases) because there’s a whole Tarot deck and Egyptian pantheon to get through in the span of ~40 episodes.

This is also the Part where the censoring of both names and gore/violence begins to stack up heavily. Jotaro’s smoking is censored for heck’s sake (just the part where his lips and the cigarette meet, not the whole cigarette) and there’s a scene where Polnareff is being eaten by the clay dolls of his sister and Avdol that is just. Really bad. But baby Polnareff can run around with his bepis hanging out so...????? I don’t know.

But I liked Stardust Crusaders - it’s a really fun globetrotting adventure story of this group of dudes just trying to reach DIO, and a lot of my gripes are tiny in comparison to that. Jotaro doesn’t feel like a main character because he doesn’t get a lot (Kakyoin gets far less, lbr) but when Jotaro does get something, holy shit is he a badass! He can do things!! He’s smart and crafty and kind of an asshole, and he really cares about his grandfather and his mother even though he takes any chance he can get to badmouth them. And his fight with DIO at the end? No other character could have done that - that fight was made for Jotaro and DIO. Literally.

The Stands were interesting to me, because there’s just so much that can be done with them. Every Stand is unique (except Star Platinum and The World, hueh hueh plot stuff) and it felt like a natural transition from Hamon - which returns in this! Old Joseph still uses Hamon, and in conjunction with Hermit Purple at times! The introduction of Stands make for an odd thought when you realize that Joseph had Hermit Purple even in Battle Tendency but, whatever, things get retconned all the time. I’m sure its fine.

Like I said, my gripes on Stardust Crusaders are small and have a lot to do with how the story is structured as a whole. JoJo hasn’t really dealt with this many main characters yet and of course some are going to get shelved, which is why...

Part 4, Diamond is Unbreakable

... Which is why I like Part 4 so much. The animation style has changed to a much smoother look, which helps a lot and the color palettes are weird and crazy and it works. DIO is dead (for good this time, right guys??) and the story focuses on a more compact narrative, in the town of Morioh, the people in it, and how a great big mystery can go unnoticed in a small community if you’re not looking for it.

Our heroes this time are Josuke and his group of friends, which slowly grows as the story goes on. Mainly, it focuses on Josuke, Koichi, Rohan, and Okuyasu (who gets the backseat too much, honestly) - but there are plenty of side characters like Yukako and Jotaro - yes, Jotaro is a side character in this and he’s better for it imo - to use now and then.

The story first focuses on the discovery of the Stand Arrows, and how they give people pierced by them Stands. Josuke and his small crew chase down Red Hot Chili Pepper throughout the town and deal with the Stand users that Okuyasu’s brother created with the Arrow - which sounds a lot like Part 3, right? Well yeah, it does - but there’s something else to it that I really liked. It wasn’t always the main focus of the story to fight the Stand users. There are joke episodes! Episodes where Stand users aren’t even bad guys (Shigechi and Tonio)! And these characters come back - Rohan is one of them, and he’s important in the second half of the Part.

So they defeat Red Hot Chili Pepper and his user and on to part two of DiU - Kira. And boy, is Kira a doozy. His Stand power is a foil to Josuke’s - destruction versus restoration - and he’s just. Good. A really, really good villain. He’s smart and deceptive and Not At All There and he’s good at what he’s doing - and its only when Rohan and Koichi meet Reimi, a ghostly girl killed by Kira and Rohan’s childhood friend, that they even know something is wrong in Morioh in the first place.

So they chase Kira, and they find him after the death of a friend makes the group emboldened. Kira gets away, but the hunt is on. Everyone is looking for signs of Kira, and he gets cornered again, which leads to even more shit. There are more Stand users but this time they’re more disposable, as they’re assassins more than just people hit by circumstance. The final fight of Crazy Diamond versus Killer Queen was great and the Bites the Dust episodes were heart-wrenching to me. 

There’s just a lot that I liked about DiU and I could talk for a while, lol. But I won’t, this is long enough as it is.