#i've written the word higashikata way too many times today

[whos-hotter-jjba]

(Part 8) Higashikata Family poll maybe?

I feel like with the dad polls and the canon couple asks i've had so many Higashikatas recently, but hey, if it's what the people want, why not?

Higashikata Family Showdown

[shoechoe]

I just finished Jojolion today. Usually when I liveblog, I like to keep my actual critical thoughts about the story to a minimum and mostly just point out things I think are interesting and funny, but now that I've read the entire thing, I'll share my full opinion of it. (Word count: 1160)

Overall, I had a lot of fun with Jojolion. It has some great moments, themes, and characters, some even being some of my favorites in the entire series, I think. I loved the Higashikata family and how the story was all about them as well as the main theme of family bonds. The story tries to bait you into thinking that they're evil for a while, and some of them flip back and forth between being endearing and being evil, but then you learn to see them as all adorable weirdos just trying to succeed (...except Joshu, who was definitely a shitbag, and Jobin, who was kind of a dark-gray area in terms of villainy). Josuke also fits himself into the dynamic and is gradually accepted by them as part of the family, which was really sweet.

My favorite character in Jojolion is, without a doubt, Yasuho. I'm going to be honest, I think she's one of my favorite characters in the entire series. She was a lot of fun every time she was on screen, I love Paisley Park as an ability, and I just ended up caring about her the most out of any character. I think she and Josuke are really both the main characters; she's given pretty much equal importance to him and they go through arcs that parallel each other. Her backstor(ies) hit me like a truck each time, especially the one with her dysfunctional family and her father.

I also absolutely adored Yasuho and Josuke's relationship with each other. Paralleling Josuke being more obviously alone and unsure of his identity with his total memory loss, Yasuho is left essentially without a family as well due to her living as an only child with a neglectful single mother. Because of that, Josuke and Yasuho really only have each other for most of the story. There's also an obvious romance between the two of them that I actually liked and cared about, which is an accomplishment (usually, romances tend to disinterest me).

Even the characters I didn't like weren't too bad. Joshu was definitely the worst, but the story knew what it was doing with him and he didn't get in the way too much nor was his nonsense shenanigans left unacknowledged. In other words: he got the shit beat out of him constantly and ended up losing a limb by the end, so I'm satisfied. I still feel like his aggressive perverseness was... very unneeded, though.

Rai Mamezuku was another character I disliked. I have been informed by mutuals that he's a fan-liked character, but... I just don't see it, sorry. He was needlessly cruel to Yasuho and even drove a wedge between her and Josuke for a while to make room for a sort-of implied love triangle-thing with Tooru, and I just didn't like it. When he wasn't being a dick to my favorite character, he still wasn't doing anything that made me like him very much.

While there were a couple snags here and there, though, the characters are overall my favorite part of Jojolion. A lot of them were genuinely heart wrenching (Kaato, Jobin, and Tsurugi come to mind) and the relationships between them were really tightly written.

That being said, while the characters were written tightly, the whole of Jojolion was... not. This is where we get into some major issues I had with it: the noticeably worst thing about Jojolion was its story. I get the strong suspicion that there was no real plan here; it was messy and near-incoherent at times, especially towards the end, and it introduced far too many story aspects way too late in that resulted in a strange ending that visibly did not resolve all of the problems it introduced.

Tooru was an interesting concept of a main villain and I can't say I disliked him, but he shows up so randomly at chapter 81 and is only even confirmed to be the main bad guy at the last ten chapters of the story (and he's defeated before the last two of those). He didn't have enough time to introduce himself as a character and just kind of left me with a feeling of "huh?"

The final fight felt the most written-along-the-way out of the entire story. It felt like play-fighting with an annoying kid that keeps making stupid imaginary one-ups and rules to make themselves win. Soft & Wet's "Go Beyond" ability was... what do I even say about it? "Actually, Josuke had this super secret ability nobody ever knew about where he can make invisible bubbles that defy all of reality, including as the perfect counter to Tooru's ability!" What?

Not to mention all of the loose ends that were just... left there? Why do people get Stands when they go near the Wall Eyes? What was with the strange humanoid bite marks they all received? Was Karera Sakunami really intended to show up only once and never come in again? One of the first reasons given for Josuke to acquire the Locacaca fruit was to cure Holy Joestar-Kira's illness, paralleling Holy Joestar's illness in part three, but then Holy goes comatose and every last Locacaca fruit is destroyed, and she's just totally forgotten about with no follow-up as to what happened with her or any sort of resolution to her story. It was confusing and unsatisfying, to say the least.

The ending itself was also kind of odd. While it's nice to see what happened to Lucy Steel and get an alternate-universe Joseph Joestar, the weird fight with a random rock person from the 1940s felt like it was wasting time that could've been spent with a stronger conclusion to the characters we've actually been with the whole time. The very last scenes with the family in tears, yet the generations-long curse finally being broken was nice, but it still left me feeling odd.

I am of the opinion that Jojolion's story was a total mess; I feel like it tried introducing way too much way too late and ended up writing itself in a corner that it couldn't get out of in any satisfying way (and often didn't even get out of at all, in Holy's case). It was confusing to read and its last chapters had me going "Wait, it's ending already? But what about all of the things it totally forgot to clear up? No, don't say 'Part 8 End!!' Nooo!"

Though, if I had to pick between something with a really good story but bad characters vs. something with really good characters and a bad story, I would always pick the latter option. Jojolion's characters, as well as their relationships and arcs, were so good that a lot of them immediately rocketed into my main favorites.

Jojolion isn't bad, in my opinion- it has a lot of great moments, and when it knew what it was doing, it did it well. It just bit off a lot more than it could chew and that resulted in a very messy, though still enjoyable experience.