#insert dio meme here

[kotoprotranslations]

EPISODE 7 LIGHT NOVEL Chapter 6-9 English Translation

“I-I wonder what I should do? What shape should I make you? Should I turn your whole head to stone? Oh, yes, actually, you’re such a lovely lady, I-I’ll turn your head into a beautiful flower!”

The man spun his words together like a song as he stood before the chained Elnora. She surveyed the room as he talked. A table laden with all sorts of scientific implements, minerals, and chemicals stood directly in her line of sight. Old shelves holding jars of unidentified flesh chunks in formalin lined the walls. There were also stills filled with some sort of liquid and a number of flasks lying scattered about... and a rotted ball of flesh piled in the corner of the room. Bits of blue-gray stone lay buried here and there in the neglected mass, slowly and repeatedly building up into a bigger and bigger pile.

These were all his “models,” his failed projects. Once upon a time, they had been human. The pile had been moaning until just a little while ago. Now it lay silent.

“... If you want to make a flower, just make a real one,” Elnora grumbled. “Why’re you so obsessed with stone?”

He laughed, like the very thought was absurd. “B-Because I was sent here to produce stone, of course! Th-That’s the whole reason I’m here, to make more and more and even more! Wh-What should I mix with you, what would be the most fun? It is fun, isn’t it? There’s nothing more enjoyable than this!” He tossed some chemicals and minerals into a beaker and swirled them around, watching them combine with rapt attention.

“You got sent here to make rocks, sure, but what kind? Why are you trying to make them out of people?”

Elnora’s question drew him up short. “What kind...? Hm....” He considered for a moment, head tilting to the side. “I wonder... what kind was it again?” He thought some more, then shrugged. “Well, stone is stone,” he settled on. “I-I was told that something wonderful would come into being if I made stones from human bodies! I-I was born to follow that directive! So I keep making them and making them, and I discovered true happiness. I-It’s fun making stone! It’s fun turning people into stone! It’s wonderful!” There was no hesitation, no doubt in his eyes. He was wholly convinced of his own path.

Elnora snorted with a wry, humorless smile. “Huh... you’re so insane, it’s almost refreshing. But I guess that’s for the best. I wouldn’t be able to slice you to bits in my sister’s name guilt-free otherwise.”

“Th-There you go again. I’m telling you, I really have no idea what you’re talking about. Y-You talk a little too much, I-I’d really like if it you stopped, you’re distracting me.... Also, please quit kicking, it’s unbecoming. Y-You sent the last batch of medicine flying and ruined all of it.”

“You might not remember, but I do. Your face and voice are burned into my brain. You’re the man who killed my sister, you monster! And you’ve been treating people like toys for centuries!”

“B-Between the two of us, I think you’re the monster, though? Y-You’re some devilish creature that’s lived far longer than the laws of human nature would allow.” He stuck a needle into one of the test tubes and sucked up some of the muddy brown mixture within. “Y-You go around pretending to be a human, brandishing emotions like weapons! It’s laughable, really! Ahh, I-I think it’s time, don’t you? I don’t think I’ll get the results I want from a monster like you, b-but there’s still value in running experiments.” He approached Elnora, syringe at the ready. “I-I wonder what type of stone I’ll get from monster flesh? Wh-Whatever, even if it fails, that’s fine! I-I’ll just mix it with different stone. And – right, right, flower motif, let’s see if we can make a beautiful stone flower bloom!”

He grabbed her by the bangs and yanked, dragging her head up and exposing her pale neck. “Let me go!” she screeched, thrashing in his grip. “Don’t grab me like like that, monster!”

“H-Hey, now, don’t struggle, I can’t hit your veins like this. Y-You don’t want to be stabbed a bunch of times, right?”

“What part of ‘don’t touch me’ did you not get?! Demon!!”

She twisted and spat directly in his face. He paused for a moment with a disdainful grimace, but soon started chuckling again without even bothering to wipe his cheek. “Y-You say the strangest things. The Demon here is you.”

His free hand snaked around to grab her by the throat, squeezing tight enough that her bones threatened to crack. She choked and curled in on herself as she struggled for air that wouldn’t come, and still his grip never faltered.

“There we go, theeere we go, don’t fight, don’t fight, j-just sit still, it’ll all be over soon. There we go, good girl....” The needle approached the back of her neck. His eyes were alight with the joy that came from freely crushing her with his own two hands.

Yet even in the face of all that, Elnora still glared at him with pure venom.

I only want one second.

Just one. A single instant will do.

Give me the time I need to tear his windpipe, Mia...!!

She screamed in her mind loud enough to drown out all other thoughts.

The cold tip of the needle dug into her skin.

And then –

“Pierce through, Prison of Stakes!!!”

The door blasted off its hinges and several massive crimson stakes shot out of the floor at the feet of the new arrival, blasting out with such vigor that they pierced straight through the left arm of Elnora’s assailant, ripping it clean off his shoulder.

“Oh?”

Without a sound, the arm hit the ceiling and tumbled to the floor. The man stood stock-still, dumbfounded.

Elnora, however, screamed at the top of her lungs and lunged, teeth bared and aimed straight for his throat. He gave a wordless exclamation and hopped back a few steps, safely out of her range. She clicked her tongue and fell back.

“Don’t do that, Elnora,” chided the new arrival. “You’ll wreck your stomach eating that.”

“I’m not going to eat him, you know I’m a gourmet!” Elnora rolled her eyes and turned to face him. “More importantly, you’re late, idiot!”

There in the doorway stood Clemens, with Owl hovering just behind him.

“Please, you have to help me...! I finally found him... I found my sister’s killer...!” Elnora turned her hateful glare back on her captor, the chains around her wrists rattling with the force of her screams. “Help me tear him to shreds!”

“... Mia’s...?” Clemens lurched forward, most likely to rush over to her –

“Wh-Whoa there, p-please don’t move. There are a lot of valuable things lying around in here, I-I’d be very put out if you weren’t paying attention and broke something.”

“!!”

The man didn’t seem to care that his arm had just been blown off... he didn’t even seem to be in pain as he pointed the syringe toward Elnora again. Clemens froze at the glint of the sharp metal. “G-Good, yes, just stay nice and quiet over there, please,” the man said soothingly. “Ah, don’t get me wrong, I-I only happened to find her down here by chance, okay? I was trying to save her. Hey, look, look closely, do I look like the sort of person to do these sorts of things to a lady? She sees me as her enemy, I think she’s confused. I don’t mind.” The man swayed from side to side with a joyous, familiar smile. Not a single drop of blood spilled from the stump where his arm used to be.

These were not the reactions of a regular person. Owl raised his gun. “... Who in the world are you?”

“Aww.” The man blinked at him behind his thick, round glasses. His messy silver hair, tied back in a ponytail, shifted as he tilted his head, strands falling over the shoulder of the standard institute student uniform. This man was familiar. “‘Who am I’? I-I told you, didn’t I? I’m Dio. Dio Tis Tifnie. We’re friends, right, Rossignol? And yet here you are pointing a gun at me. Th-That’s so mean. You’re making me sad.”

“Sad? You? You were completely stone-faced when you saw Meg’s body, though.”

“Meg? Well – yes? I-I didn’t need her anymore.” The man shrugged as if he merely found things regrettable, as if he merely read about manners in a book and truly had no concept of what the correct emotional response should feel like. “You said you would be my friend, and I don’t need two friends in the Lapertes faction, so whatever happened to Meg was entirely inconsequential. H-Humans don’t think anything of it when a useless object breaks, right? Besides, she was a good-for-nothing vixen threatening the director – i-if anything, more people would be relieved than sad to see her gone, wouldn’t you say? Ah – right, right, in fact, all four of the people who died and turned to stone were awful people, t-tricking patients and stealing people’s money and lovers and whatnot. Y-You don’t need to grieve them or anything.”

Owl gritted his teeth. “So you did kill them. You warped their bodies.”

“Killed? Me? O-Oh, please, no, I told you not to get it wrong.” Dio’s eyes widened in a deliberate show of surprise. “That wasn’t me. I couldn’t. Do you really think someone as powerless as me could leave a dead body in a burning building, o-or string one up on the ceiling of the observation deck? Th-There’s no way. Plus, remember, when the body was found on the Castille side, I-I was with you, wasn’t I? How could I have left the body there then?”

“Not sure,” Owl replied easily. “It might be impossible, even, if you were a normal human. But if you aren’t a ‘normal human,’ then there’s no use thinking about it. A first-rate alchemist, no matter where they’re locked up, can undo all the locks on the door in a single second and go drink tea at a cafe several kilometers away before you’ve even walked out the door; I’m sure someone with wings could easily make the leap up to the top of the observation deck.”

That wiped the smile off Dio’s face.

“It’s obvious the four dead people are your work,” Owl continued.

“Based on what, exactly?”

“You said their bodies were transformed into stone from the start, where everyone else was saying the stone was fused to their bodies. Even I thought it looked like they’d been forcibly fused together, but you took one look at how their flesh changed to stone and determined it was a orper change in state. The only time I’ve ever seen a person change in composition so radically is when they’ve been afflicted with the Black Rose Disease – in any other circumstance, it’d normally be impossible. But if someone knew that it was possible, they might just throw around words like ‘transformed’ from the start... like you did.”

“I-I just misspoke, is all.”

Dio’s denial fell on deaf ears. Owl simply pressed harder. “There’s more. You were the first to identify the stone on Meg’s body as ‘seashells,’ and identify them as a metaphor for the sea god Glaucus, weren’t you?”

Dio sighed, “Well, you said it first, they were all metaphors for people Asclepius saved. The bolts of lightning stood for Capaneus, the horse legs for Hippolytus, and the torches for Hymenaeus, i-it was you who said they were all symbols of the people the god Asclepius revived from the dead, wasn’t it?! And the seashells symbolized Glaucus –”

“Asclepius didn’t resurrect Glaucus the sea god, he resurrected Glaucus the son of King Minos, ruler of the Aegean Sea. There are various takes on the story, though.”

For the first time, Dio’s constant stream of words ceased. “... Huh?”

“It’s a common misconception. There are a lot of characters in Greek myths called Glaucus.”

“... But that’s....”

“You made the same mistake, huh? For being in one of the factions that endorses Asclepius’ healing techniques, you’re not well up on his mythology. Sounds like you were lazy.”

“I – that’s.... but....” The word “lazy” clearly stung, only serving to agitate him further.

Owl soldiered on. “You were acting strange from the beginning. You belonged to a faction whose motto is to heal the heart and mind as well as the body, but when faced with Meg’s body you didn’t seem to have much of a heart at all.”

“That’s, but, I’m not in charge of that sort of thing! I was told it was okay to not have a heart, that it wasn’t that important, it was another individual’s job to learn the heart...!!”

“I’ll ask again.” Owl flicked the safety off his gun. “Who are you?”

The gun itself didn’t seem to frighten Dio, but he still trembled and muttered to himself. The calm, collected attitude he’d had not a few minutes prior had vanished without a trace. “I-I-I was just doing what I was told, m-making stone is my job, anyway, I didn’t have to do that part, it’s not my job to deal with these things...!” On and on his excuses went, his eyes flicking back and forth like he forgot Owl was even there.

Strange behavior aside, Owl opened his mouth, ready to ask for a third and hopefully final time.

And then someone sighed, long and loud. “... My, oh, my, to think that you can’t use your wits in even a trifling matter like this. You’ve really deteriorated, haven’t you? Perhaps I shouldn’t use dolls of your make for centuries on end.”

For a moment, Owl thought it was Dio himself speaking, given that the voice sounded the exact same... but no. That slow, wholly naturalistic manner of speech came from someone standing behind Dio.

Everyone stopped dead the second they saw him.

This person had the same face, the same hair, even the same glasses....

... This person was Dio. There was another Dio behind Dio.

“... What?”

Owl and the others were lost for words. Why wouldn’t they be? A second Dio had just shown up without warning.

“Well, you did just barely manage to hold out until the flask arrived, so I suppose that’s good enough. My next task will be to investigate the differences in time it takes for defects to present themselves per subject.” The Dio in the back grabbed the Dio in front’s head in both hands.

SNAP

“Hu...uh?”

With an audible cracking of bones, the first Dio’s neck twisted around 180 degrees. He blinked at his counterpart now that his head was facing backwards, befuddled, then collapsed to the floor with a resounding thud, dead before he even hit the ground.

“What have you done?!” Jack shouted, already preparing to spring over to the dead Dio.

Owl threw an arm out to stop him. “Don’t!”

Dio offered them an exceedingly gentle smile. “Yes, yes, you’re correct. This isn’t a human, so human treatments won’t work, and it’s just a lump of dirt, now, anyway, so you can’t revive it. Not even Asclepius could give it life.” He spoke so kindly, it was almost hard to believe this was the same man who’d just killed his own doppelganger in cold blood.

“A lump of...?”

“Yes. It wasn’t alive to begin with – it was a doll made of clay I had working on this Earth. It... hm, it was the alchemical equivalent of a... golem? Ghoul? One or the other. Either way, I shrunk it down and had it get close to humans to gather knowledge and perform various jobs for me --  a sort of telescope, if you will, for studying humanity. I extracted a good deal of knowledge from it while I sat up in Heaven, but using it for centuries like that... well, the deterioration was awful. Disposing of it really was the right call.”

Dio nudged the thing that used to be Dio with his foot, sighing to himself. The single light touch was enough to demolish the body all at once, leaving it to crumble into simple dirt clods on the floor.

“Its main weakness is that once it starts degrading like that, it gets obsessed with its own enjoyment. It even recently forgot the directive I laid out for it to make humans into stone. And not only that, it became completely absorbed in making sculptures out of inferior stone and playing strange games with humans... assembling a ‘soul’ really is a difficult prospect. I keep running into errors no matter how many times I try.” Dio glanced at the human remains piled in the corner of the room and sighed again, his shoulders drooping a touch. “So many valuable resources, wasted... I told it to take good care of humans and look how that turned out...” he muttered to himself. “We need more of that to sustain them, but this won’t do at all... ahh... there’s not enough! I don’t have enough! Not enough of that, not enough humans...! Humans are the cornerstone of my research, I need more, I want more...!” Wild eyes turned on Elnora. “Humans! Yes, humans! I want to see more of what’s inside you! Where does your faith come from?! And your love?! Is it your brain? Your heart?”

One arm shot out and grabbed Elnora’s face. Before she could raise a single protest, Dio hoisted her into the air, leaving her feet to scrabble uselessly in midair.

“Elnora!” Owl shouted.

“Let her go!” Clemens glared and raised his arm. “Activate scarlet cells...!!” Black rose petals cloaked his body for a brief moment, and when they fell away he wore the violet justaucorps and burning crimson eyes of his vampire form. A bloodred saber formed in his raised hand, which he aimed directly at Dio’s head and swung with no hesitation.

“A vampire would also make for interesting research material, but I want to take azoth from you directly. Stay put for now, if you don’t mind.”

But Dio didn’t even look his way as he rolled his neck.

In the span of a single blink, Dio transformed.

Dazzling light shot out of his body, from which stretched a pair of wings with cogs at the base. Massive tentacles with hypodermic needles and surgical implements attached extended beneath those wings. His uniform changed to something more resembling a hooded chasuble decorated with a beautiful cape that faded from purple to green. His ponytail came undone, silver strands billowing around him in a gorgeous curtain. A gigantic machine appeared over his head.

No, not a machine, a halo.

He looked divine.

In the span of a single blink, the foolish, cheerful Dio Tis Tifnie was erased, and in his place stood a messenger from Heaven, a winged being... an angel.

The wings spread wide and flapped.

In the next instant, Clemens was thrown violently to the floor. The sheer pressure from a single flap of those elegant wings was enough to knock him down flat. The vampire wheezed from the blow.

“I don’t necessarily dislike your foolishness. You’re certainly not boring.” Dio’s eyes narrowed in a smile. “I am the angel Diotis. Bow your heads, humans, and offer your bodies unto me. Now is the advent of my mission of knowledge. I have been watching over you for quite some time.”

His mechanical tentacles descended on Clemens, who noticed the attack coming just in time and dodged by a hair’s breadth. And a good thing, too, because the floor where he’d just been lying shattered into pieces without a sound as though the stone was as soft as jelly. The ends of Clemens’ hair also fluttered to the ground – he’d managed to get out of the way, but the tip of his braid had been caught after all. “A scalpel...!” he hissed. Apparently, Dio’s – rather, Diotis’ – implements were powerful enough to cut through even steel.

“Stop it!” Elnora screeched, straining against her bonds. “If you touch a hair on his head you’ll be sorry!”

Diotis yanked on her hair. “Yes! That’s it! That’s the soul, the heart I want to learn!” His eyes glittered with fathomless excitement. “Love! Love, compassion, rage, sorrow, everything that only you feeble, imperfect beings possess! Show me more, show me more!”

“Be quiet already, you creep! Let go of me!”

Elnora struggled further in his grasp, but she might as well have been talking to a brick wall. “As I thought, there’s a world of difference in the level of precision when it comes to information gathering between just absorbing it secondhand and experiencing it for yourself. Such rich data... oh, I see, the dolls I sent down here collected so much data they went over capacity. That makes sense! Yes, yes, then that must be why this doll found such joy in a simple command like making stones and lasted so long. The others went to live among humans to gather data on the less concrete topic of the ‘soul’ and therefore hit their information limits much quicker. Yes, I see, it all makes sense now.” He was mumbling to himself again, getting his thoughts in order with ever increasing excitement. “Then that one doll I sent to gather data on ‘love,’ did it try to run off with a human woman because it went over capacity and errored? No, wait, maybe... it acted based on patterns of ‘love’ it learned? It tried to run... because it was in love?” He hunched forward regretfully. “Ahh, if that’s the case, maybe it wasn’t defective! I shouldn’t have burned it up without checking first! It’s so rare for one of them to get so attached to a single human female like that. I really messed up, I could’ve gotten some great data from it. Ahh, what a waste.”

“... What?” Elnora stilled, glaring at Diotis with even more heat from between the gaps of his fingers. “What did you just say? Answer me!” She raised one leg high, a knife slipping out of the tip of her shoe as it arced upward. She slashed at Diotis’ torso with all the strength she could muster.

Diotis, however, didn’t budge an inch. His coat didn’t even tear. “Oh, you’re so lively,” he breathed, eyes shining.

“I told you to answer me, you monster!”

For the first time, a trace of annoyance flitted across his face. He turned to look at her and blinked, like he finally noticed something, and leaned in to peer more closely. “... I burned a doll with the same face as me,” he said. “Though it might be more accurate to say I made it burn itself.”

“You made it?”

“Oh, yes. My dolls can’t disobey me. I made it burn down that entire village... every horse, every cow, every field, every family that believed in the old gods and every idiot villager that believed my doll’s words. Everything.”

“... You mean....”

“I believe its name was... Amedeva?”

“!!!”

A shudder wracked Elnora’s frame.

“Stop! Don’t say another word!” Clemens raised his saber again, but the force of the mechanical feelers sent him sprawling once again.

“That one’s responses back then were so indecent I could hardly bear to look at the thing. The whole time it was lighting the fires and watching the village reduce to cinders, all it did was cry ‘Mia, Mia,’ in the most hideous voice you could imagine.”

Elnora shuddered hard enough to rattle her chains. “... A... Ah....!”

“It was comical, at the end, when it finally lit itself on fire and turned back into the dirt from whence it came. That final moment, when it crumbled into pieces... that was the funniest part of all.”

“... Ahh...!”

“But I think it was for the best. That human woman was better off not giving birth to any children made of dirt, right?”

“AAAAHHHHHH!!!” A guttural scream tore from her throat. “It was you! You’re the one who destroyed my village! You’re the real Diotis! You killed my sister! She loved you and you killed her...! Monster! MONSTER!” Her eyes burned with malice. She strained against her shackles, hard enough her joints seemed in danger of breaking, yet she gave no indication of any pain. “I’ll tear you limb from limb...!” she vowed.

Then it happened.

Black fog spewed forth from her mouth, fluttering around her like flower petals. It was the black miasma that preceded Demonization, the inky substance that cocooned those afflicted with the Black Rose Disease and awakened their Demonic power.

Clemens went deathly pale. “Elnora, NO!”

“Elnora’s...?” Owl gaped. “How?! She’s not infected!” He hurriedly loaded a disassembling bullet into the chamber.

“And she’s not even a descendant of the Teos Island inhabitants like Eliza?” Jack wondered, equally perplexed.

The scraps of miasma coated her in the blink of an eye... or rather, they would have, but right before they made contact with her skin they erupted into tiny crackling fireworks and disappeared.

“What? It’s not wrapping around her...?”

“Something’s weird!”

It looked almost as if her body was rejecting the Demonization. Elnora growled and writhed around, the Demonizing cocoon failing to form.

“Is she... reacting against it? Or – is that an antibody response?”

Neither Owl nor Jack had ever seen anything like it. What on Earth was going on? Clemens, however, groaned vexedly. “It was only a matter of time. The potential lies in her very blood.”

“Potential?”

“She’s a special case.... One of her ancestors, many generations past, was a particularly powerful Possessed.”

“What?” Owl whirled on Clemens, eyes nearly bugging out of his skull. He’d never mentioned this before! “Are you talking about atavism?! I’ve never heard of an infection passing down blood lines!” The muzzle of his gun wavered.

However, the miasma was persistent, and slowly began to win out over whatever resistance Elnora had. Bit by bit, the petal-like substance began to cover her body. The cocoon of Possession was starting to form.

Clemens watched on in horror. “She can’t resist it this time...!”

Owl leaped to set up an array to subdue Elnora once she Demonized... but then she spoke.

“Are you ready to repent?”

At the same time, all the miasma clinging to her skin peeled off and transformed into a pale curtain that began to sway around her in an unfelt breeze. The curtain draped over her like a massive robe that merged with her, turning her clothes pure white.

“There’s only one judgment for you....”

Her long, beautiful legs firmly touched the ground. The stone beneath her feet snapped cleanly in two.

“GUILTY!”

Her hands balled into fists. The bolts on her manacles rattled and screeched, then melted away like a chocolate bar in the sun.

“For the sin of killing my sister...!”

Without a loud SNAP, the chains shattered.

“I’ll have you atone with your body and your life!”

The floor beneath her exploded. She launched at Diotis.

“... Oh, my, this is –”

That was all he managed to get out before one pale, supposedly weak fist came flying right at his face. He folded his wings to block the blow just in time, sending a metallic CLANG reverberating through the room. The sound still rang through the air as Elnora twisted her body and aimed a kick at his head, shoe knife already primed and ready. Diotis, however, didn’t even attempt to dodge; he simply parried her flying feet with his mechanical feelers. Sparks flew and screeching metal echoed as her knife and his scalpel met. In the end, though, the scalpel won out. Elnora’s knife snapped as she was sent hurtling back toward the wall with a yelp. However, she twisted in midair to kick safely off the wall and launch herself at Diotis again.

“I’ll kill you...!” she shouted, her eyes burning crimson with intent. She took a deep breath... then barked at Diotis, “Now KNEEL!!” Her voice rolled over Diotis like a wave, subsuming him completely and bouncing off the walls.

Owl’s eyes widened. “That’s the same as Clemens...” he breathed. She had just produced a powerful, familiar shock wave. That was the same kind of ultrasonic wave bats made. Clemens used that same voice in battle to deliver orders that couldn’t be defied and songs that bolstered his allies. And Elnora had the exact same voice.

Her words reduced part of the wall to dust, revealing a cramped space containing a sculpture of the sun on a pedestal and something hanging suspended from the ceiling by a chain. It looked to be some sort of black lump of stone, but not the blue-gray kind they’d been seeing around – no, this stone was a black so deep it hung like a void of unrelenting darkness in midair.

Clemens’ attention was immediately arrested by the thing dangling at the edge of his vision. “... That’s –?!”

The thing dangling on the chain was a particularly massive stone straddling the barrier between violet and black, so dark it lacked any clarity. Still, something seemed to shine in its depths, rather like a swarm of bioluminescent sea life.

“Whoa, there.” Diotis’ wings suddenly spread wide, masking the gap in the wall from view. “Your little prank has gone too far now.”

“That was –!”

Clemens apparently knew something about it, because he tried to creep closer to the wall through the thick cloud of dust still hanging in the air.

Meanwhile, Elnora unleashed another powerful, earsplitting shock wave from her mouth, but once again Diotis blocked it with his wings. Far from actually harming him, the blast actually ricocheted off the walls and flew toward Owl’s group instead, impeding Clemens’ way forward. “Elnora! Calm down!” Clemens shouted. His fervent plea, imbued with his own power, canceled her screaming out.

Owl’s eyes flicked between the pair. “A shock wave.... Is Elnora a vampire Demon, too? If she really inherited the core of a Black Rose Disease carrier generations past....”

If she took that form because of that carrier’s influence... if she only inherited the Demon’s characteristics instead of being a full Demon herself....

... Then her, and him....

As the theories whirled in his mind, Elnora flew at Diotis again. She hit a table fixated to the ground in the middle of the room and tumbled to the floor, but immediately righted herself again and grabbed it at both ends. With a guttural, animalistic roar, she snapped the table in two, grabbed the broken pieces of the tabletop, and hurled them at Diotis.

“That superhuman strength...!” Jack gasped. “She must be a dhampir!”

A dhampir – a hybrid child born of a vampire and a human. With vampires themselves being so exceedingly rare, dhampirs were even rarer. Only their names remained in old books and records. Females were called vampiras, possessing phenomenal strength, investigative powers, and in rare instances even supernatural abilities to hypnotize or charm people. Their physical abilities were several degrees of excellence higher than a human’s but....

“You’re a worthless, defective beast, incomplete as both a human and a monster,” Diotis taunted.

To the angel, Elnora wasn’t worth his interest. He sliced the table to bits, the pieces clattering silently to the floor.

“Be quiet!” Elnora immediately grabbed something else to hurl at him. It whistled through the air and momentarily wrapped itself around his neck.

“Oh, my,” Diotis hummed.

“You won’t escape me, darling.”

It was a whip. A bullwhip, even, not the riding crop she’d brought with her to the institute, with thick strands of hard leather weaved together in a strong braid and decorated with solid gold pieces and green jewels on the ends. It creaked as it tightened around Diotis’ throat.

“Take every last drop of my burning passion, okay?” She gently ran her hand over the spot where the grip of the whip met the body. Fire sprang up where her fingers touched and raced down the whip like a lit fuse, setting Diotis’ throat aflame.

“Is that the same power as my gloves...?” Owl wondered.

“That’s something Eliza made!” Jack whispered at the same time. The whip was a special tool the head of the McCreech family had created just for Elnora.

Even fire from a specially made alchemical tool wasn’t enough to move Diotis, though. “How pointless. Whips and flames won’t work on me.” He raised his chin to show Elnora just that. The skin underneath the fiery whip was unburnt and unharmed.

Elnora smiled boldly. “That’s not normal fire...!”

As she spoke, the magic stones within the whip ignited, releasing a cloud of vapor with an irritating stench. Diotis flinched ever so slightly, his brows furrowing as the smell penetrated his nostrils. He recognized it immediately. “Dragon’s blood...!” he hissed, reaching up and tearing the jewels off. In that single instant, he was defenseless.

Elnora took her chance. “That’s right, dragon’s blood. Burning cinnabar is poisonous even to angels, isn’t that right?!” With a mighty heave, she reeled the whip toward her, causing him to momentarily lose his balance. As she heaved again, she turned and screamed, “OWL!”

“I got it!” Owl was already prepped and ready. He aimed at Diotis, pouring all his power into this one alchemical array. This time, he didn’t hesitate. “Disassembly bullet!!”

The golden projectile filled with sunlight fired straight and true, lighting the dark basement up with its glow. It struck Diotis square in the forehead.

And yet....

“Fools.”

With an explosive crackle, the bullet split apart above Diotis and crumbled into pieces that vanished like mist in sunlight. Owl sucked in a breath.

“Do you still not get it? Pathetic lower life forms! Do you believe me to be like Mastema, whose body grew weak from becoming too close to this world?! Or like Krinos, speared on a fallen angel’s lance?!” Diotis pinned Owl with his gaze. “It may have worked on them, but my body is a masterpiece granted unto me by Heaven, the pinnacle of Their most exalted works! You couldn’t hope to lay a single scratch on me!”

“...!”

Diotis raised a single hand. All of his tentacles rose with it and pointed directly at Owl. The sharp blade of the scalpel aimed for his heart.

“Owl, RUN!” Clemens shouted. He brandished his saber. “Peering Windows of Twilight!!”

Scarlet droplets trailed the arc of his blade which quickly transformed into countless square windows that boxed Diotis in.

He didn’t give Diotis a chance to counter. “Pierce him through, Prison of Stakes!”

Once more, gigantic bloodred stakes rocketed out of the windows, shooting at Diotis and knocking his scalpel off-course before it could slice Owl to ribbons.

“Boring. Truly boring.” Diotis’ scalpel sliced through the stakes instead as easily as butter. “You could at least try to surprise me.” He flapped his wings once, sending all the shelves nearby tumbling to the ground with a mighty crash and shattering all the bottles and vials they held. The liquid in the bottles went flying and evaporated the instant they hit open air, creating a thick cloud of purple smoke.

Elnora leaped back and reflexively ran over to Owl. “Don’t breathe it in, Owl!” she ordered.

“Huh?”

“That stuff turns people into monsters, I’m sure of it! Dio was extracting it and mixing it with chemicals!”

“He was what?” Clemens whirled around. “Elnora, grab Jack!”

“I know!”

The pair bodily picked up Owl and Jack and sprinted for the exit at full speed, trying to outrun the spreading smoke. The two men yelped in alarm in Clemens’ arms and over Elnora’s shoulder, respectively. Neither of them had moved at such speeds before. Their stomachs roiled uncomfortably in their guts. They couldn’t even breathe. The vampires reached the staircase in record-breaking time, kicked down the walls, and made a mad dash down the long corridor, so fast their legs barely even seemed to move.

“Is this – a vampire’s – true – power?!” Jack wondered aloud.

“Be quiet! You’ll bite your tongue off!”

“Too – late –!”

Clemens and Elnora headed for the surface, kicking the staircase to pieces along the way with the force of their running. It took everything Owl and Jack had to cling on for dear life. In less than a minute, the four were back at the altar in the chapel. They kicked the door down and escaped the building entirely to find Hude Lou, Fossanova (conscious once more), Archie, and Oliver. Hude Lou blinked at them, eyebrows raised. “Wow, that was fast,” he commented. “We only just finished getting the students on prayer duty to evacuate.” He glanced at Clemens and Elnora, took in their respective states, and instantly understood what was going on. “You met the culprit.”

Owl leaped out of Clemens’ arms. “Barricade the door!” he shouted. “The basement is filled with poisonous fog, probably the same stuff Krinos was using! It’s going to spill out above ground!”

“What? You mean the stuff they used to infect people with the Black Rose Disease? So the thing holed up down there really was an angel. Are they making Demons here, too, then?”

“No, he was trying to make stones, not Demons. They’ve got other objectives.” Owl shook himself. “We don’t have time to chitchat. It’s dangerous here!”

He turned to look in the direction of the institute proper. A low rumbling began to emanate beneath his feet, steadily growing louder and louder, loud enough to tear the ground asunder.

Diotis was destroying the basement complex, and he was coming here.

original written by Nagaya Kawaji here

[seeyounexttime]

play us out Roundabout!  💃 🕺

of course I had to make a JoJo reference -- Dante’s English VA is Dio’s!!

.

So like, real shit, pretty much nothing of what we see of Dante's thoughts, words or actions is congruent with Lucius's plans...

Lucius calls himself "savior of the world."

Dante says "If you're calling me evil though, I take that as a compliment"

Dante straight-up laughs and says that Yami is "going to open up a world that's far more magnificent!!" which is "A world crawling with devils. A place that will brim over with every sort of malice." – and Dante is "really looking forward to this!!"

Lucius's mission "For the sake of true peace, a peace without sadness or hatred, war or discrimination." Where he'll "repair all humans" and "make them into fortunate people who are equal in every respect."

Dante meanwhile "Animals have no malice. It's the supreme emotion, one that only humans developed! You must have felt it yourself. Anger. Hatred. Revenge. Destruction! The power of malice!! When you unleash your darkest emotions... that's when you're most human. Evil is the true shape of humanity."

and he repeatedly thanks and compliments Yami for making him feel new malice and jealousy

When Lucius grabs Sister Lily he says "Let me show you a human who is truly happy." Which apparently to him means brainwashing and paladinizing them.

Lucius calls Asta a flaw and wants to eliminate him.

Dante is apparently amused by Asta and says:

"Even if our ranks are different, we're both possessed by devils. We should be able to see eye to eye."

When Asta rejects Dante's ideas, Dante goes "I guess there's no choice. I'll wake up your true feelings for you" and stabs Gauche. In Dante's undeniably fucked-up view, he's doing Asta a favor

He's happy when Asta goes berserk, even saying "Now that's what makes you human!!!"

And as Asta is losing it, he says "I wanted to get your story... but you're out of control, and I guess now isn't the time."

He apparently genuinely wanted to have a chat with Asta. It's true that Dante beats Asta up, but as we see later, Dante could've done so much worse to him. He could've ripped him apart if he actually felt like it. Arguably, that beating was Dante going easy on Asta. Not only that, when Dante is asking Yami how he acquired "so many people with such unique magic" the panel shows Vanessa, Grey and berserk Asta.

I guess he was going to take all of them with him? I don't think Dante is as...interested in Asta the way he is with Yami but he does seem keen on bringing Asta to the dark side [insert "don't you want to go ape shit" meme here]

(also I've actually seen quite a bit of art where Dante adopts Asta 😁)

And then to top it off, Dante's moment of... dare I say... vulnerability with Yami. "I was bored. Tired of everything. Nothing... satisfied my malice." If you look at the page...

–this apparently includes the freaking coup and killing the king. Dante already had devil power at that time, but he still wasn't happy...

Either there's an actual rift between Dante and Lucius, or one of them came along later than some of you would like to believe.

[sadandpoutyandfrench]

You were expecting Mirei gacha but it was me, Dio Falulu!

[insert Falulu as Dio meme here]

(Fun Fact: JoJo Bizarre Adventure scriptwriter Kazuyuki Fudeyasu also wrote for PriPara. This reference has synergy!)

Talk about an October surprise. I was all ready to ignore whatever the next gacha was but then this happened and well . . .

Holy Maloney, two PPRs in one pull. I wish the second one could have been the other one piece. For once, I would have even accepted shoes. But if it was any PPR I'm glad it was the Falulu-colored coord.

All together ended up with a 19 percent bonus for the current event. I'm going easy on D4DJ and Bandori so maybe I'll put my tiering strength towards Idolland instead.

Matched the color scheme as best as I could.

[princesscatherinearts]

Domestic AU headcanons from yours truly 💞

1. To start off, Dio is VERY secretive about his intimacy with Caitlin. He prefers to keep it this way because he has a serious reputation to uphold, he can’t be seen in public kissing/cuddling his wife in front of his peers and enemies, that would make him look soft and weak.

2. That being said, he and Caitlin are absolutely obsessed with each other. In private, they can’t keep their hands off of each other, and Dio is always the one starting things. He’s very grabby. 

3. Dio’s nicknames for Caitlin include: Princess, Darling, Sweetheart, and Beloved. Caitlin’s nicknames for Dio include: Dear, Sweetheart, Honey, my Lord (only used during role-plays), and Big Man. 

4. Because of their 6 year age gap, Caitlin teases Dio about being an old man, which annoys him to no end since he fears aging. 

5. Of course both of them have jobs to support each other and their home. Caitlin works as a veterinary technician while Dio works as a lawyer.

They work long hours and get home late. 

6. Caitlin got Dio to watch Breaking Bad because she thought it would be funny. 

7. Dio’s favorite parts of Caitlin’s body are her neck and tummy. 

8. One thing that made Dio fall for Caitlin was her weird yet intriguing personality, despite her introverted nature she was funny and had a lot of insight on prehistory. 

9. At first, Dio thought Caitlin’s interest in paleontology was childish and silly, but over time he grew fascinated by how much she knew about dinosaurs and extinct life. For a date, they binge watched paleo documentaries like Walking With Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Planet. 

10. DIO LOVES HEARING CAITLIN TALK ABOUT HER INTERESTS!!!!!! 

11. The blonde is extremely possessive over Caitlin, he gets easily jealous whenever another man tries to get close to her. Even Jonathan isn’t safe from Dio’s jealousy. 

12. After they got married, Dio thought about raising a family with Caitlin, but she wasn’t 100% on board at the time because she wasn’t ready for such a huge responsibility, much to Dio’s dismay. 

13. He never EVER infantilizes her or treats her like a child because of her disability, and will scold anyone who mistreats her. Dio is always patient with her and makes sure to avoid triggering her. 

14. He has anger issues, but he tries to control himself so that he doesn’t upset or hurt his wife. 

Keyword is *tries*

There are days where he ends up yelling and ranting about his problems at work, but his anger never stems from Caitlin. 

15. One time he came home cursing and ranting about how awful his day was at work, which frightened Caitlin. She tried to calm him down but he wouldn't stop yelling and complaining about his clients and coworkers. Later, he apologized to her and gave her a big hug. 

16. He 100% spoils her with gifts and affection and she relishes it. 

17. He loves hugging her from behind, spooning is his favorite cuddling position. 

18. He’s a big teaser, there’s just something amusing about seeing her face turn red by pushing the right buttons.

“Could you leave? I’m changing here.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize it was a crime to stare at an angel for too long.” 

Insert Caitlin blushing intensely 

19. He hates hearing her degrade and say untrue things about herself :((((

20. Dio has photos of him and Cait on his desk for motivation and comfort. 

21. He’s definitely a better cook than her lol. 

22. Cait is the one who sends funny memes and videos to Dio just because. 

23. On mother’s day, Dio would take Cait to visit his mother’s grave to send their respects.

24. Cait will steal some of Dio’s shirts to cuddle and wear, she loves his blue sweater vest the most.

[the-giug]

OMG THANK YOU FOR DRAWING SICILY I AM SO PROUD <333

Now I have the change to show my pookies (Tumblr followers) my coolass Sicily OC

First of all, this oc is ACCURATE since I myself am Italian and because GRAAAHHHH THE MAIN ITALIAN ISLANDS DESERVE TO HAVE A CANON HETALIA CHARACTERS. I NEED SICILY AND MY GOOFYAAH ISLAND SARDINIA HIMARUYA

(The first person who nominates the furry Sicily oc will get a detonator sent to their house)

Ah… as much as i love Romano this oc isnt a self-insert. Why using a dumbass oc to smooch my fav character when I can assert dominance and straight up use my persona. Also I am not sicilian, i am sardinian… which is cooler

So here:

Sicily

Appearence

Sicily has short, dark spiky hair (it symbolizes the Etna volcano, still active btw), a slender figure and green eyes. She usually wears traditional clothes and a bandana with the Sicilian flag on it.

So Sicily is a really joyful girl with a huge passion for oranges and fishing. She loves playing the tamburine, dancing and overall taking walks near the seashore.

Personality

(Enfj 3w4)

Sicily is overall a pretty optimistic country. She is capable of making friends but she is kinda shy at first, due to the fact that she is an island. Pretty much flawed due to years of beign conquered and heavy mafia activity. She is a very responsable person but at times she can be kind of an airhead and geta distracted easily. She is religious and carries with her a rosary at all times. She is capable of cooking for a family of 9 people which well too fucking bad for the poor souls that just wanted a tiny bowl of pasta but instead got appetizers, other appetizers, 2 first courses, 4 second courses and bigass desserts (Romano has to cook to avoid this. That one time that he forgot to cook cost him, Veneziano and Seborga's goddamn life).

She is capable of holding grudges.

Relationships

Romano:

She basically only interacts with Romano… and they were also married… for 45 years, so they could create the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. Like they knew eachother since they were respectively the Kingdom of Naples and the Kingdom of Sicily but due to Romano’s dumbass tsundere behaviours and Sicily trying to understand if it’s spelled “arancino” or “arancina” (she eventually found out) they were hella late. The marriage didn’t last long because Garibaldi instead of solving his failing marriage decided to unify the Italian brothers, creating the Kingdom of Italy and fucking up the Kingdom of Sardinia and the Kingdom of the two Sicilies. Romano was mad as shit, Sicily was flabbergasted and didn’t speak for days, on the other hand Sardinia was hella happy because Veneziano was a pain in the ass and always ate all of his cheese (even the one with the fatass worms).

My friend has the headcanon that Sicily and Romano have hard secret tickle time when Etna erupts (5 to 35 times a year) so now I had to make it canon. Well guess the region of Puglia has to work harder.

Turkey:

Turkey was a pain in the ass to Sicily for centuries and when Sicily completely got rid of him she was so happy!! Then Spain came. She doesn’t really like him but hides it.

America:

Sicily doesn’t really like America due to the war crimes committed in WW2… but does appreciate the fact that he helped Romano during his immigration (what a good ex-wife).

Yuh here some sketches and memes, if y’all would know more about here hit me in the inbox :3

||A voi siculi di ru gazzu quanto cazzo ci mettete a chiedere l’indipendenza come noi dio, Malta che è un’isoletta burda è indipendente e noi che siamo il quadruplo più grandi siamo legati ai terroni. Forza indipendenza per le isole italiche.||

quick drawing different hetalia characters everyday until my birthday day 10-11 💔

ft @the-giug 's sicily oc :3

[stillwill76]

I was watching the new Bleach episode this morning and realized something really funny. It may only be funny to me but I thought it was worth sharing. Spoilers if you haven't seen the latest episode yet:

Okay, so Nel drops in on Ichigo to tell him Hueco Mundo has been attacked and I'm like, "Yay Nel!" Then Pesche follows shortly after and I'm like, "Ehhh, okay." Until I realize that Pesche's voice sounds very familiar. Specifically, it sounds like Takehito Koyasu. I look it up and yup, it is him. Now why is this so funny, you might ask? Simple. Because it means that this guy,

is voiced by the same guy that voices

Dio Brando from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure.

Again, this may only be funny to me, but it's really funny.

Bonus fact: Takehito Koyasu also voices Bobobo-Bo Bo-Bobo from the series of the same name. Also really funny.

[dolphin-enthusiast]

May I request a hc for some of the main Jojo villains having the following job: Party Clown

This is exactly their job anon kdrggkj and they all reside @ the goddamn carnival

- Dio is that one obnoxious clown that always scares all of the kids away. Honestly the asshole even takes pride in that and says that he’s “just like Pennywise” when in reality he’s just a fucking loser. He has ugly ass clown shoes that are exactly like his cursed elf ones and they obnoxiously s q u e a k whenever he prances around. He has no idea how to tie balloons and is almost always kicked out because he’s just god awful. Never hire him.

- Kars is arguably the best one at this job even tho he too kinda sucks at times. Surprisingly enough he’s pretty decent with kids and can tie fucking balloons unlike somebody else. His clown attire is always well put together and he applies his clown makeup himself (does a pretty damn good job at it too) since he’s a beauty guru. It’s always 50/50 with him tho because kids either love him or immediately run away since he’s a literal giant, but aside from that go ahead and hire him.

- Kira is a wannabe fucking joker. Me mans already wears clown suits in general but this time he changes it up and wears a red one and dyes his hair green so he fucking looks like the the Joker (2019) as well. Although sometimes he also pulls off the Dark Knight Rises look as well. First thing he says when entering a room is “wE LivE In A sOciEtY” as everyone else looks at him while cringing. If you thought Dio was awful then wait until you see Kira because he’s literally an abomination and all kids hate him. But hey at least he makes good pies. Are they poisonous?? No one knows.

- Doppio is a soft and nice clown that everyone loves obviously, but Diavolo is the opposite. Unlike Doppio, Diavolo has a short ass temper when it comes to kids and is known to get angry at them then only throw more fists when he gets kicked out. He also doesn’t even need to wear a wig because his hair is already as clowny as it could get. Moral of the story: Hire Doppio, never Diavolo.

[cardsbizarreadventure]

Chancellor DIO Palpatine: *gives Joelle a taco*

“Now I need to figure out how to pull off my helmet...“ - Joelle.

[elite-guard-hardygal]

Deku is 5 foot 6~, and the shortest one at that table is 5 foot 8, with four of them topping a whopping 6 foot 5

I can’t blame him for backing off

All that said, I agree with everything stated above

has no one posted this on tumblr?

[highdio]

Got an ask and follow-up re: whether Dio is an "archetypal villain" so doing it as one reply (fwiw I just did a reply re: Dio's nuance so keeping this to the 'archetype' part of the ask).

“so, i seen some people say Dio is simply a archetypal villain, perhaps even flat. what would you say to someone that told you he was without nuance? i plenty believe he has, but sometimes i dont know exactly what to say”

“someone i asked about what was their favorite villain told me he was a archetypal villain. and i think two years ago i saw a meme pic about how Dio fans are obnoxious or something. i mostly got my liking from him by analyses, alongside the fact that i do think personally that he DID change as a character, not completely, but he had some development.”

I partly agree with that, although maybe there's not one single 'archetypal villain.’ The person you spoke with probably meant that Dio's is Evil with a capital 'E,' as opposed to a villain who does the bad things for understandable reasons, or who gets corrupted by events outside their control. Araki's vision for Dio (in Part 1 especially) is, morally speaking, black-and-white, with Dio's Evil defined by Araki as an innate trait rather than the effect of his circumstances.

fwiw David Mamet's got a good list of eight villain archetypes - the anti-villain, the beast, the bully, the machine, the mastermind, the evil incarnate, the henchman, and the fanatic - and I thought for the purpose of this reply it's helpful to defining Dio's specific brand of badness. Of those archetypes, two stand out as defining Dio's *specific* type: the Evil Incarnate and (technically not on the list but inspired by it) the Anti-Hero.

(fwiw you can read my convo here about why Dio isn't a bully type. I see him mistyped this way especially by people who want to expand Jonathan's role in the series. tl;dr, basically it comes down to the fact that Dio's charisma - his most important character trait btw - draws people toward him while a bully actively seeks out confrontation. The bully barges into a room, the charismatic character gets you to barge into a room. Dio is the latter.)

Evil Incarnate's almost self-explanatory - Dio's literally called that in the series (邪悪の化身) - although I can talk more about this if you want. By contrast, his anti-hero role's maybe less obvious ... but that designation offers us a way of reconciling some of the stuff listed under Mamet's 'Evil incarnate' that doesn't work with how Dio's written. Specifically, an Evil incarnate-type villain's primary role in the narrative is usually as an obstacle to the hero's journey, ie, as an antagonist. imo, Dio functions instead primarily as a parallel protagonist.

(I've written about this before but) Araki's said this a lot: Dio joins Jonathan as a dual protagonist in Phantom Blood, and Dio's own story follows a Hero's rising arc.

(Was surprised I didn't notice this until I hunted a gif for this reply: while the Part 1 OP features both main characters throughout, it's Dio alone who's given a special manga panel mini-montage during its bridge, emphasizing his hero-style arc.)

In a lot of ways Dio's more fleshed out than the actual hero since Araki had already worked out the specifics of his personality in a prior series (whereas Jonathan was vaguer to Araki, even as Part 1 was being published: "just as Jonathan was unsure how to live his life, I was unsure as to where to take his character.") Phantom Blood starts off with Dio's introduction, not Jonathan's. As Araki puts it,

The title of the series is Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, but first and foremost, I actually wanted to draw Dio.

The hero's introduction is inserted within Dio's introduction, as a story-within-a-story recalled in a flashback by Dio's dad. We don't get to meet Jonathan on his own terms until the next chapter, and, because of this ordering, if you read Part 1 cold you could start off thinking it's Dio who's going to be the hero. Dio's story's a riff on your stereotypical rags-to-riches tale but with the obvious twist that he's written as unapologetically Evil. Like the rags-to-riches protag, Dio's faced with increasingly difficult setbacks and challenges throughout his story's progress, and, in spite of these, he keeps moving forward. Araki, again:

Dio moves in a rising direction, like Jonathan. Dio accepts and embraces his evil nature and follows his dark path without hesitation. In other words, both Dio and Jonathan are living life with everything they’ve got, and both always maintain a rising personal arc.

In other words, Dio has his own upward rising arc by design and it's independent of the hero's. ofc his interactions with the Joestars throughout the series are significant and their back-and-forths drive the larger story, but the trajectory of Dio's arc remains largely the same throughout all this.

If you see Dio as a protagonist then you also recognize that Jonathan's (and later Jotaro and company's) relentless pursuit (yes, they pursue him, because charisma is a gravitational force) provides the antagonistic force to Dio's arc. (And going back to the Araki quote, that "without hesitation part" is really important - Dio's willful embrace of his Evil nature and the intentionality of his actions throughout Part 1 again align him with a heroic type: it's a positive character trait, just in Dio's case it's executed wrongly.)

So call Dio an anti-hero or, if it makes you more comfortable, a Villain who thinks he's the Hero in the story. This isn't a unique situation (and probably as you're reading this you might be thinking, well all villains have their own story arc too)  but imo Araki writing Dio with this specific perspective and intent sets him apart from what we think of as the more generic model of a villain, whose role within the narrative is secondary to the hero's and whose arc is cleanly set up as in opposition to that hero.

Ofc, a villainous anti-hero is by nature appealing because we know we really shouldn't root for him. We should hate him ... but we still sort of love him, especially when, because of that rising story arc that Araki gave him, he keeps coming back after stupidly impossible odds. Usually when you get decapitated you lose but Dio's not like that, and there's something compelling about a character who repeatedly breaks the narrative flow by improv-ing his way through impossible situations.

tl;dr, basically if you're looking to characterize what 'type' of villain Dio is (and why he's attractive), Dio is Evil personified fused with the inconvenient fact of his also being more or less protagonist-identified. Araki wrote Dio with a hero in mind, and that fact keeps him interesting on his own terms and places him in the contrarian posture of a particularly reprehensible anti-hero.

[zirkkun-uthcs]

You thought it was Duo, but it was I, Dio

(insert a jjba reference of sorts here hnnn can u tell i dont watch it i just know the memes asbavs)

[bethsreverseharem]

Hello! I see you like jojo characters, and that’s awesome cause I’m also a jojo fan! May I ask if you have any sort of self insert for the series? Do you tie in their story to the main plot, or do you have your own sort of idea for where they fit in to the universe? I’m curious! Only share if you’re comfortable! (@captain-self-ships , from the PSA meme)

@captain-self-ships ! First of all, its really cool to have JoJo fans sliding in here! Even if yall don't have f/os from it or anything, its nice to know people care about my interests ^^

The way I work my JJBA s/is is to have a single s/I for each part, maybe 2 depending on who I like. I try to keep the plot mostly the same as in the part, granted with a few "fix-it" elements sprinkled in. My s/I usually doesn't have too interesting of a story, honestly. I have details as to why they are where they are, and a small chunk of backstory involving other self-shippers and their s/is, but that's really it. I'm really close with a few other self-shippers IRL so most of my s/I lore is rattled off amid conversation with them. I never actually sat down to write it out, I really should tho ^^,. I'm gonna address this specifically with my part 3 s/I(s) becuase that is the one I have the most roundabout ideas for.

My part 3 character has this entire backstory and sort of subplot with the Agents of DIO. In the AU I have with Avdol, she manages to escape being a member and joins the Crusaders. In the AU I have with Steely Dan, she remains a member as a result of attachment to the group and her family (real and found) within it. My character doesn't really tie-in with the main plot when with Steely Dan, she exists in this weird sort of pre-SDC AU where all the agents live with DIO in his mansion (including her and her two siblings [those are friend's s/is]). There's this whole weird sub-plot where her and her siblings, and her siblings boyfriends become a weird friend group and Dan just kinda tags along until I catch feelings for him. Agents of DIO S/I is definitely the one I have thats the best fitting into the universe and the most backstory, along with being the most similar to IRL me.

[somarysueme]

WicDiv Thoughts, some overly personal

stiiiiiillllll can’t really put together my feelings about the end and epilogue.  I will say that I liked the ending and epilogue more than I expected to*, and the longer I sit on it, I find more things to like about it.

(* Except for everything about Baal and Mini)

That said, there’s still that huge, unpleasant gap between what I wanted/expected this comic was supposed to be, and what it actually intended/was. I wrote this post after 43 (the “everyone does the thing” chapter), using bits of a half-written reaction to 39 ("Laura did the thing” chapter) to talk about that gap. I decided to sit on it til everything was said and done Just In Case, but I mostly still agree with what I’d written. 

So Here Are My Thoughts

The full pantheon abdicating! This is basically where I expected us to go. Since 39 it seems like the natural place for the story to be headed. Laura’s revelations, along with the Daddy Forgive Us special made it clear that the only way out of the game was not to play it. I was kinda luke warm on that concept, but it made sense for where the story was at that point. I was waiting to see how it actually played out before getting fussy about it.

I give him a C for execution here. Maybe a C+. 

I thought Dio’s moment was great. Jon’s was beautiful. Inanna’s I definitely could have gotten behind if he’d actually gotten to have any of that arc on the page instead of getting put on a bus 30 chapters ago. 

The rest range from “meh” to “yikes.”

I could have liked this, I wanted to like this. Given how much “OKAY” has been miles more thoughtful than Mothering Invention, I was genuinely hoping to like this. I would have loved to see these kids find something more important than godhood to live for. But that’s not what we got.

We did get them realizing that being a god is not worth dying for. Which is good!  And essential! And basically the central conceit of this comic! 

But.

But...  

I really wanted to see our cast value their lives period. And while there was some of that, there was far more of seeing them be humbled. We saw them beaten down until they had no choice but to admit they Were Not Special (or at least, were not as special as they thought). I was hoping for them to find a capacity to value their lives because their lives have value whether or not they are special, but instead it was a story about being humbled, and I guess to me, I just can’t see that what young queer artists need is help being humbled. They need help being valued as people, they need the internal presence of self to command that value be respected, and they need the external support to give them a fighting chance at that.  And not to be That Fan, but that fighting chance doesn’t come from individual actions. It comes from worker solidarity and respect for labor as labor.  It just doesn’t work for me to have a series around the exploitation and consumption of young talent and leave anything material about money and labor practices out of the material.

(McKelvie’s My (6000 F) pantheon has unionized joke, but unironically.)

Anyway this comic was all about Don’t Let This Happen To You.  And that’s a good start, but I was hoping for it to be so much more than that. It could be that this is me looking at WicDiv and wanting it to say something broader about specialness and creativity and mental illness and exploitation. 

(There’s a lot to be unpacked wrt presenting itself as a story about the whole world through all of human history, while also intending to be  psuedoautobiographical for a very specific set of circumstances. But that’s not this post.)

It’s weird because like, Fandemonium already delivered masterfully on Laura learning to value herself outside of godhood.  Laura’s last pre-apoptheosis soliloquy about “I can’t save any of them, but I can still help them” was one of those wham moments that really cemented this book’s place in my heart. Living through Fandemonium and realizing that the gods were people, and needed actual love and support from people who cared about them as people, and that just being a decent friend is something worth living for, fuck!! That’s good shit!! That’s fucking excellent!! 

And for the rest of WicDiv’s run, I was always waiting for the story to get back to that place, but it never really did. 

 (ETA AFTER 45 IS OUT: ok fine I fucking love that Laura saved Luci. Big Gay Hero Girl drags naughty non-devil out of hell and they kiss, fucking A+. But “can’t save but CAN help” is still something I wish the comic had followed up on more. The friendship thing got touched on a little bit too,  but never in a way I found as satisfying as Fandemonium.)

So anyway Luci going Full Diva. Her future is this and her future is nothing.

The longer I chew on it, the more I like it, and the more it seems like the inevitable place for Elanor Rigby’s story to go. It’s a good continuation from where we last saw her have any scrap of agency, but also frustrating in that “the lat time we saw her have any scrap of agency” was basically the entire comic ago. It was jarring to have her go from [One Sassy Line Per Issue] to [Maybe I’m The Final Boss]. Her story suffered deeply suffered from all the time she spent off screen. But despite all that, I’m very much really looking forward to whatever the fuck Laura Wilson’s going to do about this. 

I’m trying not to get my hopes up for Talk Her Down ending. It seems perfectly in line with this series to end with the moral of “sometimes, no matter how kind or brave or caring you are, people you love pick their addictions over living.” That’s a song I’ve already heard live and in person, and I don’t really want or need to hear anyone else’s studio cover.

Uh final thought on 43 is.... Minanke DOES seem to count herself as part of the 12, which still lines up with my Emily Was Also A Fake God theory (Fauxmaterasu theory? Nokami hypothesis? Amaterasuspicion?) but it does seem unlikely to actually be a Thing between now and the epilogue. shrug.

(ETA AGAIN: I had to write out my feelings on 39 and Laura’s own abdication (unpotheosis?) to properly respond to 43. So here’s a draft of another unpublished post that I fleshed out.)

I have extremely mixed feelings about chapter 39. 

First Feeling: thank fuck the pregnancy plot is over. 

Second feeling: establishing abdication as an option established a nice overarching shape to this book. Things have felt directionless for many chapters, but this does make it seem like we are back on some kind of track.

Third Feeling: kinda liking abdication as a general direction for endgame.  For most of the series, I was hoping the whole that there actually was Something Important about the recurrence, but since it's clear now that it’s basically all lies, I like this this angle well enough.

Strongest Feeling: hell fucking yes to Laura’s shaved head. 

(Tangential Feeling: buzzing your own head is good and you should think about doing it. Doing it for catharsis in a moment of crisis is A-OK, but I did it once just because I felt like it and it was fucking great. banishing your high maintenance hair does not cure depression, but it does give you back an hour of personal upkeep every day and the fuzzy head is wonderful to touch.)

Contrary to most of the fandom, though, I absolutely loathed Laura’s monologue here, and the context that it puts around her not-choice. There’s a lot of shitty Hot Takes out there about how mental illness and addition and creation intersect. A lot of people will suggest that being unhealthy makes you a better artist, and what’s more that being a better artist is worth being unhealthy.  This series is unambiguously and steadfastly against that message, which is one of the absolute best and most important things about it!  I don’t want to diminish that.

But that all said, seeing Laura alone in the dark describing “an addicts moment of clarity” was... jesus it was all kinds of personally painful and upsetting. It hurt real bad, and not in the way I though I had agreed to be hurt. And I’m not sure how to spell out why.

I have thousands and thousands of words on why it struck such a sour cord in me, but a lions share can be summed up with “fuck absolutely every story where a Troubled Girl just needed to get traumatized/humiliated/humbled enough to Realize How Bad She Was Being.” Double fuck this one in particular for showing the girl getting over addiction/mental illness by literally sitting alone in the dark thinking about how much she fucked up.  That story is tired, and cruel, and dangerous, and thank Christ I encountered this comic at 30 and not 19 because I would have swallowed it down with all the other poison that Helpful Adults fed me.

But yeah though, her shaved look is fucking adorable as shit.  Neither she nor Britany made any hair mistakes.

ETA ULTIMATE: That last bit is the one thing in this post I don’t quite still stand by. By the end, it’s clear that the above wasn’t at all the story this book was trying to tell at all. I thought WicDiv was trying to tell some Epic Truths, Hard-Facts-About-Human-Nature shit. But despite the sweeping setup (All Across The World and Through All Of History) the book was using a complex allegory for a very specific situation (Selling Your Soul and Name and Life To Creative-Industrial Machines), and that made it muddy.  

(Insert Principal Skinner meme here “Am I out of touch? Was I simply interrogating the text from the wrong perspective?  No, it’s the original creators who are wrong!”)

I’m from a family of mentally ill, addiction-prone, recovering-Catholic artists.  Laura is in my blood. Half the people I love are Laura.  I have Laura’s painting on my wall and her books on my shelf. I’ve sat with Laura’s mother a few years after Laura’s death, as her father now slowly dying in the next room, and listened to her music for the first time. (It was good. It was really good.  And I never even knew.)

These experiences colored my read, but how could they not?  

I do now, I think, understand what Gillen was trying to say- the addiction he was talking about was to stardom, the attention and accolades, and free pass to make your own shit be everyone else’s problem. I understand now that the “art” that the gods made was always supposed to be Not Real Art, that there was no true “message” from their songs- all noise, no signal. It was never about Laura’s art, or even Laura as an artist.  And that was unpleasant to reconcile.

Because when you're Laura, or Elanor, or any of them, life doesn’t have to grant your ill-advised wish before it fucks your head and kills you. Sometimes you fight as hard as you can with every fiber of your being and you’re still in Hell. Sometimes you’re doing all the Meetings and self-reflection and therapy you can manage and you’re still a Destroyer. But the shit you create while you’re down there is worthy of creating. What you do with your too-short, too-fucked time matters. A fucked up life was still worth living because it was your life to live. And... I guess, from the story presented in Faust Act and Fandemonium, I sort of thought that this was what WicDiv was supposed to be talking about. I thought it was going to be about doing something good even when life is fucking you. But instead it is a cautionary tale that  that suggests you could have stopped getting fucked at any time if you had just gotten over yourself and said the magic words.

We spent half the comic watching Laura drag herself through the mud. Half the comic was focused on Her Mistakes, when so little of her circumstances were actually her fault. “Punish Ophelia until she gets over herself” is not at all what WicDiv meant to be about. I imagine the creators would be aghast to hear that’s what I got out of it. But the text is what the text is.  While it is intended (and successful!) at being many other very good things, this one really bad thing is still part of that mix, and that sucks.

Maybe I should have picked up on the discrepancy between my read and the intent sooner. Probably I should have just done myself a favor and stop reading once I did.

2016, 2017 while my life was going a bit to shit, this comic was exactly what I needed. Being in the fandom made my life better and helped me meet cool new friends and get through some of the hardest shit to happen to me since I was a kid. Then in 2018, it slid into source of frustration and soured promise. Now at the end I have no idea if I liked it or not. 

But that’s fine, now that it’s done. The ink is dry, the ritual is over. It’s just a comic book now.  Some pictures I still love and some words I don’t always agree with. A lot of noise, arguable amounts of signal, but not a song I want to play on loop anymore.

I have no real conclusion to draw here. I respect at how firmly WicDiv rejects dark and unhealthy parts of being a professional creator- especially unhealthy things that are generally just accepted as Common Wisdom. I don’t think it took enough care in spelling out what it was rejecting, though, and I do think it was remiss in not finding good healthy things to embrace as an alternative.

All of the above notwithstanding, I have to give it credit for delivering almost exactly what I wanted in terms of lesbian nonsense. That ain’t nothing.

I give this series ?????/∞ and am happy to be safely clear of Kieron Gillen’s Wild Ride

[rollerbreaker]

DAY 3. Fav villain

[insert overused dio meme here]

[kiichu]

11, 17, 27, 33 (electric sheep) for the fanfic writer meme? :)

asks for fanfic writers!

11. do you listen to music when writing?

Yes! I need to, but it also has to be instrumental. It’s difficult for me to listen to lyrics and form words at the same time.

17. favorite AU to write

“Everyone lives/Nobody dies” AUs, or some variation. ;)

27. best review you ever got

Here’s a few! And here! There’s a lot of good ones, honestly... I’m grateful for every review. ;v;

33. alternate ending for (insert story title)

Well, there’s my original vision - Luna “dies” and is turned off permanently, and Dio indefinitely dies. They’re both dead, and that’s that. :’) 

[harvnoshiobana]

salty asks: DO 'EM ALL!

pwryyynce u absolute mad lad djskjfd thank u for the asks 🌼∠( ᐛ 」∠)＿. sorry it took so long! and i left out 25 because that’s the one i spent so long thinking about and i don’t know, i just couldn’t think of anything.

2. Are there any popular fandom OTPs you only BroTP?*jotaro/kakyoin!!!! and also gyro/johnny.

3. Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?ghjskjhfdskjkd naah.

6. Has fandom ever made you enjoy a pairing you previously hated?*hmmmm. kind of? idk! i wouldn’t say i enjoy jotaro/josuke but i can enjoy the art for them now.

7. Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?*joseph. sometimes i’m like, juuust post part 2 tho. but then i see him or read a post about how much someone loves him and i’m like, yeah, ok, fuck that dude.

11. Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?probably enya?? well, i don’t know if they don’t like her but i never see content for her. i really liked her though, she was funny + a tru ride or die for dio 😔✊.

12. Is there an unpopular arc that you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?arc? mmm i’m not too sure actually. i do love everything about phantom blood though, and i know that’s an unpopular part ; ~ ;

13. Unpopular opinion about XXX character?i’ve got some reallly unpopular opinions… but i will save those for another time.and since you didn’t specify a character i’m just gonna say i think we should all appreciate giorno for his fucked up morals and goals and stop treating him like a baby… at least just a little!!

and!!!! ok, i know it’s prbly just ppl projecting and having their fun with bruno being mom/dad okkkkk but i don’t see him that way at all. ugghh, i think bruno is such a beautiful character. like?? he’s got jonathan levels of lovely in him and he also has his own personal trauma and fucked up struggles. he’s a good person but he’s also relatable. and to be reduced down to ‘the mommy of the group hehuhee’ is so!!!!!!! frustrating. you are all so ugly.jpg

14. Unpopular opinion about your fandom?terrible with memes 94% of the time.

15. Unpopular opinion about the manga/show?besides feeling like golden wind could’ve been done better? i’m not sure if i have any yet?? mate am genuinely jus here for a laff x

16. If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?[inserts filler] :_). i’m kinda itching to change giorno’s color scheme. give him his orange eyes & a proper pink suit. where did the green eyes come from? but i think most importantly just redo gw. have giorno & his story closer to the manga. keep bru//gio moments intact. yknow

17. Instead of XYZ happening, I would have made ABC happen…yeah ok instead of that weird blood transfusion thing with joseph coming back to life i would’ve just killed him off and had jotaro suffer more. joseph not being around in part 4 wouldn’t change anything. shizuka would probably not be involved but that’s okay because araki didn’t really do anything with her anyway!!

18. Does not shipping something ‘popular’ mean you’re in denial and/or biased?absolutely not lol.

20. What is the purest ship in the fandom?is there any other ship more pure than jonathan/erina?!! 🤧💕💕💗

21. What are your thoughts on crack ships?i’m a little.. safer with my crack ships. i’m not too big on shipping so its gotta be really interesting if it catches my eye.

22. Popular character you hate?j o s e p h !

23. Unpopular character you love?pet shop! and shinobu!!!!! oh my god, she was one of the most interesting jojo girls/part 4 characters. i love her so much ; ; !!!!!!!!!!!!

24. Would you recommend XXX to a friend? Why or why not?jojos? yeaaaahhhh ; ;