#jojolion 107 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

duhragonball · 7 months ago

Text

JoJolion Ch. 107-108

Remember when JoJolion got insanely popular for a while, and everyone was spamming "Inca No Mezame Potatoes" memes all year long? Those were good times.

At this point, the final battle is nearly finished. Toru's Stand is still extremely dangerous, but Josuke was able to get past his defenses, with a little help from Yasuho. He's not dead, but he's badly hurt, so if you just stand back and leave him alone, it should just be a matter of waiting for him to die.

However, Toru ate the last fruit off the New Locacaca Branch, so he could recover from his wounds, but only if he can touch someone to act as a donor in the equivalent exchance process. That's how the New Locacaca works, by the way. The original version healed one body part in exchange with another. If you've got too many injuries, like Toru here, the Old Locacaca wouldn't do any good. But with the New Locacaca, you can absorb health from a second person, and they end up taking on your injuries.

And that's the situation Caato Higashikata has walked into. She's been renting an apartment lately, and she made a stew for Jobin, with Inca No Mazame potatoes, just the way he likes 'em. But when she brought it over for him, she found the apartment wrecked and Jobin dead.

Yasuho's fear is that Caato will try to attack Toru in a vengeful fury, except this would play right into Toru's hands. As soon as she gets close enough, he can grab her and heal himself with equivalent exchange. Even if she attacks him from a safe distance, his Wonder of U power is still active, so a calamity will strike her down. So Yasuho is desperately begging Caato to just do nothing. The only winning move is not to play.

But Caato has a plan, much to Yasuho's chagrin. She tosses some of her playing cards around him, and reveals her Stand abilitiy. Space Trucking can hide objects between playing cards. The cards themselves are no threat to Toru, so simply demonstrating all of this is not enough to trigger a calamity. She even uses the cards to hide Toru's arms, but this isn't an attack either, since it doesn't hurt him. It's just to keep him in one place.

That's an interesting angle, actually. Is it possible to simply trap Toru in a place where he can't escape? Like, if he falls down a hole and he can't get out, that's not an attack, and I don't think his Stand has the kind of physical power it would need to pull him out. Could you defeat him that way? That's not Caato's plan, but it's something to think about.

I'm skipping over a lot of stuff here, because most of this chapter is just Toru and Caato cutting promos on each other. Toru keeps taunting Caato about how her dead son's dreams were never realized, and Caato keeps explaining things. He's trying to goad her into making a mistake, and she's just dragging this moment out, for various reasons, but mostly just to keep Toru guessing.

Then we get this flashback to before the Wonder of U arc began. Caato came over one day and Jobin revealed to her the New Locacaca branch that he had secured during the orchard fire. He had been stressed out about keeping it hidden, and the stress of sharing that secret with Tsurugi, and the danger of losing the branch to enemies. Caato reassured him and offered to hide the branch--pot and all--inside her cards if the need arose.

I'm not sure what the point of this was, except to make it clear that Caato knew about the branch and the powers of its fruit. Specifically, Jobin showed her how two of his beetles did an equivalent exchange. I guess they just got close enough to the plant that they ingested some of the sap? There were only two fruits, and they hadn't grown yet in the flashback, so I don't know. The point is that both Jobin and Caato understood that the branch actually had this power.

So finally, Toru begins to get flustered, and demands to know what she's hiding in her cards. She didn't come out to the garage just to talk to him while he died, so what is she up to? So Caato finally shows him...

Turns out, she hid Tsurugi in there, and now the kid rolls out onto the floor and his body contacts Toru's, which initiates the equivalent exchange!

But which way will this go? Toru's the one who ate the fruit, so that should mean his injuries will be healed, not Tsurugi's disease. Well, Caato thought that, which is why she hid the plant in her cards too, and made sure to crush the branch so as to extract the sap. She drips this into Tusurugi's mouth, and that seems to do the trick. I'm not sure why this gives Tsurugi precedence in the exchange, but sure.

As Toru dies, he tries to talk his way out of this. He warns them that they'll never find another plant like this again, and if they destroy it now, there'll never be another. I would have thought they could just find another Old Locacaca plant in New Guinea, plant it near the Wall Eyes, and there you go. But Toru seems to think there were other coincidences at play, like the earthquake and everything else that happened in this Part. The New Locacaca that Kira and Josefumi unwittingly created was truly unique.

Needless to say, this doesn't impress anyone in the garage. The Locacaca has caused the Higashikatas and Yasuho a lot of grief, so who needs more of that bullshit? And even if it were a boon to humanity, if we need Rock Humans like Toru to access it, then it's probably not worth the trouble, since the Rock Humans have demonstrated time and again that they aren't trustworthy. Remember, Poor Tom died trying to bring what he thought was the branch to Toru, and Toru used his Stand to kill him. The Rock Humans can't even trust each other. The idea of them posing as doctors is bad comedy.

But mostly, fuck Toru. Even if he could snap his fingers and cure Holly and resurrect all of his victims, he'd never do it. You know, he might even have that kind of ability. Wonder of U causes misfortune to befall anyone who pursues or attacks Toru, but maybe it can do nice things for people too. We just never find that out because Toru has no altruistic tendencies. Helping someone else isn't in his character. It would never occur to him to try to help Holly or anyone else. So his pleas for mercy are especially pathetic.

Then he starts appealing to Yasuho, talking about all the good times they had together. Yeah, like the time you dropped a chunk of aircraft on her head, remember that? Yeah, Yasuho doesn't budge. She looks concerned, but I think it's just because she's so horrified to watch this horrible creature's death throes. Why is it taking so long?

At last, Toru finally dies, and his last thought is the image of a hornet, like the one he clung to as an infant so he could parisitize its nest. He realizes this was just a memory, but I guess maybe he somehow hoped that he could grab the hornet again and be taken to another nest where he could be safe and warm while he recovered.

That's really all Toru had, in the end. For all his polished facade, he never actually had any relationships with anyone. Not with Yasuho, not with his colleagues at the hospital, not with his fellow Rock Humans. They were all just means to an end, hornets that he could exploit to enrich himself. Toru often spoke of wanting good memories to keep him company. That seems to be what he saw in Yasuho. He never loved her or cared about her, but he wanted the experience of spending time with her all the same.

But in the end, his memories are all hollow. A regular human might die thinking of his family, like Jobin. But all Toru has is is his hornet.

So that's it for Toru, and that's also it for Caato, as she didn't get off scott free with this stunt of hers. When she poured the sap into Tsurugi's mouth, that constituted an attack on Toru, and so the calamity was activated. In this case, Toru had been brandishing a saw when Caato entered the garage, and this got trapped in her cards when she pinned down his arms. Somehow, as he was dying, the saw came out of the cards and flung itself into Caato's belly. I think that might be a malfunction of Space Trucking, sort of like how Wonder of U made Mitsuba and Josuke's Stands do unexpected things. Anyway, Caato lays down and dies, and I'm pretty sure she expected it to end this way.

Yasuho has this internal monologue about everything the Higashikata Family has endured in this story, but in the end, the family has gathered in the garage, not in mourning or despair, but because of hope. That's because, Tsurugi's Rock Disease has been cured thanks to the equivalent exchange, and now, at long last, the curse has been broken.

And this leads us to that moment where Tsurugi drags Norisuke out of his office, which was shown in the flash forward about twenty-odd chapters ago. What I still don't understand is: Why is Tsurugi bringing him out here? There are ambulances on the way, but I'm pretty sure they could come in the house and get Norisuke.

I think the more important thing Araki was trying to get across is that Tsurugi is finally healthy and free of the dread of worrying about the curse. While the rest of the family is still reeling from today's events, he's back on his feet and taking charge. So that's why he's the one who goes to get Norisuke, and he's the one who informs the others that he's still alive, and Jobin didn't hurt him as badly as everyone feared.

Okay, but Norisuke's right hand still fell off his arm. Like, that definitely happened. I guess he'll live even if they can't reattach it, because people lose hands and fingers in JJBA all the time, and it's more like a bad flu than anything else.

But it's not quite over yet! Toru may be dead, but somehow, Wonder of U is still active? The Stand crawls inside of Norisuke for some reason. It aggravates his injuries, though I'm not sure why. Wait, is this how it impersonated Dr. Satoru Akefu? Did Toru find the real Dr. Akefu and send Wonder of U into his body to do some sort of pod people thing?

Fortunately, Josuke's here to save the day, having just returned from the TG University Hospital. I think the idea in these two chapters is that Toru was recalling Wonder of U back to his side, and that's why it was floating around in the garage, but Josuke was also on his way back, which is why he made it on the scene not long after. Now that he's here, and there's no more bullshit Rock Insects to get in the way, Josuke can just shoot his Go Beyond bubbles at Wonder of U without any problem. He does as Yasuho to stand clear, though, because the bubbles are invisible and that makes it really difficult to aim them precisely.

And at this range, Josuke can't miss. Wonder of U explodes, and Yasuho holds him like the girlfriend in old B-Movies after the monster finally dies.

So that seems to wrap things up, right? No more Rock Humans, no more Locacaca, no more branches to fight over, no more curses, and no more Jobin to get in everyone's way. Also, Joshuu lost his right arm, so that probably just makes the whole town safer overall.

Wait, what about Holly? And what about Josuke's memories? Also what was the deal with that baby who washed up on shore the night Johnny died in 1901? And Karera said she would be back, so what happened to her? Also, Josuke and Yasuho need to kiss or something, right? There's a lot of loose ends we need to wrap up, but fortunately there's still two more chapters and...