#so it positions the higashikatas as allies that are willing to become enemies if it means hurting josuke and yasuho to help their family

[danganronpa2]

jjl thoughts+spoilers

at first the idea of "calamity" in jojolion seemed kind of stupid to me, like one of those vague shonen words like "resolve" that doesn't actually mean anything, but i feel like if you consider jojolion to be a story about family and tradeoffs it actually seems a lot more meaningful. the higashikata family is the heart of the story and although it seems a lot more functional and loving than most traditional families in jojo, it's still built on secrets and lies under the surface - the curse, jobin's deals with the rock humans, kaato's imprisonment, even the fact that they don't show their stands to each other just for the sake of privacy. i think that if they were just being attacked by a certain enemy they would easily be able to unite against it. but as it is, tooru doesn't really have any personal vendetta against anybody, he just wants the rokakaka, and his stand takes the form of pure, random misfortune. so with all the recurring themes of sacrifice and tradeoffs throughout the part, i think it really comes down to the question of "what are you willing to sacrifice in the face of misfortune - for the people you care about and for yourself?" when you take all of the supernatural weirdness away, it's ultimately the story of a family faced with disaster trying to weigh the value of their own lives against the lives of others, and it ends in an avoidable tragedy because they couldn't close those rifts between them by communicating and reaching a compromise. there were two fruits, holly and tsurugi both could have lived, but only tsurugi was saved due to kaato's sacrifice and a whole bunch of other people ended up dying too. so yeah i still don't really get tooru as a character but i think i appreciate what he represents within the story, which is the idea of a "calamity" that can come out of nowhere and tear a family apart.