#sort of like kira in part four of jjba

[constanttea]

scenario where not-them unintentionally replaces an abusive s/o and then the partner suddenly has a sort of awkward loving partner and not-them can't figure out why the victim is not creeped out!!

[foodlesoodlesdoodles]

i would love to know more about ur jjba ocs :D

‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ AN EXCUSE TO YAP . GODSPEED BELOVED CITIZEN. FOR SPACING I MAY HAVE TO DO A MULTI PART BUT I THINK ILL START WITH THE OGS. Honestly I wouldn’t mind an input about which one to clarify about,,,,, also Godspeed because you did this anon off which I could never be brave enough to do (positive) OKAY OKAY SO.

The Primary setting is Diamond Is Unbreakable. Featuring my favorite four gay college aged losers.

JOUJIROU HANABUSA is, quite obviously, yet another illegitimate child of a certain old man. 20 years old and studying to become essentially a professional bug researcher? She was actually made separate from the entire groups theming. She’s kindhearted and struggles to stand up for herself or take things serious, as she feels great remorse for who she was previous to college. She used to be a big hothead boy (‼️TRANSFEM BTW) who was the classic archetype of kid having a rough time at home (or at this case, lack thereof as she was in the foster system at a very small age) and took it out on other people. She struggles with feeling like she’s constantly left out or behind, which emphasizes itself when shit kicks into high gear in the story. (AU pictured briefly here where Joseph finds her at 11 and takes her to be apart of the family)

This kind of reputation proceeds her in the small town, and as such she’s become much more withdrawn and introverted. She left for a period of time as to help her adoptive father on business trips. After which, she came across her little half brother after he accidentally bumped into her while she was frozen looking at a millipede on a streetlight. They didn’t like eachother at first! But brother, once the moms found out it was OVER.

Her stand is The Seven Plagues of Egypt, a very odd place for a stand such as this! But that’s sort of her whole point, she’s sort of an echo of someone she never knew and the issues resulting sort of warping her life and behavior forever unintentionally. (Fun fact: she was 11 when the SDC arc happened!) her stand itself is disturbing and odd, manifesting itself not just out of the material it controls (locusts, fire, blood, etc etc) but also her own internal issues.

The stand itself is crazy, but it’s in the hands of a person who never wants to hurt anyone. Her favorite bugs are of course locusts, having certain earrings and a ponytail holder resembling the insect. It’s range is rather questionable, as Seven Plagues did fuck up— Y’know— Egypt. Or at least a wide range. I don’t have an exact number, as it’s very hard to pin down! She sees through the eyes of the locusts, and can pretty much go anywhere with it even though she can’t use her abilities through the bug outside of a certain radius.

Speaking of, as to how she takes damage— a lot of her stand is multiple organisms in hordes, and she often uses these creatures passively. Whether it be one or 30 all hidden around the room to listen and watch. They appear as small cuts on her body whenever they die, which is HIGHLY annoying for her. (and, newsflash: she DOES get headaches from being rattled around in a jar)

(AU pictured briefly here where Joseph finds her at 11 and takes her to be apart of the family part 2) I’ve tried drawing it only a handful of times once before, but I do struggle to capture it in a way I like. I have far better sketches I know I’ve deleted but can find! But I’d rather not accidentally delete all of this as I’m on mobile.

Her SCARRING is something very important, as it actually doesn’t come from her hurting herself! It’s a close call with Yoshikage Kira, and brother she FELL for that damsel in distress act he put up and he GOT her ass. Luckily he was on the run so she didn’t have to worry about any extra shit, but needless to say her persistent belief in the goodwill of others gets her in trouble. (I am totally certain this won’t happen a second time with a pink haired man who has some weird shit goin on)

This is the most RECENT but UNFINISHED mapping of her scars, body and shape. As you can tell I made the center of the blast sort of blister into a star mark. She gets more later, but as of right now we’re focused on part 4 Jouji. This obviously fucked her up big time, destroyed any feel in that side of her body and definitely needed several surgeries, medications and a cane. Her eye technically survived but it’s very piss poor vision on her other side.

She functions poorly in serious social situations, often opting to do bits or try to lighten up the mood. Though she can hold her own close range as well as a regular buff ass 6’6 woman can, she doesn’t often resort to that unless it’s protective. She at least knows how to try her best in situations where people need support or feel isolated, as she knows those kinds of feelings well and tries to befriend people through food and gifts. This is actually why all of her friends came not from college, but from the cafe Norman works at!

LASTLY, she warms up to her new dad rather quickly! She’s an adult, and she tries to reassure him he couldn’t have known she or her brother were born. (“Though, did you HAVE to cheat on your wife? I mean, thanks for the life and all…… but jeez, dude— TWICE? at your age? Damnn….”) she can’t help but wonder if somewhere in the back of his mind, he knows what her mom is like. who she is. She was left alone in Morioh at like 5, and doesn’t remember her twin brother. (And never learns of him until far, far, FAR later.) She just wants to know why she was left behind, and the only one to be. (It was the destructiveness of her stand, and for a assumedly standless mother— it was far too much to handle. So she took the other less exhausting son.)

Though…….. if she were smaller it would NOT be the case.

[duhragonball]

Vento Aureo Reread, JJBA Ch. 448-456

One of the things that frustrated me about reading JJBA in manga format was that the volumes never lined up with the story arcs.  For example, this arc, where Giorno meets Bruno’s superior in the gang for his initiation, is broken up across volumes 2 and 3.   Sometimes the volumes manage to break a story up on a decent cliffhanger.  In this case, volume 2 ends with Giorno defeating Black Sabbath, but still wondering if he’ll pass his initiation into the gang.  Most of the time, though, it just feels like the editors are only looking for a certain page count, regardless of where the story leaves off.

With that in mind, I decided to break this up into story arcs, now that I can do that without spoiling myself on the story.  The first time I read Part 5, it felt like this continuous slog, with no real break in the action, but now that I’ve looked it over more carefully, and dispensed with the volume numbers, I can break it down pretty well.  

At first, I tried to sort it all by location.    Coming up soon is a mission on Capri Island, followed by an assignment in Pompeii, but once I actually looked at a map of Italy, I found those are all pretty close to Naples, which is where the story starts.  So I can lump the first section of Vento Aureo as the “Naples” part, which is then followed by a section set in Venice, then Sardinia, and finally Rome.  It just helps me keep everything straight.    I suppose I needed the same kind of clarity with Part 3 and Part 7, but my knowledge of U.S. and Asian geography is a lot better than anything I know about Italy. 

In this arc we meet Polpo, the Passione Operative who runs things in Naples.  Passione is the name of the gang.   There’s 756 members, including Stand Users like Bruno Bucellati, and guys without Stands, like Leaky-Eyed Luca.   Giorno soon realizes that Polpo has a Stand when he visits him in prison and he starts eating his own fingers. 

One of the things that always bugged me about Polpo is how he seems to have completely different abilities in his cell, as opposed to the ones we see when his Stand is formally introduced to the story.   Polpo isn’t just morbidly obese; his head is bigger than Giorno’s entire body, and he seems to barely fit in his cell, prompting Giorno to wonder how he ever got through the door.   Also, he has all these hidden compartments in the cell, and he can somehow hide his enormous body from plain sight. 

I finally got a clue when I noticed a couple of things on the reread.  First, Polpo’s fingers don’t just reappear at random.   When Giorno sees Polpo’s bloody stumps, a cuckoo clock goes off, causing him to look over to it, and when he looks back, Polpo’s fingers are back, now holding a lighter.   As we see later, Polpo’s Stand, Black Sabbath, travels through shadows, so I think it’s reasonable to assume Polpo was actually reaching into a shadow to retrieve the lighter.   He uses similar tricks to hide himself and other objects in his cell, and he can probably leave the prison altogether just as easily.   Bruno hinted as much when he led Giorno to the prison, but, as Giorno deduces, Polpo is probably safer in jail, and Polpo seems content to live out his sentence and run his gang business from inside. 

Of course, that doesn’t explain the blood we see on Polpo’s “stumps”.  This may simply be wine he surreptitiously spilled on his hand to confuse Giorno, or maybe he really does bleed whenever he moves his body into the shadow dimension his Stand uses.  Or maybe he’s got real blood stashed with the lighter, but that seems kind of extreme.

Anyway, Giorno’s initiation test is to take Polpo’s lighter and keep it lit for twenty-four hours straight.  He almost whizzes it twice.  First, he has to be searched before he can leave the prison.   Since he can’t hide the lighter, he uses his own Stand, Gold Experience, to transform it into a flower.   It does not, however, transform the flame. 

Next, Koichi breaks into his dorm room to steal back his passport.   Giorno hides, but worries that Koichi will snuff the lighter if he happens to notice it.   So he turns the wiring into a snake, which bites into the loaf of bread he put the lighter in, and tugs on the cord to lift the whole thing out of Koichi’s sight.  

I’m trying to keep track of Giorno’s powers as the story winds on.    So far, I’ve got the following:

Gold Experience can transform inanimate objects into living things, and back again.

If these creations are attacked in any way, the attack will be reflected back upon the aggressor.

At first, Giorno claims that his creations have wills off their own, but he seems to have at least some influence over their actions, or perhaps he simply has an intuitive understanding of what they’ll do.

When Gold Experience strikes a living being, their perceptions are accelerated, causing them to think the world around them has slowed down.   They also become extremely sensitive to pain.

What we see here is Gold Experience transforming inanimate objects only partway.   The lighter becomes a flower, but there’s enough of the lighter left unchanged to keep the flame lit.   The cord becomes a snake, but only on the end Giorno needs to grab the bread.    The other end of the cord remains a cord.

Despite Giorno’s best efforts, the lighter goes out anyway, and a friendly janitor relights it.   Giorno had assumed this was impossible, since there would be no point in the test if the lighter could simply be re-lit.   As it turns out, this is precisely the point, as re-igniting the lighter summons Polpo’s Stand, Black Sabbath.  Black Sabbath’s only function in this situation is to yank out the soul of its targets and stab their souls with the arrow in its mouth.   This is the same kind of arrow as the ones from Part 4, which either kill on contact, or activate latent Stand abilities.   Black Sabbath’s targets are anyone who re-ignites the lighter, and anyone who witnessed the lighter being re-lit.  The janitor dies to the arrow, while Giorno is injured by it, not once...

Not twice...

But three times, when the arrow pierces Gold Experience.  I find this conspicuous, now that I know how the story ends, but I’ll worry about that later.

Basically, Polpo’s initiation is rigged.   Of course, if an applicant actually managed to keep the lighter lit for the full 24 hours, he would pass the test and be accepted into the gang, since Polpo admires trustworthiness.   However, the real idea is that the initiate will succumb to the temptation to relight the flame, at which point Black Sabbath will either kill them or give them a Stand power.  We can infer from this that this is how Bruno got his own Stand, Sticky Fingers.  It’s also plausible that Leaky Eye Luca actually kept the flame lit for the full 24 hours, which fits his stubborn personality.   Or maybe Luca passed some other test. 

What Polpo’s test never seems to take into account is that the initiate might already have a Stand.  Black Sabbath is essentially automated in this fight, so it doesn’t know that it’s fighting Stand Users here.   It’s just trying to stab Gold Experience (and Echoes, when Koichi jumps in to help), just like it stabbed the Janitor’s soul to kill him.    Presumably, this means Polpo is willing to kill Stand Users unaffiliated with the gang, perhaps because he sees them as potential threats.   What he wants are kids like Bruno, who only get a Stand by joining Passione. 

Ultimately, Giorno defeats Black Sabbath by using his own body as bait.   While B.S. wrestles with him, hampered by Echoes’ 3-Freeze ability, Giorno manages to accelerate the life of a nearby tree, causing it to wither and die within seconds.   So chalk that up as another application of Gold Experience.   The tree was the only thing protecting Black Sabbath from the sunlight, so it faded away to return to its master. 

At first, Giorno thinks the presence of Black Sabbath means that Polpo has discovered his failure of the test.   He also thinks that defeating Black Sabbath killed Polpo, until Koichi explains how remote, long range Stands work.   And that was the other half of the puzzle for me.    I couldn’t figure out how Black Sabbath’s demonstrated powers would explain Polpo’s abilities in his cell, but they don’t have to be consistent.   When Koichi explains Black Sabbath’s ability, he’s comaring it to his own experience battling Yoshikage Kira’s Killer Queen in Part 4.   But Killer Queen had multiple modes.    The one Koichi fought was Sheer Heart Attack, which could attack foes at long distances based on very specific parameters.   But when Kira wasn’t using that mode, he could use Killer Queen more creatively than that. 

I think it’s reasonable to assume that Black Sabbath works the same way.   In person, Black Sabbath allows Polpo to move from shadow to shadow, and he can store objects for safe keeping, like the lighter and the arrow, or even portions of his own body.   But he can also reconfigure B.S. for an automated mode that hides inside the ligher, with the arrow hidden inside its mouth.    That version works like Sheer Heart Attack.   We could call this “Paranoid” or “War Pigs”, for the sake of argument. 

Anyway, Koichi wants to contact his friends immediately, now that he knows there’s a Stand Arrow in Naples, but Giorno convinces him to keep it to himself, since the enemy is an organization, and he can’t afford anyone leaking his plans.  We never see Koichi again after this scene, and while he appears to accept Giorno as a righteous person, we never actually hear him agree to Giorno’s request.   For all we know, he returned to Japan and blabbed his head off to Jotaro and everyone in Morioh.   Once again, there’s ambiguity over whether Giorno is to be trusted, and ambiguity over how the other heroes feel about him.   We’re left to wonder if Koichi vouched for Giorno, or if he raised an army to oppose him. 

When Giorno return the lighter to Polpo he somehow turns one of Polpo’s guns into a banana, which fires when Polpo tries to eat it.   I still can’t figure out how Giorno did this, since the gun was on the far wall off the cell, which looks to be out of Gold Experience’s range.   Assuming it was in G.E.’s range, then it’s no problem.   Giorno could have moved it through the walls and touched the gun without Polpo seeing it, and then it would just be a matter of moving the gun into the refrigerator with the rest of the bananas.  

I’m also not sure how the gun went off.   Giorno has some control over his creations, but bananas can’t move on their own, and I don’t buy that Polpo just happened to have his thumb where the trigger would be as it changed back into a gun.  For a second, I thought maybe this was a case of what happened to Luca.   Polpo bites down on the banana, and the “attack” is reflected back upon him.    But if that were the case, he would have a big bite mark on his head, not a gunshot wound.  In any event, Giorno arranged this trap to avenge the old janitor, whose needless death offends Giorno’s sense of honor.

Then Giorno goes with Bruno to meet the rest of their team, and he drinks pee.  OR DOES HE?

The better translation made this scene a lot clearer, in that Giorno was visibly aware that Abbachio had filled his cup with urine, and the others knew that Giorno knew it.  So it wasn’t a thing where Giorno was pretending to play along.   Abbachio was trying to trap him into either getting mad at his new teammates, or actually drinking pee and looking like a dope.  Giorno used his Stand to create a third option that would impress them all, which I suppose is worth touching pee with your lips. 

I don’t quite understand how Giorno can get his tooth back, though.  Does he have to extrude the jellyfish first?   Maybe it’s best not to think about that.

I remember being so irritated about all these new guys being introduced at the same time.    I still have trouble remembering the names of Part 4 characters.   But in color, it’s pretty easy to keep track.   Doily Hat, Dick Helmet, Baby Idiot, and Dressed in the Dark.  But I’ll have more to say about them later.