#this is my fatal flaw after a year i just want to rewrite everything i've ever written

[shoechoe]

Yeah, I totally agree with you on those tags. Vento Aureo has great foundations but I think it went too fast (both in-universe time and the actual pacing of the story) and didn't spend enough time on character exploration or relationships. And I feel like Doppio and Diavolo really needed some extra time, I get that they're meant to be mysterious but it ends up just... Messy and vague. I love Vento Aureo and I simultaneously want to change so much about it.

Yeah, though I'll leave my more in-depth thoughts for when I finish my rewatch, those are definitely some of the big issues with it. I think VA had a large cast and didn't really know how to manage them properly, so it ended up having some of the weirdest pacing out of any Jojo part (and that's saying something) and a lot of characters only got around one fight to establish themselves before either being killed, leaving the story, or being shoved to the background. Trish, Doppio, and Fugo are big examples of this.

And, while I know I've talked about this ad nauseum already, I think the way it handles the setting of a mafia is... not great a lot of the time. Particularly, the way that Giorno and Bruno hyper-focus on the fact that Passione sells drugs and ignore practically every other crime makes for some weird hypocritical behavior that I really wished got called out at some point (Bruno is perfectly willing to invite kids to join the mafia- except for Narancia that one time, though he still got in- and torture a 15 y/o for information, but he draws the line at selling drugs to kids and... doesn't see any connection between crimes there? Also, his panic when he realizes Passione sells drugs of all things after years of working for it and committing crimes that are probably just as bad really makes zero sense. It makes him look unrealistically naïve for a supposedly intelligent character.)

VA's ending is also where it hits its absolute low point for me in pretty much every aspect- to be honest, I didn't even really watch the ending all the way through on my last rewatch. But the more I've thought about it, thinking of a better ending for VA would really require a reworking of the entire plot.

It's unfortunate, but there's no going back in time to tell Araki to fix it, so what can you do except think about hypothetical story changes and make online rants about it, you know?