FirstAidKite posted:

What kind of time things havent been done yet? Not saying he can't just reuse one or repurpose one but I'm not sure what other kinds of time stuff would be available.


I guess maybe something related to time dilation, making events run at different speeds in relation to one another, or just flat out slowing things down, or making events play in the wrong order

Red Bones posted:

Maybe the new bad guy will have a space stand like Valentine did. I dug how before Love Train, Valentine has a very balanced stand and not a super-powerful one. It's the same with Pucci, but I think Valentine is a far better version of the main villain being dangerous without that being entirely because he's got a very scary stand. It would've been easy to put a more flexible limit on D4C, like the time limits The World and King Crimson have, but making it based around squishing Valentine between two things was a really good way to make it weird and cool and more in the scope of the rest of SBR's stand powers.

Even Love Train works much better than Made in Heaven as part of the story, because of what Love Train represents within the story: a character seizing the power to reject random misfortunes, and inflict them on everyone else instead. It's a wonderful culmination of the story because SBR is pretty much entirely about determination and misfortune. The character's lives are all shaped by acts of complete chance, mostly for the worse (Johnny losing his brother and being crippled, Hot Pants' brother being eaten by a bear, etc). In Stardust Crusaders and after, Stands are normally a product of character agency: Dio's giving them out in part 3, Jotaro introduces the arrow to the prison in part 6, etc. In Steel Ball Run, gaining a stand is literally an act of God, given to people seemingly randomly and often when they are dying and have no agency at all. The intentions, and the extent, of 'God', or 'fate', in SBR is never made clear to the reader and often seems contradictory: Johnny is crippled because he was rude to someone in the line to the cinema, he finds a corpse part and is given a stand which saves his life in the next fight, but Johnny and Gyro lose all their corpse parts to the president's men later on. I think that scene is a really good example of how far Araki is working this idea of deserved or undeserved misfortune into the narrative, because it is sprung on the reader without foreshadowing: until this point, SBR has been a narrative where Gyro and Johnny face seemingly unwinnable situations in the face of their goal, and manage to triumph over them anyway. When they are given the rest of the corpse parts by the tree, you might already realise that by the stand's rules they will have to give them away, but you think to yourself "I'm sure they'll find a way out of it", and then they don't; they're left in the snow and they spend the rest of the story desperately trying to get back into a good position against Valentine. A lot of stories drop twists like that to up the drama or change the stakes, but in SBR it works really well because it fits in with the themes of the story and the unfair world that Araki is presenting to the audience. Events in the story never feel like narrative contrivance, they just feel like expressions of SBR's recurring question of whether fate or divine will exists, or not.

The Corpse is presented as an instrument of divine will within the story, and one that acts in ways that feel very unexplained. In Stone Ocean, the green baby and Dio's diary are the source of this bizarre sequence of supernatural developments that feel very sporadic and disjointed. Why does Dio know that this series of events will create Made in Heaven? Where did he learn this? In Stone Ocean, the answer is just " it makes things exciting", but in SBR the essentially random, unexpected actions that the Corpse takes (giving people on every side of the conflict a stand, appearing to Lucy and then almost killing her by turning her into a wooden doll, etc) just serve to drive further home the message of the story; that God's Will is unknowable and confusing and maybe doesn't even exist at all. Johnny doesn't even win by gaining any divine favour, he succeeds by virtue of his own determination and personal growth, just as Valentine had until that point. At the end of the story, the ending is bittersweet and none of the characters who have hypothetically "earned" a victory win it - Pocoloco does, because one day he started having a stand that has been giving him good fortune for the entire race. Norisuke comes second and plays a small part in instigating the events of Jojolion a century later, despite barely appearing in the narrative before this point. There's no grand and satisfying ending where The Corpse is no longer a danger, it's just shut in a vault for a hundred years, despite the story making it plainly clear that neither the readers or the characters can know whether that would even do anything to prevent what are essentially more acts of God from happening. We just have to do what Johnny does: hope and soldier on, in a True Man's World.

And then have your head crushed by a rock a few years later as a product of events you did nothing to deserve.

Josuke Higashikata posted:

Johnny deserved everything he got in the end and didn't deserve a good ending in the first place. Dude's a selfish, merciless prick whose entire motive essentially boils down to "gently caress you, got mine."
Not saying that in a "Valentine did nothing wrong! Johnny's a terrorist" way as memes go, but in a genunine Johnny's just a lovely person one.


It's why he's a great JoJo and a breath of fresh air.

Stallion Cabana posted:

They slowed down everyone's body but not their minds, leading to normal people be unable to do anything because their minds and bodies were desynchronized.

Aurora posted:

Jesus' corpse is probably beneath that tree Yasuho fell in

Moltrey posted:

Jesus' corpse was recovered by the US government iirc and presumably put it back in the vault.

Moltrey posted:

Jesus' corpse was recovered by the US government iirc and presumably put it back in the vault.

Aurora posted:

drat, you're right, I don't know why I thought they didn't get it

Jo Joestar posted:

Because Johnny had died recently and the Corpse is an ancient mummy, and it's not very plausible that they'd mistake one for the other?

Jo Joestar posted:

Anyway, what I'm keen to see from Jojolion is an explanation of whatever it is that's been going around biting people and giving them Stands.

Waffleman_ posted:

Didn't Johnny become rock'd or did he just die?

Moltrey posted:

If anything in JoJolion gets the Araki Forgot explanation, I feel it will be this. We haven't seen this since like, near the beginning, after Joshuu and Yasuho got bitten? Once things became about rock sickness and fruits, that and the origin of the Wall Eyes exited stage left.

Fiend Computer posted:

You caught me with my spelling pants down. it's my stand's one weakness!

Moltrey posted:

If anything in JoJolion gets the Araki Forgot explanation, I feel it will be this.

Johnny Joestar posted:

i feel like it'll start being more relevant soon since kira and josefumi have planted the rokakaka by a hosed-up area with some wall eyes or something.

e: there -has- to be some sort of connection given what happens to stuff buried near them and what the fruits do.

Josuke Higashikata posted:

Sinners Sandwich posted:

Josue isn't even two people in that scene

Johnny Joestar posted:

yeah, it's one of those cases where araki just makes it look normal for the sake of time and since it's such a fine detail. also there's definitely still more than enough time for that guy that gappy had a vision of to become relevant.

Adlai Stevenson posted:

I still would like followup/acknowledgment that Kira made a guy eat his own fingers

I didn't dream that, right? That totally was mentioned early on, right?

Red Bones posted:

Yeah I'd definitely bet on the main villain of Jojolion not being a fat dude, especially considering part seven started off with the main villain being a fat dude and then Araki gave him abs through literal divine means. If there's one thing constant throughout Jojos, it's the main bad guy being a hot dude with abs, and that guy from Gappy's flashback looks a lot more like main bad guy material than the guy he's fighting at the moment.