Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders – Episodes 15 to 17

As of this post, Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure has been dropped. Really sorry to all those that’ve been following the posts, but my irl circumstances are making it really difficult for me to have much time with anime (i’m like 5 episodes behind on Jojo’s right now). There may be an overall review, but since this series is a split cour, I’m looking at only putting the post out next year once it’s done airing (and that is if no other writer is going to cover the second half)

First off, apologies for being so late with my posts. I’m starting college life in August, and I’ve been swamped with module choices, timetable scheduling, freshmen orientation and the like, and ended up having like 6247652841 episodes to catch up on.

Anyways, I’ll be splitting this post into 2 parts, one to discuss episode 15 (the Justice), while lumping 16-17 together since they cover the entirety of the Lovers fight.

Episode 15 – Justice Part 2

Jojo’s has had a couple of bummer episodes, but the Justice fight is VERY entertaining, even if I don’t actually understand much of what is going on. They never really explicitly explain what Enyaba’s Stand allows her to do? Does she just reanimate corpses/control bodies with open wounds through justice? Does the actual fog give off some kind of illusion, since the corpses later immediately become skeletons after the fight? Also, why the fuck is Polnareff so weak? Isn’t Silver Chariot supposed to be the fastest? Strange how he couldn’t even get one proper hit on Enya. That aside though, I alreaddy went in to Jojo expecting them to gloss over the details for plain, simple, fighting frenzy fun so it didn’t really hinder my enjoyment. In fact, this might be better for Jojo. The more I turn off my brain the more I enjoy Jojo (though I am not saying it’s a stupid show, there are clear signs of why it’s still so popular)

This episode was great because it manages to focus on Polnareff, who is, in my not so humble opinion the best cast member of Part 3 with the exception of Joseph, and it’s actually pretty funny that he has to fight in a bloody toilet. Again. Poor boy just wants to find some love, avenge his sister (I honestly don’t really care about that part though) but ends up getting screwed over in toilets of all places. Polnareff, my heart is with you.  I LOVED how he unintentionally pushed all of Enyaba’s buttons just by being nice. Jojo has a great sense of humor, if Joseph’s hijinks in part 2 didn’t make this fact clear enough. I loved it, and it just establishes another facet of Polnareff’s character – he probably can’t get the girls because he’s so good at unintentionally offending the ladies and pissing them off and the shithead doesn’t even know (the second reason being his wearing of the black sports bra).

Best part of the episode still goes to Joseph outright laughing at Polnareff though. Christ was that funny. And so mean-spirited. Old man Joseph should be setting an example for the young’uns but it turns out he’s the most childish one of them all. I bet he conveniently forgot about his own squealing and fear of needles. Truly a role model for young male readers.

Episode 15-16 – Lovers 

This fight was good as well, for two reasons. 1)Steely Dan is so comically evil and also really awful at it, harking back to part 1, pre-vampire Dio and 2)Joseph screaming in english

Seriously, Steely Dan is lots of fun. His Stand clearly reflects his personality – weak, acknowledges his weakness (AND STILL CAN’T FUCKING DO SHIT), obnoxious. He’s a pretty great Stand user, and this Stand battle is definitely one of the more bizarre battles that helped this series rightfully earn its name. After taking over Joseph’s brain with his stand he doesn’t even do anything /that/ awful – asking Jotaro to scratch his back for him? Maybe just kinda humiliating? He’s so easily riled up too, and thinks he’s hot shit for getting Jotaro to ‘submit’ to him.

What sets Jojo apart from many other series of its ilk is just the weirdness of each characters abilities, and that no Stand user is as strong/weak as they seem, but for the strangest, most creative (and weird) reasons. Similar to HunterxHunter’s more unique Nen abilities (Alluka and Neon, anyone?) , what is important is often never the raw power of the Stand but how to strategically use it to hit your opponents HARD. Except for Star Platinum. That Stand clearly exists to beat the shit out of everything else.

The actual battle between Steely Dan’s, Kakyoin’s and Polnareff’s Stand was great too – once again there is a great use of the series’ wacky color scheme and bold artistic direction. The part where Steely Dan’s stand made tons of copies of himself to confuse Kakyoin and Polnareff would normally be lame as hell, but because of just how well handled the fight was, it really made the fight that much creepier. The portion where the colour scheme was nearly entirely yellow hues as Steely’s Stand covered the screen was genuine nightmare fuel for me.

Also, seeing Joseph completely lose his shit because of Steely Dan’s Stand on the streets and people mistaking him for being a crazed senior citizen was pretty damn priceless. And Joseph screaming his trademark “OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOO!” and ‘OOOOOOOOOHHHHHHH GOOOOOOOOOOOOD” felt so good. I should probably re-watch part 2.

So yeah, Stardust Crusaders has got quite a number of rough spots so far – a less than satisfactory cast, poor narrative structure etc, but as long as the individual fights themselves can still stay fresh and stand out from each other I’ll still be perfectly down with another 2-3 cours worth of Part 3. Also, there’s still one more main cast member yet to be introduced (the dog? I’m unsure, please don’t spoil anything!) so there’s that to look forward to.