Can you go into how you think Dios insane and how his mind works. I have trouble putting my thoughts into words but reading other people's opinions helps and not a lot of people talk about dios insanity even tho i find it very interesting
Sure thing!!! You know I love to talk about DIO lmao(NOTE: This will include spoilers for Stone Ocean later on)
In part 1, human Dio’s goal appears to be proving a point to his dead father as well as himself. He always wants more, to achieve more, to prove he’s capable of more. He does that by pursuing superiority in many fields; he proves academic excellence by finishing law school at the top of his class, he proves he’s a talented sportsman by being one of his school’s star rugby players, and he actively, since the moment he joined the Joestar family, wants to prove that he’s superior to Jonathan and therefore a better heir and a better son.
It’s also important to mention the flaws he sees in himself here; his anger. I went into this before here but to summarize it; Dio has an anger problem and he not only knows it - it’s his most despised thing about himself.
That’s all simple stuff at the start, as it’s just trying to prove he’s better than others, and that’s easy to understand.
Then he becomes a vampire and a power trip REALLY hits him. Now he doesn’t have to pretend that he’s a gentleman anymore because literally no one can do shit to him. That law he studied? Fuck that, he can break it now all he wants, because it doesn’t apply to him anymore. The law is written for mere humans, and he’s not one of them anymore. He can do whatever he wants and he will do that - as flamboyantly and dramatically as possible. The Joestar fortune he was after in his earlier days? Fuck that too, he’s an immortal vampire with superpowers now, he can just take whatever money he wants.
Now Dio is free to be himself in every sense, and he stops pursuing power in a sneaky, deceitful way, but just. Straight up terrorizing anyone who steps in his path. Now EVERYONE gets to know about his wish for power, not just Jonathan.
And what’s even better - NO ONE is a problem anymore. NO ONE can hurt him. You know what this means for Dio? That he doesn’t have to get angry and frustrated anymore, because no one is able to push him that far.
….Except for Jonathan Joestar, who just won’t leave him alone
Jonathan keeps coming back and it low key pisses Dio off, but on the other hand, he also has major respect for him because of that. In his life of power and bliss, Jonathan manages to be the ONLY thing to disturb him
So Phantom Blood ending happens, Dio is bodyless, and in a mixture of necessity and respect, he takes Jonathan’s body. I notice people often seem to think that he took his body because he wanted it from the get go or something, but that’s not accurate. Initially it was for revenge, because Jonathan was the one who caused him to have to behead himself, and in SDC DIO even clearly says he NEEDED to take that body in order to survive - it was originally revenge and survivalism, but seeing Jonathan’s final actions also added immense respect to that. That body means a lot of different things to DIO.
Anyway now we get to the good part.So Dio is underwater all alone with a corpse for about 100 years. I went into more into this once before but to TL;DR that post; that kind of situation Does Bad Shit To You.
By the time DIO arose from that coffin, the insanity REALLY took hold of him. Because, in that coffin, he got to THINK. He got to do a LOT of thinking. All alone. He got to think about what matters to him.
And once he did all that thinking, he found his goal.It was not riches or power, but lack of anger: Inner peace.
Throughout SDC and Stone Ocean, that’s his ultimate goal.Now, how he goes about to obtain that is… hm.
In Stone Ocean, we are introduced to DIO’s diary, in which he essentially wrote down a highly complex, highly convoluted ritual of obtaining peace of mind, or as he likes to call it like the dramatic bitch that he is: Heaven.
I’ve seen people say that he apparently doesn’t show any philosophical interest in that kinda thing in SDC to which I say, do you even pay attention?
Think about DIO throughout SDC - what do we actually see him do before the final battle? He’s reading, he’s studying, he’s relaxing, he DOESN’T WANT TO BE BOTHERED.
He isn’t even the one sending out his assassins at first - the Tarot enemies are all Enya’s employees, she dragged those homicidal maniacs together. It’s only after all of them are defeated that DIO sends out HIS followers, the Glory Gods.
DIO wants his minions to take care of this because it’s low key stressing him out and he Doesn’t Need This Shit Right Now. He’s SO CLOSE to doing his ritual, Pucci is waiting for himin America, they have PLANS, and now these Joestar bastards are in Egypt?? What the fuck??? Can they like, not??? Is there any respect left for the ‘Do Not Disturb’ signs you hang on the door handles??
Basically, SDC catches DIO at a really bad time because he’s just in the middle of something big and it all just comes in to crash his plans, but there’s a lot about him that can be discerned from the final battle, and that is one of my favourite aspects of him, which is also very closely tied to his idea of Heaven; KNOWLEDGE.
DIO was really REALLY confident at the start of the battle, because he was convinced he had more knowledge about the Joestar group than they did about him, and knowledge was supposed to be his greatest weapon.
You can tell how paranoid and stressed out he becomes once Jotaro breaks that idea of him Knowing More and starts moving in stopped time. One of my favourite scenes in the final battle has got to be the ‘Is Jotaro Really Dead?’ scene, in which DIO acts like a paranoid wild animal, he acts like a cat who has his sights on something, but is not 100% sure if it’s safe to come close.
This paranoia is a HUGE factor of why he wants Heaven, aka Peace of Mind, and he is fully aware that he has this issue.
Another one of my favourite moments happens to revolve around his paranoia, that being the moment in Stone Ocean which shows us that it’s preventing him from fully trusting even those who are the most devoted to him, such as Pucci;
What we’re looking at here is DIO speaking to someone who is essentially the closest thing he EVER had to a friend, someone he admits he feels truly relaxed with, and yet even with this man he’s unable to shake off the paranoia he feels.
DIO really doesn’t know true inner peace, even in a situation that he himself described as being one that’s making him feel at ease.
Now we finally get into some bigger Stone Ocean spoilers regarding the stand of the main enemy of that part, Pucci - the same stand that DIO tried to obtain.
Here’s basically what the ritual-obtained stand, Made in Heaven, does;
It speeds up the time of entire universe to bring it back to a point where it started the spin, with everyone still alive just as they were (except the people who the stand user kills), but this time everyone has a vague idea/knowledge of what will happen next, because everyone essentially witnessed the future.
Now, assuming that DIO’s Made in Heaven would do the same thing as Pucci’s did, here’s what this tells us about DIO:
He is SO PARANOID that the thing that gives him the most anxiety and unrest, the thing he wants to get rid of, is the same that all of us take for granted:Not knowing what will happen next.
DIO wants to obtain peace of mind by getting rid of that ‘problem’ of an unknown future and making EVERYONE know what’s inevitably coming next, but he’d be the only one who would be able to change it. That’s his ideal world.
DIO’s insanity was born from his wish to achieve peace of mind.He wants to get rid of his anger and paranoia, but his idea of the solution to those feelings is absolutely demented and unfathomably convoluted.
Basically… it’s something that only be thought up by a megalomaniac vampire who was left deep underwater for 100 years in a claustrophobic coffin with only the corpse of the only man he ever respected to keep him company.
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